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Rachel Merrill Moss and Gary Alan Fine 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 Pageants and Patriots: Jewish Spectacles as Performances of Belonging Rachel Merrill Moss and Gary Alan Fine By Published on November 8, 2018 Download Article as PDF The night before Independence Day in 1933, something unprecedented occurred. [1] As part of Chicago’s Century of Progress Exposition, “Jewish Day” was celebrated, culminating in a record-breaking performance that garnered an audience of between 125,000 and 150,000 spectators crammed into Chicago’s Soldier Field, causing massive traffic jams before and after. [2] While some of Chicago’s other immigrant ethnicities were represented as part of the Expo, Jewish Day and its show-stopping finale were the most notable ethnically-oriented events of the entire fair. So impactful was the performance, The Romance of a People , that not only did it receive twelve columns of coverage in the Chicago Tribune the following day, but an encore performance was sponsored by the Tribune three nights after the initial performance. Ultimately a bold Zionist affair, raising money for creating the would-be Jewish refuge of Palestine, The Romance of a People combined spectacle and politics in a remarkably successful performance as Hitler was coming into power. A decade later, in the midst of World War II, another Jewish pageant of massive scale graced the city, but after ten years of atrocities, the motives and emotions were much different. Well into wartime, 1943 brought the New York-originated pageant, We Will Never Die , to Chicago as part of a nationwide tour. While still promoting the increasingly insistent need for a government-sanctioned nationhood (the demand which transformed Palestine into Israel five years after the Chicago performance), the pageant, as evidenced by its title, spoke to the threat to Jewish life and identity by the Nazis. Even more than in The Romance of a People, We Will Never Die carried the fear of genocide. A somber tone and a tocsin of impending death replaced the patriotic and inclusive hunger for recognition evident in The Romance of a People . Another decade later, as series of smaller individual performances were organized as part of a nationwide Jewish-American celebration: the American Jewish Tercentenary. Commemorating three hundred years of Jewish presence in America, the year-long event was held from 1954 through 1955, and boasted “forums, exhibitions, pageants, musical festivals, and public dinners organized by local committees in at least four hundred cities and towns.” [3] While these three decades of pageants bore similarities in theme and in production elements, their execution and tone differ drastically, speaking to the radically different times in American history for Jews and America’s relationship to the Jews. In our examination of these pageants, we understand them to be historically contingent, site-specific, and temporally-bounded events. Each of these Jewish-American pageants relied on its historical specificity and locale, while these elements also contributed to their lack of performance longevity. But it is in their nuanced, culturally-reflective status that we find these pageants compelling—they are historical artifacts that didactically perform their own contextually-contingent ideologies. Furthermore, as we focus on each of the three decades of pageants in the paper that follows, we contend with the ways in which their varying degrees of site-specificity are also intricately bound within a broader American network, reflective of both Jewish American microcosms and the macro-national level. Pageants and Politics We use twentieth-century Jewish pageants to argue that the pageant form of theatre is an ideal forum by which to make claims about citizenship and political engagement. While these pageants differ from traditional theatre in terms of their fluid scripting, grand scale, and limited potential for extended performance runs, they nonetheless resemble normative theatre in that they are specific, performed events with beginnings and endpoints, they feature performers enacting a narrative upon a stage, and they rely heavily on the audience-performance dynamic that is live theatre’s hallmark. That said, however, by virtue of the extent of its stagecraft, audience, and ambition within the public sphere, the pageant form, as distinct from the routinely-performed play, expresses the perspective of a segment of the population. This was particularly important from the end of the Civil War to the 1960s, a period of extensive immigration, during which the issue of accepting and integrating ethnic immigrants was salient and “patriotic pageants became a popular form for promoting the assimilation of the immigrant into American society.” [4] Pageants reached their apogee in the first half of the twentieth century, playing off the desire to solidify an American tradition, but this was necessary precisely because of the migrants who had to demonstrate that, despite diverse customs, religions, and beliefs, they belonged to—and were fervently patriotic towards—the American nation. Explicating this sentiment, albeit baldly, Esther Willard Bates describes this integration in her pageantry how-to guide, The Art of Producing Pageants from 1925: “pageantry is more than an end; it is also a means. . . . It teaches our late-comers the story of the nation in an imaginative manner, and when they act [as] our fore-fathers and speak their very words, they become part-owners in our traditions.” [5] The ethnic pageant, and in this case the Jewish-American pageant, was designed to meet this need but was also situated in light of the political needs of the community, as defined by organizations with the resources and authority to create extensive performances, requiring personnel, locations, and the activation of audiences. Pageants are not merely a means of displaying nationalism and tradition but also an occasion on which community resources are expended to set a political agenda. America’s longstanding tradition of using spectacle and pageantry for the formation and assertion of “Americanness” can be traced back to the earliest years of the American republic. Colorful, boisterous, and clear in message, pageants of early American history fostered community among America’s ethnic, religious, and social groups, simultaneously unifying them under a single banner of American identity and mobilizing as a vehicle for hybrid American-ethnic identity formation. S. E. Wilmer traces this long history of America’s theatricalized nationalism in Theatre, Society and the Nation . “Particularly in times of national crisis,” he states, “the theatre has served as a political and ideological tool to help reconfigure the [American] nation,” defining or challenging “national values and the notion of the nation,” and “reformulating concepts of national identity” that even predate Germany’s nationalistic theatrical Romanticism. [6] While the American-Jewish relationship to pageantry reflects these community—and nation-building—protocols, by the twentieth century pageants changed in their focus. Pageants became strategic attempts at persuasion, both within the community and beyond. American perceptions of Jews, both American and international, have also altered greatly over the course of the twentieth century, and the changing approaches to Jewish-American pageantry are as much a reflection of this shift in perception as of the changing relationship of American Jews to both America and assimilation. In American Historical Pageantry , David Glassberg describes the legacy of early American pageantry, its heyday in the first decades of the twentieth century, and its ultimate decline after the late-1920s. In its prime, historical pageantry played a major role in American celebrations and festivals, showcasing “the belief that history could be made into a dramatic public ritual through which the residents of a town, by acting out the right version of their past, could bring about some kind of future social and political transformation.” [7] Reiterating both American pride and the possibilities of growth of the town, neighborhood, or ethnic association, these productions presented an idealized vision of past and future through “the use of historical imagery to discover or invent an appropriate tradition in support of reform.” [8] In addition to Glassberg’s and Wilmer’s book-length studies on historical American pageantry, from early to mid-century American works, Richard M. Fried’s The Russians Are Coming! The Russians are Coming!: Pageantry and Patriotism in Cold-War America examines national patriotic activity and efforts executed through theatrical pageantry and ritual, implemented through federal-level initiatives, as a means of reasserting national identity during troubling political times, particularly focusing in on Cold War-era “patriotic and civic pageantry.” [9] While the book does not focus closely in on them, Fried also acknowledges the plethora of more localized, group-specific pageant performance traditions from the turn-of-the-century onwards. Additionally, a number of articles focus specifically on minority-driven American political pageants, including those by Stephen J. Whitfield, Robert Skloot, and Lauren Love, that individually explore two of the pageants discussed within this article, examining the pageants’ “civic purpose” and ability to activate Jewish solidarity. [10] Likewise, in “Performing the Polish-American Patriot,” Megan E. Geigner similarly examines theatrical pageant performances that serve to reiterate hyphenated other-American identity as a means of galvanizing patriotic kinship. [11] In this same vein, Martha S. LoMonaco’s work on nineteenth-century Mormon pageants looks at historical pageantry as creating a foothold in American historical narrative through performance. [12] Taken together, recent scholarship displays a clear interest – albeit a diffuse one – in the performance practices of minority groups in America who used pageantry as a means of articulating their hyphenated American identity. While this article seeks to add to this body of literature, our goal is also to further that discussion by including the ways in which mid-century Jewish-American pageants built upon such an American tradition, while, conversely, discussing how we can use these past pageants as a way to explore the turns in performance practices in moments where Jewish and American-Jewish identity are in jeopardy. Our approach offers a macro view of how pageants were utilized as a means of identity production and group unification spanning three decades. Despite the overall decline in popularity of the pageant form across America, the mid-century Jewish pageants we discuss display a continuation of those same ideologies fostered by the American pageant tradition, but with particular, persuasive goals sensitive to the situation of American and global Jewry. While small towns no longer emphasized the performance of patriotism, this became increasingly important for urban Jews. For the Jewish community, the pageant both energized the community and spoke to the wider American public through the media representations of the large gatherings. Though the American pageant form by this point had morphed into the “folk play, the restored museum village, or the annual historical festival . . . depict[ing] the past as a separate world from the present,” Jewish American pageants before, during, and after the Second World War successfully bridged the gap between the ethnic enclave and the Christian public. [13] Employing familiar techniques and tropes that were long central to American civil religion, [14] these pageants continued the American pageantry legacy while utilizing the theatrical form as a successful way to assert an overtly didactic message: Jews are a unique and worthy people, they lack a homeland ( Romance of a People ), they are threatened with destruction from un-American enemies ( We Will Never Die ), and they share core American values while contributing to national history (the Tercentennial pageants). Each moment of pageantry had its own agenda, but the overall message—the insistence that Jews were worthy and patriotic Americans—remained throughout. By performing these Jewish narratives within but not eclipsed by an American narrative, these pageants performed Jewish difference, thereby drawing attention to specifically Jewish issues before Jewish and broader audiences. Furthermore, these pageants also represent a unique moment in the American pageantry legacy, as they also interpolate its historical tradition of ethnic subsumption into a homogenous (Anglo-)American, nationalist narrative. These three mid-twentieth-century pageants allow Jews to represent themselves (i.e. prominent Jews in American history) while still arguing for their Americanness and adopting a stance that hybridizes the American aesthetic and American nationalism. Additionally, we examine the ways in which these Jewish-American pageants are responsive to their contemporary moment in explicit and didactic ways that limit their potential for longevity but that offer themselves up to historians as illuminating points of reference into their cultural and political contexts. We examine each of these pageants, describing their content and how they situated the Jewish community in light of contemporary issues that a large, well-attended performance could address. 1933: The Romance of a People The Romance of a People was a three-hour pageant of epic proportions: a program “which symbolize[d] four thousand years of colorful history—history high in its drama, packed with pathos, terrible in tragedies, glorious in its victories.” [15] The pageant featured 3,500 cast members, including singers and dancers reminiscent of a Greek Chorus on a massive scale, nearly all of whom were local residents of Chicago and members of the Jewish community. [16] To prevent chaos and cacophony from the humongous cast, director Isaac Van Grove opted to amplify mechanically the speeches and songs of the cast from a room hidden beneath the stage. Covered in a Chicago Daily Tribune article that ran the day after the initial performance, columnist Virginia Gardner’s discussion of the methods utilized by Van Grove for the production, and the fact that it merited newspaper coverage at all, provides evidence of its remarkable execution. “The control room and amplifying system made possible what Van Grove described as ‘the effect of an intimate theater two blocks long.’” [17] The marriage of artistry and technology not only assisted in executing the mass theatre in which Van Grove openly believed, but also aligned with the Century of Progress mission to promote technology unimaginable in the previous hundred years. [18] Van Grove is credited for pioneering amplified sound for a theatrical production, as he did in The Romance of a People . [19] Across all press reports and published material about The Romance of a People , it is evident that the public reception was strong. The word “colorful” appears a dozen times throughout the pageant’s press coverage, as do accolades about the audiences’ upturned faces and positive Jewish attitudes and self-opinion, such as in David and Goliath allegories. [20] The positive perception of the extravagance at Soldier Field is clear but seems largely to pertain to the material only aesthetically. While the production aimed to educate for the purposes of the Zionist cause, Van Grove and his producers spared no expense to generate entertainment and to immerse the audience in the spectacle. Six months earlier in December 1932, Chicago audiences had an early taste when a massive Chanukah holiday pageant, also directed by Van Grove (and similarly produced by Meyer Weisgal), was staged at the Chicago Stadium, entitled “Israel Reborn.” [21] Though the cast size and audience numbers were more than doubled for The Romance of a People , the previous Jewish “theatrical spectacle” was heralded as a performance that “one sees once in a generation.” [22] Van Grove knew going into the colossal Soldier Field production what had worked so triumphantly only half a year prior for a similar Chicago audience. Van Grove was a staunch believer in the opportunity to create theatrical impact that “mass spectacle” afforded. [23] To Van Grove, the possibilities for emotional gravitas were substantially higher when utilizing pageantry and grand-scale spectacle, rather than realism that he considered “passé.” [24] It was the power of thousands of bodies in coordinated movement that Van Grove believed could elicit the vital response The Romance of a People needed. While the pageant aimed to garner support and attention for the Zionist cause, it also allowed an emotional appeal to non-Jewish audience members. The pageant strove to engage Jews and Christians alike, so much so that it was commented on in nearly all reviews of the pageant production. Perhaps the Chicago Daily News reporter, S. J. Duncan-Clark, put it most poignantly in his pageant review that ran 5 July 1933, highlighting the community forged through pageantry: There was laughter and weeping among the thronging spectators for the floodtide of emotion had been released. Christians and Jews grasped hands with a new sense of spiritual kinship. There were thousands of Christians present. All Christian creeds had joined in approving and promoting the magnificent project of their Jewish neighbors.[25] While Duncan-Clark recognizes the pageant’s message of Jewish distinctiveness in order to highlight the specific plight of its people, he rightly points to the pageant’s goal of community orientation—attempting to bring others into the fight for Jewish lives abroad. Regardless of, or perhaps due to, the diversity of the audience, the pageant itself was both a dramatic and edifying affair, chronicling notable events in Jewish history. The pageant depicted “forty centuries of religion” in the form of six episodes with two interludes, starting with a dramatization of the religion’s formation. [26] A 27-foot idol of the god Moloch surrounded by 500 slaves and worshippers set the scene for Judaism’s rejection of the false god, thereby depicting “the birth of true religious concepts.” [27] Furthermore, this attempt at monotheistic universality is mentioned in the pageant’s program “Greeting and Tribute” penned by producer and script-writer Meyer Weisgal. Hailing the presumed diversity of the crowd, Weisgal declaimed, “Among you are representatives of all the races and creeds which are incorporated in the structure of the American Republic. The composition of this assembly bears equal witness, therefore, to the spirit of fellowship and mutual respect among diversities of faith and race.” [28] While his program greeting closes with a reminder of the pageant’s Zionist cause, Weisgal’s preamble anticipates what would later be the American Jewish Tercentenary’s purpose: realigning Jewishness within an American historical context and within a multiethnic community. The pageant consisted of a prologue, six episodes, and two “interludes” (performed transitions) that outlined widely-known moments from “biblical and historical records,” from ancient to present times. [29] Beginning with “The Creation,” a scene depicted the first lines of the Torah (the Jewish Bible) and the creation of humanity, using chaotic lights and sound to represent “the morning of Creation, the freshness of the world as it came from the hand of the divine Artificer.” [30] This scene was followed by the aforementioned birth of Judaism and Abraham’s covenant with God after denouncing the impending sacrifice to a false god, the escape from slavery in Egypt, the building of the first temple and its subsequent destruction, exiles wandering in search of a new homeland, and finally, deliverance to a new Israel. Part of the pageant’s power comes not from the scenes depicted, but rather the sheer scale of the production itself. The thousands of bodies onstage before gigantic scenery, depicting, at turns, false idols, the temple in Jerusalem, and finally the future homeland, constituted a remarkable spectacle. The use of amplified sound enabled giant choreographed movement onstage to take place without worry about carrying noise, while the stereophonic voice-acting of forty or so actors depicting The Voice of God, Abraham, and other significant figures were hidden beneath the stage, merging media and performance technologies to enable unimpeded spectacle. The production set for the pageant was claimed to be “unquestionably the most elaborate stage ever built” at Soldier Field. [31] A “mammoth” four level, 200-foot long, 150-foot wide set filled much of the stadium. “Fashioned to look like stone, the set, on the one hand, suggested the use of ancient materials, substantial enough to endure for thousands of years into the future. On the other hand, solid but blank, this place’s history was waiting to be inscribed.” [32] The tiered stage accommodated a chorus of 1,500 and an orchestra on a single level, with ample room left for the action of the performance, [33] with the temple at stage center, adorned with a Star of David. [34] Advanced coverage in the Chicago Daily Tribune raved of the pageant’s precedent-breaking visual spectacle, including embedded floor lighting, four 35-foot lighting towers, and a giant glass “curtain” (35 feet long by 25 feet high) onto which colorful light effects would be projected. [35] These lights were used with great dramatic effect for the final stage picture: a single light blazed from darkness to illuminate the temple’s star, as the sung prayer “Shema Yisrael/Hear, O Israel” brought the pageant to a close. [36] The production’s playbill also reflected the high level of community interest and involvement. Featuring advertisements and well-wishes from organizations and businesses citywide (both Jewish and secular), the program itself enacted a coherent community voice vouching support of the production, albeit a commercially motivated one. [37] The program serves as a material testament to the city’s vested interest in the Jewish community’s patronage. The range of pageant-specific advertisements include a message in handwritten Yiddish from Sophie Tucker of The 225 Club, a note to the “Jews of Chicago” from D. L. Toffenetti of the Triangle Restaurants franchise, and an ad from Flashtric Sign Works, creators of “One of the Most Outstanding Features of Jewish Day,” the illuminated Star of David used in the production. [38] The playbill, therefore, performed the same integrated community mentality that the pageant itself asserted and reflected a desire for its success from community supporters. In his history of Soldier Field, Liam T. A. Ford notes that “rather than promoting assimilation into America’s melting pot, [ The Romance of a People ] helped make pride in being Jewish more acceptable to non-Jewish Chicagoans and at the same time, helped define what being Jewish would mean for generations of American Jews.” [39] Ford’s assertion as to the pageant’s reverberating impact on public performances of Jewishness in America in the generations to come certainly rings true when considering the next generation’s overlapping uses of spectacles for asserting Jewish-American acceptance. That said, the pageants in the decades that follow The Romance of a People differ in important ways, reflecting their altered political and cultural circumstances. 1943: We Will Never Die World War II created a new context for Jewish-American pageantry. A decade after The Romance of a People , the fate of European Jews was desperate, survival in the balance, while at the same time the might of the American military was arrayed against their tormentors. Though, perhaps, saving Jews was not a prime motivator of American military involvement, the vicious anti-Semitism of the Nazis was used to justify the war effort, leading to sympathy for Jews and a rejection of the more overt forms of prejudice in the United States.' The 1943 pageant, We Will Never Die , was produced at a moment in which wartime patriotism was linked to a hatred of anti-Semitism, and the pageant built on this connection. We Will Never Die premiered at New York’s Madison Square Garden, emphasizing that preserving Jewish culture and community was consistent with American values, and it featured a laundry list of theatre-celebrity involvement, including direction by Moss Hart, script by Ben Hecht, music by Kurt Weil, and was produced by Billy Rose. As their titles suggest, the decade between Romance of a People and We Will Never Die dramatically altered the substance of these theatrical narratives. While both pageants featured distinctly Jewish narratives, The Romance of a People represented hope and galvanization, whereas 1943’s We Will Never Die , facing the grim realities of Nazi crimes, presented a desperate plea for Jewish safety and mobilization to assure it. Both pageants were attended by both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences, [40] and each addressed the future of Jewish inclusion and preservation. While We Will Never Die was more didactic, both pageants played off ethnic distinctiveness—Jews as a special category of “Americans”—in gaining the attention of an audience that accepted the legitimacy of that difference. Perhaps the pageants had limited effects in changing American policy, but in performance, they made the case that Jewish interests were American interests. We Will Never Die , performed on 9 May 1943 at the Chicago Stadium, proffered similar themes as The Romance of a People , but with darker, more somber tones. The pageant was a “memorial to the 2,000,000 Jews” that the producers stated had already been murdered in Europe, and was penned by acclaimed Jewish-American playwright and screenwriter, Ben Hecht. [41] We Will Never Die used vastly disparate tactics from The Romance of a People , and was credited as the first wide-scale dramatic presentation of the destruction of the Jews in Europe. [42] Contrary to the optimism of the 1933 pageant, We Will Never Die threw violent, gory details at audiences, hoping to make viewers incensed at the slaughter, rather than to convince the crowds of the goodliness and godliness of the Jewish people. We Will Never Die featured a cast of 1,000 and garnered a Chicago audience between 15,000 to 20,000. [43] It was treated as a critical step in advancing the cause of the Jewish people. The Chicago Daily Tribune titled their review, “Pageant Stirs 15,000 to Vow: Jew Must Live.” [44] Using high praise, the Tribune reviewer, Edward Barry, wrote, From a majestic stage flanked by representations of the tablets of the law and the star of David, 1,000 American Jews last night delivered a plea to an audience of 15,000, and thru these 15,000 to the world, to heed the plight of the Jews of Europe before the last remnants of the race there are sacrificed to the Nazi fury.[45] In contrast to the 1933 review by James O’Donnell Bennett, who reviewed The Romance of a People , Barry does not differentiate the Jews and gentiles in the audience, perhaps indicating the unifying, humanist appeal of the material. Unlike the historical epic of The Romance of a People , We Will Never Die opted for relative naturalism in the script. Though the production set consisted of “two towering Tablets containing the Ten Commandments loom[ing] at the back of the stage,” much of the dialogue is realistic and personable, albeit didactic, and often gruesomely so. [46] The show begins with the Kol Nidre chant from Yom Kippur, [47] a shofar is blown, and a rabbi emerges from between the two tablets to introduce and honor the plight of “the two million who have been killed in Europe.” [48] The rabbi gives the stage over to two narrators who begin a series of short episodes, each addressing the Jewish plight. The first of four episodes begins with a “roll call” of important Jewish contributors to American and global life—somewhat foreshadowing the Tercentenary narratives—including a disparate collection of individuals, such as Luis Ponce de Leon, Benjamin Disraeli, Marcel Proust, and Samuel Gompers. The second episode chronicles one Jewish-American soldier’s wartime experience and urgent telegraph home on the brink of his death during American defeat in the Philippines. Episode Three chronicles the struggle and uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, [49] and the pageant closes with an episode entitled, “Remember Us,” consisting of the dead announcing their gruesome ends at the hands of the Nazis, while beseeching the audience not to forget them. Closing with two narrators urging American involvement in the Jewish plight, the pageant used the rhetoric of the American ethic: We [Americans] have brave soldiers who are fighting to victory. But the massacre of the unarmed civilians is beyond the reach of their guns. The desert and the Mediterranean are the battle front and they are honorably engaged on it. The massacre in Europe is our battle front—and we are not honorably engaged on it.[50] Then, making a greater, global claim, a second narrator decries, “the crime of Europe calls for the mobilization of every shred of righteousness and spiritual power left in the world.” [51] While We Will Never Die offered a persuasive cry for a cohesive front and fight against the Axis and Nazism in order to rescue the remaining European Jewry, support from American Jewish organizations was spotty. Though Ben Hecht, the pageant’s scriptwriter, presented a work-in-progress to garner financial support from the Jewish community, “with representatives of nearly three-dozen Jewish organizations,” the groups “could not agree to work together in support of the forthcoming pageant. Even when Hecht . . . offered to withdraw the formal endorsement of the controversial Committee for a Jewish Army and to work only behind the scenes, the others declined to sponsor We Will Never Die .” [52] Furthermore, the pageant attempted not only “[t]o heighten concern for doomed coreligionists . . . it was also targeted at public opinion and at the nation’s capital. Hecht and his collaborators . . . wanted to stimulate a change in policy.” [53] This ambitious goal was also ultimately unattainable. As Whitfield argues in “The Politics of Pageantry, 1936-1946”: Perhaps none of these pageants was great enough, soaring enough, memorable enough . . . but there is a more likely explanation. It asks too much of art to expect it to halt the juggernaut of tyranny. Nazism and fascism were too powerful for that. . . . Neither masterpieces nor spectacles could influence geopolitics; and the lesson that many Jews learned is that, while art can enhance and illuminate and expose power, only countervailing force can effectively confront it. . . . That realization meant consolidating a sense of peoplehood, instilling in American Jewish audiences a sense of transatlantic solidarity.[54] While transatlantic solidarity was important during the war years due to the threat to Jewry in Europe, other issues took priority during the 1950s as Jews attempted to demonstrate their bona fides as “Americans.” Whitfield points toward what would become the strategy of the yearlong American Jewish celebration to follow a decade after We Will Never Die . 