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FRANCESCA D'UVA presents An Hour With Francesca D’Uva at the PRELUDE 2024 Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center CUNY. PRELUDE Festival 2024 An Hour With Francesca D’Uva FRANCESCA D'UVA 8-9 pm Saturday, October 19, 2024 The Segal Theatre RSVP Francesca will present material from her solo show, This Is My Favorite Song , which will premiere at Playwrights Horizons in November. The show, written over the last three years, examines her relationship to comedy before and after her father's death. Directed by Sam Max Originally commissioned by Abrons Arts Center, currently being produced by Playwrights Horizons LOBSTER Nora loves Patti Smith. Nora is Patti Smith. Nora is stoned out of her mind in the Chelsea Hotel. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is her mind. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is an out-of-use portable classroom in the Pacific Northwest, and that classroom is a breeding ground for lobsters. LOBSTER by Kallan Dana directed by Hanna Yurfest produced by Emma Richmond with: Anna Aubry, Chris Erdman, Annie Fang, Coco McNeil, Haley Wong Needy Lover presents an excerpt of LOBSTER , a play about teenagers putting on a production of Patti Smith and Sam Shepard's Cowboy Mouth . THE ARTISTS Needy Lover makes performances that are funny, propulsive, weird, and gut-wrenching (ideally all at the same time). We create theatre out of seemingly diametrically opposed forces: our work is both entertaining and unusual, funny and tragic. Needylover.com Kallan Dana is a writer and performer originally from Portland, Oregon. She has developed and presented work with Clubbed Thumb, The Hearth, The Tank, Bramble Theater Company, Dixon Place, Northwestern University, and Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute. She is a New Georges affiliated artist and co-founder of the artist collaboration group TAG at The Tank. She received her MFA from Northwestern University. Upcoming: RACECAR RACECAR RACECAR with The Hearth/Connelly Theater Upstairs (dir. Sarah Blush), Dec 2024. LOBSTER with The Tank (dir. Hanna Yurfest), April/May 2025. Needylover.com and troveirl.com Hanna Yurfest is a director and producer from Richmond, MA. She co-founded and leads The Tank’s artist group TAG and creates work with her company, Needy Lover. Emma Richmond is a producer and director of performances and events. She has worked with/at HERE, The Tank, The Brick, and Audible, amongst others. She was The Tank’s 2022-23 Producing Fellow, and is a member of the artist group TAG. Her day job is Programs Manager at Clubbed Thumb, and she also makes work with her collective Trove, which she co-founded. www.emma-richmond.com Rooting for You The Barbarians It's the Season Six premiere of 'Sava Swerve's: The Model Detector' and Cameron is on it!!! June, Willa, and (by proximity) Sunny are hosting weekly viewing parties every week until Cameron gets cut, which, fingers crossed, is going to be the freakin' finale! A theatrical playground of a play that serves an entire season of 'so-bad-it's-good' reality TV embedded in the social lives of a friend group working through queerness, adolescence, judgment, and self-actualization. Presenting an excerpt from Rooting for You! with loose staging, experimenting with performance style, timing, and physicality. THE ARTISTS Ashil Lee (he/they) NYC-based actor, playwright, director, and sex educator. Korean-American, trans nonbinary, child of immigrants, bestie to iconic pup Huxley. Described as "a human rollercoaster" and "Pick a lane, buddy!" by that one AI Roast Bot. 2023 Lucille Lortel nominee (Outstanding Ensemble: The Nosebleed ) and Clubbed Thumb Early Career Writers Group Alum. NYU: Tisch. BFA in Acting, Minor in Youth Mental Health. Masters Candidate in Mental Health and Wellness (NYU Steinhardt: 20eventually), with intentions of incorporating mental health consciousness into the theatre industry. www.ashillee.com Phoebe Brooks is a gender non-conforming theater artist interested in establishing a Theatre of Joy for artists and audiences alike. A lifelong New Yorker, Phoebe makes art that spills out beyond theater-going conventions and forges unlikely communities. They love messing around with comedy, heightened text, and gender performance to uncover hidden histories. She's also kind of obsessed with interactivity; particularly about figuring out how to make audience participation less scary for audiences. Phoebe has a BA in Theatre from Northwestern University and an MFA in Theatre Directing from Columbia University's School of the Arts. The Barbarians is a word-drunk satirical play exploring political rhetoric and the power of words on the world. With cartoonish wit and rambunctious edge, it asks: what if the President tried to declare war, but the words didn't work? Written by Jerry Lieblich and directed by Paul Lazar, it will premiere in February 2025 at LaMama. The Barbarians is produced in association with Immediate Medium, and with support from the Venturous Theater Fund of the Tides Foundation. THE ARTISTS Jerry Lieblich (they/them) plays in the borderlands of theater, poetry, and music. Their work experiments with language as a way to explore unexpected textures of consciousness and attention. Plays include Mahinerator (The Tank), The Barbarians (La Mama - upcoming), D Deb Debbie Deborah (Critic’s Pick: NY Times), Ghost Stories (Critic’s Pick: TimeOut NY), and Everything for Dawn (Experiments in Opera). Their poetry has appeared in Foglifter, Second Factory, TAB, Grist, SOLAR, Pomona Valley Review, Cold Mountain Review, and Works and Days. Their poetry collection otherwise, without was a finalist for The National Poetry Series. Jerry has held residencies at MacDowell, MassMoCA, Blue Mountain Center, Millay Arts, and UCROSS, and Yiddishkayt. MFA: Brooklyn College. www.thirdear.nyc Paul Lazar is a founding member, along with Annie-B Parson, of Big Dance Theater. He has co-directed and acted in works for Big Dance since 1991, including commissions from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Old Vic (London), The Walker Art Center, Classic Stage Co., New York Live Arts, The Kitchen, and Japan Society. Paul directed Young Jean Lee’s We’re Gonna Die which was reprised in London featuring David Byrne. Other directing credits include Bodycast with Francis McDormand (BAM), Christina Masciotti’s Social Security (Bushwick Starr), and Major Bang (for The Foundry Theatre) at Saint Ann’s Warehouse. Awards include two Bessies (2010, 2002), the Jacob’s Pillow Creativity Award (2007), and the Prelude Festival’s Frankie Award (2014), as well an Obie Award for Big Dance in 2000. Steve Mellor has appeared on Broadway (Big River ), Off-Broadway (Nixon's Nixon ) and regionally at Arena Stage, Long Wharf Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, Portland Stage and Yale Rep. A longtime collaborator with Mac Wellman, Steve has appeared in Wellman's Harm’s Way, Energumen, Dracula, Cellophane, Terminal Hip (OBIE Award), Sincerity Forever, A Murder of Crows, The Hyacinth Macaw, 7 Blowjobs (Bessie Award), Strange Feet, Bad Penny, Fnu Lnu, Bitter Bierce (OBIE Award), and Muazzez . He also directed Mr. Wellman's 1965 UU. In New York City, he has appeared at the Public Theater, La Mama, Soho Rep, Primary Stages, PS 122, MCC Theater, The Chocolate Factory, and The Flea. His film and television credits include Sleepless in Seattle, Mickey Blue Eyes, Celebrity, NYPD Blue, Law and Order, NY Undercover, and Mozart in the Jungle. Chloe Claudel is an actor and director based in NYC and London. She co-founded the experimental company The Goat Exchange, with which she has developed over a dozen new works of theater and film, including Salome, or the Cult of the Clitoris: a Historical Phallusy in last year's Prelude Festival. She's thrilled to be working with Paul and Jerry on The Barbarians . Anne Gridley is a two time Obie award-winning actor, dramaturg, and artist. As a founding member of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, she has co-created and performed in critically acclaimed works including Life & Times, Poetics: A Ballet Brut, No Dice, Romeo & Juliet, and Burt Turrido . In addition to her work with Nature Theater, Gridley has performed with Jerôme Bel, Caborca, 7 Daughters of Eve, and Big Dance, served as a Dramaturg for the Wooster Group’s production Who’s Your Dada ?, and taught devised theater at Bard College. Her drawings have been shown at H.A.U. Berlin, and Mass Live Arts. B.A. Bard College; M.F.A. Columbia University. Naren Weiss is an actor/writer who has worked onstage (The Public Theater, Second Stage, Kennedy Center, Geffen Playhouse, international), in TV (ABC, NBC, CBS, Comedy Central), and has written plays that have been performed across the globe (India, Singapore, South Africa, U.S.). Upcoming: The Sketchy Eastern European Show at The Players Theatre (Mar. '24). Francesca D'Uva is an experimental comedian living in Brooklyn. Often employing her background in electronic music, she alternates between improvised storytelling and meticulously crafted mini-musicals that take the audience on a chaotic and strange journey inside her mind. She has performed all around New York City and at venues like MoMA PS1, MOCA and Ars Nova. Francesca was the 2022 Performance AIRspace Resident at Abrons Arts Center, culminating in her solo show, This Is My Favorite Song , which will have its Off-Broadway premiere at Playwrights Horizons in November. Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2024 See What's on

Watch Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) by Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. This documentary video follows the creative process behind “Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director)”, a new work by Thailand’s most sought-after director, Wichaya ARTAMAT, which was staged at KYOTO EXPERIMENT 2023 as an international coproduction with sound designer ARAKI Masamitsu and dramaturge TSUKAHARA Yuya.  In the new work, Artamat examines his relationship with “props as metaphors,” reconsidering upon reflection that he may have been prone to mistreating them, while also looking back on his previous stage works in conjunction with the political history of Thailand. His playful yet subversive approach to directing suggests ways of asking questions in order to overcome harsh and unreasonable situations: not only in regard to the Thai government, but also any individual or wider society that is unwittingly subsumed by larger authoritarian structures.  *This video was produced for the Japan Foundation’s International Creations in Performing Arts 2023 and consists mainly of the creative process behind “Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director)” staged at KYOTO EXPERIMENT 2023, culminating in the performances, as well as interviews with the participating artists. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre Theater, Documentary This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks. About The Film Country Thailand and Japan Language Thai, Japanese Running Time 55 minutes Year of Release 2024 This documentary video follows the creative process behind “Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director)”, a new work by Thailand’s most sought-after director, Wichaya ARTAMAT, which was staged at KYOTO EXPERIMENT 2023 as an international coproduction with sound designer ARAKI Masamitsu and dramaturge TSUKAHARA Yuya.  In the new work, Artamat examines his relationship with “props as metaphors,” reconsidering upon reflection that he may have been prone to mistreating them, while also looking back on his previous stage works in conjunction with the political history of Thailand. His playful yet subversive approach to directing suggests ways of asking questions in order to overcome harsh and unreasonable situations: not only in regard to the Thai government, but also any individual or wider society that is unwittingly subsumed by larger authoritarian structures.  *This video was produced for the Japan Foundation’s International Creations in Performing Arts 2023 and consists mainly of the creative process behind “Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director)” staged at KYOTO EXPERIMENT 2023, culminating in the performances, as well as interviews with the participating artists. Co-Produced by Kyoto Experiment, The Japan Foundation and For What Theatre Supported by The Saison Foundation (International Project Support Program / Kyoto Experiment × For What Theatre Juggle & Hide [Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director]) About The Artist(s) Wichaya Artamat is a co-founding member of For What Theatre. He was long captivated by performances since when he was still studying Film. He started working in theater as a project coordinator for Bangkok Theatre Festival 2008. He joined the New Theatre Society in 2009, during which he grew to become a director recognized for various experimental forms and unconventional theatrical approaches. Hailed as ‘one of the most promising contemporary theater creators of Southeast Asia,’ Wichaya is especially interested in exploring how society remembers and unremembers its history through certain calendar days. He co-founded For What Theatre in 2015 and is also a member of Sudvisai Club and Collective Thai Scripts. Since the European premiere of his most prominent work ‘This Song Father Used to Sing (Three Days in May)” at Kunstenfestivaldesarts 2019, Wichaya has been extensively touring and creating in Europe, Asia, and beyond. Get in touch with the artist(s) forwhattheatre@gmail.com and follow them on social media http://www.facebook.com/theatreforwhat, http://www.instagram.com/forwhattheatre/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou

Donatella Galella, Dorinne Kondo, Esther Kim Lee, Josephine Lee, Sean Metzger, and Karen Shimakawa Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 2 Visit Journal Homepage Behind the Scenes of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies Donatella Galella, Dorinne Kondo, Esther Kim Lee, Josephine Lee, Sean Metzger, and Karen Shimakawa By Published on May 21, 2022 Download Article as PDF For this historic issue on “Asian American Dramaturgies,” guest editor Donatella Galella brought together Dorinne Kondo, Esther Kim Lee, Josephine Lee, Sean Metzger, and Karen Shimakawa to reflect on currents of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies. They discussed how they created and entered this field, even as they critically questioned a foundations-based framework that reifies some lines of study and inevitably leaves out others, as they themselves made up a select group available for this meeting. They tracked scholarly trends and concluded by sharing their hopes for Asian American theatre and performance on stage and in academia. A joyful gathering with multi-vocal storytelling, this conversation was held over Zoom on November 12, 2021. We hope that this roundtable will stimulate more conversations, more artist-scholars, and more histories of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies. Donatella Galella : I’m so happy to see you today and to have this really important conversation on foundations of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies. I see this as something that’s for us but also makes a major intervention in the larger field of Theatre and Performance Studies. I’m going to start with some questions that I circulated to you beforehand, and basically the trajectory is that I would like to invite you to reflect on the origins of this field, where you think it is now, and where you think it’s going. I’d love if we could start off hearing from everyone on how did you come into your research in Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies, and how would you articulate the foundations of this scholarly field? Esther Kim Lee : I was doing my PhD work at Ohio State University. I started there in 1995 and graduated in 2000. I was an ABD, and I had already chosen the dissertation topic, which was going to be on Korean mask drama. It was all proposed and all that stuff. Then I remember walking around the library, looking at some books to read. I was TA-ing a course on ethnic theatre, and I noticed that there was really nothing on Asian American theatre. There were whole rows of books about African American theatre, maybe a couple on Chicano theatre, but really nothing on Asian American theatre. I had to go to the literature section to find Jo’s book, or anthropology just to find Dorinne’s book. But in the theatre section, there was nothing there. So, I actually got angry, and I thought: this is not right. I decided to change my dissertation topic, and I took a tape recorder—and it was an actual tape recorder back then—and I said, I’ll talk to a handful of playwrights and actors and find out what’s going on. I thought it would be an easy dissertation to write, but I ended up interviewing dozens, and by the time I was done, seventy people. That’s how it grew into a bigger project. In that process, I remember emailing Jo as a graduate student, “You don’t know me, but…” that kind of email. I had to introduce myself. That was the first time we actually connected, and ever since then, Jo has been my mentor. So, just really piggybacking on the works by Dorinne, Jo, and Karen. I think Sean and I are somewhat contemporary. I still have boxes of the tapes, documenting the interviews, and my dissertation became my first book ( A History of Asian American Theatre ), so that’s how I got started. I guess it’s fitting that I’m speaking first because I’m kind of in the middle in many ways and benefited from my predecessors, and I work really well with Sean and continue to collaborate. Josephine Lee : I’ve always been interested in theatre. I grew up in the New York area, and I used to, as a kid, check out volumes of plays from the library and just read them. I wasn’t involved in theatre as a performer. I did take some acting classes, but I was always, like, terrified on stage. But I did actually do a bunch of playwriting classes when I was in college. One of my teachers was A. R. Gurney, Jr. He was a playwright, and I was at MIT at the time doing physics, but I took some classes with him, and he was the one who said—I think it was my third year there—“Hey, there’s this guy who’s in college, and he has a play going on at the Public Theater, and it’s called FOB , and his name is David Henry Hwang, and you should get a hold of it or maybe even go down there and volunteer to work on it.” At the time, I couldn’t do that, I mean, it was just not feasible. But I did get a hold of the script and looked at it, and I thought this was kind of cool, you know. I had always been aware of the Asian American movement. I have a few older cousins who are maybe about a decade older than I am who were very much involved in that and did historical scholarship. They were really active, and they always looked at me and said, “You’re part of the Me generation. You’re never going to reach the heights of social justice that we have.” So, I’ve been aware of Asian American politics from a pretty young age. But I didn’t really take on the Asian American theatre thing in earnest until later. I was in graduate school at a time when there really wasn’t anything available. I never took an Asian American lit class. I mean, I read a lot on my own, but no one talked about it. I basically did my thesis on Victorian and contemporary plays, Wilde and Shaw, and I did some work on Tom Stoppard. Then when I moved to LA for my first job, I was part of the LA Theatre Center’s Women’s Project, and I got connected with some folks. I got to meet with Wakako Yamauchi. I got to meet people from East West Players, which was super fun. Then around that time was when M. Butterfly won the Tony Award, and I was like whoa, you know? How come no one’s writing about these plays, right? So, I think the germ of an idea got started. But of course, at the time, I was still very much, I guess, in the kind of canonical, traditional world, writing about Pinter and Beckett, none of which got published. Then I went to teach at Smith College, and I got involved in an Asian American Studies collaborative with Mitziko Sawada at Hampshire College and others in the Five Colleges (Smith, Hampshire, Mt. Holyoke, Amherst, and UMass-Amherst). At the time, they didn’t have their Five College Asian American Studies Program going, but I was part of that group that was teaching classes. I taught a class on Asian American theatre because Roberta Uno was just so inspiring, and we had the beginnings of the archival collection at UMass there, and there was New WORLD Theater. It was just a great time for me in terms of shifting what I wanted my scholarly trajectory to be, you know, something that I wasn’t educated in, so it took me some time to learn the ropes. When I took the job at Minnesota, I decided I was done with the modern British stuff. I was going to take a different route, and my first book was Performing Asian America . At that time, I just was so excited to have Dorinne and Karen as compatriots. We were never in the same locations, but we sort of knew each other because of all the work that was going on. It was so rewarding to do it at a time when I wasn’t the only one, right? Because I do feel like that changed the nature of what I was able to do, and with my own work, I could go in a direction that was sort of different. I didn’t have to cover everything. I knew when I published Performing Asian America , it was at a time when there was going to be a new wave of stuff that wasn’t going to make it into that book. But that was fine with me because I thought, wow, there’s just so much out there that people ought to do, and trying to be comprehensive isn’t where it’s at for me right now. So, that was fun. I think that I’ve, since then, changed several times, and some of it is location-specific. Dorinne Kondo : First of all, in terms of Asian American anything, I was like the last generation at Stanford, where I was an undergraduate, who was part of the protest generation: strikes, tear gas, helicopters on campus, “Free the Branner 15,” students from our freshman dorm who were beat up and arrested. We also, at my graduation, walked out on Daniel Patrick Moynihan, our commencement speaker, because of his report on “The Negro Family.” There were teach-ins about that, sponsored by the Anthropology department and St. Clair Drake, the renowned urban anthropologist (and co-author, with Horace R. Cayton, Jr., of the classic Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City ). There’s that part. But I’m an outlier, I feel, because I was trained as an anthropologist and as a Japan specialist. So, my first foray into performance, not theatre as such, was when I was a member of the Gender Seminar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton where Judith Butler wrote Gender Trouble . So, I saw that in formation—very exciting—and all the controversy that it then caused. I mean, now it seems like a classic work, but believe me, there were plenty of arguments, and I got used to conflict as potentially generative. That (Butler, Foucault, and poststructuralist theories of the subject) profoundly influenced my first book , which was based on field work in a Japanese factory, where I was a so-called part-time worker, investigating the performance of gendered work identities on the shop floor and the performativity of artisanal identities and the aesthetics of work. I was trying to take labor, which is often seen only in narrowly political economic terms—I mean, that’s obviously important—but you know, what do people think they’re doing? What are the cultural meanings of work? What about aesthetics, which were in fact very important. I feel like in my latest book ( Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity ), I’m doing the opposite. It’s like the realm of the aesthetic sublime, how can we bring it back to earth and look at it as cultural work, as making, as an industry within a very particular historical and political economic context? So, being with Butler was incredibly important. That was also the year that, similarly to Jo, I saw David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly on Broadway, and I had never ever in my life seen anything like that. I talk about that in About Face , but it was life-changing. I mean I used to go back to the Asian American Theater Company in San Francisco just to see plays. That too had been a revelation, just to see people who looked like me, like in the same room doing theatre, was amazing, just to feel three-dimensional again after being [in Boston]. Frankly, Boston was horrible in terms of racism and overt racism. Anyway, David’s play was extraordinary, and I felt like I had to write about it as though my life depended on it. I know it sounds melodramatic, but that’s the way it felt. So, that started my exploration of theatre as an academic topic. Then it also was a fieldwork strategy. I took the very first David Henry Hwang Playwrights Institute classes. That was amazing—so amazing, I couldn’t sleep. I never felt about anything the way I felt about that. So, I thought, well, I have to do something here, you know what I mean? When do you ever feel that in life? I can’t not do it. I feel like it chose me. I pivoted. So, I was writing the book on transnational Japanese fashion, and then the Asian American theatre piece came in, and then I spent a number of years trying to learn the playwriting craft. In terms of academic scholarship, I’m trying to integrate the creative and critical. So, that’s what’s happening in my latest book, Worldmaking . Karen Shimakawa : It’s interesting that the three of us, the three kind of senior generation, none of us started as Asian American scholars, right? Because there really wasn’t a field there when we started it. It’s interesting that we all came from these really different places. I had come from law school, going to English grad school thinking I was going to be a specialist in Flannery O’Connor. Then for some reason—I can’t remember why—I pivoted to becoming a medievalist, and then finally I thought settled on becoming a Shakespearean. So, I was always kind of moving towards theatre and performance and kind of theatricality in some way. In retrospect, I think I could say that even my interest in Flannery O’Connor was something about theatricality. I just remember, it’s kind of like Esther—although I didn’t have quite the foresight—I remember going into the library and looking in the Shakespeare section, which was just aisles and aisles of things and thinking, I don’t really think we need another Shakespeare book. I think it’s been done. So, then I kind of was in this crisis, like what is there? I was pretty far into my graduate education at that point, and I met with some of my advisors, and they’re like, what else do you know and like? And actually, I had gone to Asian American theatre since I was a kid because, like Jo, I had siblings who were older and more politically literate in this stuff. That was the church field trip that you always take, right? So, I didn’t have quite the kind of sublime experience that Dorinne had. I envy that in some ways because I’m like, well of course I’m seeing myself on the stage. That’s our stories. But it had never occurred to me because there wasn’t really an academic field there, that that was at all connected to my sort of vocational training. That just felt personal and maybe nascently political. It felt very extracurricular at the time. Then I took David Román’s class on American theatre, and we read Dorinne’s piece on M. Butterfly . That was a real turning point for me, I think, like, to imagine that there could be this kind of rigorous, academic, legible-to-other-professors kind of work on the plays that I had grown up watching. That was a real revelation. When I think about it now, and I narrate it retroactively, I think I was always moving towards this because I was always kind of interested, you know—even in, like, medieval literature—the thing that I was sort of drawn to was liveness, the way bodies on stage sort of can perform and imagine what is, what could be, sort of imaginative possibilities, utopian or dystopian, and also kind of what the body that’s talking has to do with that. I do think that that was always kind of the thing that I was chasing. So, it was just a real joy when I read Dorinne’s piece to realize, like, yeah, there’s a way to actually express that, and it’s a legit thing to actually study, and that it’s important and that it matters to people more than just, you know, me. I think that’s really where I started. Sean Metzger : I have the pleasure of coming after the other four speakers both now and also in the past. I think I’m the only one of us who came from practice into the field. I was in high school when M. Butterfly toured, and I remember there being an ad in the San Francisco Chronicle . At that time, it registered as Asian American but also as queer, as an Asian queer play. So, that combination kind of stuck with me for a long time. When I went to university, at some point I decided I was going to be in a college of music. I was doing musical theatre, and I wanted to enter into a more practical setting. I did an internship at the Denver Center Theatre Company, and it just happened they placed me on August Wilson’s Piano Lesson . So, I was doing everything backstage. And that moment—I think this was 1992—coincided with my having emancipated myself from my parents. I was out of money, and the cast actually helped me pay for my schooling until I could pay them back. So, I thought, oh, this is theatre, like this kind of intra-ethnic solidarity. This is amazing! I learned otherwise as I moved forward. I was an undergraduate, [and] I wanted to take Lesbian and Gay Studies classes at the time, but you couldn’t do that at CU Boulder unless you were taking graduate courses because the university didn’t allow it. So, I had to take graduate courses, and I found myself quickly overwhelmed with everything I had to learn. Like, I didn’t know the word “subjectivity.” Boulder had a lot of early modernists, and the first course I took was Gay and Lesbian Literature to 1800, and it was taught by Bruce Smith, who’s now at USC, and who’s a Shakespearean. He was encouraging me to work on Shakespeare, and I also remember looking down the halls and being like, oh my god I have nothing else to say. Joel Fink, who was a professor and director at CU, said, “You should write about M. Butterfly because there’s not a lot of work on it yet.” He wasn’t a scholar, so he didn’t know by that time, 1994, Dorinne’s, Karen’s , and James’s work had been out already. But there was not a lot of material, so I started that project. Then I built my thesis on gay and lesbian Asian American drama, half as an activist piece and half as what I would consider scholarly work, but I had to train myself. I brought in an adjunct to be my Asian Americanist because there was no tenure-track Asian American lit or theatre person. That was Marilyn Alquizola. Then I went to graduate school. I decided I wanted to work in Asian American and Sexuality Studies, so USC was one of the options. They gave me the most money, so I went there. They said, “Oh, we’re hiring David Román,” at that time. So, I went to work with David, and then they said, “Oh, we’re hiring Dorinne,” and I thought, oh, this is perfect. Then as time evolved, Karen came to give a job talk and then went to (UC) Davis. David Román said, “I think you should go to Davis.” So, I did, and that changed lots of things in very good ways and not so good ways, as you can imagine without saying any names. That’s really how I started in the field. Also, because I had been quite impoverished as an undergraduate student, I went to whatever grad program that would let me do the work I wanted to do, and I just figured I’d do whatever requirements; it was basically whoever paid me the most. So, that was my philosophy. I went to Comp Lit first, for that reason, and quickly learned I was to have mastery of these languages, which I still have yet to master. Switching to a Theatre and Performance Studies program sort of made me feel like, oh, I don’t have to have the kind of linguistic expertise that Comp Lit would have required. I wouldn’t have to be in grad school for another ten years. Then my career kind of went all over the place. I was in social services for a while. I came back to grad school, and I happened to get a job at Duke as an Asian American lit and culture specialist. So, once I got that job, it was really, like, okay this is what you’re doing from then on. But I have benefited from all the great writing of all the people here. I would also say, I think for Esther and me, we both had the advantage of a group of people—quite a large group of people—who just happened to be in grad school at the same time: SanSan Kwan, Dan Bacalzo, Lucy Burns, Sel Hwahng, Yutian Wong, Priya Srinivasan, Eng-Beng Lim, Cathy Irwin, Theo Gonzalves, and the two of us. That sort of made me feel like we had a community, and it also made me able to sustain my work over a long time, even though we were located all over the country. DG : Thanks so much for this. I feel like we’re collectively writing this meta history of the field right now, and I really appreciate the names that you’re offering. I also love hearing these personal stories, these origin stories for you as superheroes, but they also gesture toward the structural, toward the material conditions that made this field possible. You’re gesturing toward not only scholarship but also Asian American theatre production. So, I’d invite us to think more about the origins of the field, but I also want to turn to the next question of how have the academic field and the field of production of Asian American theatre and performance changed since the 1980s? DK : I agree with the collective storytelling, and I think that that’s really important. But in some ways, I feel like we’re facing a paradox because of course we want to narrate these stories, but in terms of Asian American Studies as insurgent knowledge, I’ve always been suspicious of origin stories and foundations. Aren’t we about challenging the notion of foundations? Maybe gathering these multiple perspectives and stories (is one way of mounting a challenge); on the other hand, people deserve their props. I realize that one of the functions of something like this is to narrate a history that’s legible in a certain way and establishes that we’re legitimate, we’re rigorous, et cetera et cetera. So, I think it’s paradoxical, and there’s a kind of fundamental ambivalence in the move. I would say, apparently, the field hasn’t changed enough, since this is the first issue dedicated to Asian American issues, right? It reminds me of the interventions at the Claremonts, you know, as part of the mobilization around The Mikado and trying to get Asian American Studies established where Black Studies and Chicano Studies already existed. I think that Asian Americans were seen as the “little people, humble, and silent,” (from Madama Butterfly ) so we had to make some noise and do some organizing. About Face —it’s an early work that does this—but you know look at Sean’s work, for example, I mean all of the work of people in this room, the move toward the transnational and diasporic, I think is like a huge shift. There’s no more Asian American Studies, really. It’s all Asian diaspora work now and rightfully so. I totally understand that. In terms of the profession, I think it’s more professionalized. There’s certainly more theatres, which is great, and more populations represented in the arts. We need more intersectional work, but that’s also growing. There’s still a ton of work to do on all these fronts. There are also more theatre critics of color: Diep Tran, Jose Solís, amongst others. JL : I will just say that Esther and I actually have this six degrees of separation. So, when I was in my first year of college, I took a creative writing course with Tom Postlewait who was a great creative writing teacher, but I didn’t really realize his field was actually theatre history. Then years later, I realized that Esther worked with him, so just shout out to Tom. The world works in really funny ways in terms of who we’re in contact with. The work has just deepened and gotten more interesting and more varied in its approach. I totally get the diasporic, the re-theorizing of what is Asian American. All these things that I think have impacted maybe Asian American Literary and Cultural Studies more generally has also impacted the Theatre Studies field. People have been really great about bringing those in, but there’s a certain kind of depth to it now too. I’m thinking about some of the historical work that Esther brought in, creating this archive, documentation. How do you not just talk about what the theatre means but how it is actually made? I do feel like, you know, books like Esther’s, Yuko Kurahashi’s book on East West Players , what that does is it provides a record for people to dig into. Sean, your book ( Chinese Looks: Fashion, Performance, Race ) was so expansive in terms of that history. In the period before, there wasn’t “Asian American,” like that wasn’t a term that anyone used. There were people of Asian descent and representations of Asia in the Americas, and those really connect to us still. So, I do feel like what’s been wonderful is the way in which Asian American Theatre, Drama, and Performance Studies are now rooted in these larger questions. There’s been solid work everywhere you turn, even as new populations are coming in and new understandings of what this Asian American identity and experience is. It’s so much a fractured category, right? It doesn’t hold up. It’s a category that deconstructs itself. So, every time you teach students Asian American Studies, you have to go back to, “This is a social construct. This is a racial formation.” This is exactly how it was made, that we are all calling ourselves Asian American. So, I think there’s no center. But that kind of frees us up quite a bit to sort of decide on what our points of unity or solidarity or coexistence will be. I think in my own work, I’ve started doing two things: I’ve started looking more into productions that are not commercial, because one of the things I was brought into was this star power of David Henry Hwang. Then I moved to the middle of the country, which has a very active theatre scene. We’ve got more theatre seats per capita than anywhere in the nation. There are so many small theatres here and people doing non-profit theatre work, and that’s not really recognized or written about, and some of it never gets recorded. So, that sort of regional focus has shifted maybe because of where I live. But I’ve also turned to what are some of the connections with older productions, and I’ve done a lot more work than I cared to on yellowface basically. Esther knows as well, right? You get stuck down the rabbit hole when you start looking at yellowface production as opposed to Asian American production. But one thing I regret, as much as