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William DeVito, Juanita Mejia Restrepo, M. Nance, Robert Pike, and Rufus ZaeJoDaeus Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 1 Visit Journal Homepage ZAZ William DeVito, Juanita Mejia Restrepo, M. Nance, Robert Pike, and Rufus ZaeJoDaeus By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF ZAZ By Ryan K. Johnson  Directed by Ryan K. Johnson  Wexner Center for the Arts, The Ohio State University Columbus, OH September 5th, 2025 Reviewed by William DeVito, Juanita Mejia Restrepo, M. Nance, Robert Pike, and Rufus ZaeJoDaeus On September 5, 2025, the five of us experienced the dance company SOLE Defined’s world premiere of ZAZ at The Ohio State University’s Wexner Center for the Arts. According to the company’s website, SOLE Defined’s mission is to create pieces “designed to evoke the senses, creating sonic and kinetic performative archives of Black American History through the lens of African Diasporic Percussive Dance methodologies.” ZAZ powerfully realizes this goal: in ninety minutes the show’s director and playwright Ryan K. Johnson leads an energetic cast of six to manifest an expressive docudrama that performs the lived experience of the Black community of New Orleans and reckons with the devastating legacy of Hurricane Katrina. ZAZ deftly casts the theatrical space as a living palimpsest where oral histories, news reports, diverse dance forms, and mourning rituals materialize and dissipate through the physicality of these dancing storytellers. Nearly to the date, this run marked the twentieth anniversary of the disaster that laid bare the social and racial undercurrents dominating America. SOLE Defined’s immersive work responds to that moment by shepherding the bodies in the space—performers and audience alike—in a theatrical experience of shared kinesthesia. ZAZ (Cast: Claude Alexander III, Duante Fyall, Jada Hicks, Quynn Johnson, Ryan K. Johnson, Shannan E. Johnson, Jodeci Milhouse, Funmi Sofola), photo: Becca Marcela Oviatt. The production’s intentional flow submerged the current of audience’s bodies in its scenography as soon as they entered the space. Throughout four audience banks oriented around and facing each side of the set’s central dance floor, we sat among the fifty-some chairs at hazily lit cocktail tables that transformed the black box space into “ZAZ,” the titular New Orleans jazz club. Audience members were scattered throughout the space; some sat in a corner, while others of us shared tables with our backs facing a projected wall displaying performance information integrated with family photographs, posters, and other trappings found in a French Quarter establishment. The seating arrangement fostered an unexpected theatrical communion, which was continued in ZAZ’ s initial moments: amid jazz-infused hip-hop beats, ZAZ ’s host — played by Shannan E. Johnson — beckoned the audience to join her on the dance floor. Several audience members jumped in and improvised, troubling the boundaries between spectator and spectated. As individual actors dressed in everyday clothing subtly integrated into the crowd, they herded all the moving bodies in a coordinated line dance. The collective energy was effervescent, drawing all — even those who remained sitting — into the joyous community of New Orleans.   The celebration was cut short by the wail of sirens. News clips of the impending hurricane replaced the wall projections, sending us back in time to the weeks preceding August 23rd, 2005. The audience returned to their seats, leaving Johnson onstage to narrate this piece’s origins and his individual connection to the “Big Easy.” Then, this literal calm-before-the-storm shattered, and the audience was engulfed by a frightening simulation of Hurricane Katrina. From an overhead projection, the scuffed dance floor rippled as the water droplets of Katrina’s rain invaded the narrative space. The bright noise of New Orleans horns transformed into a somber-toned spiritual intertwined with the roar of helicopters. The wild abandon of social dance gave way to an athletic pas-du-deux between two embattled survivors struggling for a rescuer’s attention, their movements illuminated by isolated shafts of search lights. This was ZAZ ’s power in action: the protean, visceral design emerged through a combination of audience immersion and integrated sound, projection, and lights. As the past evaporated with each scene, experience accumulated on the performing bodies. In nearly every sense, the body was the chief investment of ZAZ . In lieu of distinct set pieces, ZAZ championed the visual effect of the promenade. Performers ebbed, flowed, and exploded onto the scene through the nooks and crannies of the entire space, causing the audience to constantly reorient themselves toward the next area of focus. The sonic world of the play married the quintessentially Black musical forms of jazz, hip-hop, and spirituals with the polyrhythmic resonances of body percussion . The cast of ZAZ , photo: Becca Marcela Oviatt. Floor mics caught these punctuated flows along with the scrapes of sand dancing and raps of tap shoes. In one sequence, as the ensemble danced ferociously, they lit the darkened stage with headlamps affixed to their foreheads, re-centering the locus of control from the light grid to the individual performers. ZAZ’s narrative structure prioritized corporeality over character as Johnson’s individual arc melded with the collage of collective experience. The performers cycled through a variety of characters, transforming their voices and changing clothing frequently, and the action never lingered on a single story long enough for emotive identification. Hurricane Katrina’s effects on the entire community were impressed upon all the attendees. In a particularly poignant moment, cast members dressed as government officials demanded the audience leave their seats. Dividing us by gender, the rescuers marshaled us throughout the audience banks and declared that we were now “displaced.” This aestheticized imposition harkened to the actual displacement of thousands of New Orleans’ s citizens that were shuttled across the country, never to return to their neighborhoods. In reenacting this harrowing experience, ZAZ highlighted the callousness of the government’s process using the actual bodies in the audience. This unique and effective method of theatrical identification crowned ZAZ ’s comprehensive commitment to the body.   As promised in their company mission, the feast of stimulation is the beating heart of ZAZ . Its use of theatrical space and the bodies within it heralded the lived — and living — resilience of a community assaulted, not only by nature, but by our leaders’ apathy towards their plight . ZAZ offers no prescriptive solutions, only experience. Yet, this vivid piece contends that acknowledging that experience is the first step towards a better future. As a coda, the closing moments of the performance advanced this proposition by returning us to the communal dance floor. Now burdened with knowledge and tempered with soul , the continued rhythms of the bodies joyously echoed forth after the storm.  The audience — pulled into the narrative, moved emotionally and physically — kept dancing even after the actors left the stage. References Footnotes About The Author(s) WILLIAM DEVITO is a theatre director and PhD student in Theatre at The Ohio State University. JUANITA MEJIA RESTREPO is a Master’s student in Theatre at The Ohio State University and recent graduate of the MFA Acting program at Purdue University. M. NANCE (they/them) is a PhD student in the Theatre program at The Ohio State University. As a theatre artist, their praxis centers dramaturgy, playwriting, and directing. ROBERT PIKE (he/him) is a theatre artist and PhD student in the Theatre program at The Ohio State University. RUFUS ZAEJODAEUS is a media design MFA at The Ohio State University with an emphasis on immersive experiences. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale “The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. The Brothers Size Dead Outlaw 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival ZAZ Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Lauren Friesen Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 1 Visit Journal Homepage Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Lauren Friesen By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage is a book that would have been helpful a century ago but could not have been written then; it would have prepared everyone for the winds of change that began then and continue today. This volume avoids prior emphases on form and structure and instead focuses on diverse methodologies and aesthetics. It provides hindsight into where playwriting has been and, more importantly, makes suggestions, even offering practical exercises as a guide to the current situation and the future of the craft. Every chapter in this landmark publication explores alternatives to Aristotelian structuralism, first articulated in Aristole’s Poetics (ca. 330 BCE). The essays have been carefully and logically selected to outline alternatives to a linear structure with its unities, singular plot line, and heroic characters. Sara Freeman’s 2023 publication Playwriting, Dramaturgy and Space begins the quest for a new direction . Decentered Playwriting takes that quest for new perspectives and presents them in full bloom. Philosophers have observed that space and time are the two constants in human experience, and playwrights have often structured their works according to time sequence (i.e., Hamlet occurs during nine months in his life). Decentered Playwriting begins with Sarah Johnson’s chapter “Playwrights as Architects of Third Space: The Dramaturgy of Japanese Traditional Performing Arts.” Johnson’s suggestion is to lay aside, for the time being, the narrative of time and explore the possibilities of space. With that declarative beginning, the following three chapters examine playwriting on “nothingness,” praxis, and hip-hop. Few playwriting guides of the past have availed themselves of philosophical foundations for dramaturgical analysis, but these chapters wrestle with the philosophical roots of Sartre, Kant, and Paul Butler, respectively. Decentering Playwriting takes another leap by advocating alternatives to the well-made play, the epic sagas of Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett’s existential wanderings. There is, instead, a vigorous emphasis on giving a listening ear to the people, issues, and connections that form the web of a playwright’s immediate social and cultural life. The book outlines how theatre can and should focus on contemporary themes rather than myths, on the daily lives of people rather than heroes, on stories about supportive relationships instead of linear plot lines, and on valuing interconnectedness over stock characters. Characters that emerge from a variety of cultural contexts, including Indian, Hawaiian, Indigenous, African, Filipino, and others, are explored throughout the book. Decentered Playwriting has sixteen chapters that present a meaningful guide to fresh writing methods with pedagogical techniques that often focus on emotional memory of cultural expressions and the ingredients for attentive relationships. This guide emphasizes the connection each writer has with their own family, local identifiers, animal interactions, local rituals, and the interactions with the wider community. Instead of exploring the universal, this study challenges playwrights to fully examine the particular, beginning with the self in community. Faculty, students, and theatres seeking approaches that reflect contemporary social and artistic sensibilities will be interested in what this text explores. Each chapter forwards a unique voice for a new aesthetic and its cultural context. Essayists of Native American, African, Indian, Cuban, LGBTQ, and other identities are included. In addition, unique and constructive methods are also represented, such as the archeology of identity or the analyzing of human experience as one dimension of a community eco-system rather than the solitary hero or victim narrative. Chantal Bilodeau’s chapter titled “Decentering Humans” offers a challenge to seasoned and aspiring playwrights: “Every play should aspire to fundamentally change our relationships to the world and to each other, and to ‘dethrone’ the human species while emphasizing that despite growing uncertainty, safety and connection are still possible” (81). According to Bilodeau, plays can present how humans are entwined with all of creation where everything is dependent on others for their existence and well-being. This interconnectedness is vital in character development to shift each one past a stereotype or two-dimensional portrait. Each chapter provides an array of options for interpersonal analysis and collaborative methods for devising scripts for stage performances. This is especially true in Oluwatoyin Olokodana-James’s chapter, in which the community as author is valued above the individual talent. The process is presented as a shared venture instead of assuming that a play is the expression of the solitary voice who is bringing the latest tablets from a mountain peak to an eager audience. This new trend might be viewed as a modern variation on the playwriting processes at the Globe in London (see Gary Taylor, “Why Did Shakespeare Collaborate?,” Shakespeare Survey , vol. 67, Cambridge University Press, 2014, 1-17). This book picks the ripe fruit for an epic theatre that is not bound by traditional rules for the stage. Brecht’s alienation effect ( verfremdungseffekt ) once served as an alternative to the well-structured play, but the chapters in this volume move beyond Brecht. Authors here instead explore how characters have meaning not because they present the alienation dynamic but because they do the opposite: illustrate the social fabric of their relationships. Diane Clancy describes how the character’s identity “aligns with the fabric of your own being” (163). The emphasis in each chapter is on new concepts and methods that focus on liberation, personal integrity, and communal experience for devising new work. Although each chapter presents new and creative playwriting approaches, the careful reader will note that Wole Soyinka, Paula Vogel, María Irene Fornés, Augusto Boal, and Kwame Anthony Appiah, and C. C. Mehta have paved the way for the current climate where the voices of Decentered Playwriting ’s authors will now be heard and absorbed. They also laid the groundwork for jettisoning colonial perspectives, moving away from Western styles, and incorporating marginalized communities. Every chapter deconstructs those previous norms and advocates a performative nature that emerges from those that previously had no voice. In summary, this contribution to the field of playwriting is a significant and practical development. If Decentering Playwriting had been available during my teaching years, I would have clung to it as a lifeboat that is headed to a new land. References Footnotes About The Author(s) LAUREN FRIESEN is the David M. French Professor Emeritus of Theatre at the University of Michigan. He is Past Chair of the Kennedy Center’s National Playwriting Program. He recently published Theatre and Aesthetics: Performance and Transformation. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications. 2024. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale “The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. The Brothers Size Dead Outlaw 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival ZAZ Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Sierra Rosetta Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 1 Visit Journal Homepage Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. Sierra Rosetta By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. Bethany Hughes’s Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity is the book that the fields of theatre, American, Native, and historical studies have long needed. With clarity and care, Hughes braids together these disciplines to expose the theatrical mechanisms that have produced and sustained the racialized figure of the “Indian” on stage. Hughes names this racialized figure “The Stage Indian,” a term analogous to “Playing Indian,” found in Philip Deloria’s monumental book of the same name, or John Troutman’s “Indianness” from his book, Indian Blues: American Indians and the Politics of Music, 1879-1934 . The term “Stage Indian,” along with her subsequent chapters that masterfully examine this topic, redefine the practice of redface as a robust communal process, one that all sides of the theatrical sphere participate in, and identifies the power of theatre as a central site of American culture. Hughes begins by stating exactly what this book does and does not do. Redface is not a comprehensive history of Indigenous performers or plays. Instead, it is a critical analysis of how Indigeneity was and is made legible through performance and how visual, affective, and narrative codes have transformed into the Stage Indian persona that continues to shape Indigenous representation today, both on and off the physical stage. After reading this book, people will be able to describe how redface is not simply about paint, feathers, or moccasins worn by non-Indigenous people. Instead, it is “a collaborative, curatorial process through which a body is made legible as an Indian” (11). This reframing is central to the book’s contribution, moving the conversation from surface to structure, which transforms the case studies Hughes provides into long-term patterns of embodied colonialism. Redface is not just about appearing Indian; it is about being recognized and named as Indian. The book examines how redface operates through acts of recognition, reinforcing not only theatrical conventions but also legal and political definitions of Indigenous identity. In an incisive argument, Hughes suggests that what audiences often subconsciously seek is not authenticity but the power to determine what is or is not an Indian. The methodological rigor of this book involves Hughes weaving together autoethnography, archival research, production analysis, and performance theory. To name a few, Hughes analyzes costume lists for Nick of the Woods (1838), production photos of Annie Get Your Gun , witness accounts of Edwin Forrest’s infamous portrayal of Metamora, and Indian princess plays that illustrate how Stage Indian conventions were absorbed into theatrical spaces. In Chapter Three, Hughes explains how physical gestures and stage movement, not just dialogue or costume, helped codify the portrayal of the Stage Indian in Edwin Forrest’s portrayal of Indian chief, Metamora, in Metamora . She spotlights Forrest’s Metamora “to understand how strategies for authenticating Indianness have shifted over time and to demonstrate that authentication is inherent to redface” (119). Later chapters trace these codes through other performances, like Hughes’ analysis of the Broadway revival of Annie Get Your Gun in Chapter 4. The structure of Redface is both innovative and an effective praxis of Hughes’s invitation for alternative modes of knowledge reception for scholars in the field doing decolonizing work. In the introduction, she asks: “How do we respond to knowledge production modes that require atypical labor?” (19). Hughes addresses this through her essay, Hinushi Inla , which means “a different path” in the Choctaw language (18). Whereas Hughes’ first four chapters trace the evolution of redface from the 1830s through the twentieth century, Hinushi Inla is braided through the book in non-linear order, providing a necessary counterpoint to the historical narratives presented in the chapters and also inviting readers to disrupt the habit of linear knowledge reception in the academy. One example is while one side of the book examines racial stereotyping in Will Rogers’ career or the blood-quantum logic embedded in casting practices, the other side explores the artistry of Native artists like DeLanna Studi, Hanay Geiogamah, Lily Gladstone, and Hughes’s own relationship to Indigeneity. It was profoundly moving for me, as both a scholar and an artist in the fields of theatre and Native studies, to see how far we have come from Metamora and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Shows. As a reader, it was also powerful to encounter both history and futurity on the same page. The Hinushi Inla sections loosen the braid of racism to show the gaps in representation and invite even more strands of knowledge to enter the conversation. Even in the twenty-first century, the search for “authentic” Native representation on and off the stage often asks for the same visual codes developed in the 1800s. In Chapter Four, Hughes explores how cutting racist lyrics from Annie Get Your Gun in the 1999 revival may soften the language, but it leaves the representational logic intact: “The revisal reshaped the Stage Indian and connected it to centuries’ long conceptions of blood that continue to delimit Indianness in many ways” (204). Hughes intervenes that fixing redface is more than editing scripts; it demands a new practice of seeing that requires action from all of us. Hughes does not excuse the racist performances of the past, nor does she ignore the ways Indigenous performers themselves have been made to navigate redface for survival. Instead, she humanizes each historical figure the book touches on to illustrate how performers, audiences, and institutions all contribute to the curation and policing of Indianness. The result is an honest account that humanizes historical subjects without excusing harm. In the final chapter, Hughes writes, “There has always been an ‘instead’ of redface. It is up to audiences to choose a hinushi inla ” (101). This call to action is not symbolic but an invitation to participate in a new kind of embodied, relational, and transformative praxis. As a scholar, theatre practitioner, and a reader, I find myself returning to this book in my thoughts and writing for its arguments, research methods, and a demonstration of decolonizing scholarship. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity is both an invitation and a critique, one that is honest, vital, and restorative toward a different path. References Footnotes About The Author(s) SIERRA ROSETTA is an enrolled citizen of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe currently completing a PhD in Theatre and Drama, with an emphasis in Native American studies, at Northwestern University. She is also a professional dramaturg, arts journalist, and playwright. Both her artistic and academic passions focus on Ojibwe storytelling, Indigenous resistance, and decolonizing dramaturgy. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale “The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. The Brothers Size Dead Outlaw 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival ZAZ Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Benjamin Gillespie and Bess Rowen Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 1 Visit Journal Homepage Introduction Benjamin Gillespie and Bess Rowen By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF This Fall 2025 issue of the Journal of American Drama & Theatre is once again brimming with compelling topics in the form of articles, book and performance reviews, interviews, and roundtable discussions. Teya Juarez leads the issue with a pressing query into the use of fat suits on stage, particularly in Samuel D. Hunter’s The Whale . Her analysis of the harms of costuming actors in fat suits is particularly resonant in the current moment shaped by the proliferation o f Ozempic and other weight loss drugs. Jewel Pereyra's article offers a fascinating deep dive on the importance of the Afro-Filipina American jazz singer and dancer Maggie Calloway’s "performances of aggregation." As Pereyra states, Calloway both preserved a form of Filipino culture and addressed the pressures of American cultural influence by “staging these political conflicts in front of popular audiences.” In keeping with our interest in expanding the range and scope of materials featured in JADT , the issue features a roundtable with members of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre. Heather Nathans and Javier Hurtado curate this discussion titled “What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre.” The participants include artists and scholars in the field who have dedicated their careers to telling the stories of marginalized communities : Benny Sato Ambush, Henry Bial, Kristoffer Diaz, Kim Marra, and Harvey Young. These major voices speak to the complexity of issues surrounding diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice in U.S. theatre. Our ongoing “Queer Voices” series explores the state of contemporary LGBTQIA+ theatre and performance through interviews. In this issue, Alex Ferrone talks to storied performance artist Carmelita Tropicana on her recent show Give Me Carmelita Tropicana !, the final performance at Soho Rep’s longtime theatre space; Benjamin Gillespie speaks to Canadian playwright Jordan Tannahill to discuss the major success of the controversial Prince Faggot in New York; and Jen-Scott Mobley and Maya Roth ask playwright Jen Silverman about intimacy, paradox, and provide an update on Silverman’s wide range of writing projects. This issue also features four book reviews from our Book Review Editor Stephanie Lim. Lauren Friesen reviews Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage , edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter (Routledge, 2024); Henry Bial reviews Ben Spatz’s Race and Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research (Northwestern University Press, 2024); Eileen Curley reviews Marlis Schweitzer’s Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century (University of Iowa Press, 2020); and Sierra Rosetta reviews Bethany Hughes’s Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity (New York University Press, 2024). If you are interested in reviewing a book, send a query to jadtbookreviews@gmail.com . We are thrilled to welcome JADT ’s new Performance Review Editor, Jennifer Joan Thompson. After adding this section to the journal two years ago to provide more space for scholarly reviews in the field, we are grateful to now have a dedicated editor to run this section. This issue’s performance reviews feature The Shed’s production of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s The Brothers Size by Isaiah Wooden; Audible Theater’s production of Dead Outlaw by Elliot Lee; a roundup up the 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival by Lindsey Mantoan; and a multi-author review of the dance piece ZAZ from the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, directed by Ryan K. Johnson. We encourage our readers to submit their review pitches to jadtperformancereviews@gmail.com . Finally, JADT continues its ongoing commitment in providing a home for the New England Theatre In Review, formerly housed within the New England Theatre Journal . Editor Martha S. LoMonaco has curated a collection of New England-based theatres and seasons including Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres by Paul E. Fallon, theaters in the Berkshires by Steven Otfinoski, and the Long Wharf Theatre by Karl G. Ruling. In these uncertain times, it is remarkable to see the range of scholarship in our field capturing the vitality of theatre and performance practices and studies across the Americas. We hope you enjoy reading the issue as much as we did. References Footnotes About The Author(s) BENJAMIN GILLESPIE   is Assistant Professor of Theatre History & Performance Studies at Santa Clara University and co-editor of the  Journal of American Drama and Theatre (JADT) . He is editor of  Split Britches: Fifty Years On   (University of Michigan Press, 2027) and co-editor of  Late Stage: Theatrical Perspectives on Age and Aging  (University of Michigan Press, 2026) and  The Routledge Companion to LGBTQ+ Theatre and Performance in North America  (Routledge, 2027). BESS ROWEN is Assistant Professor of Theatre at Villanova University. She is also affiliate faculty for both Gender & Women's Studies and Irish Studies. She is a member of Actors' Equity and an intimacy choreographer. Her first book, The Lines Between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment (2021) focuses on affective stage directions. Her next book project looks at the theatrical archetype of the “mean teenage girl.” She also serves as the President-Elect of the American Theatre & Drama Society and co-editor of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre (JADT) . Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale “The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. The Brothers Size Dead Outlaw 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival ZAZ Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Elliot Lee Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 1 Visit Journal Homepage Dead Outlaw Elliot Lee By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF Left to right: Thom Sesma, Andrew Durand, Dashiell Eaves. Photo: Matthew Murphy. Dead Outlaw By David Yazbek, Eric Della Penna, and Itamar Moses Directed by David Cromer The Audible Theater New York, NY April 13, 2024 Reviewed by Elliot Lee The first song in Dead Outlaw, a new musical by David Yazbek, Eric Della Penna, and Itamar Moses, prepares its audience to make peace with the inevitable: “Your mama’s dead / Your daddy’s dead / Your brother’s dead / And so are you,” the singers wail. “Balzac is dead / Tupac is dead / Anne Frank is dead / And so are you!” Directed by David Cromer at the Audible Theater, the musical recounts the life of nineteenth-century outlaw Elmer McCurdy, narrated through gritty country rock played by an onstage band. Halfway through the musical, McCurdy dies. The rest of the show traces his afterlife, from the coroner’s office to the discovery of his shriveled, orange spray-painted remains among the décor of a defunct rollercoaster ride. In the first half of the play, Andrew Durand gallivanted around an ever-shifting wooden frame, evocative of a barn strewn with fairy lights. As the titular outlaw, Durand executed impressive feats of vocal and physical prowess, climbing, pushing, and hanging upside down from various parts of the frame while singing. After his character’s death, Durand spent the rest of the show standing stock-still, carted around in an uncovered coffin as other characters sold and mistreated his dead body. The story transforms from an outlaw tale into an unsettling exposé of how entertainment immortalizes, profits, and desecrates memory. On Audible Theater’s stage, Dead Outlaw ’s message about exploiting the dead became a self-referential jab at the popularity of biographical musicals on and off Broadway. Biographical musicals take inspiration from historical figures, tracing a life from childhood until death. Dead Outlaw falls into this genre but takes it one step further into McCurdy’s afterlife. However, while biographical musicals tend to be linear, Dead Outlaw is more experimental in structure. In form, it is a concept musical, a genre stitching together songs driven by theme and character. Specifically, Dead Outlaw ’s vignettes are tied together by McCurdy’s physical body, initially offering snapshots from his life, and later, depicting the various people and places his corpse encounters. At the Audible Theater, the absurdity of these vignettes brought the audience into a more self-conscious relationship with McCurdy, transforming him from a character into a symbol. Dead Outlaw ’s concept musical form allowed it to subvert expectations of the biographical musical as well as (metatheatrically) question commercial theatre’s obsession with dead people’s lives. Dead Outlaw thus exposed the exploitative nature inherent in a genre that profits from history. “Now I’m an entrepreneur . . . Death is a business to me!” While other biographical musicals pick and choose from scattered life events to create a palatable narrative, Dead Outlaw does not build McCurdy up as a hero or a villain. Instead, the production made McCurdy realistically mediocre, in personality and in outlaw work. In the character’s short life, Cromer created equally arresting vignettes of magic and despondency. In one moment, McCurdy twirled his first love under glittering fairy lights. In the next scene, drums echoed the familiar rhythms of McCurdy downing drinks at the bar. Not only was McCurdy abrasive, racist, and flighty, but he also proved to be an incompetent outlaw in Cromer’s well-timed comedic sequences. In one sequence, McCurdy and an army friend hatched a plan to steal from townsfolk, only to be arrested before committing a single crime. In another, McCurdy sang a stirring number about robbing a train carrying a royalty payment to the Osage nation, only to end up on the wrong train. Dead Outlaw also critiques a theme often at the heart of the biographical musical genre: legacy (one famous example is Hamilton ’s titular character, obsessed with the legacy of his political work to the point of neglecting his familial responsibilities). As an ambitious young man, McCurdy is no exception, but Dead Outlaw ’s story extends beyond his life to show the disturbing consequences of legacy through the ordeals of his corpse. After cycling through various professions in a Pippin -esque pursuit of purpose, McCurdy finally achieves fame upon dying. When nobody retrieved his corpse, the coroners displayed him as an attraction, singing, “See the dead outlaw! ... Something from nothing at all!” Crowds spin McCurdy’s deeds into grand tales of cowboy daring in show-stopping ensemble numbers, admiring him as a relic of a bygone West. Once on display, McCurdy’s body mummified in the heat of the coroner’s office, staged through a sequence in which Durand contorted inside his coffin. Exploited, sold, and paraded around the stage in pastiches of sideshow grit and glamour, McCurdy’s corpse was passed from owner to owner. Lastly, rotting away as a beachside attraction, staff wired shut McCurdy’s jaw, silencing Durand for the remaining half hour of the show. Dead Outlaw tells the story of McCurdy getting the legacy he wanted and the grim consequences of being remembered forever. This message was most effective when stark shifts in design and impressive physical acting allowed the show’s dark irony to give way to a total confrontation with the abject. For example, when McCurdy’s mummy was forgotten in a storage facility, Durand stood in an entirely dark theatre for an uncomfortable minute of total silence. Sitting with Durand in the darkness elicited both uncomfortable laughter and sobbing from the audience. These moments served as a reminder of the cadaverous quality that could elude any living, breathing portrayal: decay, evoking both repulsion and recognition. Through these moments of theatricalized abjection, McCurdy’s corpse physicalized the desecration of memory. The production turned the horrific implications of legacy into something tangible and vile. Dead Outlaw ’s concept musical form allowed it not simply to criticize its own genre, but also its audience. Concept musicals can use the affective delight of song and dance against the audience before implicating them in their uncritical enjoyment of the material. As audiences clapped along to country rock, they realized too late that the musical in front of them was the latest in McCurdy’s tortures. By encouraging musical biographies to be retold, the audience became complicit in keeping McCurdy’s legacy alive. Dead Outlaw thus makes itself the biographical musical to end biographical musicals. References Footnotes About The Author(s) ELLIOT LEE (he/him) is pursuing his M.F.A. in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at the David Geffen School of Drama. He holds a B.A. in English from Princeton University. His work focuses on experimental musical theater and portrayals of violence in performance. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale “The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. The Brothers Size Dead Outlaw 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival ZAZ Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Karl G. Ruling Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 1 Visit Journal Homepage Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Karl G. Ruling By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF Jason Sanchez and Xavier Cano in Long Wharf’s production of El Coquí Espectacular and the Bottle of Doom. Photo: Curtis Brown Photography. “We’re still here,” is the declaration announcing Long Wharf Theatre's 25-26 season. It's a good lede for my review of Long Wharf's last season, too. Long Wharf Theatre is still here, but “here” is not fixed; it moves. Long Wharf's performances and events were held at venues throughout New Haven and as far away as Middletown, Connecticut. All the shows and events supported Long Wharf's goal to be a nexus “where bold storytelling and vibrant communities come together to shape the future of American theatre.” The shifting event locations also got audience members into communities and venues they'd perhaps never visited before. The season started with a three-day “Artistic Congress,” 15 consecutive sessions each scheduled for 1 1/2 to 2 hours that were talks, panel discussions, audience workshops, and short scenes at venues in New Haven, culminating with a staged reading of Anna Deavere Smith's work-in-progress, This Ghost of Slavery, in the Crowell Concert Hall at Wesleyan University in Middletown. The New Haven events were held at Gateway Community College, BAR (a nightclub), the New Haven Public Library, Yale's Schwartzman Center, and the Yale University Art Gallery. Long Wharf's signage—often sandwich boards on the sidewalk—was excellent for guiding attendees to the venues, and there always were smiling greeters to tell us we'd arrived at the right place. Long Wharf's publications often talk about how storytelling is essential for understanding ourselves, each other, and the world around us. The Congress touched on those ideas but also suggested that collaborative work (what theatre makers do) can be a way for our communities to address our common problems. One of the sessions, “Civic Scores #2 : 'Who has the pen to shift the housing crisis,'” had audience members in teams using Lego blocks to design ideal communities. What's ideal and for whom? There were interesting discussions among participants about the complexities of zoning and building codes. We didn't solve the housing crisis, but we got far beyond, “Somebody should do something.” Anna Deavere Smith's This Ghost of Slavery is an extension of her work in documentary theatre. Previous verbatim theatre works of hers have featured a solo performer (often herself) portraying a multitude of people with a script based on interviews she had with those people. This Ghost of Slavery is a bit different, being based on archival material as well as recent interviews. The 39 characters of the play, originally published in The Atlantic magazine's December 2023 issue, were portrayed by 17 performers, including two musicians, in a staged reading, arrayed across the platform at Crowell Concert Hall. The play, directed by Aneesha Kurdtarkar, is set in Baltimore and Annapolis, moves between the 1860s and the present, and explores the school-to-prison pipeline as part of the legacy of American slavery. Although published, the script was a work in progress, a bit long in performance, but an important exploration of how the past affects how we treat each other now. She Loves Me, with music and lyrics by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick and book by Joe Masteroff, was a wonderful holiday celebration, performed at the Lab at Conncorp in Hamden. Based on a play by Miklós László and set in Budapest in 1937, the plot revolves around the employees of Maraczek’s Parfumerie. Clerks Georg and Amalia loathe each other in the shop, while unaware that each is the other’s secret pen pal who met through lonely-hearts ads. A lovely final scene had the lovers together under falling snow. Director Jacob G. Padrón, assembled an excellent singing company of actors of different races and ethnicities, different body types. The only nod to conventional American musical casting expectations was that the lead couple were thin people, young and lively. The performance space at the Lab at Conncorp was formerly a middle school gym. The staging, designed by Emmie Finckel, was tennis court style, with the audience on two facing sides, the main playing space in the middle, and the larger scenic elements at the ends. One end was the parfumerie shop. The other end, a comfortable 1930s living room, held the four-piece orchestra. Scenes outside the parfumerie, such as the restaurant, were played in the middle space with a few props quickly brought into place by the actors playing the minor characters. Changes of season were indicated by simple devices such as the delivery boy taking leaves from his pocket, tossing them into the air, and announcing “Autumn.” Later he took snow from his pocket and tossed it and announced “Winter.” The lighting, designed by Jiyoun Chang, shifted color to match. The show ran smoothly and the singing was beautiful. I found it enchanting. El Coquí Espectacular and the Bottle of Doom had us visiting Southern Connecticut State University’s John Lyman Auditorium in New Haven for a show in the stage left wing. The Lyman stage is so big that the stage wing provided enough room for five rows of audience seating facing an end-stage. The setting, designed by Gerardo Diaz Sanchez, was a city block in Brooklyn: three brick building facades, a fire escape, a roll-up steel door, and a billboard facing a sidewalk, forming a wide but shallow playing space. The door rolled up and a wagon rolled out for interior scenes. The brick walls and the billboard were surfaces for projections by John Horzen. The play, written by Matt Barbot and directed by Kinan Valdez, is a mash-up of comic book superhero fantasy and Puerto Rican real-life in American capitalist economy. Alex, the main character, a young Nuyorican comic book artist, creates a comic book superhero, El Coquí Espectacular, a crime-fighter based on Puerto Rican folklore about a tree frog. Alex takes his invention further by creating an El Coquí costume and wearing it as a real-life protector in his neighborhood. His older brother Joe, a marketing exec for a major soda company, sees an opportunity to use Alex's help marketing to Puerto Ricans a spicy, sugary soft drink Voltage—so sugary it's unhealthy. The play at SCSU worked with the tensions between identity, responsibility to community, and making a living—and went off into fantasy with the appearance of the blood-sucking El Chupacabra and battles between it and El Coquí, punctuated with POW! and BAM! as seen in the Batman 1960s TV series projected on the setting. El Coquí Espectacular and the Bottle of Doom was an interesting piece, but many scenes were played with the volume turned up to eleven. That intensity was amusing for the 25-minute Batman TV shows but wearying for a full-length play. However, it spoke to the audience. One person during the talkback said, “I am in a comic book,” and he seemed to like that. Another audience member said he appreciated seeing Puerto Rican folklore being taken seriously. Why can't there be Puerto Rican super-heroes? Unbecoming Tragedy: A Ritual Journey Toward Destiny was a one-person show written and performed by Terrence Riggins. It was presented at the Off Broadway Theater, behind the Shops at Yale—literally off Broadway, accessed via a footpath through the middle of the block. Unbecoming Tragedy was his own story of addiction and incarceration. The setting was the corner of a jail cell. The blank cell walls served as projection surfaces for fantastic images by designer Hannah Tran. In the playwright's notes in the program, Riggins calls his show a ritual, a confession, a rite of passage, a cleansing, a way through. I saw an exorcism. Riggins portrayed a tortured soul, trying to tear the shame of stealing his dying mother's opal necklace to support his drug habit out of his life. The director, Cheyenne Barboza, in her program note invited the audience members to “become more aware of the systems in our society that isolate and marginalize. And in that awareness, I hope we choose compassion.” An insert in the program listed thirteen local resources offering help for people and their families dealing with addiction, hopelessness, and problems with mental health, incarceration, and reintegration into society. “More than a theme, We’re Still Here is a statement of resilience,” said Long Wharf Theatre's 2025-26 season announcement. In early May, Long Wharf Theatre was notified that the National Endowment for the Arts had terminated four grants, totaling more than $170,000. Besides terminating these grants, the NEA issued new guidelines for grant applications prohibiting programs promoting “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” in accordance with Executive Order No. 14173, or promoting “gender ideology,” in keeping with Executive Order No. 14168. "Gender ideology" has no accepted definition but is used by opponents of gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights. Unlike some major entertainment corporations, Long Wharf Theatre has not canceled shows to align with Executive Orders; DEI is integral to its vision. The season webpage promises the next chapter in this vision: “co-productions that reach beyond state lines, programming that uplifts historically marginalized voices, and performances that blur the boundary between art and civic action.” References Footnotes About The Author(s) KARL G. RULING is the technical editor for Protocol , the journal of the Entertainment Services and Technology Association. Prior to that position, he was the technical editor for Theatre Crafts and Lighting Dimensions magazines, and a contributor to Stage Directions . He has an MFA in theatre design from the University of Illinois, and a BA with majors in Dramatic Art and Psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has designed scenery, lighting, special effects, or sound for over 100 productions. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale “The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. The Brothers Size Dead Outlaw 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival ZAZ Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Isaiah Matthew Wooden Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 1 Visit Journal Homepage The Brothers Size Isaiah Matthew Wooden By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF The Brothers Size By Tarell Alvin McCraney Co-Directed by Tarell Alvin McCraney and Bijan Sheibani The Shed (Co-Produced with the Geffen Playhouse) New York, NY September 6, 2025 Reviewed by Isaiah Matthew Wooden In the nearly two decades since Tarell Alvin McCraney’s The Brothers Size debuted Off-Broadway as a part of the third Under the Radar Festival, the evocative three-hander has garnered considerable praise for its trenchant, poetic dramatization of some of the lasting questions shaping the lives and relationships of Black men in the United States. Audiences and critics alike have found much to admire in McCraney’s shrewd fusion of ancient tales drawn from Yoruba cosmology with given circumstances and dramaturgical devices of his own making that invite reflection on such themes as brotherhood, masculinity, vulnerability, love, and freedom. No doubt adding to the play’s appeal are the rich opportunities it affords the actors portraying its central trio—Ogun Size; his younger brother, Oshoosi Size; and Oshoosi’s close friend and former cellmate, Elegba—to flex an extraordinary range of performance muscles. The play’s return to New York City in 2025 in a co-production by The Shed and the Geffen Playhouse reaffirmed its status as one of the most compelling and resonant dramas to spotlight and interrogate the intricacies of the inner lives and social worlds of Black men. Co-Directed by Bijan Sheibani and McCraney, and featuring three actors who have achieved notoriety for their stage and screen work, André Holland (Ogun Size), Alani iLongwe (Oshoosi Size), and Malcolm Mays (Elegba), this revival was remarkably elegant in its simplicity, relying mostly on the physical and vocal agility of its performers to bring expressive clarity to the details of their respective characters’ at once mythic and mundane journeys. The integration of live music by Munir Zakee and choreography by Juel D. Lane enhanced the overall rhythm of the performance while also reinforcing the sense of call-and-response that McCraney’s striking incorporation of spoken stage directions aims to evoke. Suzu Sakai’s spare set design, which was anchored by an improvised circle marked out with a white, chalk-like substance in a clear nod to the symbolic spaces central to various syncretic spiritual traditions of the African diaspora, further bolstered the production’s invitation to audience members to embrace their roles as co-creators of the storytelling. This necessarily created space for some of the play’s more distinct features, including its setting in a fictional town in the Deep South at some point in the “distant present,” to accrue fresh significance, while also allowing Holland, iLongwe, and Mays to embody their characters with incredible specificity and vitality. André Holland (Ogun Size). The Brothers Size , The Shed, New York, August 30-September 28, 2025. Photo: Marc J. Franklin. Courtesy The Shed. Given Holland’s longstanding connection to The Brothers Size and to McCraney’s work more broadly—he played Elegba in the 2009 staging of the play co-produced by The Public Theater and the McCarter Theatre Center, and also starred in the McCraney-penned films Moonlight (2016) and High Flying Bird (2019)—it was especially moving to witness the layered complexity he brought to his portrayal of the elder Size brother. While Oshoosi often admonishes Ogun for moving through life with unnecessary hardness, Holland was deliberate about endowing the character with charm and tenderness. His insistence on surfacing the character’s multidimensionality made moments like his recollection of the suffering endured by his former lover, Oya, or his account of always getting blamed for Oshoosi’s troubled behavior during their youth, reverberate long after the action had shifted focus elsewhere. The sensitivity of Holland’s performance came into sharpest focus in what remains one of The Brothers Sizes’s most touching and restorative scenes. When Oshoosi yet again finds himself teetering on the brink of captivity by a criminal legal system that views all young Black male life as fungible, the elder Size brother commands that his sibling flee their distressed hometown as soon and as fast as possible. The boom and quake in Holland’s voice as Ogun vowed to deny his younger brother up to three times when the Law came looking for him, deepened the emotional intensity of the duo’s final embrace and, in so doing, further distinguished Holland as one of the most dynamic interpreters of McCraney’s sublime language. iLongwe and Mays likewise proved adept at surfacing the idiosyncrasies and subtleties of McCraney’s dramaturgy. The tremendous energy and vigor of iLongwe’s Oshoosi served to punctuate how the character’s relentless yearnings to make freedom mean something often complicated his everyday life. Indeed, while Oshoosi’s articulated aims to acquire a car and find a woman registered as pretty straightforward, at least at first blush, iLongwe’s nimble portrayal called attention to the ways they were symptomatic of his much larger aspirations to imagine and enact possibilities unencumbered by carceral and other oppressive logics. This accounted for the powerful hold that Mays’s spry and clever Elegba seemed to maintain over Oshoosi’s life. Much like the orisha of the same name, Elegba often appears at key moments of decision-making in the play, reminding Oshoosi of the beauty and power inherent in choices. Mays’s portrayal of Elegba as simultaneously sweet and crafty amplified his allure for Oshoosi while shedding light on why Ogun remained so deeply suspicious of the pair’s friendship. Malcolm Mays (Elegba), Alani iLongwe (Oshoosi Size), and André Holland (Ogun Size). The Brothers Size , The Shed, New York, August 30 – September 28, 2025. Photo: Marc J. Franklin. Courtesy The Shed. The minor script revisions McCraney made for the production underscored the crucial role that love—familial, platonic, erotic, and otherwise—can play in sustaining the bonds between Black men. These updates, paired with McCraney and Sheibani’s sleek staging, Adam Honoré’s subdued lighting, and Dede Ayite’s practical costumes, not only sharpened the overall storytelling but also accentuated the play’s enduring emotional and thematic resonances. Simultaneously and significantly, they enabled the production to make a persuasive case for why The Brothers Size ’s stirring explorations of Black men’s interiorities and vulnerabilities marks it as a singular and transformative work of twenty-first-century theatre. References Footnotes About The Author(s) ISAIAH MATTHEW WOODEN is a scholar-artist, writer, and Associate Professor and Chair of Theater at Swarthmore College. He is the author of  Reclaiming Time: Race, Temporality, and Black Expressive Culture  (2025) and co-editor of  August Wilson in Context  (2025),  Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration  (2020), and “Manifestos for Black Theatre, Then and Now,” a special section of  Theatre History Studies  (2024). Additionally, he served as the volume editor for the Methuen student edition of  A Raisin in the Sun  by Lorraine Hansberry (2025). Wooden’s articles and essays on contemporary art, drama, and performance have appeared in numerous scholarly and popular publications. As a director and dramaturg, he has collaborated on projects in venues ranging from the Uganda National Theatre to the Kennedy Center, including works by Lorraine Hansberry, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Lynn Nottage, and Robert O’Hara. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale “The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. The Brothers Size Dead Outlaw 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival ZAZ Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Lindsey Mantoan Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 1 Visit Journal Homepage 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival Lindsey Mantoan By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival Ashland, Oregon Jun 12-14 and Jul 16-18, 2025. Reviewed by Lindsey Mantoan Since the COVID pandemic shut down the 2020 Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) season, the festival has been plagued with challenges including nearby fires smoking out shows, controversial leadership changes, and audiences reticent to embrace non-Shakespeare offerings. Seasons have been smaller in scope, and my experience seeing every show since 2020 is that houses were often half-full. So, it was thrilling to see full houses for every performance I attended, for a season of nine productions. In the first season fully programmed by new artistic director Tim Bond, the 2025 year featured three Shakespeare plays, a musical, a classic comedy of manners, two new adaptations of canonical texts, an August Wilson century cycle play, and a recent Pulitzer Prize-winner. The sense that this was a return to the vibrant pre-pandemic OSF reverberated through the slate of programing, audience enthusiasm, and discernible joy from the artists. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is back. It seemed to me that no one had more fun on the OSF stage this year than Royer Bockus and Amy Kim Waschke, who played the eponymous wives in Shakespeare’s comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor . This production, in the outdoor Elizabethan theatre, was affirming, joyous, queer, racially diverse, and playful. Director Terri McMahon innovatively revised the script, transforming Fenton into a nonbinary character that others referred to with they/them pronouns; the character was played by nonbinary actor Ellen Soraya Nikbakht. The fact that Fenton married the much-fought-over Anne, and the entire ensemble celebrated them as they kissed in the final tableau, foregrounded gender diversity and queer joy. Slender was queer-coded, and Doctor Caius was overjoyed when he discovered that the “bride” he’d tried to marry was not Anne but, in fact, Corporal Nym—the two seemed likely to live happily ever after together. These production choices demonstrated OSF’s continued commitment to reenvisioning classic theatre for marginalized populations. Susan Tsu’s clever costume design gave Falstaff a codpiece that became its own character, and, in the finale, a white unitard with “big daddy” on the belly, a British flag vest over it, and antlers on his head. His followers, a biker gang with leather jackets, bandanas, chain necklaces, and spiked hair, danced during scene changes to techno-house music. The intimacy and camaraderie of the wives as they plotted, drank White Claw, and high-fived each other centered female friendship and comedy in a way that felt like an antidote to the sidelining of female characters in many Shakespeare plays—especially Julius Caesar , which played next door this season . The production concluded with the company dancing and singing, and an invitation for the eager audience to join them. When I approached the Thomas Theater to see 2022 Pulitzer prize-winner Fat Ham , by James Ijames, I was met with a half-dozen people waiting outside trying to get tickets. The show had been sold out for weeks, a contrast to OSF’s recent struggles with audiences. The set, featuring the façade of a back porch, a picnic table, a grill, a floor covered in grass, and eatable potato salad, put all of us in Juicy’s backyard as he negotiated his “softness,” the ghost of his father, the misogyny and homophobia of his stepfather, and the yearning of his childhood friend, Larry. Played with heart and strength by Marshall W. Mabry IV, Juicy strutted about the backyard with confidence, even while he questioned his next steps when his brutal father summoned him to perpetuate cycles of violence. During a tour-de-force karaoke performance of “Creep” by Lynnette R. Freeman as Tedra, each character was given a spotlight to physicalize their internal angst. When Larry transformed from his military uniform into full-on drag, the steps to the back porch of the set moved forward toward the center audience, expanding to become a runway, complete with lights embedded in the floor. Larry’s catwalk would make a splash on Drag Race , and all the characters took a moment to shine on the runway. Basking in the affirming ending in which mothers accepted their queer children, audiences in the predominantly-white space of Ashland witnessed vital Black queer joy and the affirmation that comes with familial acceptance. In the Angus Bowmer Theater, the larger of the two indoor spaces, Jitney featured veteran OSF actors such as Kevin Kenerly and Tyrone Wilson alongside OSF newcomers who brought August Wilson’s world to life with authority and intention. Under the nuanced direction of Tim Bond, this production offered strong ensemble interplay and studied dialect work. The interior of Becker’s car service, fully realized with a distressed couch, practical lamps, and a phone that rang every few minutes with a jitney customer, was situated in front of a street on a hill, complete with actual car. As part of the same season, Jitney and Fat Ham staged a profound conversation about Black masculinity and sexuality, particularly since a few actors featured in both productions. The casting of Aldo Billingslea as Rev in Fat Ham and Doub in Jitney highlighted this intertextual conversation, as one body put forward totalitarian views of family and sexuality in one play and a gentle acceptance of everyone in the other. During a summer of rising unemployment for younger Americans, the targeting of educational opportunities for minority students, and deepening racial division, Jitney spoke to this moment by centering community and resilience. In As You Like It , director Lisa Peterson took an intimate approach to Shakespearean comedy, placing actors in the aisles of the modular Thomas Theater to interact with the audience. Bold, stylized visuals, including all-white costumes, separated the sterile, authoritarian court of Duke Frederick and the vibrant, verdant world of the commune of banished Duke Senior in the forest of Arden. In this highly musical production, most ensemble members played instruments. Guitar chords were punctuated with musical jokes via tuba, slide whistle, accordion, and harmonica. The production featured a 1960s hippie aesthetic—complete with bare feet, knit fruit, crocheted vests, and flowers in long hair—that both reveled in and mocked itself. Peterson drew inspiration from generational differences that feature prominently in cultural narratives about this period, although more salient to me was the distinction between built worlds and natural, the latter fostering love and connection. A woolly sheep, marionetted by Kate Wisniewski as Corin, trotted from grass patch to flower, nibbling and prancing while the shepherd philosophized. As cranky Jacques, veteran OSF favorite Sheila Tousey balanced the groovy tone with a touching and melancholy interpretation of the iconic “all the world’s a stage” monologue. The final scene featured multiple couples joining in matrimony alongside a polyamorous threesome of Touchstone (the fool) Audrey, and William. A philosophical and magical production, As You Like It continued the affirming and joyous tone of the season. The Shakespeare offerings took a dark turn in the Bowmer Theatre with Rosa Joshi and upstart crow collective’s spare and percussive Julius Caesar . As Romans rhythmically waved flags to represent patriotism and its undercurrent of violence, the motion and drumbeat sank into audience members’ bodies, compelling them to become part of the crowd. In this athletic piece, ensemble members convulsed and trembled at length during transitions and in the background of some scenes, signifying the earthquakes caused by shifting political authority. Luciana Stecconi’s scenic design of angular levels and rectilinear columns provided a canvas for projections of dripping blood and lightning flashes. upstart crow’s practice of casting exclusively women and nonbinary actors in classic pieces enabled new resonances of gender and power vis-à-vis the nation. This production belonged to Jessika D. Williams, whose show-stealing Mark Antony cleverly manipulated the Roman rabble at Caesar’s funeral. In the ensuing riot, the mob attacked Cinna the Poet and lifted him into the air while he physically reached to the audience for help, before pulling him down and murdering him. A lengthier death scene than Caesar’s, this violence was rendered even more brutal by Joshi’s addition of a parent character, restrained by a violent Roman, forced to watch while the child was murdered. The final tableau before intermission featured this parent cradling Cinna’s body, repeatedly sobbing, “he is Cinna the Poet.” The suggestion here, that political violence fails to halt tyranny but does end poetry, landed like a blow in the liberal and artistic space of Ashland. In the same space, playfully satirizing Western notions of class and sexuality, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest delighted with its lush scenery, rich costumes, and innovative setting. Director Desdemona Chiang set the piece in the British Malay peninsula during the Victorian era. In a production that foregrounded physical comedy, the number of muffins and cucumber sandwiches consumed was outnumbered only by the crumbs spewed across the stage as Algie talked with his mouth full. The setting and racially diverse casting infused this comedy of manners with questions about bridging cultural differences related to acceptable social decorum. When British Gwendolen and Southeast Asian Cecily descended into food-based slights and name-calling, their rift felt as much about race and culture as about their both being engaged to “Earnest.” As a white British aristocrat concerned with capricious standards of behavior, Lady Bracknell’s double take at Cecily’s sandalled feet and bare ankles represented the negotiation of colonial norms—and the humor to be found therein. As if to underscore the connection between this season and the thriving OSF of the 2010s, this year’s musical, Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods , was a moving recreation of a 2014 production. Focused on the effects of storytelling, the show began with actors in neutral colors and a big bag center stage from which actors pulled props: Red, her iconic cape; the Baker’s Wife, her husband’s scarf. The audience’s introduction to Milky White was as a cardboard box with a Sharpie sketch of a cow and the word “moo.” Hilarious additions such as the princes riding full-sized tricycles with horseheads instead of gallant stallions, and words such as “Juicy” and “Brat” lining the stepsisters’ gaudy dresses enlivened this production with humor. However, the element of the production that moved me most was the massive twenty-one-piece orchestra that covered two levels of the stage, with the conductor in the house. When the Witch began the iconic second-act song, “The Last Midnight,” she stood atop the center stage grand piano while scenic automation moved it downstage, and the musician playing it never batting an eye. Director Amanda Dehnert’s choice to populate the pit with professional musicians alongside amateur high school and college mentees supported the intergenerational storytelling of the musical. Walking into the Thomas Theater for Octavio Solis’s Quixote Nuevo , audiences were met with vibrant accordion and guitar music and an upstage wall of sandstone-colored boulders. An adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote de la Mancha , Quixote Nuevo relocated the story of an older man with an active imagination from Spain to a fictional town situated on the US side of the Texas/Mexico border. The production opened with Quijano, a Spanish literature professor who believes he’s Don Quixote, rising atop a pyramid of books from a trap door in the stage floor, clad in a bathrobe and boxers, and brandishing a sword. Herbert Siguenza played Quijano with playfulness and sincerity, opposite Raul Cardona’s sinister and powerful Papa Calaca, or Father Death. An ensemble in skeleton costumes sang, danced, and stomped their feet to usher Quijano to the afterlife. As his mind fractured across three planes—the real world, his fantasy world, and the world of the afterlife—Quijano squeezed in one last adventure before Papa Calaca took him, vowing to fight for the unemployed, uninsured, and undocumented. This story about dreams, nostalgia, and valor tapped into the human need for adventure and the imperative to negotiate borders—between Spanish and English, nations, cultures, and life and death. In traditional OSF style, this piece braided a classic text with contemporary sociopolitical issues, a blend of adaptation, and homage that resonated across multigenerational audiences. Recent seasons of the festival have featured dynamic individual productions but have been a bit uneven. This season, every production vibrated with power and creativity. The strength of the productions, the volume of audiences, and the atmosphere across the three performances spaces all indicated that the festival is poised to thrive under Tim Bond’s leadership. Next season will grow to ten productions, and OSF seems to be moving confidently into this next phase. The Merry Wives of Windsor (2025): Royer Bockus, Amy Kim Waschke. Photo by Jenny Graham Quixote Nuevo (2025): Raul Cardona and Ensemble. Photo by Jenny Graham. Into the Woods (2025): Ensemble. Photo by Jenny Graham. August Wilson’s Jitney (2025): Preston Butler III, Tyrone Wilson, Kevin Kenerly. Photo by Jenny Graham. References Footnotes About The Author(s) LINDSEY MANTOAN is the Ronni Lacroute Chair in Theatre Arts and an Associate Professor at Linfield University. Her current book project, From Broadway to the Auditorium: How Musical Theatre Does High School (Oxford UP, forthcoming) researches the way musicals set in high schools frame adolescence as a laboratory for personal and communal experimentation. She is the author of  War as Performance: Conflict in Iraq and Political Theatricality  (Palgrave 2018), an occasional contributor to CNN.com , co-editor of six books, and co-editor of  Studies in Musical Theatre .  Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale “The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. The Brothers Size Dead Outlaw 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival ZAZ Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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

Martha S. LoMonaco, Editor, New England Theatre in Review Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 1 Visit Journal Homepage Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 Martha S. LoMonaco, Editor, New England Theatre in Review By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF Welcome to the new incarnation of New England Theatre in Review , the performance review section of the late lamented New England Theatre Journal which ceased publication last year. The kind editors of JADT made space for us last fall when I had a section brimming with news on the New England theatre scene but no place to publish it, and they further offered us a continuing gig in subsequent Fall issues. This issue features three articles that provide thoughtful interrogations of political theatre in the Berkshire mountains of western Massachusetts; highlight noteworthy productions at five small independent theatres of Greater Boston; and provide a window into Long Wharf Theater’s self-reinvention: Long Wharf abandoned its physical theatre space two years ago and is now peripatetically performing in and around New Haven, Connecticut, in hopes of reaching new audiences and new theatrical possibilities. All three give insights into how American regional theatre is thriving post-pandemic, beyond the boundaries of New York City, and in addressing the needs and entertainment desires of their local communities. Since Long Wharf is now straying a bit beyond New England’s boundaries—its 2025-26 theatre season opens with a co-production exclusively performed in New York City—I’m wondering if future issues of NETIR might take a similar tactic. I invite readers to consider writing about performance that has some base in New England—perhaps it originated there or is about some area or personality associated with or inspired by New England—but you may have seen elsewhere. Or you want to profile a particular production, series of related productions, or theatre within the six New England states that is doing noteworthy work that demands to be documented. Please send your suggestions for articles to me at: unit12msl@yahoo.com . References Footnotes About The Author(s) MARTHA S. LOMONACO is a theatre director, dramaturg, historian, and writer. She is Professor Emerita of Theatre and American Studies at Fairfield University, where she was resident director and ran the theatre program for thirty-four years. She is the author of two monographs Every Week, A Broadway Revue: The Tamiment Playhouse, 1921-1960 and Summer Stock: An American Theatrical Phenomenon and an edited collection, Theatre Exhibitions , volume thirty-three of Performing Arts Resources . She has been editor of New England Theatre in Review since 2010. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale “The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. The Brothers Size Dead Outlaw 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival ZAZ Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Paul E. Fallon Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 1 Visit Journal Homepage Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 Paul E. Fallon By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF Speakeasy Stage’s production of A Man of No Importance. (Photo: Nile Scott Studios). As an avid Boston theatregoer for over fifty years, I’ve witnessed Beantown’s ascent from a Broadway try-out town to a city with a diverse array of theatre opportunities. We still enjoy a parade of Broadway tours, as well as polished seasons from two Tony-award winning regional companies, ART and The Huntington. Our many colleges and music schools produce dozens of excellent shows. But I savor Boston’s smaller companies, who create insightful theatre, often on a shoestring, always with outsized energy. There are more than a dozen independent theatre companies in Greater Boston, and each celebrates a particular niche of our community. The grandaddy is the Footlight Club, one of the oldest community theaters in the country, which has presented plays every year since 1877. A good number of independents—Lyric Stage, Moonbox, Greater Boston Stage, Reagle Players—lean on cherished chestnuts and musicals to entertain their subscriber base. Others have a specific focus. Company One’s mission to promote social justice underscores every one of their shows. Speakeasy produces plays that articulate the evolving voices of gay men. Central Square Theater’s commitment to both create and present plays about women in science results in fresh works about overlooked accomplishment. Hub Theatre Company is committed to making theatre affordable: every seat at every show is pay what you want. Some of these companies are rooted to place: Apollinaire Theatre Company’s home, a landmark in downtown Chelsea, is the anchor for a variety of English and Spanish events that engage this largely Hispanic community. Others are homeless: the Front Porch Collaborative focuses on illuminating Black experience by co-producing shows with other independent companies. Then there are the independents whose names speak for themselves. Boston Playwrights’ Theatre only produces new plays. Actors’ Shakespeare Project is mostly The Bard. Wheelock Family Theater is always G-rated, while The Theater Offensive is…definitely not. The 2024-2025 season was particularly rich for Boston’s Independent Theatres. Post COVID, audiences have returned and appreciate experiencing live theater—together—more than ever. Here is a sampling of some of the delights, and challenges, the season offered. Speakeasy Stage Company A Man of No Importance By Terrence McNally Music and Lyrics by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Aherns Directed by Paul Daigneault February 21-March 22, 2025 Over the past thirty-three years, Paul Daigneault, founder and Artistic Director of Speakeasy Stage, has produced dozens of LGBTQ-themed plays and virtually everything by playwright Terrance McNally. A Man of No Importance was a fitting final show, as Paul hands Speakeasy’s reins to incoming AD Dawn Simmons. Over the years, Speakeasy has regularly featured beloved Boston actors; this nostalgic production showcased over one hundred years of collective Speakeasy experience. A Man of No Importance takes place in Dublin circa 1963. A bus collector by day, a thespian by evening, Alfie is blessed with a wicked love of art and Oscar Wilde; a closeted gay man before that was a meaningful term. Speakeasy’s set is a pub, with a traditionally Irish back wall of books and booze. Or maybe it’s a church, with its prominent stained glass of Christ. Or perhaps it’s an homage to Oscar Wilde, whose own stained glass sits just lower left of the Lord. The band—a few full-time players with the cast of 15 actors filling in on miscellaneous instruments—sits in front of the bar. The stage proper is a busy place, yet the movement flows smooth and continuous as a good pint among mates. Each member of the ensemble cast shines. The Dubliners’ humanity triumphs over the Catholic Church’s repression. Every moment of this fine production proclaims that everyone is welcome. Actors’ Shakespeare Project EMMA Written by Kate Hamill Directed by Regine Vital November 14-December 15, 2024 Actors’ Shakespeare Project sprinkles other works into their season, though the Bard’s influence always shines through. EMMA serves up playwright Kate Hamill’s 21 st century take on this Regency-era satire. Marry ASP’s craft with Ms. Hamill’s versatility with Jane Austen’s sensibility, and the result is simply: wonderful! Director Regine Vital betrays her Shakespearean training through broad acting, enthusiastic movement, and delightful effervescence. The former nineteenth century courtroom in the Cambridge Multi-Cultural Arts Center is the perfect space for this production. The tall, ornate space with neither stage nor raked seating, suits the extra effort required to make an Elizabethan (or Regency) audience understand what’s going on without benefit of amplification. We are in the action—and it is fun! Moonbox Productions Crowns Written by Regina Taylor Directed by Regine Vital April 11, 2025 – May 4, 2025 For a completely different experience, director Regine Vital turned the black box at Arrow Street Arts into a Southern church. An arc of seats addressed a raised altar, each with hymnal and handheld fan featuring a photo of Martin Luther King or Michelle Obama on one side, and the obligatory advertisement for a funeral home on the other. These mood-setting accessories induced chatter among the audience before the show. I learned my neighbor owns 185 hats! From all directions came women, big women, powerful women, in brilliant African attire and elaborate head wraps, chanting loud and clear and strong. Forebearers sporting their crowns. CROWNS is a pageant of pride. Of these women’s connection to their hats and their god. Their work in the fields and in the home. Their sacrifices for their families, their struggle for rights, their claim to a place in this world. It’s beautiful, inspiring, funny…and a visual delight. E. Rosser’s costumes and the fabulous hats are a Spring spectacular of purples and yellows, reds, and blues. CROWNS demands participation. We sang, we clapped, we stomped, we fanned. We praised these wonderful women and their spectacular crowns. We left refreshed, inspired, brimming in fellowship and good feeling. Isn’t that what church—and theatre—is supposed to do? Boston Playwrights’ Theatre How to NOT Save the World with Mr. Bezos Written by Maggie Kearnan Directed by Taylor Stark November 7-24, 2024 I went to see the premiere of a play. I landed in a cult. BPT is a bastion of political correctness. Someone intones a land acknowledgement before every performance. Their website’s community expectations lists all the ways in which everyone—on and off the stage—must be respected. These expectations are repeated in the notice accompanying every ticket. There’s also “Content Transparency.” For Bezos : “graphic violence, vomit and blood effects, disrobement, and discussion of drug use.” They did not warn us of the sing-along. The premise of Bezos is that Jeff Bezos (and 800+ other US billionaires) have neglected their social responsibility. Bezos is deplorable and reduced to his skivvies when the audience is invited to sing one of two ditties. The first opens with “How to kill a billionaire…” The second begins, “How not to kill a billionaire…” Unsurprisingly, 100% of the people who chose to sing voiced the “kill” verse, while exactly no one sang the “not kill” verse. I was among the small minority who kept my mouth shut. Surely, any playwright who wrote a sing-along suggesting that we “Kill the poor…unemployed… homeless…” would be drummed out of BPT’s self-defined safe space. But apparently, billionaires are fair game because, somehow, all that money strips their humanity. Playwright Kearnan and director Stark deserve credit for creating a play that induced such a visceral reaction, albeit mine wasn’t as intended. We need bold, incisive plays that call out inequities. But killing 800 billionaires will not save the world. Changing the systems that allow accumulating such egregious wealth will. I am disappointed that Bezos does not make that critical distinction. Lyric Stage Boston Hello, Dolly! Book by Michael Stewart Music & Lyrics by Jerry Herman Directed by Maurice Emmanuel Parent May 16-June 22, 2025 Lyric Stage traditionally ends its season with a popular musical. Their production of Hello, Dolly! was sublime elegance, elegantly carried off. The challenge with producing a play as familiar as Hello, Dolly! is how to include the familiar trappings the audience expects and yet make the production your own. Lyric’s Dolly! succeeds thanks to the talents of two amazing women: Aimee Dougherty, as Dolly, is the warmest Dolly I’ve ever seen, spreading charm among audience as well as cast in this intimate theatre; while Choreographer Ilyse Robbins creates her best work ever with jaw-dropping moves on Lyric’s tiny stage. Choosing Maurice Emmanuel Parent to direct this production was genius. Actor, playwright, director, teacher, and co-founder of the Front Porch Arts Collaborative, Mr. Parent is a Herculean talent. His direction of Hello, Dolly! encompasses a broad vision unburdened by identity labels of ‘Black,’ ‘underrepresented,’ or ‘gay.’ In a post-DEI world, it’s imperative that talents like Mr. Parent’s not be restricted. His gift is a Dolly! for everyone. Horace is played by a Black man; Barnaby is Asian; one of the dancing couples is gay. None of these casting decisions feel forced, each elevates the spirit of the show. Kudos for Mr. Parent’s light and facile hand. 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 Introduction Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale “The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. The Brothers Size Dead Outlaw 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival ZAZ Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Steven Otfinoski Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 1 Visit Journal Homepage Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 Steven Otfinoski By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF Above: Cherry Beaumont (Eliza Fichter) negotiates with Mr. Bezos (Noah Ilya Alexis Tuleja) in Great Barrington Public Theater's production of How To Not Save the World with Mr. Bezos . Photo: Lauren Jacobbe. Since the presidential election of 2024, theaters have turned to the political arena with both new plays that reflect the turmoil in our nation and plays of an older vintage that take on new meaning in the age of Trump. This is especially true in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts, where three major theatres—Barrington Stage Company (BSC) in Pittsfield, Great Barrington Public Theater (GBPT) in Great Barrington, and Shakespeare & Company (S & C) in Lenox—know their audience and its political bend and have chosen works that relate to the moment. One of the plays most in the moment was BSC’s N/A. The N/A of the title are former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (N) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (A), although their full names are never given, as are none of the other political figures mentioned, including a president they both detest. The play opened with the two high-powered women meeting in Pelosi’s office, AOC having just won the Democratic primary in her district. Sparks flew as A questioned the pragmatism of N’s politics and N, in turn, denigrated A’s uncompromising progressivism. Kelly Lester was a cool, aloof Pelosi, deeply committed to her causes with a withering wit that kept the laughs coming as the drama deepened. Diane Guerrero was every inch her equal, a fiery advocate and an irresistible blend of New York savvy and Latina passion. The sense of urgency was heightened by Wheeler Moon’s mind-numbing lighting and Brandon Bulls’s jagged sound design, especially in the vivid recreation of the January 6 th attack on the Capitol. In this battle of wills over how to best save our democracy, both women made a good case for idealism tempered by pragmatism, and each came to appreciate the strength and character of the other, even when in the end A turned down the retiring Speaker’s offer of House Whip to blaze her own trail. The play ends, but the drama goes on. More imaginative but no less compelling is GBPT’s production of Maggie Kearnan’s How to Not Save the World with Mr. Bezos . Artistic Director Jim Frangione called it “a rollicking, bold and thought-provoking play” and it certainly lives up to that description. The play is set in an America of the near future where it’s illegal to be a billionaire. One of the most famous of this exclusive club, Jeff Bezos, had agreed to be interviewed by journalist Cherry Beaumont (an animated and deliciously unpredictable Eliza Fichter) in exchange for information about the federal case against him. Bezos was played to a T by Noah Ilya Alexis Tuleja, right down to the billionaire’s braying laugh. As these two sparred and parried over why Bezos and the other richest of the rich couldn’t eliminate poverty and save the world, the Fact Checker (a nerdy but endearing Shai Vaknine) informed the audience of what was fact, fake, and fiction (made up by the playwright). It was a clever conceit but at times an annoying one, pulling us away from the central conflict. The two characters engaged in a lively game of beer pong and dance to Rossini’s “The Thieving Magpies Overture” and Gene Kelly crooning “Singin’ in the Rain.” (Was this a homage to Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange that set the same background music to a rape and murder?) Some of the air went out of this engaging play of ideas when it was revealed that Cherry’s secret motive was revenge for her mother, who grew up with and later worked for Bezos. The bloody finale, while powerful, was a bit predictable, and one wishes the playwright had dug a little deeper into her original argument. BSC reached further back to an earlier political era in its season opener, Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground , a one-man show starring Broadway veteran John Rubenstein as the 34 th president, a fierce defender of democracy at home and abroad. Playwright Richard Hellesen has found a solid dramatic device to propel Eisenhower’s 80-minute monologue—a historians’ survey that ranks the presidents, placing Eisenhower, much to his chagrin, at number 22. He set the record straight, musing about his long career (the play is set in 1962) in a tape recorder for a projected memoir. Rubenstein was in fine form as the indignant ex-president. Along with his triumphs he recalled his regrets—failing to defend his friend George Marshall from the red-baiting Joe McCarthy and being indirectly responsible for the death of his first-born son. Scenic designer Michael Deegan created a spacious living room in Eisenhower’s Gettysburg home for him to ramble and fume about in. An entertaining drama about a much underrated president, the play also reminded us how far the Republican Party has fallen since Eisenhower’s day, loyal not to the Constitution but to a president totally lacking the character of Ike. Eisenhower’s words, delivered with fiery passion by Rubenstein, drew spontaneous applause at the performance this critic attended. The title’s “piece of ground” refers to the farmland that Eisenhower cultivated in retirement, but by play’s end it could be seen as America itself, a ground that desperately needs saving. The presidency of Eisenhower’s successor, John F. Kennedy, is remembered as a new beginning for the nation, a time of great promise. It is forever linked to the Lerner-Lowe musical Camelot , which opened that same landmark year of 1960. BSC’s robust revival is helmed by Artistic Director Alan Paul who states in the program notes that the musical is “really about democracy.” It is also about the loss of those democratic ideals that inspired another leader, King Arthur of Britain. Both Kennedy and Arthur’s crusades ended in tragedy—the president was assassinated in November 1963 and Arthur’s reign was brought down by passion and political intrigue. Ken Wulf Clark’s Arthur is a winning combination of boyish enthusiasm and manly idealism, whose final triumph over mankind’s base desires is revealed in the play’s final moments as he mentored a young boy to carry on his mission. This “child” was African American and dressed in army camouflage, bringing out the contemporary connection. The rest of the cast is singularly fine with Ali Ewoldt as a winsome and passionate Guinevere and Emmett O’Hanlon as a stalwart, guilt-ridden Lancelot. Race and racism are major issues in our cultural wars and they were stage center in S & C’s sterling production of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson . The suffering and resilience of enslaved African Americans and their descendants is symbolized in a family heirloom, the titular piano. The two inheritors of this bitter but compelling heritage were siblings Boy Willie, a bundle of energy and earnestness embodied by Omar Robinson, and Berniece, a towering, unyielding Jade Guerra. Boy Willie wanted to sell the piano to buy the land his family share cropped on for generations, while Berniece refused to surrender it. Their struggle is witnessed and influenced by a supporting cast of family and friends that capture both the earthiness and spirituality of Wilson’s beloved Hill District of Pittsburgh. Worth singling out is ranney, who played the sly Wining Boy, who had his own conflicted relationship to the piano. The ghosts and demons of the family’s dark past were brought to life through the impressive efforts of lighting designer James McNamara and sound designer James Cannon, which in the play’s unforgettable climax transform the family home into a house of horrors. But horror gives way to love and final redemption for the feuding siblings as they awakened to a new state of self-recognition and forgiveness. Misogyny countered by a rising feminism from a far earlier time and place is central to GBPT’s production of Anne Undeland’s Madame Mozart, the Lacrimosa . From the first moment Mozart’s widow Constanze made her entrance, dragging her husband’s shrouded corpse down a staircase, it was clear she was a desperate woman. The play related Constanze’s struggle to keep her husband’s untimely death a secret until she could find someone to finish his unfinished requiem and get the money from the fickle count who commissioned it. He, along with Mozart’s assistant, who had sexual designs on Constanze, her acid-tongued mother, and all the other characters were played to perfection by Ryan Winkles, in a tour de force performance. Tara Franklin was equally fine as Constanze who grew before our eyes from a helpless widow to a tigress of a mother and preserver of her husband’s legacy. Mozart’s music was played with passion onstage by pianist Hudson Orfe, providing a dramatic backdrop to the play. Director Judy Braha brought color and light to this enchanting drama, making the most of that dominating staircase that charted Constanze’s fall and ultimate rise, an inspiration to the women of today who still struggle in a world that is still too often dominated by men. All three theatres should be commended for challenging their audiences to reflect on the chaotic times we live in with plays that keep us fixed in the moment. References Footnotes About The Author(s) STEVEN OTFINOSKI teaches in the English department at Fairfield University. He is an award-winning playwright with productions across the Eastern states and abroad. His ten-minute comedy “The Audition” won the Best Script Award at the Short + Sweet Festival in Sydney, Australia. Steve is also the author of more than 200 books for young adults and has been the long-time reviewer of summer theater in the Berkshires for New England Theatre in Review . He lives in Stratford, Connecticut with his wife Beverly, a retired teacher and editor, and their two Aussie Shepherds. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale “The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. The Brothers Size Dead Outlaw 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival ZAZ Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Heather S. Nathans, Javier Hurtado, Benny Sato Ambush, Henry Bial, Kristoffer Diaz, Kim Marra, Harvey Young Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 1 Visit Journal Homepage What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre Heather S. Nathans, Javier Hurtado, Benny Sato Ambush, Henry Bial, Kristoffer Diaz, Kim Marra, Harvey Young By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF A Roundtable with the College of Fellows of the American Theatre Participants: Benny Sato Ambush, Henry Bial, Kristoffer Diaz, Kim Marra, and Harvey Young Curated by: Heather S. Nathans (Tufts University) and Javier Hurtado (Saint Mary’s College) Three times a year, the College of Fellows of the American Theatre hosts a Roundtable on current issues facing artists and educators. When The Fellows Gazette announced its theme of “What’s at Stake” for the spring 2025 issue on diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice in U.S. theatre, could we have imagined that the stakes would be this high? Could we have imagined that the individual words—diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice—would become so weaponized that organizations and educational institutions would scrub them from their websites as though they were obscenities scrawled by vandals, rather than words that have graced some of the nation's most historic speeches and treasured monuments? And we must acknowledge that even since our Roundtable discussion seven months ago, the landscape for DEIJ work in many colleges and universities has contracted in ways that will impact teachers and students for years to come. Additionally, many dance and theatre artists across the U.S. have lost funding for work that seems too “woke” to an administration intent on silencing dissent and rewriting history. In such a moment what does it mean to try to return to the core values of DEIJ represented in each of those individual words? As part of the commemoration of its sixtieth year, the College of Fellows Roundtable explored how the organization understands what diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice mean to a community of artists and scholars who have dedicated their careers to telling the stories of marginalized communities. In this Roundtable conversation, we share the reflections of theatre artists and scholars on the past, present, and future of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice in U.S. theatre. Theatre people have always understood that survival requires collaboration. It also demands building a “Welcome Table” that uplifts all voices and identities. A note on the structure of the essay : For each Roundtable, we conduct a series of interviews with artists and scholars, inviting each to respond to the same five questions. We then blend their voices into a larger conversation. Can you describe the impact that you’ve seen DEIJ activism have on U.S. theatre over the past 10-20 years (this might include major milestones or important trends you've seen, or it might include communities represented, voices uplifted, etc.)? Henry Bial , Professor at the University of Kansas, observes, “What we are seeing is a radical expansion of the kind of stories and identities that are getting produced.” As Bial argues, Black theatre, Latinx, LGBTQ+ theatre, Women’s Theatre, Asian American theatre, Indigenous theatre, didn’t suddenly manifest in the 2000s, but “mainstream” theatres often seemed reluctant to produce art that, “expressed the whole range of human experience.” Bial notes that this was once particularly true in university theatre, where institutions might allocate a “slot” for a so-called DEIJ show, without imagining that every show in a season could engage with the university’s values around diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. Bial marks the important shift from seeing the exploration of DEIJ topics as “optional” to them becoming part of the core mission of educational institutions. Bial adds, “I think a really healthy thing that's happened in the last ten or twenty years has been moving the conversation past the kind of counting game of ‘This is how many actors of a certain demographic we've put on the stage,’ or ‘This is how many playwrights of a certain demographic have been represented,’ and we're moving towards a kind of qualitative understanding of the stories that we're telling.” He points to the importance of student activism in this shift, as new generations of performers reject narratives and types of representation that don’t do the kinds of cultural labor they want to see. Picking up on Bial’s theme of representation, award-winning director, Benny Sato Ambush , reflected on his first trip to the annual gathering of LORT theatres in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. “It was the early 1980s and there was one person of color there, me, and one woman.” Ambush’s comment raises the question of what it means to be “the only” in a space that might be majority white or majority male-identifying. Ambush describes, “I first started seeing a difference in representation especially racially and culturally during the 1980s when Equity was sponsoring regional, nontraditional casting symposiums,” as a result of a prior four-year study about representation in the American theatre. He recalled one symposium in San Franciso which explored what he then called the “hot topic” of “multicultural and non-traditional casting in different categories of approaches,” noting that this was “before the term ‘antiracist’ came into common use.” As Benny commented, “The terms we used back then were multiculturalism and pluralism… and those were supposed to create a ‘big table’ to which everyone was invited.” And while the terms have continued to develop, Ambush saw those regional symposiums and a flurry of articles in American Theatre and other publications (some that he wrote) begin, “to make a little difference.” Ambush’s acknowledgement that the difference seemed “little” offers a telling reminder of the immense gaps in representation that have persisted throughout the trajectory of U.S. theatre. “We’ve been having this same conversation for twenty-five years,” observes award-winning playwright, librettist, screenwriter, and educator, Kristoffer Diaz , as he reflected on the conversations among arts organizations and educators about creating more compositionally diverse teams and broader representation in U.S. repertoires. For Diaz, it seems a simple idea that, “The more different kinds of voices you have, the better the work is going to be.” However, he acknowledges that this is where the “simple” aspect of the work ends. He reminds his students that representation onstage, in the repertoire, and in the academy has shifted over the past three decades. Yet, he also notes, “I'm working primarily in the Broadway world these days [and] I’m consistently shocked by how few of specific groups are represented, how few Latino artists are working in on Broadway. When was the last time that a Latino playwright had a play produced, or more than one in a season?” Diaz calls out the current season as unusual for featuring two stories that center Latinx voices and cautions those who see it as clear evidence of “progress.” As he argues, “There is so much that is undone or unfinished...There's room, there's room, there's stories to be heard,” beyond those one or two plays. Diaz does see the results of the work that so many artists and scholars have put into the field over the trajectory of his career, “I think that things have gotten better…as a writer feeling comfortable and confident that I can write the things that I want to write, and that I [will] have actors regardless of the character that I want to put on stage. I'm going to be able to find the actors to play those roles. I'm going to find directors who can understand or at least have the vocabulary to do [the work]. I feel great about that…[and] I feel really good about the opportunity that these shows will have…to find an audience.” The paradox of when the work might be “finished” still lingers, as he says, “At the same time I still feel that very real sense of the work not being done.” Like Diaz, Professor Emeritus Kim Marra looked back at generational change in the trajectory of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice, sharing her perspective as a path-breaking scholar in LGBTQ+ performance history. From Marra’s perspective, “The visibility of trans advocacy and trans rights has been a major force in the last ten or twenty years.” She pointed to a number of rising scholars whose work explores “the queer unfinished” and what it means to “queer archives.” 