1954-55: A Return to Different Roots After the war, like so much else, the politics of American-Jewish pageants were indelibly altered. During the 1950s, rather than reaching outward, emphasizing a “transatlantic solidarity,” the 1954-55 Jewish-American Tercentenary pageants focused inwards, emphasizing the particularly Jewish role in the development of American life and culture over the past 300 years. These pageants were intended to incorporate Jews into American collective memory, perhaps given the concern about seeing Jews as Communists. [55] With the existential threat to Jewish life resolved in Europe, the next challenge for American Jewry was to demonstrate to fellow citizens questioning their patriotism that Jews had long been integral to American life. American-Jewish pageantry turned to its local soil to advance a narrative of Jewish “Americanness,” which became further emphasized as the Cold War tensions increased and questions of loyalty became salient. Post-war Jewish-American pageantry presented a narrative of long-standing Jewish commitment to America since its founding, no longer suggesting that the United States must do something for Jews, but instead that Jews have done something for America. The culmination of this assimilationist, hybrid-identity of Jewish-American status was the year-long American Jewish Tercentenary celebration, occurring from September 1954 through May 1955. Celebrated nationwide, the 300 th anniversary of Jewish American presence was memorialized through publications, celebratory events, television and radio formats, and pageant spectacles. The Tercentenary was well-timed for this assertion of the embeddedness of Jews in American life. The specter of Communism conjured a need to perform a non-threatening—solidly American—Jewish identity, and a choice was made to create a celebration that publicly proclaimed this allegiance. Unlike the massive spectacles in the 1930s and ‘40s, these Tercentenary pageants were on a smaller scale, [56] a function surely of a decline in large-scale pageants, and perhaps a reaction to large-scale rallies in Germany and the Soviet Union. These pageants were performed in cities across the country but with more modest casts and in smaller venues. With their local orientation, these pageants had a different position in creating public awareness and perception than the highly successful mass pageants that had taken place previously and were centered mainly in Chicago and New York, with subsequent tour stops at other urban centers, including Detroit and Washington D.C. Although hints of the post-war assimilationist movement could be seen in sporadic pageants and publications from the immediate post-war years through the early nineteen-fifties, the Jewish Tercentenary was distinct: it hoped to include every Jewish community, large or small, in the national celebration of Jewish influence on American life and democracy. Founded in 1953, the American Jewish Tercentenary Committee (AJTC) was formed to promote and establish the commemoratory year of anniversary celebrations, building on the tercentennial theme of “Man’s Opportunities and Responsibilities Under Freedom.” To this end, numerous pamphlets were published under the auspices of the organization, created to aid and encourage Jewish communities and organizations taking part across the country. Explicit in their intended goals, the materials from the AJTC provided a clear set of instructions to follow for all manner of anniversary celebration attempts nationwide. In their clarity, these instructional booklets asked that a certain ideal narrative be followed and performed across all related performance platforms. That narrative not only asserted the early and unchanging importance of Jews in America but also their unceasing dedication to the American way of life, emphasizing democratic governance. In the numerous texts published by or with the support of the AJTC, American democracy is central. The texts didactically indicate Jewish involvement through centuries of American politics and patriotism, including one text referencing Oscar Straus’s contention that the “Hebrew Old Testament” influenced America’s foundational democratic ideals. [57] What is abundantly clear in this heavy-handed commentary is that the Jewish organization saw a need to counter the association of Jews and Communism, a perspective widely accepted in the Depression years but receding in the post-war period. [58] The culmination of the Tercentenary celebration contributed to delinking Jewishness from Communist associations in the minds of the American public, despite the continuing presence of Jews in the shrinking Communist movement. Even prior to the Tercentenary celebration, the American Jewish Committee was laying the groundwork for the later message of Jewish-American involvement in foundational American democracy. A pamphlet published in 1950, written by David De Sola Pool, chairman of the American Jewish Historical Society provisional committee for planning the tercentenary project, addresses these themes. In the pamphlet’s culminating page, De Sola Pool lists the “Fruits of the Tercentenary Celebration,” providing insight into his, and presumably the committee’s, goals for the tercentenary celebration year. Heralding the coming reinvigoration of Jewish presence within American society, De Sola Pool states that the tercentenary celebration “carried out in this broad national way will make vivid for all Americans, Christians and Jews alike, how deep and centuried is the stake of the Jews in the United States,” and furthermore, that the tercentenary “will further devotion to the Hebraic ideals of democracy that have helped to mold American democracy.” [59] In 1954, a reissue of the 1905 events of the 250 th anniversary was published by the American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, seemingly as another means of naturalizing the occurrence of the 300 th . In 1905, the 250 th Anniversary of Jewish settlement in the US was celebrated on Thanksgiving Day, in an effort to “make the celebration a truly national event,” underscoring the centrality of American secular holidays and nationalism within Jewish-American identity. [60] The official celebratory proceedings for the opening event included addresses from the Catholic Bishop Coadjutor of New York, David Greer, as well as secular figures such as former president, Grover Cleveland, governor of New York State, Frank Higgins, and Mayor of New York City, George McClellan. The ceremony closed with an audience rendition of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” [61] This pan-religious, nationalist service was designed to establish Jewish Americans’ place within the cornucopia of American identities. However, the vast historical distance between the 250 th anniversary and the tercentenary couldn’t possibly have been anticipated, and the Tercentenary events had to take into account the changes in America and globally that had occurred during the past half-century. Within her pamphlet outlining Tercentenary pageant guidelines, Adele Gutman Nathan echoes the linking of Jews and early American democracy: “From the time the Jewish pilgrims arrived in 1654 at the little port of New Amsterdam . . . Jews as individuals and as groups have participated dramatically in each step of the creation of our nation, in its never-ending search for true democracy.” [62] With one small exception, [63] she fails to mention the enormous Jewish pageants of the past two decades within her description of previous American pageantry, though she mentions other popular productions from the time. This lack of connection between the Tercentenary and earlier pageants highlights their profound ideological and aspirational differences. While The Romance of a People , We Will Never Die , and the Tercentenary pageants all fall into the pageantry category, utilizing particular features of narration, spectacle, anti-realism, and episodic structures, their similarities end with that. As Nathan’s pamphlet outlined, the Tercentenary pageants strove to integrate Jewish historical presence in the United States in the grander American narrative, therefore establishing loyal Jewish “Americanness” in the post-war period. Just as earlier American historical pageants, such as the 1914 Pageant and Masque of St. Louis, [64] aimed to create an optimistic future by crafting an idealized past, the Tercentenary pageants strove for the same goal. Conversely, The Romance of a People and We Will Never Die performed Jewish difference to assert their message, while the Tercentenary performed proudly assimilationist narratives. With communities permitted either to purchase ready-made scripts (offering titles such as Faith and Freedom , The Lamp of Liberty , and We Came to an Island [65] ) or to pen their own community-oriented pageants, towns and cities across America performed their own local renditions of American Jewish history. These pageants simultaneously asserted contemporary (and historical) Jewish presence alongside Jewish integrity and ingenuity throughout American history. The basic narrative entailed several narrators framing a number of short episodes that featured notable figures through introduction or initial verbal reenactment of the scene by the narrators. For example, the 1955 pageant, The Quilt , written by Mae Clement Perley for the Louisville, Kentucky Tercentenary celebration, includes episodes describing Jewish ties to Abraham Lincoln, community ties to Louis Brandeis, and dramatized peacemaking amongst Jews and the previous Native American dwellers of Kentucky, all being reenacted in order to educate two Louisville youth about their community’s illustrious history. [66] Highly didactic, the narrative of Jewish impact on American life and society is clear. Though specific to Kentucky history, Perley’s script bears strong resemblance to more generic pageant scripts available for purchase, written to be performed across the country, and available in formats either broad enough to suit any local setting, or able to be shaped to include local events and memories. The Golden Door , penned by Norman Corwin for the American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, is an example of the former, that could be tailored to any community and offered an American narrative, depicting a broad Jewish-American history. Featuring numerous short monologues from notable public figures attesting to positive Jewish-American presence, the script is comprised of short, didactic vignettes. Monologues are delivered from figures as diverse as George Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, Levi Strauss, and the voice of God, among many others. Another alternative was a that enabled portions of the play script to be personalized for local performances. This was the case of Faith and Freedom , written by Marc Siegal for the Tercentenary committee. The script is comprised of the same narrated episodic format, and attends to both local and nationwide Jewish-American history, even including a pre-written but optional scene, available for use if the community possessed an esteemed member who had been “an eyewitness to the growth of [the] Jewish community since 1880.” [67] If so, such a person could have been featured in a scene in conversation with the narrator, Dr. Goldman, as an integral part of the plot and pageant’s mission. This potential character, “Mr. Blank,” could deliver a monologue on the hardships of early Jewish settlement in the local area, including needing to move frequently as the Jewish neighborhoods changed. Additionally, the character emphasizes the increased community engagement and local involvement in the present time: “Around (blank year) we elected our first (name of public office), (name of person). There was real excitement when he won.” [68] Much like The Golden Door , This is Our Home , written by I. Goldberg and Yuri Suhl for the Committee for the 300 th Anniversary of Jewish Settlement in the U.S., similarly enabled personalization, though also incorporated Yiddish into the core script, with nearly 50% of dialogue in Yiddish. Unlike other Tercentenary pageant scripts, this suggests a different Jewish community, one in which assimilation had not entirely erased Yiddish-language usage, potentially indicating a more recently immigrated community audience and/or one more interested in maintaining a more visible Jewish presence in a secularizing nation. In spite of its Yiddish components, however, This is Our Home almost verbatim follows the formulaic model of incorporating a Jewish thread into known nationalistic, American narratives. With four episodes and voice-overs by Albert Einstein, Chaim Zhitlowsky, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the play begins with a rendition of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” followed by English and Yiddish preambles that echo each other’s statement of the shared heritage of American and Jewish-American beginnings. This performative tactic, which extends beyond the presentation of Jewish presence in early America, led to grander statements of Jewish exemplification of true American democratic ideals. This juncture was ripe for classic American pageantry techniques, “at the intersection of progressivism and antimodernism [that] placed nostalgic imagery in a dynamic, future-oriented reform context.” [69] As was the case with the two previous pageant moments, the Tercentenary responded to contemporary political conditions. Ultimately, while the American Jewish Tercentenary celebration seems to have aided the strengthening of Jewish public image in America, the festivities, tributes, and commemorations of 1954-55 were less frequently or substantially reported in newspapers and made a less significant mark on public memory. Unlike the earlier massive-scale pageants, the Jewish Tercentenary was about blending in to the standing American narrative, erasing radical associations, naturalizing patriotism and nationalist contributions, and asserting neighborliness. Politics of Pageants Each of the pageants we examine in this essay assert Jewish significance in their individual performances; either pushing toward redefining the group’s investment in broader Jewish issues, or by insisting upon Jewish importance in early and foundational American narratives. These pageants came about during such “times of crisis” in which the necessity of American interest and involvement in Jewishness needed to be emphasized, galvanized, and supported. [70] As previously discussed, each of these mid-century pageants did so in its own manner specific to the cultural and political contexts in which they emerged, but collectively they performed Jewishness in a broader American context and in that way similarly reinvented Jewish-Americanness in their respective decades. Furthermore, each performance discussed pageants as the appropriate mode of performance by building upon America’s long history of pageantry as a means for ethnic communities’ performed articulation and redefinition of their own hybrid identities. Pageants are both theatrically significant and historically situated. That is their purpose and their charm: they uncover the themes of a community and the challenges that are being faced. As performances, they attempt to persuade their audiences about those issues that are currently engaged. These three decades of pageants, produced at distinct historical moments, demonstrate that the idea of a “Jewish pageant”—or for that matter any pageant—must be contextualized. Even more than most forms of theatricality, the pageant attempts to inspire or to rouse a public that sees itself as belonging together and sharing common assumptions and desires. The pageant form is, in some sense, the most communal of all dramatic genres: this is true not only because of its massive production values, the fact that the performers are often members of the same community as the audience, and that the authors have deep local roots, but also because the themes and the morals build a sense of unity. The pageant provides a nexus of the study of theatre, history, and sociology. While these three mid-century Jewish-American pageants each present didactic accounts of ethnic history, they do so with markedly different agendas, each a presentation of and response to Jewish-American needs and interests at the time. Beginning with the start of the worldwide Jewish crisis in 1933 as Hitler took power in Germany and spanning through the post-war period of critical ethnic assimilation, each of these pageants served to both attract broad-scale interest through the mass-appeal of spectacle and sought to channel nationwide Jewish-American interest into a singular political performance (or set of performances), thereby powerfully enacting a desired outcome, from recognition to rescue to the reconstitution of Americaness. While each pageant utilized Jewish history and linked it to the present, each depended on a different set of values and historical events, shaping collective memory for specific purposes. For this reason, too, each pageant may itself offer fruitful insight into the moment in which it emerged. Because of their questionable literary authority and their focus on events of the moment, it is understandable that, unlike canonical drama, pageants will not be reprised over time, and, as a result, few scholars have focused on examples of the form as signals of current civic concerns and ethnic worries. These three Jewish-American pageants, however, demonstrate that such historically contingent productions have value as indicators of the state of society. The community provides a stage that these dramas fill. For all their local interest, pageants reveal the world. References [1] The authors thank Megan Geigner and Grace Overbeke for comments on an earlier version of this paper. [2] Earl Mullin, “Holiday Throng at Fair Nears Monday Record,” Chicago Daily Tribune (5 July 1933): 1. The current capacity is only 61,500. For the 1933 pageant, seating spilled from the stadium seating onto the stadium green, with makeshift seating filling the playing area all the way up to the stage. (Lauren Love, “Performing Jewish Nationhood: The Romance of a People at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair,” TDR: The Drama Review 55, no. 3 (2011): 61.) [3] Arthur A. Goren, The Politics and Public Culture of American Jews (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 196. [4] S. E. Wilmer, Theatre, Society, and the Nation: Staging American Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 108. [5] Esther Willard Bates, The Art of Producing Pageants (Walter H. Baker Company: Boston, 1925), 240. [6] Wilmer, Theatre, Society, and the Nation , 11. [7] David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 4. [8] Ibid., 4. [9] Richard M. Fried, The Russians Are Coming! The Russians are Coming!: Pageantry and Patriotism in Cold-War America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 122. [10] For reference, see Stephen J. Whitfield, “The Politics of Pageantry, 1936-1946,” American Jewish History 84, no. 3 (September, 1996): 221-250.; Robert Skloot, “We Will Never Die”: The Success and Failure of a Holocaust Pageant,” Theatre Journal 37, no. 2 (May, 1995): 167-180.; and Love, “Performing Jewish Nationhood,” 57-67. [11] Megan Geigner, “Performing the Polish-American patriot: civic performance and hyphenated identity in World War I Chicago,” Theatre History Studies 34 (2015): 59-78. [12] Martha S. LoMonaco, “Mormon Pageants as American Historical Performance,” Theatre Symposium 17 (2009): 69-83. [13] Ibid., 288. [14] Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 96, no.1, (1967): 1-21. [15] “The Romance of a People.” Official World’s Fair Weekly: A Century of Progress International Exposition Week Ending July 8 th (Chicago: The Cuneo Press Inc., 1933), 6. [16] Love, “Performing Jewish Nationhood,” 63. [17] Virginia Gardener, “Unseen Actors Supply Sound at Jewish Pageant: Sing, Play and Speak in Hidden Room,” Chicago Daily Tribune (4 July, 1933): 4. [18] Ibid., 6. [19] Garfield discusses the use of amplified sound in The Romance of the People in his article about the pageant, arguing that Van Grove’s use of amplification in this context was totally unique for theatrical performances in the US. “The ‘binaural, electro-acoustical system,’ as it was called, was a highly innovative sound set-up – probably the first public use in the United States of what has since come to be known as stereophonic sound.” David Garfield, “The Romance of a People,” Educational Theatre Journal 24, no. 4 (1972): 440. [20] James O’Donnell Bennett, “125,000 Witness Jewish Spectacle: Mighty Drama Traces History Back 4,000 Years; Climax of Jewry’s Day at Fair,” Chicago Daily Tribune (4 July, 1933): 2. [21] “The Romance of a People,” Official World’s Fair Weekly: A Century of Progress International Exposition , 6. [22] Ibid., 6. [23] Garfield, “The Romance of a People,” 436. [24] Ibid., 436. [25] S. J. Duncan-Clark, “Jewish ‘Romance of a People’ Kindles Thrill of Faith in 150,000 Spectators,” The Chicago Daily News (5 July, 1933). [26] Rev. John Evans, “Jewish pageant to depict 40 centuries of religion,” Chicago Daily Tribune (9 June, 1933): 10. [27] Ibid., 10. [28] Chicago Jewish Historical Society, “The Romance of a People” pageant program reprint from 1933 (Chicago: Chicago Jewish Historical Society, 2000), 1. [29] Ibid., 17. [30] Ibid., 18. [31] Liam T. A. Ford, Soldier Field: A Stadium and its City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 157. [32] Love, “Performing Jewish Nationhood,” 60. [33] Edward Moore, “Stage Effects at Jewish Fete to Make History: Lighting Arrangements to be Feature,” Chicago Daily Tribune (17 June, 1933): 6. [34] Chicago Jewish Historical Society, “The Romance of a People,” 18. [35] Moore, “Stage Effects at Jewish Fete to Make History,” 6. [36] Chicago Jewish Historical Society, “The Romance of a People,” 19. [37] While the Pageant program includes Exposition-wide advertisements, it also contains numerous “Jewish Day” specific advertisements and messages from sponsors. [38] Chicago Jewish Historical Society, “The Romance of a People,” 56. [39] Ford, Soldier Field: A Stadium and its City , 155. [40] While audience statistics are not known to be available, the sheer numbers of spectators that attended both events render ethnic and religious homogeneity highly unlikely. In the first performance, The Romance of a People performed in front of anywhere between 125,000 and 150,000 people, depending on the source. We Will Never Die performed before an estimated 15,000-20,000 (for the opening Chicago performance). Furthermore, We Will Never Die had a significant tour around the US, including a stop in Washington, DC, where President Roosevelt sent First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in his stead, as well as numerous cabinet, Supreme Court, and Congress members (See Medoff 2002). [41] We Will Never Die Official Program from Madison Square Garden 9 March, 1943 (New York: Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews, 1943), cover. [42] certainyl ESexecuted this through loosa, 2002.”ers in attendance that night included First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, all the way Rafael Medoff, Militant Zionism (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2002), 85. [43] Edward Barry, “Pageant Stirs 15,000 to Vow Jew Must Live,” Chicago Daily Tribune (20 May, 1943): 1. [44] Ibid., 1. [45] Ibid., 1. [46] Ben Hecht, We Will Never Die: A Memorial Dedicated to the 2,000,000 Jewish Dead of Europe Pageant Script (New York: Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews, 1943), 11. [47] The Jewish Day of Atonement. [48] Hecht, We Will Never Die, 11. [49] The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is generally considered to have begun on April 19, 1943. The original production of We Will Never Die occurred in New York on March 9 th prior to the start of the Uprising, as did the Washington DC performance on April 12 th , but Hecht later incorporated an additional scene entitled “The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto,” which was performed in Los Angeles on July 21, 1943. The date written in the script for the start of the uprising was March 17, 1943 (Hecht, We Will Never Die , 29). [50] Ibid., 39. [51] Ibid., 39. [52] Whitfield, “The Politics of Pageantry, 1936-1946,” 239. The Committee for a Jewish Army had been proposed by the Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky, and was designed to create a fighting force against Hitler, but which would also support the aspiration for a Jewish-led Palestine. [53] Ibid., 239. [54] Ibid., 251. [55] Aaron Beim and Gary Alan Fine, “The Cultural Frameworks of Prejudice: Reputational Images of the Postwar Disjuncture of Jews and Communism,” The Sociological Quarterly 48, no. 3 (2007): 376. [56] On the larger-end of cast size, Chicago’s main Tercentenary pageant featured 1,000 performers, compared to The Romance of a People ’s 3,500. [57] David De Sola Pool, Planning for the Tercentenary of the Settlement of the Jews in the United States in 1954-55 (New York: American Jewish Historical Society, 1950). [58] Beim and Fine, “The Cultural Frameworks of Prejudice,” 375. [59] De Sola Pool, Planning for the Tercentenary of the Settlement of the Jews in the United States in 1954-55 , 414. [60] Judith Friedman Rosen, “In Search of… Earlier American Jewish Anniversary Celebrations: 1905 and 1954,” American Jewish History 92, no. 4 (2004): 481. [61] American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, Exercises in the celebration of the Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Settlement of the Jews in the United States, 1655-1905 original pamphlet reprint (New York: American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, 1954). [62] Adele Gutman Nathan, Producing Tercentenary Pageants (New York: American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, 1954), 7. [63] Nathan mentions a single Jewish themed pageant/play from wartime, The Eternal Road (1937), though only to use it as an example of what not to do: don’t use “canned music” (Ibid., 9). [64] “St. Louis officials desperately sought to present a different civic image to the nation. They felt that a successful historical pageant would not only cleanse the city’s tarnished reputation nationwide, but also advance a single civic identity around which the various people sand classes could rally to enact reforms at home.” Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry , 159-60. [65] Listed in American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, Program Materials for the American Jewish Tercentenary (New York: American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, 1954). [66] Mae [Maie] Clement Perley, The Quilt (Louisville: Jewish Tercentenary Committee of the Conference of Jewish Organizations, December 1954). Written for presentation in Louisville on March 8, 1955. [67] Marc Siegel, Faith and Freedom: A Dramatic Presentation (New York: American Jewish Tercentenary, 1954), 20. [68] Ibid., 21. [69] Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry , 5. [70] Wilmer, Theatre, Society, and the Nation , 11 Footnotes About The Author(s) Rachel Merrill Moss is a doctoral candidate in the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama at Northwestern University and a 2018-2019 Fulbright grantee to Poland. While earning her MA in Theatre History and Criticism from CUNY Brooklyn College, she worked in New York as a theatre critic and dramaturg. Rachel has presented work at the American Society for Theatre Research, Association for Theatre in Higher Education, and the Polish-Jewish Studies Working Group. Gary Alan Fine is James E. Johnson Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University, a member of the faculty of the Interdisciplinary Program in Theatre and Drama, and a former theatre critic. He is the author of numerous articles and book, including most recently, Talking Art: The Culture of Practice and the Practice of Culture in MFA Education . He writes extensively on reputations and scandals in art worlds and in politics. 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. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Casey L. Berner Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 1 Visit Journal Homepage Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton. Chris Jones. London: Methuen Drama, 2019. Pp. 215. Casey L. Berner By Published on November 16, 2022 Download Article as PDF Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton . Chris Jones. London: Methuen Drama, 2019. Pp. 215. Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton takes a broadly sociological look at notable Broadway shows of the last 30 years, constructing a rough lineage from Angels in America ’s 1993 Broadway opening to Hamilton ’s runaway success in 2015-16. The book opens with a compelling prologue detailing former Vice President Mike Pence’s notorious visit to Hamilton only days after the 2016 election. Then, Rise Up! ’s fourteen chapters tackle one notable Broadway play or musical and an attendant event or movement in US politics (or within the larger theatre industry). Each chapter is titled for the year of the play’s Broadway opening from 1993 through to 2016 (with a notable gap from 2002-2007). In doing so, Jones builds an historical image of Broadway in which each show discussed represents a unique and important lesson or development that would lead, almost inevitably, to Hamilton as Broadway’s cultural and political peak. Jones’s clear journalistic prose takes readers inside the various Broadway houses where each show played. At its best, Rise Up! moves seamlessly from huge events of political prominence, to the local context of New York theatre, to the particular production on which the chapter is focused. The book’s first chapter, “1993: An Angel Lands,” does this beautifully, taking readers into the Broadway of the 1980s and the AIDS crisis, discussing Larry Kramer’s activism and artistry to serve Jones’s discussion of Tony Kushner’s epic Angels in America . Chapter twelve, which focuses on the notorious flop musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark , is similarly compelling, guiding readers through the backstage turmoil and the on-stage errors and injuries that plagued the production in a way that is both sensitively handled and entertaining to read without feeling sensationalized. At the same time, the book is mired by Jones inclination toward tangents that never quite weave back to his overarching argument. Hamilton serves as a prominent but ultimately weak binding agent for the history this book constructs; Jones mentions each featured play’s connection to the hit show, but the tone is more winking gesture than compelling narrative thread. In some cases, these gestures distract—chapter five contains a lengthy description of the historical duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, connected loosely to August Wilson’s King Hedley II via gun violence. Missed opportunities to more clearly cohere this narrative abound. I was particularly struck that Jones makes only passing remarks on Oskar Eustis, perhaps the figure who connects Angels in America most directly to Hamilton . Similarly, Jones discusses Frozen at length in chapter seven without mentioning that the show shared a composer with Avenue Q, the primary subject of that chapter. While Rise Up! is an enjoyable read, it presents readers with an oversimplified history without ever quite connecting its many dots. This often renders thinner analysis for theater historians and scholars. I was struck especially when chapter five, on August Wilson, ends with a comment that the playwright “did not live long enough to see the first show staged [at the August Wilson Theatre]: Jersey Boys ” (80). Some hint toward Jones’s perspective here would have been useful to me as a reader—was this an appropriate choice, given the show’s grounding in a specific location much as Wilson’s plays were? Or was it inappropriate to open Wilson’s eponymous theatre with a musical about a white doo-wop group performing in the early 1960s that largely evades the politics of the period? While Jones’s journalistic prowess makes the read interesting, the breezy tone allows him to evade deeper evaluation and critical analysis of topics. Some hint at Jones’s perspectives on these works and their cultural significance might have helped guide the reader and connect the volume’s disparate threads. My reader’s copy was also riddled with typos and minor factual errors—such as incorrectly naming The Little Mermaid in a discussion of Beauty and the Beast (59) or a reference to 2011 that, in context, must actually refer to 2001 to make sense (92)—that left me equal parts confused and distracted. These errors and misclassifications affect the very structure of the book; for instance, the seventh chapter is entitled “2002: The Pull of Vegas and the Rise of the Meta,” but the chapter details events set largely from 2004-2006 and in fact makes no reference to events in the year 2002 beyond the title. This was particularly notable, as the chapters jump from 2002 to 2007, and the contents of this chapter would fill that gap. While these errors may reflect on the editing or publisher as much as author, they raise concerns for me about the historical narrative that Jones’ book constructs when this narrative is at odds with the basic facts he presents. This book is perfect for those developing an initial interest in musical theatre or Broadway history, and could be used as a launching point for discussing commercial theatre and politics with undergraduate students, or as an entryway for further research into any one of the works included. It is also excellent for refreshing one’s memory of recent Broadway shows, especially musicals, as most major successful works since 1993 are mentioned in some capacity. Scholars aiming for a more rigorous investigation of these issues could pair Rise Up! recent volumes on musical theatre and US American culture; for instance, Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America’s Past can provide greater insight into Hamilton as a cultural juggernaut, while Stacy Wolf’s Beyond Broadway: The Pleasure and Promise of Musical Theatre Across America plucks musical theatre from New York City and examines it in the context of communities and societies across the US. Ultimately, Rise Up! is an enjoyable and sometimes insightful read that is simply not geared toward academic readers or audiences well-versed in either musical theatre or recent political history, but can be read, used, and enjoyed with that in mind. References Footnotes About The Author(s) CASEY L. BERNER City University of New York Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue “An Art for Which There Is as Yet No Name.” Mobile Color, Artistic Composites, Temporal Objects The Anti-Victorianism of Victorian Revivals Tricks, Capers, and Highway Robbery: Philadelphia Self-Enactment upon the Early Jacksonian Stage “The Spirit of the Thing is All”: The Federal Theatre’s Staging of Medieval Drama in the Los Angeles Religious Community The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida, by Karen Jaime. New York City, NY: New York University Press, 2021; 275pp. $28.00 paper. Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton. Chris Jones. London: Methuen Drama, 2019. Pp. 215. Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America. Rebekah J. Kowal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020; Pp. 295. Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife. Kareem Khubchandani. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical; Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Do we meld into our pets? How long does that take? After that...how long do we have. Does it matter? Let's find out PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE How Do I? William Burke Theater English. Dog 30 minutes 8:00PM EST Thursday, October 12, 2023 Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All Do we meld into our pets? How long does that take? After that...how long do we have. Does it matter? Let's find out Content / Trigger Description: There will be live dogs on leashes at the performance Followed by a short discussion moderated by Jackie Sibblies Drury. Performed by: Carolina Dô Kedian Keohan Gertie Stitch Written by William Burke WILLIAM BURKE is a playwright and director living in Brooklyn. His productions include: the food was terrible (The Bushwick Starr), Is it Supposed to Last?(Playco), Help Me Draw Your Feelings(Brick Aux) PIONEERS!#goforth (JACK), COMFORT DOGS: Live from the Pink House (JACK), FURRY! (JACK) FURRY!/LA FURIA!(The Bushwick Starr), Untitled American Flag Craft Project(The Brick), Variations on The Main(JACK). With Target Margin Theater: I Made a Mistake, EXPLODITY! and DAY!Night?fuck... (JACK and The Stahl Center at Stoney Brook University) He has developed his plays/presented readings at NACL, NYTW, The Black Swan Lab (Oregon Shakespeare Festival), All For One, The Bushwick Starr, Little theatre (Dixon Place), The Prelude Festival (CUNY Grad center) and CATCH. William studied playwriting at Brooklyn College with Mac Wellman, Anne Washburn and Erin Courtney. He is the head curator for The Starr Reading Series at the Bushwick Starr, Co-Chair of the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab and co-curator for Little Theatre at Dixon Place(2017-2019). He has taught at Cornish College of the Arts and Stoney Brook University. His podcast series PEP TALKS FOR A NEW WORLD is available on all major platforms. Williamburke.net Instagram: @williamlostit Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