I’ve benefited from doing that historical work, I think I do agree with Dorinne, that it’s really telling that I got a lot of recognition for doing a book on The Mikado ( The Japan of Pure Invention ), the kind of recognition that I never got for doing work on Asian American theatre. So, people were like, oh this is so interesting that you’re doing this work, and you want to say, hey, actually there are a lot of playwrights I’ve written about that have nothing to do with yellowface. But once you start writing about yellowface, it sort of perpetuates. Why is that interesting as opposed to all these playwrights who don’t do television, who do a much better job of representing Asia? SM : One of my early scene coaches was Lane Nishikawa, so I think that experience made me understand—oh, it was at the time when the Asian American Theater Company had fractured and was kind of on its last legs, so we had several actors from San Francisco who were Asian American women with me in this training thing—some of the history that Esther talks about in her book but through a different kind of lens: a gossip episteme, if you will. So, that made me realize whatever I thought this was, doing an Asian American theatre thing, is highly contested, because even in the theatre company itself, there were all kinds of narratives of what was happening at the theatre company that were sort of interrupting its progress, let’s say. So, I think all the companies, they all have those kinds of stories embedded within them, and now some of them are more archived. But there are other stories in those companies that have not been told and some that Esther chose not to discuss, like Kumu Kahua, or you know some of the other companies around the country. I think one of the things that’s happened since that time is the founding of the Consortium of Asian American Theatres and Artists (CAATA) in 2003, and I think that has provided a national platform for people to have discussions about how artists themselves think about the formation of the field and their place within it. I think we all have realized that their version of that story is not our (a scholarly) version of that story necessarily. But I think it’s productive, and one of the things that we can see is when they add in special sessions, it’s often about the tensions they see in the field that they haven’t identified before. I remember they had a Pacific Islander special session, and they had a MENA, Middle Eastern North Africa, special session; I think that suggests something about where the practitioners feel like the field is going in terms of Asian American theatre. At the same time, at UCLA, I have two colleagues, Lap Chi Chu and Myung Hee Cho, who are both Asian American artists in lighting design and scenic design, respectively, and they did a lot of work on Asian American productions in addition to regional theatre and other kinds of things, and I think they would also narrate this story differently. So, I think I agree that there’s a lot of competing narratives, and many of those narratives have yet to come to the fore or be acknowledged. I do think that the field as a whole is pivoting around certain issues right now, like Critical Refugee Studies, which is making big advances in Asian American Studies. So, I suspect that Theatre will then follow suit. I think Jo’s work in particular has done a lot to bring attention to Southeast Asian refugee communities, and that’s of course partly location and probably the kind of theatre that you were talking about. It’s not professionalized in the same way. As for some of my own work, I do want to say that the historical part that I did was sort of at Karen’s impetus because I was interested in racial fetishism, and she’s like, you have to fetishize something . You can’t just satisfy some amorphous idea. So, that led me to tracing objects and how they get racialized, costumes in particular, because of the work I did with Dorinne. So, I thought, those are, you know, physical items we could look at and think through more. It’s really the combination of Karen’s and Dorinne’s work that helped me think through how to do an early historiographic approach because I’m not a good archivist, as many of you know. I find it very difficult to sit in a room and get the gloves and everything. I find that very trying. So, I do think that the field has moved a long way. There are some trends that are happening. I mean, when I did (the Theatre Journal special issue) “ Minor Asias ,” it was partly because the editor said, “Well if you do an Asian American issue, who’s going to contribute?” So, I contacted many people, like do you have anything right now? Because there’s not enough of us in the field. I figured if I can’t get materials from people I know, which is the bulk of the field, then we’re going to have trouble putting together an issue. Actually “Minor Asias” was a pivot on my part to try to broaden the rubric partly to get more submissions. So, it’s great, Donatella, that you’ve gotten so many (for “Asian American Dramaturgies”). That’s really good to hear. EKL : That was great. What can I add to this already rich conversation? Because my training is in Theatre—I think I might be the only one who actually did graduate training in theatre history—I could just probably comment that when my book came out in 2006, it was my tenure book. It was based on my dissertation. It’s very incomplete. I was very nervous about getting it out. Like Sean said, a lot of it is gossip based, and a lot of the gossip I couldn’t add because they made me turn off the tape recorder and told me not to add things. There are so many things I could have added. When I go to the CAATA conference, people come up and say, oh you got that wrong. They still gossip about it. I really thought that by now there would be more theatre history books on Asian American theatre. So, in many ways, I feel like there hasn’t been that much progress. I expected the book to be challenged and revised, that there would be a more enriched conversation. Maybe I could just ask back to Donatella: it’s your generation’s job to add to the work that’s done before, so is that going to happen? Who is going to do that work? Personally, in my own research, like Jo, I’ve been really interested in going back historically. My first book starts in the 1960s, and I now want to figure out what happened before. That led me to my current book on yellowface ( Made-Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era ), and my next one, I think, could be even further back. I find that going back to this kind of origin story—if yellowface was an origin story for, say, Asian American actors as they say, “We did acting because we wanted to protest”—is to revise yellowface history. It’s one origin story of Asian American theatre. But I’m looking for other origin stories in Asian American theatre. Historiographically, I feel like I’m always in conversation with Tom Postlewait, my advisor that Jo mentioned, because I did take American theatre history with him, but my book is really a revision of the history, like looking at American theatre history through the lens of Asian American Studies. So, I think I’m going to continue to do that. But looking at the whole field, I thought we would have more younger scholars, junior scholars who would be doing both theoretical and historical archival work. DG : Esther, I agree with your assessment, and I also hear what Dorinne was saying about the critique of foundations. So, first I’m thinking that I might come up with a better word for titling this, but I specifically tried to have foundations with an s , just like how I really appreciate how Esther’s first book is a history and not the history of Asian American theatre. I think in general there aren’t that many critical histories of theatre institutions. My first book is an attempt to do this but of a traditionally white institution. In their definition of Americanness at Arena Stage, that is often not inclusive of Asian Americans, but that is reflective of how Asian Americanness is in that boundary of inclusion and exclusion. So, for my own work, I felt thrust into Asian American Theatre Studies mostly because of seeing all these gaps and also just dealing with anti-Asian microaggressions in graduate school and seeing so much yellowface on professional New York City stages. So, that’s what drove me to then start researching why and how contemporary yellowface persists in musicals in the twenty-first century. I’m attentive to Jo’s point though, because I invited her for a workshop of my research, and she pointed out that I need to make sure I’m not re-centering whiteness and white nonsense, and that Asian American theatre shouldn’t just be an epilogue to that book. So, Jo, you’ve really reshaped the structure of my book so that there’s always this Asian American counter-example to yellowface in every chapter, and there will be a full chapter at the end about the musical I’m obsessed with right now, which is Soft Power . So, I really appreciate that you said that. KS : I agree with what’s been said. I just have a few things to add. One is that I think the origins of Asian American theatre are interestingly complicated. In terms of the academic field of Asian American Studies or Asian American Theatre Studies, I would almost single-handedly credit that to Jo. I think you did those reading groups early on, you had a really prescient kind of sense that there’s an academic field, like making a there there for an academic field, and people who could go on the market as that. I mean, we were all just kind of doing our own thing and doing it for ourselves, like, how do I get me my job? But you actually were thinking of a field, and I think it would not exist if it wasn’t for you. JL : I have to say this: in response to a taunt by a colleague of mine who works in Asian American Literature who made a crack at me, and I said something about Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies, and she said, “What? All three of you?” I mean, she made this crack early on, so maybe it was that there were only like three. It was pretty horrible. I would argue there were other people like James Moy , and then there were historians who were doing work, like John Tchen’s New York before Chinatown . There are all these really great connections, and people come from, as Dorinne pointed out, different interdisciplines. It’s not just Theatre Studies. KS : Angela Pao , for sure. JL : Absolutely, Angela, and other people who were just not being seen. It was partly coincidence but partly because, at the time, we were working to establish a program in Asian American Studies at the University of Minnesota, which we finally did in 2004. So, that was part of my larger thing, that we were trying to become institutionalized. I became much more aware of the need for that as a form of support, acknowledgement, and recognition, that if we actually had a field, then people wouldn’t have to keep reinventing what they do for other people or feel as though there wasn’t a place for them. I honestly think some of it’s that remark Donatella said, oh you came and said this about my work. It’s probably on the order of what Sean said about Karen saying that I need to do that. You’re making an observation and then you realize, oh my goodness, someone’s taking me seriously. They’re actually thinking that I have the answer to this. I think I’ve always been a crowd sourcing person, right? That if we do this together, it is so much more fun. Who wants to be the only person working on this? I really think that that for me was a huge motivator, to get people together, because I really felt like I was limited in terms of my perspective. I mean, if you’re going to work on theatre, which is so, so many characters, you need everybody there. I do feel like, too—the point that was made earlier about listening to people who are practitioners—I do remember a note, one thing that really changed the way I write and one of the reasons why I stopped writing work that was more, in some ways, theoretically informed for academic audiences is actually because Roger Tang did a little thing on my first book, and he said something like, oh this is not bedtime reading. I was taken aback. Like, well, this wasn’t written for you. Then I thought, well, why is that? Why is it that I felt that I had to write for a specific group of theatre scholars or literary scholars and prove myself? I think that kind of freed me up to do things like the anthology we put together ( Asian American Plays for a New Generation ), plays with Mu Performing Arts at the time. It was just really great to be at a stage, since I did have tenure, where I could let go of working so hard to establish ourselves as leaders in our field, at the university, because the academy, as anyone probably knows, will just suck you dry. I mean, it’ll just sort of take the will to write anything out of you if you have to conform to that model. I don’t know how it is at all your institutions, but it is hard. KS : Jo, you’re being very modest. You say, like, who wants to be the only one in the field? I think that really runs counter to a lot of the logic of higher education, that the whole game should be to have your turf and be the only one and defend it against other people. So, I think the character of the field of Asian American Theatre as an academic field really bears your imprint. But you know, when we started, the idea that there would be job postings for an Asian American theatre specialist—I mean, that just wasn’t a thing, right? And it is now. So, I think that’s a real contribution that you’ve made to not just the profession but to, like, thinking. In terms of the field, the artistic output, how Asian American theatre and performance has changed parallels generations of scholars. Immigration has changed, and how we think about the circulation of people has changed. I think so many of us who were starting out were really formed by a particular kind of generation of Asian American, you know Sansei, or fourth or fifth generation Chinese Americans, who were doing that kind of thing that was self-marked as Asian American theatre. That’s very specific to a post-’65 kind of immigration thing, right? The character of Asian America has changed so much from the ’80s on and has changed the kinds of work that’s being done in the theatre and the kind of sensibilities. It’s sort of the idea that there’s both out-migration and in-migration, like that kind of global character of things and the circulatory kind of sensibility. I think maybe it’s my training in law, but I peg all of that to migration. I think just the kinds of people who are on the stage or at the table have been really dramatically changed. So, that’s exciting to see. DG : I have a major set of questions to help us wrap up and look ahead: Whose research and artistry have excited you most, and where do you see or hope to see the field going? SM : I still think that there have been different trends in theatre practice that have not really gotten their due in terms of Asian American attention. One of the most exciting theatre makers for me is Ping Chong, actually. I know Karen has written on (Ping Chong and Company in National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage ) and others have written on that company as well . Ping Chong and Company is in a way tracking how communities are shifting over time. I find that work very generative, as opposed to the sort of the more commercial Broadway stuff, which has to appeal to such a wide audience (and it’s a very white audience). I think even though we’ve seen shifts on Broadway, I don’t expect massive change to happen at that commercial level or scale. KS : Sean, I’m so glad you mentioned Ping. When I was trying to come up with a list, I was thinking of people like Ping Chong and his company but also people like Ralph Peña and Ma-Yi, and Mia Katigbak. Actually, I would put Jorge Ortoll in this pile, too, even though he’s not Asian American. But I really think that those are people who are doing this very unglamorous work of actually getting other people’s voices onto the stage and making the road, even while they’re doing their own artistic work, but they’re doing a ton of work that is unglamorous, that is about making this sustainable for many more people. And that especially right now just feels like it’s both urgent and kind of a long game, which I really appreciate. So, there’s all kinds of artists that I’m into, but those guys doing the backstage work are the ones I really appreciate right now. JL : I’ll have to add my voice to all the people worshipping Ping Chong. He came and did a thing with our students two years ago, a collaboration with Talvin Wilks, one of the Collidescope projects, and I have to say, it was one of the best things I’ve seen by students, ever. I mean, it was just so moving and so wonderful. I have to have a soft spot for some of the artists who come out of our Twin Cities community. There’s a number of younger artists who have been working here for some time, and we’re putting together a collection for students. I mentioned May Lee-Yang’s play to Sean, and he was writing about that , and I really just loved her work. We also recently did a production at Penumbra Theatre of Prince Gomolvilas’s The Brothers Paranormal , which I really, really enjoyed. It was a wonderful way to think about how different communities, Asian American and Black, might intersect on the stage. And Lloyd Suh! EKL : Those are great names. I’m really excited by Qui Nguyen’s plays, just so fresh and fun to teach. Also, Julia Cho. I saw Aubergine at Playwrights Horizons, and I thought it was one of the most moving Asian American plays I’ve seen. It was well cast, well designed, and to see that Off-Broadway—such a polished professional production—it was one of those plays I cried at from the beginning to the end. It was just really moving. DK : I guess I’m wondering about people we’ve not heard of, so I’m sure that there are all kinds of people. Jo, you referenced some folks in Minneapolis and so on. So, that’s who I’d be interested in hearing about and hearing from. I hope that we’ll do more of that in the future. In terms of workers, it’s not just Asian Americans, so I’m just wondering—having worked with Anna Deavere Smith, for example—like other stuff that inspires me would be Antoinette Nwandu and Jackie Siblies Drury. In terms of the scholarship—no one’s talked about what we want to see—but I myself am really interested in integrating the creative and the critical in different ways, so I started this research cluster called Creativity, Theory, Politics in American Studies trying to look at the work of scholar-artists. I’m interested in people who are trying to do that. Sean, thank you for sponsoring a book forum on Worldmaking (in the February 2022 issue of Cultural Dynamics currently available through https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/CDY/current ) that had two of the people whose work I’m interested in: Josh Chambers-Letson ( After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life ), whom I’m sure everybody knows, with genre-bending, the intersectionality, queer of color critique, and how moving it is because I weep every time I read it actually. And then Aimee Cox ( Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship ), who’s a former dancer for Ailey who integrates movement and scholarship in her work and in her lectures. For our cluster, she gave a “lecture” that incorporated academic analysis, a showing of short films, and a movement workshop. So, I want more integration of the creative and the critical. DG : Thanks for that. Is there anyone else that you want to lift up? KS : Aya Ogaya’s work is amazing. And Dorinne as a playwright-scholar! SM : I would just want to say that, once when Esther gave a talk, and someone asked her, “What do you want to see? What are you going to do next?” she said, “I’ll just do a history that goes earlier.” But I take that seriously. It seems to me in terms of the pre-1945 stuff, there’s a ton of material there that we have not addressed in great detail that I think will open up a field and will change the way that we narrativize Asian American Studies. I think in the actual work produced, there are a lot of turns that happen that we just don’t account for. There’s a lot of transnational things happening with early Asian migrants, and in that vein, people like Andrew Leong at Berkeley, who’s an English scholar working on poetry but is also thinking through Sadakichi Hartmann, have been very inspiring for my current line of work in that regard. But I think there’s a lot of people doing early nineteenth century stuff that has a lot of potential to reshape some of the field. DK : In that sense, it’s too bad Jim [Moy] couldn’t be here. One thing I hope for the future is just to combat, you know, white American theatre on so many levels. I’ve just run into so much aggressive, soul-crushing white fragility this year in all kinds of ways, including being trolled. (The trolling was in response to an interview I did with the LA Times , following the murders of the women in Atlanta.) JL : That’s terrible, Dorinne. What happened? DK : I’ve been silenced! I was in a playwriting group. “No, you can’t talk about representation because I’m not racist. I had two black friends when I was a child.” Seriously it’s parodic, it’s so bad. Do you know how white you sound? So, it’s been that kind of year. JL : If you write that person into a play, I’ll read it. DK : I have! I’ve got to get it out somehow. DG : This has been such a fun conversation. I’m excited to be able to share it with other people, and I’m really excited that the next ATHE (Association for Theatre in Higher Education) conference is themed around Dorinne’s Worldmaking , which I hope will be another point of intervention. Thanks so much for your generosity with your time today and sharing all of these reflections. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Donatella Galella is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Riverside. She researches how systemic racism shapes contemporary American theatre from the ways white institutions capitalize on blackness to the persistence of yellowface in musicals. Her essays have been published in journals including Theatre Journal , Theatre Survey , and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism and books including Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture, and Identity and Casting a Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative . Her book America in the Round: Capital, Race, and Nation at Washington DC’s Arena Stage (University of Iowa Press) was an Honorable Mention for the 2020 Barnard Hewitt Award from the American Society for Theatre Research and a Finalist for the 2020 Outstanding Book Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Dorinne Kondo is an anthropologist, Performance Studies scholar, playwright, dramaturg, podcaster, Professor of American Studies and Anthropology, and former Director of Asian American Studies at the University of Southern California. Her award-winning books include Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace and About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater. Her most recent book Worldmaking: Race, Performance and the Work of Creativity bends genre, integrating her play Seamless . She was a dramaturg for three world premieres of theatre artist Anna Deavere Smith’s plays and co-founded the research cluster “Creativity, Theory, Politics,” spotlighting the work of scholar-artists. Esther Kim Lee is Professor in the Department of Theater Studies and the International Comparative Studies and the Director of Asian American & Diaspora Studies at Duke University. She is the author of A History of Asian American Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 2006), which received the 2007 Award for Outstanding Book given by Association for Theatre in Higher Education, The Theatre of David Henry Hwang (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015), and Made-Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era (University of Michigan Press, 2022). She is the editor of Seven Contemporary Plays from the Korean Diaspora in the Americas (Duke University Press, 2012) and a four-volume collection, Modern and Contemporary World Drama: Critical and Primary Sources (Bloomsbury, 2022), which challenges the prevailing Eurocentric reading of modern drama. Josephine Lee is currently the Associate Dean of Arts and Humanities and Professor of English and Asian American Studies in the College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is the editor in chief of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture, and her other books include Oriental, Black, and White: The Formation of Racial Habits in American Theater (University of North Carolina Press), The Japan of Pure Invention: Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado (University of Minnesota Press), and Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage (Temple University Press). She has also co-edited Asian American Plays for a New Generation (with R.A. Shiomi and Don Eitel), Re/collecting Early Asian America: Essays in Cultural History (with Imogene Lim and Yuko Matsukawa) and Asian American Literature in Transition, 1850-1930 (with Julia H. Lee) . Sean Metzger is a Professor in the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television and the former president of Performance Studies international. He has published Chinese Looks: Fashion, Performance Race (2014) and The Chinese Atlantic: Seascapes and the Theatricality of Globalization (2020) both with Indiana University Press. The current editor of Theatre Journal , he has also coedited several collections of essays and a volume of plays. Karen Shimakawa is Associate Professor of Performance Studies and Co-Associate Dean of Faculty and Academic Affairs in NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and Affiliated Faculty in NYU School of Law. Her research and teaching focus on critical race theory and performance. She is the author of National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage (2002). Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration Introduction to Asian American Dramaturgies Behind the Scenes of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies On Young Jean Lee in Young Jean Lee's We're Gonna Die by Christine Mok Representation from Cambodia to America: Musical Dramaturgies in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band The Dramaturgical Sensibility of Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap and Cambodian Rock Band Holding up a Lens to the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists: A Photo Essay Theatre in Hawaiʻi: An “Illumination of the Fault Lines” of Asian American Theatre Randall Duk Kim: A Sojourn in the Embodiment of Words Reappropriation, Reparative Creativity, and Feeling Yellow in Generic Ensemble Company’s The Mikado: Reclaimed Dance Planets Dramaturgy of Deprivation (없다): An Invitation to Re-Imagine Ways We Depict Asian American and Adopted Narratives of Trauma Clubhouse: Stories of Empowered Uncanny Anomalies Off-Yellow Time vs Off-White Space: Activist Asian American Dramaturgy in Higher Education Asian American Dramaturgies in the Classroom: A Reflection Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Stephen Hong Sohn Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 1 Visit Journal Homepage Calculated Cacophonies: The Queer Asian American Family and the Nonmusical Musical in Chay Yew's Wonderland Stephen Hong Sohn By Published on December 16, 2016 Download Article as PDF While playwright Chay Yew has garnered praise for his more than a half dozen plays, few scholars have completed any sustained critical engagements of his large body of work. [1] Yew’s productions commonly address queer Asian American experiences and associated themes, including the struggle to survive amid hostile familial ties and exclusionary social contexts. My article explores such issues through an extended analysis of Wonderland , a dramatic production involving four roles. Three of the roles—a Man, a Woman, and a Son—comprise an Asian American nuclear family. The fourth figure, a Young Man, primarily comments on scenes in which he does not take part. At the conclusion, however, it becomes clear that the Young Man plays another role: the Son as an adult. Wonderland roughly tracks the life trajectories of the three primary figures, allowing Yew to stage the challenges related to achieving success, fulfillment, and belonging, especially within the minority family. Wonderland ’s 1999 La Jolla Playhouse premiere was notable since two of its cast members, Alec Mapa (Son) and Sab Shimono (Man), are queer-identifying Asian American actors, and accordingly reveals an important alignment between performance and social identity. [2] Given the relative invisibility of queer Asian American actors in general and the restrictions still attached to this historical period (i.e., pre-same-sex marriage laws), the actors’ participation in this production encourages the audience and scholars alike to consider the roles beyond the prescribed heteronormative boundaries of the nuclear family. This critical practice, informed by queer and racial perspectives, is perhaps most apt for reading the role of the Man, who as the reproductively fertile father nevertheless engages in some non-normative social dynamics and practices at various points in the play. How an Asian American role is brought to life in a performance space always undergirds my analyses, especially with respect to the racialized and queer body as part of a larger family unit. [3] Each role bears the burden of expanding the audience’s vision to include the queer Asian American as part of a domestic social construct that better integrates non-normative sexualities as part of its core foundation. My article shows how Wonderland diagnoses this problem through its thematic depictions and offers an intriguing intervention through its deployment of form—what Yew describes as a “nonmusical musical.” I investigate the “nonmusical musical” as a quintessentially queer racial performance form that employs what I term as calculated cacophonies , which elucidates how Wonderland uses dialogic, sonic, and thematic relationalities to undercut the portrayed destruction of the Asian American family. The presence of calculated cacophonies allows Wonderland to spotlight some guarded optimism: there may be a sustained possibility for the queer Asian American son to find a place in the heteronuclear family. I begin my analysis by situating the play within broader historical, cultural, literary, and dramaturgical discourses, which the play’s post-1965 time period emphasizes directly. Prior to the Immigration Act of 1965, restrictive immigration, property, and marriage laws severely impacted the expansion of Asian American families. The obstacles they faced are apparent in numerous cultural productions set before 1965. Bachelors loom large, romantic relationships are often transitory, [4] and the possibility of marrying within one’s ethnic group remains challenging given the gender imbalances perpetrated by selective entry policies that favored men for their labor. In many plays and fictions, the Asian American family itself is under constant threat of dissolution. [5] We need not look too much further than Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea [6] to see the precariousness of the family even in the post–World War II period and in the latter stages of legislatively supported Asian American exclusion. Fortunately, that book’s protagonist, Ben Loy, recovers from impotency to impregnate his wife, Mei Oi, and therefore solidify a new Chinatown future, full of generative families who will fruitfully multiply. In cultural productions set in the post-1965 period, the emergence of this social formation is more assured. The heternormatively grounded “reproductive future” [7] is finally offered as a more sustainable possibility as evidenced by the proliferation of nuclear families, however functionally or dysfunctionally rendered, and accordingly depicted in a wide range of dramas and novels. [8] These many works admittedly do show clear fractures in the Asian American nuclear family and generate instabilities concerning the future of ethnoracially specific kinship formations. But what distinguishes these dramas and fictional narratives from the ones set in earlier periods is precisely the fact of the law: Asian American families can theoretically come into existence without the barriers formed by immigration policy or citizenship dilemmas. Practically, however, these works reveal that the formation of the contemporary Asian American heteronuclear family remains fragile. The family formations we see in the post-1965 productions are also made tenuous by other social dynamics. In literary critic erin Khuê Ninh’s estimation, depictions involving the Asian American family often involve daughters who are burdened with impossible expectations; they are supposed to bring honor to the family, marry the proper partner, and achieve a high professional status. So strict are these regimes that Asian American daughters will even engage in self-destructive acts to gain personal agency. [9] While Ninh concentrates specifically on the predicament of Asian American daughters in this exploitative economy undergirding the nuclear family, her conceptualization of filial debt applies to other cultural productions and their representations of intergenerational social formations. The battleground appears on the mind and body of the Asian American child who must be properly monitored, controlled, and perhaps even programmed to guarantee future economic and familial success. But Ninh’s argument presumes the heterosexuality of the daughters. The implicit question that her research and argument bring up is: Is the Asian American child who does not procreate inherently disobedient? The answer is almost certainly yes, meaning that queer sexuality becomes diametrically opposed to Asian American family. [10] Queer Asian America, the Nonmusical Musical, and Calculated Cacophonies Wonderland vividly demonstrates the ways in which queer sexuality cannot be fully acknowledged in the Asian American family in the post-1965 period. [11] On the thematic level, Wonderland disrupts the developmental narrative of the heteronormative, nuclear Asian American family, which relies on its children’s strict obedience. In an exchange with her son at the play’s inception, the mother tells him, “Coming to this country / A big sacrifice / Don’t forget / You must be survivor / Must be what again?”; the mother supplies the only apparent correct answer: “Must be success.” [12] The family’s reputation partially lies in this generational extension, as the Son makes good on his mother’s apparent sacrifice related to her uprooting and migration from Singapore. While the play follows the expected narrative by endowing the Son’s future with a burden of the heterosexual reproductive future, it undercuts the myth of the ever-sacrificial parental generation, while attending to the need for reconfiguring familial formations and expectations, especially in light of the queer Asian American’s expulsion from the home. In the context of post-1965 Asian American literature, Min Hyoung Song argues, “If queers are reproductive future’s negation, . . . then a select group of children of Asian immigrants are its objects of veneration.” [13] To be sure, the Son in Wonderland exists in the position of “veneration,” but his position becomes precarious once his queer sexuality is revealed. Additionally, Wonderland operates on the contextual level as part of a wave of theatrical productions focused on the Asian American family that surfaced in light of the success of East West Players, Pan Asian Repertory, and other pioneering companies that first arose in the period following the Civil Rights Movement. I earlier cited a dozen or so productions involving familial social dynamics that are set in the post-1965 moment; most were staged around or after 1990 and spotlight the far more expansive array of theater companies supporting Asian American productions. As Esther Kim Lee notes, [14] the proliferation of Asian American theater in this period came with more experimental and thematically unique productions. [15] Dramas concerning the Asian American family correspondingly boast inventive staging methods and dynamic aesthetic approaches, departing from the more realist conventions that characterized earlier productions. [16] Yew’s Wonderland operates in this same fashion, especially toward its conclusion, a surrealistic tonality that I consider in more detail later. Finally, on the formal level, Wonderland ’s staging and production gesture to the necessity of an innovative aesthetic approach to depict the queer Asian American family. At first glance, Wonderland might be described as a chamber play, which Heath Diehl notes “is a minimalist form in both dramaturgy and performance.” [17] Though Wonderland has been produced with some use of sets, including a view of the Pacific Ocean and a “wood-paneled stage,” [18] the play is meant to highlight the performances of the four actors. The sets themselves remain fixed, while a coordinated use of lighting helps mobilize a particularly dreamlike quality through the use of “aqua tones.” [19] Diehl’s reading of another of Yew’s works, Porcelain , advances that its form, the chamber play, is essential to enhance a particular thematic issue being staged: “the current impossibility of representing gay Asian identities and the need for alternative identity formations within Asian America.” [20] The sparseness of the stage, the longer silences in that particular production all emphasize the isolation and sense of futility experienced by Porcelain ’s central character. Wonderland accrues another level of formal complexity due to Yew’s description of the drama as a “nonmusical musical” in which the “monologues and dialogues” become “arias” and “duets.” [21] Though Wonderland uses no music, the play’s stage directions encourage actors to consider their lines rhythmically. Yew’s cascading script and creative use of indents spur the actors to engage their lines with musical inflection. For the most part, the invocation of nonmusical arias and duets in Wonderland reflects the ways that spoken words (and their potential musical intonations) contain some of the chaos inherent in Wonderland ’s content through a kind of mellifluous speech patterning. But in three distinct places Yew subverts the general sonorousness attached to the speaking roles. I designate these moments as calculated cacophonies because they (1) involve overlapping dialogue and argumentative language to emphasize the catastrophic deconstruction of the Asian American family, but at the same time (2) exhibit word and phrase repetitions, dialogic relationalities, and subtextual thematic connections to cohere the characters. These interlocking sequences, I contend, remind us that though the Asian American family becomes violently