1 Marra spotlighted not only the scholars who have been expanding on some of the conversations she helped to launch through her own work, but the earlier generations of scholars who helped to mold her early in her career. As she acknowledged, many of those community members might not have been able to openly express their identities forty or fifty years ago, but they made opportunities to encourage and support their students’ and mentees’ work. That encouragement helped to legitimize pursuing LGBTQ+ theatre as a research topic. Marra also shared the tremendous impact of two major Black theatre scholars who taught her during her undergraduate and graduate education, Errol Hill (Dartmouth) and Esther Merle Jackson (University of Wisconsin-Madison). Beyond the skills and knowledge they shared with her, for Marra, both of these individuals became role models, “for the battles [they] fought.” Their teachings came full circle in the year before her retirement, which witnessed the murder of George Floyd and the tremendous expansion of the Black Lives Matter movement. As she says, “I spent that summer trying to take my understanding of DEI and how my courses were honoring that mission to another level, because clearly whatever we had been doing was not sufficient. I'm grateful that I had that opportunity, that provocation to do that before I left.” Looking to the future, Marra says she hopes to continue mentoring new scholars—particularly in the areas of disability studies, eco studies, and animal studies (where much of her recent research has focused). As she observes, “The interconnectedness of species has become more and more pressing to understand, and performance can provide ways of doing that because of all of the unique potentials of performance and performance studies. My intersectional frame has expanded to include, along with race ethnicity, class gender, sexuality, gender identity, also to include species. Historically, as we know, animals have been used to denigrate people. Certain people have been seen as less human, more animalistic. So, I feel an urgency as a theater historian who has studied American theater in particular, to see how that works through those histories.” Harvey Young , Dean of the College of Fine Arts and Vice President for the Arts, ad interim , Boston University, described the transformations he witnessed as a scholar and administrator over the past decade. Young pointed to #BLM , “We See You White American Theatre,” “Stop Asian Hate,” #MeToo , and the other activist movements that have challenged American artists and spectators to “stand up and say, ‘Let’s listen to these stories. Let’s take a moment to hear a person share their experience.’” Young points to the work commissioned in the wake of so many tragedies as communities have grappled with the aftermath of multiple traumas or ongoing marginalization. He argues, “You can see the proliferation and growth of those previously unheard voices. These new plays, specifically post 2020, have helped Broadway evolve. The shifting demographics of voices featured in regional theaters are noticeable and related to the movements occurring over the past decade.” Young adds, “I often write about African American theater. My Cambridge Companion to African American Theater book, which came out in its first edition in 2012,” a moment Young describes as “the before times of Black Lives Matter at a national level.” He adds, “When the book was first published, there were not that many contemporary Black playwrights who had won the Pulitzer Prize and whose works were frequently appearing on Broadway and regional stages.” Like Diaz, Young sees positive change in whose stories are being told now and whose work is being recognized. However, also like Diaz, he acknowledges the significant distance yet to be traveled for the professional theatre to create equity in representation. How have the DEIJ initiatives you just talked about seeing shaped your career as an artist or scholar, or both? Bial describes the call to activist work that has shaped his career since the 1990s, watching people like Jill Dolan and Dwight Conquergood. As Bial says, they argued that “The work that we do in the theater and in theater education has to be engaged and active. Theater can't be just an aesthetic artistic thing that happens in a vacuum, or about the kind of conservation of the great cultural achievements of the past, but it has to be that the work we do is about shaping the world for the better, going forward about doing kind of cultural labor.” Bial has been drawn to that kind of craft throughout his career, but says that the diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice movement of the last decade, “has helped sharpen and focus,” his efforts. He adds, “It's helped me realize that this abstract call for theater to make people more empathetic or make people believe more in in the goodness of humanity… is not helping the people who need help.” For Bial, theatre adorned with platitudes does nothing to “really move the needle” on “the social conditions that we want to try to influence both within our institutions and beyond.” Marra’s current research on animal performance has challenged her to think about the ways that classifications around animal labor have translated into the Social Darwinist mentality that continues to plague U.S. culture. For her, studying animals also offers a window into the origins of some contemporary conversations about ableism and the ongoing question of, “What can a body do?” Marra underscored that her research into ableism and its links to animal performance lies outside the standard subjects familiar to scholars of U.S. theatre. For Marra, a commitment to inclusion and equity are key in identifying and pursuing overlooked subjects. And it returned her to the theme that several of the Roundtable participants echoed—the ways in which subjects acquire legitimacy through the work of artists and scholars documenting and validating their experiences. Diaz described some of the opportunities that had shaped his trajectory as an artist and educator. He notes, that “None of this was DEI at the time… but I come into this business through a lot of culturally specific programs.” For example, he pointed to the Hispanic Playwrights Project at the South Coast Repertory Theatre (1986-2004) as one of his first big professional moments ( Hispanic Playwrights Project History | South Coast Repertory ). He recalls, “At that time (2003) I had just gotten out of graduate school, and I was selected to develop my play, Welcome to Arroyo’s at South Coast. They brought out four playwrights… It was me Karen Zacarias, Carlos Murillo and Quiara Alegria Huides, which was just craziness. Amazing [to work with] Quiara right before she exploded on the scene. So that was a great game-changing opportunity for me.” For Diaz, the moment meant more than a platform for his work. It meant a chance to work in a community of other artists developing new work in Latinx theatre. He praises Zacarias, who, “took me under her wing in a very conscious way…and grounded me and hipped me to the game.” Through the SCR program Diaz connected with people who would become lifelong colleagues, including Michael John Garcés and Jaime Castañeda. Diaz was open about his anxieties of entering spaces being framed in certain ways, “I was hesitant of Latino spaces, because I don't speak Spanish. I'm very, very, very Americanized. I consider my cultural heritage to be New York City as much as I consider it to be anything else. So, I always have a little bit of that concern in those kinds of spaces. And what was really fantastic about the Hispanic Playwrights Project was, it made me understand that this community was supportive of everyone , from all different kinds of backgrounds.” For Diaz, the community at SCR focused on telling stories, rather than judging artists, and “I got over that fear and self- loathing that I have for never having learned Spanish.” In looking back over the network of relationships that have supported his work, Diaz muses, “I don’t know that it necessarily falls under the big picture sort of formalized DEI work, but it's been so fundamental to my success,” and to understanding, “how this business and how this community works.” Diaz added that his experiences have helped him to realize that it is in fact important to name the work as part of a commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice: “If you’re in the work, you have to name the work.” Looking back at the way DEIJ work has shaped his career, like Diaz, Ambush noted, “Back then, we didn’t call it DEI, but that’s essentially what it was.” Ambush described his efforts in the 1980s and 1990s to create more inclusive theatre spaces but pointed to the challenges he and other like-minded artists of color faced in the process, even among what he describes as “ethnically specific theatres.” It was a constant fight for legitimacy and recognition. When Eurocentric companies did do work related to Black experiences, he argues that they often resorted to the same small collection of “safe” well-known works, such as A Raisin in the Sun , To Kill a Mockingbird , Driving Miss Daisy, and works by Athol Fugard. Reflecting back on the DEI productions of the 1980s, Ambush said, “I'm going to talk about Black folks for a moment, but I also mean by, extension, all people of color: There are palatable, comfortable explorations of plays that have Black people in them that are for white people, and there are plays with Black people in them that speak to Black people.” And Ambush points to the crucial absences of productions from the repertoires of Asian American, Latinx, and Indigenous voices. Like Ambush, Young pays attention to representation in the mainstream media and recognizable stages for artists of the global majority. He described the brief, post-2020 surge in the presence of Black playwrights on Broadway, even though, as he notes, many of those shows closed early because of audiences’ COVID-related reluctance to come back into performance spaces. Young also notes the ratio of Pulitzer Prizes for drama vs. Tony Awards over the past decade, arguing, “There’s a notable difference. The community of scholars and critics have been more likely to recognize the works of BIPOC artists than the theatre industry itself.” As a scholar of theatre, awards offer an important index for Young in tracking the kinds of voices and stories that institutions want to lift up (since 2016, the majority of the Pulitzer Prizes for Drama have been awarded to artists of color: https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-category/218 ). Have you encountered resistance to DEIJ work? How did you navigate it? What does this resistance to DEIJ cultivate for the field? Ambush reflected on his brief tenure with TheatreVirginia in Richmond, VA (LORT C). He says, “It was a short tenure only 18 months… I was teaching at California State University, Monterey Bay at the time, and living in California when I got the job. Richmond is the former capital of the Confederacy and that theater was about forty-seven years old then. I was still working in California when the newspapers announced that I was the new hire. They put my picture in the paper and before I showed up in town to begin my work, people started canceling their subscriptions, and when I physically arrived in town, there was hate mail waiting for me.” Ambush remembers, “I had a lot of people fearful that I would turn it into a ‘Black theater’ before I had even done anything.” He describes how he navigated the challenge, “I held a number of Town Hall meetings where I was trying to get to know my new community and vice versa, and to allay their fears.” He adds, “There was a lot of tension in the room during those meetings (two of them)…When I mentioned that among the few plays written by people of color that TheatreVirginia had ever done was A Raisin in the Sun , I had one white community member say, ‘Well, so what difference does that make?’” After that comment Ambush says, “I finally had one brave young woman say, “I'll tell you how my grandmother, who's not here, feels about it. She said she's afraid that because [Ambush] is here, that she will no longer be welcome as a white person.” Ambush responded, “So I told that woman, ‘Thank you for saying that, now we can get to work. Now I see where you're stuck. It's out in the open. Now I can address it’.” Coming into that environment, Ambush also remembers that he “inherited a season,” but that because of the controversy over his appointment, artists started to “bail” on the company. He made two changes to the season: canceling one play and substituting Lynn Nottage’s Crumbs from the Table of Joy for Rebecca Gilman’s Spinning Into Butter . The Virginia Chronicle described it as a “good choice” for Ambush’s debut with the company, noting that the “stunned audience was abuzz in the lobby” after Act One. The paper also pointed to Ambush as, “The first African-American to hold the post [of Producing Artistic Director] in the theatre’s 47-year history.” ( Richmond Free Press 28 February 2002 — Virginia Chronicle: Digital Newspaper Archive ). For Ambush, shifting representation onstage and among the audience at TheatreVirginia was a crucial part of his mission: “60% of the population of Richmond was Black, and they never felt invited at that theatre. So, I said, I'm changing that perception. I had people accuse me of an agenda. Almost any person of color that has taken any of these artistic leadership positions in historically white theaters faces this white fear projected on the difference-maker.” Despite his efforts, “The board shut the theater down 17 months after I took over and closed it. They hired me to make a difference. That was the whole point of me being there. I guess it wasn't the difference that they wanted.” Ambush also described another, more insidious resistance that he and other Black colleagues experience on a regular basis, “I'm a director, and I have freelanced off and on all my career. I often only hear from theatres for the Black History month show, and only for Black shows. The other eleven months of the year…crickets.” Ambush calls this the “ghettoizing” of Black artists and hails Jack O’Brien for bringing him to the Old Globe in San Diego multiple times to direct works that were not “Black shows.” Similarly, he pointed to Gloucester Stage in Massachusetts, where he had the opportunity to direct Peter Shaffer’s Lettice and Lovage and Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa . Yet, Ambush argues that his choices to direct shows outside the repertoire of Black authors sometimes drew criticism from both within and beyond the Black community. Some Black audiences, “questioned the degree of my Blackness,” while “white people [said] that I was confused and didn't know my own mind.” He recognizes that, “meanwhile my white artistic director counterparts down the road can do whatever they want and be celebrated for the breadth and depth of their vision.” As Ambush contends, “There always seems to be a double standard for historically disenfranchised artists and that includes women, anybody who's not of the dominant male, Christian, heterosexual, cisgendered population. You're less than, lower than, the collateral damage to white supremacy. White men are entitled to be in charge because they are seen to be divinely endowed with gifts superior to anybody else’s.” He adds, “That’s what we're seeing right now. What's happening in our country now is driven by that same impulse, we’re just using different terms.” Young’s observations echo Ambush’s as he described the challenge in perceptions around hiring artists from the global majority. He describes hearing friends, who are white artists, say that they “cannot” be hired for particular roles because there’s “great pressure to hire a person of color.” Young expressed concern with this phrasing, “Because the narrative of inclusion gets reframed as something being ‘taken away’ without acknowledging the biases that previously denied qualified artists of color opportunities.” For Young, this represents a misperception of what it means to bring diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice to U.S. society. It also points to a critical failure of imagination: the inability to recognize that absence of certain voices harms the greater community. As an educator, Young recognizes that there are a lot of talented artists of all backgrounds and that theatre companies should be “proactive in their outreach.” Theatre companies should not only wait until a member of a traditionally marginalized community “walks in the door.” Those individuals who claim that there “just aren’t any” artists of the global majority (for example), are “being willfully blind to the circumstances that created a condition of exclusion.” It is equally important for companies to be vocal in their desire to hire the best artists regardless of their backgrounds. Bial dissected the differences between big-picture resistance to DEIJ work (at the national or state level) vs. what individuals might experience in their home institutions, “I think that that big picture resistance is, in a sense much easier to deal with because the lines are clearly drawn and perhaps they're very nakedly partisan…The trickier ones, right are the resistance that presents itself as ‘reasonable’ or ‘necessary’.” For example, Bial cites pressure to develop theatrical repertoires with easy name recognition. In the process, “You are making assumptions about who your audience is, or who your audience is going to be.” He notes that kind of bias surfaces in season planning when people may contend that a certain play didn’t draw a large audience in the past, using that as a rationale for not doing another play by an artist of color, a woman, a member of the LGBTQ+ community, etc. And he talks about the need to be the person in the room to remind decision-makers that those kinds of generalizations don’t get applied to cis-gendered white male artists in the same way. “One flop of a play by a white man never scares a theatre company away from doing all plays by white men.” Bial also discussed the impact of prestige bias in hiring for U.S. theatre at both the professional and educational level, and the harm caused by the assumption that a candidate with a specific set of institutional credentials is automatically more qualified than another with possibly less well-known credentials. Bial adds, “I feel like I've been able to advocate in these very small rooms,” where he has had the opportunity to point out implicit or unconscious biases, “And to [people’s] credit, the resistance usually evaporates once you can take it out and put it on the table and name it. These aren't people who are cynically using these objections to advance a racist or transphobic agenda. These are people who simply haven't had the tools or the experience to see those blind spots.” Bial described pursuing training that has helped him navigate his own biases and develop the tools to call others into the work. Marra described first-hand experiences of bias and resistance in her scholarship on LGBTQ+ artists, “Well, certainly, when Bob Schanke and I started out with the idea for Passing Performances in the early 1990s we met a great deal of resistance.” In Marra’s case, colleagues with a vision for a more just and inclusive field helped to support her work, “The heroic LeAnn Fields was the editor we were working with at Michigan, and she not only supported our project, but she strategically navigated the system to help move it forward.” As Marra describes, “She set up a series called Triangulations in order to bring on Jill Dolan and David Román as editors, and have that layer of advocacy for the project” ( Triangulations: Lesbian/Gay/Queer Theater/Drama/Performance (Series) . Dolan and Román helped with the pushback from the Board about “outing” American artists of the distant past. As Marra emphasizes, “We weren’t in people’s bedrooms… so we were trying to track networks of affiliation. Who people worked with, what the lifestyles were of these folks in terms of where they lived, who they lived with for any length of time, what they did for each other.” Marra points to what has now become a standard practice in contemporary theatre research, but which encountered resistance almost thirty years ago, “You begin to see patterns that allow you to argue that that certain desires were informing these connections and informing the aesthetics of the shows they sought to do.” Marra sees the resistance to the project as a reluctance to acknowledge the full diversity and intersectionality of U.S. theatre history and credits the imagination and determination of senior colleagues who advocated for that more honest history. A blurb from Oscar Brockett on the back jacket of Passing Performances when it was published in 1998 powerfully endorsed these pioneering efforts. Diaz suggests that DEIJ activism in theatre often meets with resistance when people fear that they’re “going to be told that their approach is wrong, or problematic, or hurtful.” He has seen that defensive mode emerge and understands that it can create obstacles in doing the work. He described his own experience of realizing that he lacked awareness in critical areas and acknowledging that he would never be able to know, see, or understand the experience of every marginalized community member. However, for him, this offered a prompt to focus on the critical questions that shape conversations around identity and help to build a shared vocabulary about the importance of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice as action items, rather than nouns. Can you name some individuals or institutions whose DEIJ work has served as a successful model for your career? Interestingly, Ambush focused on the organizations, “not necessarily looking for attention, but just doing the work in their communities and embracing them.” He hailed the theatre companies that imagined diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice as, “part of their mission, not as an attachment or an add-on when funding became available all of a sudden. This has been an issue in some of the theaters I've worked at.” Ambush expressed appreciation for the groups that lean into hyper-localized work. He clarified that while they may be flying under a national radar, they’re not “hiding” their mission. Instead of “boasting and bragging, they do … Those are my kind of people.” Ambush pointed to the Los Angeles Inner City Cultural Center ( image ), which he says, “from its inception was always about all of Los Angeles.” He also pointed to La MaMa and the work of Ellen Stewart for the pioneering work in welcoming so many voices into the community ( www.innercityculturalcenter.org/our-history.html and https://www.lamama.org/ ). He offered Mixed Blood and the San Francisco Mime Troupe as additional examples. Ambush also spoke movingly about the struggles to find a role model for the kind of work he wanted to do early in his career, “I went to my mentor, George Bass, in despair saying, I'm dreaming about these things (artistically lead a LORT theatre), but I don't see anybody out there that looks like me as a role model. Bass said, ‘You have to become a role model for other people and dare to be great,’ which is what I've been trying to do ever since. I might have felt better and more encouraged if I had seen other examples at least at the LORT level; there have always been artistic directors of color and of different races, cultures, genders and sexualities in other categories of theaters that were not LORT they've always been there. But at the LORT level, I didn’t see them.” As part of his mission to be a model for others, Ambush has contributed articles on non-traditional casting and has long been an activist in that arena. As he comments, “We didn't say DEI back then in the seventies or eighties, or even in the sixties. We had a Black Arts movement, and other human rights movements. All those movements were happening in the sixties and early seventies when I came of age—ERA, free speech, the American Indian movement, Black Power, anti-Viet Nam war protests, women’s liberation. It was a very active, vital, and violent time.” In describing his models for success, Young focused on individuals who have impressed him. For example, he pointed to Crystal Williams, the President of the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design ( https://www.risd.edu/about/leadership/about-crystal-williams ). As he commented, “She might be the most articulate person I've encountered who can talk persuasively about the work of equity and inclusion in manner that does not posit diversity as a bad word and thinks justice is part of a larger narrative of solutions to exclusion.” Young also saluted the Black theatre companies in Boston, Chicago, New York, DC, Philadelphia, and elsewhere that have labored to create and expand community of all backgrounds, even as he noted that many now face challenges to their survival due to funding cuts, lack of stable leadership, or post-COVID challenges. In looking at local arts organizations near his own institutional home of Boston University, he pointed to the award-winning Front Porch Arts Collective of Boston, which identifies as, “A black theatre company committed to advancing racial equity in Boston through theatre” ( https://www.frontporcharts.org/ ) In thinking about models for diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice throughout his career, Bial cited his training at NYU’s Performance Studies program in the 1990s because of the ways it encouraged scholars to explore performance cultures in Africa and Asia, cultivating what he described as a kind of “utopian interculturalism.” He appreciated the ways that a curriculum that didn’t focus on traditional works and knowledge created space for new kinds of knowing. And while Bial notes that the original work launched by Richard Schechner has been nuanced by the scholarship of the past thirty years, as Bial says, the original vision was “inspirational.” He also points to, “The important work on queer theater and performance art with Peggy Phelan and Fred Moten on the ways in which certain types of power structures are built into the university, and how we navigate those.” Bial adds, “I feel like really fortunate to have had different models . . . they were considered dangerously radical in 1995.” As Bial contends, he found it liberating to see, “the way they made space in the curriculum for all of these other voices that had previously been excluded in the conversation through the simple expedient of saying, ‘You know what? Who cares if we read Shaw? Who cares about the weight of the stones in the theater of Dionysus? We’re going to [explore] all this other stuff. And if we neglect Arthur Miller, well, it’ll be OK.” Bial also sees his non-traditional path into Theatre Studies as part of his penchant for thinking outside the box in curriculum development, “I've often found it very liberating that I don't actually have any degrees in theater. I have one in folklore and mythology, and two in performance studies, and therefore I am not tied down to any particular idea of what has to be in a theatre curriculum.” Bial credits his students with teaching him about how to put the values of DEIJ work into practice. He says, “My tenure track job was at University of New Mexico, which is a Title V Hispanic Serving Institution.” There he taught a compositionally-diverse community of Hispanic, Anglo, and Indigenous students. “Teaching in that environment made me much more aware of these issues of representation and made me much more up to speed on the kind of writers and performers who had that experience.” As Bial acknowledges, he also struggled with the challenge of not representing the majority identity positions of his students (nor did anyone else in his department at the time). But, he says, “I bonded with a lot of these students simply by virtue of being the one closest to them in age, and so that that was really very helpful.” He describes similar experiences at his current institution, KU, where, as he suggests, it’s easier to deal with DEIJ questions in some sense, “because as a public institution we explicitly have the mandate to serve everyone.” At the end of the day, Bial also argues that schools should, “not be premised on exclusivity, on how many people we turn down . . . That’s another way of freeing us up from some of those past biases or removing obstacles to doing the work you want to do.” And as theatre programs across the country labor to increase enrollments, creating inclusive environments will prove crucial to that process. Marra focused on the need to create and support opportunities for diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice at the local level—both on college campuses and in the communities that house them. She also spoke emotionally of the ways that senior colleagues can and should protect junior scholars whose careers might be more vulnerable based on their identities or their research. Marra’s “pay it forward” model of mentorship invites people to commit to their DEIJ service at the individual and daily level. She spoke from the perspective of putting together the 100-year anniversary history of her department, since, as she observed wryly, “I was here for a third of that time.” She pointed to the importance of creating an inclusive environment in the most literal sense—ensuring that students and junior colleagues see representation in the classrooms and halls they navigate on a daily basis. She described transforming the department at Iowa, which had, prior to 2021, been replete with headshots of past faculty and alums, and which, “was like a sea of white male dominance,” without any history of the department to give context. The department elected to create a digital gallery that will now have more space to support the stories of BIPOC and LGBTQ+ faculty and alums, as well as continuing to document the history of the program’s past, such as its longstanding connections with HBCUs that brought students to the Iowa MFA program ( https://theatre.uiowa.edu/alumni ). Perhaps not surprisingly, as a lifelong theatre historian, Marra understands the importance of drawing out the nuances of our histories. Diaz emphasized the need to model multiple kinds of storytelling and to cultivate a diversity of perspectives— particularly in academic settings. He observed, “In academia we do not see people across the political spectrum. That's just a fact. We just don't see it. I don't see a lot of people from certain parts of the country. We need to do a better job. The world needs to do a better job of understanding the diversity of the United States. The United States is so many things... So, I do think there's value in the interrogation about what we mean when we ask for diversity.” However, as Diaz argues, those questions need to be posed in good faith . And like Ambush and Bial, he raised the question of who is allowed to write, direct, or tell certain stories. For example, he described wanting to “just write the story about the family that gets together on the holidays and rehashes old shit. Not [to] talk about our immigration status. That may or may not be the thing that we have to talk about. But the primary thing I want to talk about is what the relationships are if the relationships are colored by those other things. That's great. But I don’t want to be pinned into that corner.” With that in mind, he admits, that he does get “nervous sometimes around the DEI work,” if it seems to be putting limits on the kinds of stories he can tell. As a role model for work in diversity, equity, and inclusion, he pointed to an experience with Minnesota’s Mixed Blood Theatre Company ( https://mixedblood.com/ ). They invited him to be part of a 2016 project called DJ Latinidad Big Latin Dance Party . A number of writers came to craft short plays and produce them over the course of a night. ( Image, DJ Latinidad ) Diaz recalls, “I didn’t know what to write. I had a 2-year-old son at that point, and I said to him, ‘Let's make something together.’ He gave me a bunch of random baby names for characters, and it was just nonsense and baby language, like the chaos of being a little kid. And I took that, and I wrote a short play about it, and it was called Lemon Jackson , and it had no ‘cultural’ anything in it. And we put it in the show. Artist-in-Residence, Mark Valdez was the person [coordinating the show] and Jack Reuler (Artistic Director) was still there at the time, and both of them said, ‘This is great, this is this is what we want’.” ( https://www.markevaldez.com/ and https://mixedblood.com/about/history/ ). But as Diaz remembers, “Some of the audience members were the people who asked, ‘Why is this in this show? You're not talking about language. You're not talking about immigration. You're not talking about Abuelita . You're not talking about food. You're not hitting any of those markers.’” Diaz appreciated the way that the theatre’s directors and the actors stood up for him, declaring, “It's a Latino story, because it was written by a Latino man and his half Latino son. And we get to tell those stories, too.” Diaz’s experience reminded him of the need to make sure that definitions of what constitutes “diversity” don’t become so narrowly focused that they ultimately exclude voices and stories. How do you envision the future of your DEIJ work in the US, and what can you do to help artists and scholars sustain equity and inclusion in the US cultural landscape? How do people in positions of power/influence sustain this work? Marra returned to her theme of genealogies, and the need to make the generational work of campaigning for diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice visible to younger artists and scholars. That visibility and sense of legacy can counter a sense of despair and isolation. It can also create a sense of momentum and agency. Speaking from her perspective as a historian focusing on LGBTQ+ narratives, Marra reminded scholars and artists to always query the archive for what it reveals and what it conceals. She described the ways in which narratives have often been “straightened,” another process that generates a sense of isolation in queer communities. As artists and scholars, we have opportunities to resist that impulse. As Marra says, “There are stories I want to share that moved me and moved the field and if we don't share them, how will this be known?” Bial commented candidly, “As a straight white guy, I have a ton of unearned privilege. What am I going to do with it?” In answer to his own question, he makes himself vulnerable to critique by building inclusive programming in his curriculum and by representing a compositionally diverse array of voices and experiences. With his characteristic humor, he notes, “That doesn’t make me Rosa Parks,” adding, “I've definitely made some mistakes, and that's where you trust the students to tell you if you've created a culture where they feel comfortable.” He also reminded educators that claiming a certain area was outside their comfort zone or expertise was a feeble excuse for not doing the work, “No one would ever come into a class and say, ‘I haven't really bothered to read any of the literature about this Shakespeare guy, but I got hold of this play last week, and I wanted to mix up the syllabus’.” And as unthinkable as that example sounds, he observes, “I have occasionally seen people do that with a ‘diversity’ play” as a way to sidestep their own insecurities about making “mistakes” in grappling with complicated material. Bial challenges himself with the reminder that, “Any of my discomfort is so trivial relative to living as a queer person or person of color under this sort of end-stage capitalism that we're in, that I should just shut up and do the thing.” Diaz questioned the concept of “merit” being substituted for diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice—as though the terms were somehow incompatible or functioned in opposition to each other. “Meritocracy sounds great in the arts.” But he pushes back against the concept that there can be an “objective” standard for art because that supposed impartiality elides the very structures and systems that have kept some stories relegated to the margins. As Diaz argues, “One of the things that I value when I read a new play is, have I seen this play before? Have I heard this voice before? Because what I'm interested in in new plays especially is someone giving me a perspective on the world that changes the way that I think about it. So, there is something fundamentally meritorious in that .” Diaz’s goals for the future included prompts for theatre companies to imagine seasons with more than one voice or one perspective on an identity. He points to the danger of having one season slot for Latinx artists, one slot for Indigenous artists, one slot for Black artists, etc., saying, “It's putting us in a position where we feel like we are in competition with each other.” Moving forward, Diaz hopes to see seasons that might feature multiple authors from a particular group in the global majority as a way to expand the range of stories told and voices represented. He imagined a space where artistic directors would have the confidence to program an entire season of (for example) Latinx artists. For Diaz, engaging with multiple voices from specific communities represents a kind of “intellectual and artistic honesty,” rather than imagining that one artist speaks for an entire community. He also challenges companies that don’t want to represent artists from the global majority or traditionally marginalized communities to be honest about it. This circles back to his theme of merit. Rather than pretending that a certain play isn’t as good as one by a canonical (white) author, “I think it is about being like honest about what it is that you do and what you believe. I wouldn't be shocked if over the next few years, we see some theater companies start to remove that language [DEIJ] and feel like they're freeing themselves from that.” He notes that “there is a very viable business plan that is not centered around diversity” in certain communities. Diaz adds, “If you want to do that, I encourage you to be brave and be upfront about what it is that you actually do. So that for the people for whom equity in representation is an issue, we know either, ‘Okay, we're not welcome here. I'm not going to bother submitting my plays to you’.” While that may offer an uncomfortable truth, for Diaz, honesty at least counters the fallacy of a meritocracy in the arts. In imagining how to sustain diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice in U.S. theatre, Ambush declared, “Try not to be afraid. Try not to be cowed. Try not to self-censor. Try not to obey in advance. Try not to alter already.” Ambush reminds us, “Resistance is needed. Double down. Don't buy into fear. Stake your claim in the work you do and on your terms. Take back the definitions that were there to begin with. I'm at the age now where I’m not going to stop. I fought my whole life for legitimacy. The same kind of legitimacy that my white counterparts have had their whole lives. To have people now say, ‘Oh, we're bringing back the colorless society’—colorblindness never works. Don't tell me you don't see a black face. I've heard all my life, ‘Oh, Benny, when I see you, I don't see a Black person.’ Bullshit. Yes, you do.” Ambush demanded, “We have to go the other way, have to lean into it and proclaim proudly who we are in our difference, in our specificity, and insist upon an equal place at the table, a different paradigm that is horizontal, not vertical. It's a scary time right now. Personally, I'm not changing me. That may mean there'd be some projects I turn down. I've done that before. I can't live a lie, and I'm not hiding. I'm not going into anybody's closet. That's a decision that many organizations and individuals have to face now.” Ambush understands what a terrifying and uncertain moment people may be in right now, “How are you going to respond to this? I say, get courage by looking at what people who came before us did. They stood up and they fought. It's a shame that we still have to fight. But it's the same issues. The idea of America is a work in progress, and we may lose it. We're in the process of losing it right now. Can we survive it? And can we come back from it? I don't know. But right now, what's happening is how democracies die... and the dream of true equality without sacrificing difference or apologizing for difference is threatened.” Young echoed Ambush’s theme, “History should not be edited in such a way that the contributions of whole groups of people disappear. Structures and institutions should not be operated in a manner that denies the possibilities of a person's identity. How do you continue to advocate for a person being themselves especially in a climate in which just the fact of their own being is contested and threatened?” Young pointed to the “long history” of moments when societies move towards inclusion, “and then the rock rolls back down the hill.” And while he admits it can be heart-wrenching when you realize that “The pushing, the work, the labor needs to continue.” But, he added with hope, “In those moments you acknowledge that the progress you made is because there were some people who were there before carrying some of the burden.” Underscoring the generations of labor that have gone into the struggle for diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice, he said, “Those people are tired now. Some will continue to push on. Some are no longer with us. And some just need a break.” And when the people who have been in the fight need to take a breath, others need to be ready to step forward. Young admits, “that’s the hard part.” As an educator, Young can’t let go of the fight for access to education and of the right for people to express their identities freely and without fear. And while he has seen academic discourse shift over time as terms such as “gender” and “diversity” continue to evolve, he warns against the wholesale erasure of words from our teaching vocabularies. “Words that are meant to be inclusive get redefined to be exclusive.” Or words that the society has valued suddenly acquire pejorative meanings or become weaponized like “woke” or “diversity” or “justice.” As Young observes, “That’s something that raises an eyebrow . . . But this is why the work we do matters.” And at the end of the day, for Young, artists and educators can use whatever words they need, “to carry on the work, because ultimately that work is not divisive. That work is just meant to bring more people to the table.” Conclusion The Roundtable participants spoke with passion, candor, and commitment. They see the struggle that lies ahead. As veterans of many earlier struggles, they shared their faith that artists and scholars can continue to do the transformative work of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice if we remember that we never have to be alone in the work, and that we can call on each other for support and courage along the way. References Footnotes [1] For more on "the queer unfinished," see Ryan Adelsheim, “Unfinished: Queer & Trans Identity Development on the American Stage,” PhD diss., Yale University, 2025. About The Author(s) BENNY SATO AMBUSH is a theatre director, educator, and Artistic Director of Venice Theatre in Florida. A member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, he has directed professionally at leading regional theatres including the Old Globe, American Conservatory Theater, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, South Coast Repertory, and Alabama Shakespeare Festival. Ambush has held major leadership and faculty positions at Emerson College, TheatreVirginia, Oakland Ensemble Theatre, Brown University, and NYU’s Graduate Acting Program. His extensive national service includes work with the National Endowment for the Arts, Theatre Communications Group, and the Kennedy Center. He holds an MFA in Directing from the University of California, San Diego, and a BA from Brown University. HENRY BIAL is Professor and Chair in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Kansas. He is a past President of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) and a Fellow of the Mid-America Theatre Conference. He is the author of Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen and Playing God: The Bible on the Broadway Stage , and the editor or co-editor of Brecht Sourcebook, Theater Historiography: Critical Interventions, The Great North American Stage Directors, Vol. 4: Abbott, Carroll, Prince, and The Performance Studies Reader , now in its fourth edition. KRISTOFFER DIAZ is a playwright, librettist, screenwriter, and educator whose work spans theatre, television, and musical adaptation. His play The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama, and his adaptation of Disney’s Hercules premiered at the Public Theater in 2019 as part of the Public Works program. His plays have been produced and developed at major institutions including The Public Theater, Goodman Theatre, and Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Diaz has written for Netflix’s GLOW and developed pilots for HBO and FX. He teaches playwriting at New York University. JAVIER HURTADO is a playwright, director, and performance historian. He has served on editorial teams for the Journal of American Drama and Theatre and Drama’s Special Issue: Milestones in Black Theatre , the College of Fellows of the American Theatre’s Gazette, and the University of Iowa Press’ Studies in Theater, History, and Culture book series. Javier earned an MFA in Writing for Performance from the University of California, Riverside, a Ph.D. in Theatre and Performance Studies from Tufts University and is currently a faculty member in Saint Mary's College of California’s Department of Performing Arts. KIM MARRA is Professor Emeritus of Theatre Arts and American Studies at the University of Iowa. Her books include Strange Duets: Impresarios and Actresses in the American Theatre, 1865-1914 (2006; Callaway Prize winner) and the co-edited volumes Passing Performances: Queer Readings of Leading Players in American Theater History (1998), its sequel Staging Desire (2002), The Gay and Lesbian Theatrical Legacy (2005), and Showing Off, Showing Up: Studies of Hype, Heightened Performance, and Cultural Power (2017). Her interspecies scholarship comprises essays, performances, exhibits, and documentary film. Since 2017, she has co-directed the Animal Studies Summer Institute at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. HEATHER S. NATHANS is a professor in the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies and the Nathan and Alice Gantcher Professor in Judaic Studies. Her publications include: Early American Theatre from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson (2003); Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage, 1787-1861 (2009); and Hideous Characters and Beautiful Pagans: Performing Jewish Identity on the Antebellum American Stage (2017). Nathans has received the Barnard Hewitt Award (ASTR), the John W. Frick Award (ATDS), and the Betty Jean Jones Award (ATDS). In 2023 she was named as a member of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre. Nathans serves as the Editor of the award-winning Studies in Theatre History and Culture series with the University of Iowa Press. HARVEY YOUNG is Dean of the College of Fine Arts and Interim Vice President for the Arts at Boston University, where he is Professor of English, Theatre Arts, and African American and Black Diaspora Studies. An author and editor of ten books, his most recent is Theatre and Human Flourishing (Oxford University Press, 2023). A nationally recognized scholar and arts leader, Young has appeared across major media outlets including CNN, NPR, and the New York Times . Former president of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, he serves on numerous arts boards and policy committees. Young holds a PhD from Cornell University and is a Fellow of the American Theatre. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale “The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. The Brothers Size Dead Outlaw 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival ZAZ Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Teya Juarez Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 1 Visit Journal Homepage Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale Teya Juarez By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF In 2023, The Whale won the Academy Award for Best Makeup and Hairstyling: one of three films nominated for the category that year that featured performers wearing fat suits. (1) The 2022 film is an adaptation of Samuel D. Hunter’s 2012 play of the same name, both of which tell the story of Charlie, a 600-lb gay English professor, as he struggles to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter, Ellie. The plot takes place over the course of one week from Monday through Friday. As the ending suggests, this is ultimately the last week of Charlie’s life. Considered his triumphant return to acting, Brendan Fraser starred as Charlie in the film adaptation, earning the 2023 Academy Award for Best Actor. (2) Since Fraser was not himself 600 pounds, the film utilized a fat suit, additional prosthetics, and computer-generated imagery (CGI) to build Charlie’s body, creating a fabricated representation of what most Americans would likely be conditioned to consider “morbid ob*sity.” (3) While the use of fat suits in lieu of casting fat actors can be theorized as “fat drag” (4) —slender bodies dressing up as fat ones for the sake of performance—I argue that The Whale is a unique case of “ob*sity drag,” a term introduced by Royce Best. (5) “Ob*se” (rather than “fat”) carries a specific pathologization and medicalization of fat bodies in U.S. society and has continually been the target of the so-called “War on Ob*sity.” (6) The Whale ’s story of fatness reveals how the theatre and film industries perpetuate the War on Ob*sity mentality that pursues the end of fat. With the future of fat in question, it is essential for the theatre and film industries to confront the fact that fat bodies are often not permitted to represent themselves in performance, especially in the production history of The Whale . In its journey from the stage to the screen, The Whale represents a doubling-down on the use of fat suits as a valid performance of fat embodiment, cruelly suggesting in its context and content that even as stories about fatness continue to be told, real fat bodies need not exist. For decades, the U.S. has been in an endless War on Ob*sity. Warning against the dangers of fatness, public health and government officials have declared an ongoing “ob*sity epidemic” in the U.S. (7) Through the lens of the War on Ob*sity, fatness is viewed as a disease that inherently comprises overall health, or a problem that needs to be cured. Paul Campos calls this the “ob*sity myth,” which relies on three primary assumptions: “that ‘excess’ weight causes illness and early death; that losing weight improves health and extends life; and that we know how to make fat people thin.” (8) Campos points out that the War on Ob*sity labels a significant portion of the U.S. population as targets, pathologizing their fatness as ob*sity. (9) Marilyn Wann describes that fat studies scholars and fat activists have denounced the use of “O-words” such as ob*se and “overweight” that “medicaliz[e] human diversity” and “inspir[e] a misplaced search for a ‘cure’ for naturally occurring difference.” (10) Because fatness has been repeatedly pathologized as an undesirable embodiment under the guise of ob*sity, U.S. society continually orients itself around slenderness as the ideal, obedient, and inherently healthy body type. Americans resort to fad diets, exercise trends, surgical interventions, and weight-loss medications in the pursuit of slenderness. Most recently, GLP-1 medications, such as Ozempic, have become an increasingly popular method of weight loss. The rapid adoption of GLP-1s, before extensive research on the long-term effects of using these medications for weight loss, suggests that the pursuit of slenderness is often about body size, not about lasting internal health. (11) The connotation of the word “war” implies that the end goal of the War on Ob*sity is the eradication of fatness, which inherently means the elimination of fat people . With this ongoing War on Ob*sity, what does the future of fat entail? As I will detail throughout the following essay, theatre and film industries subscribe to this War on Ob*sity mentality, particularly in the case of The Whale , which demonstrates the use of ob*sity drag described above. While theatre and film continue to depict stories about fatness, these industries have often deemed fat people unnecessary to include in doing so. In their introduction to the 2018 Fat Studies special issue on fatness and temporality, Tracy Tidgwell, May Friedman, Jen Rinaldi, Crystal Kotow, and Emily R.M. Lind explore the concept of “fat time.” (12) They describe fat time as “abundant and spacious,” identifying that it “moves bigger” and “resists containment.” (13) Notably, the authors suggest that the opposite of “fat time” is “no time,” which is “capitalist and lean in character.” (14) While no time “shrinks” and “compresses,” fat time “offers more” and “makes fatness more knowable.” (15) I suggest that this relationship between “fat time” and “no time” is significant for performances of fatness like The Whale and what these performances mean for the future of fat. Whereas fat time liberates fat bodies, allowing them to take up time and space, “no time” takes on the War on Ob*sity mentality that seeks the end of fat. No time is at the heart of The Whale . As a performance of fatness, and more specifically a performance of ob*sity, The Whale reinforces the societal belief that fat people are running out of time and that fatness must come to an end. The primary source of urgency that pushes the story forward appears to be Charlie’s inevitable death at the end of the play; Charlie is out of time. By pathologizing Charlie’s body as ob*se, rather than liberating it as fat, Charlie loses access to fat time and is instead given no time on stage or on screen. This distinction between the pathologizing nature of the word ob*se and the liberatory potentials of the word fat is critical to my argument that The Whale utilizes ob*sity drag rather than fat drag. Fat is one of many marginalized identities that has been fabricated and performed by normative bodies throughout the history of performance on stage and screen. (16) Royce Best’s term “ob*sity drag” is based on Tobin Siebers’ theory of “disability drag,” wherein able-bodied actors portray characters with disabilities in performance. Siebers explains that the “modern cinema often puts the stigma of disability on display,” but said disability is represented by those who are not themselves disabled, performing for an audience that is potentially unaware of this important distinction. (17) However, audiences that are privy to the performer’s underlying able-bodiedness are assured that the performer “will return to an able-bodied state as soon as the film ends.” (18) I suggest that ob*sity drag functions similarly in The Whale as the representation of another non-normative identity by normative bodies, with the added connotations of further pathologizing fatness as ob*sity for American audiences. For stage productions of The Whale , fat suits assure the audience that the actor playing Charlie will return to a slender (or otherwise smaller) body after the performance. Fatness is thus represented by a fabricated prosthetic that is removed when the performance is complete. Especially in the film adaptation, since Brendan Fraser is a well-known actor, audiences can rely on their knowledge that the fat body they are seeing is not Fraser’s actual body and that it will return to “normal” when the movie is over. Much like Siebers’ theory of disability drag, The Whale provides representation of a nonnormative embodiment, but it does so through a fabricated depiction of ob*sity. An actual fat body would not collapse into a normative state the moment the curtain drops or the credits roll. Perhaps putting a real fat person on stage/screen is to admit that the fat body will have more time, continuing to live in fat time past the context and confines of the performance. Fatness as Ob*sity & The Ob*sity Action Coalition Fat suits can refer to varying levels of prosthetics and makeup (and in the film version of The Whale , CGI) that have been used to make slender, normative bodies appear fat in performance. Amy Gullage states that fat suits are typically “full-body costumes” worn on their own or in combination with “latex pieces or full face masks and make-up in order to fatten up [performers’] faces, chins and necks.” (19) The use of fat suits to represent fat bodies in performance suggests that “fatness itself is merely a suit to be worn and changed at will,” as well as that “fatness can be represented removed from the realities and complexities of real life.” (20) Fat suits are used to tell stories about fatness without necessarily including actual fat people in the performance. The use of fat suits implies that even when fatness is part of a story being told on the stage or screen, these roles are not intended for fat performers. Instead, slender performers perform fat embodiment with the support of prosthetics. (21) Ryan Donovan explains in his 2023 book Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity that “[t]he fat suit itself reinforces stigma because it can be put on and taken off at will, an act unavailable to the fat person perceived as morally suspect for their inability to lose weight.” (22) In this way, fat suits can be used to tell fat stories without including socially transgressive fat bodies in the process. The Whale takes the fat suit to a new level, specifically depicting folks that, in the fat liberation community, might identify as “superfat” or “infinifat.” Some fat activists have identified a “fategories” spectrum of fat identity, ranging across “small fat,” “mid-fat,” “large fat,” and superfat/infinifat, reclaiming fat identity away from pathologizing terms like overweight, ob*se, or morbidly ob*se. (23) The fategories spectrum is used to acknowledge smaller fat bodies’ proximity to societal privilege, as well as to emphasize the increasing lack of access to clothing, healthcare, and fair treatment for fat folks at the higher end of the size spectrum. Fat activists who use these fategories typically use superfat/infinifat to refer to the largest members of the fat community; this category has no size cap. Bodies in this category might be considered ob*se or morbidly ob*se by those who medicalize fat identity. The difference in size between Charlie and the performers playing him is likely much greater than the usual discrepancy between a slender performer and their fat suit. (24) Charlie’s size, combined with the health conditions attributed to his weight, reflects the U.S.’s reductive and medicalized stereotype of what a morbidly ob*se body is. To my knowledge, every stage production of The Whale since its world premiere has included its own version of a fat suit, which suggests that the theatre industry has not seriously considered casting a superfat/infinifat person for this role. (25) A Google Image search for photos from past stage productions reveals a substantial collection of fabricated fat bodies. (26) The casting history of The Whale represents persistent ob*sity drag with bodies donning a fabricated fatness in order to perform conceptions of ob*sity. The Whale also perpetuates reductive and harmful understandings of fatness by adhering to this concept of ob*sity in its story. Overall, the plot relies on stereotypes that American society tout as intrinsic characteristics of fat people: the larger someone is, the closer they are to a premature death. Not only is Charlie fat, but he has compounding health issues that he refuses to seek medical treatment for, including difficulty breathing and a potential heart condition. Liz, Charlie’s only friend (and sister to his late partner Alan), is a nurse who uses her medical expertise and access to medical equipment to care for Charlie. Charlie is, of course, also represented as having a binge-eating disorder, playing into another stereotype that all fat people have become fat because of a lack of self-control with food. (27) Charlie’s ex-wife and Ellie’s mother, Mary, tells Charlie that he has “been eating [himself] to death for fifteen years,” reinforcing his troubled relationship with food, while also implying that his weight gain is akin to death by suicide. (28) The insinuation is that Charlie’s proximity to sickness and death is an inevitable part of his fatness, rather than a separate concern of other intersecting, compounding factors. As Campos identifies, the assumption that fatness is inherently linked to disease and death is a facet of the ob*sity myth, the driving force of the War on Ob*sity. These fears for Charlie’s proximity to death are confirmed when both the play and the film heavily imply that Charlie dies at the end. In her first scene with Charlie, Ellie cruelly demands that Charlie stand up and walk to her. When Charlie reaches for his walker to support himself, Ellie says, “Without that thing. Just stand up, and come over here.” Without his mobility aid, Charlie is unable to stand up. He lies back on the couch “ wincing from the pain ” and “ wheezing loudly .” (29) At the end of the story, Charlie stands up to walk across the room to Ellie, answering her request from before. He rips the oxygen tube out of his nose and “ with a huge amount of effort and pain, [ he ] manages to stand up. ” (30) The final stage directions of the playscript describe: “ Charlie looks up. The waves [sound effect of waves] cut off. A sharp intake of breath. The lights snap to black. ” (31) In the film’s depiction of this moment, the camera focuses on Charlie’s feet as they levitate off the floor. Charlie floats towards a white, heavenly light. After a brief flashback to Charlie and Ellie on the beach years earlier, long before Charlie gained the majority of his weight, the credits roll. (32) Both versions of the story imply that Charlie dies from ob*sity and its supposed inherently related health conditions. By refusing to seek medical treatment and refusing to pursue weight loss, Charlie’s story becomes a cautionary tale for what might happen if ob*sity goes untreated, supporting the American ob*sity myth. Another facet of the script that evokes a strong association with ob*sity rather than fat is Hunter’s specification that Charlie is “around six hundred pounds.” (33) First airing during the world premiere run of The Whale , the TLC (The Learning Channel) reality show My 600-lb Life has become a significant source for the medicalization and pathologization of superfat/infinifatness as morbid ob*sity. The show, now thirteen seasons strong, features people who weigh around 600 pounds as they pursue weight loss via bariatric weight-loss surgery. My 600-lb Life makes a spectacle of superfat/infinifat bodies. As fat studies scholar May Friedman describes, the show invites the audience to “gawk at super sized people, to see them as inherently abject and impossible.” (34) Prominent fat activist Aubrey Gordon explains that My 600-lb Life treats its subjects “as freakshows, displaying their bodies and medical struggles to fuel audiences’ disgust, revulsion, and sense of superiority,” reassuring those who are not superfat/infinifat: “ At least I’m not that fat .” (35) My 600-lb Life explicitly perpetuates the War on Ob*sity mentality. Melissa Zimdars says in her 2019 book Watching our Weights: Contradictions of Televising Fatness in the “Ob*sity Epidemic” that My 600-lb Life determines its subjects to be “medically ob*se” and “in need of help beyond the health and lifestyle recommendations of diet and exercise.” (36) Zimdars also points out that while many individuals featured on the show “do not yet have—and maybe never will have—most of the ‘ob*sity-related diseases’ discussed by doctors,” they are automatically depicted as “diseased” or “at risk for disease” simply for their size alone. (37) Weight loss and weight-loss surgery are deemed the only hope in the face of such a deadly disease. In her blog post titled “Our 600 Pound Lives,” Ash Nischuk of The Fat Lip recounts receiving an email from the My 600-lb Life casting office, despite being “vocally fat positive on the internet for over 15 years.” (38) The casting agent explains to Nischuk that the show “follows the lives of real people as they embark on a road to better health” and that, “[i]f approved by the show’s physician,” she could be one of the lucky “selected individuals” who also “receive Gastric Bypass Surgery.” (39) Nischuk asserts that the producers and doctors of My 600-lb Life insist to the fat subjects on the show that if they do not take this opportunity to change their lives, they will die: “Unequivocally. This is your only option to stay alive.” (40) In order for their lives to be saved, participants must “reveal [their] most vulnerable moments—[their] greatest emotional and physical struggles—to a national audience.” (41) This televised spectacle serves the War on Ob*sity mentality, “profit[ing] off of its audience’s fear of fatness and disability.” (42) Furthermore, as Zimdars puts it, the show “borrows more heavily from the documentary tradition and frames itself as more observational than reality shows.” (43) Gordon also comments on how the show “seems to consider itself an objective and tender documentary [emphasis added].” (44) In taking this documentary-style approach, My 600-lb Life tries to convince the viewer that the show provides an authentic and objective look at the lives of those in larger bodies rather than admit to manufacturing spectacle. This feigned objectivity normalizes and downplays the way the show treats its participants, implying that My 600-lb Life is simply reporting on the lives of real fat people (just as the casting agent who tried to recruit Nischuk posed it). Because the specific weight of 600 pounds is included in the title of the show, My 600-lb Life is often referenced, either intentionally or unintentionally, when discussing this category of size in other contexts or other media. By establishing Charlie as 600 pounds, The Whale inherently cites My 600-lb Life ’s depiction of this size as a fatal disease that needs extreme intervention, especially in more contemporary productions of The Whale . Any parallels between My 600-lb Life and The Whale act to legitimize Charlie’s representation of superfat/infinifatness as an extension of this “objective documentation” of the lives of real fat people. The Whale treats Charlie quite similarly to how My 600-lb Life treats its subjects, making a point to emphasize the parts of him that are supposedly disgusting and to show him eating large amounts of food throughout the play/film. Charlie is treated as a spectacle. Charlie taunts Elder Thomas (a Mormon missionary who visits Charlie throughout the story) with details about his body, including mentions of “mold,” “sores,” and “ulcers.” (45) One of the several times Liz brings him food, Charlie starts to choke while eating and Liz uses her entire body to dislodge the food and save him. The film also features a particularly upsetting scene of Charlie, in an emotional breakdown, forcing himself to eat most of the contents of his kitchen. (46) These scenes evoke the same voyeuristic dynamic as much of My 600-lb Life , treating these real bodies as spectacle in order to reinforce the notion that ob*sity is an undesirable and fatal condition. In fact, these moments are not essential to The Whale ’s core narrative but rather crucial to concocting what the playwright and creative team imagine real ob*sity to be. When The Whale ’s creative team considered their lack of personal knowledge of fat embodiment and expressed a desire to hear from lived experience, they established an exclusive relationship with the Ob*sity Action Coalition. The OAC is an ob*sity advocacy group that seeks to “create needed change for those who are living with and/or are affected by the disease of ob*sity.” (47) Brendan Fraser, director Darren Aronofsky, and playwright/screenwriter Hunter all “worked closely” with the OAC, speaking with people through the organization who were themselves “affected by ob*sity.” (48) A feature on the OAC’s website claims that the organization consulted with The Whale ’s team to ensure that the film achieved a “realistic and respectful” representation of “living with severe ob*sity,” rationalizing that these good intentions potentially justify the use of a fat suit instead of casting a fat actor. (49) Throughout the written feature and the two additional videos the OAC published on the collaboration, OAC members praise the film for its accurate portrayal of ob*sity and express their appreciation for the team’s willingness to learn from the organization. (50) For example, in the first of the OAC’s videos on The Whale , an OAC member describes how The Whale ’s team adopted people-first language for advertising the film, at the OAC’s recommendation. (51) Using people-first language means that fat people are referred to as “people living with ob*sity” rather than “ob*se people.” As the OAC explains, people-first language has been used in mental health and disability communities to avoid “labeling an individual with their disease.” (52) The OAC advocates for people-first language to support their goal of humanizing people affected by the disease of ob*sity. The OAC member in the video says: “[Brendan Fraser] is out there talking about people living with ob*sity. That we are not ‘ob*se people,’ that we are not ‘fat people,’ that we are actually ‘people living with the disease of ob*sity.’” (53) In celebrating the results of the collaboration between the OAC and The Whale , the OAC establishes that The Whale affirms the organization’s beliefs on fat. As Tigress Osborn, Executive Director of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA), puts it in her essay on the film, “[t]he OAC legitimizes this movie while this movie legitimizes the OAC.” (54) NAAFA is “the world’s first documented fat acceptance organization” that is “dedicated to protecting the rights and improving the quality of life for fat people.” (55) NAAFA represents those who have become liberated and empowered by their fatness while the OAC’s advocacy is based on the premise of fatness as a disease. Osborn explains that the fat liberation community believes the concept of ob*sity “has created tremendous harm to fat people in the name of ‘helping’ [them].” (56) By choosing to conduct research solely through an organization that treats fatness as a disease, The Whale ’s team assured that their understanding of superfat/infinifat identity would only be known through the lens of ob*sity. Osborn observes that in the ten years that Aronofsky and Hunter worked on developing the stage play into a film, there has been “no mention of ever consulting with any fat people other than those at the OAC.” (57) Notably, she asserts that to ignore NAAFA and the work of the fat liberation community in those ten years is to selectively engage with fat people “who wouldn’t protest [the film’s] fat suit and who wouldn’t interrupt [the film’s] plan to make the kind of tragedy the [Oscar’s] Academy loves to award.” (58) Osborn’s essay criticizes The Whale ’s unwillingness to engage with fatness on the terms of the fat liberation community. While the film adaptation of The Whale did not exclude all fat bodies, the team made a deliberate choice in working with an organization that would support a narrative of ob*sity. And though (specific) fat bodies were deemed important enough to consult with, they were not ultimately put on the screen. Ob*sity Drag as Fat Embodiment Fat suits have traditionally been used for comedy, making The Whale unique in its use of fabricated fatness for a drama. Fat suits in television and cinema history have often been used for comedic effect, making fat people the target of endless ridicule, including: Courtney Cox as “Fat Monica” in the 90s sitcom Friends ; Gwyneth Paltrow in Shallow Hal (2001); and Eddie Murphy in The Nutty Professor (1996). (59) Hunter and the additional members of The Whale ’s creative team sought to create a representation of fatness that did not rely on anti-fat comedy, a primary reason for their collaboration with the OAC. Hunter recognizes the past use of fat suits in film wherein “thin actors are put into entirely unrealistic bodysuits in order to be the subject of derision or the butt of a joke.” (60) The OAC’s feature on The Whale acknowledges the history of fat prosthetics used to “demean or ridicule people with ob*sity,” indicating that the OAC “would not have participated” in The Whale if the film was using prosthetics for the sake of anti-fat comedy. (61) However, despite the dramatic nature of its story—and perhaps even because of the dramatic nature of its story— The Whale still plays into anti-fat societal norms about how fat people are to be treated according to the War on Ob*sity mentality. Susan Bordo describes in Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (2003) that society does not permit fat people to inhabit a non-normative body size and be happy in their fat bodies. Only fat people “who are willing to present themselves as pitiable, in pain, and conscious of their own unattractiveness” are able to earn “sympathy and concern.” (62) Bordo adds that fat people’s pain is often demonstrated by sharing details about “intimate physical difficulties, orgies of self-hate, or descriptions of gross consumption of food.” (63) The Whale serves this function. In their dramatic tone, both the play and film establish the conditions in which audiences can pity Charlie and feel sympathy for his circumstances as a fat person. They include scenarios of Charlie struggling to move around his home on his own, expressing deep self-hatred, and multiple instances of eating large amounts of food, enacting each facet of Bordo’s argument. In this way, The Whale still affirms anti-fat societal beliefs even though it is not using a fat suit for comedic effect. Charlie is in great physical and emotional pain throughout the entire narrative, just how the American audience needs him to be to earn their attention and sympathy. Even though Charlie is not made the butt of fat jokes, his tragic narrative ensures that he is an acceptable, appropriately pitiable fat subject. This dynamic of sympathy is made more disturbing with the use of a fat suit to represent fatness; Charlie is a fabricated construction of the perfect fat subject for audiences to practice sympathy on. The way individuals from the film and theatre industries speak about these prosthetics in The Whale reveal further anti-fat sentiments, particularly from The Whale ’s playwright and performers. Throughout several interviews on the film, as well as his guest column for The Hollywood Reporter , playwright/screenwriter Samuel D. Hunter touches on his own relationship to fatness (and to Charlie). Hunter recalls growing up as an “ob*se child” and “self-medicat[ing]” his depression with food as an adult. (64) He describes that his “weight range is in a more acceptable place now”; he wears a size “Large Tal[l]” whereas he used to wear a size “XXL.” (65) Hunter explains that when he first began writing The Whale , he “didn’t think [he] was writing a story about a man who was, among other things, living with ob*sity.” (66) But, Hunter says, “somehow making the main character hugely ob*se allowed [him] to drop in emotionally as [he] wrote [Charlie],” calling Charlie “sort of the fun-house mirror version of [himself].” (67) Hunter implies that the larger Charlie’s character became, the more he was able to feel an emotional connection to him. While Hunter has probably dealt with anti-fat stigma in his life, referring to the fategories spectrum reveals that his own experience is undoubtedly different in many ways from someone in a superfat/infinifat body. Furthermore, Hunter’s experience adheres to the anti-fat dynamic that Bordo details. Hunter’s sense of empathy grew when he decided that Charlie was ob*se and the tragedy of Charlie’s life became attributed to his fatness. Hunter established a dynamic in which he could feel empathy and concern for his character through the picture of ob*sity he was creating. Hunter’s joke that Charlie’s body is a fun-house mirror version of his own, a comical distortion because of its size, does not reflect an empathy for larger bodies. Hunter uses Charlie’s superfat/infinifat body as a vessel for exploring his own emotions connected to fatness. He created a narrative of fat that has likely never been performed by a superfat/infinifat person and that conforms to harmful conceptions of fatness as ob*sity. In an interview, Hunter states that “this is not a story about everybody who grapples with ob*sity” and that it represents “how it presented in [himself].” (68) But for some, especially for the OAC members who consulted on the film, The Whale quickly became a representation of more than Hunter’s relationship to fatness. By gaining authority from the OAC, the film became responsible for representing the supposed lives of many fat people. From the beginning of The Whale ’s production history, fat suits were used to perform this story. The fat suit created for the 2012 Playwrights Horizons production of The Whale was built with “foam, padding, weighted beads and spandex” and weighed around fifty pounds. (69) In his New York Times review, Charles Isherwood called the suit “one of the biggest fat suits ever constructed for the theater.” (70) Shuler Hensley, who played Charlie in this production, describes thinking about how “unbelievably gross” he felt he looked in the fat suit. (71) He adds that in order to better connect with his character, he then had to ask himself, “What if I was in that situation? How much guilt would I have that I’m putting not only myself through this, but my family?” (72) In other words, Hensley admitted to his own internalized anti-fatness while playing this fat character and was able to connect with Charlie through pitying him and imagining him in pain, just as Bordo explains. He was disgusted by seeing his body as larger than it really is, even though the additional weight was not real flesh. Hensley also claims that because it was so labor-intensive to wear the fat suit for the role he “lost a good 15 pounds” playing Charlie, jokingly recommending wearing a fat suit as a “weight-loss strategy.” (73) While the statement was meant to be humorous, Hensley indicates that his normative body actually became more slender through portraying fatness, paradoxically describing how his body better conformed to societal body norms through performing a fabricated fatness. The production was well-regarded and was nominated for several awards, winning the 2013 Drama Desk Special Award for Significant Contribution to Theatre and the 2013 Lortel for Outstanding Play, among others. Hensley in particular was recognized for his portrayal of Charlie, winning the 2013 Lortel Award for Outstanding Lead Actor and the 2013 Obie Award in Performance. The production was also awarded the 2013 Lortel for Outstanding Costume design: another award for a fat suit in The Whale ’s production history. (74) The film went through even greater lengths to turn Brendan Fraser into Charlie, aiming to be as real as possible without actually putting a superfat/infinifat person on the big screen. It took upwards of seven hours to get Fraser into full costume, makeup, and prosthetics, complete with skin airbrushing and hand-punched hair. (75) Due to the extremity of this transformation, an air conditioning system within the costume had to be fashioned to keep Fraser cool enough to perform through long days on the film set. (76) Fraser describes the fat suit as feeling like a “straight jacket” while also claiming that the suit was so “beautiful” and “arresting” that it belonged in a museum. 77 In addition to these extensive efforts, the film also relied on CGI, expanding the limits of how ob*sity drag can operate. Fraser explains that the final ensemble was meant to “obey the laws of physics and gravity, because we don’t see that in films.” 78 Fraser both admits that the film industry has been unwilling to put real fat bodies in movies and suggests that digitally enhanced representations of ob*sity are a valid answer to that lack of representation. The fat suits used over the course of the production history of The Whale , and especially in the film adaptation, have been treated by The Whale ’s creators and the OAC as a legitimate substitute for fat bodies. The actors who wear the fat suits appear to feel as though they have achieved some level of genuine understanding about what it is like to be superfat/infinifat, and, in the case of both the film adaption and the 2012 Off-Broadway production, are celebrated with awards for their innovation and dedication. While Fraser is not superfat/infinifat, much attention has been paid to his body throughout his career. In the 1990s, Fraser was considered a “heartthrob,” starring in films such as George of the Jungle (1997) where he showed off his hyperfit physique. (79) On an episode of the Variety talk show Actors on Actors , Fraser discusses his career with fellow actor Adam Sandler. Having worked together on the 1994 film Airheads , Sandler recounts watching Fraser go on to “get very jacked for George of the Jungle .” (80) “I was disappointed how good you looked in that,” Sandler jests, “You made us feel bad about ourselves.” (81) Here, Sandler expresses (though in a humorous tone) that he felt betrayed by Fraser’s body transformation and new heartthrob status. Fraser was celebrated for achieving a particularly conventionally attractive and muscular body, entering a new realm of celebrity. Though, this achievement did not come without sacrifice. Fraser describes being “starved of carbohydrates” to the point of experiencing memory loss while working on George of the Jungle in order to maintain his physique. (82) Fraser would eventually undergo several surgeries to address injuries he sustained while performing stunts for films such as The Mummy (1999) and The Mummy Returns (2001), pushing his body beyond its limits for the sake of his acting career. Fraser’s heartthrob status ultimately came at the cost of overworking and harming his body, negatively impacting his well-being for years after the fact. Despite continuing to act in film and television consistently through the 2000s and 2010s, Fraser seemed to fall into the periphery of the public eye. A 2018 GQ feature by Zach Baron titled “What Ever Happened to Brendan Fraser?” acknowledged Fraser’s retreat from mainstream fame and reignited public interest in Fraser and his career. (83) Guy Webster, in a 2021 Kill Your Darlings article, notes that the new attention Fraser was receiving also reignited a “weird, though wholly unsurprising, preoccupation with [Fraser’s] body.” (84) In the GQ feature, Baron describes Fraser’s appearance, detailing the stubble on his “once mighty chin” and how his shirt “draped indifferently over the once mighty body.” (85) Webster was struck by Baron’s word choice, claiming Baron “focus[ed] this shared memory on Fraser’s body in a way that emphasises what has been lost.” (86) Fraser’s failure to conform to the Hollywood body ideals he once exemplified inevitably became a talking point around his “comeback.” Webster reports social media posts comparing images of Fraser’s current body with images from George of the Jungle “with unoriginal captions like ‘oh god, what happened?’” (87) Fraser’s body has inevitably and understandably changed since the 90s, due to (among other factors) his injuries, aging, and no longer starving himself to maintain his hyperfit figure. And this change—much like his first transformation—could not go without comment from the media. Moreover, Fraser intentionally gained weight in preparation for The Whale , a further bodily transgression as he entered proximity to Charlie’s fatness. While Fraser explains that his “weight has been all over the map,” he is still significantly smaller than Charlie is intended to be, even after gaining weight for the role. (88) In her essay on the film, Tigress Osborn calls Fraser “Hollywood fat,” recognizing that while he is “larger now than he was in his 1990s heartthrob heyday,” he is still “several hundred pounds smaller” than Charlie. (89) Fraser admitted that his weight gain did not result in him becoming Charlie’s size and, thus, he wore a fat suit; his body and the fat suit “worked together” to become Charlie, Fraser describes. (90) Fraser has faced anti-fatness for his “Hollywood fat” body, but he does not have the embodied experience of the anti-fatness that superfat/infinifat people face. If Fraser’s weight gain was part of his attempt to gain a better understanding of fat embodiment, earning some sense of authority to represent fat people, this blatantly disregards the nuance of experiences across different sizes that the fategories spectrum signifies. This conflation mirrors Hunter’s failure to acknowledge important differences along the fategories spectrum. Yet, Fraser’s performance as Charlie has been treated as a genuine and respectful representation of superfat/infinifat lives, and Fraser has been rewarded for his dedication. (91) While Osborn admits that Frazer “ooze[d] good intention” throughout his press tour, conveying that he “felt totally committed to getting this right,” his performance as Charlie did not challenge harmful, normative ideas about fatness. (92) This was still a performance of ob*sity drag. Queer/ed Fat Timelines In the article “Tempo-rarily Fat: A Queer Exploration of Fat Time,” authors Jami McFarland, Vanessa Slothouber, and Allison Taylor consider how fat bodies are “queer/ed” by their failure to conform to heteronormative timelines. (93) Fat bodies are rendered queer in their relationship to heteronormative time. The authors focus on the heteronormative milestones of “marriage, reproduction/childrearing, and death” to determine how fat bodies are “‘out of time’ in societies governed by heteronormative temporal arrangements.” (94) The authors also explore the “productive potential of positing fat subjects as chrononormative failures.” (95) In The Whale , Charlie’s queer sexual orientation intersects with the queerness of his fat body, specifically as it relates to achievements of successful heteronormativity. His relationship to heteronormative family is further complicated by his fatness. Thinking through fat as a chrononormative failure, Charlie’s fatness becomes the site of further transgressions of the heteronormative majoritarian sphere. The representation of Charlie’s transgressions through ob*sity drag demonstrates for U.S. audiences how queer/ed fatness fails to achieve a normatively successful family life, again adopting the War on Ob*sity mentality to further pathologize fatness. In the play/film, Charlie was initially married to Mary and together they had their daughter Ellie. But then Charlie met Alan, a student in one of Charlie’s classes (though he is described as “only a couple years younger” than Charlie). Alan was “the engaged son of a Mormon bishop” and Charlie “had a wife and kid at home,” but the two “couldn’t stand to be apart.” (96) Alan left his fiancé and Charlie left his family so they could pursue a relationship together. But Alan was unable to cope with his religious trauma while also being in a queer relationship and he ultimately committed suicide. Charlie indicates that his grief over Alan’s death caused him to gain weight. He tells Ellie, “Someone very close to me passed away, and it—had an effect on me.” (97) The last time Ellie saw Charlie was when she was two years old. Though Charlie claims that he “was always big,” Ellie’s response to seeing Charlie again emphasizes how much larger he is now. (98) In their second scene together, Charlie tries to learn more about Ellie’s current life, asking her, “Is your mother—with anyone now?” Ellie replies, “No. Why, you interested?” As Charlie stumbles over his words to respond (“Oh, no, I was just—”), Ellie says, “I’m kidding, Jesus. How could you be with anyone?” (99) While it was the queerness of Charlie’s sexuality that led to the end of his marriage with Mary, breaking up his heteronormative family unit, this exchange with Ellie demonstrates how Charlie’s queer/ed fatness has become a barrier to any potential romantic relationship on a heteronormative timeline. McFarland, Slothouber, and Taylor describe that in contemporary society “fatness and marriage are positioned” as “mutually exclusive”; they write, “In other words, fatties do not marry.” (100) Charlie is now fat, meaning that he does not have the proper slender embodiment required to successfully enter into a new relationship. Even if a potential partnership was not a queer one, it would still violate this societal belief that fat people are not meant to find long-term romantic partnerships. Society also dictates that obedient bodies are to “lose weight for each ‘straight’ time ‘achievement.’” (101) After said achievement, bodies are permitted to “indulge” but “not to the point of getting fat.” (102) The Whale ’s narrative adheres to these societal rules, punishing Charlie for leaving his heteronormative family life and determining that he is not worthy of another relationship in his current body. Furthermore, McFarland, Slothouber, and Taylor cite Francis Ray White to establish that fat people, specifically through the lens of ob*sity, are determined to be “sexual and reproductive failures, or ‘fucking failures.’” (103) In addition to a lack of romantic love, Charlie is not permitted to have a successful sexual life. Early in the plot, the stage directions indicate that Charlie is seen “ masturbating to gay porn .” (104) But he feels a pain in his chest and starts to hyperventilate, unable to continue. This scene insinuates that Charlie’s health conditions related to his fatness make him unable to fulfill his own sexual needs. Later, further establishing Charlie as a “fucking failure,” Ellie says to Elder Thomas, “What’s more surprising? That a gay guy has a daughter, or that someone found his penis?” (105) Charlie’s fatness is also implicated as a reason for his failure as a parent. First, the authors of “Tempo-rarily Fat” state that because ob*sity is “figured within a ‘personal responsibility frame’ as ‘a behavioral problem,’” fat parents are “understood as making the ‘wrong’ choices for both themselves and their children by being fat while parenting.” (106) Second, and of particular concern to the War on Ob*sity mentality, the authors explain that “fat parents are also charged with potentially (in the future) depriving their children of parents” because ob*sity is associated with “premature death.” (107) When Mary comes to Charlie’s apartment to confront him, Charlie expresses that he wants to know Ellie will have a good life after he is gone, especially because he has not been involved in most of her life. Charlie says that Mary “fought [him] pretty hard for full custody,” indicating that Mary (and the court) did not find Charlie to be a fit parent after breaking his heteronormative family unit. (108) Charlie pleads for Mary to not give up on Ellie, for her to be there for Ellie after he dies. Mary responds, “You’ve been eating yourself to death for fifteen years and you’re saying that I gave up on her?” (109) Mary explicitly addresses Charlie’s fatness as the reason he has failed as a father to Ellie. Mary also alludes to Charlie’s impending death which ultimately adheres to the prognosis that fat parents will leave their children in a premature death. The authors of “Tempo-rarily Fat” make clear that they offer this analysis of fat people as chrononormative failures not to “positio[n] these limitations as wholly oppressive” but in order to “conclude that queer/ed fat temporalities offer opportunities for reimagining ways of life and time.” (110) In other words, even as they point out how queer/ed fat bodies do not conform to “straight” temporalities, the authors desire to show the liberatory potentials of fat bodies existing and thriving in their own fat temporality/time. However, The Whale does not allow for Charlie to exist outside of the confines of heteronormative temporalities, or beyond the limits of “no time.” Charlie remains out of time : both out of sync with heteronormative temporality and with no time left in his life. The Whale denies the possibility of fat time by excluding fat bodies in performance and ensuring that Charlie’s character upholds the War on Ob*sity mentality. The Future of Fat From the first production of The Whale , superfat/infinifat performers have never been cast to play Charlie . For the Denver premiere, playwright Hunter expressed that it would not be possible to cast an actual person of Charlie’s size in the show. “Someone in that condition,” he said, “they were not doing eight shows a week.” (111) For the film adaptation, Aronofsky claims that the film’s team briefly considered casting a fat actor. However, Aronofsky also concluded that it would be “impossible” to cast a “real person dealing with [the] issues” that Charlie lives with. (112) Aronofsky was concerned that “an actor with severe ob*sity would struggle with the demands of a grueling production schedule.” (113) “From a health perspective,” he says, “it’s prohibitive.” (114) Aronofsky says both that most superfat/infinifat bodies will inevitably be plagued with fatal health concerns like Charlie and that they would not be able to endure or survive performing the role. Because of both Aronofsky’s and Hunter’s unwillingness to entertain the capabilities of fat performers, The Whale further cemented its legacy of ob*sity drag in the film adaptation. Though, the consideration of a fat performer in the role of Charlie presents an issue for further (and future) consideration: would the anti-fatness of The Whale be mitigated by casting a fat performer? In other words, even with a fat body in the leading role, does this story need to be told at all? In their 2020 HowlRound essay “Towards a Fat Theatre: Reimagining Bodies Onstage,” Jeff Bouthiette describes taking on the role of Charlie in a reading of The Whale on Zoom. Not knowing the play very well before the reading, Bouthiette recounts feeling “hopeful, since it contains one of the few theatrical depictions of someone living in a very large body.” (115) But when they engaged more deeply with the play they “became discouraged,” finding a fat character who was “a relentlessly sad individual in a relentlessly sad story.” (116) Bouthiette concludes: “The fact that this is one of the few examples of characters of this size is heartbreaking.” (117) Bouthiette’s experience with The Whale suggests that the theatre and film industries should be asking not if fat performers can survive the grueling conditions of playing Charlie but if fat performers can endure the conditions of a tragic script like The Whale . Asking fat people to tell this particular story of fatness is to ask fat bodies to perform a narrative of ob*sity. And the War on Ob*sity mentality consistently feeds on the premise of their fat bodies no longer existing at all. In order to support the future of fat in the face of a war against it, and to ensure the survival of fat bodies, both theatre and film industries must give more attention to the fat stories told by fat people. A fat future is one where fat bodies can exist on their own terms, abundantly expanding in fat time beyond the conceptions of no time. Fat futures are not to be determined entirely by bodies that are not fat or bodies that perform fabricated, dehumanizing fatness. The cycle of normalizing and celebrating slender bodies for their temporary proximity to fatness is what must ultimately come to an end. References The other two films nominated for the 2023 Oscar for Best Makeup and Hairstyling that used fat suits were Elvis (Tom Hanks) and The Batman (Colin Farrel). Kelsey Castanon, “The Problem With 3 Oscar-Nominated Films Using Fat Suits,” PopSugar , last modified 13 March 2023, https://www.popsugar.com/beauty/prosthetics-makeup-fat-suits-hollywood-49111321 . “Brendan Fraser & Adam Sandler: Actors on Actors,” posted 6 December 2022, by Variety, YouTube, 29 min., 23 sec., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XpAb11hqy4&t=1092s . Following the lead of fat activists like Tigress Osborn, the current Executive Director of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA), I use an asterisk in the word ob*se/ob*sity throughout to mark the word as an anti-fat slur that the fat liberation community and fat studies field generally denounce. All additions of asterisks are my own, save any reference to Tigress Osborn’s essay on The Whale . Ob*sity as a concept is antithetical to the efforts of all fat liberation activists and fat studies scholars. Fat is not a bad word. For more on this see: Marilyn Wann, “Foreword: Fat Studies: An Invitation to Revolution,” in The Fat Studies Reader , ed. Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay (New York University Press, 2009), ix-xxv. Paul Campos, The Obesity Myth: Why America’s Obsession with Weight is Hazardous to Your Health (Gotham Books, 2004), 83-86. Royce Best, “Making Obesity Fat: Crip Estrangement in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1 ,” Disability Studies Quarterly 39, no. 4 (2019), https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v39i4.7149 . Tracy Tidgwell, May Friedman, Jen Rinaldi, Crystal Kotow, and Emily R.M. Lind, “Introduction to the Special Issue: Fatness and Temporality,” Fat Studies 7, no. 2 (2018): 118, https://doi.org/10.1080/21604851.2017.1375262 . The previous use of “Amercians” and all future references to “America” throughout refer to the United States. Campos, The Obesity Myth , xv-xvi. Campos, xxv. Campos, xvii. Wann, “Foreword: Fat Studies,” xii, xiii. Emma Beckett, “Drugs Like Ozempic Won’t ‘Cure’ Obesity But They Might Make Us More Fatphobic,” The Conversation , last modified 9 April 2024, https://theconversation.com/drugs-like-ozempic-wont-cure-obesity-but-they-might-make-us-more-fat-phobic-219309#:~:text=The%20Ozempic%20buzz%20isn't,who%20live%20in%20larger%20bodies .; Elizabeth Daube, “Are the New Weight Loss Drugs Too Good to Be True?” UCSF Magazine 13, no. 1 (2024), https://magazine.ucsf.edu/weight-loss-drugs-too-good-to-be-true .; Flora Oswald, “Anti-fatness in the Ozempic Era: State of the Landscape and Considerations for Future Research,” Fat Studies 13, no. 2 (2024): 128-134, https://doi.org/10.1080/21604851.2024.2307674 . Tidgwell et al., “Fatness and Temporality,” 115. Tidgwell et al., 115. Tidgwell et al., 115. Tidgwell et al., 115-116. For more on the history of fat suits and prosthetics, as well as the portrayal of disability, in theatre history (in this case, on Broadway) see: Ryan Donovan, Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity (Oxford University Press, 2023). Tobin Siebers, “Disability as Masquerade,” Disability Theory (University of Michigan Press, 2008), 115. Siebers, “Disability as Masquerade,” 116. Amy Gullage, “Fat Monica, Fat Suits, and Friends : Exploring Narratives of Fatness,” Feminist Media Studies 14, no. 2 (2014): 179, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2012.724026 . Gullage, “Fat Monica, Fat Suits, and Friends ” 186. I want to note that even when the performer pre-fat suit would not be considered particularly slender, their own body is still smaller than their body in a fat suit. The fat suit is used to portray a fabricated fatness. Additionally, even small(er) fat people can express anti-fatness towards other fat bodies, especially towards those larger than their own. Donovan, Broadway Bodies , 81. I identify as small fat. Ash Nischuk is credited with the coining of the term “infinifat” and identifies as such. Ash Nischuk, “Beyond Superfat: Rethinking the Farthest End of the Fat Spectrum,” The Fat Lip , last modified 20 December 2016, http://thefatlip.com/2016/12/20/beyond-superfat-rethinking-the-farthest-end-of-the-fat-spectrum/ .; Linda Gerhardt, “Fategories: Understanding the Fat Spectrum,” Fluffy Kitten Party, last modified 1 June 2021, https://fluffykittenparty.com/2021/06/01/fategories-understanding-smallfat-fragility-the-fat-spectrum/ .; Cherry Midnight and Max Airborne, “Community Origins of the Term ‘Superfat,’” Medium , last modified 2 December 2020, https://cherrymax.medium.com/community-origins-of-the-term-superfat-9e98e1b0f201 . Though, it is important to note that weight is used to determine Charlie’s size, and the same weight can look extremely different from body to body. The world premiere production of The Whale was presented by the Denver Center Theatre Company at the Ricketson Theater in Denver, Colorado, in early 2012. Tom Alan Robbins played the role of Charlie and, though he was described as “a bit overweight” himself, he wore a fat suit. Michael Mulhern, “BWW Reviews: Denver Center’s The Whale—A Heavy, Superb Drama,” Broadway World , last modified 26 January 2012, https://www.broadwayworld.com/denver/article/BWW-Reviews-Denver-Centers-THE-WHALE-a-Heavy-Superb-Drama-20120126 .; Ray Mark Rinaldi, “Theater Review: ‘The Whale’ a Drama of Gigantic Proportions,” The Denver Post , last modified 3 May 2016, https://www.denverpost.com/2012/01/23/theater-review-the-whale-a-drama-of-gigantic-proportions-2/ .; Ray Mark Rinaldi, “‘Whale’ Promises to be a Whopper of a Family Drama,” The Denver Post , last modified 1 May 2016, https://www.denverpost.com/2012/01/05/whale-promises-to-be-a-whopper-of-a-family-drama/ . “The Whale Charlie Stage Play,” Google Image Search, accessed 26 October 2025, https://www.google.com/search?q=the+whale+charlie+stage+play&sca_esv=8e61a810906f0d86&rlz=1C1UEAD_enUS1113US1113&udm=2&biw=1440&bih=731&sxsrf=AE3TifN_h16QQMJ1UU9kzRTqtHZVJw1fpA%3A1761529337469&ei=-c3-aJavHMukiLMPu6jW-QE&ved=0ahUKEwjWj6-ToMOQAxVLEmIAHTuUNR8Q4dUDCBI&uact=5&oq=the+whale+charlie+stage+play&gs_lp=Egtnd3Mtd2l6LWltZyIcdGhlIHdoYWxlIGNoYXJsaWUgc3RhZ2UgcGxheUifI1AAWMUhcAV4AJABAZgBuAGgAYIZqgEFMjEuMTG4AQPIAQD4AQGYAhagAooQqAIKwgIKECMYJxjJAhjqAsICBxAjGCcYyQLCAgoQABiABBhDGIoFwgILEAAYgAQYsQMYgwHCAg4QABiABBixAxiDARiKBcICCBAAGIAEGLEDwgINEAAYgAQYsQMYQxiKBcICBRAAGIAEwgIEEAAYHsICBhAAGAgYHpgDCpIHBTExLjExoAftcrIHBDguMTG4B_APwgcIMC4xLjE3LjTIB4MB&sclient=gws-wiz-img . This is not intended to discount or invalidate the experience of those who are fat and do have a binge eating disorder, but the stereotype is often used as a way to discriminate against fat people rather than sympathize with their experience. Samuel D. Hunter, The Whale and A Bright New Boise (Theatre Communications Group, 2014), 85. All of the quotes from The Whale throughout are from the playscript; though, the playscript and film script are quite similar. Hunter, The Whale , 29. Hunter, The Whale , 99. Hunter, The Whale , 100. Darren Aronofsky, director, The Whale , A24, 2022, 1 hr., 57 min., https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/amzn1.dv.gti.fcfefde7-0072-43a7-90ca-6f14e50fcfd7?autoplay=0&ref_=atv_cf_strg_wb , 1:50:00. Hunter, The Whale , 6. May Friedman, Fat Studies: The Basics (Routledge, 2025), 89. “Super sized” is another term that can be used to describe superfat or infinifat bodies; though, Midnight and Airborne explain that those who created the term “superfat” were replacing the use of “supersized” for themselves. See: Midnight and Airborne, “Community Origins of the Term ‘Superfat.’” Aubrey Gordon, What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat (Beacon Press, 2020), 124. Melissa Zimdars, “Spectacle, Sympathy, and the Medicalized Disease of ‘Obesity,’” Watching Our Weights: Contradictions of Televising Fatness in the “Obesity Epidemic” (Rutgers University Press, 2019), 111. Zimdars, “Spectacle, Sympathy, and the Medicalized Disease of ‘Obesity,’” 115. Nischuk has both a blog and a podcast titled “The Fat Lip.” Ash Nischuk, “Our 600 Pound Lives,” The Fat Lip , last modified 21 March 2020, http://thefatlip.com/2020/03/21/our-600-pound-lives/ . Nischuk, “Our 600 Pound Lives.” Nischuk, “Our 600 Pound Lives.” Nischuk, “Our 600 Pound Lives.” Nischuk, “Our 600 Pound Lives.” Zimdars, 103-104. Gordon, What We Don’t Talk About , 123-124. Hunter, The Whale , 90. Aronofsky, The Whale , 1:32:53. “Why the OAC Exists,” Obesity Action Coalition, accessed 30 October 2025, https://www.obesityaction.org/about/purpose/who-we-are/ . Beatrice Verhoeven, “‘The Whale’ Producer on Criticism of the Film: ‘We Just Want to Be Honest and Truthful,’” The Hollywood Reporter , last modified 10 February 2023, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/the-whale-producer-film-criticism-brendan-fraser-1235319749/ . “Obesity Action Coalition and ‘The Whale,’” Obesity Action Coalition, last modified 8 December 2022, https://www.obesityaction.org/the-whale/ . “An Honest Conversation About ‘The Whale’: Fresh Perspectives,” video, posted 11 January 2023, by Obesity Action Coalition, YouTube, 17 min., 43 sec., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXcik2xfPOM .; “The Whale: Brendan Fraser Talks with OAC,” video, posted 17 February 2023, by Obesity Action Coalition, YouTube, 12 min., 16 sec., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ka4jLFrWVc . Obesity Action Coalition,“An Honest Conversation,” 12:18. “People-First Language,” Obesity Action Coalition, last accessed 30 October 2025, https://www.obesityaction.org/action-through-advocacy/weight-bias/people-first-language/ . Obesity Action Coalition, “An Honest Conversation,” 12:28. It is worth acknowledging here that “fat” is not a comfortable word for all people with larger bodies; the word fat can still also be used to cause harm. Tigress Osborn, “Hollywood’s Anti-Fatness Extends Beyond The Whale,” NAAFA, last modified 20 March 2023, https://naafa.org/newsletter-articles/hollywoods-anti-fatness-extends-beyond-the-whale . “About Us,” NAAFA, accessed 30 October 2025, https://naafa.org/aboutus . Osborn, “Hollywood’s Anti-Fatness.” Osborn, “Hollywood’s Anti-Fatness.” Osborn, “Hollywood’s Anti-Fatness.” Gullage, “Fat Monica, Fat Suits, and Friends .”; Niall Richardson, “‘But It’s Only a Fat Suit!’: Representing ‘Fake’ Fat in Popular Culture,” Transgressive Bodies: Representations in Film and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2010).; Katharina R. Mendoza, “Seeing Through the Layers: Fat Suits and Thin Bodies in The Nutty Professor and Shallow Hal ,” in The Fat Studies Reader, ed. Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay (New York University Press, 2009). Samuel D. Hunter, “Guest Column: ‘The Whale’ Writer Samuel D. Hunter Says the Film is an Invitation to Experience Humanity,” The Hollywood Reporter , last modified 7 December 2022, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/the-whale-writer-guest-column-samuel-d-hunter-1235276194/ . Obesity Action Coalition, “Obesity Action Coalition and ‘The Whale.’” Susan Bordo, “Reading the Slender Body,” Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body , 10th Anniversary Edition (University of California Press, 2003), 204. Bordo, “Reading the Slender Body,” 204. Scott Heller, “Characters Who Take Up More Than Their Share of Room in the Family,” New York Times , last modified 12 December 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/13/books/obesity-with-jami-attenberg-and-samuel-d-hunter.html .; Hunter, “Guest Column.” Heller, “Characters Who Take Up.” Hunter, “Guest Column.” Note the use of people-first language here. Heller, “Characters Who Take Up.” Brent Lang, “Brendan Fraser’s Triumphant Comeback: How Playing a 600-Pound Gay Man in ‘The Whale’ Resurrected His Career,” Variety , last modified 12 October 2022, https://variety.com/2022/film/features/brendan-fraser-the-whale-career-1235399057/ . Barbara Hoffman, “Broadway Goes Big,” New York Post , last modified 4 November 2012, https://nypost.com/2012/11/04/broadway-goes-big/ . Charles Isherwood, “The Enormity of a Man’s Problems, and Vice Versa,” New York Times , last modified 5 November 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/06/theater/reviews/shuler-hensley-in-the-whale-by-samuel-d-hunter.html . Rosalind Bentley, “Looking Past Heft, Finding Humanity: In ‘The Whale,’ Local Actor and Director Explore the Shrinking Orbit of a Large Man,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution , 24 November 2012, Gale General OneFile. Bentley, “Looking Past Heft.” Hoffman, “Broadway Goes Big.” American Theatre Editors, “20 Questions for Shuler Hensley,” American Theatre Magazine 30, no. 6 (2013): 88.; Gordon Cox, “Off Broadway’s Lortel Awards Like ‘Piano Lesson,’ ‘Whale,’” Variety , last modified 6 May 2013, https://variety.com/2013/legit/news/off-broadways-lortel-awards-like-piano-lesson-whale-1200464475/ .; “The Whale,” Concord Theatricals, accessed 28 October 2025, https://www.concordtheatricals.com/p/12562/the-whale .; Andrew Gans, “Nominees Announced for 79th Annual Drama League Awards,” Playbill , last modified 23 April 2013, https://playbill.com/article/nominees-announced-for-79th-annual-drama-league-awards-com-204687 . Liam Kelly, “Brendan Fraser’s Seven-Hour Transformation for The Whale,” The Times , last modified 5 March 2023, https://www.thetimes.com/culture/film/article/brendan-frasers-seven-hour-transformation-for-the-whale-7wtx7t20c . David Canfield, “Inside Brendan Fraser’s The Whale Transformation: ‘I Wanted to Disappear,’” Vanity Fair , last modified 31 August 2022, https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/08/awards-insider-the-whale-brendan-fraser-darren-aronofsky-exclusive . Kelly, “Brendan Fraser’s Seven-Hour Transformation.” Canfield, “Inside Brendan Fraser’s The Whale Transformation.” Variety, “Brendan Fraser & Adam Sandler: Actors on Actors,” 16:07. Kelly, “Brendan Fraser’s Seven-Hour Transformation.” Variety, “Brendan Fraser & Adam Sandler: Actors on Actors,” 7:15. Variety, “Brendan Fraser & Adam Sandler: Actors on Actors,” 7:20, 7:37. Variety, “Brendan Fraser & Adam Sandler: Actors on Actors,” 7:47. Zach Baron, “What Ever Happened to Brendan Fraser?” GQ , last modified 22 February 2018, https://www.gq.com/story/what-ever-happened-to-brendan-fraser . This feature was also the first time Fraser had spoken publicly about his sexual assault allegations against former Hollywood Foreign Press Association president Philip Berk, another factor of Fraser’s career that most likely impacted his relevancy in the industry between the 1990s and the 2020s. Guy Webster, “An Ode to Brendan Fraser and Body Neutrality,” Kill Your Darlings, last modified 8 November 2021, https://www.killyourdarlings.com.au/article/an-ode-to-brendan-fraser-and-body-neutrality/ . Baron, “What Ever Happened.” Webster, “An Ode to Brendan Fraser.” Webster, “An Ode to Brendan Fraser.” Variety, “Brendan Fraser & Adam Sandler: Actors on Actors,” 17:13. Osborn, “Hollywood’s Anti-Fatness.” Variety, “Brendan Fraser & Adam Sandler: Actors on Actors,” 17:26. It was predicted that Fraser was bound to win the Oscar for Best Actor after receiving a six-minute standing ovation at the world-premiere screening of The Whale . Ramin Setoodeh, Zack Sharf, and Elsa Keslassy, “Brendan Fraser Breaks Down in Tears as ‘The Whale’ Gets Huge 6-Minute Standing Ovation in Venice,” Variety , last modified 4 September 2022, https://variety.com/2022/film/news/brendan-fraser-cries-the-whale-venice-standing-ovation-1235337836/ . Osborn, “Hollywood’s Anti-Fatness.” Jami McFarland, Vanessa Slothouber, and Allison Taylor, “Tempo-rarily Fat: A Queer Exploration of Fat Time,” Fat Studies 7, no. 2 (2017): 2, https://doi.org/10.1080/21604851.2017.1376275 . McFarland et al., 2, 3. McFarland et al., 9. Hunter, The Whale , 48-49. Hunter, The Whale , 40. Reality shows centered on weight loss (such as My 600-lb Life and The Biggest Loser ) often exploit this trope of fatness being connected to grief or past trauma, requiring participants to divulge their pain for the audience. See: Friedman, Fat Studies , 88. Hunter, The Whale , 25. Hunter, The Whale , 40. McFarland et al., 3. McFarland et al., 2. McFarland et al., 2. McFarland et al., 6. Hunter, The Whale , 11. Hunter, The Whale , 42. McFarland et al., 6-7. McFarland et al., 7. Hunter, The Whale , 80. Hunter, The Whale , 85. McFarland et al., 3. Rinaldi, “Whopper of a Family Drama.” Lang, “Brendan Fraser’s Triumphant Comeback.” Lang, “Brendan Fraser’s Triumphant Comeback.” Lang, “Brendan Fraser’s Triumphant Comeback.” Jeff Bouthiette, “Towards a Fat Theatre: Reimaging Bodies Onstage,” HowlRound Theatre Commons, last modified 26 October 2020, https://howlround.com/towards-fat-theatre . Bouthiette, “Towards a Fat Theatre.” Bouthiette, “Towards a Fat Theatre.” Works Cited “About Us.” NAAFA. Accessed 30 October 2025. https://naafa.org/aboutus . American Theatre Editors. “20 Questions for Shuler Hensley.” American Theatre Magazine 30, no. 6 (2013): 88. “An Honest Conversation About ‘The Whale’: Fresh Perspectives.” Video. Posted 11 January 2023, by Obesity Action Coalition. YouTube. 17 min., 43 sec. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXcik2xfPOM . Aronofsky, Darren, director. The Whale . A24. 2022. 1 hr., 57 min. https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/amzn1.dv.gti.fcfefde7-0072-43a7-90ca-6f14e50fcfd7?autoplay=0&ref_=atv_cf_strg_wb . Baron, Zach. “What Ever Happened to Brendan Fraser?” GQ . Last modified 22 February 2018. https://www.gq.com/story/what-ever-happened-to-brendan-fraser . Beckett, Emma. “Drugs Like Ozempic Won’t ‘Cure’ Obesity But They Might Make Us More Fatphobic.” The Conversation . Last modified 9 April 2024. https://theconversation.com/drugs-like-ozempic-wont-cure-obesity-but-they-might-make-us-more-fat-phobic-219309#:~:text=The%20Ozempic%20buzz%20isn't,who%20live%20in%20larger%20bodies . Bentley, Rosalind. “Looking Past Heft, Finding Humanity: In ‘The Whale,’ Local Actor and Director Explore the Shrinking Orbit of a Large Man.” Atlanta Journal-Constitution . 24 November 2012. Gale General OneFile. Best, Royce. “Making Obesity Fat: Crip Estrangement in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1 .” Disability Studies Quarterly 39, no. 4 (2019). https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v39i4.7149 . Bordo, Susan. “Reading the Slender Body.” Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body , 10th Anniversary Edition. University of California Press, 2003. Bouthiette, Jeff. “Towards a Fat Theatre: Reimaging Bodies Onstage.” HowlRound Theatre Commons. Last modified 26 October 2020. https://howlround.com/towards-fat-theatre . “Brendan Fraser & Adam Sandler: “Actors on Actors.” Posted 6 December 2022. By Variety, YouTube. 29 min., 23 sec. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XpAb11hqy4&t=1092s . Campos, Paul. The Obesity Myth: Why America’s Obsession with Weight is Hazardous to Your Health . Gotham Books, 2004. Canfield, David. “Inside Brendan Fraser’s The Whale Transformation: ‘I Wanted to Disappear.’” Vanity Fair . Last modified 31 August 2022. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/08/awards-insider-the-whale-brendan-fraser-darren-aronofsky-exclusive . Castanon, Kelsey. “The Problem With 3 Oscar-Nominated Films Using Fat Suits.” PopSugar . Last modified 13 March 2023. https://www.popsugar.com/beauty/prosthetics-makeup-fat-suits-hollywood-49111321 . Cox, Gordon. “Off Broadway’s Lortel Awards Like ‘Piano Lesson,’ ‘Whale.’” Variety. Last modified 6 May 2013. https://variety.com/2013/legit/news/off-broadways-lortel-awards-like-piano-lesson-whale-1200464475/ . Daube, Elizabeth. “Are the New Weight Loss Drugs Too Good to Be True?” UCSF Magazine 13, no. 1 (2024). https://magazine.ucsf.edu/weight-loss-drugs-too-good-to-be-true . Donovan, Ryan. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity . Oxford University Press, 2023. Friedman, May. Fat Studies: The Basics . Routledge, 2025. Gans, Andrew. “Nominees Announced for 79th Annual Drama League Awards.” Playbill . Last modified 23 April 2013. https://playbill.com/article/nominees-announced-for-79th-annual-drama-league-awards-com-204687 . Gerhardt, Linda. “Fategories: Understanding the Fat Spectrum.” Fluffy Kitten Party . Last modified 1 June 2021. https://fluffykittenparty.com/2021/06/01/fategories-understanding-smallfat-fragility-the-fat-spectrum/ . Gordon, Aubrey. What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat. Beacon Press, 2020. Gullage, Amy. “Fat Monica, Fat Suits, and Friends : Exploring Narratives of Fatness.” Feminist Media Studies 14, no. 2 (2014): 178-189. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2012.724026 . Heller, Scott. “Characters Who Take Up More Than Their Share of Room in the Family.” New York Times . Last modified 12 December 2012. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/13/books/obesity-with-jami-attenberg-and-samuel-d-hunter.html . Hoffman, Barbara. “Broadway Goes Big.” New York Post . Last modified 4 November 2012. https://nypost.com/2012/11/04/broadway-goes-big/ . Hunter, Samuel D. “Guest Column: ‘The Whale’ Writer Samuel D. Hunter Says the Film is an Invitation to Experience Humanity. The Hollywood Reporter . Last modified 7 December 2022. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/the-whale-writer-guest-column-samuel-d-hunter-1235276194/ . Hunter, Samuel D. The Whale and A Bright New Boise. Theatre Communications Group, 2014. Isherwood, Charles. “The Enormity of a Man’s Problems, and Vice Versa.” New York Times . Last modified 5 November 2012. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/06/theater/reviews/shuler-hensley-in-the-whale-by-samuel-d-hunter.html . Kelly, Liam. “Brendan Fraser’s Seven-Hour Transformation for The Whale.” The Times . Last modified 5 March 2023. https://www.thetimes.com/culture/film/article/brendan-frasers-seven-hour-transformation-for-the-whale-7wtx7t20c . Lang, Brent. “Brendan Fraser’s Triumphant Comeback: How Playing a 600-Pound Gay Man in ‘The Whale’ Resurrected His Career.” Variety . Last modified 12 October 2022. https://variety.com/2022/film/features/brendan-fraser-the-whale-career-1235399057/ . McFarland, Jami, Vanessa Slothouber, and Allison Taylor. “Tempo-rarily Fat: A Queer Exploration of Fat Time.” Fat Studies 7, no. 2 (2017): 135-146. https://doi.org/10.1080/21604851.2017.1376275 . Midnight, Cherry, and Max Airborne. “Community Origins of the Term ‘Superfat.’” Medium . Last modified 2 December 2020. http://thefatlip.com/2016/12/20/beyond-superfat-rethinking-the-farthest-end-of-the-fat-spectrum/ . Mendoza, Katharina R. “Seeing Through the Layers: Fat Suits and Thin Bodies in The Nutty Professor and Shallow Hal.” In The Fat Studies Reader , edited by Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay. New York University Press, 2009. Mulhern, Michael. “BWW Reviews: Denver Center’s The Whale —A Heavy, Superb Drama.” Broadway World. Last modified 26 January 2012. https://www.broadwayworld.com/denver/article/BWW-Reviews-Denver-Centers-THE-WHALE-a-Heavy-Superb-Drama-20120126 . Nischuk, Ash. “Beyond Superfat: Rethinking the Farthest End of the Fat Spectrum.” The Fat Lip . Last modified 20 December 2016. http://thefatlip.com/2016/12/20/beyond-superfat-rethinking-the-farthest-end-of-the-fat-spectrum/ . Nischuk, Ash. “Our 600 Pound Lives.” The Fat Lip . Last modified 21 March 2020. http://thefatlip.com/2020/03/21/our-600-pound-lives/ . Obesity Action Coalition. “Obesity Action Coalition and ‘The Whale.’” Last modified 8 December 2022. https://www.obesityaction.org/the-whale/ . Obesity Action Coalition. “People-First Language.” Accessed 30 October 2025. https://www.obesityaction.org/action-through-advocacy/weight-bias/people-first-language/ . Obesity Action Coalition. “Why the OAC Exists.” Accessed 30 October 2025. https://www.obesityaction.org/about/purpose/who-we-are/ . Osborn, Tigress. “Hollywood’s Anti-Fatness Extends Beyond The Whale.” NAAFA. Last modified 20 March 2023. https://naafa.org/newsletter-articles/hollywoods-anti-fatness-extends-beyond-the-whale . Oswald, Flora. “Anti-fatness in the Ozempic Era: State of the Landscape and Considerations for Future Research.” Fat Studies 13, no. 2 (2024): 128-134. https://doi.org/10.1080/21604851.2024.2307674 . Richardson, Niall. “‘But It’s Only a Fat Suit!’: Representing ‘Fake’ Fat in Popular Culture.” Transgressive Bodies: Representations in Film and Popular Culture. Routledge, 2010. Rinaldi, Ray Mark. “Theater Review: ‘The Whale’ a Drama of Gigantic Proportions.” The Denver Post . Last modified 3 May 2016. https://www.denverpost.com/2012/01/23/theater-review-the-whale-a-drama-of-gigantic-proportions-2/ . Rinaldi, Ray Mark. “‘Whale’ Promises to be a Whopper of a Family Drama.” The Denver Post . Last modified 1 May 2016. https://www.denverpost.com/2012/01/05/whale-promises-to-be-a-whopper-of-a-family-drama/ . Setoodeh, Ramin, Zack Sharf, and Elsa Keslassy. “Brendan Fraser Breaks Down in Tears as ‘The Whale’ Gets Huge 6-Minute Standing Ovation in Venice.” Variety Last modified 4 September 2022. https://variety.com/2022/film/news/brendan-fraser-cries-the-whale-venice-standing-ovation-1235337836/ . Siebers, Tobin. “Disability as Masquerade.” Disability Theory . University of Michigan Press, 2008. “The Whale.” Concord Theatricals. Accessed 28 October 2025. https://www.concordtheatricals.com/p/12562/the-whale . “The Whale: Brendan Fraser Talks with OAC.” Video. Posted 17 February 2023, by Obesity Action Coalition. YouTube. 12 min., 16 sec. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ka4jLFrWVc . “The Whale Charlie Stage Play.” Google Image Search. Accessed 26 October 2025. https://www.google.com/search?q=the+whale+charlie+stage+play&sca_esv=8e61a810906f0d86&rlz=1C1UEAD_enUS1113US1113&udm=2&biw=1440&bih=731&sxsrf=AE3TifN_h16QQMJ1UU9kzRTqtHZVJw1fpA%3A1761529337469&ei=-c3-aJavHMukiLMPu6jW-QE&ved=0ahUKEwjWj6-ToMOQAxVLEmIAHTuUNR8Q4dUDCBI&uact=5&oq=the+whale+charlie+stage+play&gs_lp=Egtnd3Mtd2l6LWltZyIcdGhlIHdoYWxlIGNoYXJsaWUgc3RhZ2UgcGxheUifI1AAWMUhcAV4AJABAZgBuAGgAYIZqgEFMjEuMTG4AQPIAQD4AQGYAhagAooQqAIKwgIKECMYJxjJAhjqAsICBxAjGCcYyQLCAgoQABiABBhDGIoFwgILEAAYgAQYsQMYgwHCAg4QABiABBixAxiDARiKBcICCBAAGIAEGLEDwgINEAAYgAQYsQMYQxiKBcICBRAAGIAEwgIEEAAYHsICBhAAGAgYHpgDCpIHBTExLjExoAftcrIHBDguMTG4B_APwgcIMC4xLjE3LjTIB4MB&sclient=gws-wiz-img . Tidgwell, Tracy, May Friedman, Jen Rinaldi, Crystal Kotow, and Emily R.M. Lind. “Introduction to the Special Issue: Fatness and Temporality.” Fat Studies 7, no. 2 (2018): 115-123. https://doi.org/10.1080/21604851.2017.1375262 . Verhoeven, Beatrice. “‘The Whale’ Producer on Criticism of the Film: ‘We Just Want to Be Honest and Truthful.” The Hollywood Reporter . Last modified 10 February 2023. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/the-whale-producer-film-criticism-brendan-fraser-1235319749/ . Wann, Marilyn. “Foreword: Fat Studies: An Invitation to Revolution.” In The Fat Studies Reader , edited by Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay. New York University Press, 2009. Webster, Guy. “An Ode to Brendan Fraser and Body Neutrality.” Kill Your Darlings Last modified 8 November 2021. https://www.killyourdarlings.com.au/article/an-ode-to-brendan-fraser-and-body-neutrality/ . Zimdars, Melissa. “Spectacle, Sympathy, and the Medicalized Disease of ‘Obesity.’” Watching Our Weights: Contradictions of Televising Fatness in the “Obesity Epidemic.” Rutgers University Press, 2019. Footnotes About The Author(s) TEYA JUAREZ (she/her) is a scholar, dramaturg, educator, and current student in the Theatre and Performance PhD program at the University at Buffalo (SUNY) where her research focuses on fat studies and fat embodiment. As a small fat person, she is dedicated to critiquing and dismantling anti-fatness in theatre for all fat bodies, as well as highlighting the liberatory potentials for fat bodies in performance. She was the recipient of the 2024 American Theatre and Drama Society Emerging Scholars Award for her paper “‘How Dare You Presume I’d Rather Be Thin’: Origins/Iterations of Fat Activism & Performances of Fatness” featured in the 2025 volume of Theatre Annual . Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale “The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. The Brothers Size Dead Outlaw 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival ZAZ Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Eileen Curley Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 1 Visit Journal Homepage Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Eileen Curley By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century . Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Marlis Schweitzer’s Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century explores girl actors and societal responses to them in the first half of the century. This interdisciplinary work contextualizes the careers of girl stars Clara Fisher and Jean Margaret Davenport—and many other child actors as well—in an overlapping series of historical frameworks, seeking to understand their careers in theatrical, cultural, artistic, literary, and economic histories, among others. Schweitzer uses the girls as two throughlines within a wide-ranging discussion of the performance of girlhood onstage and in the press, informed by a diverse set of theories and approaches to interrogate specific moments in time or items in the archival record. Structurally, Schweitzer reproduces the nineteenth century theatre’s packed evening bill by including a prologue, epilogue, and chapters interspersed with interludes. More than just an appropriate historical nod, this format enables Schweitzer to effectively tell the complex histories of Fisher, Davenport, and other girl actors in a roughly linear narrative, with interludes allowing short diversions into fascinating related topics and historiographic challenges that might otherwise have disrupted the flow of the individual chapters. Practically, this format also enables these excerpts of the book to be used effectively in introductory undergraduate research methods courses as engaging trips through the archive; Interlude 3, for example, is both an excellent model of an historiographical research process and a fascinating theory of the potential meaning behind three sentences in Mrs. John Drew’s 1899 memoir. Those few words are contextualized in transatlantic touring, amateur theatricals, the shifting attitudes towards professional actors during Drew’s lifetime, and more. The chapters delve more deeply into character types performed by Fisher and Davenport and how those reflect shifting audience and societal perceptions of children, child actors, and celebrity, all the while connecting these types and the performances to broader historical and societal contexts. Chapter 1 explores the fad for young girls playing old men such as Richard III, framing Fisher’s career as drawing on Master Betty’s fame, while also exploring its presence amid contemporary interest in miniaturization, phrenology (Fisher’s head was cast and studied), girlhood, and burgeoning press interest in celebrity. Chapter 2 explores her career as it moves into the terrain of travesty roles. Here, Schweitzer focuses on the role of Little Pickle in The Spoiled Child , contrasting the child performer against adult women who specialized in these lines, such as Dorothy Jordan, and she argues that the de-sexualization of the performer’s body––and thus the role–– undermines its prior transgressive power, shifting the focus towards a nostalgic view of childhood impishness that was particularly well received in the colonies. While this appealed to colonial audiences on transatlantic stops of Fisher’s tour, as Chapter 3 discusses, her continued aging and movement closer to an adult physique was sufficiently distressing as her career again morphed, this time into farcical roles written for girls. She had the most success in the breeches role of Matilda from Old and Young , which is notably written for a girl who must perform as her poorly behaved fictional brothers and which “enlists the plasticity of the girl actress to query emerging binaries of age and gender” (121). Throughout the first three chapters, Schweitzer also analyzes Fisher’s father’s motives and attempts to shield his daughter from the press while still exploiting its coverage of her vital content for then understanding the subsequent discussions of Davenport and her father in Chapters 4 and 5. Indeed, the tightly woven intersections between the chapters, the two performers, and the contextual topics raised is a delight—in part because Davenport’s career was so obviously modeled on Fisher’s—but also because those parallels and nuanced discussions are incredibly well foregrounded and supported by Schweitzer’s structural choices. Chapter 4 covers Davenport’s early career in the 1830s, which quite closely follows the roles, marketing, and framing of Fisher’s career, complete with attempts to balance competing demands of privacy, propriety, and celebrity. As with Fisher, Davenport’s aging eventually presents challenges, discussed in Chapter 5 alongside the limitations of her father’s engineering of good press on their transatlantic tour to colonies which approached Davenport’s performance of masculinity in these roles with much more concern. The strengths of Schweitzer’s work are the broad-ranging use of interdisciplinary research to explore our inherently interdisciplinary theatrical world and her deft inclusion of historiographical process and exploration of archival finds. Schweitzer makes excellent use of artefacts of actors’ careers throughout the book, regularly offering analyses of images which support her discussions of changing societal comfort levels with girls in breeches roles, travesty roles, and performing as adult men alongside adults on stage. Indeed, Schweitzer actively, but not intrusively, shares her historiographical process with readers throughout the book. Evidence gaps are discussed, such as when Schweitzer details her argument that Fisher’s father likely “had ample opportunity to follow debates about children’s reading” (33), thereby contextualizing his choice to expose his daughters to Shakespeare and have them perform as Richard III. These approaches are particularly seen in the interludes, which support the tightly woven narrative of the book by introducing contexts such as popular contemporary vehicles for celebrity, transatlantic culture, and performances of childhood. Schweitzer begins with the career and influence of male child star, Master Betty, in Interlude 1. Fisher’s fame draws on and responds to his career and ensuing Bettymania, just as Davenport overtly draws on Fisher’s, and thus the historical throughline and evolving popular trends of child stars and the representation of children on and off-stage is reflected in the structure of the book. Interlude 2, on the tomboy in society, drama, lays the groundwork for Chapter 2’s travesty roles, and looks far ahead to the final chapter’s discussion of childhood, performance, and race in the British Empire. Fandom is another constant, with a deeper exploration of fans’ material culture detailed in Interlude 4. The final interlude, then, offers another historiographical discussion of a scrapbook of transatlantic travel owned but possibly not written by Davenport, wherein a “most peculiar story of colonial anxiety emerges” (163), setting up Chapter 5’s discussion of scrapbooks and Davenport’s positioning in the British Empire. In part, this comprehensive range of approaches is necessary to better understand the complex interactions that Schweitzer is detailing—between performer, culture, text, audience, empire, and history. It also stems from Schweitzer’s following the archival trail to logical places, a process that is refreshingly explored throughout the book and shared in her overt discussions of historiographical process. The result is a refreshingly varied and vibrant work, reading as much as a cultural history of the period and exploration of the artists’ careers as it is an entry into Schweitzer’s own process of storytelling, research, and artistry. References Footnotes About The Author(s) EILEEN CURLEY is Professor of English/Theatre at Marist, where she serves as the Director of the Theatre Program and teaches a wide range of theatre, drama, American Studies, and English courses. She is also the Editor in Chief of USITT’s Theatre Design & Technology . Her research on nineteenth-century amateur theatre has appeared in The Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Popular Entertainment Studies, Pamiętnik Teatralny, Theatre Symposium, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, and edited collections. She holds an MA and PhD in Theatre History, Theory, and Literature from Indiana University and a BA in Theatre from Grinnell College. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale “The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. The Brothers Size Dead Outlaw 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival ZAZ Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Jewel Pereyra Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 1 Visit Journal Homepage “The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya Jewel Pereyra By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF Actress Maggie Calloway (date unknown). Photo courtesy Robin Raymundo. Introduction [1] A curious performance occurred at The Stadium, Manila’s premier bodabil stage, on 4 January 1927. According to the Manila Times, in this jazz and kundiman Championship Contest, the leaders of two chorus groups, the “lady kundimans” and the “jazz girls,” were Filipina starlet Honorata Atang da la Rama and multiracial Afro-Filipina American jazz singer and dancer Maggie Calloway. [2] A staged conflict between the two cultural forms arose: kundiman, the Filipino national genre of love songs, which allegorized Filipino resistance against Spanish colonization—and African American jazz songs and dance styles, including the Charleston and Black Bottom. Indeed, this contest between the jazz and kundiman dance styles parodied an imperial drama of political tensions between the colonized (Philippines) and the colonizer (United States) to potential theatregoers through a performance: the preservation of the Philippines’ national culture (kundiman) versus the pressing influence of American culture (jazz). The chorus girl played a role in staging these political conflicts in front of popular audiences. These scenarios were common in Philippine bodabil theatre productions at the turn of the twentieth century where chorus girls helped to popularize bodabil —the Philippine adaptation of vaudeville—which encompassed multi-genre live performances that adapted American and European vaudeville variety acts, ranging from comedy sketches, poetry, songs, and dances to boxing competitions and acrobats. According to journalist Luningning B. Ira, “ Vodavil was a gaiety. It was jazz-snappy, bawdy, alive-sounding after generations of the languid kundiman, balitaw, and slow waltzes of a moribund Spanish era. Vodabil was feminine pulchritude and, most of all, female legs exhibited for the first time on the Philippine theatrical stage.” [3] While many chorus girls danced in ensembles onstage, others danced one-on-one with paying patrons. Their live and intimate acts, performed in front of large audiences of various classes and ages at venues located in the center of Manila’s commercial districts, entertained audiences in between silent film showings at theatres like The Stadium or Rivoli Theatre, or at cabarets and dance halls at the Savoy Hotel. This article analyzes the performing routes and moves of Maggie Calloway, who participated in creating the “first Philippine blues style” in colonial Manila and British Malaya’s (Singapore and Malaysia) theatres and cabarets in the 1920s to 1940s during U.S. occupation of the Philippines (1898-1946). Analyzing her transcultural dance styles, vocal experiments, and fashion choices, I argue that Calloway and her chorus girls reinvented modern ideas of Filipina and Black femininities when religious and Philippine independence movements nationalized the “Filipina” figure as pious, asexual, and devoted to man, church, and the nation. Rather, Calloway’s performances focused on pleasure and shifting racial and gendered formations as she popularized various racialized dances like the Black Bottom, Charleston, and Hawaiian Hula during the interwar period as part of burgeoning transpacific performance circuits from Manila to Singapore, China, and California. In both the Philippines and the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, the Filipina and Black American chorus girl was a controversial figure. On one hand, she was praised for her beauty, exuberance, and mastery of different dance forms onstage. On the other, she was often seen as unruly, aberrant, and immoral, particularly within conservative and religious Philippine movements for independence from American colonial rule . Domingo N. Casiño, a leader of the Filipino Christian youth, wrote of vaudeville, “This modern show is immoral; it is a menace to society for various forms of Satan’s act are shown which in turn is greatly appreciated by the youth. Vaudeville turns our youth into irreligious men… [and] our youth become Godless; for a man without religion is no better than an animal.” [4] The chorus girl often reflected the nation’s desire to allegorize docile and pious Filipina femininity as the symbol of Philippine independence and religious devotion. Similarly, on the East Coast in the United States, African American chorus girls were seen as what Jayna Brown terms “Babylon girls,” and as “embody[ing] the modern condition as an illness of spirit and a cultural death” and as hedonistic excess. [5] For example, in his poem “Cabaret,” African American writer Sterling Brown “pathologizes the young [chorus girls], directly situating them as willful and uncaring urban courtiers against their poor rural brethren” after the Stock Market crash in the late 1920s. [6] Multiracial Filipina and African American chorus girl, Magdalena “Maggie” Calloway, gained stardom and acclaim for her mastery of varying performance styles in bodabil. In the first half of the twentieth century, Calloway was one of the only celebrated African American women performers and socialites in Manila. As a child of Mamerta de la Rosa, a Filipina woman from a family of rice farmers in Central Luzon, and Sergeant John W. Calloway, an African American Buffalo soldier who served in the Philippine-American War, her itinerant career led her to study dance in the United States and Manila and to help train and choreograph many different styles of dance, from jazz dances like the Charleston and Black Bottom to the Spanish Revue, Scottish Dance, and Hula. Her performances drew on and assembled various cultural traditions across overlapping empires in the Pacific, from Manila and Shanghai to Singapore and San Francisco, where she permanently settled after World War II. With her working connection to John C. Cowper, a prominent American director of Philippine variety shows in Manila, Calloway was contracted to work in a transpacific performance circuit in Southeast Asia that connected Manila to British Malaya and cities across China. [7] After World War I, many performers from Asia and across the diaspora took part in shaping Western and indigenous performance styles, displaying racial and gendered stylized acts across international arenas. In one of her first performances in Singapore in 1928 at the City Opera, the press wrote, “Miss Maggie Calloway, ‘star of the aggregation,’ was as usual the life of the performance.” [8] I draw on the reviewer’s use of aggregation as a useful analytic to situate her importance as a multiracial performer who syncretized both Filipino and Black performers and performance styles. Aggregation refers to a “formation of a number of things into a cluster.” [9] In concert with Saidiya Hartman’s theorization of the “chorus,” aggregation attends to the “radical hope of living otherwise” and collective possibility for Filipina and African American performers in the Philippines during the interwar period. [10] Calloway contributed to the makings of an interracial Afro-Filipina chorus through what I call performances of aggregation, which she created as a soloist, and as an ensemble member and choreographer. As a multiracial soloist, she aggregated various racial identifications and performance genres throughout her career. For instance, Calloway embodied multiple racial identifications, including Black, Filipina, and Hawaiian both in the Philippines and Singapore. As a chorus girl and choreographer, she also aggregated interracial performances in ensemble formations. Singing and dancing live in the bodabil cabarets became sites of spectatorship and enjoyment, and people from all racial, gendered, and classed backgrounds socialized in these spaces. In all these roles, she spectacularized feminine pleasure and sexuality, troubling the national symbol of the modern Filipina woman. Scholarship on the Black Pacific and relationships between Filipinos and African Americans in the first half of the twentieth century has tended to focus on African American and Filipino male soldiers and musicians who played in constabulary bands. [11] Expanding upon this work, I examine Calloway’s ephemeral traces—poetry, photoplay films, photographs, and newspaper reviews—in archives across the Philippines, Singapore, and Malaysia during the interwar period to elucidate her role in forging these Philippine and African American performance genealogies. Assembling this performance archive demonstrates the significance Calloway had as a multiracial performer in embodying these aggregated performance styles during the interwar period. This article also reads against the grain of accounts that argue that these cabarets were segregated and that women lacked creative choice in performance, as Isidora Miranda, Dough Ancheta, and Vernadette Gonzalez have argued. [12] Indeed, Calloway’s presence in these cabarets and dance halls contests W.E.B. Du Bois’s notion of the segregated “global color line” in the midst of American occupation in Manila and the burgeoning political struggles for African American racial progress in the United States. This Afro-Filipina aggregation performed new versions of femininity and the modern Filipina woman by appearing in and adapting various media and popular technologies available to them, like the bodabil theatre space, silent photoplay films, and broadcast radio. As Denise Cruz writes on “transpacific femininities,” at the first half of the twentieth century, defining the Filipina woman became a “cultural obsession” and debates about Filipina femininity over time and space was shaped by multiple and overlapping Spanish, American, and Japanese imperial presences. [13] In the first part of this article, I historicize Calloway’s life and her family history. I also trace the forces that compelled both interracial Filipino and African American disaggregation and aggregation with the presence of African American soldiers and performers during American occupation (1898-1946) in the Philippines. While African American soldiers and performers formed affinities with Filipinos, there were also intensified divisions across race, gender, and class. In the second part of the article, I focus on Calloway’s performances of aggregation as sites of interracial collectivity and pleasure-making in bodabil across colonial Manila and Singapore. Maggie Calloway and Interracial Anxieties and Affinities in Colonial Manila Maggie Calloway was born in 1910 in Manila and had a prolific performance career in Asia. Her family lived in the Quiapo neighborhood in Manila, in a center of vibrant social and cultural change during the American colonial period. In addition to his military service, Sergeant Calloway was an ardent fan of the arts and wrote to Black intellectuals like W.E.B. Du Bois about the importance of African American racial progress through music, theatre, and dance. [14] Maggie Calloway similarly followed her father’s affinities for the arts; however, rather than perform opera and other European “high art” forms that her father and African American bourgeois intellectuals argued would “uplift the race,” Calloway often choreographed popular African American jazz songs and dances, like the Black Bottom and Charleston in her repertoires. [15] While the origins of the Black Bottom and Charleston have been contested, scholars conclude that African Americans in the South first performed both dances and these styles migrated to theatres and popular music recording circuits in the North during the Jazz Age. Tim Ryan writes that the lively and syncopated Black Bottom dance style may have first premiered in the 1924 staging of Dinah in Harlem. [16] However, white Broadway performers, like Ann Pennington in George White’s Scandals , and Tin Pan Alley songwriters appropriated and recorded the “Black Bottom” in 1926. [17] Similarly, African American workers in Charleston, South Carolina created the notable Charleston dance style, including the “feet twisting and rapid forward and backward kicking steps,” that African American stars Josephine Baker and Ada “Bricktop” Smith garnered praise for. [18] As Matthew McMahan asserts, “the language surrounding the Charleston consistently depicted it as a liberating force in contrast to the stolid quality of European dances.” [19] The novel and rebellious appeal of both dance styles attracted international performers and audiences. Calloway, who learned these performance styles in the United States, gained her start as a chorus girl in Manila with the Savoy Nifties and Varieties Company that were managed by theatre manager J.C. Cowper. Named the “Tala ng Bodabil” (star of bodabil ), Calloway was praised in the press for her dancing and singing of both Filipino and American popular songs. During the Philippine-American War, government officials, journalists, and people in the sound recording industries often justified the occupation of the Philippines through the racial co-affiliations of Filipinos with African Americans and Native Americans. In many political cartoons in satirical magazines like Puck and Judge, Filipinos were depicted as Black minstrel characters. In addition, the music industry intensified these racial anxieties, especially of Filipino and African American romantic and sexual unions. For instance, in the Tin Pan Alley recording industries in the early 1900s, songwriters like Charles K. Harris wrote the song “Ma Filipino Babe,” which illustrated a Filipina woman as racially Black in the songbook’s images. The lyrics also racialized the Filipina woman as Black and detailed her romance with an African American soldier. African American intellectuals, writers, and musical composers in the United States responded to these interracial Black and Filipino dynamics in the Pacific. African American intellectuals like W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells outwardly spoke out against U.S. intervention in the Philippines. Writers and performers also used comedy and “brown face” to introduce complex portrayals of Filipino and African American relations to popular audiences. For instance, in 1902, the Black Patti Troubadours staged a parody and musical comedy The Filipino Misfit: A Farcical Skit in One Act that cast Black actors and actresses as Filipino/as . According to Marta Effinger-Crichlow, the actors were “lumped into a generic Asian or foreign body, with no regard for the cultural, language, and historical differences.” [20] Similarly, African American playwrights Bob Cole, Rosamond Johnson, and James Weldon Johnson’s 1907 play Shoo-Fly Regiment featured African Americans performing in “brown face” of Filipino characters, highlighting the contradictions of African American participation of empire, as well as their critique of global anti-Black racism through such productions. [21] During the war, African American military men like Sergeant Calloway forged relationships with Filipinos in the Philippines. During his ten years of service in the Army, Sergeant John W. Calloway wrote numerous letters about his stay in the Philippines and the reception of African Americans by way of Filipino perspectives. He informally interviewed Filipinos about their perspectives on the war, including a physician named Señor Todorica Santos who stated, Of course, you [Black and White Americans] are both Americans, and conditions between us are constrained, and neither can be our friends in the sense of friendship, but the affinity of complexion between you and me tells, and you exercise your duty so much more kindly and manly in dealing with us. We can not help but appreciate the differences between you and the whites. [22] These accounts demonstrate the Filipinos’ affinities towards African Americans in the Philippines despite the racial segregations that African American soldiers experienced. Indeed, during his service, Sergeant Calloway befriended Filipino families, like the Consunji family of San Fernando, Pampanga. While forming relations with the Consunji family, Calloway was dishonorably discharged from the U.S. Army over suspicions that he was a “well known sympathizer with the insurrectos” during his service. [23] In Sergeant Calloway’s case, these interracial affinities created racial anxieties that were deemed dangerous and risky. These fears of racial intermixing and proximity often punished African Americans, creating distance and disaggregation during the Philippine-American War. These perspectives illuminate the complex tensions of U.S. imperialisms and U.S.-Philippine relations. In his study of the Black Pacific, Vince Schleitwiler theorizes the “Black transpacific culture” as the mode by which “African Americans would imaginatively and materially access new degrees of imperial privilege by crossing the Pacific as ambivalent participants in U.S. imperialism, while simultaneously contemplating the emergence of a militant Asian champion of the darker races against white worl d supremacy.” [24] On one hand, soldiers like Sergeant Calloway and David Fagen—another celebrated African American Buffalo soldier during the Philippine-American war who defected from the U.S. causes—participated in military operations in the Philippines. On the other hand, they also critiqued anti-Black and anti-Filipino sentiments enforced by white American colonial officials. In performance cultures in the Philippines during U.S. occupation, blatant forms of anti-Black sentiments also existed, particularly from the upper-class Spanish Tagalog elites. In colonial Asia, jazz singing and dance styles like the Charleston and Black Bottom were racialized and acquainted with African American popular dance forms. Peter Keppy writes about Filipina jazzista performers who performed jazz dances like the Black Bottom and the Charleston: “From an elitist perspective these dances were particularly suspicious, if not dangerous to society as they originated from the ranks of the lower classes, and even worse, from the descendants of slaves.” [25] Keppy argues that elite Hispanicized Filipinos harbored racial antagonism toward Black slaves and sought to ensure that the emerging Philippine nation was not associated or identified with Blackness. These dances often were classed and critiqued as “low art” in comparison to “more respectable and refined” Euro-American dance and singing styles like waltzes and operas. However, performers like Calloway performed the Charleston and Black Bottom dances, altering normative notions of race, gender, and sexuality in the cabaret spaces. Through her performances of aggregation, Calloway took on the persona of popular Black women performers like Josephine Baker, whose rendition of the Charleston exhibited a multiplicity of racialized surfaces, or what Anne Cheng calls as “second skins.” [26] These alternative and aggregated performance styles also flourished in these interracial cabaret spaces that challenged the Jim Crow logics of racial segregation and interracial intimacies, even as these repertoires became increasingly commodified and staged for white audiences. As Shane Vogel argues, performers in cabarets in Harlem demonstrated how the “interplay of close and distance, acceptance and refusal, connection and disconnection, concentration and distraction” coincided. [27] As a result of these racial affinities, anxieties, and antagonisms in the early 1900s, multiracial Filipino and Black Amerasian identities and anti-Blackness were and, today, are fraught in the Philippines. Anti-Blackness in Filipino communities both in the Philippines and in the diaspora perpetrate white supremacist structures and “colonial mentalities,” especially against indigenous groups like the Aeta peoples. Despite these contradictory interracial socialities and relations, after World War II and onwards, Manila would see more performances by other famous Black cultural performers like Marian Anderson, Muhammad Ali, Nat King Cole, Eartha Kitt, and Donna Summer, all of whom all made appearances at the famous Araneta Coliseum. Moreover, today in the Philippines, hip hop and other major African American cultural figures are celebrated in the archipelago. “I Want”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure Calloway’s career in entertainment started in an era of rapidly growing commodity cultures, trade, and industrialization in the United States, the Philippines, Shanghai, and British Malaya during the interwar period. Henry Jenkins theorizes this interwar technological period as “pop cosmopolitanism” and “the ways that the transcultural flows of popular culture inspire new forms of global consciousness and cultural competency.” [28] As the phonograph, 78 RPM vinyl records, radio, and silent films gained popularity as commodities, so too did bodabil performances. [29] With electrical recording booming in Manila and Singapore, global protests and musical movements by subaltern subjects in the colonies also responded to Euro-American colonial presence. Michael Denning calls these responses as global “noise uprisings” after World War I where musicians in entrepôt cities, like Manila, Jakarta, Honolulu, Goa, Shanghai, Havana, and Rio De Janeiro, formed a “world musical revolution.” Performers adapted vernacular musical forms that became “fundamental to the extraordinary social, political, and cultural revolution that was decolonization.” [30] For instance, transcultural music practices, like the kundiman encountered jazz and blues styles and crossed over and circulated. The novelty and global appeal of Filipino bodabil led to the creation of transpacific tours and circuits where these Afro-Filipina aggregations took shape. In addition to Calloway’s background in jazz singing and dancing, she also performed traditional Philippine dances like the sword dance, Moro Moro, and Cariñosa. As she traveled within these circuits, she was exposed to different transcultural music and dance styles like jazz, the rhumba, kundiman, Hawaiian hula, the Scottish dance, the New York flapper, and the Spanish revue, which she also learned and choreographed in their own shows. Spectacularizing her body through the aggregation was part of her transcultural dance styles. Calloway’s performances of aggregation brought together kundiman and jazz-blues forms that became their own cultural phenomena. This demonstrates how Filipina and Black women transformed these practices into hybridized dance and singing styles, while also establishing relations with one another through the ephemeral socialities that emerged in the cabarets. Women performers on stage explored the contradictory and shifting gender dynamics in the Philippines during the U.S. period. Women challenged monolithic ideals of feminine respectability and stars like Atang de la Rama and Katy de la Cruz’s performers and songs focused on women’s pleasures and commented on conservative gender norms. For instance, Atang de la Rama performed in the silent film Dalagang Bukid ( Country Maiden ) and her song “Nabasag ang Banga” (The Clay Pot Broke) commented on the preservation of women’s virginity through the metaphor of a broken jar. Katy de la Cruz, who was named the “Queen of Jazz,” used humor throughout her jazz and blues performances to comment on women’s pleasures. Her song “Balut” (Fertilized Duck’s Egg) from the 1930s allegorizes women’s sexual desires. The popular plays on the notion that the balut delicacy is said to “not only allude to strength and general good health but refers to sexual robustness and stamina.” [31] In addition, her song “Ang Manok” (The Chicken) references cock fighting and alludes to ideas about men’s infidelity. These outwardly sexual themes in her songs contended with the conversative ideas of women as the virginal, pious, meek, and devoted Filipina figure. These mythologized women, like the Maria Clara figure who was popularized in Filipino writer Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tángere, became pious symbols of the Catholic church, family, and education systems that espoused these moral and nationalist politics. [32] Indeed, women in bodabil challenged representations of modern femininity in the Philippines. Filipina women during the Spanish colonial period commonly worked as cigarette rollers, seamstresses, domestic workers, teachers, nurses, performers, and as prostitutes. [33] With the emergence of Filipino bodabil in Manila in the early twentieth century, young, independent, and working-class chorus girls sought out employment in the cabarets and dance halls. Women in bodabil and their reception were met with contradictions: on one hand, they were celebrated for their displays of modernity and adaptations of