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 Polyphonies of the Present: The Pulse of the Almada Festival By Savas Patsalidis Published: December 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF Returning to Almada As I have done in recent years, this July (2025) I returned once again to Almada, drawn not only by the calibre of its annual festival, one of Portugal’s most significant theatrical events, but also by the atmosphere it cultivates: warm, relaxed, and almost familial in its sense of coexistence. In contrast to larger, often impersonal festivals with their endless parallel events and hurried transitions from venue to venue, the Almada Festival offers a markedly different experience. Here, one feels at home. The experience is more embodied, more communal, and, in a subtle yet clear sense, quietly anti-systemic. There is no imperative to engage in relentless networking, business cards at the ready, pressure to "see everything." Instead, there is time, time to watch, to listen, to feel, to reflect, to write, to encounter the city and its people. For me, this constitutes a form of cultural resistance: an alternative to the dominant festival logic of overproduction and consumption, what we might describe as the “festival-as-supermarket” model. Under the artistic direction of the energetic Rodrigo Francisco, the Almada Festival has organically embraced a philosophy of community , not merely as a thematic or managerial motif, but as the core of its artistic practice. Its programming does not cater to any particular aesthetic ideology or social elite, nor does it play into the dichotomy of "experts" versus "the masses." Instead, through its inclusive framework, it opens aesthetic proposals to a wide-ranging public, aiming not simply to disseminate the art of Dionysus, but to cultivate spectatorship itself, exposing audiences to a plurality of theatrical quality languages and stylistic vocabularies. One particularly emblematic gesture is the festival’s annual invitation to audiences to vote for the performance they would most like to see return the following year. This is not merely symbolic; it re-enacts a genuine form of co-curation, an authentic dialogue rather than a token gesture of “participation.” Staged in Restraint, Anchored in Emotion : Marius (Directed by Joël Pommerat) The first performance I attended was Marius , drawn from Marcel Pagnol’s emblematic Marseille Trilogy , directed by Joël Pommerat and staged on the main stage of the Teatro Municipal Joaquim Benite. The plot is relatively straightforward, some might even call it predictable: a young man (Marius) is torn between the dream of escape and the pull of romantic love. Life unfolds in a small café owned by his father, César, near the Marseille harbour, a place of routine, familiar encounters, philosophical banter, quarrels, and laughter. It serves as a communal hub, a kind of agora or informal tribunal, where everyday lives are continuously staged and restaged. For Marius, who longs to become a sailor and flee toward the unknown, the tightly composed and almost claustrophobic stage design by Éric Soyer becomes a metaphor for entrapment. Marius (Michel Galera). the dreamer of Marcel Pagnol’s Marius. Compagnie Louis Brouillar. Stage design: Éric Soyer. Cast: Damien Baudry, Élise Douyere, Michel Galera, Ange Melenyk, Redwane Rajel, Jean Ruimi, Bernard Traversa, Ludovic Velon. Photo: Agathe Pommerat. Courtesy of Almada Festival Into this enclosed world enters Fanny (Elise Douyere), Marius’ great love. Yet, as is often the case in narratives of departure, it is the dream, rather than the love, that ultimately prevails. Marius departs secretly at night, chasing the freedom promised by the sea, forsaking the stability and emotional security his relationship offers. Pommerat’s direction adopts an everyday, almost anti-theatrical rhythm, one that allows silences, hesitations, and tentative confessions to generate atmosphere. The staging resists melodrama; emotional charge emerges organically through dialogue, through the cadence of the local dialect, through understated humour tinged with melancholy, and through small, restrained gestures: a glance, a touch withheld, two bodies falling in love without ever fully closing the physical distance between them. Particularly in the scenes with Fanny, the physical detachment intensifies the spoken word, as the absence of bodily expression lends weight and space to language itself to perform its acoustic “physicality.” Fanny (Elise Douyere), thoughtful and troubled, at César’s café where her beloved Marius works. Photo: Agathe Pommerat. Courtesy of Almada Festival A striking aspect of this production is its origin in carceral space. Marius was first developed and staged in a high-security prison (2014–2017), with most of the current cast composed of formerly incarcerated individuals. Only the actress playing Fanny is a trained professional. This choice lends the production not only a profound social resonance but also a form of raw authenticity. Even the occasional performative imperfections or technical inconsistencies do not weaken the work’s power; on the contrary, they enhance its credibility and emotional depth. As noted earlier, thematically, Marius does not tread new ground: the sea as desire, love as dilemma, the conflict between duty and longing, father and son, these are familiar tropes. One might even be reminded of Eugene O’Neill’s sea plays, written during roughly the same period as Pagnol’s trilogy. Nor is the portrayal of Fanny, patient, compassionate, self-sacrificing, foreign within the representational codes of early 20th-century patriarchy. And yet, Pommerat’s direction holds the viewer’s attention through emotional restraint and formal discipline. The intensity is not on the surface, but it is there, quiet, unmistakable. In a world driven by acceleration and spectacle, Marius reminds us of the power of waiting, of deliberation, of the understated. Behind the Curtain, Beyond the Gaze: Teatro Delusio (Familie Flöz) At the open-air theatre of Escola António da Costa, we watched Teatro Delusio by the internationally acclaimed German ensemble Familie Flöz, a wordless performance imbued with the atmosphere of silent cinema and the precision of corporeal theatre. Its narrative centre is not the stage, but rather its backstage, that liminal zone where the dream of theatricality collides with the muted, repetitive routines of its unseen labourers, electricians, stagehands, ushers. Teatro Delusio . Opening scene with the three puppeteers presenting the star of the show to the audience. Cast: Andre Angulo, Johannes Stubenvoll, and Thomas Van Ouwerkerk . Direction & Scenography: Michael Vogel. Masks: Hajo Schüler. Costumes: Eliseu R. Weide. Lighting: Reinhard Hubert. Sound Design / Music: Dirk Schröder. Photo: Eckard Jonalik. Courtesy of Almada Festival At the heart of the piece are three theatre technicians, Bob, Bernd, and Ivan (played by Andre Angulo, Johannes Stubenvoll, Thomas Van Ouwerkerk), who emerge as emblematic figures of a world both invisible and essential. Through a sequence of slapstick-inflected episodes, we follow their backstage frictions, aspirations, vanities, and unspoken dreams. While the "front stage" dazzles with lights, applause, and spectacle, the backstage unfolds as a silent tragedy, the tragedy of waiting, invisibility, and failure, the tragedy of an unacknowledged life. Movement and mask convey the energy of Teatro Delusio . Photo: Eckard Jonalik. Courtesy of Almada Festival The three performers portray a total of 29 characters, ranging from conductors and dancers to eccentric directors and narcissistic stars. Their performance displays remarkable technical precision, choreographic clarity, and performative dexterity in their seamless transitions between roles, bodies, and tasks. This is physical acting par excellence, where the mask, intricately designed by Hajo Schüler, becomes a living surface, capable of transmitting fear, joy, awkwardness, and despair. Rather than concealing, the mask reveals. Backstage, a crew member longs for the spotlight of the star’s attention, while she prepares to dazzle her adoring audience. Teatro Delusio . Photo: Eckard Jonalik. Courtesy of Almada Festival Using purely visual means, without a single line of spoken dialogue, Teatro Delusio manages to explore themes of human solitude, the yearning for recognition, jealousy, love, and fulfillment. It is a dramaturgy of silence, where laughter and poignancy coexist in a fragile equilibrium. One does not laugh at the characters, but rather through them, recognising in their gestures the viewer’s own minor failures, deferred desires, and the barely perceptible weight of obscurity. Love of fame and recognition won’t take long to lead the members of the backstage crew into conflicts, confrontations, and absurd quarrels that spark laughter with their gags, but also evoke a deep sense of sympathy. Teatro Delusio. Photo: Eckard Jonalik. Courtesy of Almada Festival The absence of linguistic barriers explains why Teatro Delusio has toured in 34 countries to this day. Though meticulously structured, the performance might have benefited from a slightly tighter dramaturgy, particularly in the final twenty or so minutes, where the repetition of certain motifs risked narrative dilution. The birth scene, for instance, felt inventive but dramaturgically unanchored, an idea left unexplored. Nevertheless, this is a profoundly hybrid and meta-theatrical work where puppet theatre, mime, physical comedy, slapstick, tragedy, and farce are woven into a fluid structure that dialogues with the tradition of theatre within theatre . It is, in many ways, a reflexive homage to theatre itself, and especially to the mask, both as material object and as metaphor for identity, secrecy, duplicity, and existential disappointment Familie Flöz turns our attention to the invisible processes of stage-making, evoking resonances with productions like Ellie Dubois’ No Show (the Herald Award recipient at Edinburgh Fringe, 2017) in which the audience watches what does not happen when a performance collapses before their eyes, or Constanza Macras/Dorky Park’s Open for Everything (2012) , which centres on marginalised performers (from Roma communities), giving voice to those who remain in the shadows. Most notably, it echoes Michael Frayn’s ageless Noises Off (1982), an ingenious meta-farce that reveals the chaos behind the scenes of a matinee performance. In all these cases, gaze shifts from centre to margin, from performance to infrastructure, from protagonist to technician or outsider. What emerges is a commentary on theatrical visibility and the politics of spectatorship: Who is seen and thus rendered a subject of the gaze? And who remains unseen? What does it mean, literally and metaphorically, to be offstage, in theatre and in life? The closing moments offer no catharsis, only a bittersweet image of a world perpetually left behind. The characters remain there, in a space with no curtain, no lighting, no applause, only their breath, and their gaze, fixed upon an audience that does not see them. The performance does not speak.But it is loudly heard. A Classroom Against Oblivion: El mar. Visión de unos niños que no lo han visto nunca (Concept Xavier Bobés & Alberto Conejero) This Spanish documentary-style performance, El mar. Visión de unos niños que no lo han visto nunca (“The Sea: As Seen by Children Who Have Never Seen It”), performed by Xavier Bobés and Sergi Torrecilla, is based on the true story of Antoni Benaiges, a teacher in a remote village school in Bañuelos de Bureba (Burgos) in 1936. It is rooted in an act of historical remembrance and poetic reconstruction, a gesture of tender resistance through memory and education. Xavier Bobés and Sergi Torrecilla (in red shirt) on stage. Of the two, Torrecilla is the one who performs and narrates excerpts from the children’s writings, Conejero’s text, and Benaiges’ own words and Bobés the one who activates memory through the use of objects. Photo: Alberto Conejero. Courtesy of Almada Festival The story begins in 1934, when Benaiges, using his own savings, purchased a gramophone and a printing press for his rural classroom, encouraging the children to express themselves creatively. Two years later, his students produced a small booklet titled El mar. Visión de unos niños que no lo han visto nunca , in which they described how they imagined the sea, though none of them had ever seen it. Benaiges promised to take them to the coast that summer. However, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and his execution (July 25, 1936) at its onset rendered this promise tragically unfulfilled. Jou Serra and Mario Andrés Gómez’s lighting score, combined with Albert Coma’s projections and Julià Carboneras’s soundscape, creates an immersive and suggestive atmosphere that brings the audience closer to the space and time of the story enacted by the two actors. Photo: Alberto Conejero. Courtesy of Almada Festival The performance treats this historical episode with emotional delicacy, ethical clarity, and narrative restraint. Built around the aesthetics of documentary theatre and object theatre, the piece deploys minimal theatrical resources. Objects do not simply support the storytelling; they act as catalysts of emotion, charged relics that summon the affective memory of a vanished world. Through the use of live cameras, the children's perspective is expanded and brought into the visual field, layering the adult narration with the imaginary gaze of childhood. There is nothing ostentatiously innovative about the staging. On the contrary, the production is deliberately unassuming, almost “non-theatre” in its visual economy. It pivots around empathy, emotional presence, and the quiet beauty of relationality. Though it occasionally borders on melodrama, the performance maintains its composure, evoking emotion for the right reasons. It creates a subtle oscillation in which the spectator feels at times like the teacher, and at others, like the child. On stage, the two performers, Xavier Bobés and Sergi Torrecilla (wearing the red shirt), engage in a complementary enactment of memory: Bobés through the material activation of objects, and Torrecilla through the performative narration of texts drawn from the children’s writings, Alberto Conejero’s script, and Antoni Benaiges’ own words. Together, they articulate the dialectic between the “here-and-now” of theatrical presence and the “there-and-then” of historical absence, thereby bridging past and present with nuanced subtlety. With humility and clarity, they share the story and the memories it holds, honoring the legacy of Benaiges while elevating the values of hope, education, and human dignity, all conveyed through the fragile yet enduring voices of children. It is unsurprising that the piece has been presented widely across Latin American countries. Originally premiered at the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya in February 2022, it has since been nominated for several Max Awards, including Best Play, Best Direction, and Best Actor (Bobés) for its performance at Teatro Corral de Comedias. To Move Is to Survive : Zugzwang (Concept and Performance Le Galactik Ensemble) Presented in the outdoor space of Escola D. António, Zugzwang (2021) marks the second collective creation of the French company Le Galactik Ensemble, following their earlier piece Optraken (seen at the same venue the previous year). Borrowing its title from the chess term zugzwang , a situation where any move leads inevitably to disadvantage or loss, the performance transforms this concept into an explosive physical allegory of human precarity and imbalance in a world of constant destabilisation. The set of Zugzwang (by Mathilde Bourgon) at the end of the performance : a bombed-out landscape, a pile of construction materials that would regain their shape and “threatening” role in the very next show Photo: Martin Argyroglo. Courtesy of Almada Festival Five acrobats encounter one another in a volatile scenographic landscape, somewhere between workshop, construction site, and laboratory. For sixty minutes, they compose a narrative of survival, not through language or plot, but through somatic confrontation with risk. The body becomes a storytelling device, contending with gravity, collision, imbalance, and fear. Each movement appears to be dictated by an environment that resists trust. The performers live, quite literally, in a constant state of zugzwang. Le Galactik Ensemle in action. Mathieu Bleton, Mosi Espinoza, Jonas Julliard, Karim Messaoudi, and Cyril Pernotrelo engage in a continuous struggle for survival in a world of unexpected obstacles and difficulties. Reacting and moving quickly is not a matter of choice but of necessity. Photo: Martin Argyroglo. Courtesy of Almada Festival The set design by Mathilde Bourgon, a kinetic, fragile mechanical architecture, populated by rails, pulleys, ropes, collapsing doors, and unpredictable surfaces, plays a pivotal role. It is not a passive backdrop but an active opponent, reactive, obstructive, sometimes deceptive. Visually, the piece evokes the mechanical traps of silent cinema, yet it resonates with a distinctly contemporary anxiety: the instability of material systems and environments. The performers do not merely move upon it, they survive within it. Struggling with the collapsing set. Photo: Galactik Ensemble. Courtesy of Almada Festival Everything falls apart. They have to do something to get out of the mess. Photo: Galactik Ensemle. Courtesy of Almada Festival For those unfamiliar with Le Galactik Ensemble, it is worth noting that their work specializes in what they call “situational acrobatics,” a form of real-time physical risk-taking, in which safety is never entirely guaranteed and failure is always a possibility. Nothing is wholly predetermined. The tension derives from this very volatility: perpetual edge, where everything could go wrong, and often nearly does. It s precisely at this threshold that theatricality emerges. Humour plays a crucial role, not as comic relief, but as a mechanism of resistance. It is the humour of despair and survival. The figures on stage are not superhumans but clowns, fragile, fallible, exposed. The grotesque, the comedic, and the existential coexist in a performative poetics of insecurity. As in the work of Aurélien Bory’s Compagnie 111 [i] or Cirque Inextremiste, [ii] physicality here is not for spectacle, but a necessary language for articulating the inexpressible. The ensemble performs with remarkable collective precision. There are no individual protagonists; the group functions as a single, interdependent organism navigating a hostile world. Acrobatics, choreographic tension, and acting discipline converge, not to showcase virtuosity, but to reveal necessity. This is a dramaturgy of survival rather than display. Zugzwang offers no resolution. There is no comfort, no catharsis. It presents a world that remains unstable, where every move carries the risk of collapse, and yet... stillness is not an option. One must keep moving, because to stop is simply to cease to exist. Listening to Absence: A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (Directed by Teresa Gafeira) Staged in the experimental venue of Teatro Joaquim Benite, this production by Companhia de Teatro de Almada is based on Peter Handke’s deeply personal novella A Sorrow Beyond Dreams , written in the aftermath of his mother’s suicide. The work resists conventional, plot-driven dramaturgy, opting instead to trace the inner rhythms of grief, and the writer’s struggle to render them communicable through language. Scene with the two protagonists (Duarte Guimarães and Pedro Walter) in Handke dramatized novella. Photo: Rui Mateus. Courtesy of Almada Festival Set in rural Austria between the two World Wars, the narrative unfolds against the backdrop of Handke’s mother’s life, her marriage, her disillusionment, her psychological collapse, and eventual death by overdose. Handke offers no sentimental embellishments. His narration oscillates between clinical observation and introspective inquiry, not aiming to provoke emotion, but to understand: How does one do justice to a life that disappeared in silence? The actors Duarte Guimarães and Pedro Walte share the text on stage, seamlessly voicing passages from Handke's novella. They embody the narrator’s internal monologue rather than portraying discrete, fully developed individual entities. Photo: Rui Mateus. Courtesy of Almada Festival This very question forms the basis of Teresa Gafeira’s directorial approach. The piece is delivered as a dual vocal monologue, wherein two performers do not “act” but testify, functioning as emissaries of an internal elegy. Their delivery is austere emotionally contained, eschewing outbursts of sentimentalism in favour of restraint. However, the absence of surtitles made the work significantly less accessible for non-Portuguese speakers. Despite prior familiarity with the source text, the live experience lacked linguistic and emotional immersion. It became difficult to apprehend how the words carried their weight, how silences sculpted their resonance, or how the performers physically processed the inner landscape of grief. While the vocal interpretation remained faithful to Handke’s style, the visual and spatial potential of the stage was left largely underutilized. The projected images functioned more as atmospheric backdrop than dramaturgical interlocutors. As a result, the possibility of a multimodal dialogue with memory remained underdeveloped. The performance lingered in a liminal space, powerful in speech, but theatrically rather undercharged. And yet, the ethical core of the work remained intact. The performance did not “display” grief, it remembered it. It whispered sorrow through language. That act alone carried immense weight. Mourning was not an emotional identification but a form of justice through articulation. Handke does not ask the audience to empathise but to reflect: How can theatre represent a life shaped by silence? How does theatre speak when the other no longer can? In this regard, the production aligns with other theatrical meditations on mourning, not as pathos, but as remembrance of absence. From Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape , where the voice of a cassette becomes the medium of grief, to Theodoros Terzopoulos’ Antigone , where loss is rendered as somatic burden and vocal repetition, theatre becomes not a mirror of life, but a ritual of memory. Such performances do not scream. They do not shock. They demand attention, silence, and time. They ask us to listen to what is never fully said. And the very fact that they continue to exist, and to insist, in an age of speed and information saturation, is itself a political gesture of interiority. A quiet monument to theatrical dignity in the face of erasure. A Language of Gesture, A Geometry of Motion: Quatro Cantos num Soneto and The Look (Choreography Fernando Duarte and Sharon Eyal) Fernando Duarte’s Quatro Cantos num Soneto undertakes an ambitious project: to translate Luís de Camões’ sonnets into the language of dance, capturing not only their semantic content but also their rhythm, texture, and contemplative depth through bodily gesture. Rather than illustrating the poetic text, the choreography treats it as a score for corporeal expression. The dancers of the Portuguese National Ballet (Ana Lacerda, Inês Amaral, Isabel Galriça, and Paulina Santos) do not narrate; they transcribe. Their movements become elliptical stanzas, undulations, and gestures that evoke musical interpretation more than dramaturgical action. Quatro Cantos num Soneto premiered at the Teatro Municipal Joaquim Benite, July 17, 2025. Music: Selections from John Dowland and Diego Pisador, curated by Ricardo Leitão Pedro. Costume Design: Ana Lacerda. Lighting Design: Fernando Duarte. Photo: Hugo David. Courtesy of Almada Festival The sonic landscape, enriched by precise vocal recitations of the sonnets, intensifies the performances’ multisensory atmosphere. The result is less a conventional dance narrative and more a case of "poetry in motion." However, this multilayered approach risks fragmenting the spectator’s experience. The continual interplay of speech, sound, and movement situates the piece in an intermediate space, neither pure dance theatre nor lyrical portraiture, demanding sustained attention, openness and patience from the viewer. Absent is a dramaturgical climax. The work foregoes linear progression and emotional crescendo. Instead, it offers introspection, poetic silence, and an invitation to contemplative observation of the body as a vessel of language. This is a piece that resists facile visual consumption. It does not seek to move the audience emotionally but to attune it. It is an “anti-spectacle,” an embodied reminder that silence, too, possesses rhythm. The Look Immediately following was The Look , choreographed by Sharon Eyal and originally created in 2019 for the Batsheva Dance Company. Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s quote, “Nobody can hurt me without my permission” ( Time Out/ Israel, Feb. 24, 2019), this masterful work delicately balances group movement with individual expression, and mechanical synchronization with organic flow, maintaining an exquisite tension throughout. The dancers, dressed identically, move en masse , as if forming a single body, yet never surrender their individuality to the anonymity of the collective. Each body retains its uniqueness. The Look . Costume Design: Alon Cohen. Lighting Design: Daniel Nørgren-Jensen. Music: Ori Lichti. Photo: Hugo David. Courtesy of Almada Festival Whether moving as solitary units or as coordinated formations, their ceaseless motion and repositioning releases an atmosphere that is hypnotic, mesmerizing, and almost trance-like, an effect intensified by the cold, geometrically regulated lighting. Movement patterns unfold in relentless cycles: mechanical repetitions that mirror the steady pulse of the human body. These motions are intricately shaped and sometimes provoked by Ori Lichtik’s precise and nuanced musical score. Together, they create a physical rhythm where the dancers’ bodies transcend their materiality, taking on the quality of fleeting shapes or abstract concepts rather than solid forms. The Look . Photo: Hugo David. Courtesy of Almada Festival Compared to Eyal’s other works, such as the emotionally charged Love Chapter II (2017) or the hybrid 2 Chapters Love (2022), The Look adopts a rather more formalist and abstract choreographic language. While Love Chapter II and 2 Chapters Love emphasize raw emotion and narrative complexity, The Look strips movement down to its essential elements. Here, the dancers function more as vessels of energy and repetition, articulating phrases in an algorithmic dance vocabulary of movement . The Look stands as a significant addition to Sharon Eyal’s artistic corpus. Structurally rigorous and aesthetically entrancing, it probes the very essence of “looking,” of perceiving movement as meaning. The gaze of the dancer becomes inseparable from the gaze of the spectator. This very sense of disciplined sensitivity was realized by the dancers of Companhia Nacional de Bailado. They did not “perform” the choreography; they embodied it. Without exaggeration or unnecessary embellishment, they delivered a performance of unity and aesthetic discipline. Their aim was not to impress, but to articulate, as a single organism, the expressive potential of the work. Broken Images, Breathing Bodies: Extra Moenia (Conception and Direction Emma Dante) My recent visit to the Almada Festival concluded with Emma Dante’s polyphonic performance Extra Moenia (Latin for Outside the Walls ) , which once again confirmed her unique theatrical method: a choral mosaic of bodies and voices, in which the traditional notion of plot gives way to the dramaturgy of coexistence. The opening scene of Extra Moenia . Photo: Roselina Garbo. Courtesy of Almada Festival Extra Moenia is not a conventional performance. It is a living body in motion, a collective choreography of everyday gestures and fractured social realities. Fourteen performers from Dante’s company Sud Costa Occidentale awaken within a set resembling a makeshift shelter. As they dress and begin to move through the performance space, they confront a world beyond the safety of its walls, a world marked by crisis, war, destitution, and displacement. Extra Moenia, premiered in March 2025 at Teatro Bellini in Naples.The production is a collaboration between Teatro Biondo Palermo, Atto Unico – Carnezzeria, and Sud Costa Occidentale. Photo: Roselina Garbo. Courtesy of Almada Festival The rhythm of the performance constantly shifts. Scenes alternate like snapshots: a railway station, a marketplace, a congregation in prayer, a beach turned into a site of shipwreck. Dante composes a palimpsest of contemporary wounds, embodied by emblematic figures: a refugee from Ukraine, a migrant from Congo, an Iranian woman removing her veil, a conservative family, a group of football players from Palermo. Each character carries trauma, but each also contains a sliver of hope. Extra Moenia. Costume Design: Mariella Gerbino. Movement Assistant: Davide Celona. Production Assistant: Daniela Gusmano. Sound Department Head: Giuseppe Alterno. Artistic Coordination: Giuseppe Baiamont. Photo: Roselina Garbo. Courtesy of Almada Festival Aesthetically, the narrative evokes the logic of social media: brief, rapidly shifting images that allow no time for sustained reflection. Thematically, war, displacement, patriarchy, and ecological collapse are introduced more as reference points than as subjects of in-depth exploration. This fragmentation risks aesthetic overload but simultaneously reflects with accuracy the disorienting experience of contemporary social disintegration. Dante’s primary tool is the body, not the idealized, but the socially worn body that bears tension, fear, and desire. A body that does not enact roles but reveals its political weight as a record of violent coexistence, a container of memory, and a site of survival. The tone oscillates between the satirical and the tragic, from the noisy market scenes and station announcements to monologues about rape, war, and displacements. The finale, featuring a "sea of plastic," is visually and emotionally powerful. It symbolizes a collective shipwreck, a space where the body becomes an archive of trauma. At times, the multiplicity of themes results in aesthetic saturation. The accumulation of images and messages leaves little room for reflective engagement; nothing fully settles. The rapid pace of the performance allows little space for depth or contemplation. In a way, the direction seems primarily concerned with creating a kaleidoscope of impressions, with inclusivity as its dominant image. Despite the fragmentation and underdeveloped elements, the performance as a whole manages to transcend the limitations of its elliptical narrative. It draws the audience into a theatrical experiment that breathes with History, a collective ritual devoid of heroics or final applause, yet filled with bodies that persist. And in an era marked by aesthetic fatigue, that very persistence becomes a vital necessity. Epilogue: Listening to the Present This year’s festival, with its 20 productions, local and foreign, each with its own style, managed as a whole to shape a diverse ensemble that powerfully highlighted urgent issues concerning contemporary theatre: how can human experience be conveyed in an age of acceleration, instability, and global rupture, where the world seems to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions? How can contemporary theatre speak again in a voice that is neither obsolete nor overloaded, but capable of listening to the present and articulating possibilities for the future? From the sparse, introspective study of the body as a medium of language in Quatro Cantos num Soneto and The Look , to the fragmented, overwhelming polyphony of Extra Moenia , the precarious balancing act of Zugzwang , and the sharp-witted comedy Les Gros Patinent Bien—Cabaret de Carton by the French company Compagnie Le Fils du Grand Réseau , created by Pierre Guillois and Olivier Martin-Salvan, where the only stage props were dozens of cardboard boxes, the performances did not merely depict reality; they sought to reconstruct it, interrogate it, and resist it. They offered no easy answers, no closure and no comfort. Instead, they acted as mirrors and warnings. They invited vigilance, critical attention, and an openness to complexity. Perhaps this is the essential quest: to sustain our relationship with theatre not as an escape, but as a confrontation, a space of reflection, conflict, and creation. A space where light and darkness, past and present, art and life breathe together. A space that still believes in the necessity of meaning. Image Credits: Article References [i] This is a Toulouse-based performance company founded in 2000 by director and scenographer Aurélien Bory. The environment plays a significant role in storytelling. It is an active force. See Plan B (2003), Plus ou moins l'infini (2005), Sans objet (2009), and Plexus (2012), among other works. [ii] Cirque Inextremiste is a French contemporary circus company founded in 1998 by director and performer Yann Ecauvre. It blends physical theatre, circus arts, street performance, and often risk-taking acrobatics. Extrêmités (2012), Extension (2014), Exit (2017), Warning (2022) are among their most notable productions. References About the author(s) Savas Patsalidis is Professor Emeritus in Theatre Studies at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, where he has taught at the School of English for close to 35 years. He has also taught at the Drama School of the National Theatre of Northern Greece, the Hellenic Open University and the graduate program of the Theatre Department of Aristotle University. He is the author of fourteen books on theatre and performance criticism/theory and co-editor of another thirteen. His two-volume study, Theatre, Society, Nation (2010), was awarded first prize for best theatre study of the year. In 2019 his book Theatre & Theory II: About Topoi, Utopias and Heterotopias was published by University Studio Press. In 2022 his book-length study Comedy’s Encomium: The Seriousness of Laughter , was also published by University Studio Press. In addition to his academic activities, he writes theatre reviews for various journals. He is on the Executive Committee of the Hellenic Association of Theatre and Performing Arts Critics, a member of the curators’ team of Forest International Festival (organized by the National Theatre of Northern Greece), and the editor-in-chief of Critical Stages/Scènes critiques , the journal of the International Association of Theatre Critics. 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.