fractured, there exists a latent desire to find unity among its exploding parts. In this sense, the play’s nonmusical musical form employs an aesthetic construct to help accentuate one central theme: the desire to make a place for queer identity within the structure of the Asian American heteronuclear family. Therefore, one may ask what is it about the nonmusical musical that makes it the appropriate form for a performance focused on the potential but eventual impossibility of the queer Asian American family? To answer this question, I turn to the scholars engaged in both race and queerness as they arise in the musical form. Stacy Wolf, D. A. Miller, and John M. Clum respectively reveal the need to engage musicals by unveiling subtexts and subtle social arrangements that constitute queer desire as they emerge in performance-based cultural productions. [22] At the same time, such scholarship is limited because it focuses on sexuality as the element that requires a kind of spectatorial un-closeting. Asian American studies and performance scholars help expand how we read performance, especially musicals, for their veiled meanings and significations. [23] For instance, Celine P. Shimizu has reconsidered Miss Saigon through the resistant acts performed by Asian American actresses who are cast as the bar girl-prostitutes. [24] Though the musical has been vilified for stereotyping Asian women as hypersexual, Shimizu’s analysis reveals the subtle ways that actresses command their roles to articulate a space of performative agency. [25] While Shimizu focuses on the intents of actresses in those roles, her approach can be expanded to consider the ways we must engage what cannot always be directly seen. I am influenced by these critical interventions in the ways that Yew’s nonmusical musical catalyzes calculated cacophonies to emphasize a different form of spectatorial un-closeting: the desire to create a stable place for the queer child in the heteronuclear Asian American family. But if there can be no actual home for the queer child in this traditional social construct, then we can at least turn to formal and thematic hybridities to engender other relational possibilities for such fugitive belongings. I thus turn to some key scenes that hallmark how calculated cacophonies function in the nonmusical musical. Babble / Babel The first scene of calculated cacophony occurs at the conclusion of part 1. The Man, an architect, has reached the pinnacle of his career after constructing a megamall called Wonderland. At the end of part 1, however, we learn that the mall has collapsed due to shoddy construction. In this scene, Young Man, Woman, and Son all “surround Man” and “batter him with an endless barrage of questions” (366). This scene seems to break the realist conventions of the play to a certain extent because the Young Man and the Son appear on stage together at the same time and place. But it is more logical to read this moment as a rendering of accusatory discourses levied at the Man from different entities, not only from the direction of his Asian American family but also legal and occupational institutions. Phrases such as “charges of negligence” and “a fatal miscalculation” (366) suggest that the Young Man, Woman, and Son also embody the legal rhetoric that emerges in the wake of such a catastrophic architectural failure. At the same time, the Man’s family questions his integrity. The Young Man asks him whether he is a “murderer”; the Son asks whether the construction of the mall with cheaper materials was “a bad judgment call”; and the Woman repeatedly asks questions that are clipped off (366). We might call this scene a nonmusical climax moment for the drama, as it jumpstarts the second part of Wonderland : the Man and his family must grapple with the fallout of this event. This scene is the first of three in which overlapping dialogue is specifically emphasized in both the actual staging and textual directions. This moment obviously deviates from the more harmonious scenes that predominate in Wonderland . The nonmusical musical incorporates calculated cacophony here to critique the Man’s single-minded focus on the Wonderland mall as the categorical architectural symbol of his status as the ideal multidimensional family man: the good corporate son who builds an expansive consumer paradise, the filial Chinese American biological child who achieves, and the successful heterosexual husband and hardworking father. This moment is critical to stage as a calculated cacophony because it undercuts a common feature of musicals that involve group numbers meant to celebrate the success or the recognition of a central romantic relationship and compulsory heterosexuality. [26] In Wonderland , the Man’s varied familial investments, which are sublimated into the construction of the megamall, are shown to be illusions not only through the play’s narrative details but also through the use of form, as nonmusical arias and duets give way to this calculated cacophony in which voices overlap and yell over each other. The Young Man, Man, Son, and Woman cannot seem to find a common social formation to endorse in the final scene of part 1. Another level of structure to this initial scene of calculated cacophony bears scrutiny. All four actors appear on stage together, with three seemingly accusing the fourth, the Man, of negligence as an architect. All four roles are given lines with an important refrain, “you know,” which appears in an interrogative context. Even as the staging and the spoken words suggest outright hostility among the characters, the repetition of this phrase “you know” provides some dialogic unity: there is a desire for a unity based on some shared understanding. At the same time, the staged chaos of this scene makes communication sometimes unintelligible. Though the script gives the characters specific words to say, the actual production involves several minutes in which a multipronged babbling predominates among the actors. This moment of calculated cacophony brings into great relief a longer discourse coded into the early sections of part 1 related to the Wonderland mall, its relationship to spectacle, religion, and the Man’s reenvisioning of his place in a corporate family. Consequently, I move to a brief consideration of the ways that the mall’s collapse and the babbling family coheres through these interrelated themes and discourses. The drama is set at a time of heightened consumerism in Los Angeles, a space that urban studies scholars such as Edward Soja, Fredric Jameson, and Mike Davis effectively read as the quintessential postmodern city. [27] Los Angeles is perhaps the perfect location for this play, as it is associated with simulacrum, a place in which image exists above substance. The architect is hired to build a number of strip malls, which stands in direct contrast to his aesthetic aspirations to “birth / tomorrow’s concert halls / cathedrals museums skyscrapers monuments” and that such buildings would be “bold / gargantuan / towering over cities and peoples / reaching / touching the heavens” (290). His company describes these strip malls as “the new city centers / The future town squares of America / where people can come together / commune socialize fraternize” (288) and adds that “These malls will dot all over America / and no matter where you are from / where you are / when you come to a mall / you’ll feel right at home” (288). The utopian description of these locations rewrites the consumer center as the home, somehow engendering a multicultural milieu, able to embrace and include individuals from varied backgrounds, races, ages, genders, and sexualities and construct this new mall-based family. In a certain sense, then, the drama depicts the Southern California strip malls as “commodified landscapes designed to satisfy fantasies of urban living.” [28] The “fantasies of urban living,” of course, are limited in their realizations, especially since American families with higher disposable incomes and class status would be more likely to find metaphorical homes in the mall. [29] The architect buys into this line of mall-based consumerism and lets it reflect in his work. And, at first, his diligence is rewarded. Upgrading from strip malls to enclosed shopping centers, he is commissioned to build Wonderland, the sort of megamall that becomes a common site throughout Southern California in the latter half of the twentieth century. [30] This structure embodies the pinnacle of the consumer’s paradise. [31] Even more than the strip mall, the shopping mall enables the sense of a family-oriented environment, replete with clean hallways, visual diversions, and communal eating spaces. In addition, the architect believes Wonderland is the conglomeration of all his hard work and will allow him to finally pursue building his own aesthetic creations. He muses, “Surely / after this / this Wonderland / the company will give me / their favorite son / on a silver platter / more responsibilities / more projects / more buildings / of stature / of rank / that join rank / rival those of / Gehry Wright and Pei” (324). Most central is that he compares the company to a family in which he is “their favorite son.” By reconstructing the corporate world as his home, the architect promotes the idea that his compromise to do as his “parents” tell him will grant him the possibility to follow his actual dream. In some sense, Wonderland emerges as a kind of reproductive product of the Man. After having completed the Wonderland megamall, he calls it “My creation / My latter-day Tower of Babel / touching / kissing the heavens” (324). The architect’s self-congratulatory proclamation recodes the mall as something he has given birth to, giving himself godlike powers that can, at least metaphorically, transform buildings into humanlike entities, replete with the capacity to lock lips with the heavens. Unfortunately, the analogy strikes as portentous since the Tower of Babel, according to the Bible, was the very structure that engendered the linguistic pluralities that divided people. His desire to create is simultaneously too prideful, a twisted version of corporate construction and reproduction based on the flawed language of capitalist consumption. Now we can return to the climactic scene of part 1’s conclusion, as a calculated cacophony that bears out the babble that follows the Tower of Babel’s emergence. The play sources Asian American familial division in the focus and emphasis on capitalist constructs of community, which prevail over and above competing social forms. Certainly innovative in its configuration, the capitalist family nevertheless promotes superficial attachments and structures, especially as noted by the Man’s own building practices, which emphasize ornamentation and façade over integrity and foundation: “I chose / I imported / more expensive materials / Italian marble teak wood titanium / I skimmed / compromised on the rest” (396). Nonsensical speech becomes the appropriate formal and contextual mode of communication by which to root this scene in which all four actors appear at the same time on the stage with “overlapping” voices and dialogue. You Couldn’t Be / You Couldn’t Be! The second scene of calculated cacophony occurs not long after the Son comes out to his parents as queer. The dialogue appears in the script as two columns, a format that encourages the actors to speak over each other, as in the first calculated cacophony scene. This two-character scene portrays a conflict being waged between an Asian American mother and her queer Asian American son: Son “You couldn’t be” Woman You couldn’t be! “No” No! “Can’t” Can’t! I hear Not possible! every word No son of mine! (388) This pivotal dialogue clarifies the Son’s expulsion from the Asian American home, as he becomes a casualty of his own truth-telling by divulging his queer sexuality. But this scene is further notable because it emphasizes familial discord rather than the harmonious unions found in the latter stages of traditional musicals. [32] Note that the first three words are basically the same: the Son parroting back what his mother is yelling. As with the first scene of calculated cacophony, the word repetition unites the characters’ roles through oral discourse, even while the spoken words connote disharmony. In other words, the calculated cacophony shows a measure of sonic structure and alignment that ties these two characters together even amid their apparent antipathy for each other. In this sense, their inability to communicate even as they speak the same words reveals both the impossibility of and longing for a queerly informed Asian American family. We cannot call this scene a traditional duet by any means, yet nevertheless an oral subtext binds mother and son as a necessary pairing. On the thematic level, Wonderland makes an important intervention here in its portrayal of the queer Asian American who cannot coexist within the framework of the nuclear family. The play’s depiction of the Son’s repudiation by his mother follows the established work of numerous scholars. As Ski Hunter notes, “If children make disclosures, parents may regard this as an act of treason against the family and culture.” [33] After all, “traditional expectations for an Asian man, especially an eldest son, are to get married and have children, especially sons, to carry on the family name. Asian American gays and lesbians face tremendous parental pressure to fulfill their traditional roles.” [34] And the price of being perceived as treasonous to the “traditional role” can be very high, encouraging some to remain in the closet for fear that they will be “disowned, or have their identity negated / denied.” [35] Wonderland perfectly showcases the ways that coming out of the closet is a communicative act fraught with psychological and material peril. As with the first scene of calculated cacophony, the overlapping dialogue makes it likely that some audience members will misunderstand the characters’ words. This aural confusion, though, is necessary given the situational context. At the same time, the full scene continually references the failure of dialogue and what is spoken versus what is understood. The mother asks: “What will people say? / What will neighbors / say? /. . . Ay, you [Son] deaf or what? / Ay, you listening or / not?” The Son responds: “I hear / every word / yelling / saying / Every word / Sentence phrase” (388). Recall that in the first scene of calculated cacophony, language becomes a kind of babble, not necessarily conducive to a meaningful conversation. In a similar manner, this second scene shows us two figures who cannot understand the other, despite their lives being more alike than they comprehend or are willing to admit. To fully flesh out this line of reasoning, I move to short readings of other moments in Wonderland that bring into relief how this particular scene accrues deeper meaning and how the two figures appear as imperfect reflections of each other. I then go on to argue that this scene of calculated cacophony calls out to other portions of Wonderland to situate how these two figures must be considered as part of a queer Asian American genealogy. As a young woman living in Singapore, the mother meets her future husband, the Man, through her work as a bargirl. The Man relates his first impressions: “And / there she is / A woman of twenty-two / Wrapped tight / in a delicate silk cheong sam / Sipping a bright red umbrella drink / gin sling / Sitting / at the Long Bar” (284). Not surprisingly, she strikes up a conversation with the Man that night, and soon after they have sexual intercourse. While no evidence within the play ever suggests directly that she or any of the other “sarong party girls” are prostitutes, references abound that they use sexual allure to achieve their own goals. The Woman, for instance, admits to the audience that she lied about her first pregnancy to persuade the Man to marry her, a ruse that works. Based on this falsehood, the architect decides that the right thing to do is to marry her and return with her to the United States. Tellingly, the Woman distances herself from the other bargirls who expressly target who they perceive is the dim-witted “white man,” duping him into believing that their engaged performances indicate their devotion and love; their true goal, of course, is to get the valued “Green Card” (311). In contrast, the Woman believes she truly loves the Asian American architect and morally justifies deception rather than couching it within a framework of citizenship gain. That the Woman is unable to directly admit what she has done, instead calling it “motivation,” further demonstrates the screens that she places over her language, a way in which the audience then is invited to look into her divulgences for subtextual significations. Her tirade, then, concerning what neighbors might say strikes as particularly hollow given her tactics in pursuing marriage with an American transnational. I read against the content and context of the scene to reconsider the mother and son through the lens of their unity on stage, as a kind of fractured duet. The pair shares the stage with overlapping dialogue that is spoken in relative temporal unison, even if the words are not exactly the same. Additionally, the script equally emphasizes their pairing through its bifurcated structure and appearance on the page. But this connection, primarily rendered through form and overlapping dialogue spoken in rhythm—that is, this calculated cacophony—is not simply a clichéd desire for rapprochement between mother and son, but a deeper understanding of the importance of their shared, but not necessarily twinned experiences, each having a complicated connection to his or her sexuality. This second scene of calculated cacophony accordingly accrues another level of meaning because of the Son’s mocking of his mother’s accent. While he purports to listen to every word his mother says, he also states that “she speaks an endless / soundtrack of broken English / Embarrasses the fuck outta me” (388). As language fractures and communication breaks down, the nonmusical musical emphasizes these calculated cacophonies further through the problem of acculturation after transnational movement. After initially arriving in the United States, the mother’s status as a foreigner directly impacts her dreams to work as a Macy’s salesperson, as she is turned away due to her accent. The Son’s derisiveness over his mother’s English language faculties hallmarks an internalized form of racial shame, which he uses as a weapon to strike back at the mother who disowns him. In a telling twist, however, the Son metaphorically becomes the mother he has denigrated when he attempts to establish an acting career. In the Son’s final extended monologue, given during a Hollywood audition, he is asked to improvise two film scenes in which he plays a racialized Asian subject. In the first, he must “Speak broken English / Deliver Thai food” (426). The customer asks him to wait inside while he retrieves payment for the food. Spying dirty magazines on the coffee table, the delivery boy becomes aroused. When the customer returns, he reveals he is Vietnam War veteran and thinks that the delivery boy is “Cambodian Vietnamese something,” later admitting that “[Asians] all look alike” (426). Later, the delivery boy is asked whether he has “ever watched The Killing Fields ” (426); he responds in the affirmative by saying “yes / It was exactly like my life” (426). After that point, the veteran becomes sexually interested in the delivery boy, and they begin to touch each other. The power differential is made apparent on multiple levels as the delivery boy waits to receive cash and willingly submits to the veteran’s erotic advances, even after being reduced to a prototypical racial phenotype. This audition requires the Son to be a foreign subject whose English is far from proficient. This role is largely more indicative of the plight faced by actors, who are hampered by a Hollywood casting system that perpetrates the image of the Asian who speaks only broken English. In an ethnographic study of Asian American actors, Joann Lee notes that many of her interviewees believe that “Asian specific roles are fine,” but the chance to do much “beyond that” is extraordinarily limited. [36] Asian American actors are too often cast as “villains, gangsters and immigrants or filler roles such as professionals, or side kick to the leading role.” [37] Wonderland emphasizes the problems brought up by Lee, as the Son takes on roles that are racially insensitive and far from the lead roles he might have dreamed of as a youth. Given that the Son is probably not more than a twenty-something at the time of the audition, we know the period is sometime in the 1980s, a cultural moment in which the Asian American registered in martial arts films such as The Karate Kid . [38] Also during this period, dozens of major Hollywood films were set in the Vietnam War era. Though perhaps offering Asian American actors more work, these films largely cast the Vietnamese figures in unspeaking civilian roles. Knowing that this audition is one of few chances for him to break into the industry, the Son tactically chooses to remain invested in the casting process, even when it involves sexually and racially reductive roles. Further still, the conclusion of the audition scene suggests the possibility that the entire process may have been a variation of the proverbial casting couch, as it is implied that the Son and the director are engaging in drug use together. The Son’s original reference to the “soundtrack” that accompanies his mother’s accented English is ultimately a prophetic and apt word choice as the son’s and mother’s connection in this scene accrues more meaning as the nonmusical musical continues onward. In its most basic definition, the soundtrack functions as a key accompaniment to a visual cultural production. The soundtrack is typically structured to operate with synchronicity, aligning with particular dialogue, visual, and other such cues in a performance. The Son’s use of “soundtrack” to describe “broken English” seems at first strange given his derisive attitude, but underlying this use of the word is perhaps an unconscious desire to remain connected to his mother, however foreign she may be. Though they cannot find a time and place to be together in that stage and at that moment, their pairing emphasizes their lives as imperfect mirrors of each other. On the one hand, the mother cannot embrace the Son for his queerness, even though she, too, is attached to what might be categorized as a deviant sexuality through her tactical entry into the United States. On the other, the Son cannot embrace his mother for her lack of English fluency, even though he, too, is attached to what might be categorized as linguistic foreign-ness when he seeks a career in Hollywood. Conditional Probabilities If the first two scenes of calculated cacophony render language as a site of miscommunication but provide formal and dialogic relationalities as a temporary salve over such chaos, then the final one offers a very different directive. The third scene of calculated cacophony appears toward the end of Wonderland , not long before the Man kills himself. At this point, the Man is touring on a sort of lecture circuit in which he speaks about architectural issues. He is forced to lecture because he cannot find other work: Young Man Given Man The function of the dire most buildings is financial straits to protect people he is swimming in from the weather (429) This scene is intriguing because it presents the bifurcated structure of the “You couldn’t be!” scene between mother and son, but diverges in one key way: the Young Man’s lines are presented in the more musical cascading format while the Man’s are not. The Man’s lines connote the monotonous circumstances under which he must lecture to “make ends meet” (429). Here, calculated cacophony appears in the guise of the staging context: only one figure is aware of the other. The Young Man appears as a kind of omniscient narrator, giving us the circumstances behind why the Man must lecture at all. But the cascading lines suggest a desire for direct musical engagement: that is, a duet (or even a playful dialogue) might be possible, but the Man, for some reason, cannot understand the impact of his words beyond their most literal meanings. In particular, he explains how “[t]he structural / components / of a building / assure that the / elements required / to fulfill / its function / to stand up” are somehow met (429). These words resonate for the Man only because he failed to uphold the “function of most buildings” in his construction of the megamall, but the larger import of the Man’s lecture is far more relational: as an architect he is tasked to protect people through structural integrity, but, as a father, he seems to have abandoned a similar duty entirely. At the precise moment he is giving the lecture, the Man’s son is turning tricks in Hollywood to survive. If the Man is forced to employ his architectural skills to make lectures about how he failed to keep him and his wife solvent, then so too is his Son pushed to instrumentalize his sexuality to endure outside of the Asian American home space. As with the second scene of calculated cacophony, the father and the son accrue another level of connection through the shared but not necessarily twinned experiences concerning spectacle, deviancy, and limited occupational options. The father is put on display on a lecture circuit to spotlight what not to do when constructing large buildings. Fittingly, the Young Man calls the father’s work something that stems from his “new found celebrity” (429). Almost concurrent with the father’s appearance at universities, the Son struggles to live independently. He takes a job as a stripper, becomes a prostitute living on the profits of his regulars, and later attempts to break into the Hollywood acting industry. The Son often has to perform, especially in sexually suggestive ways, to finance his life. These sequences involving the Son’s trials outside the home all occur just before the third scene of calculated cacophony and hence inform the way in which the Young Man and the Man cannot connect with each other, even as they appear on stage together speaking lines at the same time. Because the Young Man is who the Son eventually becomes, his presence is meant to reinforce how the Son and the Man face similar dilemmas in the period following the mall’s collapse. At the same time, the Man cannot see beyond his own myopic perspective and cannot engage the Young Man in a meaningful pairing, disrupting the possibility of a harmonious duet. As in the previously described scene between the Son and mother, the Young Man and the Man are not functioning in unison. Yet this scene also appears structured through a subtextual relationality. The Young Man’s language is rooted in the discourse of conditional probabilities. According to Alan Hájek, “In general, conditional probability is probability given some body of evidence or information, probability relativised to a specified set of outcomes, where typically this set does not exhaust all possible outcomes.” [39] This definition clarifies another elliptical connection between the Young Man and Man, as the Young Man changes the conditions of a probable outcome. In this case, the Young Man provides specific conditions, the outcome of which is the Man’s appearance on the lecture circuit. The use of the conditional probability in this context is intriguing because it can only emerge as the relationship between two elements. This scene accrues a level of unity on the basis of this conditional probability: though these characters are not seen engaging in a musical duet, they nevertheless find an associative connection through the vocabulary of statistics. As with the previous scene, this kind of subtextual link appears again as the method by which calculated cacophony operates. This scene brings to mind whether or not there may have been a different outcome: did the father necessarily have to lecture in order to make ends meet? This question seems relevant in this context precisely because of the marital instability that arises in the wake of the mall’s collapse and the Son’s expulsion from the family home. Additionally, the Young Man adopts language from a quantitative discipline, gesturing in part to the very occupational path of his father. The use of language denoting conditional probabilities would have been familiar to the father given the necessity of eliminating risk factors in building constructions. In this sense, again, there is a desire to find a connection, even if the two do not appear on stage as a concordant duo. The Memory Play and the Im/possible Queer Asian American Family The shadow that continually shrouds these frustrated nonmusical duets and group numbers appears in the guise of the fractured family unit, which requires some sort of greater unifying thread. The three scenes spotlighting what I call calculated cacophonies signal the queer child’s yearning to be accepted by his Asian American parents. If circumstances make the queer Asian American son’s embrace by his parents impossible, then the nonmusical musical operates with subtextual dialogic links that provide some measure of order amid these discordant dynamics. Further still, these scenes and their various levels of thematic and formal relationalities reveal how the child’s so-called queerness is not so alien from the ways that his parents have instrumentalized their bodies and their skills to achieve and to survive. The final scene of the nonmusical musical leads us to the image of the “golden carpet” to contest a conclusion otherwise completely devoid of promise. This moment is not one of calculated cacophony, as the actors do not confront or oppose each other. But a problem equally as obvious as that encountered in the three earlier scenes—that is, the inability to communicate—does emerge in this final scene’s collection of characters on stage. The Young Man arrives to find his mother looking out over the ocean. The Young Man tells the Woman: “Dad used to say / He’d look out and wait” (453) for an image of the setting sun that looked like a “golden carpet” (453). At first the Woman does not see this image, but then the Man appears, who by this time has killed himself, and then later the Son appears, who by this time has grown up (and whose “role” is now given over to the Young Man). Only when the Young Man, Son, and Man all appear together can the Woman see the image. This final sequence of the nonmusical musical we might reconsider in light of the earlier scenes of calculated cacophony precisely because all four characters can see the same image, but cannot actually exist in the same time and space. The “golden carpet” functions as an appropriate symbol given its suggestive connotations of homely welcome and of the path that would lead the queer son back to his family. Here, we can say that Wonderland takes some inspiration from the memory play. Epitomized by The Glass Menagerie , [40] the memory play typically uses more surrealistic and subjective staging that includes projections, stylized music, and subtle lighting to generate a production focused on “moods, a study in futility and frustration constructed on incidents rather than on a consecutive plotline, using as material the trivial happenings that can throw such huge shadows in the lives of decent yet desperate people.” [41] Yew’s Wonderland draws on these stylizations, formal and staging conceits, and nonlinear plotlines, but diverges from the traditional genre conventions precisely because a memory play is typically situated from the perspective of one character or his subjective recounting of the past. [42] Instead, Wonderland quite squarely depicts the disintegration of dreams for multiple characters, eschewing a surrealistic filter for the majority of the play while accentuating the dissolution of the Asian American heteronuclear family. Further still, the meta-theatricality inherent in the memory play is not suggested in Wonderland until the concluding arc. [43] If Wonderland can be marked as a memory play at all, then this labeling is most apt in the final pages when the Son and Young Man merge on stage. Here, realism is partly eschewed as the division between time periods collapses. [44] And memory is itself the very topic of this moment, as the past comes crashing into the present, reminding the audience that the Son and Young Man still harbor that same intimate view of the ocean, though each must reflect on it with a different parent. To consider Wonderland as a memory play at this juncture is crucial precisely because it provides a necessary countermeasure to one thematic related to the traditional musical’s finale, which operates in the mode of “celebrating romantic love and American courtship ties.” [45] The memory play, with its emphasis on the importance of what has already occurred, undercuts any future-oriented ethos suggested by the successful completion of a courtship narrative with its proverbial “happily ever after” conceit. Wonderland encourages us to look back to enable a different thematic to take center stage, one related to social formation. In this sense, the memory play begins to align more seamlessly with a different feature of the musical finale: a concluding group number that functions to “celebrate community.” [46] Anne Beggs argues that “the finales [in West Side Story and Les Misérables ] . . . engage with the spirits of the dead . . . , musically reiterating their messages of hope and love.” [47] We can apply Beggs’s reading to Wonderland ’s final scene, as the four actors come together as a family, united through their ability to see the “golden carpet.” Even the dead Man comes back to life to provide “messages of hope and love.” A memory is resurrected, and a family is thus reconstructed. Second, the power of this finale is also made apparent in its racializing impulses. We can turn to Lei Ouyang Bryant to consider how the musical form operates with respect to themes of race and associated social differences, as they appear in a finale. Bryant analyzes The Walleye Kid: The Musical , which involves “the story of a young Korean American adoptee named Annie and her experiences” [48] in her rural white Minnesotan home. Bryant argues that the musical, adapted from Philip Gotanda’s play of the same name, “requires a resolution where we return to the trigger incident when Annie is teased by her peers, and have the kids come back to apologize to Annie so that the company can come together as a cohesive community.” [49] As Bryant notes, the musical’s concluding group number functions to show how the Korean American adoptee can find a place among her primarily white peers, transforming the racial homogeneity that might have been predominant in a school’s culture. This reading applies equally well to Wonderland because it complicates the notion of community, as the queer Asian American family remains on stage, although without a larger group surrounding it. The isolation of the queer Asian American family suggests its radical disarticulation from structural support systems that might help to sustain a fledgling and fragile social formation. Not surprisingly, then, the surrealistic nature of this scene—the Man’s magical resurrection, the Son’s temporally anachronistic presence—undercuts its actuality and tangible materialization. Here, the actual staging of Yew’s production is most salient, especially as the use of lighting helps generate the luminescence that colors the pathway to the horizon point, resulting in a “moody” and “deceptive” atmosphere. [50] As reviewer Pat Launer notes, “The ocean is almost a palpable presence in Rachel Hauck’s dramatic set design.” [51] The word “almost” is the key, as the queer Asian American family unit cannot unify their perspectives on one “golden carpet” unless somehow magically reunited. In this sense, I extrapolate from the work of Stacy Wolf, who has argued in relation to the musical Wicked that its conclusion “unifies the community, but with irony and a critical slant.” [52] Wolf’s intervention clarifies how we might reread the promise of Wonderland ’s group collective as one tempered by its ultimate impossibility. Wolf’s reading, of course, is couched in relation to the queer undertones that go unresolved: “ Wicked ’s queer ‘marriage’ is private, spoken only between the women and impossible to be revealed publicly. The principals must permanently separate because the community refuses to tolerate their union.” [53] Not unlike Wicked , then, the only reunion possible in Wonderland is an unrealistic one, due to the heteronormative demands placed on racialized family formations. But at least in this moment, the cacophony that comprised earlier scenes is overshadowed by this chimerical convergence, a solidarity prescribing the need for a time and place that can promote the emergence of the queer Asian American family. Wonderland ’s greatest dream is the desire to form a sustainable kinship system, one that exists alongside rather than beyond the heteronuclear Asian American home. Wonderland leaves us there with a gleaming “golden carpet,” coalescing features of the memory play and the nonmusical musical, to remind us that even with such a problematic conclusion, a queer Asian American family must still be made possible. Acknowledgments: First off, I want to thank the editors of JADT , Naomi J. Stubbs and James Wilson, as well as the journal’s editorial staff for their unflagging support. I very much appreciate the Herculean efforts of my readers, who include the indefatigable Lisa Wehrle and Donatella Gallela. References [1] Chay Yew’s plays have been published in two omnibus editions: Porcelain and A Language of Their Own: Two Plays (New York: Grove, 1997) and The Hyphenated American (New York: Grove, 2002). My research has yielded just a small handful of critical studies on Yew, only one of which is partially based on Wonderland : Caroline De Wagter explores the play in relation to cultural memory in “Re-configuring Cultural Memory in Chay Yew’s Wonderland and M. J. Kang’s Blessings ,” in Signatures of the Past: Cultural Memory in Contemporary Anglophone North American Drama , ed. Marc Maufort and Caroline de Wagter (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 273–90. Heath A. Diehl and Jordon Schildcrout respectively engage in critical analyses of Porcelain , which is another play that focuses on queer Asian diasporic themes; see Heath A. Diehl, “Beyond The Silk Road : Staging a Queer Asian America in Chay Yew’s Porcelain ,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 37, no. 1 (2004): 149–67; and Jordan Schildcrout, Murder Most Queer: The Homicidal Homosexual in the American Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press). Schildcrout, in particular, does note the influence of musical forms on his production, as one of the primary roles involves an individual with a fondness for Puccini. [2] Both actors have been out for some time. Mapa discussed his queer sexuality in his one-man