American cultural forms. On the other hand, chorus girls were castigated in society, especially by religious and conservative politicians, and were often associated with prostitution. For instance, Manila’s City Mayor, Justo Lukban, who was elected in 1917, disbanded the Gardenia District, Sampaloc’s former red-light district in Old Manila. Filipino cultural critic Nick Joaquin writes “when [Lukban] tried to abolish the cabarets too, the bailarinas, a more spirited tribe, rose in revolt and marched on City Hall. The mayor backed down and the cabarets remained to color the lives of all the wild bucks of the era.” [34] Cabarets in Manila continued to flourish until talking pictures emerged in cines and nightclubs were introduced in the 1930s. Nick Joaquin was one rare writer who documented the pleasures of bodabil and of Calloway’s authorial voice within the interracial and multi-expressive aggregation. In his long poem “Bye-Bye Jazz Bird,” Joaquin captures the spirit of bodabil in the height of its appeal in the 1920s . In contrast to Sterling Brown’s vilification of the “Babylon girls,” which is also apparent in Filipino writer Jose Garcia Villa’s 1927 short story “The Bailarina,” Joaquin centers the erotics of the cabaret, and especially women’s pleasure. Published in 1979, “Bye-Bye Jazz Bird” is a poem written in a documentary style that offers images from the bodabil scenes through Joaquin’s perspective as a journalist and cultural critic. As Joaquin did not grow up in the 1920s and 30s when Calloway performed, his poetic work contends with the limits of the performance archive as he dramatizes the events at the cabarets. The poem draws us in into the sensual atmosphere of the vaudeville scene with “King of Jazz Piano,” Porfirio “Ping” Borromeo, and his contemporaries. Borromeo served as the piano player and bandleader for the Savoy Theater vaudeville company. He performed his signature “stride bass” ragtime jazz style alongside the popular Filipina starlets of the time, including Nena Warsaw, Grace Darling, Katy de la Cruz, and Isabel Rosario Cooper, who experimented with “modern” jazz dances like the “Charleston” and “Black Bottom.” They performed in front of diverse audiences and, at times, segregated white-only spaces like the Army and Navy Club, the Manila Polo Club, and the Tiro Al Blanco. At places like the Rivoli Theater, audiences racially intermixed. Joaquin writes, Shift the scene to Manila Late in the 1920s. Vaudeville tops show-biz. It’s cash with class. On Plaza Goiti is the Savoy with its Nifties. Plaza Santa Cruz Nightly shines with the rainbow hues Of the Rivoli Theater, which has the Varieties. And our princely boy Stars there now as King of Jazz Leading the band. He stabs the keys As leggy high-kicking Nena Warsaw Knocks her knees against her torso. His piano groans as the sailors howl. Hot has Maggie Calloway got ‘em While she shimmies her Black Bottom. [35] Joaquin’s poem captures his impressions of the cabarets as he homes in on the pleasure-filled atmosphere that the cabaret girls elicit, particularly for their “sailor” audiences who “howl.” American military men and Filipinos of various social classes frequented the cabarets and dance halls. Fritz Schenker writes about the “imperial whiteness,” where white men patrons asserted their racial dominance in juxtaposition to the Filipina jazz dancers. [36] While conservative writers, political officials, and religious figures disparaged the morality of dance halls, as venues subject to adultery, prostitution, and disease, Joaquin invites readers into the glamour, the wild aesthetic gestures, the novel techniques of these women performers, and sexuality in the cabarets. Borromeo leads the jazz band as he “stabs the keys” and “his piano groans.” Nena Warsaw “knocks her knees against her torso” while “hot has Maggie Calloway got ‘em / while she shimmies her Black Bottom.” Joaquin’s attention to these erotic gestures energizes the performing bodies that are too extra, intense, and incontrollable. Moreover, Calloway’s performance s of aggregation and the Black Bottom demonstrate how performers and audiences coming together in the cabaret was a site of pleasure. The Black Bottom was a radical act that presented African American popular culture in front of audiences despite the Spanish and Tagalog elite’s racial prejudices against such dances. In addition, the Black Bottom, as popularized by African American blues songstresses like Ma Rainey, depicted Black women’s pleasures publicly. Towards the end of the poem, Joaquin ends with Calloway again, But the last tune on the tape is the sweetest of all, as new today as when first given shape and shiver. Life was a smile when [Porfirio Borromeo] wrote it (circa mid-1920s), the first blues Philippine style. And because it never went to market it hasn’t lost novelty, is as fresh as when Maggie Calloway first sang it on the Rivoli stage: “ I want, I want, I want I want a little lovin’ …” [37] While this final stanza honors Borromeo indelible “first Philippine blues style,” Joaquin also ends the poem with Calloway declaring a desire: “I want.” Presumably, Joaquin here is listening to a recorded performance of Calloway’s singing, one that is no longer accessible in present archives. And yet, he highlights Calloway’s pleasures which repeat, “I want, I want, I want,” a simplicity that stands as its own complete thought: “I want.” Whereas the opposite, the refusal of “I don’t want,” establishes a boundary and enclosure, the lack of specificity in Calloway’s “I want” is an opening, an improvisational jazz break, and open-ended refrain as the long poem ends. Fred Moten has theorized the possibility of the break as a place of improvisation for African American performers. [38] As the audience members rile with passion in the poem, Calloway declares this refrain significantly as a testament to her wants within the cabaret and dance hall scenes that were often organized and socialized for Filipino and foreign men’s desires, wishes, and wants. Moreover, Calloway’s repetition of “I want” reflects her subjectivity as a soloist within the male-dominated space. “I” re-asserts the cabaret space as a place solely for men’s pleasures and complicates the hierarchies of “imperial whiteness” and social dynamics between men and the chorus girls. This moment in the poem is significant and demonstrates not only as an important interracial and transcultural moment of the Philippine blues style, but also a significant moment of Afro-Filipina women’s pleasure in creating and fashioning this cross-genre aesthetic. As Maureen Mahon writes, African American women in rock, blues, and jazz have long participated in experimenting with musical categories and genres across the twentieth century, often exposing how these imposed categories have been racialized and gendered. [39] Indeed, Joaquin notes that this moment “hasn’t lost its novelty,” as indeed, these two singing and performing together at the Rivoli was novel for audiences. Furthermore, Calloway’s expression of “I want” attends to how pleasure and desire were important in her popularity and career and—with Joaquin’s ending of this poem with her—she featured significantly in Filipino bodabil cultures. “Mood of Ecstasy”: The Filipina Josephine Baker in Colonial Singapore Calloway’s first appearance in Singapore on September 27, 1928 featured her dancing the Charleston and Black Bottom, which received positive reception from audiences. In an interview with the Malaya Tribune, Calloway characterizes her impressions of her performance, On my first night, after singing one or two, I thought I would see if they liked the Black Bottom, for they kept insisting I should come out for some more. I struck off with a delicate cadence to suit their apparent reserve and decorum. As the orchestra swept along in its interpretation of the playful moods of the dance, I increased their interest in my movements by ‘speeding up’ a little. First a smile of pleasure, then a light ripple of applause broke over the audience. This gave the director his cue and he led his orchestra from the mood of delight in the dance to the mood of ecstasy. Here I swung from the Black Bottom to the Charleston a la Josefina Baker. Well, all I can say is the English for once came dangerously near losing their studied reserve and the natives lost theirs completely, if they ever had any. [40] Calloway’s first-hand account gives an intimate insight into the audiences she performed in front of and her own authorial vocal and choreographic experiments. Audiences were attracted to Calloway’s unique singing and dancing and often gave her encores. Calloway details how she captivated audiences through her “playful moods,” “smile of pleasure,” and “mood of ecstasy.” Through these hyperbolic descriptions, Calloway’s performance also overcame the “studied reserve” of both British and Malayan audiences. She notes that she “increased their interest” by responding through tempo, facial gestures like smiling, and competing with the big band. This was met through their applause. Similar to Joaquin’s “Bye Bye Jazzbird” poem, Calloway delivered an authorial voice and risqué gestures that were not common at the time, nor looked fondly upon. In this way, Calloway developed a pleasure politics on stage that negotiated with the desires of the audiences and her own. In this performance, Calloway also compares herself to Josephine Baker who was performing dances like the Charleston and Black Bottom in Paris. Baker was a prominent African American dancer and singer born in Saint Louis, Missouri. She immigrated to Paris during the 1920s Harlem Renaissance, contributed to the makings of a global Black feminist performance style. While stars like Atang da la Rama were named the “Queen of Kundiman” and Katy de la Cruz was heralded as the “Queen of Jazz” and was compared to Mae West and Sophie Tucker, Calloway likened herself as the Josephine Baker of the Philippines. African American women performers were seldom written about in the Philippine and British Malayan presses. Thus, Calloway’s claiming of herself as Baker, a Black woman dancer who popularized the Charleston and Black Bottom, forged an affinity between her. Rather than continue to promote the elite Spanish Tagalog racial and classed hierarchies, Calloway chose to perform popular dances like the Black Bottom and Charleston as an act of proximity and affiliation. Indeed, Calloway becomes part of this Black women’s performance genealogy and instrumentalized this Afro-Filipina chorus. In the austere British Malaya venues City Opera and Victoria Hall, like Baker, Calloway demonstrated creative risk in front of British and Malayan audiences. In her performance of the Charleston, Calloway delivered an exuberance that countered typical comportments of Filipina femininity and shifting racializations. Like Baker, Calloway’s performances of the Black Bottom, Charleston, and other racial types interacted with and challenged the colonial primitivist views of African Americans on these international stages and asserted a Black Amerasian feminine pleasure and politics on the stage. As Anne Cheng argues, Baker was the definition of modernity in the 1920s and 1930s. Through her performance of “second skins,” which she displayed through different organic and inorganic materials (coal, bananas, glitter, and shimmering ensembles), she mastered the artifice of surfaces and masks through performance. [41] Similarly, Calloway’s performances of aggregation across British occupied-Malaya embodied a multiplicity of Filipino and Black women racial presentations and masks through her dancing and singing of Black popular dances in Singapore. After her first performances of the Black Bottom and Charleston at the City Opera and Victoria Theatre, Calloway also performed the Charleston at the Moonlight Hall at the New World Shows. One reviewer wrote, “ Maggie Calloway was in great demand. Indeed, the audiences were cruel in their calls for encores. Maggie pleased immensely in “The Roof Blues,” charleston-ing and singing on top of the piano with that ease and abandon only expected of an accomplished artist.” [42] The New Orleans Rhythm Kings wrote the song “The Rooftop Blues,” or “Tin Roof Blues,” in 1923 and it is considered a jazz standard about New Orleans. Louis Armstrong sang a popular version in 1955. The reviewer notes Calloway’s exuberant and pleasurable performance as exhibiting “ease and abandon” and the moods and delights she displayed through her performances. I read the “ease” of her performances as pleasures that Calloway articulated on these stages. While many of these blues songs were commissioned and selected on behalf of Calloway by the company managers, she also had the authorial voice and choreographic capacities to express her mastery, skill, and pleasure through jazz and the blues. These kinds of pleasures countered the invisible labor of Black women performers and singers, who were often exploited and vilified. For instance, the Black Bottom was popularized by “Mother of Blues Singer” Gertrude “Ma” Rainey’s “Black Bottom,” which she recorded in 1927 in Chicago, Illinois. According to Rainey’s accounts and theatre productions such as August Wilson’s 1984 Broadway play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom , Rainey performed under conditions of duress. She was not compensated for her labor as an in-demand African American women performer. The Black Bottom was a major hit in the United States and because of Calloway’s training in the US, she participated in popularizing and transferring this dance style to chorus girls and audiences in Manila and Singapore. Calloway returned to British Malaya during World War II in the 1940s where there was a pronounced shift in her image in advertisements in the press. Calloway’s comeback career in Singapore occurred in the 1940s, perhaps one of her last performances that she danced in and choreographed during World War II and before the declaration of Philippine independence in 1946. In the 1940s Singaporean press, there is a notable shift and attention to women’s bodies and sexual economies with the heightened presence of British and Japanese military in Singapore. Calloway’s image started to change, especially with the kinds of performances and visualizations she participated in. Rather than perform her regular jazz Charleston and Black Bottom numbers, she started to perform as racial types like the hula girl and harem girl. Cabarets featured the hula girl racial type across the world, not only in the Philippines and Singapore, but across cabaret venues in port cities across the Pacific. The hula girl fantasized “imagined intimacies,” what Adria Imada argues “brokered the process of incorporation and integration” of Hawai’i into the United States empire. [43] Hula girls performers performed the fantasy of Hawai’i as a site of rest, relaxation, and hospitality for their audiences. In one advertisement of her performance of a Special Dinner-Dance and Cabaret at the Sea View Hotel, a popular resort outside Singapore’s urban city center, Calloway poses as a hula girl. [44] She wears a tropical Hawaiian influenced look with a bikini top that bears her midriff and a sheer grass skirt. She has a hibiscus flower in her hair and a lei around her neck. These full-body images in The Straits Press and Malaya Tribune contrast her public appearances in the press in Manila, which were exclusively headshots. In Manila in the 1920s and 1930s, she typically adorns Philippine and American attire in the 1940s, and her body is not the focal part of the advertisement. In contrast to her prior visualizations in the press, these photographs are full-body and elicit racial, gendered, and sexual desires. Indeed, these changes of “moods of ecstasy” became more sexually explicit and geared towards military audiences during the 1940s when the British occupied Singapore and Penang. Indeed, Calloway’s adaptation of this solo performance of the hula at the Sea View Hotel performed a localized form of hospitality through the British colonial integration of Malaya. Through these subaltern’s performances, women’s bodies specifically became sites of hospitality that brokered these imperial intimacies. As part of these shifting racial and gendered performances amongst women performers, Calloway’s performances of aggregation responded to the larger presence of military men who frequented the cabarets in the 1940s. Military men from the Royal Arm Forces (RAF) were stationed in Seleta r in Singapore. Pre-World War II photographs depict the Royal Arms Forces (RAF) servicemen and Yacht clubs as well as the leisure places they frequented. Many of these military men were nostalgic for entertainments, so they joined sailing and yacht clubs and watched boxing and sporting events. Like the hula girl, Calloway’s performances of these racial types and transition to more explicit performances demonstrate how the cabaret catered more to men’s desires as women also negotiated their place and authority in the cabaret scenes during World War II. Conclusion Mirroring the imperial drama that I opened this article with, I end with another encounter between choruses and popular dances fifteen years later at the Cabaret Tea Dance at Singapore’s Cathay Café in 1941. The press advertised for the “Philippine Islands Folk Dance for Singapore Cabaret Show” to take place at the Victoria Memorial Hall. Calloway served as the choreographer at this event and trained the cariñosa dancers, as well as those who danced the conga, “the newest American craze,” and the rhumba. The People and Places” advertisement reads “Preparing for Feb. 9 Floor Show: Miss Maggie Calloway, who is training the dancers who will take part in cabaret items at the Cabaret Tea Dance to be given by the Singapore Filipino Association at the Cathay Café.” [45] Next to the advertisement is a portrait of Calloway. She wears a sheer lightweight dress in a modern Filipiniana style with terno sleeves that reflects the traditional attire that Atang de la Rama wore in her kundiman performances. In the portrait, Calloway poses by touching a vine of flowers. Her short hair is well-kept as she smiles towards the camera. In this portrayal, one of the last visual depictions of Calloway in Singapore’s archives, she does not masquerade as American, African American, Asian Hawaiian, Middle Eastern racial type. Rather, she is represented as a professional woman choreographer. I read this last visual representation as another performance of aggregation meant to situate Calloway’s professional credibility as a dancer amidst her varied representations. While Calloway’s performances of aggregation participated in the cabaret’s masculinist and militaristic desires towards the end of her performance career in Asia, she also continued to demonstrate her creative authorship by choreographing choral arrangements with the cariñosa and rhumba dancers in Singapore. Calloway was a master of improvisation and like Josephine Baker, she continuously modulated her image. With her performances of aggregation, along with popularizing jazz and the blues in Manila and British Malaya, she also translated different choreographic dances and articulated varying racial and gendered performances across her repertoires. In addition, Calloway’s choreography and continuous training of Filipina chorus girls transferred cultural forms—from the Charleston and Black Bottom to the cariñosa and rhumba—through repetition and body-to-body knowledge across these various locales in the Pacific. These performances of aggregation became cultural and formalistic experimentations. They offered places of improvisational pleasure and bodily reinvention for Filipina and Black chorus girls. Ultimately, this article charts Calloway’s presence and formations of performances of aggregation in the emergence of Filipino bodabil in colonial Manila and Singapore. On one hand, the presence of Filipino and African American collaborative performances demonstrates how American modernity and jazz styles promoted a sajonista American modernity and capitalist profit in the entertainment industries in Manila. During this time, fear of intermixing and proximity between Filipinos and African Americans was also a concern and produced racial and classed antagonisms formed by white American colonial officials and Spanish Tagalog elites. On the other hand, Calloway’s appearances in bodabil also revised modes of respectable racial and gendered comportments with her jazz performances and choreographic arrangements of pleasure. Bailarinas and jazzistas in bodabil adapted jazz as modes to experiment, play, and comment on pleasure in their aesthetics, and Calloway’s performances added to the complexity of these pleasure politics within Colonial Manila and British Malaya’s performance cultures. Specifically, I contend that Calloway’s vocal and choreographic gestures asserted a pleasure politics that responded to the nationalist, racialized, and gendered ideations of Filipina women. Centering her pleasure in her oeuvre, Calloway’s performing body and spectacularized gestures, even ephemerally, rearranged the contours of her itinerant life and imagined otherwise her confined conditions as a young actress. Calloway’s career and the aggregation tell a reverberating story and legacy of how subalterns interacted, contradicted, strategized, and negotiated with dominant cultures, as they emphasized the creation of vibrant transcultural music and musical practices that resulted from such encounters. After Calloway moved to the U.S. permanently in the 1940s during World War II, other multiracial Filipina and Black stars and comedians like Elizabeth Ramsay made their vibrant presence in Philippine performances in the 1950s and 60s. An intimate study of Calloway’s life gifts us with interracial and transnational lenses through which to study diasporic Philippine and Black American performance genealogies as not separate, but as intertwined and aggregated histories, of which more is yet to be made known. References [1] I thank Arwin Q. Tan, Isidora Miranda, and Frederick “Fritz” Schenker for their keen feedback and encouragement on earlier versions of this article. Thank you to the librarians at the University of the Philippines Diliman College of Music, the Miguel De Benavides Library at the University of Santo Tomas, and the Rizal Library at Ateneo de Manila University for your help with accessing these archival sources. Lastly, much gratitude to the Calloway family, including John Calloway, Rebecca Calloway Mosley, Robin Lee Raymundo, Tedi Raymundo, and Deborah Calloway for sharing your stories, archives, and costumes of your auntie/grandmother Maggie. Maraming salamat! [2] “At the Stadium Tomorrow,” Manila Times, January 4, 1927. [3] Luningning B. Ira, “Two Tickets to the Vod-a-Vil,” Filipino Heritage: The Making of a Nation, Vol. 10 (Manila: Lahing Pilipino, 1978), 2510. [4] Domingo N. Casiño, “The Evil Influences of Vaudeville,” The Independent, July 31, 1926, pg. 7. [5] Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 236. [6] Ibid. [7] There were other circuits that connected the Philippines to Japan, Hawai’i, Indonesia, New Zealand, and Australia. The performance circuit depended on the managers and their vaudeville companies. [8] Hollandus, “The City Opera,” Malaya Tribune , September 28, 1928. [9] “Aggregation,” New Oxford American Dictionary, accessed May 3, 2023. [10] Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W.W. Norton, 2021), 299. [11] For scholarship on military histories and relationships between Filipinos and African American soldiers and the constabulary bands, see Scot Ngozi-Brown’s “African-American Soldiers and Filipinos: Racial Imperialism, Jim Crow, and Social Relations” (1997) in The Journal of Negro History ; Rene G. Ontal’s “Fagen and Other Ghosts: African-Americans and the Philippine-American War,” in Vestiges of War (New York: New York University Press, 2002); E. San Juan’s “African American Internationalism and Solidarity with the Philippine Revolution” (2010) in Socialism and Democracy ; and Mary Talusan’s Instruments of Empire: Filipino Musicians, Black Soldiers, and Military Band Music during US Colonization of the Philippines (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021). [12] Maria Ancheta, “The Rise of the Naughties: Humor in Katy de la Cruz’s Bodabil Songs,” ed. José Buenconsejo, Philippine Modernities: Music, Performing Arts, and Language, 1880-1941 (Quezon City: University of Philippines Press, 2017); Isidora K. Miranda, “Creative Authorship and the Filipina Diva Atang de la Rama,” Journal of Musicological Research, vol. 40, no. 4 (2021); and Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Empire’s Mistress: Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021). [13] Denise Cruz, Transpacific Femininities: The Making of the Modern Filipina (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 5. [14] Letter from J. Calloway to W.E.B. Du Bois, November 14, 1927, MS, W.E.B. Du Bois Papers 312. Spec. Coll. And University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Library. [15] Ibid. [16] Tim A. Ryan, “‘Music That Breathes and Touches’: The Implications of 1920s Blues and Jazz in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, ” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. 48, 1 (Spring 2023): 11-12. [17] Ibid. [18] James S. Olson and Mariah Gumpert, “Charleston,” The New Era of the 1920s: Key Themes and Documents (New York City, New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017), 35-36. [19] Matthew McMahan, “‘Let me see you dance:’ Ada ‘Bricktop’ Smith, the Charleston, and Racial Commodification in Interwar France,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 29, 2 (Spring 2015): 51. [20] Marta Effinger-Crichlow, Staging Migrations Toward an American West: From Ida B. Wells to Rhodessa Jones (Louisville, KY: University Press of Colorado, 2014), 96. [21] Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns, Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Empire (New York: New York University Press, 2013). [22] Gill H. Boehringer, “Imperialist Paranoia and Military Injustice: The Persecution and Redemption of Sergeant Calloway, ed. Hazel M. McFerson, Mixed Blessings: The Impact of the American Colonial Experience on Politics and Society in the Philippines (Westport: Greenwood Publishing, 2002), 330. [23] Gill H. Boehringer, “Imperialist (In) Justice: The Case of Sergeant Calloway,” International Association of Democratic Lawyers, 3. [24] Ibid, 324. [25] Peter Keppy, Tales of Southeast Asia’s Jazz Age: Filipinos, Indonesians, and Popular Culture, 1920-1936 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 43. [26] Anne Anlin Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker & the Modern Surface (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). [27] Shane Vogel, The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, and Performance (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 70. [28] Henry Jenkins, “Pop Cosmopolitanism,” 114. [29] Arwin Tan writes on the political economy Philippine bodabil and how “Filipino musicians responded to the capitalist imperative of a growing market and audience while also maintaining a space for the negotiation of relations between the divergent cultures of the hegemonic empire and the colony” (85). See Arwin Q. Tan, “ Bodabil Music and the American Empire,” Made in Nusantara: Studies in Popular Music, eds. Adil Johan & Mayco A. Santaella, 2021. [30] Michael Denning, Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution (New York: Verso Books, 2015) , 6. [31] Ancheta, “Rise of the Naughties,” 338. [32] Ibid, 336. [33] Maria Luisa Camagay, Working Women of Manila in the 19 th Century (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1995). [34] Nick Joaquin, “Pop Culture: The American Years,” Filipino Heritage: The Making of a Nation, Vol. 10 (Manila: Lahing Pilipino, 1978), 2734. [35] Nick Joaquin “Bye-Bye Jazz Bird,” Collected Verse (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila Univeristy Press, 1987), 80. [36] Schenker, Empire of Syncopation, 256. [37] Nick Joaquin “Bye-Bye Jazz Bird,” 81. [38] Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). [39] Maureen Mahon, Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020). [40] Maggie Calloway, “Impressions of Singapore,” Malaya Tribune , 27 September 1928. [41] Anne Anlin Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker & the Modern Surface (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). [42] “Public Amusements,” Malaya Tribune, February 22, 1929, pg. 7. [43] Adria Imada, Aloha America: Hula Circuits Through the U.S. Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 6. [44] Other vaudeville artists performed in Hawaii for Philippine Ilokano laborers in the 1920s, including Atang de la Rama and Toytoy. Oftentimes they performed traditional kundiman in front of Philippines audiences. In addition, Isabel Rosario Cooper also performed as the “racial type” of the hula girl in her live performances and films. [45] “Philippine Islands Folk Dance for Singapore Show,” Morning Tribune, January 29, 1941, p. 4. Works Cited Ancheta, Maria. “The Rise of the Naughties: Humor in Katy de la Cruz’s Bodabil Songs,” ed. José Buenconsejo. Philippine Modernities: Music, Performing Arts, and Language, 1880-1941. Quezon City: University of Philippines Press, 2017. “At the Stadium Tomorrow,” Manila Times, January 4, 1927. Burns, Lucy Mae San Pablo. Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Empire. New York: New York University Press, 2013. Boehringer, Gill H. “Imperialist Paranoia and Military Injustice: The Persecution and Redemption of Sergeant Calloway. ed. Hazel M. McFerson, Mixed Blessings: The Impact of the American Colonial Experience on Politics and Society in the Philippines. Westport: Greenwood Publishing, 2002. Brown, Jayna. Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern. Durham: Duke UP, 2008. Calloway, Maggie. “Impressions of Singapore,” Malaya Tribune , 27 September 1928. Camagay, Maria Luisa. Working Women of Manila in the 19 th Century. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1995. Casiño, Domingo N. “The Evil Influences of Vaudeville,” The Independent, July 31, 1926. Cheng, Anne Anlin. Second Skin: Josephine Baker & the Modern Surface. New York: Oxford UP, 2013. Cruz, Denise. Transpacific Femininities: The Making of the Modern Filipina. Durham: Duke UP, 2012. Denning, Michael. Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution. New York: Verso Books, 2015. Effinger-Crichlow, Marta. Staging Migrations Toward an American West: From Ida B. Wells to Rhodessa Jones . Louisville, KY: UP of Colorado, 2014. Gonzalez, Vernadette Vicuña. Empire’s Mistress: Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper. Durham: Duke UP, 2021. Hartman, Saidiya . Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. New York: W.W. Norton, 2021. Hollandus, “The City Opera,” Malaya Tribune , September 28, 1928. Imada, Adria. Aloha America: Hula Circuits Through the U.S. Empire. Durham: Duke UP, 2012. Ira, Luningning B. “Two Tickets to the Vod-a-Vil.” Filipino Heritage: The Making of a Nation, Vol. 10 . Manila: Lahing Pilipino, 1978. Jenkins, Henry. “Pop Cosmopolitanism: Mapping Cultural Flows in an Age of Media Convergence.” Eds. M.M. Suárez-Orozco & D.B. Qin-Hillard, Globalization: Culture and Education in the New Millennium . Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Joaquin, Nick. “Bye-Bye Jazzbird.” Collected Verse . Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1987. —.“Pop Culture: The American Years.” Filipino Heritage: The Making of a Nation, Vol. 10 . Manila: Lahing Pilipino, 1978. Keppy, Peter. Tales of Southeast Asia’s Jazz Age: Filipinos, Indonesians, and Popular Culture, 1920-1936. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. Mahon, Maureen . Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll Durham: Duke UP, 2020. McMahan, Matthew. “‘Let me see you dance:’ Ada ‘Bricktop’ Smith, the Charleston, and Racial Commodification in Interwar France,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 29, 2 (Spring 2015): 43-61. Miranda, Isidora K. “Creative Authorship and the Filipina Diva Atang de la Rama.” Journal of Musicological Research, vol. 40, no. 4 (2021): pp. 297-322. Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003. Ngozi-Brown, Scot. “African-American Soldiers and Filipinos: Racial Imperialism, Jim Crow, and Social Relations,” The Journal of Negro History, vol. 82, no. 1 (1997): pp. 42-53. Olson James S. and Mariah Gumpert. “Charleston,” The New Era of the 1920s: Key Themes and Documents . New York City, New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017. Ontal, Rene G. “Fagen and Other Ghosts: African-Americans and the Philippine-American War. Eds. Angel Velasco Shaw and Luis Francia, Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, 1899-1999. New York: NYU Press, 2002. “Philippine Islands Folk Dance for Singapore Show,” Morning Tribune, January 29, 1941. “Public Amusements,” Malaya Tribune, February 22, 1929. Ryan, Tim A. “‘Music That Breathes and Touches’: The Implications of 1920s Blues and Jazz in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, ” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. 48, 1 (Spring 2023): 1-23. San Juan E. “African American Internationalism and Solidarity with the Philippine Revolution.” Socialism and Democracy vol. 24, no. 2 (2010): pp. 32-65. Schenker, Frederick J. Empire of Syncopation: Music, Race, and Labor in Colonial Asia’s Jazz Age, PhD Dissertation. University of Wisconsin—Madison, 2016. Talusan, Mary. Instruments of Empire: Filipino Musicians, Black Soldiers, and Military Band Music during US Colonization of the Philippines . Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 2021. Tan, Arwin Q. “ Bodabil Music and the American Empire.” Eds. Adil Johan & Mayco A. Santelli, Made in Nusantara: Studies in Popular Music, 2021. Vogel, Shane. The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, and Performance. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 2009). Footnotes About The Author(s) JEWEL PEREYRA is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University. Her first book project, Dreamed Dwelling: A Memory Reconstruction of Afro-Filipina Relational Aesthetics, re-orients scholarship on Afro-Asian social movements and military histories of the Black Pacific by amplifying Filipina and Black feminist and queer performance genealogies across the long twentieth century. Her research was awarded the 2024 American Studies Association's Ralph Henry Gabriel Dissertation Prize and has been supported by the U.S. Fulbright Program, the American Society for Theatre Research, and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Her writing also appears or is forthcoming in MELUS, Post45, and Beyond the X: Queer and Trans Filipinx Studies, and in exhibitions in affiliation with Little Manila Queens and Tufts University Art Galleries. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale “The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. The Brothers Size Dead Outlaw 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival ZAZ Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Henry Bial Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 1 Visit Journal Homepage Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. Henry Bial By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. The concept of artistic research travels under various names (practice as research, performance as research, creative research, etc.) through various national and institutional contexts. At the same time, performance studies scholars insist that art-making constitutes not just the preservation and transmission of culture, but the generation of new knowledge. “Yet,” as scholar-artist Ben Spatz notes in their introduction to Race and the Forms of Knowledge, “a wide gulf remains between this critical assertion and the activation of its implications, which in their implementation imply nothing less than an epistemic revolution” (3). The stakes of that revolution are the decolonization of knowledge itself, demanding a radicalized and reflective approach to artistic research that is informed by “black studies, critical race studies, critical indigenous studies, and critical whiteness studies, as well as feminist and queer theory” (11) [an Author’s Note (ix), explains Spatz’s choice to lowercase all identity designations]. An Introduction, “Materialities in Artistic Research” lays out the book’s intent “to reformulate and radicalize artistic research as an intervention into the racialized forms of knowledge” (23). This is accomplished through three chapters, each a lengthy meditation of fifty pages or more exploring how and why performance can and must challenge our concepts of knowledge, power, and identity. The introduction also announces the author’s desire “to avoid what I call ‘white writing’: the logocentric usage of alphabetic writing to inscribe a dominating sense of prior reason and truth” (21). Instead, Spatz offers sustained engagements with a range of ideas and practices both familiar and unfamiliar to performance studies scholars. These engagements, which unfold gracefully across each chapter, are as provocative as they are evocative, frequently gesturing at understandings that the text itself cannot contain. Chapter 1, “Molecular Identities,” begins from the premise that considering identity in performance solely through the lens of casting is inherently limiting, anchoring analysis to a fixed notion of identity as adhering only and always to an individual performer. “To think beyond casting,” Spatz writes, “is to bypass the individualist framing of identity as that which a given person is or is not and to think instead about how racial and other identities cut through a given moment, event, or practice, at levels both above and below the individual” (31). Instead, drawing on the work of dramaturgs Dorinne Kondo and Katherine Profeta, the chapter argues for greater attention to the lived process of performance-making, in which racial and other identities are continually explored, negotiated, and played with. In this context, suggests Spatz, “the individual performer is no longer taken for granted as a premise or starting point but is recognized as a nexus or site at which multiple layers of technique and identity intersect” (36). Building on the framework established in What a Body Can Do (Routledge 2015), the chapter offers a complex and radically interdisciplinary model in which elements of performance technique (gesture, melody, breath) are understood as “molecule[s] of gendered and racialized material” (60) that have both material and sociocultural significance. Significantly, this means shifting our attention from a finished public performance to the rehearsal room as the most active site of artistic research, as well as looking beyond the live performance to technologically-mediated audiovisual works. Chapter 2, “Whiteness and the Racialization of Knowledge,” provides a dense but masterful opening section (“White Writing,” 83) that synthesizes a wide range of theoretical perspectives from black studies, performance studies, and poststructuralist theory to argue that concepts such as “ knowledge, expertise, science, thought, rationality and research ” should be reframed “in the context of european colonialism and the ongoing global hegemony of european and eurocentric modes of thought, as artifacts of white writing” (101, emphasis in original). In response, the author calls for a critical whiteness practice, one that unmasks whiteness from its unmarked claim to universality. The chapter considers the post-theatrical work of Jerzy Grotowski as a possible model, noting that in his interculturalism and his move away from logocentrism, “Grotowski looked for techniques that could transform or even transcend identity” (131). Yet Grotowski’s work, Spatz argues, proved difficult, if not impossible, to scale beyond the individual, suggesting that more significant social transformation demands confronting institutional forms and structures of knowledge, i.e. the university. The latter part of the chapter then considers three approaches to artistic research developed in European and North American universities, “roughly glossed as those of inclusion, escape, and experimentation” (134). The inclusive approach seeks to make space within the research university for artistic work to be recognized and valued; such attempts, as illustrated by the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities (a2ru), are well-intentioned but prone to co-optation by the corporate and political power of the institution. Escapist approaches take the opposite tack, positioning artistic research as “always in excess of the university, constantly fleeing and escaping its expectations and in this way radically unavailable to capture and co-optation” (140). This tactic, which looms large in contemporary performance studies, is illustrated through an analysis of Erin Manning’s Concordia University (Montreal)-based SenseLab. The third model, experimentation, takes more direct aim at the institutional structure itself, explicitly challenging the primacy of (white) writing. Though all three approaches have their merits, the author concedes, “It is only honest to admit that I find myself personally in closest alignment with pragmatist and experimental approaches: those that neither take prevailing institutions for granted nor seek to disappear from them but instead grapple with them through a kind of technics that is deeply engaged with matters of form” (134). This is vividly illustrated in Chapter 3, “Audiovisual Ethnotechnics,” which details some of the author’s own experiments in artistic research. Most of these examples are drawn from “The Judaica Project,” an extended multi-year series of investigations conducted at various sites in the US, UK, and Poland, and organized around “an embodied practice of singing or songwork in which jewishness is treated as molecular” (152). These examples are richly described, with particular emphasis on how strategic uses of audiovisuality, including both sound and video recording, can enhance the generative power of artistic research by capturing the dynamic relationship between identity and technique theorized in the first chapter. This is not simply a matter of documentation, but of using the potential of audio-visual media to juxtapose and layer sound and image in ways that explore new relationships between identity, temporality, and place. Importantly, Spatz’s explorations of “molecular jewishness” are based not only in practice, but in a deep engagement with major thinkers in Jewish cultural studies, such as Jonathan Boyarin, Shaul Magid, and Santiago Slabodsky. Along the way, the chapter makes a compelling case that critical theory itself can be understood as a counter-hegemonic mode of reading and writing that is specifically Jewish. Building on the work of other scholars who have highlighted the marginalized position of figures such as Marx, Freud, Benjamin, and Derrida, as well as the Talmudic tradition of learned disagreement that, some argue, anticipates poststructuralism, Spatz suggests that a critical Jewish studies might find common cause with critical Black studies, critical Indigenous studies, and other decolonial approaches to knowledge, if and only if it can acknowledge and overcome its “entanglement with whiteness” (136). While not the central focus of the book, this nevertheless represents an important contribution to Jewish studies, and I hope Spatz finds an opportunity to expand on this thesis in the future. Considered singly, each chapter of Race and the Forms of Knowledge makes a substantial contribution to conversations within theatre and performance studies about practice-as-research, about audio-visual media, and about the critical slipperiness of identity in performance. Taken as a whole, however, this ambitious and uncompromising volume poses a different kind of challenge to the field: to embody that which we profess, and to profess that which we embody. References Footnotes About The Author(s) HENRY BIAL is Professor and Chair in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Kansas. He is a past President of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) and a Fellow of the Mid-America Theatre Conference. He is the author of Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen and Playing God: The Bible on the Broadway Stage , and the editor or co-editor of Brecht Sourcebook, Theater Historiography: Critical Interventions, The Great North American Stage Directors, Vol. 4: Abbott, Carroll, Prince, and The Performance Studies Reader , now in its fourth edition. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale “The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. The Brothers Size Dead Outlaw 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival ZAZ Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Journals The Segal Publication Wing includes three open-access digital journals and over twenty-five individual volumes of international plays and theatre resources. The journals are all available for FREE online to a global readership. After three decades, the final print editions of The Journal of American Drama and Theatre (JADT), Slavic and East European Performance (SEEP) , and Western European Stages (WES) were printed in 2013/2014. All Journals are indexed in the MLA International Bibliography and are members of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. The Ruin at the Volland Store, photo by Maddy Michaelis Journal of American Drama and Theatre (JADT) JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Read Now Past Issues End of The World Theatre, Egypt. Image ©Kaupo Kikkas Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. Read Now Past Issues Le Septième Jour. Directed by Meng Jinghui. Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage Festival d’Avignon European Stages The journal provide English-language readers with the most comprehensive source available on current theatre practices across Europe. Read Now Past Issues Ondinnok’s Xajoj Tun Rabinal Achi,directed by Yves Sioui Durand at Montreal’s Excentris. (Photo by Martine Doyon) Indigenous Stages (Coming Soon) The world’s first and only global interdisciplinary academic journal dedicated solely to indigenous stages. Its mission is to foster, survey, and publish the contemporary and historical theoretical discourse surrounding the field.

Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Robert Wilson Yearbook Volume 1 Visit Journal Homepage Robert Wilson's Production of Henrik Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken Yoni Oppenheim By Published on September 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF Robert Wilson's Production of Henrik Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken I don’t like most of Ibsen’s plays, Ibsen usually explains too much... —Robert Wilson (1) Robert Wilson’s aesthetics and opinion of Ibsen make him seem like a curious choice to direct an Ibsen play. However, to Robert Brustein—founding artistic director of American Repertory Theater and the Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard – Wilson was the perfect choice to direct When We Dead Awaken at ART in 1991. For decades, Brustein’s aim as an educator, critic, scholar, and producer was to – as he told me in an interview – “draw Ibsen away from realism.”(2) Brustein titled his essay arguing for a non-causal view of Ibsen’s work “Theatre in the Age of Einstein: The Crack in the Chimney.” As this title, with its reference to Einstein suggests—it was Robert Wilson’s aesthetic worldview embodied in Einstein on the Beach that epitomized an approach to theatre that Brustein wanted applied to Ibsen. He urged theatre-makers to find “the poem inside Ibsen’s plays,” and it was this view of Ibsen he inculcated in his students at Harvard. (3) Wilson had directed works at ART three times before. In 1986, Brustein invited him to direct Euripides’s Alcestis . It was the first time Wilson directed a classical dramatic text. As Brustein stated, “Robert Wilson was ideally suited for directing When We Dead Awaken because he can’t think in a linear fashion. It’s impossible for him. He thinks in terms of images.” (4) Robert Wilson’s production of When We Dead Awaken in an adaptation by Robert Brustein with musical knee plays by Charles “Honi” Coles played at ART from February to March 1991 and continued on to the Alley Theatre in Houston, Texas, in May and to São Paulo, Brazil, in October of that year. (5) This paper sheds light on the development of that production. An archival video of the work is available to view at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and ART’s archive. Surprisingly, it was not Brustein who came up with the idea of having Robert Wilson direct Ibsen’s rarely produced final play . Rather, it was one of his directing students at Harvard - Mary Sutton - who made the suggestion to Brustein upon leaving his Modern Drama lecture about When We Dead Awaken. (6) Brustein described his phone conversation with Robert Wilson to pitch the show: “When I described Ibsen’s last play to Bob over a crackling long-distance line to Germany, he immediately agreed to direct it, though he hadn’t yet read it.” (7) It is not at all surprising that Wilson agreed to direct the play solely based on a description of it. His process when directing texts is often to have someone synopsize the work for him as he sketches and takes notes. (8) Furthermore, Brustein’s interpretation of the play as an image-laden, non-realistic work surely captured Wilson’s imagination. Wilson described his initial reaction to reading the play: “[I] was immediately drawn to it. It’s a play that’s strange, mysterious, and something we can’t completely understand. There was something I just couldn’t put my finger on. I don’t like things I can understand. If I understand something, I don’t want to do it. It doesn’t interest me.” (9) ART would go on to market Wilson’s production of When We Dead Awaken as follows: Rubek, an aged sculptor [played by Alvin Epstein and in Brazil by Joel Grey] , vacations with his young, dissatisfied wife, Maya [Stephanie Roth], at a mountain spa. Irene, his former model and a patient at the local sanitarium [played simultaneously by both Elzbieta Czyzewska and longtime Wilson collaborator Sheryl Sutton (10)], seeks revenge on him for having used her to create his greatest work while rejecting her selfless love. Rubek realizes that he has sacrificed his soul for the sake of his art, and Maya runs off to cavort with Ulfheim, a bear hunter [Mario Arrambide]. Rubek and Irene ascend to the mountaintop only to be killed by an avalanche. (11) Creating the Adaptation With Wilson signed on to direct, Brustein began writing the adaptation in consultation with Wilson. However, ART’s literary director Robert Scanlan recalled that: Wilson over and over wished that he could do the play without text at all. His instinct with When We Dead Awaken has been to express this work through massive elemental forms—the mountains in each of the three acts, the water of the sea in the first act, and the water of the mountain brook in the second act, the snowstorm which “whites out” the finale of the play—and minimize the play’s dependence on words. The play does not strike Wilson to be about what people say. (12) Brustein, however, insisted that Wilson use Ibsen’s text and wrote an adaptation half the length of the original without “excising anything vital to the action, the characters, or the theme.” (13) He incorporated preliminary cuts made by the director and honored Wilson’s dislike of the “ping pong” of conventional dialogue. Wilson prefers his actors focus on their lines and not on the need to respond to the other actor in the scene. Brustein’s adaptation “set about rendering Ibsen’s strange, occasionally verbose play into a kind of suggestive English [he] hoped might spark Wilson’s imagistic imagination.” (14) In rehearsal, Wilson made further cuts. Brustein explains that Wilson wanted to cut “the line ‘When we dead awaken, what? We discover that we never lived.’ A very important line. He did not want the title in the play. I [Brustein] fought him hard on this, and [I] managed to get a compromise which left most of it in.” (15) Ultimately, Wilson placed the title in bold multicolored hand lettering on the white stage curtain, and it became part of the second of three song-and-dance knee plays performed at first by Charles “Honi” Coles and Alvin Epstein’s Rubek. They were then joined by the entire cast with the knee play evolving into a tap number. They sang “Yes, we fell in love, yes we fell in love, yes we fell in When We Dead Awaken,” repeating “When We Dead Awaken” as they shuffled off the stage. (16) Rather than cutting the line entirely as Brustein feared, Wilson turned the title into a musical number. The knee plays were created by Charles "Honi" Coles, a legendary tap dancer and blues singer/songwriter whom Wilson cast in the role of The Manager of the Spa. He and Wilson also collaborated that year on Mr. Bojangles' Memory, Og Son of Fire, a short musical film which included some music from the show’s knee plays and was presented at The Centre Pompidou in Paris as part of the Festival d’Automne. (17) A knee play is Wilson’s term for a short vaudevillian routine which he uses in his work to introduce an act. Knee plays serve, for him, as joints linking the show together, and function either as a commentary or in counterpoint to the tone of the play. In the first knee play, Charles “Honi” Coles came onstage and sang a song which begins: I was alone when I met her Now I wish I was alone. I wasn’t doing so bad But she came along and now everything is wrong I met her and I wish I never had. (18) As Coles, sitting in a yellow chair and dressed in a white suit, sang a song which resonated with the act’s theme, Elzbieta Czyzewska, who performed the first of two Irenes Wilson had play the part, “appeared in a glittering one–piece bathing suit, high heels, and one long red glove to do a Betty-Grable-from-behind cheesecake number,” (19) as one critic described it. Such critics mocked the knee plays as dismissive of Ibsen and just attempts to lighten things up. However, it makes complete sense that Irene who says later in the play, “I worked in nightclubs” (20) would be performing in such a number. In his attention to the details of the text, Wilson honored an element of the character’s history through this knee play. Instead of proving Wilson’s disregard for Ibsen’s text, the knee play underscored Wilson’s deep understanding of it. Act three was preceded by the final knee play. In this one, Sheryl Sutton, who played the shadow-like second Irene, was in a bathrobe smoking on the side of the stage as Coles gradually walked to a metal hospital bed in front of the “When We Dead Awaken” curtain as he sang a mournful blues song featuring the line: “Unless you’ve lived it, felt its misery, joy You can’t understand L-O-V-E, the doggonest feeling ever.” (21) Wilson maintained the theme of love established earlier, but endowed it with a more serious, mournful tone, foreshadowing death in the final act. The First Workshop The production process for a Wilson work is a long one. There were two workshops which preceded rehearsal. With Brustein’s adaptation in hand, the first workshop took place over five days in July 1990 and focused on developing the design concept of the show and the visual storytelling. It began, as Stage Manager Abbie Katz described, with the production team sitting in Robert Brustein’s office, “reading the script several times, stopping whenever anyone had a question, a thought, or a visual association to offer. While we read, Bob sketched.” (22) As scenic and costume designer, John Conklin notes: We discussed Ibsen’s life, personality, and a wide range of topics—the conversation veered from Brecht to Beckett to World War I. Bob Wilson listened, absorbed, and then drew and drew and drew. Bob thinks with his hands, a pencil, and a blank sheet of paper. Ideas, dreams, images, furniture, skies, mountains, trees, water, and an avalanche all emerged. (23) By the second day Wilson and Conklin were requesting visual and literary sources based on the previous day’s discussion. “The office walls are covered with pictures and images—the Grand Canyon, Ibsen walking the streets of Oslo, an Alpine hut, mountains and glaciers in Greenland, Gustave Dore’s illustrations for Dante’s Inferno .” (24) Assistant Dramaturg Dorthee Hannappel provides an example of the impact Dore’s illustrations had on Wilson’s designs, explaining: “One of these engravings particularly intrigued Wilson while he was sketching several versions of a stone chair [which Rubek sits on] in the second act. The picture shows a steep, tall rocky cliff. Looking at it carefully, Wilson transformed the shape of the cliff into the shape of the stone chair he was working on.” (25) Each day Wilson and Conklin would work together, with Conklin building models of every possible design Wilson sketched. The most central element of theatre for Wilson is light (26), and lighting designer Steve Strawbridge used a few lights with colored gels to provide a sense of a lighted set. As Conklin described it: What begins to emerge is a series of dream-like evocations of Ibsen’s brooding world of the mountains of Norway—rendered principally in black, white and gray. They become the essence of the psychological drama of the play, not an illustration of it. Bob creates an alternate reality—vision and movement divorced from surface narration. He uses juxtaposition and irony to liberate the text from its weight and density. . . . So this last, symbolic, heavy dream of Ibsen about failure, frustration, death, and resurrection will have a show curtain in bright vivid colors—red, blue, yellow letters striding and dancing across a pure white background. (27) It is noteworthy that Conklin discusses “the psychological drama of the play” in relation to Wilson’s design for the production. Wilson is known for his anti-naturalistic aesthetic which is not concerned with psychology, at least not in the conventional sense. But in Conklin’s opinion, Wilson does deal with the psychological drama on his own terms through the visual world he creates rather than by working with the actors. As Conklin understands it, Wilson is simply choosing alternative modes to tell the story—modes which perhaps honor the mystery of Ibsen’s creation more than a naturalistic approach would. By the final day of the workshop Robert Wilson and his collaborators had a “clear outline of the set that Bob envisioned for the production.” (28) The Second Workshop The second workshop occurred over two weeks in October of 1990, during which Wilson worked with the entire cast and developed the staging. In addition, the designers were present to see how the staging would affect their designs. As alluded to above, Wilson’s work with actors is very different from a conventional rehearsal process. As Wilson discussed with ART News: Normally actors start by talking about character and motivation; discussing what is going on in the play as preparation for rehearsals where development of relationships and the telling of the story are the primary objective. With Wilson, none of this takes place. Actors are told where to go, what to do (this includes unexplained gestures and poses), and when to speak (usually uninflected in early rehearsals). Wilson also told the actors, “I’m not the type of director who is interested in psychology. Knowing where you are going, that’s the main thing. Keep it very simple. Beneath it all it can be very complicated, but let theatre always be about one thing and keep that very simple.” (29) Essentially Wilson’s movement score creates a mask for the actors that is rigidly set and quite complicated to master, although it keeps things “simple.” On top of this score Wilson layers on the text at specific moments. The article explains: Actors must take extensive notes on their timing of the text to movement. No explanations are given about what any of these things may mean. Wilson likes, in early rehearsals, to explore what he calls “the tensions and the structure of the space.” He likes to start early because, as he says: “The visual book should be able to stand on its own. Space is texture and structure—something that can’t be talked about” . . . Wilson has said that a line of text should not interrupt the silence and that “when you finish a line, it doesn’t end, it continues into silence.” (30) Once the actors have learned the choreography and where to say their lines, they can fill the rigid form he has provided them. There can be great freedom for the actor within this structure. Wilson is not interested in why the actors do what they do; he just wants them to do it. “I don’t want to know why I’m doing something. That’s why my theatre is different, noninterpretive. Interpretation is for the audience.” (31) To an extent, the experience the actors have working on the piece is similar to Wilson’s aim for the audience’s experience. “He talks about giving the audience literal and mental space within the theatre piece to fill with their consciousness and feeling.” (32) Trusting Wilson’s method was not always easy for the actors. In the stage manager’s production book for the actual production, I found a note to the actors that they must fully commit to Wilson’s non-naturalistic style and trust that it will work if they do. The note reprimanded the actors, saying that it only looked bad when they do not fully commit to his style. (33) The second workshop ended with a Bauprobe , the building of a full-size mock-up of the set, which is rarely done in the United States. It is an example of how Wilson and ART introduced European production methods to the US theatre. The Bauprobe allowed Wilson and his designers to see how Wilson’s set would work in the actual space and to make adjustments, discuss props, etc. Having the actors there as well allowed the lighting designer to work with Wilson on the lighting before the start of rehearsals. This was a huge benefit considering that lighting is, for Wilson, the most important element, and the cues in his production are always painstakingly detailed and precise. The two workshops allowed Wilson and his company to have much of the intricate elements of his design and staging ready so that the relatively short rehearsal period was sufficient time for the production to open on schedule. Rehearsal Despite his wariness of text, Wilson did reinstate one of Brustein’s initial cuts. Taken from a dialogue from the start of the play between the aging sculptor Rubek and his young wife Maja as they sit at the spa recalling their train journey there: Although absolutely nothing happened I knew that we had crossed the border, That we were really home again, Because it stopped at every little station, No one got off and no one got on, But the train stood there silently, For what seemed like hours. At every station I heard two railmen Walking along the platform— One of them carrying a lantern— And they mumbled quietly to each other In the night, without expression or meaning, There are always two men talking About nothing at all. (34) Wilson found this passage to be mysterious and poetic. He amplified this text’s mystery by recording and using it as a taped refrain at various points in the play. Dramaturg Robert Scanlan adapted the dialogue into a monologue in rehearsal to remove Wilson’s loathed ping pong of dialogue. His focus on and repetition of this text lends insight into what attracted him to When We Dead Awaken in the first place. Throughout his oeuvre, Wilson has had a penchant for train imagery, an interest in silence, and a lack of interest in words. Einstein on the Beach has a train scene at the beginning of the opera. In terms of content, this monologue is an expression of a world in which speech is not the primary mode of communication. “I heard two railmen / Walking along the platform.” It is the sound of walking which is initially heard and noted. When they finally speak, they “mumble quietly without meaning.” The dream-like quality of the play, this scene, and Wilson’s work in general are underscored in this text. Maja thought Rubek was asleep (in the realm of dreams) on the train, but he was hearing the silence around him. This Ibsen text can be understood as an expression of Wilson’s theatrical aesthetic, and his choice to reinstate the text opens a window into his work methods. I would like to circle back now to the Wilson quote I opened with: “I don’t like most of Ibsen’s plays, Ibsen usually explains too much.” He continues: But When We Dead Awaken is different. It’s so mysterious. Nothing is as beautiful as a mystery. I like this play because I don’t understand it. The minute you think you understand a work of art it’s dead. It no longer lives in you. This play lives on in the mind like a hallucination. It’s Ibsen’s dream play.” (35) Following his rigorous engagement with Ibsen’s work at ART on When We Dead Awaken , Wilson would go on to direct two more Ibsen productions: Lady from the Sea and Peer Gynt along with countless productions of classic dramatic texts. Endnotes Arthur Holmberg, “Robert Wilson at the ART,” Harvard Theatre Collection. Robert Sanford Brustein, personal interview, March 19, 2008. Robert Sanford Brustein, Critical Moments: Reflections in Theatre and Society 1973–1979 (New York: Random House, 1980), 128. Robert Sanford Brustein, personal interview, March 19, 2008. Robert Orchard. “The São Paulo Follies.” ART News Nov. 1991 Originally, ART was planning on touring When We Dead Awaken in Europe. Arrangements were being made to open the 1991 Ibsen Stage Festival in Oslo with the production. That tour would have been cosponsored by the Belgrade International Theater Festival. But because of the brewing tensions in Yugoslavia, the Oslo/Belgrade tour fell apart. The Festival d’Automne in Paris was also interested in the production but that possibility was not pursued because it would have conflicted with the Ibsen Stage Festival schedule. Mary Sutton, phone interview, 20 February, 2008. Robert Sanford Brustein, “Henrik Ibsen and Robert Wilson: New Weapons and New Armor,” ARTnews , February 1991. Kate Whoriskey, personal interview, March 16, 2008. Robert Wilson, “Robert Wilson: Interview by Gary Susman,” Stuff , 1991, Harvard Theatre Collection. Sheryl Sutton, whom Robert Wilson had collaborated with since Deafman Glance in 1970, was his early muse. He not only cast her as the shadow Irene—muse to sculptor Arnold Rubek—but also costumed her in a dress similar to her dress in Deafman Glance . This was one of several visual references to Deafman Glance in the production. It suggests Wilson’s desire to link this newest chapter of his development as an artist directing an Ibsen play—a work centered on an artist reflecting on his life, regrets, art, muse, and masterpiece—with the wordless opera that was his first great artistic breakthrough two decades prior. American Repertory Theater, August 5, 2024, https://americanrepertorytheater.org/shows-events/when-we-dead-awaken/ . Robert Scanlan, “Nearing the Silence,” ART News 11, no. 2 (February 1991): 6. Robert Sanford Brustein, When We Dead Awaken: Henrik Ibsen, in a New Adaptation by Robert Brustein (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1992), 3. Robert Sanford Brustein, “Henrik Ibsen and Robert Wilson: New Weapons and New Armor,” ART News , February 1991. Robert Sanford Brustein, interviewed by Elinor Fuchs with Rolf Fjelde, “An Evening with Robert Brustein,” Ibsen News and Comment: Journal of the Ibsen Year in America 14 (1993): 6. When We Dead Awaken , directed by Robert Wilson, performed by American Repertory Theatre, archival videocassette, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts—Theatre on Film and Tape Archive, 1991, call no. NCOV 974. Mr. Bojangles’ Memory, Og Son of Fire , https://www.numeridanse.tv/en/dance-videotheque/mr-bojangles-memory-og-son-fire . Stage Managers Production Book, When We Dead Awaken , American Repertory Theatre, 1991. Joan Templeton, “Ibsen Lite: Robert Wilson’s When We Dead Awaken ,” Modern Drama 49, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 287. Robert Sanford Brustein, When We Dead Awaken , 25. Templeton, “Ibsen Lite,” 292. Abbie Katz, “Scenes from a Workshop,” ART News 11, no. 2 (February 1991): 3. John Conklin, “Working the Wilson Vision,” ART News 11, no. 2 (February 1991): 3, Harvard Theatre Collection. Ibid. Dorothee Hannappel, “Peeling an Onion,” ART News 11, no. 1 (November 1990): 12. Arthur Holmberg, The Theatre of Robert Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 121. Conklin, “Working the Wilson Vision.” Katz, “Scenes from a Workshop.” “Wilson: The Actor’s View,” ART News 11, no. 2 (February 1991): 2–3. Ibid. Leigh Hafrey, “He’s Back Home, but Is It the Real Robert Wilson?” New York Times , February 3, 1991, 5, 19. Conklin, “Working the Wilson Vision.” Stage Managers Production Book. When We Dead Awaken , 1991 ART. Brustein, When We Dead Awaken , 4. Arthur Holmberg, “Robert Wilson at the ART,” Harvard Theatre Collection. About The Author(s) Yoni Oppenheim is a New York based theater director, dramaturg and the artistic director of 24/6: A Jewish Theater Company. Robert Wilson Yearbook The Robert Wilson Yearbook, published annually by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, offers a dedicated platform for scholarly and creative engagement with the life, artistry, and enduring legacy of Robert Wilson (1941–2025), one of the most original visionaries in contemporary theatre and performance. The Yearbook seeks to explore and expand upon Wilson’s groundbreaking approaches to staging, lighting, movement, and visual composition. Each issue will feature a diverse range of content—including original essays, critical commentary, archival materials, artist reflections, and photography—examining facets of Wilson’s multifaceted practice across genres, eras, and geographies. The Robert Wilson Yearbook is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - This Issue “Going on a Journey”: Space, Time, and Experience in Robert Wilson’s Installations and Museum Interventions Re-Viewing Stefan Brecht’s The Theatre of Visions: Robert Wilson from a (B.) Brechtian Perspective Towards a Formalist Ritualistic Theatre: An Artaudian Reading of Robert Wilson’s Aesthetics The Theatre of Autobio-hetero-thanato-graphic: The Life and Death of Marina Abramović Time’s Shadows: Crisis of Subjectivity and Reconciled Concord in Robert Wilson’s Performative Reading of Shakespeare's Sonnets They Asked Me to Draw a City: Postdramatic Imaginings in Robert Wilson’s Direction of Strindberg’s A Dream Play Robert Wilson's Oedipus: The Postdramatic Journey of the Oedipus Story from Sophocles through Freud Robert Wilson and Norway Robert Wilson’s Art of Senses and Emotions Listening to Deafman Glance Robert Wilson's Production of Henrik Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken Thinking in Structures: Working as a Dramaturg with Robert Wilson Bertolt Brecht and Robert Wilson: The Dialectical Triad of Playwright, Director and Berliner Ensemble Actors in Wilson’s The Threepenny Opera Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 19 Spring 2026 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Reframing the Past: Situating Mesopotamian Theatrical Traditions Within a Cross‑Cultural Performance Continuum By Amir al-Azraki Published: May 11, 2026 Download Article as PDF Arab Stages, ISSN: 2376-1148, Vol. 19 (Spring 2026), pp. 1-26 Abstract: This article repositions Mesopotamian ritual and dramatic practices within a broader cross‑cultural history of ancient performance, challenging theatre historiographies that have traditionally marginalized non‑Greek traditions. Instead of seeking to establish beginnings or precedence, the study examines Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian performance forms as complex and historically situated practices that combine ritual action, mythic narration, embodied movement, and structured dialogue. Drawing on linguistic evidence, ritual sequences, archaeological contexts, and a substantial body of Iraqi scholarship rarely acknowledged in Western discourse, the article reinterprets the Akitu festival, the Sacred Marriage, the Descent of Inanna, city laments, and Sumerian disputation poems ( adamin and tesitu ) as examples of organized performative expression shaped by distinct social, political, and religious environments. Particular emphasis is given to the dramaturgical sophistication of the disputation poems, which function as competitive and adjudicated verbal contests and display striking affinities with contemporary modes of agonistic expression. By foregrounding interconnection, mutual influence, and the plurality of ancient performative traditions, the study argues for a more inclusive and intercultural theatre historiography. This approach positions Mesopotamian performance within a continuum rather than a linear narrative of development and underscores how ancient societies used embodied and communal practices to negotiate meaning, authority, and identity, demonstrating that theatricality has emerged through multiple overlapping cultural trajectories. Keywords: Mesopotamian performance, Sumerian disputations , Akitu Festival , Sacred Marriage , Inanna/Ishtar, Ritual drama, Theatre historiography Introduction The theatrical traditions of Mesopotamia—the ensemble of ritual-dramatic and festival performances attested in Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian contexts from the late fourth to early first millennia BCE—constituted a sophisticated performative culture. These traditions included impersonation and role-taking in ritual dramas, structured dialogues and disputations, lamentations with choral leadership, sacred-marriage enactments, and mythic re-enactments. They were performed in designated spaces (temple courts, processional routes, and festival houses), using codified movements, costumes, and props. Yet early 20th-century scholarship made few references to Mesopotamian drama and theatre, often dismissing the culture as "pre-theatrical." In 1925, for example, German Assyriologist and ancient Near Eastern religions expert Alfred Jeremias asserted that the development of myth into drama is only evident in traces within the Sumerian-Babylonian cultural cycle. [i] His limited examples included Chaldean festival performances, in which the myth of the dragon fight was enacted comedically; Assyrian festival plays, in which the king assumed the role of the dragon-slayer; and an Assyrian-Babylonian dialogue between a master and his servant, referred to as the “Dialogue of Pessimism.” [ii] Moreover, conventional theatre historiographies credited ancient Greece as the birthplace of drama, largely overlooking the possibility that theatre existed in other ancient cultures. This marginalization or ignorance of Mesopotamian theatrical traditions, despite their ritualistic origins that parallel those of Greek theatre, reflected a Eurocentric bias that historically prioritized Greek theatre as a source and a foundational model. This bias not only shaped and distorted European scholarship on ancient theatre traditions, but also influenced scholarly discourse in Iraq, where a majority of Iraqi theatre scholars—especially those educated in Western institutions during the mid-twentieth century—embraced Eurocentric historiography with little critique. Modern Iraqi theatre was founded by scholars and Christian clergy trained in the West, such as Sami Abdul Hamid, Haqi al-Shibli, Ibrahim Jalal, and Hanna Habash, whose reliance on European models for teaching, translation, and production practices often reinforced colonial frameworks, even as a smaller group of voices pressed for recognition of indigenous traditions. As Khalid Amine points out, colonialism fostered divided loyalties and contributed to epistemic violence, a “Eurocentric eclipse, if not exclusion, of other peoples’ performance traditions” within theatre studies: “Borrowing western historiographical models without critiquing their claim of universality and exclusivist tropes,” Amine argues, “amounts to a new kind of colonialism.” [iii] Other obstacles have also contributed to gaps in scholarly understanding of Mesopotamian theatre traditions. One such obstacle is disciplinary compartment-alization: the archaeologists and field epigraphers who recover and publish sites, and the philologists and linguists who edit and translate cuneiform sources, are rarely in dialogue with theatre historians and performance theorists. Another obstacle is that the field of Mesopotamian studies is vast, and scholarly focus has often been on other aspects of the culture, such as religion, politics, and social structures, leaving the performative dimensions of Mesopotamian material underexplored. Political instability, and destruction due to wars, invasions, and natural disasters, has further complicated the study of Mesopotamian theatre, posing significant obstacles to archaeological efforts. The volatile political climate has made it difficult for scholars to access important sites and artifacts that could provide crucial insights into ancient performance practices. Moreover, under Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi government's nationalist agenda influenced how Mesopotamian heritage was presented and researched, sidelining certain aspects of cultural history, including theatre. Even today, financial, logistical, and security challenges continue to limit archaeological work on Mesopotamian heritage. Former Minister of Culture, Tourism, and Antiquities Dr. al-Hamdani indicates that Iraq is currently home to approximately 15,000 archaeological sites, of which less than 2% have been excavated, and with the potential for additional discoveries in the future. [iv] Promising sites for further exploration include some documented yet still under-analyzed ceremonial structures: the bit akitu at Babylon, the Eanna precinct at Uruk, and the Ekur temple complex at Nippur. While well known in Mesopotamian studies, these sites have not yet been systematically examined through the lens of theatre and performance history. Future research that integrates archaeological, philological, and performance-theoretical methods could reframe them as central nodes in the history of ancient theatre, rather than as ancillary ritual space. Yet it would be misleading to suggest that scholarship on these issues is completely absent. A substantial body of research has traced Near Eastern mythic and ritual continuities into Greek literature [v] and has examined performance elements within Sumerian and Akkadian texts. Moreover, a number of Iraqi historians, archeologists, and theatre scholars, utilizing evidence from early twentieth-century Western archaeologists and historians, have long argued for the significance of Mesopotamian theatre. [vi] Among the most significant contributions are those of Awni Karomi, Fawzi Rashid, and Mohammed Sabri, whose works remain untranslated into English but collectively advance an important counter-narrative. Karomi argues that ancient Iraq possessed dedicated performance spaces, most notably the Bayt al-Tamthil (“House of Performance”) at Uruk, which he reads as evidence for a theatrical tradition structurally distinct from temple ritual. [vii] Rashid postulates that theatre existed in ancient Iraq prior to Greece, proposing that the Descent of Inanna reflects an early performative tradition necessitated by limited literacy and the need to integrate myth with communal life, and citing 1967 excavations at Uruk as material evidence of ritual spaces potentially linked to dramatized representations of the underworld. [viii] Sabri goes further by theorizing the Babylonian theatre as an indigenous innovation predating Hellenistic influence, describing it as a multifunctional structure for ritual, spectacle, and athletic display. [ix] While these works constitute a crucial foundation for any inquiry into Mesopotamian performance, my approach diverges in both scope and intention. Unlike Karomi, Rashid, and Sabri, whose studies sought to challenge the aforementioned Eurocentric bias by demonstrating that theatre existed in Mesopotamia prior to ancient Greece, I am not concerned with questions of origins or precedence. Rather, I aim here to reframe Mesopotamian theatre traditions within a cross-cultural continuum of ritual and performative expression that emphasizes interconnected developments, reciprocal influences, and shared performative vocabularies across ancient civilizations. I examine Mesopotamian theatrical traditions as a historically specific constellation of practices that can be usefully studied through the lens of more recent advances in performance and theatre history, particularly cross-cultural approaches that situate ancient performance within interconnected ritual and cultural systems, and that highlight the emergence of performance traditions as a widespread and multifaceted human phenomenon rather than as the innovation of any single civilization. By illuminating the significance of underrecognized research, including Iraqi scholarship, on Mesopotamian theatrical traditions, and by interrogating the intersections of Sumerian dispute texts, ritual enactments, linguistic and architectural evidence, this article provides new and innovative observations, such as the striking parallels between Sumerian disputation poems and contemporary battle rap, which highlight unexpected continuities in performative traditions and underscore the enduring relevance of Mesopotamian cultural legacies. Linguistic Evidence for Mesopotamian Theatre Traditions Lexical evidence preserved in the Assyrian-English-Assyrian Dictionary suggests the presence of organized performance practices in ancient Mesopotamia. [x] A cluster of terms relating to performative activity including epšētu (n. act), epāšu (v. perform), mašālu (v. mime), mēlulu (actor or player), riqdu (dance and dancing), aluzinnu (clown/jester), [xi] mupaggianu (n. mimic), and gendered performers such as mummillu (actor) and mummiltu (actress or dancing-girl), may indicate that performance was recognized as a distinct form of social and ritual behavior, potentially extending beyond entertainment into broader religious and communal contexts. Terminology associated with material culture and performance settings further supports this interpretation, as terms such as kuzippu, nalbašu, talbuštu, and tēdiqu (costume), kutmu (mask), šumaku (prop), duʾu and hutû (platform), and lulīmu and mardītu (stage) imply designated performance environments. Likewise, taklimtu (drama and spectacle), alongside distinctions between dabūbu (dialogue), and dāgilu (spectator), suggest formalized presentation and performer–audience interaction. The distribution of these terms across general lexical compilations, rather than within single literary or ritual texts, suggests that performance-related vocabulary formed part of wider linguistic usage. Although such evidence cannot confirm the existence of theatre in the modern sense, it supports the hypothesis that Mesopotamian societies maintained structured performative traditions involving specialized performers, audiences, spatial organization, and staged or ritualized presentation. One possible contextual illustration of the broader semantic and cultural range of performance-related terminology may be found in literary and theological interpretations of the goddess Inanna–Ishtar. R. Harris has drawn attention to the significance of play ( mēlulu ) within the characterization of the goddess, suggesting that playful and performative elements formed part of her divine persona across multiple spheres of activity. The interrelationship between play, performance, and ritual underscores the goddess’s multifaceted role in transcending social norms and reasserting divine order. As Harris notes, “Play ( melulu ) is an integral part of Inanna-Ishtar's personality. She is ‘the player ( mummiltu ) par excellence.’ The semantic range of the Akkadian word for play includes dancing and acting and […] involves the arena of war, for her playground was the battleground.” Harris quotes, among other things, a text in which the phrase “the play of Ishtar” is used as a euphemism for “battle,” and also highlights the connection between “play” and the carnivalesque elements of the festival of Ishtar. [xii] Moreover, play and performance are framed as vital elements of Mesopotamian ritual, as evidenced by the presence of portable stages, referred to as littum riqdi . [xiii] These platforms were used during performances that had religious, ceremonial, and possibly theatrical functions, reinforcing the idea that the act of performance was central to religious worship and social rituals. The littum riqdi suggest that these performances were more than artistic expressions; they were instruments for enacting divine narratives, involving both gods and humans in the broader cosmological drama. Another word that relates to theatre props is melammu , masks, which were associated with gods, royals, or demons (see Image 1). A.L. Oppenheim explores the Akkadian concept of melammu , traditionally understood as a supernatural aura, and argues that it also refers to physical masks used in religious performances. He associates melammu with ritual practices in which priests donned masks to embody divine or demonic beings during ceremonies, including instances where priests wore these masks in cultural theatrical representations before the worshippers of Ishtar. [xiv] Thus, melammu not only signified divine radiance but also played a key role in theatrical and ritualistic performances in Akkadian culture. Image 1: Clay mask of the demon Huwawa [Humbaba]. Old Babylonian period (c. 1800–1600 BCE), from Sippar (Abu Habba), Iraq. British Museum, Museum No. 1883, 0118, AH.2598. Credit: ©Trustees of the British Museum Shared under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license , no changes made to image. Oppenheim mentions different types of masks, including lion masks ( zumar labbi ) and fish masks ( zumar nune ), used by priests in ritual performances. He references Akkadian texts describing how specific priests, particularly the kurgarru and assinnu , wore masks as part of ceremonial and theatrical enactments. For example, in the Ishtar festival in Uruk, priests appeared as "lion-men" (i.e., wearing lion masks) in ritual performances. Moreover, he notes that some priests, such as those involved in exorcisms or magical rites, donned masks to embody supernatural beings, likely to intimidate spirits or symbolize divine presence. Oppenheim connects these masked performances to broader Mesopotamian religious practices, arguing that the masks served not only as disguises but also as tools to invoke divine power and create awe in ceremonial contexts. [xv] Performance of Rituals and Myths The roots of Mesopotamian drama trace back to early agrarian and pastoral communities of the Neolithic and Ubaid periods, where ritual practices were intertwined with hunting, herding, and the first stages of organized agriculture. In these early communities, ritual performance provided a medium for engaging with deities, ancestors, and non-human forces. Through song, dance, masking, and procession, participants enacted relationships with the natural and divine worlds. Rather than representing a linear evolution from ‘animism’ to more advanced forms, these practices reveal layered cosmologies in which new political and theological emphases (such as royal ideology) were grafted onto longstanding performative grammars. As Mesopotamian urban life developed, anthropomorphism took center stage, and rituals evolved. By the second millennium, kings and community representatives acted in these dramas, with love and marriage symbolizing the bond between the people and the fertility powers, strengthening social and psychological ties. [xvi] The history of Mesopotamian performances reveals how older traditions persisted while being reinterpreted to meet new political and religious needs. Fertility rites, lamentations, and mythic reenactments continued to coexist, but rulers and temple elites adapted these forms strategically to assert authority, consolidate communal identity, and dramatize cosmic order. For Thorkild Jacobsen, this shift mirrors a broader transformation in Mesopotamian religion from a nature-based system to one dominated by political forces, moving from democratic pluralism to monarchies and, eventually, exclusive nationalist ideologies. [xvii] In this sense, dramatic expression developed not through linear evolution but through the appropriation and exploitation of existing practices to serve changing cultural and political agendas. A parallel can be observed in fifth-century Greece, where inherited ritual and mythic frameworks were re-purposed to sustain civic ideology. This framing emphasizes continuity and adaptation, situating Mesopotamian theatre within a dynamic continuum of performance responsive to specific historical conditions. As we shall see in the following sub-sections, examples of this adaptive process are found in Babylon’s Akitu festival, where the king ritually embodied Marduk to dramatize divine victory and legitimize his own rule, and in the Sacred Marriage rite, where older fertility rituals were re-staged to anchor royal authority in cosmic order. Similarly, Battle Drama reconfigured inherited mythic motifs into a political performance celebrating the birth of the nation. These cases provide insight into the cultural fabric of Mesopotamian society, and illustrate how Mesopotamian drama appropriated existing ritual forms to serve shifting cultural and political agendas. Enuma Elish and the Akitu Festival Enuma Elish (also known as The Seven Tablets of Creation ) is the Babylonian creation myth, the title of which is derived from the opening lines of the piece, “When on High.” Composed in Akkadian during the late second millennium BCE and preserved most fully on seven tablets from the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, Enuma Elish was ritually performed at the Akitu festival. The Akitu , the origins of which go back to the third millennium BCE in Sumerian cities such as Ur and Lagash before becoming central in Babylon, functioned as both a religious and political spectacle. [xviii] In the third millennium BCE, Sumerian Akitu -type festivals were often celebrated twice yearly, at both the spring and autumn equinoxes. By the first millennium BCE, however, the Babylonian Akitu had become standardized as a spring festival in the month of Nisan (the start of the Babylonian New Year), when the Enuma Elish was performed. [xix] The myth tells the story of the great god Marduk's victory over the forces of chaos and his establishment of order at the creation of the world. Marduk, the chief god of the city of Babylon, defeats the elder goddess Tiamat and brings order to chaos, and thus becomes the Lord of the gods of Heaven and Earth. In analyzing elements of cultic drama at Akitu festival, Erich Ebeling asserts that “the events were not only pantomimically represented but also made comprehensible to the devout audience through a more or less detailed dialogue between the main characters and the chorus.” [xx] Although the evidence is fragmentary, a number of scholars have proposed reconstructions in which the Enuma Elish and related mythological narratives were integrated into cultic performances during the Akitu festival. Ritual texts and later scholarly interpretations suggest that these narratives were not confined to silent symbolic action but may have involved structured spoken exchange and ritualized dialogue. On the basis of fragmentary ritual texts, Ebeling argued that elements of the creation myth were enacted within a cultic drama, involving verbal interaction between principal divine figures and a group of priests functioning in a chorus-like role, rather than through pantomime alone. [xxi] Within this framework, mythic events were made intelligible to participants and observers through a combination of recitation, lamentation, and symbolic ritual action. Descriptions of the Babylonian Akitu festival emphasize its visual and performative dimensions; as Lauren Ristvet notes, “the resulting spectacle was imposing, colourful and even comic.” [xxii] Lexical and ritual references, including terms such as littum riqdi , further suggest that these performances could unfold in temple courtyards and along processional routes rather than in a single fixed space. As the Akitu was a civic-religious festival central to urban life, such ritual performances likely addressed a broader public audience, including priests, officials, and assembled citizens. While these reconstructions remain necessarily speculative, they support the interpretation of the Enuma Elish as functioning within a large-scale public ritual framework that combined “demonstrative and performative acts” with formal recitation and symbolic enactment. [xxiii] The drama begins when Belet‑ili, dispatched by Marduk's consort Zarpanitum, embarks on a frantic search for the god. Along the way, she encounters a priest from Borsippa, who joins the search as rumors spread of Marduk’s vanishing. Meanwhile, the citizens of Babylon, fearing the loss of their divine protector, cry out for Marduk’s return, praying to Shamash and Sin (gods of the sun and moon, respectively) for intervention. The turning point occurs when Marduk’s lifeless body is discovered at the Bab Ka-bu-rat gate, with a goddess mourning by his side. The nature of his death remains unclear, but symbolic rituals suggest the involvement of chaotic forces. This revelation triggers civil unrest in Babylon, with rebellion and grief overtaking the city. Marduk’s death is reported to Zarpanitum, whose intense mourning underscores the tragedy. In response, rituals are performed to restore Marduk’s strength and to petition Shamash and Sin for his return. Although the Akitu festival unfolds through a sequence of ritual actions that parallel themes of crisis and restoration found in the Enuma Elish , these actions are best understood as cultic ritual rather than theatrical drama. [xxiv] The king was ritually identified with Marduk, although only at specific points within this sequence, rather than across the entire narrative arc. The disappearance, mourning, and symbolic endangerment of Marduk belonged primarily to the mythic and liturgical register of the festival and were articulated through recitation, lamentation, and ritual gesture, not through direct enactment by the king. The king did participate explicitly in the ritual, however, most notably on the fifth day of the Akitu, when he underwent the well-attested humiliation rite before the statue of Marduk in the Esagila. During this rite, the high priest would remove the king’s regalia, strike his cheek, and compel a declaration of innocence; the king’s ability to shed tears functioned as a divinely evaluated sign of Marduk’s continued favor: “if the tears flow, Bel is friendly; if no tears appear, Bel is angry.” [xxv] This moment does not dramatize a mythic battle or represent Marduk’s combat with chaotic forces but instead ritually enacts the king’s submission to divine authority at a moment of cosmic uncertainty, establishing the conditions for the subsequent restoration of order. Later in the festival, particularly during the procession to and from the Akitu house and the ritual “taking of the hand of Bel” (Days 8–11), the king appeared in a restored and legitimized role that reflected Marduk’s reassertion of cosmic and political order. These actions aligned the king symbolically with Marduk’s victory over chaos, yet they remained ritual affirmations rather than mimetic reenactments of combat with figures such as Kingu or Tiamat. The king’s role was thus episodic and symbolic, embedded within a broader sequence of cultic actions rather than constituting a continuous dramatization of the creation myth. Early claims that the Akitu festival involved a dramatized representation of Marduk’s death and restoration derive largely from the interpretive framework of the early twentieth-century Myth–Ritual School. Within this paradigm, cultic action was assumed to function as a ritual reenactment of mythic narrative, and the Babylonian New Year was accordingly reconstructed as a dramatic performance of Enuma Elish . The most influential formulation of this view appears in the work of Svend Aage Pallis, who argued that the Akitu festival as a whole was “represented dramatically,” with priestly personnel, processions, and symbolic acts rendering the myth present through ritual performance rather than through narrative recitation alone. [xxvi] Pallis’s reconstruction drew attention to the festival’s ordered sequence, embodied actions, and public intelligibility, and for much of the twentieth century it provided the standard point of departure for discussions of Akitu ritual form. Subsequent scholarship, however, has increasingly qualified these claims. The evidence for the staging of the Akitu ritual remains fragmentary and largely indirect. The primary sources consist of Seleucid-period cuneiform ritual instructions, references to the recitation of Enuma Elish , and associated liturgical prayers, all of which prescribe ritual actions (such as the humiliation of the king, the removal and restoration of regalia, and the procession of divine statues between cultic spaces), without supplying stage directions or narrative cues sufficient to support a mimetic dramatization of myth. Archaeological evidence, including the Processional Way and the Akitu house outside Babylon’s walls, confirms the existence of architectural settings designed for movement and public ritual visibility, but it does not preserve evidence for dramatic props, costuming, or enacted divine combat. Later Assyriological scholarship has rejected interpretations of the Akitu as theatrical re-enactment, viewing its rites instead as symbolic affirmations of divine and political order. This position was later synthesized and reframed by Jonathan Z. Smith, who emphasized the festival’s function as a historically contingent ritual of cosmic and political rectification. [xxvii] Within this framework, the description of the Akitu as a “performance” refers to the bodily, public enactment of symbolic gestures, movements, and speech acts, rather than to theatrical drama in the modern sense. Sacred Marriage The Sacred Marriage appeared in the third millennium BCE as a Sumerian cultic rite through which the king enacted a bond with Inanna to secure fertility and well‑being. [xxviii] Public elements (offerings, processions, ritual purification, and adornment) preceded a private union enacted by the king and a designated priestess representing the goddess. The ceremony was accompanied by a love‑song repertoire whose dialogic and lyrical form indicates performed speech and song, rather than silent recitation. [xxix] Comparative evidence indicates that the hieros gamos functioned as ritual drama, staged by kings, priests, and cult personnel (singers, dancers, musicians) and articulated through processions, spoken exchanges, and chorus‑like refrains. [xxx] Within the Sumerian corpus, the Sacred Marriage is likewise voiced and embodied: organized love‑song cycles (marked by performative rubrics such as balbale , tigi , kungar ) present dialogues/monologues with responsorial refrains, embedded in a sequenced choreography—processional approach, ritual bathing and adornment, bed preparation, and the king’s escorted entry to the goddess’s inner space (often at Eanna)—after which the festival reopens, to banqueting, music, and public rejoicing. [xxxi] Read together, these sources warrant interpreting the Sacred Marriage as efficacious ritual performance: codified actions, roles, and sounds whose enactment renews agricultural abundance and confirms kingship in the public, cultic sphere. This framing helps clarify how later scholars have interpreted the rite’s evolution. Thorkild Jacobsen argues that this Sacred Marriage Drama was an early immersive ritual which later developed into a highly structured performance, reflecting broader shifts in Mesopotamian society. To describe the later iterations of the Sacred Marriage as a “performance,” however, is not to suggest that it lost its ritual efficacy or became aesthetic spectacle alone. The hymns, processions, and liturgies continued to be understood as acts that ensured fertility, divine favor, and cosmic balance. What changed was not the belief in efficacy but the mode of enactment: from a participatory rite in which participants embodied Inanna and her spouse Dumuzi, to a temple-centered performance where king and priestess acted as representatives of the gods. Like the Dionysian plays in classical Greece, which invoked a god and effected catharsis through language and ritual action, later iterations of the Sacred Marriage retained a performative force that linked the community to divine powers. The distinction, therefore, is not between “real” ritual and “aesthetic” performance, but between different ways of staging divine presence. As Richard Schechner has argued, performance is best understood as a continuum that encompasses ritual, play, and theatre, all grounded in what he calls “restored behavior,” that is, twice‑behaved, rehearsed actions that can be replayed and recombined across ritual and performance. [xxxii] From this perspective, the Sacred Marriage was not “mere ritual” or “mere theatre,” but a hybrid enactment whose force lay in both efficacy and representation. As Mesopotamian society became increasingly urbanized and politically stratified, religious thought shifted toward more anthropomorphic conceptions of the divine. Gods that had once been experienced through diffuse forces and direct embodiment were now imagined as distinct personified beings, often organized into divine “families.” Yet this was not a clean break. Traces of earlier animistic traditions persisted in healing rites, local practices, and temple ceremonies, and elements of direct divine embodiment remained possible within the liminal space of ritual. By the third millennium BCE Sacred Marriage ceremonies became increasingly institutionalized under temple authority and within temple settings, accompanied by formalized hymns, musicians, and priestly oversight, thus aligning religious performance with emerging urban political structures. By the first millennium BCE, earlier fertility enactments had developed into new forms such as the Battle Drama, which Jacobsen describes as a “political drama celebrating and reaffirming the birth of the nation as a divine achievement.” [xxxiii] Surviving hymns and liturgies from the Sacred Marriage provide glimpses of these performances: songs of Inanna’s desire for Dumuzi, ritual dialogues between king and priestess, and choruses that integrated the wider community into the drama’s effects. Descent of Inanna into the Underworld The Descent of Inanna into the Underworld is a Sumerian myth that narrates the descent of the goddess Inanna (Ishtar, in Akkadian) into the Underworld to overthrow its ruler, her sister Ereshkigal, the Queen of the Dead. However, following the removal of her adornments, Inanna perishes, and her corpse is suspended on a nail. The god Enki restores Inanna to life, but she must deliver another living human in exchange for her freedom. She selects Dumuzi, her spouse, who is abruptly transported to the Underworld. In response to the pleas of Dumuzi's