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

Eric M. Glover Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 1 Visit Journal Homepage American Musical Theater Eric M. Glover By Published on December 11, 2017 Download Article as PDF American Musical Theater . James Leve. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015; Pp. 448. American Musical Theater by James Leve provides instructors and students with an interdisciplinary approach to the history of the musical from Reconstruction to the contemporary period. From burlesque, the minstrel show, operetta, and vaudeville to the musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber and those of Stephen Sondheim, Leve presents the musical as a narrative genre that shapes and is shaped by national themes of cross-cultural encounter. Leve argues that the musicals of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, II were and remain the standard by which all musicals are judged, a standard to which he does not capitulate unconditionally but resists throughout. Leve’s stated purpose for the textbook is to track and explain “the evolution of musical comedy from a popular entertainment to a popular art form as well as to measure the impact of Rodgers and Hammerstein on musical theater” (xvii). He accomplishes this by presenting thirteen case studies of stage works from Oklahoma! to The Light in the Piazza alongside artists’ biographical information, relevant criticism from scholars, a script’s production history, and the social and historical values a stage work reflects and embodies. Leve’s remaining case studies of the “black musical” ( The Wiz , adapted from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz , by L. Frank Baum), musical theatre off-Broadway ( The Fantasticks ), rock on Broadway ( Hair ), and the star ( Gypsy ) allow him to synthesize the breadth and depth of American musical theatre. American Musical Theater rises out of the school of thought that a well-made musical, quintessentially American in origin, is integrated, having a book and a score of lyrics and music that work together as a unit, and as a result Leve adds to our knowledge of musical theatre and relates to current debates in our field. By beginning chapter one with a case study of Oklahoma! , Leve shows the extent to which integration theory is as much a construction of the artists who created Oklahoma! as it is a construction of the scholars who study musicals. Leve weaves a literature review of scholarly works by Geoffrey Block, Scott McMillin, Andrea Most, and James O’Leary into the case study of Oklahoma! to show that artists and scholars have not reached agreement and likely never will. Leve notes, “It is therefore helpful to consider integration as an overarching artistic attitude, a frame of mind, a basic aesthetic of coherency, rather than as a strictly observed dramaturgical approach” (5). Leve reads closely Lemuel Ayers’s sets and Miles White’s costumes, Agnes de Mille’s choreography, Hammerstein’s book and lyrics, and Rodgers’s music to support his claims, all of which are complemented by “And Bear in Mind,” a section that presents Kiss Me , Kate as a counterpoint to Oklahoma! and includes discussion questions, key names, terms, and concepts. Leve is at his best when he describes the nature of racial formation in the archive and the repertoire of American musical theatre. Even though it is widely accepted by artists and scholars that Oklahoma! is a musical about the wants of the community taking primacy over the wants of the individual, Leve makes a case for taking Oklahoma! seriously as a grim reminder that an individual becomes part of a community but at a cost: either assimilation in the case of the Jewish (Ali Hakim) or elimination in the case of the black (Jud Fry). Recent textbooks on American musical theatre prior to Leve’s omit several black major authors and musicals and subscribe to a history of the musical as the province of white people. Chapter fifteen, “The ‘Black Musical,’” provides a genealogy from A Trip to Coontown to The Scottsboro Boys in spite of cultural barriers that make it hard for musicals by and about black people to climb to the top and make it on Broadway. Leve intervenes in the fields of theatre and performance studies by suturing the black origin of the musical to the organization of the textbook. There are few if any weaknesses at the level of argumentative coherence, formal analysis, and textual evidence when judging the textbook by its intentions. However, Leve’s use of musical examples presumes technical knowledge of music on the part of the reader, and this forms a particular challenge for some to understand his analyses of lesser-known stage works like Little Johnny Jones and Very Good Eddie . It would also have been helpful if Leve’s content on greater-known stage works like Anything Goes and In Dahomey were not beholden to a racial binary of black and white so that artists, black and white, who participated in the practice of yellowface in those very musicals could have been held to account for stereotypes of Asian American people. American Musical Theater is a textbook about just that, American musical theatre, and yet Leve lacks a chapter on musicals by and about Asian Americans. Instructors who are teaching in fields like African American studies, American studies, digital humanities, English, music, and theatre can use Leve’s textbook. Educators and students would benefit from this work in courses about not only the history of the musical, but also popular culture, race, and sex. Leve’s textbook is well-written, its argument and evidence are clear, and its large number of illustrations in black-and-white and color are helpful. Moreover, its free, open-access companion Web site, complete with annotated bibliographies and unit quizzes, is easy to navigate. Given the fact that interdisciplinary approaches to American musical theatre are hard to find, Leve’s own in which a musical like The Phantom of the Opera sits comfortably with a musical like Company is a great boon to instructors and students, in that it demonstrates a way of discussing Lloyd Webber and Sondheim together and apart without putting down the former to uplift the latter. Leve’s textbook is recommended to anyone who counts among their teaching interests the place of American musical theatre in the production of cultural knowledge. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Eric M. Glover Swarthmore College Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue May Irwin American Musical Theater Musical Theatre Books New York's Yiddish Theater Chinese Looks Reclaiming Four Child Actors through Seven Plays in US Theatre, 1794-1800 The Illusion of Work: The Con Artist Plays of the Federal Theatre Project On Bow and Exit Music Legitimate: Jerry Douglas's Tubstrip and the Erotic Theatre of Gay Liberation Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Paul E. Fallon Cambridge, Massachusetts Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Paul E. Fallon Cambridge, Massachusetts By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Jennifer Mogbock and company in Toni Stone at The Huntington. Photo: T. Charles Erickson Prayer for the French Republic Joshua Harmon (7 Sep-2 Oct) Fat Ham James Ijames (22 Sep-22 Oct) The Band’s Visit Itmar Moses and David Yazbeck (10 Nov-17 Dec) The Heart Sellers Lloyd Suh (21 Nov-23 Dec) Yippee Ki Yay Richard Marsh (27 Dec-31 Dec) Stand Up if You’re Here Tonight John Klovenbach (20 Jan-23 March) John Proctor is the Villain Kimberly Belflower (8 Feb-10 March) Toni Stone Lydia R. Diamond (17 May-16 June) In July 2023, Christopher Mannelli became Executive Director of The Huntington, following Michael Maso’s forty+ year run as Managing Director. Mannelli took over a strong organization, fully recovered from the pandemic, that offered an extensive season performed in three venues. The Huntington’s first full season with Loretta Greco as Artistic Director opened on the main stage in grand style. Prayer for the French Republic is an expansive three-hour journey across five generations of French Jews. Everything about The Huntington’s production matched the play’s ambitions that began with full color, enlarged (8.5”x11”) program books at a time when some theatres shifted to QR codes. The set featured a rotating dining table that provided critical clues to following the sprawling story. Tony Estrella, as the narrator, delivered historical context directly to the audience, while the remaining cast enacted their private trauma. Carly Zien, as Elodie, delivered an astonishing stream-of-consciousness monologue that illustrated humans’ complex discrepancies. Meanwhile, at The Calderwood, 2022 Pulitzer Prize winner, Fat Ham served up a comedic rap on Hamlet at a Black family backyard barbeque in the American South. Each character bears attributes of their Shakespearean equivalent, plus invented twists. Juicy: misunderstood; moody; and contemplative as any Hamlet, was also obese and gay. The production shredded the fourth wall, fed off our familiarity with Shakespeare’s play, and then skewered it with potato salad, sausage, and pulled pork. The comedy was often broad, always inciteful. Juicy’s karaoke number began so badly it was hilarious, until it turned chilling. Standouts among the cast included Lau’rie Roach as Tio and James T. Alfred at Rev/Pap. Shaken with laughter, I wondered how Fat Ham could mirror Hamlet to the end. Let it be said that death visits the barbeque in ways both funny and fitting. “Nothing is as beautiful as something you don’t expect,” Dina, an Israeli kibbutznik, suggests to Tewfiq, the Egyptian band leader. The sentiment encapsulates the simple pleasure of The Band’s Visit . The Huntington, in collaboration with Speakeasy Stage, delivered unexpected beauty in this musical that infuses traditional Middle Eastern music with a Broadway sound. Director Paul Daigneault highlighted music and broad comedy over the slim plot of this feel-good confection, where scenes unrolled as cross-cultural vignettes that elevated shared humanity over political differences. The Huntington celebrated a non-traditional Thanksgiving. Lloyd Suh’s The Heart Sellers emphasizes comedy over pathos when Filipino immigrant Luna (Jenna Agbayani) and Korean immigrant Jane (Judy Song) come together on this strange holiday in a strange land in 1973. When Luna utters, “So, we’re the lucky ones,” with a profound sigh, she pierces the comic surface of baffled immigrants trying to cook a frozen turkey to reveal two lonely souls. The set was remarkably appalling: a messy studio apartment lined with glossy wallpaper, boxed in a black frame, elevated above the stage. One wall incorporated a sliding glass door, the only opportunity for variable light. Whenever they dreamed of a larger life, the women drifted toward the light. An equally unconventional holiday gift, Yippee-Ki-Yay , is part reenactment of the classic 1980s film, Die Hard ; part confessional of a Die Hard geek; part stand-up comedy; all unspooled in awful meter. Uninitiated audience members were probably perplexed by Darrel Bailey’s zany performance: fluffing imaginary big hair from his bald head; turning the bloodthirsty villain into a pirouetting diva. Those of us familiar with the source, however, anticipated every corny cliché and witty takedown of the movie’s profligate confusions. I received an email a few days before Stand Up if You’re Here Tonight , directing me to enter the theatre through the back alley. Street construction, I figured. On a drizzly January night, one stark light from a small door illuminated the dark alley and beckoned me up two flights and into the rear of the Michael Maso Studio, littered with dusty furniture, clouded mirrors and consignment-quality rejects. Eventually, an old man walked among the clutter and began. Several times. Each diversion was humorous. When wiry, wonderful Jim Ortlieb proclaimed such witticisms as, “Two pots near each other never boil. Make pasta in the space between,” I understood this as a play about nothing. Turns out, the back-alley intimacy was critical to the show’s success, so willingly did supposed grown-ups participate in silly hijinks. It might seem a stretch to legions of high school students burdened with Arthur Miller’s The Crucible that John Proctor could be the villain. Yet playwright Kimberly Belflower makes a convincing case that John Proctor is the Villain . This remarkable resetting shifts witch hysteria in seventeenth-century Salem to a twenty-first century Georgia high school, where coming-of-age girls are treated as suspect while male authorities are exalted, despite whatever horrifics they’ve performed. The ensemble cast featured five outstanding women drowning in adolescent torment and triumph. Their friendships and jealousies ricocheted around the stage, exposing the emotional complexity of becoming adults. Yet, the stand out was Benjamin Isaac as Lee Turner, the school nobody, whose character realizes the greatest emotional growth. It was pure delight to watch this man-boy (potentially the next generation’s adulterer) find new understanding of himself and his relationship to women. Toni Stone , the season’s finale, was a hit. The Huntington’s long affiliation with playwright Lydia R. Diamond ( Stick Fly, Smart People, The Bluest Eye ) scored in this funny, poignant bio of Toni Stone, the first professional female baseball player who played in the Negro leagues in the 1950s. As Toni, marvelous Jennifer Mogbock told us straight up she’s no good at telling stories in the right order, then launched an opening monologue that fast pitched the joys of baseball. She also held her own against the supporting cast of ten men playing an array of characters. The second act made a few errors, perhaps because accurate biography doesn’t align with theatrical climax. Two production numbers, fabulously choreographed by Ebony Williams, provided the buoyancy of a Broadway musical, while Diamond’s sparkling script and crisp direction beautifully modulated the euphoria and struggles befitting a lonely woman playing in a dwindling league. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) PAUL E. FALLON is an architect who spent over thirty years designing housing and healthcare facilities. A commitment to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake became the focus of his first book, Architecture by Moonlight . In 2015-2016, Paul bicycled through each of the 48 contiguous states and asked everyone he met the same question. How Will We Live Tomorrow? became his second book. Returning to Cambridge, MA, Paul continues to write blog essays, plays, and NETIR articles about Boston-area theatre companies. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

A green city-wide pop-up-park festival of creative, innovative, and inspiring environmental art works in the boroughs of New York City. Free. Outdoors. Off-grid. No electricity. Rain or shine. Bridge Matter / The Reach Bridge Matter / The Reach Brooklyn is Not a Sacrifice Zone Brooklyn is Not a Sacrifice Zone Weather Weather Bridge Matter / The Reach Bridge Matter / The Reach 1/13 Prelude in the Parks performances for the planet SEE SCHEDULE FREE | OUTDOORS | OFF-GRID/NO ELECTRICITY | RAIN OR SHINE A green city-wide pop-up parks festival of creative, innovative, and inspiring environmental art-works by artists addressing environmental & climate change issues. Co-Curated by Frank Hentschker & Robin Schatell / Mov!ngCulture Projects; The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at The Graduate Center CUNY. June 7th @ 6pm, June 8th & 9th @ 3pm What's On: Performance I Dance I Music I Theatre I 13 Presentations Where It's Happening: Parks & Gardens City-Wide: Brooklyn, Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island – all 5 Boroughs Partners: Bronx River Community Garden; Eastside Outside Community Garden; Manhattan , Hunters Point Park Alliance/Queens ; ID Studio Theater/Bronx ; Social Practice CUNY; Newtown Creek Alliance/Brooklyn ; Roc-A-Natural Cultural Foundation/Staten Island ; Summer on the Hudson/Riverside Park Conservancy/Manhattan What's On Performance I Dance I Music I Theatre I 13 Presentations in 5 Boroughs Friday, June 7 - All performances @ 6pm Brooklyn Pliable Futures Strike Anywhere Performance Ensemble Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn Manhattan Devrai (Sacred Grove) Richard Move / MoveOpolis! Riverside Park, Manhattan Manhattan Bridge Matter / The Reach Kinesis Project dance theatre Inwood Hill Park, Gaelic Field, Manhattan Queens Guinean Environmental Stewardship Traditions Sidiki Conde and Tokounou Dance Company Hunter’s Point South Park, Queens Saturday, June 8 - All performances @ 3pm Bronx Land Connections: Reflections with Dennis Dennis RedMoon Darkeem Bronx River Community Garden.,The Bronx Manhattan The Heat Will Kill Everything Keith Josef Adkins Riverside Park South, Manhattan Bronx Dance in Connection ID Studio Theater and Daniel Fetecua Barretto Point Park, Viele Avenue, The Bronx Staten Island Mixed Use | Cyn | M.A. Dennis | Manners and Respect | | Thomas Fucaloro | Tappen Park, Staten Island Brooklyn WATER RISES Artichoke Dance Company Newtown Creek Nature Walk, Kingsland Ave, Brooklyn Manhattan Community Poetry and Tea Tea, Arts & Culture Eastside Outside Community Garden, Manhattan Sunday, June 9 - All performances @ 3pm Brooklyn Brooklyn is Not a Sacrifice Zone Al Límite Collective Newtown Creek Nature Walk, Greenpoint Avenue, Brooklyn Brooklyn Resilience Thinking Walkscape Rafael de Balanzo Joue and Daniel Pravit Fethke Endale Arch, Prospect Park, Brooklyn Brooklyn Weather Anh Vo Brower Park, Prospect Place, Brooklyn Locations City-Wide: Brooklyn, Bronx, Manhattan, Queen Staten Island – all 5 Boroughs Meet The Team Robin Schatell Co-Curator Robin Schatell is a creative producer who works with artists, arts group, cultural and community organizations and city agencies to shape, design, develop, and organize creative visions for activating their public spaces with arts and cultural programming. Co-Founder , Mov!ng Culture Projects, Director of Museum Mile Festival for 20 years, Founder and Artistic Director of Riverside Park’s Summer on the Hudson Festival, Executive Director of River To River Festival, Director of Programming for Madison Square Parks’ Mad Sq Art program, Curator of Public Programs for the Van Alen Institute, Managing Director of Performance Space 122, and Ralph Lemon Company, Founder of The Puffin Room, Manhattan Community Board 3 Member, Contributing Cultural Writer for TheLoDownNYC.com. Gaurav Singh Nijjer Web and Digital Producer Gaurav Singh Nijjer is a theatre-maker, creative technologist and designer whose artistic works explore technology and media in live performance. He is one half of the Indian performing arts collective Kaivalya Plays, and also works as a freelance artist and arts manager with collectives in India and abroad, currently as Digital and Web Producer at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Centre CUNY. He is a former German Chancellor Fellow and a Chevening scholar. He trained at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London. Apart from theatre, Gaurav also works as a freelance marketing, design and creative consultant for diverse organizations. Frank Hentschker Co-Curator Frank Hentschker, who holds a Ph.D. in theatre from the now legendary Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Giessen, Germany, came to the Graduate Center in 2001 as program director for the Graduate Center’s Martin E. Segal Theatre Center and was appointed to the central doctoral faculty in theatre in 2009. Currently executive director and director of programs at the Segal Center, Hentschker has transformed the center into the nation’s leading forum for public programming in international and U.S. theatre and theatre studies; each year, he curates and produces more than forty events—staged readings, lecture-demonstrations, symposia, works-in-progress, and conversations with theatre scholars, theatrical luminaries, and emerging voices in the international, American, and New York theatre scenes. Among the vital events and series he founded at the Segal Center are the World Theatre Performance series; the annual fall PRELUDE festival, which features more than twenty New York–based theatre companies and playwrights; and the PEN World Voices Playwrights Series. Hentschker also led CUNY’s nineteen performing arts centers in founding the CUNY–Performing Arts Consortium (C–PAC), producing the consortium’s first joint festival in 2009. Hentschker edited the MESTC publications Jan Fabre: I Am A Mistake, Seven Works for the Theatre (2009) and New Plays from Spain (2013), and he served as president of the board of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art from 2005 to 2009. Before coming to the Graduate Center, Hentschker founded and directed DISCURS, the largest European student theatre festival existing today; he acted as Hamlet in Heiner Müller’s Hamletmaschine, directed by the playwright; performed in the Robert Wilson play The Forest (music by David Byrne); and worked as an assistant for Robert Wilson for many years. Producer, General Operations Manager Teresa Soraka Next Generation Fellow Nurit Chinn For queries, feedback and any more information get in touch with us at segalcenter@gmail.com

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 Hecuba Provokes Catharsis and Compassion in the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus By Cindy Sibilsky Published: November 25, 2024 Download Article as PDF Hecuba, Not Hecuba , written and directed by Portuguese director, festival director, author, and performer Tiago Rodrigues and performed by actors from Comédie-Française (one of the oldest theatre companies still running, formed 1680), premiered at the Festival d’Avignon in France at the end of June but found its true home amid the ancient theatrical spirits of Greece at the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus at the Athens Epidaurus Festival late July 2024. [A shorter report on the Avignon performance and another in Pilsen can be found elsewhere in this issue.] I was fortunate to witness not a clash but a camaraderie, a magnificent mingling coexistence of cultures, languages, characters, emotions, and eras that blended together flawlessly to present a timeless tale of humanity in all its myriad forms, from the tragic to transcendent, from the grotesque to the glorious. The production, the performances, and the setting combined created a transformative experience that vividly reminds one of the necessity and vital power of theatre to heal and create collective awareness of shared human existence. Like all great odysseys, internal and external, my journey began with crossing an ocean from New York to Athens, followed by a quick metro ride to a two-hour bus excursion alongside the Sardonic Gulf. We traversed dense pine forests and drove by dirt road goat farms clinging to cliffs. The epic voyage was part of the soul-opening that prepares one for the profoundness of encountering the ancient Theatre of Epidaurus for the first time, a theatre with exquisite acoustics and aesthetics built in the 4th century BC by the architect Polykleitos the Younger that seats up to 14,000, still in use for contemporary audiences to experience dance, music and dramatic performances as the ancients did thousands of years before. Dionysus is best known as the Greek god of theatre, ecstatic dance and wine. His temple and theatre are in the heart of Athens at the Acropolis. However, in Epidaurus, the God of choice is the God of medicine, Asclepius, who the performances were meant to worship. While the connection to theatre and medicine may not seem obvious outright, ancient Greeks believed that seeing comedic and tragic plays was a form of healing, observing that those watching dramas performed onstage had positive effects mentally and physically. In fact, the word catharsis was coined by Aristotle in his Poetics and is derived from the Greek word “kathairein,” which means "to cleanse or purge.” This term aptly describes the release of emotional tension Aristotle noted that spectators experienced when viewing dramatic tragedy. Why are we drawn to witnessing pain and suffering on stages and screens? It connects us with universal humanity and fosters understanding. “We sometimes think that our grief is unique, without precedent, that no one in the history of humanity has suffered so much. But we only need to watch a play,” Rodrigues explained. Upon entering what feels like a truly sacred space, a centuries-old amphitheatre surrounded by woodlands growing dark in the dusk, the ancient spell is broken by 20th- century sounds. Otis Redding's voice, full of love and longing, soul and sorrow, cuts through the night sky. The somewhat odd opening music choice will come full circle in one of the play's most powerful moments. The set (scenography by Fernando Riberio) is simple: a few tables, some chairs, and a large object obscured by black cloth, looming like a mountainous Pandora’s box filled with secrets. But the real set is the setting, which dwarfs anything manmade or modern. The actors are clad in black flowing garments (by Jose Antonio Tenente)—European chic, with a nod to the Greek draping of yesteryear. Indeed, upon the opening lines (spoken in French with Greek and English surtitles on the sidelines), the ensemble introduces themselves as the chorus. They aim to set the tone and stage, explaining in unison their multiple roles and purpose. It’s a little cute and slightly undermines the depth and intensity of the performances to come, but a lighthearted introductory approach has a way of disarming an audience, just as the Otis Redding music did. The Comédie-Française ensemble is superb, and each of them volleys between roles of an actor rehearsing for a present-day performance of Euripides’ Hecuba in Paris, France, the character they are portraying in Euripides’ Hecuba , and several people entangled in a court case. Seamlessly, they shift from one role to another without fussiness or