performance, “I Remember Mapa,” in O Solo Homo: The New Queer Performance , ed. Holly Hughes and David Roman (New York: Grove, 1998), 199–228. One reference in which Shimono publicly addresses his queer sexuality occurred in 2010 in a post to Matthew’s Place, a site run by the Matthew Shepard Foundation; see Sab Shimono, interview by Thomas Howard, Voices (blog), 6 April 2010, http://www.matthewsplace.com/voice/sab-shimono/. [3] In this respect, my article honors the work of performance studies scholars such as Karen Shimakawa, Josephine Lee, and Esther Kim Lee, who have been attentive to the techniques of production, staging, and drama to their analyses and studies. See Karen Shimakawa, National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Josephine Lee, Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997); and Esther Kim Lee, A History of Asian American Theater (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). [4] For several prominent examples of these transitory relationships, see Genny Lim, Bitter Cane , in The Politics of Life: Four Plays by Asian American Women , ed. Velina Hasu Houston (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 163–204; Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973); and David Henry Hwang, The Dance of the Railroad , in FOB and Other Plays (New York: Plume, 1990), 51-86. [5] Two examples that concern Japanese American families are Wakako Yamauchi, And the Soul Shall Dance , in Songs My Mother Taught Me: Stories, Plays, and Memoir (New York: Feminist Press at CUNY, 1994), 153–208; Wakako Yamauchi, 12-1-A , in The Politics of Life: Four Plays by Asian American Women , ed. Velina Hasu Houston (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 45–100. [6] Louis Chu, Eat a Bowl of Tea (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976). [7] Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 147. [8] Ayad Akhtar, The Who & the What (New York: Back Bay Books, 2014); Wajahat Ali, Domestic Crusaders (San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2011); Jay Antani, The Leaving of Things (Seattle: Lake Union, 2014); Frank Chin, Chickencoop Chinaman/The Year of the Dragon: Two Plays (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981); Julia Cho, Durango , in Version 3.0: Contemporary Asian American Plays , ed. Chay Yew (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2011), 327–92; Julia Cho, 99 Histories , in Seven Contemporary Plays from the Korean Diaspora in the Americas , ed. Esther Kim Lee (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 21–84; Sung Rno, Cleveland Raining , in But Still, Like Air, I’ll Rise: New Asian American Plays , ed. Velina Hasu Houston (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), 227–70; Lloyd Suh, American Hwangap , in Seven Contemporary Plays from the Korean Diaspora in the Americas , ed. Esther Kim Lee (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 85–150; Sung J. Woo, Everything Asian (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2009). [9] erin Khuê Ninh, Ingratitude: The Debt-Bound Daughter in Asian American Literature (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 1-18. [10] David Eng argues the ways in which the Asian American is historically rendered as a queer subject through laws that have regulated sexuality and the development of families; see The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); and Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 204–28. [11] Some important publications do offer a number of important interventions, but are primarily rooted in social scientific analyses; see, e.g., Rosalind C. Chou, Asian American Sexual Politics: The Construction of Race, Gender, and Sexuality , 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015); and Gina Masequesmay and Sean Metzger, “Introduction: Embodying Asian/American Sexualities,” in Embodying Asian/American Sexualities , ed. Gina Masequesmay and Sean Metzger (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009), 1–21. In specific studies of queer Asian American cultural productions, the emphasis has tended to remain on film, cinema, and television; see, for instance, Nguyen Tan Hoang, A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). [12] Chay Yew, Wonderland , in Hyphenated American , 312. All subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. Unless noted, typestyles and formatting are from the original. [13] Min Hyoung Song, The Children of 1965: On Writing, and Not Writing, As an Asian American (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 168. Song’s reading is placed in the context of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (New York: Houghton, 2003). [14] Lee, History , 200–224. [15] For another useful consideration of East West Players, see Yuko Kurahashi, Asian American Culture on Stage: The History of the East West Players (New York: Routledge, 2013). [16] Julia Cho’s 99 Histories and Sung Rno’s Cleveland Raining , for instance, include stage directions that emphasize dream-states and the fluidity of memory. [17] Diehl, “Beyond The Silk Road ,” 151. [18] Michael Phillips, “Haze Obscures the Landscape in a Troubled Wonderland ,” Los Angeles Times , 6 October 1999, http://articles.latimes.com/1999/oct/06/entertainment/ca-19230. [19] Ibid. [20] Diehl, “Beyond The Silk Road ,” 151. [21] Yew, Hyphenated American , 281. [22] Stacy Ellen Wolf, “‘We’ll Always Be Bosom Buddies’: Female Duets and the Queering of Broadway Musical Theater,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 3 (2006): 351–76; D. A. Miller, Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); John M. Clum, Something for the Boys: Musical Theater and Gay Culture (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999). For other useful sources on queerness, performance, musicals, and associated genres, see Steven Cohan, Incongruous Entertainment: Camp, Cultural Value, and the MGM Musical (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); and Judith Peraino, Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). [23] More recently, cultural critics have explored how popular musicals have been revised using purportedly race-blind casting considerations, which have included Asian American actors and performers; see, e.g., such as Angela C. Pao, “Green Glass and Emeralds: Citation, Performance, and the Dynamics of Ethnic Parody in Thoroughly Modern Millie ,” MELUS 36, no. 4 (2011): 35–60; and Donatella Galella, “Redefining America, Arena Stage, and Territory Folks in a Multiracial Oklahoma! ,” Theatre Journal 67, no. 2 (2015): 213–33. [24] Celine P. Shimizu, The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). [25] Ibid., 51. [26] Wolf, “Bosom Buddies,” 352. [27] See Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (New York: Verso, 1989); Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991); Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage, 1992). [28] Michael Dear and Steven Flusty, “The Iron Lotus: Los Angeles and Postmodern Urbanism,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 551 (May 1997): 155. [29] Additionally, the Man must adhere to certain boundaries in the construction of these malls due to his status as what John Chase terms a “[C]onsumerist architect.” John Chase, “The Role of Consumerism in American Architecture,” Journal of Architectural Education 44, no. 4 (1991): 211. [30] Timothy Davis, “The Miracle Mile Revisited: Recycling, Renovation, and Simulation along the Commercial Strip,” Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 7 (1997): 93–114, esp. 97. [31] For some important studies on the American shopping mall (and variations such as the shopping center), see Jon Goss, “The ‘Magic of the Mall’: An Analysis of Form, Function, and Meaning in the Contemporary Retail Built Environment,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 83, no. 1 (1993): 18–47 and Lizabeth Cohen, “From Town Center to Shopping Center: The Reconfiguration of Community Marketplaces in Postwar America,” American Historical Review 101, no. 4 (1996): 1050–81. [32] For a compelling case for rereading popular musicals through the lens of queer spectatorship, see Wolf, “Bosom Buddies.” [33] Ski Hunter, Coming Out and Disclosures: LGT Persons Across the Life Span (New York: Routledge, 2012), 110. [34] Nang Du, Hendry Ton, and Elizabeth J. Kramer, “New Immigrants,” in Praeger Handbook of Asian American Health , ed. William Baragar Bateman, Noilyn Abesamis-Mendoza, and Henrietta Ho-Asjoe (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2009), 1:338. [35] Cirleen DeBlaere and Melanie Brewster, “Diversity across the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning Community,” in Creating School Environments to Support Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning Students and Families: A Guide for Working with Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning Youth and Families , ed. Emily S. Fisher and Karen Komosa-Hawkins (New York: Routledge, 2013), 77. [36] Joann Lee, “Asian American Actors in Film, Television and Theater: An Ethnographic Case Study,” Race, Gender & Class 8, no. 4 (2001): 182. [37] The problem of racialized casting is further exacerbated by the simple lack of representational diversity in film, television, and elsewhere. Margaret Hillenbrand, “Of Myths and Men: Better Luck Tomorrow and the Mainstreaming of Asian America,” Cinema Journal 47, no. 4 (2008): 50. [38] The Karate Kid , dir. John G. Avildsen, perf. Ralph Macchio, Noriyuki “Pat” Morita, Elisabeth Shue (Culver City, CA: Columbia Pictures, 1984). [39] Alan Hájek, “Conditional Probability,” in Philosophy of Statistics , ed. Prasanta S. Bandyopadhyay and Malcolm R. Forster (Amsterdam: North Holland, 2011), 7:99. [40] Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie (New York: New Directions), xix–xxi. [41] Patrick O’Connor, “Theatre,” Furrow 15, no. 3 (1964): 166. [42] According to R. B. Parker, the memory play functions primarily through the subjective viewpoint of a narrator figure: “[W]e not only see exclusively what the narrator consciously wants us to see, but also see it only in the way he chooses that we should.” R. B. Parker, “The Circle Closed: A Psychological Reading of The Glass Menagerie and The Two Character Play ,” Modern Drama 28, no. 4 (1985): 519. [43] For a consideration of the memory play through the lens of meta-theatrical elements, see Philip Kolin, “ Something Cloudy, Something Clear : Tennessee Williams’s Postmodern Memory Play,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 12, no. 2 (1998): 35–55. Parker also considers the meta-theatrical character of the memory play by calling it a “box-within-box structure” (Parker, “The Circle Closed,” 519). [44] Diana Sandars and Rhonda V. Wilcox, “Not ‘The Same Arrangement’: Breaking Utopian Promises in the Buffy Musical,” in Music, Sound and Silence in Buffy the Vampire Slayer , ed. Paul Gregory Attinello, Janet K. Halfyard, and Vanessa Knights (New York: Routledge, 2010), 206. In this sense, Wonderland does gesture to the central thematic of aging in the memory play and how this process necessary impacts how we look back on past events. Valerie Barnes Lipscomb, “Performing the Aging Self in Hugh Leonard’s Da and Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa ,” Comparative Drama 47, no. 3 (2013): 286. [45] Andrea Most, “‘We Know We Belong to the Land’: The Theatricality of Assimilation in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! ,” PMLA 113, no. 1 (1998): 79. It must be noted that Sandars and Wilcox, “Not ‘The Same Arrangement,’” provide this articulation of the musical in their context of Buffy . [46] Andrea Most specifically makes this argument in the context of Oklahoma! Most, “We Know We Belong.” [47] Anne Beggs, “‘For Urinetown is your town . . .’: The Fringes of Broadway,” Theatre Journal 62, no. 1 (2010): 46. [48] Lei Ouyang Bryant, “Performing Race and Place in Asian America: Korean American Adoptees, Musical Theatre, and the Land of 10,000 Lakes,” Asian Music 40, no. 1 (2009): 4. [49] Ibid., 9. [50] Pat Launer, “ Wonderland at the La Jolla Playhouse,” KPBS, October 8, 1999, http://www.patlauner.com/review/wonderland-at-the-la-jolla-playhouse. [51] Ibid. [52] Stacy Ellen Wolf, “‘Defying Gravity’: Queer Conventions in the Musical Wicked ,” Theatre Journal 60, no. 1 (2008): 17. [53] Ibid., 17–18. Footnotes About The Author(s) STEPHEN HONG SOHN is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of Racial Asymmetries: Asian American Fictional Worlds (NYU Press, 2014), the co-editor of Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits (Temple University Press, 2006), and the editor of Karen Tei Yamashita’s Anime Wong: Fictions of Performance (Coffee House Press, 2014). Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Curtis Russell Editorial Assistant: Christine Snyder Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Comment Historical Subjectivity and the Revolutionary Archetype in Amiri Baraka's The Slave and Luis Valdez's Bandido! Calculated Cacophonies: The Queer Asian American Family and the Nonmusical Musical in Chay Yew's Wonderland August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle: Critical Perspectives on the Plays. Edited by Sandra G. Shannon. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016; Pp. 211. Performance, Identity, and Immigration Law: A Theatre of Undocumentedness. By Gad Guterman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014; Pp. 236. Kitchen Sink Realisms: Domestic Labor, Dining, and Drama in American Theatre. By Dorothy Chansky. Theatre History and Culture Series. Series editor Heather Nathans. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015; Pp. 620. Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: Body, Brain and Being. Edited by Nicola Shaugnessy. London: Bloomsbury, 2013; Pp. 300. Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience. Edited by Clelia Falletti, Gabriele Sofia, and Victor Iacono. Performance and Science: Interdisciplinary Dialogues Series. Series editors: John Lutterbie and Nicola Shaugnessy. London UK, New York NY: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 260. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

By Daniel Gerould | A unique anthology playwrights from Poland, Slovenia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Romania in the backdrop of rebellion, war and revolution. < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the TCG Bookstore or Amazon.com. You can also get in touch with us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu Playwrights Before the Fall Daniel Gerould Download PDF Eastern European Drama in Times of REVOLUTION. In this unique anthology playwrights from Poland, Slovenia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Romania examine the moral and psychological dimensions of the transformations taking place in society during the years of transition from totalitarianism to democracy. Written before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the five plays reveal the absurdities of an inflexible system based on belief in abstract ideology that sacrifices the individual to dogma. These authors bear witness to the ravages of communism and to the traumas of its disintegration and lend their voices to the frightened and manipulated whose lives were stunted by entropic regimes. Edited by Daniel Gerould Preface by Dragan Klaić Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

Tison Pugh Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 1 Visit Journal Homepage Edward Albee’s Sadomasochistic Ludonarratology in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Tison Pugh By Published on November 8, 2018 Download Article as PDF A relatively new term in the critical lexicon, ludonarratology theorizes the intersection of games and narrative structures in a particularly apt formulation for the theatrical world. Of the intersection of gaming and literary art, Astrid Ensslin explains that “narrative, dramatic, and/or poetic techniques are employed in order to explore the affordance and limitations of rules and other ludic structures and processes.” [1] That is to say, ludic, literary, dramatic, and poetic themes and structures often overlap, with kaleidoscopic refractions of form, structure, and story. From this new perspective, ludonarratology allows a clearer eye on the ways in which the theatre encourages its actors, producers, and audiences to engage in the rituals of play. Certainly, as a site simultaneously recreational and professional in its ambitions, the theatre multiplies the ludonarrative potential of characters qua players, in that actors must adopt the personae of their roles, with these characters then assuming complementary or contrasting stances toward one another as the plot unfolds. Such a dynamic is strikingly evident in Edward Albee’s masterpiece, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), the first act of which alerts viewers to its ludic themes through the subtitle “Fun and Games.” The actors undertaking the parts of Martha and George and of their late-night guests, Honey and Nick, must bring to life the antagonism expressed in the protagonists’ mutually tormenting games, with these sadomasochistic structures challenging viewers to consider the inherent ambiguity of Martha’s and George’s relative positions to each other. Much formalist, structuralist, and even poststructuralist narratology assumes that a given text’s protagonist is clearly identified, and much ludology similarly envisions a sharp distinction between the competitors of a game, yet sadomasochistic ludonarratology, as an interpretive and eroticized dynamic, complicates these simplistic views. Indeed, sadomasochism dismantles the certainty of many narratives because it implicitly—and sometimes explicitly—blurs the categories of sadist and masochist, leaving interpreters of the ludic story unsure of its overarching direction and thus capable of identifying with the players only through an ephemeral sense of relation that might waver in the scene’s next beat. When a game’s players continually shift in their respective positions toward one another, how can one win, how can the other lose, and how can viewers pierce through the dissolution of ostensibly antagonistic roles to determine the game’s meaning? Sadomasochistic ludonarratology envelops characters, players, and interpreters in complex wrangling over the very meaning of desire, with striking repercussions to the play of the game for all involved, particularly when plotlines reveal the characters and structures hidden from view that nonetheless guide the game’s unfolding. Under such circumstances, absence and inaction function as meaningfully as presence and play, alerting interpreters to the structural secrets hidden yet subversively in effect in sadomasochistic narratives. Theatre, Character, and Sadomasochistic Ludonarratology As a whole, the theatre creates a ludic world in and of itself, one that is defined by its lexicon of play, in which playwrights pen plays brought to life by actors playing roles. The theatrical experience is by definition an immersive one, and Sebastian Domsch posits the necessity of immersion for ludonarrative experiences: “Playing games and reading fiction are both activities that involve the temporal and partial neglect of knowledge in order to function.” [2] We know the gameworld differs from the real world, but it proceeds apace into the ludonarrative pleasures at hand. Beyond this creation of a playful zone, the theatre approximates a game in the tension between the guidelines of performance codified in a script and the inherent potential to disrupt these expectations. Building on Elizabeth Bruss’s foundational work in literary ludonarratology, Lynda Davey theorizes that theatrical narratives exhibit ludic features both in the interactions of playwrights and spectators and in the additional elements introduced through the narrative’s inherent performativity, which must be realized by actors, mise-en-scène, lighting and other requisite elements of a theatrical production. [3] Blanket statements about the theatre’s ludic aspects cannot cover all plays and all performances, yet sufficient overlap between theatre and game arises for ludonarratology to illuminate their mutual pleasures. Surely Tom Bishop is correct in his statement that “one does not need a fully worked-out theory of the nature and place of play in human life to perceive or discuss the ludic in drama.” [4] It is the objective of this essay, if not to propose a universal theory of drama, to flesh out a theory of sadomasochism in a particular theatrical artifact while suggesting its utility throughout a range of ludonarrative forms. Games require players, plays require characters, and characters require actors (i.e., players) to play them, with the overlap among these terms highlighting the ludic potential in dramas that stage agonistic and antagonistic relationships among their characters. Many formalist and structuralist theories of narrative envision characters primarily as essential functions of a story deployed to advance its plot, such that they retreat from any sense of organic individuality into a strictly utilitarian position. Aristotle, in his foundational assessment of narrative and drama, asserts that characters must align with a given plot’s ambitions: “In the characters too, exactly as in the structure of the incidents, [the poet] ought always to seek what is either necessary or probable, so that it is either necessary or probable that a person of such-and-such a sort say or do things of the same sort.” [5] Extending this Aristotelian view, Joel Weinsheimer points to the ways in which narrative structures envelop and thereby erase characters: “As segments of a closed text, characters at most are patterns of recurrence, motifs which are continually recontextualized in other motifs. In semiotic criticism, characters dissolve.” [6] Characters become subsumed as their narratives progress, acting in a particular fashion so as to adhere to the expectations of the plotline’s unfolding. Both narratives and games are almost universally established upon a bedrock of conflict, and Baruch Hochman pinpoints the utility of antagonism for discerning a given character’s motivation and identity: “we tend to think of character—of people, to begin with—in terms of conflict, which may be moral, social, or psychological in nature.” [7] Viewers understand the rudimentary structure of many ludonarrative artifacts simply by identifying the characters’ relationship to one another through this lens of conflict. And certainly, such a binary relationship pitting protagonist against antagonist is encoded into the characters of myriad narratives and games, both in the theatre and beyond, such that the assumption of a sharply defined antagonism bleeds into critical perspectives on narratology and interpretation. The binary of protagonist/antagonist, nearly ubiquitous as a narrative and ludic device, predetermines a story’s outcomes, as Ronald Jacobs details: “By arranging the characters of a narrative in binary relations to one another, and doing the same thing with the descriptive terms attached to those characters, narratives help to charge social life with evaluative and dramatic intensity.” [8] Interpreters can anticipate much of the developing action of a drama simply by understanding the characters’ relationships to one another through the oppositional logic of protagonist versus antagonist, in much the same manner as spectators of a game. Whereas formalist and structuralist insights into characters focus on their positions in an overarching storyline, poststructuralist insights have expanded an understanding of their necessity beyond the paradigmatic and functionary. James Phelan discerns characters performing in a trifold fashion as mimetic (representing a personality), thematic (representing a central idea), and synthetic (representing a narrative construct). [9] The theatre productively complicates the concept of character, and Brian Richardson, in terms similar to Phelan’s, argues that dramatic characters fulfill mimetic, formal, and ideological functions, as he further theorizes the necessity of a “performative fourth dimension” in light of the fact that “when a play is enacted on stage, the characters’ portrayal by actors can greatly affect the representation and its reception; dramatic representation by its very nature tends to complicate, enhance, or dissolve the unity of a character.” [10] A particular character bears the potential to shift markedly when performed, as the actor undertaking this role might strengthen or undermine its defining aspects through the vagaries of performance, and although it is more likely that a performance would alter a character’s mimetic features, shifts in its thematic and synthetic functions are possible, too. As Thomas Malaby proposes, games are inherently processual—“Every game is an ongoing process. As it is played, it always contains the potential for generating new practices and new meanings, possibly refiguring the game itself”—with this assessment readily applicable to the ways in which plays and the characters within plays shift according to the codes of performance. [11] Ludonarrative characters liberated from zero-sum formulations of victory/loss operate within a similar framework, for in these instances they transcend the default archetypal positions of protagonist or antagonist. Typically, to play a game involves seeking to defeat one’s opponent yet not concomitantly to view one’s opponent as the co-protagonist of this joint endeavor. In many texts, whether ludonarrative or not, the protagonist and antagonist share the goal of victory over the other, no matter how loosely this victory might be defined, with disruptive potential emerging when their wrangling implicitly troubles any narratological assumption of a single protagonist journeying through various plot points to the climax and then concluding with the dénouement. Whereas in many instances the protagonist and antagonist represent simply the flip sides of the same coin, in other circumstances the “protagonist” and the “antagonist” inhabit roles defined by their mutual aggression but also by the potential for their mutual overlap such that the binary dividing them crumbles. For the interpreter of such a ludonarrative artifact, one’s sense of kinship with a protagonist is always provisional, and no end of interpretive alliances could be formed with characters assigned an antagonistic position that they nonetheless evade. As a hermeneutic relevant to desire, narrative, and game, sadomasochism enlightens the fruitful possibilities of disentangling the protagonist/antagonist binary and instead locating characters qua players in fluctuating relationships to one another. At first glance, sadomasochism would appear to represent yet another instantiation of binary logic: sadist versus masochist, in an erotic ritual pitting protagonist versus antagonist under a veneer of cruelty. Indeed, Leopold Sacher-Masoch’s foundational text of masochism, Venus in Furs , ends explicitly with a moral based on antagonism: the protagonist Severin, humiliated and defeated following his affair with the alluring Wanda, realizes that “woman, as Nature created her and as man up to now has found her attractive, is man’s enemy; she can be his slave or his mistress but never his companion.” [12] Venus in Furs delineates masochistic ritual as a game to be won or lost, yet this is only one potential ending of a sadomasochistic encounter, particularly when the binary of sadist versus masochist is reassessed as a complementary positionality accessible to both players. These archetypal positions need not stand in direct opposition to each other but might instead enable fluctuating, orbiting points of contact. In sadomasochism’s most profound contradiction, a masochist typically seeks out a sadist, thereby initiating the scripts that they will fulfill in complementary service to each other, yet in so doing, the masochist, at least implicitly and if only temporarily, assumes the dominant position. In a cash-based, capitalist economy of desire, those who write the checks control the scenarios, even while casting themselves as the abject and pitiable site of desire’s unchecked degradations. In this light, sadomasochism shatters the logic of much formalist and structural narratology, for most narratological theories presume a clearly identified protagonist. Within a sadomasochistic framework, the linearity of the protagonist’s quest gives way to undulating gyres of desire, with the sadist and masochist contributing unpredictably to the form and structure of the plot. The narratological aspects of sadomasochism are readily apparent, with Gilles Deleuze, in his iconic work Coldness and Cruelty , declaring that both masochism and sadism “tell a story.” [13] More so, masochism is inherently dramatic in its roles and staging, with Deleuze outlining its theatrical characteristics: “Masochism is above all formal and dramatic; this means that its peculiar pleasure-pain complex is determined by a particular kind of formalism, and its experience of guilt by a specific story.” [14] The masochist and the sadist ostensibly inhabit radically opposed roles yet this presumption falters in its very enunciation, particularly when the masochist initiates the encounter. In these instances, the purported victims orchestrate the erotic episode that concludes with the consummation of their desires, and so masochists and sadists do not stand against each other in fixed poles but engage in endless negotiations about the very meaning of desire, as Deleuze further explains: “Dialectic does not simply mean the free interchange of discourse, but implies transpositions or displacements of this kind, resulting in a scene being enacted simultaneously on several levels with reversals and reduplications in the allocation of roles and discourse.” [15] In this manner, sadomasochism, rather than enforcing strict binaries, subverts them, and applying this insight to the ludonarrative realm complicates spectators’ understanding both of any game afoot and of the respective positioning of its players. As a ludonarrative construct, sadomasochism applies particularly well to the theatrical realm, for although in many instances a game’s parameters are clearly demarcated, the theatre facilitates a more porous sense of play and game, one in which its players stand on unequal footings. In his description of theatre’s dark play , Richard Schechner underscores how play dissolves its own borders and how play’s protean force summons potentially dangerous situations. The traits of dark play include that it: “(a) is physically risky, (b) involves intentional confusion or concealment of the frame ‘this is play,’ (c) may continue actions from early childhood, (d) only occasionally demands make-believe, (e) plays out alternative selves.” [16] Dark play intriguingly approximates many of sadomasochism’s most complex psychological and erotic factors: in the possibility of physical harm; in the unsettling reality of sexual play at hand; in the potential for a sadomasochistic impulse to have its roots in childhood desires; in the dissolution of the construct of “make-believe” through its insistent, brute enactments; and in the sadist’s and the masochist’s adoption of their roles that allow them to access alternate aspects of their quotidian personas. Schechner further explains: “Dark play occurs when contradictory realities coexist, each seemingly capable of cancelling the other out. . . . Dark play subverts order, dissolves frames, breaks its own rules, so that the playing itself is in danger of being destroyed.” [17] Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? exemplifies these dynamics, in that the audience must “live in this meaning” of the theatrical experience, as they are simultaneously ensnared in Martha and George’s sadomasochistic game that expands ever outward, catching Honey and Nick within its web. Narrative and metanarrative merge as Honey and Nick model the audience’s reaction, with spectators, watching from the promised safety of their seats, becoming entwined in the unfolding game. As a ludonarratological hermeneutic, sadomasochism disrupts the ostensible clarity of players as adversaries, compelling interpreters to forgo the standard binary of victory/defeat for a looser, more ambiguous sense of the game’s boundaries and aims. Martha and George complicate the very meaning of game as they fiercely struggle over their marriage and their phantom child, with Albee collapsing the dualistic force of protagonist and antagonist and leaving only an oscillation of desiring characters in his wake. Martha and George’s Sadomasochistic Games The plot of Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is stunning in its apparent simplicity: after attending a faculty party, Martha and George host their new acquaintances, Honey and Nick, for a round of drinks. For the three acts of the play—“Fun and Games,” “Walpurgisnacht,” and “The Exorcism”—Martha and George bicker viciously, frequently ensnaring Honey and Nick in their hostilities, while playing four so-called games: “Humiliate the Host,” “Hump the Hostess,” “Get the Guests,” and “Bringing Up Baby.” [18] The titles of these pastimes allude to Martha and George’s mutual attempts to humiliate each other, to George’s fear of (but potential desire for) cuckoldry, to their joint aggression against Honey and Nick, and to the phantom child that symbolizes their joyless marriage. Each game, C. W. Bigsby notes, “clearly act[s] as a substitute for sexual excitement.” [19] With its classic form, adhering to the Aristotelian unities of time, place, and action, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? marches inexorably to its conclusion, as Martha and George divulge each other’s devastating truths, while their guests both observe this debacle in horror and are conscripted into its play. As Walter A. Davis avows, “Aggression is the force that structures [ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? ] by ripping through all masks and roles.” [20] On the narrative’s surface, aggression abounds: Martha’s antagonism toward George positions her as the sadist to his masochist, and she inhabits this role with zest and pleasure, reveling in the humiliation she metes out to him. Before proceeding further into this discussion, however, it should be noted that Albee questioned a sadomasochistic interpretation of their marriage, declaring, “I think [Martha and George] love each other very much. It’s not an ‘S and M’ relationship. I mean there’s some problems there. They’ve had a lot of battles, but they enjoy each other’s ability to battle.” [21] Here Albee appears to envision sadomasochism as incompatible with love, but many would dispute this presumption. Also, Albee graciously conceded to an interviewer pursuing the gender dynamics of his oeuvre, “I don’t observe my plays the way you and other . . . critics observe them. I don’t think about them in those terms, so I can hardly talk about them that way.” [22] As Albee suggests, the fact that he would not discuss his play within a sadomasochistic framework—or likely within a ludonarrative framework as well—does not discount the insights gleaned from these complementary theories. Martha’s sadistic impulses define her character and her relationship with George, particularly when she insults his manhood, pointedly telling Nick and Honey “that maybe Georgie-boy didn’t have the stuff . . . that he didn’t have it in him!” She climactically concludes that he is a “FLOP! A great . . . big . . . fat . . . FLOP!” (210), with her words clearly alluding to his impotent penis. With George symbolically castrated, Martha stands as the more virile of the two, a dynamic further evident when he comments on her masculinity, telling Nick that “Martha is the daughter of our beloved boss. She is his . . . right ball, you might say” (184). Martha agrees, “I’m loud, and I’m vulgar, and I wear the pants in this house because somebody’s got to” (260). Violence, often staged yet painful in its consequences, belongs in the sadist’s repertoire, and Martha recounts an incident of physical abuse when her father was teaching George to box and she sucker-punched him: “I yelled, ‘Hey George!’ and at the same time I let go sort of a roundhouse right . . . just kidding, you know? . . . and he was off balance . . . he must have been . . . and he stumbled back a few steps, and then, CRASH, he landed . . . flat . . . in a huckleberry bush!” (191). Martha’s qualification that she was “just kidding” fractures the binary of play and seriousness, as her punch purportedly launched in jest proves her aggressive physicality with George. Furthermore, in her role as sadist Martha stands symbolically impervious to penetration of any sort, such that it would appear impossible to act upon her or otherwise to overturn the roles of the sadist/masochist dyad. This aspect of her character is evident in her retelling of her schoolgirl days at “Miss Muff’s Academy for Young Ladies.” Through this institution’s crude yet obvious allusion to female genitalia, Martha synechdochally represents herself through her vagina, as she then explains how she was “revirginized” following her brief marriage to the institution’s lawn mower (206). Through the impenetrability of her hymen—registered both in its purported reconstitution following this aborted union and in the phantom child who was never born (and who thus necessitated hymeneal penetration neither in its conception nor in its delivery)—Martha symbolizes the impermeable, imperious woman whose lovers cannot act upon her during even their most intimate encounters. Deleuze tersely comments, “The masochist is morose,” with this assessment applying well to George and his longsuffering, hangdog affect. [23] The hapless victim of his wife’s sadistic torments, George presents himself as emasculated and metaphorically castrated, acquiescing to her sadistic ploys. When Martha asserts that “ Some men would give their right arm for the chance” to marry the daughter of a college president, George replies sardonically, “Alas, Martha, in reality it works out that the sacrifice is usually of a somewhat more private portion of the anatomy” (171). George accepts his masochistic role in the play’s opening act, yet he resents it as well, telling Nick: “Do you think I like having that . . . whatever-it-is . . . ridiculing me, tearing me down, in front of . . . (Waves his hand in a gesture of contemptuous dismissal) YOU? Do you think I care for it?” (214). Explaining to Nick that he has “been trying for years to clean up the mess I made”—referring to his marriage to Martha—he reveals his coping strategies to be the masochistic triad of “accommodation, malleability, adjustment” (222). In this merciless game in which they have entangled themselves, George relies on a strategy of accommodation, apparently having lost any hope of shifting roles with his tormentor. Notwithstanding the appearance of Martha and George’s oppositional roles as firmly established, Albee adumbrates the inevitable erosion of the sadomasochistic binary. In a crucial revelation of the interlocking and mutually undercutting identities of sadist and masochist, George admits the pretense of their outwardly antagonistic relationship: “Now, on the surface of it . . . it looks to be a kind of knock-about, drag-out affair, on the surface of it” (223). Also, at several moments throughout the evening, George stages small rebellions against Martha’s sadistic tyranny, pettily insulting her. “Well, that was probably before my time ” (157), he declares in response to Martha’s questions about Bette Davis’s films, and when discussing the condition of her teeth, he again needles her about her age (163). Such scenes corrupt the logic of sadomasochism as based upon fixed positions, a theme amplified when Martha delights in George’s staged murder of her. He “shoots” her with a gun from which “a large red and yellow Chinese parasol” blossoms, and she asks him, “Where’d you get that, you bastard?” with the stage direction noting she does so with a joyous intonation (192). Indeed, this mock-violent ploy clearly arouses her, as she soon intones, “Yeah . . . that was pretty good. ( Softer ) C’mon . . . give me a kiss,” and then escalates this erotic encounter by placing his hand on her breast (193). George spurns her advances—“What are we going to have . . . blue games for the guests?”