sister, Geshtinanna, his circumstances are somewhat ameliorated: he is permitted to remain in the Underworld for only a portion of the year, with his sister assuming his role for the remaining duration. Iraqi historian and archaeologist Fawzi Rashid argues that theatre existed in Iraq before the Greeks, using the myth of Inanna’s Descent as evidence. He suggests that, given the limited literacy in ancient Mesopotamia, the myth must have been performed, rather than merely read, in order to engage the public and to connect everyday life with religious teaching, thereby increasing social cohesion. [xxxiv] Indeed, the mythic text contains dialogic exchanges, role substitutions, and ritual laments that are inherently performative in structure and would lend themselves to live enactment. To further support his argument, Rashid refers to archaeological findings in Uruk in 1967, where excavations uncovered a structure with three concentric stone walls, which he proposes may have symbolized the entrance to the underworld in a public performance. [xxxv] Additionally, as Karomi notes, the Bayt al-Tamthīl (“House of Performance”) at Uruk, though situated near the temple of Inanna, is architecturally distinct from the cultic precinct, indicating a space deliberately demarcated for communal gathering and spectacle (hence its name), rather than exclusively for worship. [xxxvi] Similarly, the Babylonian theatre associated with Nebuchadnezzar II offered a large, multifunctional arena used for ritual dramas, athletic events, and mythological reenactments during civic festivals such as the Akitu . While these are structurally distinct from Athenian theatres, they nonetheless represent performance spaces—arenas intentionally structured to accommodate audiences and enactments—which substantiates the claim that Mesopotamian culture embedded performance within both civic and sacred life. As many scholars have noted, narrative and mythic performance forms occur in virtually every ancient culture, from Egypt to Anatolia and beyond. To avoid conflating these diverse traditions, this study uses the term “theatre” in a specific sense: not merely the existence of story or ritual, but the development of architecturally or socially demarcated spaces where communal enactments were staged before an audience. This distinction allows us to separate general ritual or narrative expression (practices shared widely across ancient societies) from the more focused phenomenon of theatre, where myth, ritual, and spectacle intersect in settings designed for spectatorship. In this light, Mesopotamian examples such as the Bayt al-Tamthil or the Babylonian theatre can be considered “theatrical,” while also acknowledging that their forms and functions differed from the later Athenian model. To further support his argument that theatre existed in Mesopotamia before the Greeks, Rashid also outlines potential connections between the myth of Inanna’s descent to the underworld and early Greek plays such as Aeschylus’ Oresteia . His analysis suggests that recurring motifs shared by Inanna’s Descent and The Oresteia , such as neglect, substitution, divine intervention, and sibling loyalty, may point to thematic continuities or indirect cultural echoes from Mesopotamian traditions, raising the possibility that Greek tragedy was shaped in part by earlier Near Eastern performance forms. [xxxvii] Nonetheless, while the parallels with The Oresteia are suggestive, the Eleusinian Mysteries (and their mythic focus on Demeter and Persephone) provide a far more convincing and historically grounded analogue to Inanna’s Descent , since they ritualized the katabasis motif within a performative cultic context rather than a later dramatic retelling. Recited and ritually enacted during the Mysteries, the Hymn to Demeter staged the cycle of loss, katabasis , and renewal in a manner strikingly parallel to the Sumerian narrative: both traditions employ ritual substitution, seasonal suffering, and the cyclical return of fertility. As Walter Burkert has shown, the Mysteries drew on a repertoire of descent motifs that circulated across the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, with katabatic themes functioning not only as mythic narratives but as ritual dramas of transformation enacted before communities. [xxxviii] Burkert emphasizes that antiquity itself recognized these resonances, with Greek tragedy (such as the choral invocations in Seven Against Thebes ) reflecting patterns known from Mesopotamian ritual laments and healing ceremonies. [xxxix] From this perspective, the Demeter/Persephone cycle offers a closer and more productive comparative frame than sibling motifs alone, since its ritualized performance within the Eleusinian Mysteries directly parallels the communal dramatization of cosmic order, divine suffering, and seasonal renewal found in Inanna’s Descent . Epic of Gilgamesh The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the earliest known works of world literature, survives in multiple languages and recensions because it developed over nearly two millennia across different Mesopotamian cultural and linguistic contexts. Originating in the late third millennium BCE as independent Sumerian poems about the hero “Bilgamesh” (later known as Gilgamesh), these narratives were later synthesized into an Akkadian epic during the Old Babylonian period and subsequently adapted into Hurrian and Hittite translations in Anatolia. The best-known form, the Standard Babylonian version edited by Sin-leqi-unninni (ca. 1300–1000 BCE), represents a deliberate literary reworking of earlier material that shaped the epic’s theological and philosophical emphases. Scribal copying, translation, and editorial revision across centuries produced the textual plurality evident today, preserved in hundreds of fragmentary tablets from Nippur, Ur, and Nineveh. This complex transmission history explains why Gilgamesh reaches us in divergent forms that reflect the evolving linguistic, religious, and intellectual traditions of the ancient Near East. The epic follows Gilgamesh, a powerful yet tyrannical ruler, whose friendship with the wild man Enkidu transforms him through shared adventures: most notably their defeat of Humbaba, guardian of the Cedar Forest, and the slaying of the Bull of Heaven sent by the goddess Ishtar. When Enkidu dies as divine punishment, Gilgamesh is overcome by grief and fear of mortality, prompting a quest for eternal life that leads him to the immortal flood survivor Utnapishtim. Ultimately, he learns that immortality is reserved for the gods and that human meaning lies in wisdom, compassion, and the lasting works of civilization. Across its many recensions and translations, the epic reflects evolving Mesopotamian conceptions of kingship, friendship, mortality, and the search for understanding in the face of death. Image 2: Relief, Gilgamesh and Enkidu slaying Humbaba at the Cedar Forest . Photo credit: Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin, via Wikimedia Commons. Shared under a Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license , no changes made to image. The Epic of Gilgamesh was not only transmitted through written tablets but also rooted in the ritual and performative culture of ancient Mesopotamia. While there is no textual evidence for formal or Western-style stage dramatizations of the epic, the ritual contexts of Mesopotamian festivals (particularly the Babylonian Akitu ) suggest that mythic narratives were embodied symbolically through processional and ceremonial performance. As Judith E. Filitz argues, the Akitu ritual demonstrates how ancient ceremonies could occupy a liminal space “between ritual and theater,” combining corporality, multi-sensual ostentation, event, and representation within a religious framework. [xl] Such performative qualities help explain how mythic stories could be enacted through gesture, music, or costume as part of communal expressions of cosmic renewal. Professional singers ( kalu ) and lamentation priests ( naru ) likewise performed mythological and royal compositions in temple settings, emphasizing the oral and performative dimensions of Mesopotamian literature. Iconographic scenes of Gilgamesh wrestling a lion (emblems of divine kingship and cosmic order) echo this tradition, showing how the epic’s imagery participated in a broader culture of ritual performance rather than in Western-style theatrical dramatization. Mohammed Sabri argues that artifacts such as cylinder seals, clay tablets, and carved stone figures further illustrate the theatricality of these performances. [xli] This argument highlights the performative dimension of Mesopotamian myth, in which artistic representations of figures such as Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and Humbaba convey movement, gesture, and symbolic embodiment (see Image 2). Cylinder seals frequently depict scenes that correspond to episodes from Gilgamesh (most notably the hero’s combat with the monstrous guardian or the divine bull)—compositions that evoke ritualized struggle, rather than static illustration. While none of these objects can be shown to represent actors or staged performances, their iconography (muscular confrontation, divine insignia, and recurring motifs of heroism) suggests that Mesopotamian art visualized mythic action as part of a broader ceremonial and religious aesthetic. The existence of terracotta masks of Humbaba, such as those discovered at sites like Sippar and Nippur, further supports the idea that ritual impersonation and embodiment played a role in Mesopotamian religious practice. In this sense, Sabri’s notion of “theatricality” captures the experiential quality of these representations: they translate myth into embodied form, revealing a ritual imagination that predates but anticipates later traditions of performative storytelling. The epic’s moral and theological dimensions cannot be attributed to the early Sumerian religious framework nor to any single belief system, however. Much of the material known to us has been transmitted through later Akkadian, Babylonian, and even Hittite versions, reflecting centuries of adaptation across Mesopotamian and Anatolian cultures. Its exploration of human defiance against divine limits, the pursuit of immortality, and the redemptive power of friendship and loss reflects a dynamic dialogue between changing cultural values rather than a static doctrine. Its enduring themes transcended local religious orthodoxy, allowing Gilgamesh to remain a living and evolving part of the Mesopotamian ritual and cultural imagination. Adamin/Tesitu : Sumerian Battle Rap Certain Sumerian-language literary texts preserved in Old Babylonian manuscripts were composed and transmitted with performance in mind. As Paul Delnero observes, a key distinguishing feature of these texts is their likely intended use for performance. This is demonstrated by the presence of “performative rubrics and subscripts in the texts themselves,” “a highly syllabic orthography to indicate how the words in the text were to be pronounced during performance,” and an “Old Babylonian liturgical source which includes musical glosses.” [xlii] Oral recitation was a pervasive feature of ancient textual culture: apart from administrative or inventory lists, nearly all Mesopotamian compositions were read aloud to listeners. Yet, as Delnero’s analysis makes clear, the Sumerian disputation poems differ from ordinary oral reading in their formal design and explicit performative cues. Their alternating dialogue structure, ritual refrains, and notations referring specifically to a-da-min-se, “the performance of a disputation,” reveal that these were not simply pedagogical recitations but dramatized enactments, probably staged within temple-schools ( edubba ) or at cultic festivals. In this sense, they represent a specialized form of performance that bridges the worlds of ritual, education, and theatrical expression, embodying a more deliberate and structured dramatization than other texts examined here. While reading about early Sumerian literature and theatrical practices in ancient Iraq, I was struck by a fascinating performative tradition that resonates with what in modern terms is known as battle rap, a genre where performers engage in verbal duels, trading boasts and insults in rhythmic, improvisational exchange. This is not to suggest that such forms are uniquely modern; on the contrary, the art of competitive verbal performance appears across a wide range of ancient and contemporary cultures. From the Sumerian adamin and tesitu disputations to the Greek agon , the Arabic munafarat and naqaʾid , Norse flyting , and West African griot rivalries, verbal contest has long served as both entertainment and a test of intellect, memory, and creativity. The analogy to battle rap is therefore not meant flippantly, but rather to illuminate the enduring human impulse to dramatize competition through public poetic exchange, a performative continuity that bridges ancient Mesopotamia and the modern stage. The Sumerian genre of "dispute" ( adamin; tesitu in Akkadian), studied in the edubba (the Sumerian tablet-house or school, dating back to before 2000 BC), shares striking similarities with battle rap. Tesitu was performative, burlesque, and often described as "contests (between) two" or "contests in speech"—that is, disputation poems, meant to be performed in communal occasional and festivals. Enrique Jiménez notes that external evidence for such performances, while limited, does exist: two Ur III documents mention deliveries “for the performance of a disputation” ( a-da-min aka ) and “for a disputation” ( a-da-min-se ). These documents probably refer to the enactment of a disputation performed in the context of a cultic or festival event. [xliii] From the first half of the second millennium BC, eight fascinating Sumerian disputation poems emerge, each with a notably theatrical flair. In these dramatic verbal duels or dialogic drama, two rivals face off in a battle of words, each striving to prove their superiority. The structure of these contests echoes the format of a stage performance, with carefully crafted exchanges designed to showcase wit and rhetoric, and with a judge (a god, like Enlil or Enki, or a human authority figure, such as king or a schoolmaster) delivering a final verdict on the contest. The participants often represent contrasting elements of the world, creating vivid and symbolic characters: the Tree squaring off against the Reed, or the Hoe battling the Plow, each antagonist embodying its own essence in the contest. These verbal sparring matches extend beyond the agricultural sphere, with dramatic confrontations between metals (Precious Metal vs. Copper), seasons (Summer vs. Winter), and even professions (Farmer vs. Shepherd). Some disputes involve more complex roles, such as school personnel and graduates, or animals (Bird vs. Fish). At times, the poems present unexpected pairings, such as a crop plant confronting a Ewe, in a clash of categories. Adil Hashim, professor of ancient Iraqi history, postulates that ancient Iraqi society was marked by significant ethnic diversity, with the indigenous Sumerians alongside the Semitic peoples who migrated from neighboring regions. Over time, these groups merged to form a unified culture. However, Hashim argues that conflicts and differences occasionally emerged, both between and within these groups. These societal tensions, such as the clash between urban and nomadic lifestyles or class and profession divisions, were often symbolically represented in Mesopotamian literature, especially in the form of debates/ adamin . [xliv] One particularly striking example presents a showdown between two city lords, Enmerkar and Ensuhkešdanna, where the entire city becomes a stage for their intellectual and political contest. Claus Wilcke examines the theatrical dimensions of this poem, arguing that it blends elements of epic narration with dramatic performance. He identifies four internal textual features that point toward performative enactment, each observable within the text itself. First, the repeated use of demonstratives and deictic pronouns. For example, when the narrator commands, “ Let him come here! ” or says, “ There he stands before the gate of Aratta! ” the phrases function like stage directions, orienting audience and performers in space. Second, the ergative marking of animals (e.g., “The ox drives the plow,” “The lion seizes the prey”) may signal that these actions were represented mimetically by human actors. Third, the absence of a dominant central character allows fluid shifts in voice and perspective, supporting multiple speakers or roles. Finally, rapid scene and character changes (e.g., moving from Enmerkar’s city to Ensuhkešdanna’s court and back again) suggest a performative sequencing of acts. [xlv] Taken together, these textual markers lend credence to Wilcke’s claim that Enmerkar and Ensuhkešdanna was not simply recited but staged, as a kind of civic or ritual performance. Another example is a verbal duel between school staff and graduates, where two characters take turns delivering speeches in which they boast of their virtues while hurling insults, often escalating into harsh and abusive exchanges. This exchange was meant not only to display rhetorical skill but also to entertain and amuse, perhaps as a way to offer relief from the otherwise monotonous routine of classroom life. These compositions were invented by Sumerian scribes, who would compose, copy, and have them read by students. [xlvi] Among the well-known disputations are those between school graduates named Enkita and Enkihegal, in one case, and Enkimansi and Girnishag, in another. To illustrate the performative dynamics of Sumerian disputation poetry, the following example pairs a passage from Enkita and Enkihegal with a rap-like reinterpretation that reimagines its rhythm and verbal combativeness in a modern idiom. Formal translation of the Sumerian text: You have a harp, but know no music, You who are the ‘water boy’ of your colleagues. Your throat can’t sound a note, You stutter your Sumerian, can’t make a straight speech, Can’t sing a hymn, can’t open your mouth— And you are an accomplished fellow! [xlvii] My “rap-ified” translation: You got a harp, but no music to show, Water boy to your crew, that's all you know, Your throat can’t hit a note, you’re fallin' apart, Stutterin' in Sumerian, can't even start, You can’t sing a hymn, can't open your mouth, When you try to speak, all we hear is a drought, And you call yourself accomplished, man, what a sight! Similarly, battle rap operates as an agonistic performance form, structured around confrontational verbal exchanges in which two or more MCs, typically from the African-American community, assert dominance through verbal dexterity, creative wordplay, and strategic insult. Just as tesitu was designed to entertain and display rhetorical prowess, battle rap serves a similar purpose in contemporary culture, providing a space for performers to showcase their linguistic skills, often pushing the boundaries of humor and aggression. Both forms, in their respective eras, seem to recognize the power of words not only to challenge and insult but also to entertain and bond the participants and the audience through a shared appreciation of verbal artistry. More importantly, tesitu can be seen as both entertainment and social criticism. School sketches often depict exaggerated characters like the complacent professor, obsequious students, and bullying teachers, figures that serve as satire rather than reality. [xlviii] This satirical tone suggests that tesitu was not just about competition, but also a critique of societal norms and the power dynamics within education. Similarly, battle rap today uses sharp wordplay and insults to address issues like inequality and identity, offering both entertainment and social commentary. Both tesitu and battle rap employ exaggeration and humor to critique societal flaws, using verbal contests as a form of both performance and social reflection. The comparison to modern battle rap is not meant to suggest a direct historical lineage but to serve as a heuristic analogy for understanding the performative nature of Sumerian disputation poetry. Both forms rely on competitive verbal display, improvisation, audience response, and performative embodiment, core elements that precede and anticipate later theatrical traditions. In the context of a pre-Greek performance culture, adamin and tesitu can be viewed as proto-theatrical genres, in which social, political, and ritual tensions are dramatized through staged verbal contest rather than narrative representation. The analogy to rap performance thus tries to sharpen my central argument: that ancient Mesopotamian literature possessed a developed sense of performative competition, role-play, and audience engagement that laid the cultural groundwork for theatrical expression. The Lamentation Over the Destruction of Ur The Lamentation Over the Destruction of Ur is an ancient Sumerian poem that mournfully describes the destruction of the city of Ur, lamenting the fall of its civilization and blaming the gods, particularly Enlil, for the devastation, with the goddess Ningal often depicted as weeping and pleading for mercy on behalf of her people. It is considered a prime example of a "city lament" from ancient Mesopotamia, detailing the city's desolation and the suffering of its inhabitants after the catastrophic event. As John Jacobs explains, the Sumerian city laments were “historically embedded texts, designed for repeated performance at a specific time and place,” to ritually reenact the death and the rebirth “not only of the city per se but also of the house/temple-city-universe.” [xlix] Through this performative lamentation, the city itself becomes a speaking, suffering figure: “over the course of the evolution of the genre… the personified city comes to lament its own fall.” [l] Moreover, as Mary R. Bachvarova argues, key motifs first expressed in Mesopotamian city laments were later adapted in the Iliad , where earlier versions of Troy’s destruction were absorbed into its epic narrative. [li] The Lamentation, a 435-line Sumerian text drenched in sorrow and divine anguish, illuminates the ritual roots of performative expression, where religious practice and dramatic storytelling intersect. Composed in response to the fall of Ur (c. 2000 BCE, with the lament composed shortly thereafter), the work extends beyond literary lament to a ceremonial act of grief and supplication, belonging to a ritual performance tradition: Sumerian lamentation priests ( gala ) chanted such compositions aloud within temple contexts, employing formal vocal techniques, and likely accompanied by ritual instruments, alongside communal participation. The lament’s structure (with its alternating voices, refrains, and responsive cadence) suggests a choral mode of delivery that guided collective emotion, akin to the Greek chorus. While the text does not explicitly record gestures, ritual mourning practices in Mesopotamia included weeping, raising hands in prayer, and prostration, widely attested in liturgical sources and visual depictions of lament rituals. [lii] Thus, the text’s vivid imagery and emotive language would not have remained confined to the page; it functioned as an embodied, communal expression of grief before the gods, where speech, voice, and gesture merged into a sacred performance. In many ways, The Lamentation echoes the hallmarks of Greek tragedy. The heightened emotional intensity of the dialogue, the deep sense of divine justice, and the human suffering that results from it resonate with the works of Sophocles and Euripides. As Edith Hall observes, the Greek vision of suffering was one element within a wider cultural sensibility shared across the eastern Mediterranean, where diverse ethnic and linguistic groups interacted two and a half millennia ago. In this context, Greek tragic poetry, with its themes of divine wrath and human vulnerability, shows clear affinities (e.g., tone and content) with older traditions, including Mesopotamian literature such as Gilgamesh as well as the Old Testament. [liii] Just as in Greek plays, the gods here are active participants in the drama, not distant figures, and the cosmic consequences of their actions unfold before a suffering human populace. Yvonne Rosengarten has argued that The Lamentation is not merely a religious or liturgical piece, but rather an early form of drama, akin to Greek tragedy. She highlights several key aspects that suggest the text was intended for performance, rather than just recitation (the latter implies the oral and often solemn and formulaic delivery of text, while the former suggests a more embodied and communal act, involving stylized vocal delivery, emotional expression, musical elements, and ritual staging within a sacred setting). These aspects include the text’s vivid emotional content, the use of choral lamentation and the use of the chorus to guide the audience’s response, and the central role of the goddess Ningal, who interacts with the divine in a manner similar to a theatrical protagonist. The text's emotional range and repetitive and symbolic language, along with musical accompaniment, further support the idea of a staged event. Ultimately, Rosengarten proposes that The Lamentation should be seen as an early form of religious theatre, possibly performed in Sumerian temples, and predating Greek tragedy. This challenges the traditional view of the text as solely a religious document and invites consideration of the dramatic and performative elements in early Mesopotamian culture. [liv] Karomi, who directed a staging of The Lamentation in 1974 at the Academy of Arts Theatre in Baghdad, highlights the enduring power of the ancient text in performance: the production, he said, “proved its performative potential—which knows no limits—and affirmed that its philosophical idea remains relevant to this day”—no mean feat for a text written in 3000 BCE. [lv] In these ancient lines, one does not merely encounter expressions of grief over the fall of a city; rather, one witnesses the emergence of a dramatic tradition. The Lamentation shows how early Mesopotamian communities used embodied, communal performance to stage crisis, mourning, and renewal—practices that resonate with, but are not reducible to, later Mediterranean forms. Architectural Evidence of Mesopotamian Theatres Iraqi scholars have proposed that the Bayt al-Tamthil at Uruk, the Akitu House, and other urban venues reflect early Mesopotamian performance architectures. As already noted, the city of Uruk reveals evidence of a dedicated performance space in the vicinity of Inanna’s temple that functioned independently of religious drama. Moreover, while the extant theatre at Babylon is Hellenistic in date, some scholars read it as a hybrid structure layered onto long-standing local performance traditions rather than a purely exogenous import. Theatre professor Mohammed Sabri takes the argument a step further, arguing that the Babylonian theatre was not built under Alexander the Great, nor was it a replica of Greek or Roman theatres. Instead, according to Sabri, it was an independent and innovative Mesopotamian structure, designed for religious rituals, performances, and athletic events. [lvi] The site under discussion lies within the ruins of Babylon, roughly 85 kilometers south of modern Baghdad. Excavations led by Robert Koldewey between 1899 and 1917 uncovered the remains of a Hellenistic-style theatre near the Processional Way and the Ishtar Gate. Stratigraphic and architectural evidence identified the building as a Seleucid or early Parthian construction, dating between the mid-2 nd and early 1 st centuries BCE, [lvii] and later investigations confirmed that assessment: the Nebuchadnezzar-stamped bricks should not be taken as evidence that the building dates to the sixth century BCE. As Olof Pedersén explains, the theatre “was constructed in the south-western part of the Homera hills, which … consisted of fills from the demolition of the ziggurat before its planned rebuilding … where a Greek theatre was constructed on part of the fill.” [lviii] Yet these findings may indicate that the theatre at Babylon was a cultural hybrid, reflecting both Hellenistic architectural forms and the needs and traditions of the local Babylonian community. Nevertheless, Mohammed Sabri’s interpretation provides a postcolonial rereading of this evidence. He acknowledges the Hellenistic form of the extant structure but emphasizes the continuities with indigenous Mesopotamian performance practices that pre-dated Greek colonization. Thus, the Seleucid theatre did not appear ex nihilo ; rather, it was superimposed upon an existing local tradition of ritual and communal gathering, transforming the space into a hybrid arena that merged Greek theatrical conventions with Babylonian ceremonial functions. Such a synthesis aligns with broader cultural patterns of the Hellenistic Near East, where Greek civic architecture often absorbed and recontextualized native symbolic forms. Sabri’s argument thus reframes Babylon’s theatre not as a Greek import but as an instance of cultural adaptation, expanding the discussion of ancient performance beyond a Eurocentric narrative of Greek origin to a more intercultural history of theatricality in Mesopotamia. Conclusion Before Athens institutionalized theatre in the 5 th century BCE, Mesopotamian societies had cultivated rich performative traditions that intertwined ritual, myth, and dramatic spectacle. These traditions, embodied in the Akitu festival, the Sacred Marriage, The Descent of Inanna , the Sumerian disputations, and The Lamentation over the Destruction of Ur , demonstrate a deep awareness of performance as both sacred act and communal expression. Figures such as Ebeling, Karomi, Rashid, and Sabri have each illuminated different facets of this performative world, from the ritual re-enactments of cosmic renewal to the architectural and linguistic traces of dramatic practice. Together, they reveal a culture in which performance was not peripheral to social or religious life, but central to the articulation of cosmic order, kingship, and identity. The purpose of this study is not to replace one narrative of origin with another, nor to position Mesopotamia as a rival to Greece or any other ancient culture. Rather, this paper argues for the recognition of Mesopotamian performance traditions as part of a broader, interwoven history of theatricality that spanned multiple ancient civilizations. When viewed through this wider lens, the dramatic and ritual performances of Mesopotamia, Greece, and elsewhere in the ancient world appear not as competing beginnings, but as parallel articulations of the same human impulse to perform meaning into being. Recognizing Mesopotamian drama, therefore, expands the frame of theatre historiography. It invites us to move beyond linear genealogies and toward a more plural and dialogic understanding of performance history; one that acknowledges exchange, convergence, and independent innovation. As archaeological discoveries continue and collaborations between theatre historians, archaeologists, and philologists deepen, further evidence may emerge to clarify how these early practices intersected across regions. In this broader vision, the Mesopotamian contribution to theatre history lies not in claiming primacy, but in demonstrating that the performative imagination (ritualized, communal, and creative) has always been a shared human inheritance, reframed here as one that transcends civilizational boundaries. From this perspective, re-centering Mesopotamia within this interconnected landscape may enrich our understanding of world theatre as a complex, evolving network of traditions rather than a single, Western-centered lineage. Performance, as these early cultures reveal, has never belonged to one civilization alone; it has always been a dialogue among many voices, each shaping the art of theatre in its own time and form. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes [i] Alfred Jeremias, Babylonische Dichtungen, Epen und Legenden (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs, 1925), 30. [ii] The “Dialogue of Pessimism,” a Babylonian poem dating from around 1000 BCE, is often interpreted as both an existential reflection and a comedic satire targeting social hierarchies and the educational system. Franz Marius Theodor de Liagre Böhl suggests that the Master-Slave Dialogue may have functioned as a form of ritual comedy performed during the Babylonian New Year Festival, akin to the Roman Saturnalia. This reversal of roles, where the slave assumes the position of the master, points to a theatrical performance infused with satirical commentary. See Franz Marius Theodor de Liagre Böhl, Anthropologie réligieuse , ed. C. J. Bleeker (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 47–48; “Dialogue of Pessimism,” Electronic Babylonian Library , Corpus L II.4 (Standard Babylonian recension), trans. Benjamin Read Foster, https://www.ebl.lmu.de/corpus/L/2/4/SB/ . [iii] Khalid Amine, “Decolonizing Theatre History in the Arab World,” Horizons/Théâtre 12 (2018): 10-25, at 12. [iv] Abdul Ameer al-Hamdani, “Iraq’s Heritage: An Update,” online lecture, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, 6 January 2021, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDrca7zbGH0 . [v] Walter Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age , trans. Margaret E. Pinder (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Martin L. West, The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). [vi] Awni Karomi, “Utruha fil Masrah al-Iraqi al-Qadeem” [A Thesis on Ancient Iraqi Theatre], al-Aqlam , no. 6 (March 1979): 3–7. [vii] Karomi, “Utruha fil Masrah,” 5. [viii] Fawzi Rashid, “al-Masrah Babili wa Lais Ighriqiyan” [Theatre Is Babylonian, Not Greek], al-Mawrid 16, no. 3 (Fall 1987): 66–67. [ix] Mohammed Sabri, “al-Masrah al-Babily: Tarikhuhu, Tirazuhu wa Khasa’isuhu” [Babylonian Theatre: History, Design, and Features], Al-Academy , no. 74 (February 2016): 74–75. [x] I do not claim expertise in the languages of ancient Mesopotamia, but I have consulted Simo Parpola, ed., Assyrian-English-Assyrian Dictionary: Cuneiform Edition (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press/Eisenbrauns, 2023), 4, 11, 25, 30, 33–34, 37, 41, 80, 82, 94, 96, 101, 121–22. [xi] For more on this term, see Maddelena Rumor, who points out that the aluzinnu was a Mesopotamian comic performer (an early jester) whose role centered on parody, mockery, and boastful incompetence. He appears in temple and court contexts, performing songs, dances, humorous recitations, and satirical impersonations of experts such as healers, diviners, and scholars. Rumor further postulates that this figure is directly connected to the Greek ἀλαζών ( alazôn ), noting that the Greek term has no convincing Greek etymology and closely matches the phonetic shape and comic function of aluzinnu . She argues that both characters share the same defining traits—exaggeration, deception, and comic pretension—and that the Greek braggart likely reflects a cultural and linguistic borrowing from the earlier Mesopotamian tradition. Maddalena Rumor, “There’s No Fool Like an Old Fool: The Mesopotamian Aluzinnu and Its Relationship to the Greek Alazôn ,” KASKAL 14 (2017): 187–207. [xii] Rivkah Harris, “Inanna-Ishtar as Paradox and a Coincidence of Opposites,” History of Religions 30, no. 3 (1991): 261–78, at 274. [xiii] Anne Draffkorn Kilmer, “An Oration on Babylon,” Altorientalische Forschungen 18, no. 1 (1991): 9-22, at 19–20. [xiv] Adolf Leo Oppenheim, “Akkadian pul(u)ḫ(t)u and melammu ,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 63, no. 1 (1943): 31–34. [xv] Oppenheim, “Akkadian pul(u)ḫ(t)u and melammu ,” 31–34. [xvi] Thorkild Jacobsen, “Religious Drama in Ancient Mesopotamia,” in Unity and Diversity: Essays in the History, Literature and Religion of the Ancient Near East , ed. Hans Goedicke and J. J. M. Roberts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 76–77. [xvii] Jacobsen, “Religious Drama,” 77. [xviii] Wilfred George Lambert, Babylonian Creation Myths (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2013), 3–6; Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others , rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), xvii–xviii; Thorkild Jacobsen, The Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 167–77. [xix] E. A. Speiser, “The Creation Epic,” in Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament , edited by James B. Pritchard, 3rd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 60. [xx] Erich Ebeling, Tod und Leben nach den Vorstellungen der Babylonier , Part I: Texts (Berlin and Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1931), 41. [xxi] Ebeling, Tod und Leben , 41. [xxii] Lauren Ristvet, “Between Ritual and Theatre: Political Performance in Seleucid Babylonia,” World Archaeology 46, no. 2 (2014): 264. [xxiii] Sam Mirelman, “The Babylonian Akitu Festival and the Ritual Humiliation of the King,” ANE Today 10, no. 9 (September 2022), https://anetoday.org/mirelamn-ritual-humiliation-king/ . [xxiv] By “ritual” and “theatrical performance” I refer to analytical aspects of the same Akitu festival sequence, not to separate events. Following Richard Schechner, ritual and theatre may be understood as points on a continuum of performance rather than mutually exclusive categories; see Richard Schechner, Performance Theory , rev. ed. (New York: Routledge, 2003), 70–74. The Akitu is fundamentally a cultic rite of renewal characterized by fixed procedures and ritual efficacy, while also exhibiting embodied, demonstrative, and public dimensions that can be described analytically as performative, rather than theatrical in the modern sense. [xxv] Jonathan Zittell Smith, “A Pearl of Great Price and a Cargo of Yams,” History of Religions 16 (1976): 1–17, at 3. [xxvi] Svend Aage Pallis, The Babylonian Akitu Festival (Copenhagen: Hovedkommissionær A. F. Høst, 1926), 253–65. [xxvii] Smith, “A Pearl,” 6–8. [xxviii] Samuel Noah Kramer, The Sacred Marriage Rite: Aspects of Faith, Myth, and Ritual in Ancient Sumer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), 49–50. [xxix] Kramer, Sacred Marriage Rite , 63–66, 67–78. [xxx] Inge Nielsen, Cultic Theatres and Ritual Drama: A Study in Regional Development and Religious Interchange Between East and West in Antiquity (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2002), 39–41. [xxxi] Pirjo Lapinkivi, The Sumerian Sacred Marriage in the Light of Comparative Evidence (Helsinki: Neo‑Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 2004), 30–47 (for the performative rubrics balbale , tigi , and kungar ; and for alternating voices and responsorial refrains), 92–106, 151–66 (for ritual sequencing: the processional approach; bathing/adornment; the nuptial bed; Ninšubur’s escort into the goddess’s inner space at Eanna), 185–206 (for the post‑union banquet, music, rejoicing); cf. Inge Nielsen, Cultic Theatres , 39–41 (for processions, spoken exchanges, chorus‑like refrains; and the roles of kings, priests, and cult personnel), 52–53 (for the major processions, including the city‑to‑ Bīt Akītu route). [xxxii] Schechner, Performance Theory , 324. [xxxiii] Jacobsen, “Religious Drama,” 77. [xxxiv] Rashid, “al-Masrah Babili,” 66. [xxxv] Ibid. [xxxvi] Karomi, “Utruha fil Masrah,” 5. [xxxvii] Rashid, “al-Masrah Babili,” 71–72. [xxxviii] Walter Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 68. [xxxix] Walter Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 109–10. [xl] Judith E. Filitz, “At the Threshold of Ritual and Theater: Another Means of Looking at a Mesopotamian Ritual,” in Teaching Morality in Antiquity: Wisdom Texts, Oral Traditions, and Images of Virtue , ed. T. M. Oshima and Susanne Kohlhaas (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018), 233–34, 241–44. [xli] Mohammed Sabri, al-Masrah al-Iraqi al-Qadim [The Iraqi Ancient Theatre] (Baghdad: Dar al-Arif, 1991), 38. [xlii] Paul Delnero, “Translating the Untranslatable: The Role of Akkadian in the Sumerian Liturgical Corpus,” plenary talk presented at the American Oriental Society Annual Meeting, Portland, 18 March 2013, 8. [xliii] Enrique Jiménez, The Babylonian Disputation Poems: With Editions of the Series of the Poplar, Palm and Vine, the Series of the Spider, and the Story of the Poor, Forlorn Wren (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 15–16. [xliv] Adil Hashim, personal interview, 18 March 2025. [xlv] Claus Wilcke, The Sumerian Poem Enmerkar and En-suḫkeš-ana: Epic, Play, or? Stage Craft at the Turn from the Third to the Second Millennium B.C. (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 2012), 18–33. [xlvi] Christopher J. Lucas, “The Scribal Tablet-House in Ancient Mesopotamia,” History of Education Quarterly 19, no. 3 (Autumn 1979): 305–32. [xlvii] Samuel Noah Kramer, The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 222–23. [xlviii] Cyril John Gadd, Teachers and Students in the Oldest Schools (London: University of London, 1956), 36. [xlix] John Jacobs, “The City Lament Genre in the Ancient Near East,” in City Lament: Commemorating Destruction in the Ancient Mediterranean and Beyond , ed. Ann Suter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 16, 19. [l] Jacobs, “The City Lament Genre,” 30–31. [li] Mary Rosalie Bachvarova, “The Destroyed City in Ancient World History: From Agade to Troy,” in City Lament: Commemorating Destruction in the Ancient Mediterranean and Beyond , ed. Ann Suter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 36–78. [lii] Mark E. Cohen, Balag Compositions: Sumerian Lamentation Liturgies of the Second and First Millennium B.C. (Malibu, CA: Undena Publications, 1974), 5–7; “The Lament for Sumer and Ur,” Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL), University of Oxford, text no. c.2.2.3, https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section2/tr223.htm . [liii] Edith Hall, Greek Tragedy: Suffering under the Sun (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 10. [liv] Yvonne Rosengarten, “Au sujet d'un théâtre religieux sumérien,” Revue de l'Histoire des Religions 145 (1968): 117–60. [lv] Karomi, “Utruha fil Masrah,” 5. [lvi] Sabri, “al-Masrah al-Babily,” 74. [lvii] Daniel Thomas Potts, “The politai and the bīt tāmārtu : The Seleucid and Parthian Theatres of the Greek Citizens of Babylon,” in Babylon: Wissenskultur in Orient und Okzident , ed. Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum et al. (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2011), 244. [lviii] Olof Pedersén, Babylon: The Great City (Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, 2005), 158. References About The Author(s) Amir Al‑Azraki is an Arab‑Canadian playwright, literary translator, and theatre scholar whose work explores war, exile, and identity. A practitioner of the Theatre of the Oppressed, he collaborates with artists, educators, students, and equity‑seeking communities to foster dialogue and social change. His plays have been staged internationally, and his translations have introduced contemporary Iraqi drama and Arabic poetry to English‑language audiences. Al‑Azraki is co‑author of Theatre in Iraq under Occupation, 2003–2011 and co-translator/co-editor of Contemporary Plays from Iraq . He is Associate Professor and Coordinator of Studies in Islamic and Arab Cultures at Renison University College. Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Reframing the Past: Situating Mesopotamian Theatrical Traditions Within a Cross‑Cultural Performance Continuum Gen Z Theatre from Turkey Taps into Repertoires of Millennial Resistance: A Comparison of the Short Festival Plays 'Helezoni' and 'Orange' Performance Review: THE CLOWN, by Mariam Basha. Directed by Kamal El Basha. El Hakawati Theatre, Jerusalem. August 28, 2025 in person, September 11, 2025 via WhatsApp video. Performance Review: DODI AND DIANA, by Kareem Fahmy. Directed by Reginald L. Douglas. Mosaic Theater, DC. September 23, 2025. Performance Review: ALMONDS BLOSSOM IN DEIR YASSIN, by Hanna Eady. Directed by Hanna Eady. Cherry Street Village, Seattle. October 25, 2025. Book Review: Samer Al-Saber. A Movement’s Promise: The Making of Contemporary Palestinian Theatre (Stanford University Press, 2025). Pp. 328. Hardcover, Paperback, E-book. 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Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 14 Spring 2023 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Performance Review: A FAMILY THAT HAS BEEN BLOCKED By Areeg Ibrahim Published: November 26, 2023 Download Article as PDF A FAMILY THAT HAS BEEN BLOCKED. By Mustapha Shohaib. Directed by Mohamed Sobhi. Sonbol City Theatre, Egypt. Feb. 18, 2023. Reviewed by Areeg Ibrahim, Helwan University At the outskirts of Cairo, on the way to Alexandria, lies Sonbol City, a cultural complex established by prolific Egyptian actor and theater director Mohamed Sobhi (b. 1948), who named the place after a famous role he played in a television series. Sonbol City hosts the Mohamed Sobhi Theatre House, which showcases a photo gallery of Sobhi’s works before the audience enters into the auditorium of the stage. There, I recently watched the play A Family That Has Been Blocked . First performed in 2022 , A Family That Has Been Blocked is a comedy that traces changes to Egyptian family values through time. The play is written by Mustapha Shohaib and directed by Sobhi, who also plays the leading role as patriarch of a family that spans four generations, with supporting roles played by Wafaa Sadek, Kamal Attia and others. At the beginning of the play there is a mix of cinematic and theatrical tools. A screen projection plays a video showing a future time where life has been dehumanized, and humans have become more like robots. Then the scene shifts to the house of an average Egyptian family. The play follows this Egyptian family and its patriarch, Zeinhom Effendi (Mohamed Sobhi), from the time of the revolutionary figure Saad Zaghloul, who led the 1919 Revolution. The family is shown to abide by strict decorum and tradition. We follow the same family’s descendants through time until we reach the present, witnessing their deterioration in values, respect and their level of language use. One symbolic example is the willingness of the descendants to sell the family’s library and books. Another example shows the impact of technology—such as the phone, television, media and social media—on the disintegration of family relationships. One particular scene refers to the deterioration of education, to the extent that the family’s children take private lessons and memorize their lessons like a song accompanied by drum beats. The title of the play can be interpreted on several levels. First, the family members have blocked one another, dissolving the family connections. “Blocking” may also refer to the family’s neglect of the past glory of Egypt and of the family’s relationship with their ancestors. In addition, the play’s title may refer to a general societal tendency to neglect familial values. This socio-political satire draws our attention to the role of family, and didactically promotes family values while criticizing materialism, the domination of social media, and the deterioration of the educational system. Sobhi was famous for his collaborative theater work with the late playwright Lenin El-Ramly (1945- 2020). Their collaboration during the eighties produced famous comedic and political satires, such as, for example, You Are Free (1981), The Savage (1985), The Indecisive (1985), Hallucinations (1989) and Point of View (1989) . Later on, Sobhi directed and acted in a number of successful plays with Egyptian actress Simone; these included Carmen (1999), A Woman’s Plaything (2000) and The Road to Safety (2000). This play is a comedy that incorporates several songs, but its spirit is slightly different from the Lenin/ Sobhi comedic style, which was subtly satirical. Here, the play seems to be trying too hard to re-capture the previous commercially successful formula of comedy, song, political satire and nationalistic fervor. Sobhi’s directorial style depends on some physical slapstick, as well as satirizing social situations and changes in societal taste concerning the quality of music and songs. The comedic effect happens through the repetition of certain motifs and phrases that seem to slightly change across the scenes and times. For example, different scenes refer to the prices of goods and make fun of how prices have become inflated. But this comedic effect felt predictable and labored at times. The scenery also sometimes failed to evoke warmth and intimacy; this may have been intentional, however, to show the alienation of the family members and the coldness sweeping over their relationships. Despite some biting jokes about inflation and education, the play ends on a didactically nationalistic and hopeful note. Overall, A Family That Has Been Blocked is a pleasant family outing. The front of the house team at the theater is well-managed and punctual, the play is neatly blocked, and all participants appear to be well-trained and highly disciplined. Sobhi has managed to leave a mark in the history of Egyptian theater both as actor and director, and his years of theater experience show to good effect in his work. However, for this play, it may have been a better idea to train another actor in the leading role; more humor could have been created from the combination of Sobhi’s experience with the fresh perspective of a budding comedic theater talent. But Sobhi’s play is worth watching for its humor, values and professionalism. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes References About The Author(s) Areeg Ibrahim is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of English Language and Literature at the Faculty of Arts in Helwan University, Cairo. She was the Dean of Graduate Studies and Research at Effat University, KSA in 2020. She has published widely in both Arabic and English on Arabic and international drama, and is the co-editor of a Routledge book, Rewriting Narratives in Egyptian Theatre . She has translated a number of theater books published by the National Center for Translation in Egypt. Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Review: Mother Courage adapted and directed by Alison Shan Price Review of Theaters of Citizenship: Aesthetics and Politics of Avant-Garde Performance in Egypt written by Sonali Pahwa Review: Decolonizing Sarah: A Hurricane Play written and directed by Samer Al-Saber “Indigenous Avant-Gardes”: The Shiraz Arts Festival and Ritual Performance Theory in 1970s Iran Review: Baba written by Denmo Ibrahim, directed by Hamid Dehghani Review of MUKHRIJĀT AL-MASRAḤ AL-MIṢRĪ (1990-2010): DIRĀSA SĪMIYŪṬĪQĪYAH [Female Egyptian Directors (1990-2010): A Semiotic Study], written by Hadia Abd El-Fattah Review of Syrian Refugees, Applied Theater, Workshop Facilitation, and Stories: While They Were Waiting written by Fadi Skeiker Review: Layalina written by Martin Yousif Zebari, directed by Sivan Battat Up There by Wael Kadour, Introduction Review: Playwright Showcase, New Arab American Theater Works Two Giants of Egyptian Theatre: Conversations with Mohamed Abul-ʿEla El-Salamouny and Lenin El-Ramly Crossing Borders: A Theatre Practitioner’s Odyssey, An Interview with Hassan El Geretly On Writing Egypt from the Diaspora: An Interview with Adam Ashraf Elsayigh Performance Review: A FAMILY THAT HAS BEEN BLOCKED Performance Review: BETHLEHEM SITE-SPECIFIC THEATER FESTIVAL Performance Review: HOOTA. By Amer Hlehel Performance Review: LITTLE SYRIA Book Review: ACTING EGYPTIAN Book Review: MANSOUR, MONA. THE VAGRANT TRILOGY Previous Next Attribution: Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.