overt formality, a credit to the actors and the director. In the first scene, they are all gathered for a table reading of Euripides’ Hecuba. As is typical in these gatherings, the actors (playing actors) are in various self-centric states, detracting from the task at hand. Some are bored or frustrated, waiting for their lines; others are desperate to know their entrances and exits, arrogantly claiming more space than the others (particularly the actor who plays Polymestor, a brilliantly pompous and despicable role for Loïc Corbery). Then there’s the lead actress playing Hecuba, Nadia (played with exceptional dimension and sensitivity by Elsa Lepoivre). Nadia is clearly distracted, constantly checking the time, eager to depart. The only thing on her mind is her son’s court case. Nadia’s son, Otis, named after the musician, is autistic. She attempts a pun that people suggested she prophesied his condition by naming him thus (say Otis with a French accent, and you get “au-tee-ss”)—a little humor attempt that falters, especially when trying to keep up with the translations. Otis is verbally limited to about fifty words, mainly something and not something. Fruit, not fruit; home, not home; mama, not mama; cuddle, not cuddle (hence Hecuba, Not Hecuba). It was a vehement “not cuddle” that alerted her maternal instincts that something was very wrong. She approached him from behind, arms open for an embrace, and Otis threw his arms into an “X” above his head and yelled, “Not cuddle!” Most of the time, Otis is under the state’s care in a facility. This gesture made Nadia certain he was being abused, and the remainder of the performance darts between scenes betwixt Euripides’ Hecuba characters that parallel or sometimes contrast with lawyers, prosecutors, defendants, witnesses and the accused abusers. Life imitates art and vice versa. In the court, human nature is revealed as it is on stage. Elissa Alloula plays the actress portraying Coryphaea (a mountain goddess) in Hecuba and Nérine in the courts. As Nérine, she confesses to witnessing the abuse. Her fears of speaking out because she is an immigrant and threatened with deportation are lessened by being a mother and caretaker. Conversely, Séphora Pondi, who also plays Nadia’s lawyer preparing her for the wrath of the cross-examination (“Why, as his mother, do you allow the state to take care of Otis?”) is another who looks after Otis but is devoid of proper training for caring for an autistic child. Hecuba, Not Hecuba. Photo © Alex Kat Gaël Kamilindi, who is barely more than an observer for the first half of the play, gets two strong moments to shine as the actor. Playing the small role of a servant in Euripides’ Hecuba, he confronts Nadia’s lamentations about the insurmountable stress of her son’s abuse and the trail by putting his own pain and role into perspective. “At least he is alive!” he challenges her, referring to the loss of his father, who was his “whole world.” Each character, no matter how small, has a life and relationships that are their “world.” This pivotal moment speaks to the universality of pain and Rodriguez’s observation on how we each suffer individually and feel we are in a silo with our anguish, while others are feeling tormented too. Kamilindi’s sympathetic actor is starkly contrasted by Dubois, Otis's lead abuser. Cold, hard and staring blankly ahead, he defiantly defends himself for “doing what needed to be done.” Denis Podalydès, who also plays the actor portraying Agamemnon (a controversial character, not as outright villainous as Polymestor, but the one who lays judgment on Hecuba, ultimately deciding she was right in her vengeance on Polymestor and his sons), also plays the Prosecutor, an amiable man who grows more so as the trial continues with subtleties like offering or denying refreshments to the witnesses and passionately defending Nadia and Otis. In one such moment, he questions the reason for force, and when Kamilindi, as Dubois, states he felt threatened, Podalydès, as Polymestor, flails his arms back and forth at his chest and shouts, “He was dancing!” This transitions into one of the most unexpectedly powerful moments of the play. Each cast member dons a helmet (like those worn by children to protect them from injury) and, to Otis Redding’s “Try A Little Tenderness,” flings their arms about with wild abandon and joy. At first, it seemed absurd, another attempt at humor flattered. But, almost immediately, another sensation rushed over me as the actors, fully committed, almost forgetting themselves, flung their limbs with such sweet sincerity and innocence that I felt the waterworks welling up in my eyes uncontrollably. Hecuba, Not Hecuba. Photo © Alex Kat I felt a combination of the absurdity, innocence, joy and the unspeakable violations to crush those feelings. It hit me then that catharsis wasn’t the only healing effect of witnessing tragedy. The greater emotion and, indeed, power that is stirred is compassion. I cannot personally relate to the plights of these characters; the tragic mother (Hecuba, who lost most of her nineteen children, or Nadia with her abused autistic son) is far removed from my experience. Yet, the depth of compassion such performances provoke is enough to feel the pain as your own. And with that, to feel less isolated in your struggles and less separate from others’ hurt. Perhaps this was Nadia’s turning point as well. The actress and mother was at first defensive when hearing Dubois’ excuses, then in a bold choice that could only happen at a theatre surrounded by pine trees engulfed by the velvety night, Lepoivre shifted from defensiveness to listening as she wandered off the stage into the woods, her pale skin and blond hair glowing against the darkness. She emerged from the forest with a new purpose, even some compassion for Dubois, the abuser, as a fellow victim of systemic abuse and with a newfound vengeance for the real perpetrator, the mastermind behind the government-run grossly lacking facilities, the Alternate Minister, arrogant, slick, vile and dangerous as Polymestor himself, played by the same actor in that role, Loïc Corbery. Nadia performs to the press to highlight the injustices. The Minister’s defenses fall flat as lies and sophistry. Their battle plays out much like Euripides’ Hecuba, with justice being served blindingly. A significant theme peppered throughout is of a canine kind. In some tellings of Hecuba, she was transformed into a dog by the gods after snarling at Odysseus as a slave. This seeming punishment allowed her to escape. Dogs play an integral part. Nadia speaks of an animation that Otis adores (parents of autistic children have noted that cartoons and anime are calming and enjoyable because the emotions are easier to identify) about a stray dog roaming alone, who upon various turns, shows up more beaten and injured, eventually losing a leg. This is later emphasized when the black drape covering the mountainous set piece reveals a grotesque statue of a wolfish hound whose leg falls off. Nadia uses this as a prop to represent Otis to the press. In the play’s final triumphant moments, Nadia tells the audience end of the cartoon, the lost stray finds a puppy, and they are no longer afraid or alone. Image Credits: Article References References About the author(s) A lifelong theatermaker and arts worker, Cindy Sibilsky (she/her) is the founder/CEO and producer of INJOY Entertainment LLC (established in 2011), a multimedia, multi-genre and multi-purpose arts & entertainment company focusing on meaningful cultural exchange worldwide. She is a Broadway, Off-Broadway & international independent producer, marketing/PR director, and writer/journalist. In 2019, she was guest editor, curator, and lead writer for American Theatre Magazine ’s special edition on Japanese Contemporary Theatre. Through inJOY Entertainment, Cindy represents a diverse and constantly growing roster of New York and global clients, companies and shows, including festivals, theatre, musicals, dance, concerts, cirque, cabaret, drag, curated art shows, public art, and immersive performances. 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.

Alex Ferrone Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 2 Visit Journal Homepage Appropriate Alex Ferrone By Published on June 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF Michael Esper, Elle Fanning, Natalie Gold, Alyssa Emily Marvin and Corey Stoll in Appropriate. Credit: Joan Marcus. Appropriate By Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Directed by Lila Neugebauer Helen Hayes Theatre New York, NY November 30, 2023 Reviewed by Alex Ferrone A prolonged blackout opens Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate , so it is through sound—the tremulous hum of “ a billion cicadas ”—that the audience first encounters the yet unseen world on stage. In Lila Neugebauer’s production at the Hayes Theatre, the play’s first time on Broadway, ten years after regional co-premieres in Louisville and Chicago, sound designers Bray Poor and Will Pickens immersed the audience in a surround-sound cicada song that seemed almost to overwhelm the senses. I say senses (plural) because the soundscape’s penetrative quality was intended to exceed audition: as Jacobs-Jenkins explains in the stage directions of the play’s prologue, the sound “ sweeps the theater […] over and beyond the stage – washing itself over the walls and the floors, baptizing the aisles and the seats, forcing itself into every inch of every space, every nook, every pocket, hiding place and pore until this incessant chatter is touching you. It is touching you .” We were thus meant to feel the sound on our bodies, on our skin. When the lights finally came up on the meticulously cluttered interior of an old two-story Arkansas plantation house, designed by the collective Dots, the play’s premise was deceptively familiar: the semi-estranged family of a dead white patriarch reunites to auction off the property and divide the assets, but their long festering resentments soon dominate the proceedings and cause irreparable fissures. Appropriate knowingly riffs on the American tradition of the family reunion play, inviting easy comparisons to plays like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , Buried Child , and August: Osage County —a tradition Jacobs-Jenkins admires and also problematizes for its racial exclusivity. “No one ever talks about Raisin in the Sun as a family drama,” he told Diep Tran in the December 2023 issue of Playbill : “It’s always ‘a social allegory about race and class.’” Jacobs-Jenkins expressed a similar misgiving in American Theatre nine years earlier, the first time Appropriate was mounted in New York in an off-Broadway production at the Signature Center: “there were a lot of triggers for me in hearing people list and describe the ‘great American family dramas.’ I’d look around and be like, ‘There’s no people of color on these lists.’ […] Who has access to this idea of ‘family’ as a universal theme?” Michael Esper, Elle Fanning, Natalie Gold, Alyssa Emily Marvin and Corey Stoll in Appropriate . Credit: Joan Marcus. Of course, the Lafayette family drama was front and center at the Hayes Theatre for Appropriate ’s almost three-hour runtime. The cast, led by an indomitable Sarah Paulson, traded endless verbal (and eventually physical) assaults as they aired their grievances and exposed each other’s indiscretions. Supporting performances were uniformly excellent: Corey Stoll, as the absent, entitled son for whom care entails merely signing checks, and Nathalie Gold, as his apprehensive wife who struggles as an outsider in the family, were standouts; so was Michael Esper, as the prodigal son whose serial transgressions alienate those close to him; Elle Fanning was especially memorable as his suspiciously young girlfriend, whose new-age spiritualist word salad was a consistent source of humor. But the evening belonged to Paulson: she gave an astonishing performance as the eldest daughter Toni, at times beset with exhaustion, at others ferociously stalking the stage, her fierce commitment to her family barely concealing both vulnerability and venom. If there is familiarity here, soon comes the curveball, a series of disturbing discoveries as the family sorts through Daddy’s things: first, an album of lynching photos; then, jars of “weird stuff” that resembles human remains; finally, a Klan hood over the head of the youngest grandchild, which, when I saw the show, drew the night’s loudest combination of belly laughs and horrified gasps. It is a rupture the family is determined to avoid, as they downplay and outright deny Daddy’s obvious involvement in anti-Black violence. But their insistence on centering themselves, on claiming victimhood at each other’s hands, wilfully sidelines the Black victims of racist violence whose traces continue to crop up on the family estate. And so the photo album shifts signification, no longer a physical record of heinous racist violence but a commodity worth “hundreds of thousands of dollars” whose sale would enact yet another indignity on the murdered Black people among its pages. While the family cannot fathom calling Daddy an outright racist (gasp!), daughter-in-law Rachael points out that the Antebellum South is “the soil upon which his worldview was fashioned.” This mention of soil is no coincidence, for the vast property includes two burial grounds: one, a cemetery for generations of the Lafayette family; the other, the unmarked graves of generations of enslaved people who worked on the plantation. Even unseen, they are nevertheless there. And so we return to the cicadas, whose characteristic life cycle confines them to the soil for thirteen years at a time. In Appropriate , the cicadas never left, their low thrum pulsating through the theatre for the full length of the show. (In the text, Jacobs-Jenkins specifies that they “ fade to a place just beyond us but never disappear ,” and, sure enough, the stage directions that end each scene reinvoke their continuous presence.) It is an unnerving element of the sound design, something the audience acclimates to, often drowned out by the onstage histrionics, but never absent—an ongoingness that recalls Christina Sharpe’s figuration of “antiblackness as total climate” in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Ultimately, little is resolved by the end of the play. Instead, Jacobs-Jenkins pulls another narrative trick (and maybe exacts some revenge) by absenting the Lafayette family altogether: generations whoosh by (“ it is some day – any day – tomorrow – thirteen years from now – twenty-six years from now. It is the future. It is the present. It is any present. Is the past – any past – now ”), and, in a stunning coup de théâtre , the house falls apart before our eyes. Jane Cox’s dazzling lighting produced a cinematic timelapse as shelves collapsed and windows shattered and a chandelier swung from a rope. Finally, a colossal tree grew from the ground, its wide trunk and full branches stretching out of view, high up into the fly space—radical growth after so much decay. Neugebauer’s final image departed from the text, but it was perhaps in direct conversation with the titles of the play’s three acts, not reproduced in the Playbill. Where Act II, “Walpurgisnacht,” gestures to paganism and witchcraft (and surely to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , another “family drama” in its own way), Acts I and III, titled “The Book of Revelations” and “The Book of Genesis,” take us from the end of the world back to the beginning, to the garden and the great flood, to regeneration. The production’s final scene, with its spectacular collapse and its magnificent tree growing through (or perhaps from) the ruins, beautifully captured the extent to which Appropriate is not really about the Lafayettes at all: it’s about the house and about the land on which it stands and eventually falls. It’s about the soil. Sarah Paulson in Appropriate . Credit: Joan Marcus. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Alex Ferrone (PhD) is an Assistant Professor of English in the Département de littératures et de langues du monde at l’Université de Montréal, where he teaches dramatic literature, theatre history, and performance studies. He is the author of Stage Business and the Neoliberal Theatre of London (Springer, 2021), and his articles and reviews have been published in Theatre Survey , Theatre Journal , and Comparative Drama . Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction America Happened to Me: Immigration, Acculturation, and Crafting Empathy in Rags Burning it Down: Theatre Fires, Collective Trauma Memory, and the TikTok Ban “A Caribbean Soul in Exile”: Post-Colonial Experiences of a Jamaican Actor Archiving a Life in Theatre: The Legacy of Michael Feingold Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspapers in New York Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre Another Day's Begun: Thornton Wilder's Our Town in the 21st Century Appropriate Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month MáM Scene Partners Oh, Mary! Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Despite being in a revitalized era of civil rights and land acknowledgements, one Lenape gets confronted with a stark reality that can only begin to be resolved with a group journey through four hundred years of history. At times surreal, at times absurd, and at times brutal, This Play Is Native Made is a quintessential untold story of America through the lens of one member of an indigenous nation that is one of the longest continuous democracies on Earth. Directed by Ash Marinaccio PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE This Play is Native Made Opalanietet Theater 6:30PM EST Friday, October 20, 2023 Torn Page, 435 W 22nd St, New York, NY 10011, USA Free Entry, Open To All Despite being in a revitalized era of civil rights and land acknowledgements, one Lenape gets confronted with a stark reality that can only begin to be resolved with a group journey through four hundred years of history. At times surreal, at times absurd, and at times brutal, This Play Is Native Made is a quintessential untold story of America through the lens of one member of an indigenous nation that is one of the longest continuous democracies on Earth. Directed by Ash Marinaccio Content / Trigger Description: Opalanietet is a member of the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape tribal nation of New Jersey. He is currently a PhD student at The Graduate Center at the City of University of New York (CUNY), and the Founder and Artistic Director of Eagle Project, www.eagleprojectarts.org . Upon graduating from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, Opalanietet has performed in workshops and productions at such renown New York theatrical institutions as the Public Theater, Nuyorican Poets Café, New York City Opera, and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. In November of 2020, Opalanietet made history by giving the first-ever Lenape Land Acknowledgement at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on NBC. Ash Marinaccio (Director) is a multidisciplinary documentarian working in theatre, photography, and film. She is dedicated to storytelling highlighting the socio-political issues defining our times and regularly works throughout the United States and internationally. For her work, Ash has received the Lucille Lortel Visionary Award from the League of Professional Theatre Women, a Drama League Residency, fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, NY Public Humanities, and National Endowment for the Humanities, been listed as one of Culture Trip’s “50 Women in Theatre You Should Know”, and is a two time TEDx Speaker. Currently, Ash is a Ph.D. Candidate in Theatre and Performance at the CUNY Graduate Center. Ash is the founding artistic director of the United Nations recognized NGO Girl Be Heard and founder of Docbloc, dedicated to bringing artists across documentary genres together for live performance collaborations. Website: ashmarinaccio.com/ Instagram: @ashmarinaccio Eagle Project Founded by Opalanietet (Ryan Victor Pierce) in 2012, Eagle Project is the only Lenape-led performing arts company in New York City. Its mission is to explore the American identity through the performing arts and our Native American heritage, deciphering what exactly it means to be American while using the Native American experience as the primary means for which to conduct its investigation. Since its inception, Eagle Project has produced six full productions, numerous readings and workshops, and has collaborated with the Public Theater, Nuyorican Poets Café, Rattlestick Theater, and Ashtar Theater in Palestine. For more information, visit www.eagleprojectarts.org . Photo by Ash Marinaccio www.eagleprojectarts.org Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Encounter Al Límite Collective's work Brooklyn is Not a Sacrifice Zone in Brooklyn, at this year's edition of the Prelude in the Parks festival by The Segal Centre, presented in collaboration with Newtown Creek Alliance. Prelude in the Parks 2024 Festival Brooklyn is Not a Sacrifice Zone Al Límite Collective Interactive Theater Sunday, June 9, 2024 @ 3pm Newtown Creek Nature Walk, Greenpoint Avenue, Brooklyn Meet at the entry near 59 Paidge Ave. Newtown Creek Alliance Presented by Mov!ng Culture Projects and The Segal Center in collaboration with Presented by Mov!ng Culture Projects and The Segal Center View Location Details RSVP To Event Walk along the banks of the Newtown Creek Nature Walk with this community-engaged theater performance while hearing the stories and visions of local residents and activists who dream to topple their neighbor, a giant fracked gas depot, and imagine what the landscape could be if National Grid's site was decommissioned and the land rehabilitated. * With text from interviews with: Margot Spindelman, Katherine Thompson, Kier Blake, Anna Tsomo, EW Fye, GiGi Niesen, Kevin LaCherra, William Vega, Kim Fraczek, Willis Elkins, Eric Kun. Al Límite Collective Leah Bachar is a performer/producer/director/experimenter. Fascinated with human connection, Leah is drawn to public performance and unique, interactive situations that create an open arena for spontaneous experiences and promote no barriers between the spectators and performers. With a deep interest in ritualistic theatre and the healing properties of the arts, she combines her passion for guerrilla theatre, different cultures, the written word, surreal stagings, entering trance states, dancing, radical artistic collaboration, social experiments, and curating happenings where performance art and human healing intertwine. Realizing the powerful social and political message that the arts emit, Leah is interested in initiating conversations and introducing people to one another who wouldn’t normally meet in order to help facilitate a greater universal discourse between artists and their communities. Monica Dudárov Hunken is an activist, storyteller, and teacher who creates docu-adventure plays inspired by her international bicycle voyages. Monica is touring a solo performance with music called Mt Rushmore, developed at her artist residency in SPACE on Ryder Farm and the Fish Factory in Iceland. She has performed it in the On Women Theater Festival at Irondale, NYC’s Exponential Theatre Festival, The Brick Theatre, MKE Fringe, Charm City Fringe, International Festival for Making Theater in Athens, Greece. She is a current CulturePush Fellow and is developing a traveling Drag performance and participatory Drag transformation project called DragCycle in Brooklyn in 2023/2024. As a repeat recipient of the Brooklyn Arts Fund, she co-devised an outdoor, site specific piece along the route of the North Brooklyn Pipeline with theater company, Al Límite Collective, a company she co-founded. Al Límite Collective completed a tour across Europe summer 2023 leading workshops in storytelling, street performance and remounting the Living Theatre show, Electric Awakening, and then were invited by the historic Freedom Theatre in Jenin, Palestine for their second annual Feminist Festival in September 2023. https://www.monicahunken.com/ Visit Artist Website Location Meet at the entry near 59 Paidge Ave. Newtown Creek Alliance Here are some transportation possibilities: Bus: Take the B43 Bus to the Manhattan Ave and Clay Street Stop then walk 8 minutes on Clay street over to the end of Paidge Ave to the Nature Walk entrance. Train: Take the G train to Greenpoint Ave stop, walk 13 minutes on India Street to Provost St to Paidge Ave Citi Bike: Drop off a Citi Bike at the 371-383 McGuinness Blvd station or the 1164 Manhattan Ave station The Newtown Creek Alliance is a community-based organization dedicated to restoring, revealing, and revitalizing Newtown Creek. The Newtown Creek Alliance works to restore the Creek by securing mitigation and remediation of known environmental hazards – both in the neighborhoods surrounding Newtown Creek and in Newtown Creek itself – reporting ongoing sources of pollution, and preventing new pollution. To restore the ecological functions of the waterway, the Newtown Creek Alliance supports investments in green infrastructure, bioremediation, and habitat restoration. The Newtown Creek Alliance endeavors to reveal the Creek by conducting tours by foot, bike, bus, and boat that educate the public about the history of the waterway and current activity. We also work to nurture and expand open spaces along Newtown Creek to enable public access to a waterway which has few public access points and we partner with educational institutions to teach Newtown Creek-based curricula. The Newtown Creek Alliance helps revitalize watershed communities by playing a leadership role in area-wide brownfield redevelopment planning, creating programs that improve the environmental profile of industrial businesses, and engaging in workforce development to create local green jobs. Our work supports environmental, economic, and human health. Visit Partner Website