—and it is evident that his words wound Martha, as it also evident that he has seized momentary advantage in their sadomasochistic sparring. Martha encourages George to leave aside his masochistic posturing—“I like your anger. I think that’s what I like about you most . . . your anger” (162)—yet it is her sadistic treatment of him that sparks his anger, in a repeating circle of abuse and attraction. The cruelty of Martha and George’s game is balanced out by its pleasures, and several moments suggest that George not only approves but enjoys Martha’s humiliating tactics, thus pointing to the gratification he finds in their sadomasochistic rituals. In one of her salvos against his masculinity, Martha begins, “George hates Daddy . . . not for anything Daddy’s done to him, but for his own . . .”; as her words trail off, the stage directions indicate that George is “ Nodding . . . finishing it for her ” as he then declares “inadequacies” (205). This moment depicts George’s participation in his emasculation, his guiding of the sadist who torments him yet does so at his behest. A telling sign that George understands his masochistic role appears in his ready acceptance of cuckoldry, or more accurately, his insistence on his masochistic role such that cuckoldry becomes nearly unavoidable. Adultery and cuckoldry can be likened to a zero-sum game in which the lovers win and the cheated-on spouse loses, but George bleaches cuckoldry of its zero-sum dynamics by embracing his masochistic role. When Martha begins seducing Nick, George observes them, with the stage directions indicating not merely his awareness but his enjoyment of his wife’s actions: “ George enters . . . stops . . . watches a moment . . . smiles . . . laughs silently, nods his head, turns, exits, without being noticed ” (266). When Martha warns him, “We’re going to amuse ourselves, George,” he agrees, “Unh-hunh. That’s nice.” She further cautions, “You might not like it,” but he genially accedes, “No, no, now . . . you go right ahead . . . you entertain our guests” (269). This encounter might appear to contribute to the gradual unraveling of the sadomasochistic roles that Martha and George have assumed in their marital games, yet it would be more accurate to observe that they underscore the paradoxical and chimerical intransigence of these positions while also admitting the masochist’s latent power. This theme continues as George refuses to step out of his masochistic role—or in other words, he insists that the game continue despite the fact that doing so might compel Martha to cuckold him—and this refusal ironically highlights his agency in the game through his insistent and unwavering passivity. Indeed, when Martha tries to shock him with her adulterous liaison—“Never mind that. I said I was necking with one of the guests”—George encourages her, “Good . . . good. You go right on” (270). As the scene continues, he soon tells her with a touch of exasperation: “Lord, Martha, if you want the boy that much . . . have him . . . but do it honestly, will you? Don’t cover it over with all this . . . all this . . . footwork” (272). George insists on his masochism in this scene, insists that his wife cuckold him, and in so doing, asserts the agency latent in passivity by ascribing this agency to his wife’s staged desires. In such moments, sadomasochism undercuts the presumed telos of ludology in the victory/defeat dyad, for George’s victory over Martha would arise in his refusal to abandon his status as masochist, thus compelling her to remain in her sadistic and cuckolding role despite her hesitance to assert her dominance to this degree. For Martha, any ostensible victory over George by cuckolding him would entail a latent acknowledgment of the force of his passivity, and for George, his erotic defeat through his wife’s betrayal would entail the cuckold’s ultimate victory in the pleasure of abjection. The fluctuating erotics of cuckoldry are further confused by George’s expressed desire not to be cuckolded, evident when he recognizes Nick as a threat and cautions him, “You realize, of course, that I’ve been drawing you out on this stuff, not because I’m interested in your terrible lifehood, but only because you represent a direct and pertinent threat to my lifehood, and I want to get the goods on you” (228). In her reading of the play’s homosocial dynamics, Clare Virginia Eby proposes that Albee “shows how competitive masculinity sustains marriage,” further positing that the playwright depicts the manner in which “homosocial rivalry serves to underwrite heterosexual stability.” [24] George seeks to preserve the sanctity of his union with Martha while simultaneously pushing her to cuckold him through his insistent masochistic posturing. The games of “Humiliate the Host,” “Hump the Hostess,” and “Get the Guests” would appear to necessitate varying strategies to achieve their eponymous objectives, but Martha and George’s sadomasochistic marriage effectively responds to the shifting ludic engagements of the evening, for it is the very adaptability of the sadomasochistic dyad that proves its utility in each round of their evening of games. The play’s façade of sadist versus masochist cracks further at numerous points, as Martha and George expose the contradictions inherent in the sadomasochistic dyad. In a striking exchange, George acquiesces to his masochistic role as Martha confesses her exhaustion with sadism: GEORGE : You can sit there in that chair of yours, you can sit there with the gin running out of your mouth, and you can humiliate me, you can tear me apart . . . ALL NIGHT . . . and that’s perfectly all right . . . that’s OK. . . . MARTHA : YOU CAN STAND IT! GEORGE : I CANNOT STAND IT! MARTHA : YOU CAN STAND IT!! YOU MARRIED ME FOR IT!! (A silence) GEORGE ( Quietly ): That is a desperately sick lie. MARTHA : DON’T YOU KNOW IT, EVEN YET? GEORGE ( Shaking his head ): Oh . . . Martha. MARTHA : My arm has gotten tired whipping you. (257-58) In many ways, this scene represents the critical crux of interpreting Martha and George’s sadomasochistic relationship, and thus of interpreting the play as a whole: is Martha correct that George married her precisely for her sadistic talents, of which even she has grown tired, or is he correct that such an allegation is a “desperately sick lie”? It is noteworthy that these lines come shortly after a moment of domestic harmony between the two, when Martha compliments George: “It’s the most . . . life you’ve shown in a long time,” to which he genially replies, “You bring out the best in me, baby” (256). In this moment of concord, masochist and sadist agree on their mutually satisfying relationship, yet such a moment cannot last given the pressures of their relationship based on the pleasure of conflict. As Martha and George’s games entangle Honey and Nick, the audience witnesses the interpretive disarray created by sadomasochism, for this young couple can neither comprehend nor meaningfully participate in their hosts’ ludic pastimes. Nick disavows any masochistic tendencies in himself, declaring to George that “I just don’t see why you feel you have to subject other people to it” (215). He also states that “flagellation isn’t my idea of a good time,” although he concurs when George suggests that he “can admire a good flagellator . . . a real pro” (215). Honey and Nick denounce the games their hosts are playing: “I don’t like these games,” Honey intones, with Nick agreeing, “Yeah. . . . I think maybe we’ve had enough of games, now” (249). Significantly, Nick understands that any games he plays with George and Martha are unwinnable, that their ludic structures preclude meaningful intervention by outside agents. When George demands Nick’s response to his mock declension of “good, better, best, bested,” Nick explicates his host’s rhetorical trap: “All right . . . what do you want me to say? Do you want me to say it’s funny so you can contradict me and say it’s sad? Or do you want me to say it’s sad so you can turn around and say no, it’s funny. You can play that damn little game any way you want to, you know!” (175). As a ludic experience, sadomasochism establishes a framework that obscures rather than enlightens, and although Nick stumbles upon this truth early in the storyline, he is unable to extricate his wife and himself from the evening’s dark play. George, speaking with feigned awe, approves of Nick’s perceptiveness—“Very good! Very good!” (175)—yet Nick’s comprehension of the game’s traps does not allow him to participate in it and simply emphasizes his role as a bystander ensnared in events beyond his ken. One of the chief tactics in this sadomasochistic game that further destabilizes the identities of its players arises in its allegorical registers, for both the audience and Honey and Nick must pierce through the veil of Martha and George’s blurred accounts of their desires and their lives. In this vein, when George plays “Get the Guests,” he attacks Honey and Nick with an allegorical account of their marriage—“Well, it’s an allegory, really—probably—but it can be read as straight, cozy prose . . . and it’s all about a nice young couple who come out of the Middle-west. It’s a bucolic you see” (250)—as he proceeds to describe Honey and Nick’s marriage and its discontents. According to the stage directions, George ends this part of the game “ abruptly and with some disgust ,” as he concludes, “And that’s how you play Get the Guests” (254). In its doubling of storylines, allegory surrounds a deeper truth with an outer fictional layer, but George ultimately strips the outer layer from the inner, revealing the couple’s humiliating secrets inside. Allegory aligns with ludic sadomasochism in this exchange, for the positions of sadist and masochist establish an interpretative valence for the game that are then radically deconstructed as the game evolves. As allegory encourages interpreters to digest the narrative before them, it also corrupts the potential of interpretation, for the poles of interpretation inevitably shift, and often they do so in light of the savage strategies of the game afoot. As Albee’s conjoining of ludonarrative sadomasochism with allegory corrupts the antagonistic positionality of characters as players, so too does his storyline obscure essential players from view, cloaking their significance to the game’s play and resolution. In particular, the allegorical surface of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? obscures the role of Martha’s father as the instigator of the play’s dysfunctional games. This man, never depicted onstage, lurks in the background of Martha and George’s marriage, with the couple both haunted by his influence and employing him as a totemic weapon. Owing to these inescapable and tortuous family dynamics, they act as children perpetually stunted by living in this man’s shadow, such as when Martha says, “I’m firsty,” with the stage direction stressing that she is “ Imitating a tiny child ” (164). George plays along, calling her his “little yum yum” (213) and suggesting that he will make “a gweat big dwink” for her, his “little mommy” (185). With the epithet “little mommy,” George creates the paradox of an infant parent, one who ostensibly bore him yet who remains preternaturally young and dependent on him for nurturing. Contrasted with these images of Martha and George as developmentally crippled, Martha’s father represents the player who cannot be played against, the character absent from the narrative yet critical to its narrative structure, for his actions have sparked the play’s plot. Martha and George’s marriage and even George’s career have been ordered to his measure; likewise, Martha and George would not have met Honey and Nick if not for his intervention, as George reminds his wife: “If your father didn’t set up these goddamn Saturday night orgies all the time” (158). In defending her invitation to Honey and Nick despite the lateness of the hour, Martha avers, “Because Daddy said we should be nice to them, that’s way,” as she then repeats this rationale in quick succession (160). Enhancing this theme, Albee establishes Martha’s father as an allegorical representation of an arbitrary and callous deity, not just her father but The Father. George states sardonically, “He’s a god, we all know that” (170). In Martha’s account of her father—“Jesus, I admired that guy! I worshipped him . . . I absolutely worshipped him. I still do” (206)—Albee deploys the ambiguity between “Jesus” as a mild exclamation and as a direct address, allowing the conflation between her human father and the Christian deity to deepen the play’s allegorical consideration both of intergenerational and of marital family dynamics. And thus a key critical crux in interpreting Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? emerges in the meaning of a character who shapes the plot but who cannot be held accountable for his actions, who eludes the binary both of antagonist and protagonist and of sadist and masochist while sparking the antagonism that necessitates some sort of resolution. Although one might presume the father/Father corresponds with the sadist—and in Albee’s play it is Martha’s father whose psychic force traumatizes the couple—Deleuze details how this father figure embodies masochistic desire: So when we are told that the character who does the beating in masochism is the father, we are entitled to ask: Who in reality is being beaten? Where is the father hidden? Could it not be in the person who is being beaten? . . . What the subject atones for is his resemblance to the father and the father’s likeness in him: the formula of masochism is the humiliated father.[25] Aligning Martha’s father with George admits a perverse logic to the psychosexual dynamics unfolding throughout this torturous evening: Martha avenges herself against the patriarchal authority that controlled her life to the extent of annulling her first marriage and “revirginizing” her, and George allows himself to be humiliated in the effort to humiliate the father who orchestrated his humiliation. Such an interpretation gives psychological clarity to a play whose fraught emotional dynamics have long enthralled viewers, yet the shifting tides of sadomasochism complicate even this logic. As the poles of sadist and masochist inevitably shift, so too must any allegorical vision of Martha’s father as the antagonist of their marital game. This dynamic is evident in the fact that, as much as Martha’s father stands as the narrative’s invisible character, the omnipotent father who haunts and directs the players’ actions, George reveals that this figure can also be strategically deployed in his games with Martha. To invoke the father is to invoke his uncontestable authority, as in George’s cool reply to Martha’s request for a “big sloppy kiss”: GEORGE ( Too matter-of-fact ): Well, dear, if I kissed you I’d get all excited . . . I’d get beside myself, and I’d take you, by force, right here on the living room rug, and then our little guests would walk in, and . . . well, just think what your father would say about that . (164) George evades Martha’s demands for affection, and even in this early moment of the play, destabilizes the sadomasochistic binary upon which their relationship is presumably established. The father/Father is thus a conscriptable character within their antagonistically ludic marriage, one who may be deployed to advance their individual strategies while standing removed from the play at hand. For a drama with only four characters, it is striking that two additional absent fathers contribute to its plotline, with George’s and Honey’s fathers similarly entering the narrative as spectral figures whose influence cannot be evaded. George tells Nick of an incident in which a boy—presumably George himself—accidentally killed his father, with George recalling the aftermath of the fatal car accident: “And in the hospital, when he was conscious and out of danger, and when they told him that his father was dead, he began to laugh, I have been told, and his laughter grew and he would not stop” (218). George escapes his father’s influence by this man’s untimely death, with his hysterical laughter indicating his liberation from this patriarchal regime and an incipient panic induced by this newfound freedom. Nick says of Honey’s father that he “was a man of the Lord, and he was very rich,” detailing this man’s rise to fame and his accumulation of wealth: “He spent God’s money . . . and he saved his own” (226). In these paternal storylines, the fathers direct their children’s and their in-laws’ lives, constraining their choices and identities, such that the father must be surpassed in the quest for self-determination. The marital game, Albee suggests, cannot be played only by wife and husband, for they are ensnared in erotic rituals established by the preceding desires of the patriarchy. The childlessness of both couples then emerges as a definitive rebuff of patriarchy’s claim to futurity, with the children forever scarred by the previous generation ending this game that cannot be won. As Lee Edelman provocatively argues, “The Child . . . marks the fetishistic fixation of heteronormativity: an erotically charged investment in the rigid sameness of identity that is central to the compulsory narrative of reproductive futurism.” [26] Within the fictions of Albee’s play, the couples’ joint childlessness represents an anti-erotic strategy in the overarching sadomasochistic game that constitutes the American family, as they deny the Father’s power by cutting off the roots of social reproduction. The play’s final game—“Bringing Up Baby”—thus illuminates the potential of a ludic escape from the ruts of familial disharmony. Whereas Martha and George’s sadomasochistic games allow for some ambiguity in its strategies, the game concerning their phantom child requires their mutual and strict adherence to its rules. This child symbolizes both the pleasure and the hollowness of their marriage, yet many viewers have expressed disbelief over this aspect of Albee’s play, such that he defended his choice, declaring that “it always struck me as very odd that an audience would be unwilling to believe that a highly educated, sensitive, and intelligent couple, who were terribly good at playing reality and fantasy games, wouldn’t have the education, the sensitivity, and the intelligence to create a realistic symbol for themselves. To use as they saw fit.” [27] The phantom child imbues their marriage with meaning as it also establishes rules for their interactions. By mentioning the child to Honey and Nick, Martha corrupts the game, piquing George’s anger: “I mean, you can make your own rules . . . you can go around like a hopped-up Arab, slashing away at everything in sight, scarring up half the world if you want to. But somebody else try it . . . no sir!” (257). And whereas sexuality provokes eddies of humiliation and desire in their marital games that prove mutually satisfying, if also fraught, Martha appears truly to torment George by suggesting that he is not the father of their phantom child. “He’s not completely sure it’s his own kid,” she impugns, as George replies in shock, “My god, you’re a wicked woman” (202). Even within the realm of fantasy, in which George could be envisioned if not as a virile lover then at least as a genial father, Martha portrays him as impotent to the point that he could not ejaculate the phantom seed of a nonexistent child. The promise of anti-futurity, registered in the refusal to cede to the Father’s authoritarian impulses, entails the end of Martha and George’s game. Some critics have viewed Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as ultimately conservative in its sexual politics, as evident in Rachel Blau Duplessis’s observation that in the play’s conclusion, “the humiliated, weak, unsuccessful man is shown to be stronger than the brutal, emasculating woman. The family problems are solved not by investigating their ultimate source . . . but by regulating family relations in a highly normative manner.” [28] From another perspective, however, their sadomasochistic marriage fractures the meaning of traditional gender roles, and through their nonexistent offspring, they have radically reformulated the meaning of family and of narrative closure. Complementing this sadomasochistic reading of the play, it is worthwhile to note that George repeatedly refers to Martha’s and his phantom child as a “little bugger” (201, 210), with this deft allusion to sodomy further highlighting the fruitlessness of their marriage. Indeed, several critics have viewed Albee’s play as a queer allegory. Richard Schechner excoriates it as “perverse and dangerous,” declaring that its theme of “sexual perversity [is] there only to titillate an impotent and homosexual theatre and audience.” [29] Sky Gilbert avows that George is a “gay man . . . with certain obvious, stereotypical gay characteristics” and that Martha “is really a part for a drag queen.” [30] John Clum acknowledges the potential for this queer allegory but argues in contrast, “In a way, it’s a good thing for gay men that [Albee] didn’t [write queer scenes]; for a gay Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? would also be antigay.” [31] These various, contradictory readings testify to the protean force of a queer subtext in Albee’s play, one that corresponds well with its themes of sadomasochism and anti-futurity that, to some degree, transcend the genders of the roles. For in the end, Martha and George’s childlessness is the only effective strategy available to them in their jointly sadomasochistic struggle against the Father, a battle that has left them emotionally hollowed yet capable still of feeling, a condition aptly encapsulated in Martha’s assessment of their icy tears: “I cry alllll the time; but deep inside, so no one can see me. I cry all the time. And Georgie cries all the time, too. We both cry all the time, and then, what do we do, we cry, and we take our tears, and we put ’em in the ice box, in the goddamn ice trays (Begins to laugh) until they’re frozen” (273). The play’s conclusion may suggest a slight thaw in their frozen interiors, but the sadomasochistic strains of their marriage and their family hinders any such interpretations from fully recuperating their lives into the range of the heteronormative. Within Albee’s ludonarrative assessment of the American family and its discontents, the pleasure of Martha and George’s marriage arises in their games, as Martha divulges in a rare statement of her affection for her husband: “who keeps learning the games we play as quickly as I can change the rules; who can make me happy and I do not wish to be happy, and yes I do wish to be happy. George and Martha: sad, sad, sad” (277). This enigmatic dynamic, evident in the shifting poles of sadist and masochist that embody a core logic that simultaneously falters in its enunciation and enactment, leaves Nick and Honey unsure of how to interpret a marital game that they uncomfortably observe but cannot decipher: “Hell, I don’t know when you people are lying, or what,” Nick resignedly declares (283). The ultimate game against the Father, Martha and George’s sadomasochistic rituals allow them the pleasure of a game that can never be declared, such that it must end when the one inviolate rule is crossed, as George tells Martha: “You broke our rule, baby. You mentioned him . . . you mentioned him to someone else” (307). As Jesper Juul posits of games and their rules, “rules can cue the player into imagining a world,” an apt assessment of the ways in which Martha and George’s rules animate their marriage. [32] Within the rule structure they have created, to speak of the game is to destroy it, yet it is only through speech that Martha and George can enact their rage against an exterior force that has corrupted the very core of their being. Within this instance of sadomasochistic ludonarrativity, the enemy within is the enemy without, with Martha and George striking blindly at themselves, at their guests, and at Martha’s father, playing a marital game that undulates in its play and strategies yet builds to a climax of a child who will never be born, and thus of a Father who cannot initiate another round of the game against Himself through his children. Ludonarrative Theatre and the Masochistic Audience As Martha and George’s marriage demonstrates, sadomasochism illuminates the ways in which hostile play diffuses other, often more threatening acts of violence, providing a release mechanism through the ludic structures implicated by desire. On a narrative level, these dynamics affect the development of the play’s characters, and on a metanarrative level, they affect the play’s audiences as well. Certainly, Albee envisioned Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as ensnaring the audience to the point that they are actively involved in the psychological carnage depicted on stage. In an interview with Matthew Roudané, Albee detailed how conflict and aggression stand at the heart of the dramatic experience: “All drama goes for blood in one way or another. . . . Sometimes the act of aggression is direct or indirect, but it is always an act of aggression. And this is why I try very hard to involve the audience. . . . I want the audience to participate in the dramatic experience. . . . If the drama succeeds, the audience is bloodied .” [33] Following this compelling image of a bloodied audience, Albee proceeded to explain how viewers must participate in the theatrical experience: If audiences approach the theatre . . . and are willing to participate; if they are willing to have the status quo assaulted; if they are willing to understand that the theatre is a live and dangerous experience—and therefore a life-giving force —then perhaps they are approaching the theatre in an ideal state and that’s the audience I wish I were writing for.[34] Theatre as a “live and dangerous experience” entails the dissolution of the border between stage and seats, the eradication of the safe space of viewing through the crumbling of the “fourth wall” that never existed except in the imagination of performers and viewers who desired it. An art form that bloodies, Albee’s ludic theatre positions the audience as the masochist to the narrative’s unfolding, enduring the discomforting storyline for the sake of the ultimate edification of its experience. And further aligned with masochism, playgoers initiate the sadomasochistic scripts of the theatre by purchasing their tickets, proving both their power within its commercial economy while also submitting to the powerlessness of their positions in their darkened seats. What sadomasochism shares with Albee’s sense of ludonarrative drama is the possibility for a safe space that feels unsafe, for the heady illusion of danger that unfolds within an ultimately protected milieu. Numerous theorists have demarcated play’s mercurial flirtations with danger, such as in Clifford Geertz’s classic study of Balinese cockfights, in which the illicit nature of this play, coupled with its potential to reopen and exacerbate latent hostilities, underscores the fact that games cannot always be marshaled into pre-authorized temporal and spatial boundaries. [35] So too with sadomasochism, in its erotic, its narrative, and its ludonarrative incarnations: it is only “play,” yet it is play that allows conflicts to be waged between partners that destabilize their relative positions to each other. The sadist, the masochist, and the complementary roles they inhabit inevitably bleed out from any attempt to cordon “play” from the reality of the ludonarrative event, and any observer of these interactions must likely become implicated as well, for there is no safety in simply observing, as Honey and Nick demonstrate in their blindsided reactions to Martha and George’s vicious games. And from this vantage point, sadomasochism serves as a particularly apt hermeneutic for thinking through ludonarratology’s structures and secrets. Games require players, objectives, and rules governing their interaction, with narratives similarly necessitating characters pursuing an objective while observing various strictures (whether those of realism or fantasy or any other genre). Sadomasochism tweaks these paradigms and reminds players and interpreters alike that structures hide secrets. A sadomasochistic permutation of ludonarrativity may, in many instances, be designed to withhold pertinent structural information—missing characters, undeclared rules, self-destructive strategies—that undermine the promise of the text’s telos. The game ends, as all games and all texts must, but only through the dissolution of key elements in light of the oscillating enactment of desires that plague a plot with aporias that ironically grant it its foundational meaning. For George and Martha, this aporia coheres in the image of the Father, yet the play of sadomasochistic ludonarrativity cannot be delimited to this one invisible antagonist. As it breaks the borders between characters and their desires, between audience and the perceived events, the game brews a heady concoction of desires that enable the players’ identities to fracture and to unite against an Other with whom one could not otherwise contend, for both Albee’s savaged characters and his bloodied audiences. References [1] Astrid Ensslin, Literary Gaming (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014), 6. [2] Sebastian Domsch, Storyplaying: Agency and Narrative in Video Games (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 27. [3] Lynda Davey, “Communication and the Game of Theatre,” Poetics 13 (1984): 5-15, at 10. For Bruss’s foundational study, see “The Game of Literature and Some Literary Games,” New Literary History 9.1 (1977): 153-72. [4] Tom Bishop, “Shakespeare’s Theater Games,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 40.1 (2010): 65-88, at 67. Bishop offers a strong reading of Shakespeare as a ludologist. [5] Aristotle, Poetics I , trans. Richard Janko (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987), 20. [6] Joel Weinsheimer, “Theory of Character: Emma ,” Poetics Today 1 (1979): 185-211, at 195. [7] Baruch Hochman, Character in Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 51. [8] Ronald Jacobs, “The Narrative Integration of Personal and Collective Identity in Social Movements,” Narrative Impact: Social and Cognitive Foundations , ed. Melanie Green, Jeffrey Strange, and Timothy Brock (Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002), 205-28, at 216. [9] James Phelan, Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996), 29, and Living to Tell about It (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 20. [10] Brian Richardson, “Beyond Poststructuralism: Theory of Character, the Personae of Modern Drama, and the Antinomies of Critical Theory,” Modern Drama 40 (1997): 86-99, at 95. [11] Thomas Malaby, “Beyond Play: A New Approach to Games,” Games and Culture 2.2 (2007): 95-113, at 102. [12] Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs , in Masochism (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 141-293, at 271. [13] Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty , in Masochism 7-138, at 130-31. It should be mentioned that Deleuze argues against the possibility of sadomasochism, deriding it as “pseudomasochism” (124) and as a “semiological howler” (134). [14] Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty , 109. [15] Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty , 22. [16] Richard Schechner, “Playing,” Play and Culture 1 (1988): 3-19, at 14. [17] Richard Schechner, “Playing,” 12-13. [18] Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in The Collected Plays of Edward Albee, 1958-1965 (New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2007), 149-311; cited parenthetically, with all italics and capital letters in the original. [19] C. W. Bigsby, “ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Edward Albee’s Morality Play,” Journal of American Studies 1.2 (1967): 257-68, at 261. [20] Walter A. Davis, Get the Guests: Psychoanalysis, Modern American Drama, and the Audience (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 214. [21] Philip C. Kolin, ed., Conversations with Edward Albee (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988), 187. [22] Kamal Bhasin, “Women, Identity, and Sexuality: An Interview with Edward Albee,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 7 (1995): 18-40, at 23. [23] Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty , 71. [24] Clare Virginia Eby, “Fun and Games with George and Nick: Competitive Masculinity in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? ” Modern Drama 40.5 (2007): 601-18, at 614. [25] Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty , 60. [26] Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 21. [27] William Flanagan, “The Art of the Theatre IV: Edward Albee: An Interview,” Paris Review 10 (1966): 92-121, at 111; italics in original. [28] Rachel Blau Duplessis, “In the Bosom of the Family: Contradiction and Resolution in Edward Albee,” Minnesota Review 8 (1977): 133-45, at 137. [29] Richard Schechner, “Who’s Afraid of Edward Albee?” Tulane Drama Review 7.3 (1963): 7-10, at 8-9. [30] Sky Gilbert, “Closet Plays: An Exclusive Dramaturgy at Work,” Canadian Theatre Review 59 (Summer 1989): 55-58, at 57-58. [31] John Clum, Acting Gay: Male Homosexuality in Modern Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 189. [32] Jesper Juul, Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 196. [33] Edward Albee, quoted in Matthew Roudané, “ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? : Toward the Marrow,” The Cambridge Companion to Edward Albee , ed. Stephen Bottoms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 39-58, at 51; italics in original. [34] Edward Albee, quoted in Matthew Roudané, “ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? ,” 51. [35] As Geertz notes, “Fighting cocks . . . is like playing with fire only not getting burned. You activate village and kin group rivalries and hostilities, but in ‘play’ form, coming dangerously and entrancingly close to the expression of open and direct interpersonal and intergroup aggression (something which, again, almost never happens in the normal course of ordinary life), but not quite, because, after all, it is ‘only a cockfight’” ( The Interpretation of Cultures [New York: Basic Books, 1973], 440). Footnotes About The Author(s) TISON PUGH is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Central Florida. His recent books include The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom , Precious Perversions: Humor, Homosexuality, and the Southern Literary Canon , and Truman Capote: A Literary Life at the Movies . Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Are We “Citizens”? Tony Kushner’s Deweyan Democratic Vision in Angels in America Pageants and Patriots: Jewish Spectacles as Performances of Belonging “Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something”: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the Reconstruction of Melodrama Edward Albee’s Sadomasochistic Ludonarratology in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism. Kirsty Johnston. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 240. Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting. Amy Cook. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Pp. 198. The Late Work of Sam Shepard. Shannon Blake Skelton. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016; Pp. 256. Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism. Patricia A. Ybarra. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 247. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 20, 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Interview with Walter Bart (Artistic Leader, Wunderbaum Collective & Director, Die Hundekot-Attacke) from the 2024 Berliner Theatertreffen By Steve Earnest Published: July 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF Interview with Walter Bart, Artistic Leader of Wunderbaum Collective and Director of Die Hundekot-Attacke from the 2024 Berliner Theatertreffen Wunderbaum, Co-creators of Die Hundekot-Attacke at Theaterhaus Jena Walter Bart was born in Rotterdam in 1978 and completed his training as an actor at Toneelacademie Maastricht in 2001. In the same year, he founded the collective Wunderbaum with Maartje Remmers, Wine Dierickx, Marleen Scholten and Matijs Jansen (they were later joined by stage designer Maarten von Otterdijk), and together they created more than 50 productions over the past 22 years. Wunderbaum collaborated with Johan Simon’s company Hollandia and with NTGent before the collective joined up with Theater Rotterdam in 2010. Theater Rotterdam continues to be Wunderbaum’s basis today. From 2018 to 2022, Wunderbaum formed the team of directors of Theaterhaus Jena. With Wunderbaum, Walter Bart created theatre for the main and the small stage as well as other venues across the city. They developed concepts, directed and performed. The collective’s most recent productions include “Alfa Romeo”, “Wunderbaum spielt LIVE, online läuft es schief” (both in 2024), “La Cordista”, “Der Platz” and “Die Hundekot-Attacke”, a co-production with Theaterhaus Jena that was invited to the 2024 Theatertreffen. About the Incident in Question In February 2023 Choreographer and Ballet Leader of Hannover Opera Marco Goeke walked up to critic Wiebke Hüster , confronted her about a scathing review she had published about his new work “In the Dutch Mountains” the day before. Angered about her comments, Goeke then pulled out a back of dog excrement (from his pet dachsund) and violently smeared it all over Hüster’s face. The police and authorities then got involved and Goeke, a rising star in the German dance scene, was first suspended and later removed from his post as Director of the Hannover Ballet. The incident made national news across Europe (as well as the New York Times ). The Hannover Ballet stated that Goeke’s impulsive and violent actions damaged both Ms. Hüster as well as the reputation of the company itself. The incident was universally condemned as an attack on the freedom of the press. ES: So your background, you're now the artistic director of Theaterhaus Jena? WB: No, no, I used to be, until 2020. But together with my group, Wunderbaum, we are an actors' collective from the Netherlands. And we are based in Rotterdam, in Theater Rotterdam. And then we read that this theater was looking in 2018 for a new artistic direction, or a new artistic leader. ES: And they specifically asked for a collective to apply for the leadership role? To come in as a group of people leading? WB: Yeah, a group of people. They wanted a group of people. Not just one, and that's kind of like the way this theater, the background of this theater is. They like to work as a... Yeah, and it has partly to do with the history of it, because it was torn down. I will give you a book of the history of the theater house, it's pretty interesting. It's like, after the wall came down, they... I mean, the whole East was like... Kind of like, they didn't know in what direction to go, of course. So, they were all kind of... And all the money was gone. All the money was gone, so they were really poor. And they tried to... They invited a group from the Ernst Busch, in 1990s, 91. And that's a group of actors from the Ernst Busch Schule in Berlin, and they... it was a class from the Ernst Busch who took over this theater. . So the leaders of this theater, they just drove there, and they said to a few actors, come over to Jena, you'll get the whole theater, and do what you want. ES: It sounds like an excellent opportunity for a group of young actors studying theatre to finish their last year in this situation. Was it? WB: It was okay. But there was not a lot of money. And they got a... Good luck.Yeah, good luck. And the theater was really run down. It was really terrible., like a mess. And I'll show you later the building. And then... So there is something like this situation in the DNA of the house, there's a strong collective vibe. And then it's also led by a group of... They call them... It means like some sort of a board. But in the board are also technicians, for example, from the theater. And they decide of the future, so they choose the next people. And so for that reason, I think the theater also always had like a collective background. And then they asked us to come and we... But we are an actors' collective, so we are six actors. It's funny, we worked quite a lot in the U.S. as well, as a group. ES: So has your company visited the USA? WB: We did two, three co-productions with the Red Cat Theater in Los Angeles. The Red Cat. It's Mark Murphy. There's so many theaters in Los Angeles. It's part of the Disney Theater. It's the Red Cat. And then we went to play in Austin in the Fusebox Festival a few times. And in New York also in a theater. And we did... Yeah, Detroit. We've been in the U.S. quite a while. But never in Carolina. It's a pity. No, no, no. Maybe Atlanta would be the closest. The U.S. is so huge. So the actors are also involved in decisions about how they run the theater. And now this group, the actors, and my girlfriend, who's a director, and our set designer, do it till this summer. And then we moved to Berlin. But Wunderbaum stays in Rotterdam. But I moved to Berlin. And then they asked me as a director to do this piece. So they invited me again. ES: So what about this piece? I wanted to know how you developed this project. WB: Obviously, it was a big story at first. Yeah, exactly. So it's kind of like... Why make a play out of this? I always thought... Because a lot of people didn't know how to talk about it. And I kind of liked that about it. Because you felt there was a huge insecurity. Because of course the press framed it pretty fast as an attack on the freedom of speech. And then you felt on the artistic side, people who deal with critics, they think, okay, what can I say about it? The image of somebody putting... Yeah, it's so extreme. And all the time you... I felt there was such much... People were so uncomfortable to talk about it. So, there was not an honest talking about it. t's also like... And for me that kind of fitted in the time. I think in this time there's a lot of subjects. And I think it certainly has to do with Corona. It also has to do with politics. That I felt there's a lot of topics where people don't immediately say there, open your mouth. It's like immediately... And not in the first conversation. But say, okay, are you a Trump voter? Or are you a Biden voter? Or are you a pro this or pro Corona? Believe me, that's a big problem. I know, of course. We follow the American politics day by day. I'm hooked on it, unfortunately. It's stupid. Make a play about that. Yeah. I think Americans have to do it themselves. It's already a play. ES: It is. We're living it. WB: But then I felt like this kind of discomfort, is that a word? Where you don't know how to talk. And I thought that was in this subject a lot. Because it's kind of like... You didn't know what to say about it, actually. Or you don't know. People were not like... And then I thought that... So it would be great to... Because it's so difficult to talk about it. But then theater is the best place also to talk about it. Because it happened in a theater. ES: What actually happened in the theater and how did you guys make the piece? WB: It happened in a theatre in Hanover, the incident. So, then we made the concept about the theater. And I did it before with Wunderbaum. And that piece played also in the United States. Which one now? It's called Looking for Paul . And it also won in Edinburgh. We won a big theater award for it. And it is about... It was the same concept. It is a group of actors who want to make a piece. But they end up in a fight. So they don't make it to the premiere. And they fail. So they don't... But that's in fiction. It's like... We play a group of actors. We're developing a play. And they don't succeed. And in the end, they decide to read the emails they wrote each other during the rehearsal process. So, it's like this meta. So, it's a group of actors reading emails. About why they didn't succeed. And then you follow this group of actors and all their thoughts. And I knew that this way of having more perspectives on one subject and blurring the line of fiction and reality. WB: So, it's kind of like a pseudo-documentary work. Because the actors use their own names and use real stuff and mix it with fiction. And then I thought it's also a great way to... It's on reality TV now. Everybody is so interested in that, but I don't understand that. Not, exactly. We cringe at Survivor . ES: I can't believe that. My wife likes to watch The Bachelor . WB: I would leave the room to watch The Bachelor . It's terrible. What is it? The Bachelor . This married idiot. This young single idiot wants to date all these girls. It's so stupid. And the women are like, Oh, he's so sweet. I'm like, shut up. It's funny. ES: This totally took over our culture. I wonder why. WB: Yeah, me too. I think it will go away. I hope so. It's like zombies. ES: It's like zombies. They just came and took everything. And now, please go. WB: Well, of course, in a way, I think TikTok took over. I mean, the younger generation is, of course, watching TikTok. And it's the same. What I like about TikTok is hat's reality TV. Everybody can produce it. So, it's getting easier and easier. I read this Michael Cohen thing. I read it every day. This process that's happening now. He said, no, I'm going on TikTok at night. When I'm tired and I want to lose stress, I go on TikTok. And then he goes on TikTok saying these stupid things, you know, about this process. He also has this trouble that he's saying too much about the process. I don't know. But it's legal. ES: He can do this. Yeah, he can do it. Freedom of speech. WB: Exactly. But I'm so surprised people do that. I would never, like, at night when I cannot sleep, go live. Or maybe you've been drinking or something. You say things. Yeah, I would be way too scared. But that's kind of funny as well, that these people see this reality. I don't know. They don't care. ES: So how did you develop the script? Just by improv? WB: We started writing in the reality. As a group. We wrote it together, which is the great thing about it. And then, so we knew that when we would, and we did the writing together with a reality timeline of what happened for real. So, we knew when we would do the press release of it, that there would be a lot of reactions. And we wanted to have these reactions in the writing. So we did the press release that we were going to make it. And then we, everything that happened, we used in writing. So, we had characters. And these characters, yeah, they write about their perspective, with the reality of the incident as a background. And then the joke was that they, because nobody comes to Jena, besides theatre critics. There's a lot of times we don't get a lot of critics, because it's in the province. In the story, there's only one newspaper following us. It's the local Thuringer Zeitung. And they, it's very hard to get attention from other newspapers. And then we thought if we do this topic, that's the storyline. The actors think, hey, when we make a piece with this topic, maybe more press will come. So let me ask you though, before we go forward. ES: So, who are the actors? Are they playing themselves as actors, inviting the press? Or who are they? WB: They are the actors from the theater. Actors from the company. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, they play themselves. But they play themselves. Because what they play is, they develop characters out of this. And they just decide to, as a group, they decide to take this on as a project. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And in the fiction, I'm not part of the fiction. So there is, in the fiction, there's no director. Okay. So they develop it as a collective. Okay. Because we thought it was more interesting. Not to have the dynamic of it. Not to have the director in it. But that's also how we work, in a way. Because all the material you would make. Because everybody is the director, in a way. Yeah, exactly. ES: Are you in the show? WB: No, I'm not. But that's what, Wunderbaum and my collective, we all direct. And we are all directors. So, there's no hierarchy. Maybe you, I don't know if it's... ES: No, I understand fully. I know groups like this. Yeah, it's like... And sometimes that's the best way to work. WB: But sometimes... it sucks. (laughs) But sometimes it's more efficient. You direct it. Everybody does this. We got three weeks. Shut up and listen to him. Or whatever. You do whatever. Exactly. That's exactly how we work. Exactly. It's what works best. And then, that was kind of the joke in it. That they don't have a job anymore next year. Because this is the last production they make here. Oh, I saw that in the script. Okay, this is gonna be our last show here. Yeah, so this is the last show. It's not really, it's not totally true. Because now they rehearse for another. There's gonna be one more summer production. But... We play, it's the last season. Next year they are all jobless. So, they don't have work next year. ES: Really? WB: Yes, that's the truth. So, they are all jobless next year. And that's why we thought it might be good to get as much press as possible for this thing. ES: Well, getting in the Theatertreffen is a good gig. WB: Exactly. So that's also playing with it. They also try in the script, they also say maybe if we make this, the Theatertreffen will come. So, the Theatertreffen is even part of the script. So we were kind of... And then it kind of like, how it developed. So how it developed, it developed in the best possible way. Reality. So yeah, that's it. And then we decided to dance. So there is like a dance part in it. Because it's also about the dance world. Because it's of course about a choreographer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, there's a dance sequence, okay. We worked with a choreographer. And he taught us how to dance. Modern dance, and in their rehearsals, they dance. They work on a dancing show. And in the end of the emails, they present this dance material they rehearsed. That you will see. So, it's first emails, reading, and then dancing. And it's the idea that the dance is bad, so the critic also says, this sucks, you know, so they all want to... Well, they tried to really dance, so we worked with a real choreographer. We tried to make the dance not ironical. But of course, it's a really bad dance. I mean, to the standards of modern dance, it's not good. But they worked hard on it. And in the characters, they try to... In the dances, they also try to tell the story with dance. The story of what happened. The story of the incident. The story of the incident they try to tell in the dance. Is told in the dance. And it was good because it's way more abstract. Because of course, there's a lot of like... You cannot... The incident itself on stage would be very... I don't know, not that interesting. And also not tasteful. I mean, for the critic, it's a lot about taste as well. What words do you use if you want to... And of course, there's a lot of discussion also in German theater about reproducing things. So, you would reproduce a violent act. Do you want to do that? No. ES: Why do you think this work is important? WB: Oh, God, I really don't know. ES: Well, do you think the questions about the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press... WB: No, not totally. But I think it's very much about... Or what can the theater express? No, I think it's about the periphery and the center. So, it's like where the center is. It's in a theatre in Berlin, in Germany. And what's the periphery? How do you call it? Is that a word? What's outside the center? The work is about where the center of everything is, right? Yeah, I think that's it. And they try to get... And these actors, they are very aware that they are not in the center. ES: And they try to become the center? Okay, I understand. WB: Yeah, they try. They know that we need... And in that way, it's... Yeah, it's about where is the center and what's important and what do we think as actors or as theater makers is important. And that's, I think, the main question and how we function in this media is also a big topic because we found out when we did it that we're like... You have this DPA, Meldung , it's called in Germany. And I know it's... I think you will have it in America as well that when you do like a press thing and then it goes to all media. So, you have like, you write something, and it goes to all news channels. ES: A press release? WB: Yeah. Yeah, but then a press release... normally when we do a press release with theater it doesn't end on the front page of all newspapers. But now it did. Okay. So we got like... And then we found out how this media works. And they... Because the word dogshit is in it, people click on it because they are interested in the story of the dogshit. So people want to read that. So it's also a lot about how media functions and how attention works. It's pretty inevitable to talk about. It's like so much... about how these media function. They have this clickbait thing so that journalists also get paid for how many clicks they have. Of course, I mean, it's also this... I think it's this Trump thing. Of course, the drama. Every article where there is Trump in it, people click on it. ES: Really? People are that... You think people outside of the USA are interested to know what's going on with Trump? WB: Totally. Yeah. That's fascinating. It's like... But it's like a real-life show. It's like the biggest entertainment there is. Like the president... Wow. The porn star. It's like better than The Bachelor . I thought it was only... USA late-night talk hosts. They always talk about Trump. I'm like, what are they going to do when he's gone? Because that's where they get all their material. They're talking about Trump. ES: Yeah, yeah. I think they're happy that he's back. Because now they know what to talk about again. WB: Yeah. I mean... I mean, how are they going to talk about... I don't know. About migrants at the Mexican border. But then... Without Trump. Exactly. That's... That's the whole... I mean, you know... Because you see it here. You see a little bit in Germany. Of the migration. Image Credits: Article References References About the author(s) Steve Earnest is a Professor of Theatre at Coastal Carolina University . He was a Fulbright Scholar in Nanjing, China during the 2019 – 2020 academic year where he taught and directed works in Shakespeare and Musical Theatre. A member of SAG-AFTRA and AEA, he has worked professionally as an actor with Performance Riverside, The Burt Reynolds Theatre, The Jupiter Theatre, Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theatre, The Colorado Shakespeare Festival, Birmingham Summerfest and the Riverside Theatre of Vero Beach, among others. Film credits include Bloody Homecoming , Suicide Note and Miami Vice . His professional directing credits include Big River , Singin’ in the Rain and Meet Me in St. Louis at the Palm Canyon Theatre in Palm Springs, Musicale at Whitehall 06 at the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach and Much Ado About Nothing with the Mountain Brook Shakespeare Festival. Numer ous publications include a book, The State Acting Academy of East Berlin , published in 1999 by Mellen Press, a book chapter in Performer Training, published by Harwood Press, and a number of articles and reviews in academic journals and periodicals including Theatre Journal, New Theatre Quarterly, Western European Stages, The Journal of Beckett Studies and Backstage West . He has taught Acting, Movement, Dance, and Theatre History/Literature at California State University, San Bernardino, the University of West Georgia , the University of Montevallo and Palm Beach Atlantic University. He holds a Ph.D. in Theatre from the University of Colorado, Boulder and an M.F.A. in Musical Theatre from the University of Miami, FL. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents The 2025 Festival International New Drama (FIND) at Berlin Schaubühne Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 20 Willem Dafoe in conversation with Theater der Zeit The Puzzle: A new musical in the Spoleto Festival, Italy presented by La MaMa Umbria Varna Summer International Theatre Festival Mary Said What She Said The 62nd Berliner Theatertreffen: Stories and Theatrical Spaces That Realize the Past, Present and Future. Interview with Walter Bart (Artistic Leader, Wunderbaum Collective & Director, Die Hundekot-Attacke) from the 2024 Berliner Theatertreffen Duende and Showbiz: A Theatrical Odyssey Through Spain’s Soul Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Isaiah Matthew Wooden Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 32 1 Visit Journal Homepage Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze Isaiah Matthew Wooden By Published on November 6, 2019 Download Article as PDF Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze. Shane Vogel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018; Pp. 254 + xi. A trip backstage at the Imperial Theatre in late fall 1957 promised brushes with a number of black performers who would help radically transform the cultural and racial logics of the United States. In an effort to profit from the “calypso craze” fueled by the success of Harry Belafonte’s 1956 record Calypso , producer David Merrick teamed up with composer Harold Arlen, lyricist E.Y. Harburg, and playwright Fred Saidy to bring the original, conspicuously titled musical Jamaica to Broadway. The incomparable Lena Horne was tapped to lead a company that included such tastemakers and change-agents as Alvin Ailey, Ossie Davis, and Josephine Premice. As Shane Vogel outlines in his thoughtfully researched and compellingly written book, Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze , their musical proved much more than “a typical instance of midcentury Broadway Caribbeana” (133). Vogel reveals how the production not only “provided a surface for constantly shifting and destabilizing configurations of nation and race,” but also opened space for “political alternatives to be staged, sounded, and embodied, even in the face of the tourist economies and minstrel traditions in which black fad performance trafficked” (134-135). In so doing, this recent book exposes musical theater as one of the many potent sites through which black performers interpellated by the Jim Crow era’s various “Negro vogues” staged and embodied various acts of refusal. Vogel examines performances across multiple media-sound recordings, nightclub acts, film, television, dance, as well as musical theater—to highlight some of the sophisticated strategies black artists developed to negotiate the racist, imperialist, and appropriating impulses of the American entertainment industry. He brings particular attention to the ways these artists engaged performance to challenge, sometimes playfully, binaries such as “inauthenticity/authenticity, false/true, improper/proper, ungenuine/genuine, and insincerity/sincerity” (7). Stolen Time notably does not offer a comprehensive accounting of the calypso craze. Instead, the book explores several key examples that elucidate how black performers thwarted the representational imperatives and constraints demanded and imposed by American fad culture. As detailed in chapter one, the 1950s calypso craze was not the first “race craze” to generate widespread excitement during the Jim Crow period. Indeed, Vogel draws direct links between earlier crazes—notably, the ragtime craze of the 1890s and the Harlem vogue of the 1920s—and the midcentury thirst for Caribbeana, thereby exposing “the structural repetitions that shape[d] these fad cycles” (34). The chapter’s close readings of Josephine Premice’s nightclub performances and the two albums she recorded at the height of the craze, in addition to evidencing Vogel’s assertion that fad time is always already stolen time, shed important light on the tactics black performers deployed to make “the tempos and tastes of the marketplace” (66) align with their own motivations and aspirations. Vogel offers additional evidence and analysis of these tactics in subsequent chapters. Chapter two, for example, examines the cinematic calypso craze of the 1950s and the live nightclub revues coopted and reproduced on screen to illuminate the self-reflexivity of the “calypso program.” This chapter offers particularly astute readings of Maya Angelou’s performance as a calypso chanteuse in the low budget film, Calypso Heat Wave (1957), which serve to substantiate Vogel’s suggestion that the “calypso craze project[ed] nothing other than itself” (89). Chapter three turns attention to Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s 1957 live television presentation of their LP recording, A Drum Is a Woman . Vogel analyzes the event as an example of “radical counterprogramming”—that is, “an alternative to the middlebrow’s exploitation of blackness in the project of Cold War internationalism and a fundamental rewriting of the calypso program” (108). As “radical counterprogramming,” the live broadcast of A Drum Is a Woman stole back the time of the calypso craze and, in the process, “posed important questions about the relationship between nation and diaspora; African American and Afro-Caribbean cultural exchange; white commercial culture and black performance; and the sounds and gestures that reshaped cultural geographies in the twentieth century,” Vogel writes (108). Chapter four’s focus on the Broadway production of Jamaica further surfaces and explores the entwinements of race, nation, and diaspora. Vogel examines the production as a signal example of “mock transnational performance”—“a theatrical mode and performative stance that takes up the misuse of diasporic cultural indices to critique and refigure the politics of the nation-state and racialized national formations” (134). The chapter also considers how the show’s multiracial cast fostered and forged community on and offstage, thereby posing direct challenges to the white supremacist status quo. Through the careful attention he gives to Horne’s performance as Savannah in the musical, Vogel expands on some of the arguments he explores in his first book, The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performanc e (University of Chicago Press, 2009), further illustrating the range of approaches black performers developed and deployed to frustrate the racial expectations and assumptions of their Jim Crow audiences. Chapter five’s considerations of the crucial role that dancer-choreographer-director-performer-designer-painter Geoffrey Holder played in stirring and sustaining interest in the calypso craze serve to underscore Vogel’s assessments throughout Stolen Time that the fad was often marked by and constituted through the avowals and disavowals of its most prominent participants. Even as he disavowed what he called “Manhattan calypso,” characterizing it as an amusing imitation of “true Calypso,” Holder, Vogel notes, disavowed his own disavowals, popularizing a new dance form, the “Limbo-Calypso,” with the public. He also drew on the craze for inspiration to develop work for the concert dance stage. Especially striking throughout Stolen Time is Vogel’s skillful weaving of history, biography, theory, and critical inquiry to contemplate the significance of the calypso craze and the ontological conditions of black fad performance. The book is rich with fresh insights and important methodological interventions that add complexity to our understandings of concepts such as race, time, performance, diaspora, transnationalism, and mass culture. Students and scholars across myriad fields—theater studies, performance studies, media studies, popular music, and critical race studies, among them—will no doubt benefit tremendously from rigorously engaging with each chapter. To be sure, there is much to be gleaned about the significant role that artists continue to play in prompting social, cultural, and political change from Stolen Time’s absorbing prose and its shrewd considerations of black performance in the Jim Crow era. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Isaiah Matthew Wooden Brandeis University Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics Law and Sexuality in Tennessee Williams’s America Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze Staging Family: Domestic Deceptions of Mid-Nineteenth Century American Actresses Excavating American Theatrical History: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors, Appropriate, and An Octoroon Mabou Mines Tries Again: Past, Present, and the Purgatory of Performance Space Rehearsing Bereavement with Laughter: Grief, Humor, and Estrangement Affect in Sarah Ruhl’s Plays of Mourning Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

The Segal Centre The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center (MESTC), The Graduate Center , CUNY , is a non-profit center for theatre, dance, and film affiliated with CUNY’s Ph.D. Program in Theatre . Originally founded in 1979 as the Center for Advanced Studies in Theatre Arts (CASTA), it was renamed in March of 1999 to recognize Martin E. Segal, one of New York City’s outstanding leaders of the arts. At the same time, the multi-purpose performing space in The Graduate Center’s new home in the former B. Altman department store was named the Martin E. Segal Theatre. The New York Times called Mr. Segal “New York’s leading cultural power broker.” An extraordinary figure in the arts and education in New York City, he has played a seminal role in many of the City’s most important cultural initiatives. The Center’s primary focus is to bridge the gap between the academic and professional performing arts communities by providing an open environment for the development of educational, community-driven, and professional projects in the performing arts. As a result, MESTC is home to theatre scholars, students, playwrights, actors, dancers, directors, dramaturgs, and performing arts managers, as well as both the local and international theatre communities. The Center presents staged readings to further the development of new and classic plays, lecture series, televised seminars featuring professional and academic luminaries, and arts in education programs, and maintains its long-standing visiting-scholars-from-abroad program. In addition, the Center publishes a series of highly regarded academic journals, as well as single volumes of importance, including plays in translation, all written and edited by renowned scholars. The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center is a longstanding collaborative partner with the Byrd Hoffman Water Mill Foundation where Dr. Frank Hentschker serves as an advisor. This collaboration includes national and international artistic exchanges of archival work, talks, and research regarding the work of Robert Wilson. The Martin E. Segal Theatre is a 70-seat, fully equipped flexible space that provides an intimate venue where both artists and theatre professionals can actively participate with audiences to further the advancement, awareness, and appreciation of the theatrical experience. In addition, the Segal Center presents three annual festivals (PRELUDE, PEN World Voices: International Pay Festival, and The Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance) and publishes and maintains three open access online journals (Arab Stages, European Stages, and The Journal of American Drama and Theatre). The Segal Center also publishes many volumes of plays in translation and is the leading publisher of plays from the Arab world. The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center (MESTC) is a vital component of the Theatre Program’s academic culture and creating in close collaboration a research nexus, focusing on dramaturgy, new media, and global theatre. The Segal Center provides an intimate platform where both artists and theatre professionals can actively participate with audiences to advance awareness and appreciation MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER The CUNY Graduate Center Room 3110 New York, NY10016 ph: 212.817.1860 mestc@gc.cuny.edu

Drew Barker Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 2 Visit Journal Homepage Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator Drew Barker By Published on May 16, 2023 Download Article as PDF Between this interview (edited for length and clarity from October 2022) and the publication of this issue, Gancher and Mezzocchi’s 2020 production of Russian Troll Farm won an OBIE Award. Since it was one of three productions to be given such an honor in the category of “Digital+Virtual+Hybrid Production,” all of which were reviewed over the last three seasons due to the pandemic, one wonders how such recognition will impact and inspire other digital+virtual+hybrid projects in the future. Regardless, it can certainly be argued that Gancher and Mezzocchi’s production (co-directed by Elizabeth Williamson) met the historical moment better than most digital theatre productions. The play satirically addresses the weaponization of misinformation via social media during a presidential election season that mirrored not only the prior presidential election season, but also the weaponization of misinformation in other parts of the world. Ultimately, using satire and a suite of digital technologies allowed the production to feel familiar and dangerous at the same time. If new times demand new forms, what will we miss if we hesitate to embrace the progress made in terms of theatrical creativity and audience engagement? We should remember what Barbara Fuchs declares: “At its most elaborate, digital theater does more than simulate the real: it complicates and remixes it, foregrounding the artifice and conventionality in how we think about production, performance, audiences, and theater itself.” [1] Playwright Sarah Gancher and multimedia creator Jared Mezzocchi collaborated on the critically-acclaimed, digital production of Russian Troll Farm in late 2020, and are now working on a new project — even as other productions of Russian Troll Farm continue their success. In this interview by Performing Arts Librarian, Drew Barker, Gancher and Mezzocchi discuss how their creative process has evolved. Barker: Your 2020 production of Russian Troll Farm was a benchmark for digital theatre during the pandemic. Now you’re both teaming up again, and the word “epic” has been tossed around. What can you tell us about this new project you’re working on? Gancher: We are working on an epic about deep time that is set throughout all the different eras of history present in one Brooklyn bar — Sunny’s in Red Hook. It has been in continuous operation since 1890. And of course, there’s a lot of history on that spot before that point, and there will be a lot of history on that spot after this time. We are asking the question: What would you learn if you were able to see all of the history in one spot superimposed on top of all the moments of history superimposed on top of each other? If you were able to hop back and forth between them, remix and match them? What would we find out about ourselves, and what will we find out about the patterns that we live? We’re hoping that when superimposed that they all add up to make a giant question that none of them make individually. I think that it’s going to be a massive participatory art project sort of made by the community, consisting of a film shoot at Sunny’s with snippets of video that are like scenes or seamless moments from across all the different eras of Sunny’s, and then after playing their part in that people can walk down the street to this big warehouse where there will be an installation showing everything that’s being shot at Sunny’s superimposed on top of each other and allowing people to hop back and forth between them and see the composite story as it begins to emerge. And there’s bluegrass involved because of the famous bluegrass jam that happens at Sunny’s. It will also have an on-line component. It’s very cool, but it’s currently hard to explain. Mezzocchi: I would add that it’s a two-part process for an audience member to participate in the scene, and then go into an entirely different space, and see how that participation plays a role in a much wider, larger container of time and space. And now you’re both the viewer of a kind of a gallery installation of live mixed video, while also seeing yourself reflected inside of it. And so, you’re kind of unlocking the history of the place, but also you’re participating in a new part of the history of the place. What does it mean when we are aware of our own immediate footprint in time? It’s like a widening of the consciousness of the participant. And I think that’s the big question for me — what does that do to a person when they know that they’re a part of the history of a place? Gancher: It’ll be an experiment and obsession, and it’s sort of in two senses: one where we’ll literally have people playing music and jamming, and then also there’s going to be a kind of like a visual jam session as people, essentially solo with images taking turns, matching the images to the music, finding and making meaning in the connection between these different moments. Mezzocchi: So, perhaps we can create a jam session, both audibly and visually. All of those things are for me, as a technologist, taking the discoveries of Russian Troll Farm which made that thing feel more full of breath in life. Because the editor was present, the editor was doing the thing live. Now in this residency [at Bethany Arts Center] working with Sarah, watching Sarah now take the reins, I don’t think our collaboration would have led to this without Russian Troll Farm . I also don’t think that my technological inventions would have brought me where I am today without Russian Troll Farm . Gancher: I think that we both — if I may speak for Jared and I certainly intend to — we found Russian Troll Farm so thrilling because we were making up something that nobody had ever done before, and that we weren’t sure whether or not it was going to work, or how it would work. And so we had to also invent a process, and we both got really into that. I mean, it’s painstaking, it’s slow. It’s frustrating. But it’s also so fun. And so cool, because you feel like you’re making a new form. Mezzocchi: And I think that, I don’t know, the older I’m getting, the more rare I’m realizing it is to find people that you can kind of run around in the dark with. And the pandemic felt like the darkest time. And I felt so fortunate with Sarah, with Elizabeth [Williamson], with that cast, that we all in the middle of a pandemic found each other and said, “Let’s keep playing tag for a second” I wanted to hold onto that accidental joy that was found in the middle of horrific trauma, because that was a joy that I’ve never felt before, ever. Barker: Sarah, you’ve written that as a playwright you’re obsessed with questions of how history shapes us. How has the pandemic shaped your storytelling process? Gancher: My main experience of the pandemic was as a parent trying to raise a five year old, who became a six year old, and then a seven year old, all while in a shoebox apartment. I went from being a full time playwright, writing a minimum of 40 hours a week to virtually having no writing time at all, and kind of going insane. It was a nightmare, watching all of the things that I had planned that I was so excited for all fall apart and crumble. But I do think those ashes have turned out to be very fertile for me, because there have been multiple things that I never would have done, never would have tried, had life continued on its original trajectory. Russian Troll Farm in particular created an appetite to try new things more. So, I just finished the first draft of lyrics for my first musical book, where I’m also writing the music. Considering this new project with Jared, which I’m so hyped on now, I’m not sure I would have been brave enough to attempt it before. And I don’t think that anybody would have thought about offering me that opportunity before Russian Troll Farm . If we’re considering the pandemic as a whole politically, the themes continued to resonate with Russian Troll Farm — disinformation, mass delusion, echo chambers, mass hysteria, and the fact that our collective unconscious seems spiraling into a deep depression — and I don’t know, we should probably get on that. Barker: Indeed. Things were different for you, Jared, but it was still an upheaval, right? Mezzocchi: Yeah, I feel like everything changed for me. I look back on the very beginning, when we did She Kills Monsters [at the University of Maryland in April 2020]. Because I decided to call the chair and say, “Don’t cancel it, we have an opportunity to do research here.” And I made that call to her while I was in a panic down in Arkansas after a regional theatre production of Curious Incident of the Dog in Nighttime that I was directing had just shut down. It had been a moment of real, positive, directorial growth for me that was stripped away the day before tech. And so I look back on that and I don’t know why I made that phone call. And I also don’t know why that same day, I called my board at Andy’s Summer Playhouse and said, “Cancel the summer. Because if we cancel now, then we don’t spend any more money preparing for a summer season that won’t happen, and therefore we have more money to deal with what this brings. And let’s go weird.” I remember the thrill of being in a support system at UMD and at Andy’s that allowed me to take a risk, because the safety net was more educational in both of those realms. And that put me in different shoes, so then I felt more courageous when walking into my freelance life and calling Sarah, which happened about two weeks later. And so, I think that being in two educational environments allowed me — and I’m really saying this for the first time — allowed me the courage and to say, “Fuck it. Like, it’s research.” The flip to using the term “research” was a big thing for me, and that hasn’t changed. And I think that getting the recognition, sharing the lessons learned, getting the positive press, and then making more connections made me realize the power of being an experimenter who could produce things, produce things quickly, and vocalize the flaws of each experiment. Suddenly the power of discovery was the thing, and I’m not ever going to forget that. Barker: How do words and design influence you both now during your creative process in terms of dramaturgy? Is it like asking about the chicken and the egg? Or, how is the story influenced by the format? Gancher: I think it’s both chicken and egg. And nobody knows where either one came from. One of the nicest things that anybody’s ever said to me in my life was when Jared said much of what he technologically invented for Russian Troll Farm only happened because of the demands of the script. A lot of people presumed that it was written for Zoom, but in fact it was barely adapted for that format. In my brain it had always been for the stage. Now in this latest residency, as we began to iterate, I start thinking about the story. What is the event? Sometimes I write “scratch drafts,” like sort of pre-writing, like scenes, but they don’t even have character names yet, you know? I’ve never shown anybody in my life work that early, but I showed it to Jared. And then that sort of kickstarted him thinking from the container and also asking, “What is the event?” What will the tech for this need to look like? And, as we ping pong back and forth, we influence each other. Mezzocchi: I would add to that if you’re coming from content, and I’m coming from form, we’re both kind of saying, “Here’s how I would take your offering and make it function inside of my brain,” and vice versa. If the text is the content constant, and the tech is the variable, here’s how function can form and then flip it and say, if the tech is the constant, and the text is the variable, here’s what happens there. Tech is a tool, and function is the space that we’re kind of finger painting in. That to me feels pretty subversive to the industry standards. Gancher: It’s more related to the sort of experimental devising world that we actually both come from — nobody knows that we’re both musicians, and nobody knows that we both come from the world of devising and experimental stuff. It’s actually quite key to the way that we work together, and it reminds me of my favorite Suzan Lori Parks quote: “Form is content.” And I think that I’m trying to work with Jared not like a playwright traditionally works with the designer, but like the other half of my brain, or like I’m the other half of his brain. Also, his live video editing skills responded to hearing the rhythm in the words, which totally amplified the humor and timing in Russian Troll Farm in a unique way. Barker: Jared, among many other things on Twitter you’ve talked about mediaturgy. Can you comment on how you position that in your current theatrical practice? Mezzocchi: That idea was actually based on a course I teach. It’s not about just telling stories on digital terms. We ask questions like: Why and how are we using technology to drive the story forward? What’s its point of view for the story? How is it used differently for each character? It’s not just spectacle. Mediaturgy informs choices which then contributes to the overall dramaturgy. Ideally, it allows for more collaboration, with the actors understanding a new language within a new process, too. Digital storytelling should be seen as a scene partner. Gancher: I would add that mediaturgy makes you consider new questions as well. For example, how are you casting the audience? Are they spying on the characters? How does the story move in digital theatre? It’s a bit of a filmic question, too, of course. Does it move in jumps, does it move in fades? Does it root us down in one spot, or does it disorient us? But more importantly, does it live up to our vision? Mezzocchi: It was helpful that the world slammed to a halt, and we had to interrogate how we use and connect through technology. As a society, and as a theatre community, in order to get to the necessary technological solutions we must also address the problems of how we use technology. We’re continuing to learn how to use the tech as a tool, not have the technology use us. Gancher: In this new process, the whole team is writing with you. As someone who teaches writing, I want to encourage that kind of collaboration even though it’s scary and difficult. We need to find the people who can make that work. www.sarahgancher.org www.jaredmezzocchi.com (Twitter: @jaredmezzocchi) References [1] Barbara Fuchs, Theater of Lockdown: Digital and Distanced Performance in a Time of Pandemic . (London: Methuen Drama, 2022), 25. Footnotes About The Author(s) DREW BARKER is the Performing Arts Librarian at the University of Maryland at College Park. As a dramaturg he has worked at Triad Stage (NC), Round House Theatre (MD), Center Stage (MD), and Theatre J (DC). He was the curator for the exhibits The Art & Craft of Puppetry (2022), Remembrance & Resilience (2021) and The Triumph of Isabella: Exploring Performance Through Art (2018-19) at the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library. His research and creative projects include information design and literacy, the U.S. Civil War, and the working relationship between playwright Naomi Wallace and historian Marcus Rediker. 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 Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

By Josep M. Benet i Jornet, Sergi Belbel, Lluisa Cunielle, Pau Miro, Marion Peter Holt, Sharon G. Feldman | A Collection of New Works by Catalan Playwrights < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the TCG Bookstore or Amazon.com. You can also get in touch with us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu Barcelona Plays Josep M. Benet i Jornet, Sergi Belbel, Lluisa Cunielle, Pau Miro, Marion Peter Holt, Sharon G. Feldman Download PDF A Collection of New Works by Catalan Playwrights Barcelona’s theatre has experienced a remarkable renaissance in the years since the end of the Franco dictatorship. First, performance groups such as La Fura dels Baus, Els Joglars, Dagoll-Dagom, and la Cubana flourished with distinctive productions in which spectacle and movement predominated. In 1976, the Teatre Lluire began to set new production standards with a repertory or international plays. Soon the Catalan language, suppressed for more than three decades, became the vehicle of expression for new playwrights who challenged the performance groups with a “teatre de text”. The new plays in this collection represent outstanding playwrights of three generations. Benet i Jornet won his first drama award in 1963, when he was only twenty-three years old, and in recent decades he has become Catalonia’s leading exponent of thematically challenging and structurally inventive theatre. His plays have been performed internationally and translated into fourteen languages, including Korean and Arabic. Sergi Belbel and Lluïsa Cunillé arrived on the scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with distinctive and provocative dramatic voices. The actor-director-playwright Pau Miró is a member of yet another generation that is now attracting favorable critical attention. This collection includes: Josep M. Benet i Jornet: Salamander Sergi Belbel: Strangers Lluisa Cunielle: Barcelona, Map of Shadows Pau Miro: It's Raining In Barcelona Translated and Edited by Marion Peter Holt & Sharon G. Feldman Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

Michelle Dvoskin Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 27 1 Visit Journal Homepage "Just Saying Our Goodbyes": Elegies' Queer Interventions into the History of 9/11 Michelle Dvoskin By Published on March 5, 2015 Download Article as PDF In Elegies : A Song Cycle , the 2003 William Finn musical first produced at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center, five performers sing both in honor of and as the lost. [1] More specifically, they perform losses from the life of the gay Jewish composer-lyricist William Finn, embodying and/or narrating the lives of a diverse array of characters linked only by their connections to him. From a nameless English teacher, to Finn’s mother Barbara, to the architect who designed the Twin Towers, to producer/director Joseph Papp, to Finn himself, this musical engages with a range of histories. Some of those histories are obviously public (the events of 9/11, which are presented at the end of the evening); others are seemingly personal (the death of Finn’s mother); all are approached from a queer perspective. Finn (b. 1952 ) is perhaps best known as the composer and lyricist for the 1992 Broadway musical Falsettos , which tells the story of Marvin, a gay Jewish man, and his queer family: his ex-wife Trina, their son, Jason, Marvin’s lover, Whizzer, and Trina’s husband (and Marvin’s former psychiatrist) Mendel. While the first act focuses on these characters as they awkwardly attempt to negotiate their relationships, the second centers largely on Whizzer’s battle with, and eventual death from, AIDS. [2] Finn’s other well-known shows include A New Brain (1998), about a gay musician suffering from a brain tumor, and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (2005), which humorously dramatizes the competition, camaraderie, and struggle for (and against) perfection amongst idiosyncratic children at a local spelling bee. An interest in queer characters is a hallmark of Finn’s work, and Elegies is no exception. I use the term “queer” as a way of describing opposition to normativity broadly writ: a way of tweaking our vision so that we recognize that the normal, the “natural,” is in fact a construction. In this definition sexuality is one kind of normalcy queer challenges, but other structures of power that create and enforce the illusion that there is such a thing as “normal” in the first place, other “regimes of the normal,” can be challenged as well. [3] Elegies is arguably a bit queer in all sorts of ways. Most important to my project here, however, are the ways Elegies queers ideas about history and how it can and should be performed. Elegies challenges normativity in how it presents and structures its histories, as well as heteronormativity in the content of those histories. Initially performed in the highly respected and culturally valued public space of Lincoln Center (and later in other respected theatres in later productions, as well as on the commercially available cast album), Elegies challenge audience expectations about what histories deserve presentation in the public sphere, as well as how those histories should be crafted. [4] Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Elegies’ challenge to normative ideas about history comes from how it takes what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick termed a “reparative” approach, one that performs not simply what “really” was, but also what might have been. By incorporating a range of losses into a profoundly public performance, Elegies queers ideas about what kind of losses are worthy of public memorialization: in other words, what losses can be acknowledged as such in history. I am particularly interested in how Elegies ’ reparative approach to the history of 9/11 both reiterates the (hetero)normative narrative of national trauma and subtly insists, through various performance strategies, on a more nuanced representation that incorporates queer lives and losses. Including queer people in histories of 9/11 is profoundly important given that many “moral conservatives” in its immediate aftermath “blame[d] the event on homosexuals and the women’s movement.” [5] Elegies ’ complex, inclusive performance of 9/11, and its positioning of the event as one among a range of (queer) personal griefs, offers a chance for audiences to productively reconsider the story we assume we know, creating the possibility for a more nuanced understanding of history—and by extension, the present and the future—to emerge. Before proceeding to a discussion of Elegies itself, I want to briefly elaborate on my use of Sedgwick’s conceptualization of reparative reading. In her essay “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” Sedgwick argues for the importance of moving beyond what she sees as critical theory’s, particularly queer theory’s, dependence on paranoia. Paranoid readings emphasize the revelation of all possible relevant injustices and oppressions, in order to both rouse opposition and protect against unpleasant surprises. This approach limits possibility, as the need to avoid negative surprises in some ways renders negativity inevitable. [6] Sedgwick is critical of the “faith in exposure” this approach relies on, which “acts as though its work would be accomplished if only it could finally, this time, somehow get its story truly known.” [7] This assumption, of course, requires one to ignore the very real possibilities that the story was already known, or that the audience for that story, once aware of the situation, might remain uncaring or unable to help. Reparative reading takes a different approach to exposure and to surprise. According to Sedgwick, To read from a reparative position is to surrender the knowing, anxious paranoid determination that no horror, however apparently unthinkable, shall ever come to the reader as new : to a reparatively positioned reader, it can seem realistic and necessary to experience surprise. Because there can be terrible surprises, however, there can also be good ones. Hope . . . is among the energies by which the reparatively positioned reader tries to organize the fragments and part-objects she encounters or creates. Because she has room to realize that the future may be different from the present, it is also possible for her to entertain such painful, profoundly relieving, ethically crucial possibilities as that the past, in turn, could have happened differently from the way it actually did. [8] Reparative readings, then, allow for possibility . They are not denials of injustices, past, present, or future; they are, however, readings that don’t see the exposure of those failures as determinative of all possible encounters. The unexpected response is possible, and things can, in fact, happen differently. In her description here, Sedgwick is focusing on the role of surprise and hope in future-oriented work. In my consideration of Elegies , I apply her principle in reverse: that is, by presenting a vision of the past that exposes what was while demonstrating what could have been, this musical allows for the possibility of more just, ethical futures. The affective power of musical theatre assists in this reparative project. Writing about reenactments—large-scale performances of the past in the present moment—Tavia Nyong’o points out that “if reenactment risks reifying the past as it was, the transmission of affect permits us to reimagine as well as to repeat, inserting new subjectivities and new desires into familiar landscapes.” [9] Smaller-scale performances of history like those in musical theatre offer a similarly affective engagement with the past, allowing for the possibility of showing both what was and what might have been (and, by extension, might still be). Elegies takes advantage of this fundamentally reparative possibility by performing histories of trauma and marginalization in ways that acknowledge the injustices of the past while also performing other possibilities, thereby opening up hope for the present and future. I will begin my discussion of Elegies ’ reparative work by considering how it fractures the linear temporality associated with traditional history, engaging with time in fluid, nuanced ways that embrace possibilities alongside “realities.” I will then address the ways in which this musical encourages audiences to engage with a range of losses, some obviously public and others seemingly private, and to treat them all as worthy of attention and respect. Finally, I will focus on the final section of the musical, which considers the events of 9/11, and the ways in which performance strategies enable a nuanced, complex approach to this history of a national trauma. Elegies takes a decidedly different approach to most traditional, normative history, which relies on a chronologically organized narrative with a clear rupture between the past and the present. First, the overall structure of the performance is entirely episodic and non-linear, bouncing around Finn’s life without regard to chronological order. The show is essentially organized as a revue, a series of songs linked by theme and subject matter rather than narrative. There is no spoken dialogue, and while some characters recur, many appear or are mentioned only in one number. Second—and more crucially for my arguments here—there is no clear border between past and present in Elegies . This queer approach to temporality comes in part from the very nature of performing history: performances of the past create an experience of co-temporality as the past exists in the unmistakably present time of performance. [10] Elegies takes this a step further, however, by taking a melancholic approach to the losses it represents. According to Freudian understandings of grief, mourning requires the bereaved to reckon with their loss in order to let go of the lost object, while melancholia insists on holding on to the lost. While Freud initially conceptualized melancholia as pathological, alternative understandings of melancholia see it as a potentially ethical response to loss. Rather than a disordered failure to let go, “we might” as David Eng suggests, “see in the call of the melancholic . . . an ethical demand to provide another kind of language for loss, another story, another history.” [11] Queer scholars have been influential in this reclamation of melancholia, particularly in relation to the AIDS crisis. [12] Finn is a gay man, and Elegies operates within a visibly queer world: lesbians, gay men, and queer communities are all among the losses grieved onstage. The queer potential of melancholia extends beyond the identities of the grieved and grieving, however, shaping a relationship with history that is queer in its form as well as (potentially) its characters. As Eng and David Kazanjian point out in their introduction to Loss: The Politics of Mourning (2003), melancholia can be read as offering “a continuous engagement with loss and its remains. This engagement generates sites for memory and history, for the rewriting of the past as well as the reimagining of the future.” [13] Melancholia, they suggest, prevents a clear separation of past, present, and future; the rupture that defines history is present, but permeable. By offering the space for “rewriting” and “reimagining” both past and future, a melancholic approach to loss allows for a reparative approach to history, one which recognizes events from the past without seeing them as inevitable or as determinate of negative futures. Elegies takes up just such a melancholic project, calling the losses of Finn’s past into being in the present moment of performance. And while some losses are simply narrated, others are brought into momentary being through performance as the singers embody them as characters. In the case of Elegies , performance allows loss to be made tangible and concrete through the bodies of the five performers. In the world of musical theatre, however, it isn’t only the performers who embody the lost. Musical theatre scholars have noted the predisposition of the form towards particularly physicalized reception practices, what Stacy Wolf terms a “performative spectatorship” that includes “tapping toes . . . humming tunes . . . learning physical bits and choreography . . . the visceral experience of watching and listening to a musical play. In this way, spectatorship of musicals is literally active.” As Wolf points out, “what we take from the musical is embodied.” [14] Audiences take musicals into them; in the case of Elegies , the song that enters the spectator carries the trace of the dead or absent. As the five performers of Elegies sing both about and for the losses Finn has sustained, then, the letting go associated with mourning becomes literally impossible as the lost are held in the living bodies of performers and audience members alike. Finn’s lyrics suggest that this melancholic project was intentional. One of the first songs in the show, “Mark’s All-Male Thanksgiving,” offers a clear example. As he tells the story of the Thanksgiving dinners thrown by Finn’s friend Mark Thalen before Thalen’s death from AIDS, Michael Rupert, singing as the character of Finn, directly articulates the song’s purpose: “I wrote this song to not forget Mark’s All-Male Thanksgiving.” [15] Rather than allowing the distance between himself and the event to grow, as it should in “healthy” mourning, Finn chooses to stay connected to the past, to “not forget” or let go. The song “Anytime” makes a similar point, this time from the perspective of Finn’s friend Monica. The song, written by Finn for Monica’s funeral at her request, is “told from her point of view” and sung by Carolee Carmello. Imagined as “a mother singing to her daughters,” “Anytime” refuses the idea that the dead can be left behind by the living. Sung with conviction by Carmello as she stands alone in a spotlight center stage, the song repeatedly declares in its refrain that despite her death, Monica will not miss a moment of her children’s lives: “I am there each morning / I am there each fall. / I am present without warning. And I’m watching it all. . . . I am there.” [16] When she leaves the stage at the end of the number, she pauses to sing a final “I am there” over her shoulder, reaffirming that even in her absence, she will remain. [17] Once again, the character refuses to acquiesce to loss, choosing continued connection instead. In an interview about the writing of Elegies, Finn states that his greatest fear in creating the piece was that “I wouldn’t write a song that would bring my mother back to life.” [18] His language is telling; he doesn’t fear writing a song that represents her poorly, he fears he won’t be able to resurrect her. The dead are not allowed to stay dead in the world of Elegies , and that is by design: the goal of the piece is to continually “bring [them] back to life” not just for Finn, but also for everyone who encounters the show. Melancholia is not merely a byproduct of performance here; it is the goal. Elegies’ melancholic, queer approach to temporality allows for the appearance of small reparative moments throughout the performance. Time is extremely fluid within this show, denying audiences any comfortable, chronological understanding of events. Even within individual numbers the present and the past (and occasionally the future) continually collide. In the song “Monica and Mark,” for example, the three men (presumably playing the roles of William Finn in the past and the present, as well as his partner Arthur within both moments) narrate the following exchange: “He [the doctor] explained that Mark had AIDS / He explained that AIDS was then fatal / Something we did not know at the time.” [19] The men sing from the present moment of performance, looking back on a moment in Finn’s personal history of AIDS, while Christian Borle and Keith Byron Kirk sit together in chairs as Finn and his partner might have done in the past moment they describe. Complicating matters still further is the inclusion of the word “then” in the second phrase. The doctor would not, in the past moment, likely have said that “AIDS was then fatal”; he would have said “AIDS was fatal,” as he had no knowledge of a future when AIDS might be understood instead as a chronic condition. By writing the line in this way, however, Finn enacts a reparative moment, embedding hope in a brief reenactment of the past, and by extension, reminding us of hope in the present as well. The song “Venice,” in which Finn recalls the illness and death of “the former lover of [his] lover, a sophisticated Pole named Bolek,” offers another illustration of the reparative possibilities offered by a queer approach to time. Temporality seems unstable from the very beginning of the song, which features Rupert, as Finn, reminiscing about how he and Bolek would fight during dinner: “He’d say, ‘You’re being a dick.’ / I’d say, ‘Bolek,’ he’d say, ‘Billy.’ / I’d say, ‘Bolek,’ he’d say, ‘What?’” The interaction seems continuous, repeated—until the next line brings time into sharp focus, as Rupert-as-Finn sings, “That then was the night I knew that Bolek was sick.” Performance matters in this shift, as the melody and Rupert’s vocal quality mark the change in grammar. From the playful, up-tempo back and forth of the earlier lines, the sound becomes more mournful and legato. Rupert’s voice becomes softer, smoother, and somehow more emotionally charged. Later in the song, Rupert-as-Finn tells us about the trip he, Arthur, and Bolek took to Venice, answering the call of Bolek’s (and the song’s) refrain, “My friends, I’m taking you to Venice.” After several lines describing the trip, Finn acknowledges that the story never happened, that what he has just reenacted in song was an alternate history: “In truth, we never went to Venice / We said we would, but Bolek died too quickly.” Once again, fluid temporality enables a reparative moment. The past is not over and gone; Finn can manipulate and re-imagine his history, suggesting what might have happened rather than simply exposing the sorrow of what “really” was. Rupert’s performance choices heighten this effect, as he performs the section describing the trip in an earnest, matter-of-fact manner that allows the “false” history to be real for a moment. If, as I have been arguing, Elegies poses a queer challenge to the “when” of history, to its temporality, it also takes a distinctly queer approach to its “who” and “what,” insisting on the importance of all kinds of people, places, lives, and memories often deemed too trivial or too marginal(ized). There are unspoken rules as to what can be grieved in an open public, which losses are worthy of consideration. As Judith Butler has argued, society sees certain marginalized lives as invalid; publicly eulogizing those lives becomes, therefore, impossible. Butler asserts that “we have to consider how the norm governing who will be a grievable human is circumscribed and produced in . . . acts of permissible and celebrated public grieving.” [20] Performance, like the obituaries Butler writes about, has a productive function in creating public understandings of what can count as a grievable loss. Elegies takes up just this project, as it publicly memorializes a wide range of losses from the life of its queer, Jewish composer. Moreover, its challenges to normative history take place not in a paranoid style that might focus on how often queer personal losses are excluded from the historical record, but rather in a reparative spirit that assumes the value of publicly sharing such losses. In doing so, Elegies expands what losses “count” as deserving of public grief and attention—in other words, what losses deserve inclusion in public histories. Elegies performs grief for a wide variety of losses, some more obviously public than others. On the seemingly personal level, the songs of Elegies honor and sometimes embody Finn’s family: his mother features in multiple songs, and “Passover” invokes a number of other family members, as well as the holiday celebration and its accoutrements. Other “personal” songs feature an unnamed English teacher, Finn’s friend (and mother of his goddaughter) Monica, and Finn’s childhood neighborhood, memorialized in his mother’s voice. Other losses seem to exist within a blend of private and public: a corner store and the Korean family who ran it; Peggy Hewitt, a little known character actress, and her partner Dr. Misty del Giorno; and performer and composer Jack Eric Williams all fit in this category. While they might be known outside of Finn’s immediate circle, the wider public of Elegies is likely unfamiliar with them. Joseph Papp, the founder of New York’s Public Theater, is more well-known than the rest of these individuals, but even he is not precisely a household name, and the song that honors him blends public recollections—“Joe saw a theatre in Central Park, and Moses builds what Joe proposes”—with more personal ones: “I never understood what Joe was sayin’ to me—he’d quote Shakespeare, and I’d simply nod.” Also fitting into this liminal space are the numerous losses to AIDS grieved throughout the piece. While Finn uses the word AIDS in only one song, the disease’s presence resonates throughout the show, most notably in three numbers I have already mentioned. “Mark’s All-Male Thanksgiving” features a gay male community and one of its rituals, decimated by AIDS. “Monica and Mark” returns Mark to the forefront, narrating his death and the advent of AIDS simultaneously. Finally, Bolek, the featured character in “Venice,” is presumably a casualty of AIDS as well. [21] The AIDS-related deaths of gay men have often been among those deemed ungrievable by the larger culture. As Douglas Crimp points out, “for anyone living daily with the AIDS crisis, ruthless interference with our bereavement is as ordinary an occurrence as reading the New York Times . The violence we encounter is relentless, the violence of silence and omission almost as impossible to endure as the violence of unleashed hatred and outright murder.” [22] By addressing these losses in the public forum of a musical, Elegies challenges this violent silence. And in doing so, Finn claims the right to publicly grieve less tangible losses. For example, “Mark’s All-Male Thanksgiving” grieves for a gay male community marked as outside normativity, a community which included “diplomats, poets, opera guys, guys dressed in leather britches,” and a ritual shared among them. [23] It isn’t just individual people he misses; it’s a community and its practices ravaged by AIDS. This song, like so many others in the show, insists on the importance of not only those people and things most central to our lives, but those that are more peripheral as well. While Mark was clearly a close friend, the song is not simply a lament for him. It is a remembrance of the various men who attended and the details of their culture. For example, Finn gives space to memories of the food they shared: [M]en cooked the turkey, and men made the cranberry sauce Without nuts—because men don’t like nuts! But the stuffing was manly, and the finger bowls ditto — And ditto, the pureed sweet yams — Very manly, when Mark made his All-Male Thanksgiving. [24] Certainly, there is humor in this description; specific word choices like “manly” finger bowls and sweet yams play lightly on gay stereotypes for comic effect. There is also humor in the quotidian nature of the material. Hearing a man sing, in a lovely high baritone, about side dishes is funny for its very incongruity. It’s also touching, however, as the addition of music gives heft to the quotidian memory: this is important enough to sing about, and to sing about publicly. [25] This emphasis on the importance of the quotidian, the mundane, the everyday—things, places, and people—is in some ways a radical act. Crimp, discussing his first viewing of the AIDS quilt, comments that he was moved by the realization that he “had lost not just the center of my world [close friends or intellectual idols] but its periphery, too. I remember at the time saying to friends that it was the symbols of the ordinariness of human lives that make the quilt such a profoundly moving experience.” [26] Elegies honors the idea that the “ordinary” needs to be attended to, to be mourned. It celebrates people central to Finn’s life (for example, his mother), but also those, like the unnamed English teacher, who appear somewhat peripheral, arguing that attention to them is relevant not just for Finn but for audiences as well. Elegies also moves beyond the immediately personal to address national traumas, both in its treatment of AIDS and, most notably, in the closing sequence of the show, which (re)presents losses incurred on September 11, 2001. This segment immediately follows the song “When the Earth Stopped Turning,” which focuses on the death of Finn’s mother. “When the Earth Stopped Turning” is a personal song, but as the title (a recurring lyric) suggests, one that addresses an emotional event of great magnitude. [27] Using this to lead in to the least obviously personal, most public sequence of the evening encourages audiences to recognize that personal losses can be as important, as meaningful, and as deserving of a place in history as public ones. The structure also reminds us that 9/11 represents a day when the world changed for individuals, not just for the nation as a whole. This emphasis on individual meanings is a valuable intervention into the historical narratives around 9/11, which have tended to be somewhat totalizing. Writing not long after the events, Harry J. Elam Jr. noted in Theatre Journal ’s “A Forum on Theatre and Tragedy: A Response to September 11, 2001” that “descriptions of the events of September 11, 2001 commonly conjoin other words such as ‘American’ or ‘National’ with that of ‘tragedy ,’” nomenclature that suggests both an identity and a politics.” The “conspicuous outpourings of nationalism” that accompanied this linkage are, he suggests, certainly not uncomplicated or necessarily positive. [28] Ann Cvetkovich, writing in 2003, uses the lens of trauma rather than tragedy, but offers a similar warning. She writes that “In the United States, September 11 has already joined the pantheon of great national traumas, and I fear that its many and heterogeneous meanings . . . will be displaced by a more singular and celebratory story.” She goes on to note her concern with the ways in which “certain forms of suffering are deemed worthy of national public attention, while others are left to individuals or minority groups to tend to on their own.” [29] One of Elegies’ major contributions is to offer, through performance, a heterogeneous awareness within the “more singular and celebratory story” that has become the normative narrative. In considering how Elegies queers the history of 9/11, it is important to understand that normative narrative, and how the musical both engages with and challenges it. Trauma scholar Dori Laub expresses the most common understanding of 9/11, referring to it as “an experience of collective massive psychic trauma.” [30] While “trauma” is a term that defies easy definition, a “traumatic experience” can be understood as one that cannot be completely engaged in the moment of encounter, an experience too negative to fully comprehend in relation to oneself. [31] Drawing on Cathy Caruth, as well as other scholars of trauma, Irene Kacandes argues that “In fundamental ways trauma is connected to incomprehensibility,” be it an inability to fully experience an event or to clearly name or describe it. [32] In essence, trauma occurs when an event is too upsetting, too horrible, for someone to fully comprehend as it occurs. A victim of trauma cannot truly understand what has happened as something that has happened to them, and subsequently cannot (consciously) tell their story. Most approaches to trauma tend to position it as the cause of clinically recognizable symptoms requiring some sort of treatment or “cure.” Ann Cvetkovich, in contrast, takes a less pathologizing approach to what trauma can mean, one more attuned to the experiences of everyday life. She takes as her working definition of trauma “a social and cultural discourse that emerges in response to the demands of grappling with the psychic consequences of historical events.” [33] Elegies’ final section draws on understandings of trauma in order to ask audiences to “grapple” with a variety of perspectives on the events of 9/11. The two songs in the 9/11 section of Elegies represent trauma lyrically, musically, and through specific moments of physical performance. The first song, “Goodbye / Boom Boom,” features two stories: a husband calling home, presumably from the towers, to say goodbye to his wife and child, and the architect grieving for his buildings. Two singers, Keith Byron Kirk and Carollee Carmello, perform the bulk of the number, with Kirk playing the husband while Carmello sings for both his wife and the architect. Lyrically, the song’s narrative is a bit confusing; for example, the wife “turns the TV on, and scrolling down is a list of tiny names. The place he works is in flames,” suggesting that somehow the victims were being named even as the tragedy was still in progress. The husband, leaving a message for his wife, sings that their child was “the first of an expected four. I’m thinking we won’t have many more,” although since he knows he’s dying, “any” would seem a more appropriate word choice. [34] The slightly off-kilter moments in the lyrics may be disorienting for audience members, who are trying to make linear sense of this story as they have of the others in the show. I would argue, however that the evocation of this very disorientation is a skillful choice on Finn’s part, as it produces for the audience an echo of traumatic affect. Similarly, Carmello sings the wife’s part in third person: “ she turns the TV on”; “still her feet held firmer”; “when he hung up she went to bed,” but also performs her physically. When Carmello sings that “she turns the TV on,” for example, she lifts her hand as if turning on the television with a remote control, embodying the story even as she narrates it in third person. [35] The character cannot narrate the story as her own, a hallmark of trauma. Carmello’s affect throughout much of the song also offers a clear performance of trauma. While Kirk, singing in first person