Lisa B. Thompson 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 Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Lisa B. Thompson By Published on May 11, 2021 Download Article as PDF If I do not bring all of who I am to whatever I do, then I bring nothing of lasting worth, for I have withheld my essence. Audre Lorde , I am Your Sister: Collected Writings Every year I return to August Wilson’s powerful speech, “The Ground on Which I Stand.” On the 25th anniversary of his groundbreaking keynote at the 1996 Theatre Communications Group National Conference, Wilson’s words still resonate. [1] I want to honor this Black theatre milestone because Wilson not only delivers a scathing critique of systemic racism in US theatre, but he also insists that Black culture is a worthy and necessary source of artistic inspiration. Although he criticizes the structural inequalities that Black artists face, Wilson also speaks about his personal journey as a playwright and a Black man. He confesses: . . . it is difficult to disassociate my concerns with theater from the concerns of my life as a black man, and it is difficult to disassociate one part of my life from another. I have strived to live it all seamless . . . art and life together, inseparable and indistinguishable. (494) Wilson’s address motivated me to craft my own manifesto as a Black feminist artist/scholar. I’m celebrating the anniversary of “The Ground on Which I Stand” speech by crafting a manifesto which echoes Wilson’s desire for a seamlessness between being a Black person and a theatre artist. As Black people throughout the African diaspora combat dual catastrophes, a global pandemic and the brutality associated with the “long emancipation,” I feel an even greater sense of urgency. [2] I also feel a sense of urgency to make all of my conflicting identities seamless. I’m proclaiming to all that will listen that I’m not only a Black artist, but I’m also a Black feminist scholar. I’m a playwright and a professor who has choreographed a professional life that includes both the arts and the academy. I’ve learned to dance on the slash between the title artist/scholar. I must dance to remain both creator and critic because I refuse to live a divided life. I will no longer deny any part of my intellectual or creative gifts. I call on all Black artist/scholars to join me and do the same. When I was a little girl, I didn’t dance quite like my friends and family. It seemed to me that they were all illustrious dancers. I recall watching my older brother Robert dance. He was a member of the San Francisco Lockers and I loved watching those Adidas sweat suit-clad dancers move in lock step. They were commanding, rhythmic, defiant, and elegant. My classmates mesmerized me as they performed stunningly choreographed routines at the school talent shows, decked out in matching psychedelic outfits. I never joined in when they perfected their dances on Saturday afternoons in a neighbor’s rumpus room. Don’t feel sorry for me. This is not one of those “I was smart but lacked natural rhythm therefore I was a mocked and ostracized inauthentic Negro” essays. I had plenty of friends and could throw down with the best of them, it was just that I preferred dancing alone. Standing in front of the sofa or the bedroom mirror, I would jam to songs by the Jackson 5, Sly and the Family Stone, Stevie Wonder, Donna Summer, and Prince. I despised group dances, but adored the Soul Train line because it was my stage: I could be the star dancing to my own groove. Dancing alone and in my own way has led me to a life as a Black feminist artist/scholar. I define a Black feminist artist/scholar as one who works simultaneously within the academy, pursuing scholarly research and teaching, while also producing art in the public realm for wide-ranging audiences to enjoy. Black feminist artist/scholars often center the lives and experiences of Black women, girls and femmes in both their scholarly and artistic work. I use dancing as a metaphor because dance emphasizes free but disciplined movement. It requires both posture and poise. Dance allows improvisation and planning, creativity and expression. Dance can be done in a group or solo. Dance provides a way to socialize, to become and stay strong, to communicate, to develop self-esteem, and to increase your flexibility. It’s also a way to curate a sense of embodied listening and speaking. After all, dancing around the question can be more about exploring a puzzle more deeply instead of avoiding it. You need all of those traits to survive as an artist/scholar, especially a Black feminist one. The artist/scholar defies the old adage that “those who do, do, and those that can’t, teach.” Artist/scholars often prove some of the best teachers because they have immersed themselves in two worlds, the Ivory Tower as well as the theatre, or museum, art gallery or concert hall. The artist/scholar has many work spaces: the classroom, the library, the archives, and the lab or studio where we create. Some work in completely different realms so that their artistic and scholarly fields have little or nothing in common, while the scholarship and artistry of other artist/scholars is more aligned. No matter how one’s artistic practice and scholarly interests are related, this duality helps us to become great teachers because we understand the work from two perspectives simultaneously. [3] Black artist/scholars are certainly not a new phenomenon. I stand on the shoulders of those who came before me such as anthropologist, novelist, and playwright, Zora Neale Hurston; sociologist, novelist, literary journal editor, W.E.B. Du Bois; poet and comparative literature scholar Kamau Braithwaite; and choreographer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham. I rely on their examples for reassurance, for inspiration, and for guidance. Those tiny descriptors I shared about their work reveals only a fraction of the ground those giants cleared for us, only a morsel of their contributions to the world of arts and letters. Their pathbreaking interventions created the circumstances that allow many contemporary Black artist/scholars to enjoy the security of tenured positions in the academy–often in highly regarded and abundantly resourced institutions. I lean on the example of these precursors as I choreograph my own dance. Their brave work helps me to theorize about Black culture through my essays and books; their life stories inspire me to continue crafting plays about Black life. I draw on their wisdom to give me the confidence to claim my creativity and knowledge. This manifesto represents an attempt to leave some crumbs behind so that other Black artist/scholars who dance alone, but also in community with others, know that it’s possible to bop down their own creative and intellectual path. Toni Morrison, one of the greatest artist/scholars of all time, and a Cornell-trained literary critic, editor, teacher, and Nobel prize winning writer, explained her work simply: “I know it sounds like a lot. But I really only do one thing. I teach books. I write books. I think about books. It’s one job.” [4] She was also a librettist who even tried her hand at playwriting. Why did she downplay the multiplicity of her gifts and the vast reach of her intellectual and creative labor? I suspect that Morrison felt as I do, it is simply your work . It is how you feel compelled to show up in the world as a creator and thinker. It is your purpose. All of it. So, what does it mean to dance on the slash? It means identifying the spaces where the art and the scholarship meet. The powers that be insist that there is a line between teaching and doing, a line between artistry and scholarship, between creativity and criticism, that is not meant to be crossed. Dancing on the slash acknowledges that the line between being an artist and a scholar is a porous one. In the rare instances when that line is crossed or blurred, it’s certainly not meant to be transgressed by people like me, Black, woman, first generation college graduate, single mother. How does one dare to disregard borders in spaces where you are not supposed to even exist? There is a freedom in challenging the boundaries of disciplines—artistic and academic. To live an undisciplined life is dangerous, but it’s also thrilling in all the ways that make you whole. In her essay “Sista Docta,” African Diaspora studies and performance artist/scholar Omi Osun Joni L. Jones pushes back against the artist/scholar divide by refusing to privilege one over the other. Jones argues that “performance is a form of embodied knowledge and theorizing that challenges the academy’s print bias. While intellectual rigor has long been measured in terms of linguistic acuity and print productivity that reinforces the dominant culture’s deep meanings, performance is suspect because its ephemeral, emotional, and physical nature.” She adds that “Performance. Then, subverts the binary of artist/scholar when performance exists as scholarship.” [5] Jones makes clear that part of the dance includes rejecting hierarchies of knowledge. In the most skilled hands, a piece of work is both art and scholarship. Dancing on the slash means balancing the competing demands of two worlds that refuse to understand each other. Maintaining perfect equilibrium is impossible so there are times when artist/scholars devote more time and energy to one field or calling to the detriment of the other. It also means pushing back against those who insist that you must pick one and abandon the other. One must be careful while creating a life on a slash. The slash can be an aggressive and violent motion. You use it to cut out, diminish, partition, and destroy that which is not worthy, but also that which doesn’t serve the art or the argument. Living as an artist/scholar can be lonely because you must shuttle between two fields and feel that you are not fulfilling obligations to either field or community. As an artist/scholar, you have to accept that’s what it means to dance to the beat of different tunes. For me, it means writing plays, essays, and books all while trying to interest a producer in my latest piece. It means suffering the unspoken questions of college deans, artistic directors, department chairs, press editors, and theater boards. They wonder whether I’m an artist or a scholar? They ask is this play simply an essay placed on stage? Is this essay too theatrical? Dancing on the slash means trying to answer those questions and accepting that you can do too much and never enough at the very same time. This manifesto calls for academic and theatrical institutions to move beyond such simplistic questions and to allow space for all that artist/scholars bring to the table (or stage). How did I arrive on this slash? Like August Wilson, I began as a poet after falling in love with the words of Black Arts Movement poets such as Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, and Nikki Giovanni. When Ntozake Shange burst upon the theatre scene in the 1970s with her critically acclaimed choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow Is Enuf, I discovered how poetry can fill the stage and unveil the concerns and dreams of Black girls and women like a rainbow. I was fortunate to find myself in Shange’s classroom as a senior English major at UCLA. On the first day of class, Shange invited us to do a free write for 20 minutes and that’s when I penned my first monologue. One day, Shange invited a friend to visit our class. He was working on a production of his play in Westwood. The friend was George Wolfe and the play was The Colored Museum . Little did I know that seeing Wolfe’s work after spending a term in Shange’s presence would change the course of my life and chosen artistic genre. Wolfe’s irreverent humor and deep knowledge of Black culture blew my mind. I couldn’t believe that this outrageousness was possible! My turn from poetry to drama was complete. I remain inspired by both Shange and Wolfe’s theatrical love letters to Black people’s beautiful and powerful brokenness. Wilson looked to his mother’s pantry, his beloved Pittsburgh Hill District, Black history, and the slave quarters for inspiration. I turn to my home and working-class community in San Francisco, a rich and fertile place full of art, joy, beauty and books that made me into a Black feminist artist/scholar, a cultural producer and a cultural critic. It’s where I learned about Black culture, Black history, Black life, Black womanhood, and Black love; I learned in the pews of the Third Baptist Church, the oldest Black church in San Francisco where I was baptized in the 1970s, in the barbershop in Lakeview that I visited with my father on Saturday afternoons eavesdropping on tall tales told by men on barber stools, from the books left behind by the Black Panthers who rented an apartment from my grandmother in Oakland, the quick tongued signifying women at the beauty shop my mother took me to on special occasions too important for her kitchen stove press and curl, and the fine afroed boys that played basketball on Saturday afternoons in March Banks Park in Daly City. Although the public schools I attended did not teach much about Black history and culture, I was blessed with young Black women teachers who encouraged a smart creative skinny dark-skinned girl who became a champion of Black culture, Black history, Black life, Black womanhood, and Black love in her work for the stage and in her scholarship, as well as a staunch defender of public education. Suzan-Lori Parks’s evocative essay “The Equation for Black People on Stage” implores Black theatre makers to craft narratives that “show the world and ourselves in our beautiful and powerfully infinite variety.” [6] Those are the kind of stories I try to write, tales that present Black people, particularly the Black middle class and Black elites as neither the talented tenth or the sellouts. Interviewers often ask me who I write for and I want to say for me, all the ME’s I’ve been, I am, and may be—me as a little girl in San Francisco in the 1970s, me as a Black graduate student finding my voice, me as a Black single mother, me summering on Martha’s Vineyard, me facing the deaths of my parents, me facing the deaths of Black people murdered by police, me laughing with my homeboys and homegirls as we discuss romance after forty, me navigating the healthcare industry that renders me invisible, and me retiring someday in France, Costa Rica, or Ghana. I’m addressing the audience and telling the story that matters to me and I’ve never been overly concerned with the expectations or tastes of those who fail to recognize stories about Black people as worthy of a theatrical production on the main stage. I have spent my life entering and conquering unwelcoming institutions in the academy and in the theatre that were not designed for people like me. Most of those spaces will never include the classmates I watched dance as a young girl, but I know they belong in every space I decolonize so I bring Tracy, Rolenzo, Nedra, Baxter, Jane, Teru, Priscilla, Barris, and Tina with me as I try to dance through doors that continue to remain closed to Black, Asian, and Latinx people like them, like me. I’m known to leave the door unlocked so they or their children can slip in behind me and take back the stolen seats. This has not been an easy dance to perform. I’ve faced repeated opposition from staff and administrators as I’ve choreographed a life as both a theatre artist and scholar. Those episodes of discouragement are the very reason I believe this manifesto is essential. I want the academy to understand that for artist/scholars, artistic pursuits are not a magnificent distraction, but a way towards knowledge. Art is a way for Black studies and other scholarly fields to engage in public- facing humanities that invite multiple communities into Black life and culture and into conversation with scholars, artists, policy makers and politicians. It’s important to acknowledge what this dance offers. I imagine that some consider pursuing a life as an artist/scholar as a way to avoid the crushing financial reality of the artist’s existence in the US, especially for those of us who lack family wealth. I’ve joked in interviews that I picked academia because I wanted health insurance and food, but the life of a professor is not a safety net. While I never wanted to be a starving artist, I turned to the academy for another kind of necessary sustenance. I found a life of the mind and arts a rich place to research, teach, and discuss theories, ideas, novels, autobiographies, films, and plays about Black life. It allows artist/scholars to be paid for what we would do anyway—researching about craft, field, major and minor figures, genre and form. Working in the academy also allows us to have a group of brilliant and engaged folks to talk to on a regular basis—colleagues and students. The beneficiaries are not just the artist/scholars but also audiences, fans, and even critics. The academy provides us with a lab to try out work and to build relationships, to invite other artists to the university to showcase their work or collaborate with them. This offers a way to support those who don’t have a tenured job and may be living grant to grant, or artist residency to artist residency, but whose work deserves investment from academic institutions. I’ve hosted both local and nationally renowned artists so that students, faculty, staff and the community are in a room, workshop, lecture hall with folks changing the art world not only in theatre, but in film, television, dance, and more. [7] It’s powerful alchemy. There’s nothing more gratifying than inviting Black artists to the university to develop new work so that students get a kitchen island view of how the gumbo is made. What does it mean to be in the academy–as a Black person, and also to insist on being outside it? What does it mean to be in the academy as a woman, and to foster a life outside it? What does it mean to be a theatre artist as a Black woman, and to craft another professional life outside of it? How does a Black woman carve a life in the arts while also claiming space for herself as a feminist critic? Theorist? Teacher? As one of the few Black women full professors at my university, it can be lonely and frustrating. How does one hold the act of creation and the act of disassembly all at once? After all, to teach and to engage in scholarship, one must break the subject, the object apart. One must dissect and analyze what has been crafted and made (or at least attempted to be made) whole. The intellectual inquiry asks us to disassemble, unhinge, reveal, name, categorize, and make intelligible what the artist has prayed is magic. The scholar must reveal (or at least attempt to) reveal what is behind the curtain, and report back –in an essay, book chapter, or article, the pain, yearning, beauty, ugliness and mistakes that are the creation. [8] As a Black woman the fight to gain and maintain any status in either world is wickedly audacious, but to do so in two different worlds? Madness! But, for me it is also necessary. My art is theatre and performance and my scholarship is in the field of Black cultural studies. As an artist/scholar I’m drawn to exploring a question or idea in two ways: for instance, as a graduate student I examined representations of contemporary black middle class women’s sexuality. My study eventually became my first book, Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class (2009), and a two-woman show, Single Black Female (2012), my first produced and published play. In another instance, I considered the portrayal of Africans in contemporary US theatre, which resulted in the essay, “ ‘A Single Story:’ African Women as Staged in US Theatre,” and my play Dinner , that explores cultural and class tensions within the African Diaspora. I’m writing a book that analyzes ways contemporary playwrights reimagine Black history, while simultaneously completing the last two installments of my Great Migration trilogy that traces African American migrants from the south to California and their reverse migration. These dual examinations, this dancing around questions or problems, allows me to thoroughly explore answers and present my findings for different audiences and through different means. All of my work as a Black feminist theatre artist/scholar is meant to present the complexity and delicious beauty of Black life and culture in hopes that it will help make Black people freer. Why do I remain committed to theatre? I adore theatre for many reasons, but one of them is the ease of entry. You can stand on any street corner and recite your monologues or perform a one-person show for free. That’s theatre. It may not be Broadway, but not every play or musical should be. Most importantly, it is the magic of theatre that keeps me mesmerized! Watching Viola Davis perform a scene with Denzel Washington in the revival of Fences on Broadway gave me chills. At that moment, it’s clear that Wilson has presented the ground on which he stood growing up in the Hill District of Pittsburgh. When there is that kind of magic on stage, you can hear a pin drop. I’m sure you’ve felt it as an audience member because magic is not just on stage but also in the seats. A study at the University College London found that the heartbeats of audiences synchronize while watching live theatre, regardless of whether they know each other. [9] Imagine a theater full of strangers beating with one single heart. As a Black feminist artist/scholar, I’m intrigued by the thought of the hearts of strangers from every walk of life synchronizing during a story that centers the lives and experiences of Black women. No study has determined whether the heartbeats of students synchronize when they read a play together in class, but I do know that I’ve felt that group heartbeat many times during the two decades I’ve spent teaching in college classrooms. The magic is real. Lorraine Hansberry’s informal autobiography To Be Young, Gifted and Black continues to inspire me. While I am no longer young, I find Hansberry’s address to young artists poignant. She implores them to “write if you will; but write about the world as it is and as you think it ought to be and must be—if there is to be a world . . . Write about our people: tell their story. You have something glorious to draw on begging for attention. Don’t pass it up. Use it. . . The Nation needs your gifts.” [10] I urge Black artists of any age who also consider themselves scholars to avoid the debate that burdened my younger years. I say choose you; be an artist/scholar because you are both. In this challenging moment, our people need all of your gifts. So on the ground on which you stand, go ahead and dance. References [1] August Wilson delivered his remarks on June 26, 1996, at the Theatre Communications Group (TCG) National Conference at Princeton University. It was first published in American Theatre (September 1996) and reprinted in Callaloo , Volume 20, Number 3, Summer 1997, 493-503. [2] See Ira Berlin’s The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States (2015), and Rinaldo Walcott’s Long Emancipation: Moving Toward Black Freedom (2021) in which both scholars articulate the condition of unfreedom and the slow movement towards full citizenship and rights for Black people globally. [3] Other contemporary Black artist/scholars dancing on their own slash include Elizabeth Alexander, poet, literature professor and President of the Mellon Foundation; Harry J. Elam, Jr., director, theatre scholar, and President of Occidental College; Monica White Ndounou, director, theatre scholar, Executive Director of the CRAFT Institute, and Associate Professor of Theater at Dartmouth; Guthrie Ramsey, composer, musician and University of Pennsylvania musicologist; and Deborah Willis, photographer, curator, photography historian, university professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at New York University. [4] Hilton Als, “Toni Morrison and The Ghosts in the House.” The New Yorker . October 20, 2003. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/10/27/ghosts-in-the-house (accessed November 1, 2020). [5] Joni L. Jones, “Sista Docta: Performance as Critique in the Academy.” TDR (Summer 1997) 53-54. [6] Suzan-Lori Parks, “An Equation for Black People Onstage.” The America Play and Other Works, (1995) 22. [7] The arts are an integral component of Black Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. The Art Galleries at Black Studies (AGBS) is comprised of the Christian-Green Gallery and the Idea Lab. Under the direction of Executive Director Cherise Smith, AGBS has had exhibits featuring the work of Dawoud Bey, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Michael Ray Charles, Genevieve Gaignard, Jacob Lawrence, Deborah Roberts, and Charles White among others. The African and African Diaspora Studies department, the John L. Warfield Center’s Performing Blackness Series, as well as the recently re-named Omi Osun Joni L. Jones Performing Artist Residency has hosted artists such as Charles O. Anderson, Pierre Bennu, Radha Blank, Sanford Biggers, Sharon Bridgforth, Laurie Carlos, Florinda Bryant, Eisa Davis, Colman Domingo, Shirley Jo Finney, E. Patrick Johnson, Krudas Cubensi, Daniel Alexander Jones, Lorraine O’Grady, Rhonda Ross, and Stew. [8] I’ve been cautioned against focusing too much critical attention on other playwrights who are more lauded than I, but I’ve rejected that advice. To ignore their work is to betray my responsibility as a scholar which is to analyze the innovative work of Black artists. More importantly, it dishonors my deep love for Black art and Black culture. [9] “Audience Members’ Hearts Beat Together at the Theatre.” University College London Psychology and Language Sciences . 17 November 2017 https:// www.ucl.ac.uk/pals/news/2017/nov/audience-members-hearts-beat-together-theatre (accessed on Oct 28, 2020 [10] Lorraine Hansberry, To Be Young, Gifted and Black (1969) Footnotes About The Author(s) LISA B. THOMPSON UT Austin 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.

By Josep M. Benet i Jornet, Marion Peter Holt | A collection of two plays by Catalan playwright Josep M. Benet i Jornet. < 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 Two Plays: Fleeting Stages Josep M. Benet i Jornet, Marion Peter Holt Download PDF Translated by Marion Peter Holt Josep M. Benet i Jornet, born in Barcelona, is the author of more than forty works for the stage and has been a leading contributor to the striking revitalization of Catalan theatre in the post-Franco era. Fleeting, a compelling “tragedy-within-a-play”, and Stages, with its monological recall of a dead and unseen protagonist, rank among his most important plays. They provide an introduction to a playwright whose inventive experiments in dramatic form and treatment of provocative themes have made him a major figure in contemporary European theatre. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

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

Kelly I. Aliano Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. Kelly I. Aliano By Published on December 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF QUEERING DRAG: REDEFINING THE DISCOURSE OF GENDER BENDING. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. The cultural visibility and prevalence of drag performance has changed dramatically in the fifteen years since the premiere of the television program RuPaul’s Drag Race. Indeed, drag is more commonly presented in the popular culture sphere, as well as more commonly targeted by conservative attacks, than perhaps ever before. Because of this increased cultural significance, there is a renewed need to consider drag from a scholarly perspective. Meredith Heller’s Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending takes up this challenge, offering insight into “the scope of drag practice” (xi) and providing new strategies for discussing drag. Heller’s work is a useful resource for furthering the work of critically engaging drag as a performative and artistic medium that is distinctly queer. Heller reinforces the notion of queer as “not align[ing] with hegemonic structures and expectations” (6), so it can remain a valuable and expansive theoretical framework for discussing performance. Heller’s discussion here pushes beyond other definitions of drag, such as Steven P. Schacht and Lisa Underwood’s in The Drag Queen Anthology , that situate it merely as a performance that one undertakes to convince spectators that they are an individual of the opposing gender. Instead, Heller asks us to conceptualize drag as a discursive practice that includes those witnessing the practice as well as those performing it. Heller’s analysis offers us a new framework for thinking about drag by highlighting the limitations of current language to discuss the practice to use it to consider a more expansive range of performance modes while providing “new definitional guidelines for naming an act as gender-bending” (6). This new perspective centers what a body communicates as opposed to presumptions about said body itself. Queering Drag considers drag as being “what performers do rather than who they are” (17-18). Heller admirably contends with the extensive literature on drag, such as the work of J. Halberstam, Leila J. Rupp and Verta Taylor, and Esther Newton. She then offers a meaningful critique of how language has heretofore been used to discuss the practice without merely dismissing some of the field’s key voices. The lens Heller provides allows for a more comprehensive array of performances to be claimed as queer. However, there is a possibility that such a widely encompassing perspective will undercut the legacy of specifically queer-identified performance modes. Heller intentionally chose examples that have “been linguistically coded or archived as done by women or as a women’s practice” (11) because of the ways in which this might challenge the previously established dominant narrative of drag. To implement this new theorizing of drag, Heller considers “four types of US-based gender-bending”: “male impersonation, sexless mythical characters, queer butchness, and contemporary drag kinging” (33). The examples take us through popular entertainment of the nineteenth century to El Teatro Campesino to the Jewel Box Revue to a variety of community spaces in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries incorporating drag king performance. The examples, taken together, offer an interesting discussion of drag that puts women performers–broadly defined–at the center of that practice. The strict framework for performance examples here also offers an opportunity for future scholarship to consider how Heller’s framework might apply to other forms of performance claimed or defined as drag. The studies within individual chapters historicize their subjects well. Chapter 2, which explores performers in vaudeville and variety shows, considers the impact of drag king acts explicitly done for financial gain, for example, as opposed to those covered in the subsequent chapters that were more concerned with “identity politics, civil rights, or community affiliation” (72). It provides meaningful insight into the lived experiences of these figures alongside their popularity on stage. In the next chapter, on El Teatro Campesino, Heller considers the women members of the company and the ways in which their choice to perform in gender-bending projects allowed them to find “empowerment… without wholly acquiescing to unwanted sexual and gender positions” (78). This analysis centers on so-called “sexless” roles, which were by their very nature separate from the gendered identities of the performers. The discussion considers the racialized experience of gender for these performers, a concept expanded in the next chapter on Black queer performers, particularly those active in the Jewel Box Revue. Heller sees the “butch” presentation of these women as being in direct defiance of cisgender norms and “a public signifier of… queer sexual desire” (116). Chapter 5 builds on this discussion, centering smaller-scale presentations of drag king performance, with an emphasis on defining the practice as “fundamentally marked by performers’ intents to express identity queerness or highlight oppressive identity norms” (164). This is a useful framework for considering how to apply Heller’s theories beyond the examples she includes in this volume: we must center the performer’s goal with the performance, not the nature of what we perceive as being performed. Each chapter, on its own, offers a worthwhile and well-analyzed case study, although the book would benefit from a stronger thread connecting the disparate examples across the chapters. Still, Queering Drag offers diverse examples of gender-bending performance and provides a valuable framework for analyzing other examples of drag performance. In highlighting the book’s potential limitations in her conclusion, Heller wisely notes “that it is the very quality of being undefined, unnamed, and unintelligible that makes queer performance queer” (194). Nonetheless, Queering Drag provides a useful theoretical framework and compelling examples from over a century and is thus a valuable entry into the discussion of queer performance. It brings concepts from gender and sexuality theorists like Judith Butler and Michel Foucault into conversation with the rich history of theorizations of drag performance. Then it updates those concepts for our contemporary moment. Heller’s scholarship allows us to contend with the complexities of gender-bent performance by dialoguing about gender in ways that successfully challenge discourses of binary oppositions and instead embrace “the many ways people do gender” (199). This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) KELLY I. ALIANO is the author of Theatre of the Ridiculous: A Critical History (McFarland, 2019); The Performance of Video Games (McFarland, 2022); and Immersive Storytelling and Spectatorship in Theatre, Museums, and Video Games (Routledge, 2025). She teaches in the English Department at LaGuardia Community College and is the Manager of Education Special Projects at The New York Historical. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch Theater of War by Oleh Halaidych at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. Since the first hours of the full-scale Russian aggression, the collective of theatrical workers in Ukraine faces a new reality of war and turns the theater into a shelter for refugees and a center of humanitarian help. Actors, directors, and art managers get new social roles. Amidst the crisis, they live their young lives and find a place for art, joy, and mutual support.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Theater of War At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Oleh Halaidych Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Saturday May 17th at 11am (as part of the Short Film Program) and also be available to watch online on the festival website till June 8th 2025. 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. You may RSVP above to get a reminder about the Segal Film Festival in your inbox. Country Ukraine Language Ukrainian Running Time 40 minutes Year of Release 2025 About The Film Since the first hours of the full-scale Russian aggression, the collective of theatrical workers in Ukraine faces a new reality of war and turns the theater into a shelter for refugees and a center of humanitarian help. Actors, directors, and art managers get new social roles. Amidst the crisis, they live their young lives and find a place for art, joy, and mutual support. About The Artist(s) OLEH HALAIDYCH Documentary filmmaker and neuroscientist based in Kyiv, Ukraine. Graduated from the Sergiy Bukovsky documentary film program (Kyiv, 2021) and the cinematography workshop at the Kharkiv Academy of Visual Arts (Kharkiv, 2019). Holds MS in Applied Physics and Mathematics (Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, 2008-2014) and Ph.D. in biophysics (Leiden University, 2014-2018). OLHA TUHARINOVA Documentary film director and producer based in Kyiv, Ukraine. Holds an MA in architecture (Kyiv National University of Construction and Architecture, Kyiv, 2018). She entered the world of documentary cinema in 2017 as a programmer for the International Festival of Film and Urbanism “86”. Directed and produced the documentary web series “Her Place” (2020), dedicated to female representatives of professions previously prohibited for women in Ukraine. She is pursuing a DOC NOMADS Erasmus Mundus joint master’s degree. Get in touch with the artist(s) halaidych.oleh@gmail.com / olhatuha@gmail.com / LLC KSHTALT PRODUCTIONS and follow them on social media halaidych.oleh@gmail.com , https://vimeo.com/olehhalaidych, olhatuha@gmail.com , https://vimeo.com/olhatuha, Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse

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

Clara Jean Wilch Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 2 Visit Journal Homepage Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity Clara Jean Wilch By Published on June 1, 2017 Download Article as PDF Global climate change has been a major issue of concern and political debate in the US and internationally for over 20 years, marked notably by the Kyoto Protocol in 1992. While politically-fraught contention still surrounds the rhetoric of how climate change is discussed, from a scientific perspective, the physical mechanics by which greenhouse gases raise atmospheric temperatures have long been documented and understood. Due to their molecular structure, gases, including CO 2 and methane, capture and reradiate infrared photons, and as these gases accumulate in our atmosphere, heat that would otherwise leave our biosphere is trapped. [1] It is also not a subject of scientific controversy that such greenhouse gases are mined and released by human activities like industry and agriculture, and that they are continuing to rise to the highest levels experienced in our atmosphere in over 800,000 years. [2] No human, scientist or otherwise, can predict the future with certainty, but evidence has mounted to indicate climate change is occurring, and even the most conservative projections of continued climate change indicate major consequences for life on earth. In the words of the environmentalist and author Bill McKibben, “Global warming is not some distant problem waiting to appear, some hypothetical trouble we should start preparing for. The world is already changing with deadly speed. Every time we burn coal and gas and oil, we send carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and now that carbon dioxide is trapping enough heat to create a new planet.” [3] The need for a response is pressing as climate change becomes increasingly an issue of social consequence. The international NGO Oxfam has found that levels of famine are worsening in already financially impoverished regions as a result of climatic change and unpredictability. They report that roughly 26 million individuals have been forced from their homes and regions by climate change and project that “200 million people may be on the move each year by 2050 because of hunger, environmental degradation, and loss of land.” [4] The reality of global climate change thus far is that though emissions are generated disproportionately by wealthy and industrialized nations, ecological challenges have fallen disparately to the world’s poorest populations. Political scientist and environmental policy scientist Frank Biermann draws from several large government studies to caution, “climate change could ‘seriously exacerbate already marginal living standards in many Asian, African and Middle Eastern countries, causing widespread political instability and the likelihood of failed states’… migration… will be ‘uncontrolled and generate significant social and economic impacts… States and cities that are unable to cope are likely to seek international humanitarian assistance of unprecedented scale and duration.’” [5] Humanity might already be in the process of facing monumental difficulties including huge populations of dispossessed people, international chaos, or perhaps a plan for global governance which will help mitigate major disasters, and ideally, curb their magnitude. International conferences aimed at slowing or halting climate change have occurred, but significant action has been absent or inadequate, lagging far behind evidence and demand in the opinion of experts. [6] This is exemplified by the longtime refusal of the US and other primary polluters to ratify a major international effort to confront carbon emissions, the Kyoto Protocol, a disagreement that has been categorized as “an impasse between rich and poor nations.” [7] While the 2015 UN Paris Agreement demonstrated unprecedented international solidarity to lower carbon emissions, [8] recent changes in leadership in key carbon contributors like the US and Britain threaten to undermine or undo this hopeful development. Within academia, a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene has been proposed to contextualize climate change and other contemporary human-driven planetary changes within deep time. While the idea had some predecessors, the Anthropocene as such was first introduced by chemist Paul Crutzen and biologist Eugene Stoermer in 2000, and has since been widely studied and theorized within and beyond the sciences. [9] By acknowledging a departure from the 10,000 year-plus Holocene epoch that characterized modern, agricultural human history, the Anthropocene seeks to capture the contemporary age as a dawning geological period threatening substantial changes to “earth’s ecological assemblage as a whole.” [10] The Anthropocene squarely defies narratives that would deny the existence of wide-spread, irreversible climatic change, and underlines other global changes including oceanic acidification and widespread extinction events. Inherent in its naming—“The Human Epoch”—is the indication that these changes are intrinsically linked to human activity. By extension, proposing this new epoch forcefully overturns philosophical and political thinking that conceives of social and natural realms as separate or autonomous entities. In Socionatural Relations in the Anthropocene , Manuel Arias-Maldonado discusses the implications of this new epoch within a historical survey of changing conceptions of “nature” and its relationship to man. His wide-ranging work shows that our present biological and environmental status as summarized by the hypotheses of climate change and the Anthropocene “are arguably the most fruitful examples of…new ‘cooperation through dialogue’ among the sciences.” [11] He also asserts the deep and irreversible entanglement of social and natural systems that characterizes our time, despite deeply entrenched traditions of dualistic thinking stemming from philosophers including Descartes; Arias-Maldonado urges us to confront “the relation between the cultural and the material,” as much of what is evidenced in our worldly reality clashes with widely held beliefs. [12] Today, we are faced not just with the challenge of trying to address carbon emissions but also the human consequences of environmental changes already underway, and in the face of widespread indifference and denial. These complex, vital and urgent issues, while still demanding rigorous scientific study, belong also to the work of artists and scholars who help to shape the narrative of how we conceive of and feel about climate change, how we conceive of ourselves as humans, and how we conceive of our capabilities to act cooperatively and altruistically. An issue already affecting the so-called “third world” should become the concern of privileged nations before the necessity of mass-migration requires it. Only a world-wide response can address this global occurrence. Limitation of major discussions of climate change to the scientific and political realms, along with forces like bipartisan divisions and economic loyalties within major responsible nations like the US have resulted in little to no policy change or collective action. A new approach is required that constructively brings together the challenges of those dramatically affected by climate change, the abstract emotional distress of those already concerned, and the minds of those ignoring these issues. This article aims to illustrate the powerful need to grow a populous translocal community connected through an awareness of the Anthropocene as it dawns. Translocalism reframes the effort to think about and react to climate change from the abstractions of “the world” to a collection of communities, in which one’s specific locale (of culture, activity and familiar or knowable people) is connected and related to many other specific locales within and across national boundaries. The massive population upheavals climate change portends endanger the continuation of contemporary nation-states, and social formations adapted to the Holocene may be mal-adapted for the Anthropocene. Regardless of future circumstances, a reliance on government-led proposals and actions has not yet proved sufficient for creating significant change in the acquisition and use of materials that contribute to atmospheric carbon levels. I propose that there is great potential to begin an alternative discussion and movement that might grow, harness and direct the energy and action demanded by the challenges of climate change through translocal performances. Considering the current modes of global connection, I propose that this translocal effort to confront evolving matters of climate justice and environmental responsibility occur through a web-based social media platform dedicated to creativity and communication. I begin by discussing how, from a philosophical, historical and cognitive perspective, performance can spur societal and governmental action through the generation of emotions, narratives and altruistic acts. Next, I seek an understanding of how previous efforts to address climate change through performance in different media have both succeeded and failed in generating empathy and community. Finally, I propose an aspirational blueprint that attempts to generate effective altruistic action through an Internet-based community. The aim is to move thoughtfully from older to newer to possible future media formats of representing and understanding this particular concern, with the understanding that creative input is needed as much as edification. Perhaps confronting global upheaval with creativity and media seems like an incongruous and unrealistic proposal from the outset. Yet concern about climate change has not yet coalesced into a powerful mass movement on political or civil fronts in part because representations of it have produced nearly as much division and debate as action. In her book Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice , the philosopher Martha Nussbaum illuminates myriad instances of how the arts’ appeal to emotional connection and understanding has played essential roles in organizing significant and sustainable progress in national and international issues. Her basic premise is that the structures and habitual practices of societies are predominately shaped by emotionally significant narratives, and that love, defined as “a delighted recognition of the other as valuable, special, and fascinating” is the key emotion which produces sustained movement toward optimally equal and just systems . [13] Analyzing art and speeches, Nussbaum articulates how many historically monumental actions were enabled by narratives that informed public emotions, ideals and norms through performance . How we respond to global climate change is inextricably connected to how we think and feel about the crisis, and history demonstrates the importance of public performance to creating a shared emotional context that shapes belief. In a discussion of performance, ethics and history, theatre scholar Bruce McConachie explicitly compares the challenges of global climate change today to the work of the American Abolitionist movement. [14] McConachie shows how the success of the latter depended upon performances of narratives, including sermons, the speeches of Frederick Douglass, and Henry Ward Beecher’s practice of staging reverse slave auctions. Such performances produced public emotions of sympathy for the lives of slaves and were crucial to the movement’s eventual political effectiveness. This emotional investment helped to create a widespread willingness to undergo tremendous economic and mortal sacrifice during the Civil War. McConachie’s parallel emphasizes the fact that our current ecological crisis is also a matter of social justice, in which inaction has and will cause devastation to human lives. Further, it validates the possibility of a social willingness to withstand short-term economic losses for the long-term good (as, for example, oil companies and their associates would be required to do in countering the trajectory of climate change). McConachie includes a discussion of some extant efforts to create a performance-based response to activities and emotions pertinent to climate change, and writes that the Internet may be the most appropriate medium for addressing such a large-scale issue. If the challenge and approach broadly outlined seem daunting, Kitcher’s Ethical Project gives substantial reason for optimism by providing evidence for the prehistoric evolution of humanity’s now inherent capacity for altruism (acting against one’s own interest for the good of others). Kitcher argues that cooperation and egalitarianism born of a behavioral and cognitive ability to empathize—to take the perspective of others—conferred greater survival success to our ancestors than to those who behaved primarily with indifference or hostility. [15] Therefore, the human ability to relate to one another with compassion or to act altruistically is a genetic inheritance that does not need to be created wholesale in our efforts to act pro-socially in the cases of climate justice. According to Kitcher’s model of human cognition, societal failures to meaningfully confront climate change do not reflect an inherent inability to care about the welfare of others, but the peripheral positioning of this concern with regard to a given social group. Geographic distance from populations being most affected by climate change now or temporal distance from future generations who will suffer later can relegate climate change to the periphery. Fortunately, personal identification with the significance of others is not difficult to achieve. According to Nussbaum, just focusing attention on strangers (as in listening to a news story) can generate an appreciation of their importance, at least in the short term. McConachie draws attention to one cognitive basis for this reality: mirror neurons create the same neuronal activity in a human viewing intentional movement as does the movement in the brains of the viewed. These movements include emotionally involved facial expressions; so, for instance, the experience of seeing someone smile is cognitively similar to smiling. It stands to reason that simply but persistently focusing on the social plight that global climate change is creating will trigger the predisposed tendency to feel compassion for other human beings, identify empathetically and act with altruism. Performance’s activation of empathy and emotions through attention to others and storytelling has historically contributed to justice and progressive change, and can be effective in the case of climate change. Of course, performance has already been deployed to address this global crisis. The most well-known example is the 2006 documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth , an effort to educate global viewers about climate change and a call to redirect human action with greater environmental responsibility. This film brought the discussion of climate change to public attention and succeeded in familiarizing many with the issue. On an emotional register, however, the film may have unintentionally contributed to dividing public opinion, particularly in the US. Compassion and love are not the only emotions to which humans are predisposed. Nussbaum describes how the capacity for disgust, genetically reinforced through its benefits to survival throughout history, has been redirected socially as an intuitive defense against our mortality. She describes “projective disgust” as a powerful emotion that underpins systemic inequalities like racism, sexism and homophobia, in which groups of “others” are designated and defined by an association with the gross (bodily fluids and odors, for example) in order to reinforce a psychologically comforting separation for individuals from their own bodily and mortal nature. Along with the related emotions of shame, fear, and envy, disgust counters sympathy and involves the separation and “othering” of individuals in a psychologically satisfying way. [16] These constructions of human emotion and behavior can contribute to a widespread phenomenon that Jonathan Haidt has termed “groupishness,” which, like altruism, is a part of humanity’s genetic heritage because of its ability to confer success to individuals loyal to a specific group in cases of competition over evolutionary history. [17] An Inconvenient Truth is emphatically centered on Al Gore, who narrates the film and is the visually dominant figure throughout. The film documents a presentation about the science and ramifications of global climate change which Gore made throughout the world, interspersed with narrative segments about his upbringing, family and political career, including personal photographs and scenes of his daily life. In situating its call to action intimately within Gore’s life, the story becomes as much an account of climate change as one man’s mission to stop climate change in the face of widespread opposition. For people who never saw the film, the very premise—Al Gore advocating for climate change awareness—reinforces and may have helped generate the notion that climate change belongs to the American Democratic Party’s agenda, or that it is an interest of the wealthy and powerful. This construct is highly susceptible to the hard-wired reactions of groupishness (along political lines) and of envy (which Nussbaum writes is directed toward people perceived to have more status or wealth), [18] both of which disrupt compassion and create a sense of difference and exclusion. The centrality of this political figure seems to have promoted the human tendency to groupishness in some, widening fissures along class and party lines, and may have inadvertently helped de-universalize an inherently global issue. This is not to dismiss the significance and successes of this film in bringing attention to climate change, but an attempt to understand its potential limitations so that future efforts to create performed narratives might be more or differently effective in promoting compassion and united action around the issue. The potentially problematic narrative structure of An Inconvenient Truth is related to its media structure as a movie. Director Davis Guggenheim’s decision to blend climate change information with Gore’s life story drew from the reality of Gore’s committed activism, capitalized on his notoriety, and satisfied generic expectations of the feature movie format for a dramatic plot and engaging emotional and character through-line, while the film in turn provided publicity and accessibility for the content’s message. However, political polarization around climate change also suggests the major potential flaw of positioning climate change as the message of any single authority. The trouble is not Gore, but the ease with which a message about ecological responsibility can be dismissed or corrupted when it is closely associated with any one person. The media landscape has changed significantly since 2006, as the Internet has become a sophisticated, central tool for accessing information, entertainment and communication, and (where computers and web-connectivity are affordable) a primary focus of attention. Social media use among Internet users, for example, grew from 6% of those over fifteen years of age in 2007 to 83% by 2011, 1.2 billion people worldwide. [19] Although film remains an important and massively popular medium, its accessibility to both viewers and creators through the Internet and related technologies has broadened immensely and its formats have diversified. As the Anthropocene reshapes our existence at an accelerating rate, new media dissemination forms have transformed communication. Within the realm of video, the key Internet platform is YouTube, which was launched in 2005 and became the third most trafficked site on the Internet in 2011. [20] While technology and cultural theorist Johanna van Dijck defines YouTube as essentially an alternative to television that maintained many of the same technologies as TV, she states that it departs from traditional audio-visual media in significant ways. Specifically, she highlights the “novelty of having users upload self-produced or pre-produced audiovisual content via personal computers from their home to anybody’s home—that is, networked private spaces.” [21] YouTube enables the translocal distribution of professional and amateur productions by users to users, who have freedom to explore this eclectic and ever-expanding collection at will. A key to understanding the nature of the Internet interface generally is the flexible multiplicity of choices available to the user. Cultural studies scholar Berteke Waaldjak summarizes this element of the Internet experience: “Several new media scholars … stress the importance of the metaphor of the plurality of windows, enabling a less defined subject position: the user can see and relate to several things simultaneously, alternating between immediacy and hyperimmediacy, between transparency and opacity, between immersion and distance.” [22] Film primarily creates an immediate, immersive experience for the viewer through sustained attention to a linear narrative. The Internet video, conversely, is one of countless subjects of attention simultaneously available to Internet users, who can dissociate from that narrative and alternate or recalibrate their attention to multiple subjects as desired. A consequence of YouTube’s free-to-all upload capabilities in the “multiple window” environment has been the proliferation of shorter-form videos whose formats, consumption and use can depart radically from movie media. Van Dijck describes short form “snippets,” videos of less than ten minutes, as “resources rather than as products… meant for recycling in addition to storing, collecting, and sharing… posted on video-sharing sites to be reused, reproduced, commented upon, or tinkered with. [Snippets] function as input for social traffic and group communication or as resource for creative remixes…touted as typical of YouTube’s content.” [23] Individuals and organizations working to combat climate change have utilized YouTube and short-form snippets. Frequently, the resulting videos are documentaries aimed toward viewer education and engagement, not unlike An Inconvenient Truth . Due to their shorter form and reliance on cost-free YouTube dissemination, however, they are much more efficiently and cheaply produced than a full-length film and can respond quickly to of-the-moment events in climate and climate-related action. One illustration of such communication comes from 350.org, a grassroots organization aimed at combating climate change and founded by environmentalist Bill McKibbon. 350.org has posted several videos on the UN conference that culminated in the Paris Agreement. The short form alleviates the pressure to produce a strict “beginning, middle and end” narrative with specific character development, but 350.org videos still work to generate emotional engagement and promote empathy between viewers and the people depicted. In their one-minute YouTube snippet, “Global Climate March- Solidarity and Resilience,” piano music and text overlay photographs and video of climate activists who gathered worldwide on the eve of the global summit in early December, building rhythmically to those who gathered and performed protests in Paris despite security measures prohibiting a large-scale march after the local terrorist attacks on November 13th. [24] The text describes the images of shoes that thousands of would-be protestors laid out symbolically in the streets where the march had been scheduled to occur. The same technique documents indigenous people leading a prayer for victims of climate change and terrorism outside of the Bataclan, the nightclub center of the lethal attacks just weeks before. Portraits of protestors of different genders, ages and ethnicities in various emotional states appear throughout, communicating the presence and power of resilient and cooperative resistance to inaction. This video promotes a sense of inclusive empathy in the viewer through both its written narrative and its diverse images of human faces, whose wordless expressions of joy and sadness cue emotions through the spectator’s mirror neurons. The presence of varied visual social indicators and an absence of specific narrative information about the subjects are conducive to enabling widespread identification without providing fodder for envy (wealth or position) nor leaving wide room for disgust: viewers of most ethnicities, ages and gender can visually identify with someone portrayed, so the collective “subject” of the video is fairly invulnerable to body-focused projective disgust, which would group the protestors as “others.” The juxtapositions of a contemporary lethal terrorist act and the impending threats of climate change to human lives eloquently cast climate policy as an issue of basic justice, especially in regard to the equitable valuing of human life. By implying a connection between the atrocities committed against indigenous communities, the sudden violence of the 2015 Paris attacks, and lethal weather events linked to climate change, this video imbues climate issues with the combined emotional impact of major historical and very recent tragedies— and with a related sense of urgency. Certainly, the groups documented are not impervious to disgust or rejection. For example, some viewers might react with “groupish othering” and rejection of the subjects because of their status as protestors. However, the shared emotional event of the Bataclan shooting is a powerful framework for promoting a broad coalition. Nussbaum notes the power of tragedy and public grieving in promoting a shared sense of human vulnerability conducive to empathy and, eventually, shared hope. [25] This video also creates a narrative of empowerment by demonstrating the mourning and persistence of marchers in a wide and unified effort against tragic and preventable death. In addition to potentially activating an inclusive emotional significance in viewers, the video promotes viewer hope and involvement, concluding with a written message to “share this video” on social media outlets. [26] The snippet “Video On Climate Change,” also available through YouTube, deploys some of the same tactics as “Climate March,” particularly in focusing on a diverse selection of people expressing concern about climate change. This video was produced by Oxfam, a grassroots charity organization to combat world hunger that was founded in Great Britain after World War II, and has since expanded internationally. In this video, the subject is climate change in the context of agriculture, where increasingly unpredictable growing seasons and extraordinary weather events are threatening food quality and availability. The video combines instrumental music, the voice-over of a poem about climate challenges, tracking landscape shots of flooded and drought-dried environments, and testimonials regarding climate change from female farmers and organizers in the Philippines, Bolivia, Zimbabwe, and the UK. [27] The women attest in their native languages (subtitled in English) to observations of climate change in their communities and fields, and discuss their perspectives and efforts to rally support and promote sustainability. More so than 350’s video, Oxfam’s is representing a specific demographic. Conceivably, a viewer could react in self-protective, projective disgust by categorically “othering” the female farmer/laborer subject; diverse languages and localities, coupled with the topic of the universal need for food, could also promote a sense of inclusive relevance for the viewer. Summarizing the challenges brought by climate change in the stories of specific people creates an emotional narrative and visual capacity for connection through mirror neurons with suffering individuals. The focus on personal stories invites viewers to consider the video subjects, and increases their potential for significance to the viewer (without, of course, universally guaranteeing it.) This enables empathy, the painful recognition of another’s trouble, and in turn, the desire for altruistic participation, specifically prompted as the women discuss climate change as a shared responsibility. The tragedy of hunger and hardship, like the tragedies in 350.org’s video, is used to create a connecting acknowledgement of human vulnerability that is converted into hope. The music and poem begin somberly, as the women discuss their difficulty, and become more uplifting with the entrance of trumpets and the stanza “join the chorus, let’s make a difference,” as the women are shown smiling and educating others, demonstrating their hope and determination. The conclusion is a frame that promotes a specific campaign by Oxfam to bolster Europe’s role in growing food and a specific gateway for people to mobilize their altruistic desires. This video relies less on a linear narrative structure than those discussed previously, imaging people’s homes and daily lives rather than events, and presenting mood motifs based in empathetic sadness and the relief of hope. A particularly effective dimension of this video is how the geographic distance between the selected subjects illustrates the shared difficulties these climate events have on people from varied continents, cultures and economies. This reinforces the truly global impact of climate change and creates a sense of a translocal community that may motivate action. The word “global” has more complex meanings in a social context than in its geographical use. Mass media and communication scholar Fabienne Darling-Wolf writes that the lived reality of globalization exists predominately as bidirectional influences between local communities. The model of globalization Darling-Wolf wishes to promote pushes against the dominant theory of hegemony subsuming local differences, though she acknowledges an imbalance of influence linked to economic inequity. Simultaneously, local groups (villages, towns, subsets of cities) take in information, culture, even climate change itself, and process them with their own tools and ideas. Forces like Western culture and climate change are widespread, but they manifest in experiences, interpretations and reactions that are hybrids of the particular characteristics of that instance of influence (a certain imported fashion trend, or a specific abnormal weather event) mixed with local characteristics and values. Still, understanding a culturally globalizing world and even the capacity to imagine it are dependent on representations: “the notion of the global would not exist, at least not in its current form, without the media.” [28] In Oxfam’s snippet, the vision of the global is defined by what Darling-Wolf refers to as “local-to-local links,” [29] achieved here through interwoven images and narratives of small farmers and farming communities. The video maps a global reality of specific, unique and kindred communities. Darling-Wolf writes that translocalism is the ideal mode for understanding ongoing cultural globalization in which “we can learn from both the differences and similarities between contexts about the nature of larger processes of globalization.” [30] This approach is significant in the context of climate change because it promotes the inclusion of diverse political actors and ideologies representative of the global action and/or the policy at stake, and shifts away from Western hegemony embodied by US leaders alone. A global discourse about climate change and possible responses that perpetuate the dominance of Western hegemony can be highly divisive, according to Heather Smith. She observes that constructions in which “global” is understood “as a means by which to externalize the environment, deny the local and provide a sense of distance and detachment… as a solution as embodied in multilateral processes that are state-centric” have allowed the wealthy and powerful to “deny responsibility” and have alienated communities of would-be participants in confronting climate change. [31] A video like Oxfam’s may appeal to communities that are resistant to endorsing any global action for fear of western hegemony by instead illustrating a translocal vision of the global—connectivity through shared experience and causes resulting in cooperation rather than cooptation under one dominating authority. Critically, both Oxfam and 350.org’s videos, while arguably promoting greater empathetic inclusivity and more diversified visions of community, are professional products curated by large organizations with their own influence and authority, and could themselves generate political, class or ideological differences and groupish opposition. YouTube is also available to individuals outside of the audio-visual production professions, however, and the climate justice advocacy and education videos available on that site present a greater plurality of producers and tactics than there is room to discuss. They include theatrical, animated and humorous approaches to climate change, conducive to a broad range of cognitive and emotional experiences. For instance, in comedy and political satire particularly, projective disgust, envy and shame are used to promote positive change. Internet videos demonstrate the ability of such “negative” emotions to reinforce groupishness and solidarity conducive to climate justice when they are directed toward ecologically irresponsible corporations and leaders (see Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah or The Young Turks for examples). Such techniques in performance could be particularly important to the public’s role of holding governments accountable for the promises of the Paris Agreement. Other YouTube videos and websites instruct viewers in how to behave with ecological responsibility in their own lives and consumer choices to reduce their carbon footprints. [32] One can safely suppose that the mission of finding a perfect video which is universally effective in motivating every individual viewer to care about climate change and to altruistically act with greater ecological responsibility is not possible. However, there is an inherent ability of performance forms to generate interest, empathy and altruism, and a diversity of performance modes are crucial in making this issue resonate with larger, more diverse audiences. Audiences that respond by distancing themselves from one depiction of climate change or “othering” its concerned spokespeople could be moved to empathy or altruism by another depiction. Yet audio-visual content is still a product for consumption, and motivating a change in viewer perspectives is only a small first step toward reigning in carbon emissions, or ameliorating the effects of climate change. Myriad psychological tendencies underpin an avoidance of climate change as a topic; George Marshall outlines these in his book, Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change. He argues that even among populations that accept climate change as a serious and human-driven threat, silence about climate change remains common among individuals and private sentiments rarely translate into action. [33] Among his conclusions is that concerned people need to personally engage this issue in their lives and social circles. Active participation and input are required to maintain and spread growing empathy and environmental responsibility, to generate innovative approaches to combating emissions and their ramifications, and to build a committed translocal community prepared to respond with meaningful support in the case of, say, mass migrations of climate refugees. This requires a dialogic and dynamic interface. The Internet is already dominated by social media platforms conducive to exactly such personal and dynamic interaction. As Dijck notes, social media websites enable the creation of media content by users, and the exchange of this content between them. Social media has become a “new online layer through which people organize their lives” and it “influences human interaction on an individual and community level, as well as on a larger societal level, while the worlds of online and offline are increasingly interpenetrating.” [34] Social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube itself have come to define communities for a growing number of people. There are limitations to using one’s personal social media to disseminate or promote any activism. “Sharing” 350.org’s Climate March video with one’s Facebook friends, as the video prompts viewers to do, may help attract some attention but only continues a mode of essentially passive, if good-willed, media consumption. Besides this, personal social networks connect people who predominantly share one another’s cultural and social context in most cases and do little to broaden the message into new, differently-minded communities. Furthermore, these established sites, because they are the means by which active users “organize their lives,” are already rife with information spanning wide ranges of relationships and interests. The multiple window phenomenon of divided and ever-shifting attention is intrinsic within the structure of Facebook where one’s “shared” climate video might appear in juxtaposition (and competition) with an amusing cat video, news of a friend’s wedding, and a video concerning a different cause or protest. In short, dominant social media websites are neither the ideal platform for concentrating interest nor for generating action. A new social media platform uniquely dedicated to bi-directional communication about global climate change, environmental responsibility, and altruistic support for climate change victims could create a dynamic, innovative and effective contribution to climate justice and preparedness. Given the increasing inter-disciplinary academic awareness of the level of flux in which our planet and societies are mutually entwined, and the great uncertainty inherent to this upheaval, such a forum would seek to provide a transnational ground for a citizenship of the Anthropocene, unified in empathy, creativity and action, whatever the Anthropocene comes to be. I believe that such a site, drawing from the user-sharing formats of existing platforms but filling an uninhabited niche, could rally interest and would meet a demand for active involvement and community around these issues. While highly effective organizations already exist, their websites function primarily in the one-way production of professional media and static information. When US Internet users search “climate change” on Google, the most ubiquitous search engine, the current top results are all within the scientific and informational realm, and represent an important but limited perspective that does not present dynamic opportunities for involvement. In A History of Communications , Marshall Poe differentiates the Internet from the audio-visual form as being dialogic rather than monologic, and having a structural tendency towards egalitarianism, pluralism, and individualism, all elements conducive to this ideally cooperative yet diverse translocal global community. [35] Yet scholars have attested that Internet media is not necessarily very “new” at all, and most of the easily searchable media associated with climate change demonstrates this in essentially providing virtual versions of traditional media (books, movies, etc.). The structural possibilities and connectivity of the Internet could be utilized to greater effect in confronting the major issues of the Anthropocene. The website platform proposed might include existing media representations about climate justice as a foundation for generating interest, empathetic investment and educational information. Primarily, however, it would encourage users to express and interpret their lived, local experience of global climate change. Inviting creative forms like video, photography or writing, this site would act as a global canvas for envisioning climate change on a specific and human scale. It would aim to create an investment in and outlet for the personal stories and ideas of people in their confrontations with climate change and the Anthropocene as experienced by individuals. These could conceivably range from video of live plays or performance art about climate change to documentation of one’s thoughts or activities (gardening, farming, etc.) coming from anyone compelled to share. Like contributions, contributors could span a vast range of demographics and experiences, from people displaced from their homes by extreme weather events to comfortable urbanites discussing practices by which they work to engage in environmental responsibility. The diversity created by this non-professional content would provide still more dimensions for empathetic effectiveness and alternative modes of legitimacy, which are potentially challenged in the case of organizational or political productions. Presenting scientific research beside the lived experiences and observations of a Bolivian farmer, for instance, could have a synergistic effect in generating interest, while providing a dedicated platform where each user might feel heard. YouTube, as discussed, is open to user generated content, but the vast majority (over 80%) of users are strictly passive consumers. [36] Presumably many of these passive users have not felt empowered or motivated to generate content. The existence of a dedicated portal would provide inspiration, motivation and an audience for people concerned with climate justice, and hopefully draw new involvement through the egalitarian diversity of input and representations. While technological (in)availability would have major ramifications for the proposed platform’s content, the German statistics aggregator statistica.com estimates the current number of smartphone users globally at around two billion and rising, [37] a tremendous number of potential users across the globe who could access and submit text, photo and video (or any medium they are compelled to use). All media creations and participation would be encouraged. An altruistically-inspired game designer, for example, might provide a dynamic virtual world for better understanding climate change through an experimental manipulation of energy-use scenarios in a way that could engage and educate visitors. The central guiding principle would be a lack of limitations and specific directives. The guiding purpose of the platform would be an open invitation for individuals to create their own forms and shape their own narratives, to transform isolated personal experience of confusion, fear, or frustration through some concrete public contribution. Creativity is conducive to the formation of meaningful community; one can easily imagine how the exchange of new, expressive works might engage and connect users to one another in a powerful emotional camaraderie around a historically divisive and often privately-kept concern. Localism entails immediate visibility, direct contact and personal relationships between citizens, while translocalism is communication and contact between locales of different regions and nations, a globe-spanning network built from nodes of tangible, meaningful, collaborative communities. The website platform would exist to enable a translocal network of novel and non-commercial consideration of climate change as a social issue, and as a tool to encourage unmediated engagement and discussion within peoples’ non-virtual lives and localities. The broad invitation to create would (ideally) inspire open performances and public theatre, sparking avenues for education and empathy in live audiences, beyond the virtual platform and its economically restricted accessibility or ideologically-specific appeal. The Emergency Circus, a clown group that travels internationally to play and perform comedy with refugee families and other dispossessed groups, publishes video documentation on YouTube; it is just one model for creative performance action that breaks from the economic limitations of Internet-based activism, specifically relevant in the case of climate refugees. The proposed network would be conducive to a rhizomatic increase in ideas and inspirations, undercutting the dominant capitalist-driven notions that limit climate activism to consumerist choices. A benefit of a new platform is that existent forums like Facebook and YouTube conform to the interests of commercial sponsors, a distorting factor that would ideally be absent in the proposed site. Discussion boards in a diversity of languages would allow for dynamic conversation and debate in which new ideas might be innovated and shared, and personal connections and relationships might be forged. Despite the obstacle of language differences, the site would define its mission in translocal terms, and would hopefully attract a diversity of people given the global influence of its cause. In time, perhaps multi-lingual contributors and translators would enable increased cross-cultural communications. Through person-to-person international communities, one can imagine the formation of significant, material support in case of climate catastrophes. Were climate change to radically alter environments globally, the translocal community could conceivably form a base-line plan of action and communication resource in emergencies. The website might also allow for collaborative efforts to keep governments in check regarding protocols like the Paris Agreement; already, voluntary scientific observation teams gather to collect data for a diversity of ecological projects and this model could be easily formed to fit an active citizen team invested in climate accountability. Simultaneously, this platform would likely face difficulties, potentially including website promotion, user activity like “trolling,” submission of scientifically unsound information, or evolving through curation into another static authority. The primary defense against these challenges would be dynamic openness to user suggestions and ideas. This proposal is speculative, a gesture toward how this global crisis might be networked between localities, and an optimistic argument that they ought to be because pluralism and empathy are powerful tools. 2016 was the hottest year on earth in historical record (breaking the records set by 2015 and 2014), while the span of global sea ice was at a near-record low. [38] Environmental transformation has serious social consequences that are unfolding all the time; a recent report shows that terrorist groups including ISIL and Boko Haram have begun using climate-related natural disasters and resource shortages in their recruitment and control tactics. [39] While some people face dire realities like food and water shortages, large populations of developed nations live in frustrated anxiety about evolving climate change. According to a recent Gallup Poll, an increasing majority of Americans across political groups “worry” about climate change either a fair amount or a great deal. [40] Yet the US government is in talks to abandon or scale back its commitment to the Paris Agreement. [41] We must put our concern to use, push beyond the isolation of anxiety, support one another, amplify public will, and develop and coordinate practical strategies. We cannot wait for a grand solution and perfect resolution of this crisis. We are all citizens of this new epoch, the Anthropocene, and there can be no better focus of our attention and creative power than the dynamic global crisis of climatic disturbances to our geographies and subsistence. We must connect with one another to communicate and innovate approaches on individual and community levels, and to help one another take responsibility in our individual actions, through a translocal network that thrives on the limitless diversity of human perspectives provoked by climate change. This is an open-handed offer to anyone motivated and able to act on this proposal to please do so, in collaboration with me or independently. The more individuals who publically share their investment and dedication to acknowledging and confronting climate change, the better – and there is no time to waste! References [1] Graciela Chichilnisky and Kristen A. Sheeran, Saving Kyoto: An Insider’s Guide to How it Works, Why it Matters and What it Means for the Future (London: New Holland, 2009), 9. [2] Chichilinisky and Sheeran, Saving Kyoto, 20. [3] Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (New York: Times Books, 2010), 13. [4] Alex Renton, “Oxfam Briefing Paper- Summary,” Oxfam International, last modified July 2009, https://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/bp130-suffering-the-science-summary.pdf [5] Frank Biermann, Earth System Governance: World Politics in the Anthropocene (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2014), 8. [6] McKibben, Eaarth , xiv. [7] Chichilinisky and Sheeran, Saving Kyoto, 4. [8] Carol Davenport, “Nations Approve Landmark Climate Accord in Paris,” New York Times , December 12, 2015. [9] Manuel Arias-Maldonado, Environment and Society: Socionatural Relations in the Anthropocene (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2015), 73. [10] Jeremy Davies, The Birth of the Anthropocene (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 66. [11] Arias-Maldonado, Environment and Society , 9. [12] Ibid., 4. [13] Martha Craven Nussbaum, Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 176. [14] Bruce McConachie, Evolution, Cognition and Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). [15] Philip Kitcher, The Ethical Project (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). [16] Nussbaum, Political Emotions , 34. [17] as cited in McConachie, Evolution, Cognition and Performance. [18] Nussbaum, Political Emotions , 34. [19] José van Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 4. [20] Ibid., 110-111. [21] Ibid., 113. [22] Berteke Waaldijk, “A Historical Comparison Between World Exhibitions and the Web,” in Digital Material: Tracing New Media in Everyday Life and Technology , ed. Marianne van den Boomen (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 107. [23] van Dijck, Culture of Connectivity , 118-119. [24] “Global Climate March- Solidarity and Resilience,” YouTube video, 1:04, posted by “350.org,” December 2, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWPpibC7Kt4. [25] Nussbaum, Political Emotions , 267. [26] “Global Climate March.” [27] “Oxfam Video on Climate Change,” YouTube video, 8:20, posted by “Slow Food,” June 16, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuc38-Q6TBs. [28] Fabienne Darling-Wolf, Imagining the Global: Transnational Media and Popular Culture Beyond East and West (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2015), 12. [29] Ibid., 3. [30] Ibid. [31] Heather A. Smith, “Disrupting the Global Discourse of Climate Change: The Case of Indigenous Voices,” in The Social Construction of Climate Change: Power, Knowledge, Norms, Discourses , ed. Mary E Pettenger (Burlington: Ashgate, 2007), 201. [32] “How to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint,” YouTube video, 2:31, posted by “Howcast,” March 31, 2008. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7zwrzEyzkA. [33] George Marshall, Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014). [34] van Dijck, Culture of Connectivity , 4. [35] Marshall Poe, A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). [36] van Dijck, Culture of Connectivity , 116. [37] “Number of smartphone users worldwide from 2014 to 2020 (in billions),” Statista, accessed January 2, 2017. https://www.statista.com/statistics/330695/number-of-smartphone-users-worldwide/. [38] Jugal K. Patel, “How 2016 Became Earth’s Hottest Year on Record,” New York Times , January 18, 2017, accessed April 20, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/18/science/earth/2016-hottest-year-on-record.html. [39] Ben Doherty, “Climate Change Will Fuel Terrorism Recruitment, Report for German Foreign Office Says,” Guardian , April 19, 2017, accessed April 20, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/apr/20/climate-change-will-fuel-terrorism-recruitment-adelphi-report-says. [40] Lydia Saad and Jeffrey M. Jones, “U.S. Concern About Global Warming at Eight-Year High,” Gallup , March 16, 2016, http://www.gallup.com/poll/190010/concern-global-warming-eight-year-high.aspx. [41] Coral Davenport, “Policy Advisers Urge Trump to Keep U.S. in Paris Accord,” New York Times, April 18, 2017, accessed April 20, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/18/us/politics/trump-advisers-paris-climate-accord.html . Footnotes About The Author(s) CLARA JEAN WILCH received her BA in Biology from Occidental College and MA in Theatre Studies from the University of Pittsburgh. She will begin as a PhD student of Performance Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles in Fall of 2017. She thanks JADT and its editors for bringing an interdisciplinary approach and ever-necessary attention to the topic of the Anthropocene. Guest Editor for Special Issue: Bruce McConachie Editorial Board for Special Issue: Meredith Conti Allan Davis John Fletcher Ju Yon Kim Scott Magelssen Julia Walker Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to American Theatre and Performance in the Anthropocene Epoch Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti's Marrathon Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene Tú eres mi otro yo - Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy & the AnthropoScene Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines The Theatre of David Henry Hwang. By Esther Kim Lee. New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015; pp. x + 207. Directing Shakespeare in America: Current Practices. By Charles Ney. London UK, New York NY: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016. Pp. 362. Acting in the Academy: The history of professional actor training in US higher education. Peter Zazzali. London, New York: Routledge, 2016; Pp. 219. 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Heather S. Nathans Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 28 1 Visit Journal Homepage Performing Anti-slavery Heather S. Nathans By Published on March 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF Performing Anti-slavery: Activist Women on Antebellum Stages . By Gay Gibson Cima. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. xiii + 298. Gay Gibson Cima’s new book, Performing Anti-Slavery , should become a model for how to combine detailed historical research with activism. In her compelling study, she imaginatively links the struggle to end slavery in antebellum America with the larger issue of human trafficking. At once erudite and passionate, it is an exemplary piece of scholarship that will provoke discussions among scholars of American theatre, American Studies, Africana Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and other academic communities interested in how historical research can be imbued with a sense of immediacy for contemporary readers. And as the author promises, it engages with an impressive breadth of interdisciplinary methods, including performance studies, critical race theory, American studies, and feminist studies. As Cima observes in the introduction, female anti-slavery activists seldom had the luxury of presenting the kinds of public performances available to their male counterparts. So she invites her readers to consider a broader definition of what might constitute “performance” for women traditionally relegated to the domestic sphere. She examines a range of performances, from the gatherings of African American female literary societies, to the public appearances of noted escaped slave Ellen Craft, who made her way to freedom and international fame by impersonating a white slave owner. While these exist outside the realms of the playhouse proper, they nevertheless became effective sites for women to perform resistance and political consciousness. In this, the project echoes her award-winning book Early American Women Critics: Performance, Religion, Race , in which she examined how antebellum women redefined themselves as “host bodies” and their roles as cultural critics rather than mere passive observers. Performing Anti-Slavery is a natural extension of that earlier work, shifting the discourse into the realm of political activism. Cima is interested in the “stickiness” of the questions that surrounded how black and white women performed affect throughout the first half of the nineteenth century (17). She acknowledges the need for nineteenth century women to develop a wide and often subversive array of political strategies “that would enable them to reach their antislavery goals” (17). Cima pays particular attention to the question of spectatorship and how female antislavery performers such as Maria Stewart, Sarah Douglass, Ellen Craft, and Lucretia Mott, among others, conjured their imagined audiences. Rather than projecting a neutral spectator, Cima argues that activist women often invoked slaves as “the partisan, outlier spectators of their activism” (15). This paradigm shift refocused the audience’s awareness of their position, and, as Cima suggests, their understanding of their own complicity in the slave system. Cima’s study also posits what she describes as a “combination of performance strategies—working simultaneously within and outside of the state,” as a possible model for contemporary thinking about human trafficking, since “the tension . . . shows what is and what is not possible in the way of establishing human rights within a democracy” (14). Performing Anti-Slavery spans four chapters plus an epilogue that extends the discussion into the present day. In chapter one (which lays the theoretical foundation for the study), she underscores a critical distinction between sympathy and empathy, suggesting that empathy is both an ahistorical and inaccurate term to describe how nineteenth-century women engaged with enslaved women (both directly and indirectly). For Cima, the term empathy slips too easily into the realm Saidiya Hartman cautions against in her Scenes of Subjection , in which supposedly empathetic spectators displaced the slave’s body at the center of the abolitionist narrative. As Cima observes, sympathetic critical responses prompt the “second step to performing sympathy” (55). Cima also takes up the role of religion in abolitionism (as she did in Early American Women Critics ), this time turning her attention to metempsychosis, a belief in the transmigration of souls from one form to another at the time of death. As she notes, this somewhat loose adaptation of Hinduism and Buddhism was synthesized with contemporary Western writings on sympathy (68). Not content merely to witness passively, female anti-slavery activists who embraced metempsychosis openly derided women who imagined that tears could substitute for action. The concept of metempsychosis recurs throughout the study as a touchstone for how antislavery performers envisioned their activist work. Cima acknowledges that while common themes and discourses circulated among female anti-slavery activists, “anti-slavery women were fueled by wildly disparate objectives, so they generated different effects,” and indeed she returns to this theme in her epilogue in discussing present-day activist efforts (61). She reminds her reader that distinctions of class, color, and faith continued to divide women in the movement, no matter how closely their affective practices drew them together. Throughout her study, Cima pays careful attention to the ways in which female activists mobilized theatrical practices (e.g., the readings of scripted “conversations” at literary society meetings the convenings of aid societies, deliveries of public lectures, publishing of poems or jeremiads under pseudonyms designed to at once conceal and provoke). In one instance that reveals a nice attention to detail, she even points to the inherently dramatic beats or moments embedded in the cry of “oh!” that punctuate antislavery writings (for example, “with no hope to cheer them—oh!”). Cima interprets this as an “indignant shout” rather than a helpless lamentation (71). Chapters two, three, and four flow together smoothly as Cima explores the ways in which her black female subjects found compassion for themselves as well as others. For example, in chapter two she examines Sarah Douglass’s 1832 speech to the Female Literary Association of Philadelphia, in which Douglass helped to shift the rhetorical ground of abolitionist speech. As Cima argues, black women faced physical jeopardy not only for participating in antislavery gatherings, but on a daily basis as laws governing free blacks tightened in Northern states. For Douglass, feeling for the slave in bondage to the South had to be implicitly and explicitly joined to the danger facing free black women. As Cima notes, Douglass thus “created a sisterly bond, a community” (117). Cima links that recognition of compassion to the women’s ability to develop effective performative practices. The realization (which she describes as an epiphany) that outsiders did not distinguish between enslaved and free, wealthy or working class, but saw only race, helped to promote one of the most stunning episodes considered in chapter four of the study work: the escape of William and Ellen Craft and the “brilliant theatricality” that allowed Ellen Craft to perform and re-perform both black and white racial identities on a transatlantic stage in a kind of “disruptive hybridity” (182, 205). In her brief epilogue, Cima turns her attention to the urgent question of human trafficking in the twenty-first century. Quoting a report from the US “Trafficking in Persons” office, she notes that “12.3 million people exist within conditions of ‘forced labor, bonded labor, and forced prostitution’ around the globe, and 56 percent of them are women and girls” (249). Asking, “How can artist-activists imagine interventions,” Cima cautions against the ‘new’ abolitionists whose debates over strategies and the links between slavery and the ideal democratic state risk reducing the enslaved bodies in question to the inert status of three centuries ago (247). At the end of the study, she invokes her own activist practice with the Humanities and Human Rights Initiative at Georgetown as a process that illuminated her own understanding of how the female antislavery activists of more than a century ago wrestled with the challenge of combining their sense of mission with the almost insurmountable obstacles around them. Framing the work of abolitionism as an ongoing process lifts the work of Cima’s subjects out of the past and places it firmly in our present. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Heather S. Nathans Tufts University Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Comment New Directions in Dramatic and Theatrical Theory: The Emerging Discipline of Performance Philosophy Changes, Constants, Constraints: African American Theatre History Scholarship Reflections: Fifty Years of Chicano/Latino Theatre Strangers Onstage: Asia, America, Theatre, and Performance Transgressive Engagements: The Here and Now of Queer Theatre Scholarship Thinking about Temporality and Theatre Musical Theatre Studies “Re-righting” Finland’s Winter War: Robert E. Sherwood’s There Shall Be No Night[s] Star Struck!: The Phenomenological Affect of Celebrity on Broadway Performing Anti-slavery American Tragedian Murder Most Queer The Captive Stage Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Encounter Strike Anywhere Performance Ensemble's work Pliable Futures in Brooklyn, at this year's edition of the Prelude in the Parks festival by The Segal Centre, presented in collaboration with . Prelude in the Parks 2024 Festival Pliable Futures Strike Anywhere Performance Ensemble Interactive Theater Friday, June 7, 2024 @ 6pm Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn Throughout the Park. Begins at the entrance at North Portland Ave and Myrtle Ave. Presented by Mov!ng Culture Projects and The Segal Center in collaboration with Presented by Mov!ng Culture Projects and The Segal Center View Location Details RSVP To Event Experience a dynamic fusion of jazz, dance, and theater addressing the global plastic crisis in this unique, durational, site-specific performance. Strike Anywhere’s talented ensemble of jazz musicians, dancers, and actors will lead audiences through the park using Soundpainting—a live composing sign language—to guide their improvisations in real-time. The ensemble will weave music, movement, and narrative into a captivating exploration of our world's plastic plight. This performance deftly employs creativity and humor to spark dialogue about an urgent environmental issue. Strike Anywhere Performance Ensemble Established in 1997, the Strike Anywhere Performance Ensemble is a permanent collective of jazz musicians, modern dancers, and actors. Performers collaborate through an ensemble-based process to create politically-charged, original works. Strike Anywhere’s mission is to inspire empathy, creativity, and social awareness through provocative performance and innovative education. Its work is guided by the words of Bertolt Brecht, "Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it." SA performances always feature live music, physical theater and modern dance. The company applies structures and concepts from American jazz to their interdisciplinary improvisations to create performances that are engaging and alive. Strike Anywhere is the preeminent theatre company in the United States practicing Soundpainting, a universal sign-language developed by composer Walter Thompson for live composition with improvisers. Visit Artist Website Location Throughout the Park. Begins at the entrance at North Portland Ave and Myrtle Ave. Visit Partner Website