as the husband, performs looking at her, she does not face him at all. In fact, she spends much of the song frozen, staring into space or at the imagined telephone with almost no expression as her husband leaves his farewell message. The choice to play the sequence through stillness and a conspicuous lack of (obvious) emotion resonates with descriptions of traumatic affect, particularly in relationship to 9/11. [36] Certainly, the lyrics support this reading of her performance. As the machine plays the husband’s message, she cannot answer the phone and say her own goodbye because “her feet were made of lead.” She is helpless, paralyzed by the suddenness and immensity of loss—of trauma. Finally, at the close of the song, Kirk and Carmello join together to beg for a chance to try again, to “restart the day” and “say it never happened.” As their voices wrap around one another in a passionate plea, they ask in a harmonized wail, “why won’t the picture fit the frame?” In this moment, the foundation of trauma is laid bare for the audience: the events don’t, can’t, fit our frame of understanding. This section of Elegies also represents trauma through musical and vocal choices. In “Goodbye / Boom Boom,” the wife begins to show more emotion after her husband hangs up. The tempo of the piano accompaniment accelerates moving into this section, from a gentle, almost rolling sound to a more pounding, percussive rhythm. Carmello’s vocal quality becomes increasingly harsh as she sings fragments of thoughts, each punctuated with a “boom” and a strong chord from the piano: “Boom—her son at school. Boom, boom boom—life shattered,” before coming to the final musical breakdown. Rather than yells of anger or a legato ballad of sorrow, she breaks down into a series of four repeated “booms,” each accompanied by a crashing, almost dissonant chord. While she has sung the word “boom” throughout the song, it has primarily been smooth and relatively legato, with a tight, pure “oo” sound. In this section, the vowel becomes muddier, her opening consonant becomes more percussive, and her vocal quality becomes darker and almost guttural. It sounds, in many ways, like a child’s temper tantrum. This is not to say that it seems petulant, but rather that it captures that quality of childhood rage and despair that comes from an inability to understand the world around you, or to articulate your frustration—a description that also applies quite usefully to trauma. “Looking Up,” the second song in the section, opens with a lament for the towers and the hole they have left in the sky: “Looking up, seeing nothing but sky / In a blink of an eye / Where something once rose high, and higher—/ Now, nothing does.” This emphasis on the changed skyline is also part of the normative narrative around 9/11. Judith Greenberg, for example, emphasizes the importance of the towers themselves to the experience of 9/11 as a trauma: “The towers now overwhelm in their absence. . . . A profound dislocation is created when part of our landscape is missing.” [37] Betty Buckley performs this number as a solo; as she sings, long vocal rests throughout the song suggest the difficulty in finding words for the experience. As the song continues Buckley often sings on an “ahh” in between verses, and in the final section words fail entirely as she moves to syllables, “da da di,” etc. As she begins singing the nonsense syllables, Buckley gestures as though lost. Then, gradually, her delivery increases in confidence and clarity. There still aren’t words for what she needs to express, her performance suggests, but now she at least knows what she means , and feels comfortable expressing it through melody and dynamics. Although characters occasionally sing on nonsense syllables throughout the show, that technique is especially prevalent in this number. This failure of language emphasizes that it is simply not possible to tell this story literally. Even as Elegies follows normative discourses around 9/11 through its performance of trauma, however, it calls into question the (hetero)normative perspective implied by the idea of “national” trauma. Certainly, heteronormativity has been a structuring element in the normative narrative of 9/11; finding a place for queer subjects has been a challenge. [38] Judith Butler points out that “queer lives that vanished on September 11 were not publicly welcomed into the idea of national identity built into the obituary pages.” [39] Erasing queer bodies from national histories of any kind is obviously problematic, but removing them from traumatic histories, which typically call forth a kind of public grieving, has particularly disturbing implications. Removing queer people from the ranks of the grievable arguably represents a larger erasure. As Sara Ahmed, drawing on Butler’s work, suggests, “queer lives have to be recognized as lives in order to be grieved. In a way . . . queer losses cannot be admitted as forms of loss in the first place, as queer lives are not recognized as ‘lives to be lost.’” [40] Writing queer losses into history, then, implies a wider intervention; acknowledgment of loss in the past implies lives worth recognizing in the present. Scott Bravmann argues persuasively that, History helps circumvent the censorship, denial, and amnesia that have continued to inform so much of lesbian and gay existence. Public celebrations such as the commemorations of the Stonewall riots, the annual Harvey Milk memorial march in San Francisco, and various AIDS-related memory projects such as the Names Project Quilt provide gay men and lesbians with powerful collective forms of historical recollection that animate the present in a variety of complex ways. [41] Notably, the examples Bravmann cites are memorializations of arguably traumatic events: riots following systemic and often violent oppression; assassination; AIDS. The imperative for queer people to write ourselves back into history in meaningful ways, as lives worthy of recognition and grief, seems particularly strong in relationship to moments of violence, of loss—of trauma. While I am arguing that challenging the notion of queer losses as publicly ungrievable is a key part of Elegies’ overall project, in “Goodbye / Boom Boom,” Finn does not explicitly address the invisibility of queer victims of 9/11. The couple singing their goodbyes and their grief is heterosexual. Yet through performance—rather than narrative or text—this number implicitly honors queer lives and losses as well. Its ability to do so comes, in large part, from the lack of actor-character congruence in Elegies . The five performers all play multiple roles over the course of the evening, although Finn does not often make it easy to decipher the identity of a given character. In fact, only two songs feature a character explicitly naming him or herself. While careful attention and contextual clues suggest the narrator’s identity in most other songs, some openness remains. In a few songs, most notably “Infinite Joy,” it is impossible to identify the character with any certainty. Additionally, while the actors play multiple characters, characters are also played by multiple actors: for example, at least four, and possibly all five, of the performers play Finn at some point in the evening. This points to a further complication, Finn’s (and director Graciela Daniele’s) lack of adherence to traditional identity categories in parceling out roles. Of the five actor-singers, two are female and three are male. Four are white, while one of the men, Kirk, is African American. Kirk is actually the first of the performers to sing as Finn during the show, in the number “Mister Choi and Madame G.” The performers are also of varied ages, appearing to range from mid-to-late twenties to late fifties. Their sexual identities and religions are unmarked. The identity of “William Finn,” a white, Jewish, gay man in his fifties, then, is performed by several people over a range of varied identity positions, some congruent with the “real” individual, some visibly incongruent. This lack of actor-character congruence is the key to Elegies’ queering of 9/11; the actors in this song have played a variety of other characters over the course of the evening. Even within “Goodbye / Boom Boom,” Carmello sings as/for two characters: the wife and the architect. Doubling her in this way—and having her play the second character across gender (pronouns mark the architect as male)—reminds the audience of the multi-layered relationship between characters and actors in this production. Marvin Carlson writes eloquently about the ways audiences are haunted in their reception by elements from past performances, and notes that actors’ bodies are not exempt from this effect. In fact, an “actor’s new roles become, in a very real sense, ghosted by previous ones.” [42] If this is true in productions separated by long spans of time, it seems evident that this effect also operates within a single production when an actor is obviously playing multiple roles. Since “Goodbye / Boom, Boom” comes at the end of the production, Kirk and Carmello carry all the roles they have performed just under the surface of the ostensibly heteronormative couple they portray. So Carmello’s wife is haunted by Finn, as well as Monica; Kirk’s husband carries Arthur Salvatore and Finn just under his skin. Both Carmello and Kirk have performed as queer people and have sung in honor of queer people over the course of the evening, and that queerness haunts their performances here. At the end of “Goodbye / Boom, Boom,” Borle and Rupert leave their chairs to join Carmello and Kirk for a final chorus of “booms.” Bringing in the additional singers—not just as voices, but as visible bodies—further emphasizes that the scope of 9/11 was not limited to the nuclear family unit. Of course, Borle and Rupert also carry their various roles with them, bringing further heterogeneity to the moment. In the end, the array of bodies, and the residue they carry from the evening’s performance, reminds us that despite the familiar, heteronormative narrative, the events of 9/11 did not only affect those who fit into that mold. Arguably, the very notion of presenting a nuclear family unit (parents with a child), gay or straight, as the focus of grief can be problematic from a queer perspective. Eng, for example, suggests that this approach causes “certain deprivileged losses [to be] summarily erased, as alternative narratives of community and belonging, too, are diminished. . . . The rhetoric of the loss of ‘fathers and mothers,’ ‘sons and daughters,’ and ‘brothers and sisters’ attempts to trace a smooth alignment between the nation-state and the nuclear family.” [43] Eng’s point, that grieving a national tragedy through the figures of nuclear family members erases those who live outside those structures from the larger body of the nation, is an important one. But of course, even those who choose not to replicate those structures are still implicated in them, as queer people are also sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, and even fathers and mothers. As Ahmed notes, “Queer lives do not suspend the attachments that are crucial to the reproduction of heteronormativity, and this does not diminish ‘queerness,’ but intensifies the work it can do.” Highlighting “the gap between the script and the body, including the bodily form of ‘the family,’” she suggests, may invoke a certain cognitive dissonance that helps point out the fallibility of the “script(s)” followed by normative society. [44] In Elegies , beginning with a heterosexual couple and their nuclear family unit allows space to acknowledge the normative narrative, while leaving room for a queer re-imagining—a useful reparative project. Elegies advocates for the inclusion of gay and lesbian bodies and lives in histories of national traumas, and encourages audiences to question the idea that historical events and narratives were inevitable by performing how things might have been, as well as how they were. Tellingly, while the text and score of this musical contain the seeds for its queer interventions, it is in performance that those interventions find their full expression: without the actors’ bodies and voices, and their engagement with the audience, Elegies would be unable to fully accomplish its progressive work. Future productions may also find ways to make other, extra-textual losses that occurred after the musical’s moment of creation part of the experience as well. For example, when I attended the Los Angeles premiere of Elegies in 2004, the show was performed as the closing event for the Canon Theater. Demolished following the production, the Canon was one of the few remaining mid-sized theatres in its part of Los Angeles. While the audience knew the event was a goodbye to the theatre, this was also staged in the performance. The final chorus of “goodbyes” were sung as the back wall and stage door were revealed, emphasizing the soon-to-be emptiness of the space. In this moment, production choices expanded Elegies’ repertoire of grievable losses to include a cultural space, and to add the history of the Canon Theater to the histories memorialized onstage. Through performance, Elegies enacts a reparative history as it gently reminds audiences that there are also other narratives available for telling the (hi)story of 9/11, and that queer losses incurred that day must also be reckoned with. By placing that performance alongside a wide range of losses over the course of the musical, Finn also makes another important reparative move. By juxtaposing 9/11 with other losses, from the personally world-changing loss of his mother, to the more peripheral loss of an English teacher whose name we never know, to a community ritual decimated by AIDS, to other spaces or losses, like the Canon, perhaps yet to occur, Elegies queers our understanding of 9/11 as a unique event requiring particular reactions. Without minimizing the tragedy or the trauma, he encourages us to place it into a broader context: one grief among many, and one we might respond to in any number of ways. This approach, I think, resonates with Jill Dolan’s moving consideration of the role of empathy in performance and in performances’ response to tragedy. Calling for “the space of performance [to] be harnessed to imagine love instead of hatred,” she expresses profound hope that performance can “continue to grace our lives with meaning, generosity, understanding, and memory, however provisional and fleeting” even—or perhaps especially—in the face of a tragedy like 9/11. [45] Elegies’ reparative response to the events of 9/11 and to the project of public memorialization more broadly seems to me to do precisely this work, encouraging us to share in Finn’s love for these people, places, and things, and to make more complex, nuanced, and potentially hopeful sense of traumas and tragedies endured, and perhaps those still to come. References [1] First performed on Sunday and Monday nights at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center (on the set of the production then taking place on the Newhouse stage), Elegies featured five performers: Christian Borle, Betty Buckley, Carolee Carmello, Keith Byron Kirk, and Michael Rupert. It was directed by Graciela Daniele. Performance descriptions are taken from my viewing of the archival recording of this production, housed at the Theatre on Film and Tape Archive at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Elegies: A Song Cycle . Dir. Graciela Daniele. Perf. Michael Rupert, Keith Byron Kirk, Carolee Carmello, Betty Buckley, and Christian Borle. (Lincoln Center Theater. Mitzi E. Newhouse, New York. Rec. 18 April 2003). Theatre on Film and Tape Archive, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York. NCOV 2724. [2] Falsettos is a compilation with revisions of Finn’s earlier off-Broadway trilogy of one-act musicals: In Trousers (1979), March of the Falsettos (1981), and Falsettoland (1990), with the bulk of the material coming from the latter two shows. [3] Michael Warner, introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory , ed. Michael Warner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xxvi. [4] I use the term public here not solely in the sense of a theatrical public, which Michael Warner describes as “a concrete audience, a crowd witnessing itself in visible space” that “has a sense of totality. . . . A performer on stage knows where her public is, how big it is, where its boundaries are, and what the time of its common existence is.” While a specific performance of Elegies certainly creates such a finite public, as a musical the show as a whole has a far broader reach, since people who may never see a live performance can obtain the original cast album. It can be taken up by anyone who, for any reason, finds themselves hailed to pick it up and listen to it, and there is no way to know the parameters of the public formed through it. For this reason, I consider Elegies as constituting what Warner describes as a textual public, one which is “in principle open ended” and that “exist[s] by virtue of [its] address.” Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 50, 155. [5] Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, introduction to 9/11 in American Culture , ed. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (Walnut Creek: Altamira Press, 2003), xvi. [6] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction is About You,” in Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction , ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 10. [7] Ibid., 17. [8] Ibid., 24-25. [9] Tavia Nyong’o, “Period Rush: Affective Transfers in Recent Queer Art and Performance,” Theatre History Studies 28 (2008): 45. [10] For more on the relationship between performance, history, and temporality, see Charlotte Canning, “Feminist Performance as Feminist Historiography,” Theatre Survey 45, no. 2 (2004); and Freddie Rokem, Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press , 2000). [11] David Eng, “The Value of Silence,” Theatre Journal 54, no. 1 (2002): 94. [12] See, for example, Ann Cvetkovitch, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 47; and Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York, Routledge, 2004), 159-161. [13] David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, introduction to Loss: The Politics of Mourning , ed. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 4. [14] Stacy Wolf, A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 33. See also D. A. Miller, Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). [15] William Finn, Selections from Elegies: A Song Cycle (n.p.: Alfred Publishing, 2006), 22-23. [16] Ibid., 59-60. [17] Reviewer Suzanne Bixby, writing about a Boston production, makes a similar argument, declaring that “‘Anytime (I Am There)’ says everything there is to say about how we stay connected to people who are gone from our lives – and how they stay connected to us.” Suzanne Bixby, “Rev. of Elegies: A Song Cycle , by William Finn. Speakeasy Stage Company, Boston Center for the Arts,” Talkin’ Broadway , 10 May 2007, http://www.talkinbroadway.com/regional/boston/boston78.html, (accessed 6 February 2015). [18] Finn qtd. in Richard Ouzounian, “Alive with the Sound of Music: Triple Tony Award Winning Composer Captivates in the Way He Sees Dead People,” The Toronto Star , 8 February 2007, http://www.thestar.com/article/178862 , (accessed 6 February 2015). [19] Quotations from Elegies that aren’t available in the published vocal selections are my transcriptions from the cast album. William Finn, Elegies: A Song Cycle (New York: Varese Sarabonde, 2003), Original Cast Album. [20] Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 37. [21] According to his 1995 New York Times obituary, Bolek Greczynski died of non-Hodgkins lymphoma, a type of cancer often found in AIDS patients. Although the word AIDS is never used in describing his death, AIDS has already been brought up in earlier songs and so is present in the audience’s mind. It seems likely that most audience members will read the lingering death of a gay man, who continually “grew thinner” as his illness progressed, as AIDS related. [22] Douglas Crimp, Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 137. [23] Finn, Selections from Elegies , 20. [24] Ibid., 16-17. [25] I want to thank Ann Cvetkovich for reminding me of this fact. [26] Crimp, Melancholia , 196. [27] The title also echoes Alan Jackson’s country song written just after 9/11, “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning).” The similarity in titles suggests a connection between the personal loss Finn is honoring and the more “public” events that he will attend to next. [28] Harry J. Elam, Jr., in “A Forum on Theatre and Tragedy: A Response to September 11, 2001” Theatre Journal 54 no. 1 (2002): 102. [29] Ann Cvetkovich, “Trauma Ongoing,” in Trauma at Home after 9/11 , ed. Judith Greenberg (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 61. [30] Dori Laub, “September 11, 2001—an Event without a Voice,” in Trauma at Home after 9/11 , ed. Judith Greenberg (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 204. [31] Cathy Caruth, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 7. [32] Irene Kacandes, “9/11/01 = 1/27/01: The Changed Posttraumatic Self,” in Trauma at Home after 9/11 , ed. Judith Greenberg (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 171. [33] Cvetkovich, An Archive, 18. [34] Finn, Selections from Elegies , 95. [35] Although this performance strategy—narrating a character’s action in the third person—resonates with Brechtian acting techniques, in the case of Carmello’s performance the distancing effect is twofold. The primary image for the audience is a character distanced from her life due to a traumatic event. The more typically Brechtian notion of distance between actor and character is also potentially present, but less focal. [36] Laub, for example, claims that “following the events of September 11, we witnessed an instantaneous sense of paralysis, a helpless confusion.” Laub, “September 11,” 205. [37] Judith Greenberg, “Wounded New York,” in Trauma at Home after 9/11 , ed. Judith Greenberg (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 25. [38] Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 157. [39] Butler, Precarious , 35. [40] Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 156. [41] Scott Bravmann, Queer Fictions of the Past: History, Culture, and Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 4. [42] Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theater as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 67. It is worth noting that the performer who becomes most associated with Finn in the present moment over the course of the show is Michael Rupert, who originated the lead role of “Marvin” in Finn’s Falsettos —a show which deals with the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. Rupert’s presence in this production capitalizes on this ghosting effect, as the echo of Marvin in his performance will, for many audience members, make the presence of AIDS even more obvious than it is textually. [43] Eng, “The Value of Silence,” 90. [44] Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 152. [45] Jill Dolan, in “A Forum on Theatre and Tragedy,” 106-07. Footnotes About The Author(s) MICHELLE DVOSKIN is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre & Dance at Western Kentucky University. She has been published in The Oxford Handbook of American Drama and The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical , as well as Broadway: An Encyclopedia of Theater and American Culture . Her current research interests focus on musical theatre as queer historical practice, as well as the queer feminist potential of the diva in musicals. Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Phoebe Rumsey Editorial Assistant: Fabian Escalona Advisory Board: Bill Demastes Amy E. Hughes Jorge Huerta Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Beth Osborne Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Esther Kim Lee Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Refusing the Reproductive Imperative: Sex, Death, and the Queer Future in Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's boom "Just Saying Our Goodbyes": Elegies' Queer Interventions into the History of 9/11 James Purdy as Playwright: A Retrospective Reading of A Day After the Fair and The Paradise Circus Sur la Pointe on the Prairie: Giuseppina Morlacchi and the Urban Problem in the Frontier Melodrama Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

In this panel discussion we explore the impact of artificial intelligence on the performing arts industry. Curated by Kenneth Collins, participants to be announced soon. PRELUDE Festival 2023 PANEL AI in Performance Kenneth Collins, Annie Dorsen, Andrew Scoville, Marianne Weems, and others Discussion English 60 minutes 6:00PM EST Friday, October 13, 2023 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All In this panel discussion we explore the impact of artificial intelligence on the performing arts industry. Curated by Kenneth Collins. Participants: Andrew Scoville, Annie Dorsen, Marianne Weems, and others. Content / Trigger Description: Kenneth Collins is a transdisciplinary artist, working at the intersection of digital media, performance, cinema, and installation. He got his start as an artist in New York City working for Richard Foreman at The Ontological-Hysteric Theater in the East Village. He has since been a resident artist at Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric, Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center, the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, SUNY Buffalo’s Creative Arts Initiative, and was a member of Lincoln Center Theater’s Directors Lab. Collins is best known for his work with Temporary Distortion, a non-profit arts organization he formed in New York City in 2000 with the mission to create experimental work that is accessible to all. Temporary Distortion (named one of the “Best New York Theater companies” by TimeOut NY Magazine) has maintained its roots in downtown NYC as an invested stakeholder in the local community for over 20 years, while also performing at notable venues around the world. The group explores the tensions and overlaps existing between the practices of theatre, cinema, music, and media art. Together with Collins, they continually work across disciplines to create performances, installations, films, albums, and works for the stage that have been shown in over 25 cities in Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Greece, Hungary, Japan, Russia, South Korea, Switzerland, and the United States. Academic essays discussing his work with Temporary Distortion have been published in Yale’s Theater, NYU’s The Drama Review, UCSD’s TheatreForum, Queen Mary’s Contemporary Theatre Review, American Theater Magazine, Chance Magazine, and other industry leading periodicals. His work is also discussed in the books: Performance & Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field, Corps en Scène: L’acteur et les Technologies (Bodies on stage: Acting Confronted by Technologies), Utopii performative: Artisti Radicali ai Scenei Americane in Secolul 21 (Performative Utopias: Radical Artists on the American 21st Century Stage), Media Archaeology and Intermedial Performance: Deep Time of the Theatre, Every Leader is an Artist, Theatre Today, and the popular introduction to theatre textbook, Theatre, Brief (13th Edition). His plays and writing on the arts have been published in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Yale’s Theater, UCSD’s TheatreForum, and Chance Magazine. Kenneth Collins is Assistant Professor of Media Arts Production in the Department of Film and Media Arts at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Annie Dorsen is a director and writer whose works explore the intersection of algorithmic art and live performance. Most recently, her piece Prometheus Firebringer was presented at Theater For a New Audience. Other algorithmic performance projects, including Infinite Sun (2018), The Great Outdoors (2017), Yesterday Tomorrow (2015), A Piece Of Work (2013) and Hello Hi There(2010), have been widely presented in the US and internationally. The script for A Piece Of Work was published by Ugly Duckling Presse, and she has contributed essays for The Drama Review, Theatre Magazine, Etcetera, Frakcija, and Performing Arts Journal (PAJ). She is the co-creator of the 2008 Broadway musical Passing Strange which she also directed. Dorsen has received a 2019 MacArthur Fellowship, a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2014 Herb Alpert Award for the Arts in Theatre. Andrew Scoville is a director specializing in immersive layouts, technological landscapes, and hybrid-genre theater-making. He has a passion for bringing science ideas into theatrical spaces. He recently directed “Theater of the Mind” a multi-room theater/neuroscience experience by David Byrne and Mala Gaonkar at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. He was commissioned by The New York Hall of Science to create “Escape the Planet” a family-friendly interactive STEAM experience based on the research of astronomer Dr. Moiya McTier. He has created two distinct projects with Bina48, a humanoid robot, consisting of a bust-like head and shoulders mounted on a frame, developed by Hanson Robotics. Marianne Weems is a director of theater, opera, and mixed reality performance, and artistic director of the award-winning New York-based performance and media ensemble The Builders Association. Since 1994, The Builders Association has created a significant body of work at the forefront of combining media and performance. They have created many original large-scale productions and worked with some unexpected collaborators including the architects Diller + Scofidio, The National Center for Super Computing Applications, and the South Asian arts collective motiroti. Since 1994 their productions have been presented in New York at BAM (five premieres), Lincoln Center, New York Theater Workshop, the Public Theater, St Anne’s Warehouse, the Guggenheim and Whitney Museums, and other local venues. Internationally their work has been produced at the Barbican Centre in London, Maison des Arts Paris, Melbourne Festival, the Romaeuropa Festival, the Festival Iberoamericano de Bogota, the Singapore Arts Festival, and many other venues. The company has toured globally to over 85 venues in the last 25 years (www.thebuildersassociation.org ). Weems has also worked in various creative roles with Taryn Simon, The Wooster Group, Susan Sontag, David Byrne, The V-Girls, and many others. She serves on the board of Art Matters, a modest but fierce foundation that created Visual Aids, the National Campaign for Freedom of Expression, and the Arts Forward Fund. Weems is a professor in Digital Arts and New Media (DANM) and Performance, Play & Design (PPD) at the University of California, Santa Cruz. From 2008-2014 she was the head of Graduate Directing at the School of Drama at Carnegie Mellon University and she was the lead faculty of a Carnegie Mellon arts and technology initiative based in New York City. She is the co-author with Shannon Jackson of The Builders Association: Performance and Media in Contemporary Theater (MIT Press Fall 2015) and Art Matters: How the Culture Wars Changed America (NYU Press 2000.). Current members of the Builders Association include: Moe Angelos performer/writer, Dan Dobson sound design, James Gibbs dramaturg/writer, Larry Shea media architect, Austin Switzer video design, and Jennifer Tipton lighting design. Shannon Sindelar, Producing Director. Photo credits: Kenneth Collins. Photo courtesy of the artist. Annie Dorsen. Credit by Stephen Dodd. Andrew Scoville. Credit by Billy Bustamante. Marianne Weems. Photo courtesy of the artist. Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Watch The Jacket by Mathijs Poppe at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. What begins as an intimate portrait of Jamal Hindawi — a Palestinian artist doing political theater in Beirut’s Shatila Refugee camp — transforms into a captivating journey. We discover a Lebanon rarely seen — one where hope persists despite hardship and where community transcends crisis. His story weaves together the profound connection to his Palestinian homeland with an intimate exploration of a country and its people learning to navigate an uncertain present.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents The Jacket At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Mathijs Poppe Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Friday May 16th at 3:55pm. RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. You may RSVP above to get a reminder about the Segal Film Festival in your inbox. Country Netherlands Language Arabic Running Time 71 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film What begins as an intimate portrait of Jamal Hindawi — a Palestinian artist doing political theater in Beirut’s Shatila Refugee camp — transforms into a captivating journey. We discover a Lebanon rarely seen — one where hope persists despite hardship and where community transcends crisis. His story weaves together the profound connection to his Palestinian homeland with an intimate exploration of a country and its people learning to navigate an uncertain present. About The Artist(s) Mathijs Poppe, born in 1990 in Ghent (Belgium), graduated in 2017 with great distinction from School of Arts Ghent (KASK) with OURS IS A COUNTRY OF WORDS. For this medium length documentary, he worked together with a couple of families in Shatila, a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, to tell a story that balances on the thin line between fiction and documentary. The film was selected for Visions du Réel, screened at numerous international film festivals around the world and got awarded with a Wildcard by the Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF). Since then, Mathijs has developed several film and video projects as a director, cameraman and editor. At the moment Mathijs is working on his first feature film, THE JACKET, in which he will continue and deepen his collaboration with the Palestinian community in Lebanon. Get in touch with the artist(s) rebecca@plutofilm.de and follow them on social media https://www.plutofilm.de/films/the-jacket/0092 Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse

Etudes can be considered part tribunal of evidence — guided and constrained by the statutory powers of the “Interrogator” — and part ritualistic psychodynamic investigation of a sovereign polity toward emotional and restorative justice involving a collective of accused citizenry. This new multimedia performance in development by Carl Hancock Rux, with dramaturgy by Jocelyn Clarke, creates a philosophical convening of characters engaged in a recalling of crimes against humanity and its effect on their personal, historical and psychological development - as they endeavor a world of racial healing and sustainable equity as emotional justice, and a new racial healing language to help us do our emotional work. This emotional work means unlearning the language and varying rituals of whiteness - a narrative that centers white people, particularly white men, no matter the deadly cost and consequence to all women and to global Black and Brown people. PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE Etudes Carl Hancock Rux, Mabou Mines Theater, Multimedia, Performance Art English 20 minutes 7:30PM EST Friday, October 13, 2023 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All Etudes can be considered part tribunal of evidence — guided and constrained by the statutory powers of the “Interrogator” — and part ritualistic psychodynamic investigation of a sovereign polity toward emotional and restorative justice involving a collective of accused citizenry. This new multimedia performance in development by Carl Hancock Rux, with dramaturgy by Jocelyn Clarke, creates a philosophical convening of characters engaged in a recalling of crimes against humanity and its effect on their personal, historical and psychological development - as they endeavor a world of racial healing and sustainable equity as emotional justice, and a new racial healing language to help us do our emotional work. This emotional work means unlearning the language and varying rituals of whiteness - a narrative that centers white people, particularly white men, no matter the deadly cost and consequence to all women and to global Black and Brown people. Development support for this piece has been provided by the National Endowment for the Arts and Venturous Theater Fund, a fund of Tides Foundation. Content / Trigger Description: Carl Hancock Rux (writer/performer) is an American poet, award-winning playwright, novelist, essayist, recording artist, actor, theater director, radio journalist, published author, and a frequent collaborator in the fields of film, modern dance, and contemporary art. The New York Times heralded Rux as "a breathlessly inventive multimedia artist." Rux is the author of several books including the Village Voice Literary Prize-winning collection of poetry, Pagan Operetta, the novel, Asphalt, and the Obie Award-winning play, Talk. His music has been released internationally on several labels including Sony/550, Thirsty Ear, and Giant Step. Rux is also Associate Artistic Director/Curator-in-Residence at Harlem Stage. He is the recipient of numerous awards including the Doris Duke Award for New Works, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Prize, the Bessie Award, the Alpert Award in the Arts, and a 2019 Global Change Maker award by WeMakeChange.org. Rux is also an associate artist with Compagnia de Colombari (an experimental theater company founded by Karin Coonrod); a Multidisciplinary Editor to the Mass Review at UMass Amherst; Yale University Hayden Fellow; an Associate & Advisory Artist at the Billie Holiday Theater and an Associate Artist with Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts where, most recently, he has created several multidisciplinary works; Inaugural Performing & Associate Artist at Joe's Pub at the Joseph Papp Public Theater; a member of the New York Historic Landmarks Preservation Center; Faculty Emeritus at the California Institute of the Arts and Distinguished Faculty Member at Hollins University. Rux's archives are housed at the Billy Rose Theater Division of the New York Public Library and the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art, and the Film and Video/Theater and Dance Library of the California Institute of the Arts. Jocelyn Clarke (dramaturg) is a freelance dramaturg and writer. He is currently Theatre Adviser to the Arts Council of Ireland and dramaturg at the American Voices New Play Institute at Arena Stage in D.C. He has taught dramaturgy at the John Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts, Columbia University and Trinity College Dublin. He was the Commissioning and Literary Manager of the Abbey Theatre for four years, and lead theatre critic with The Sunday Tribune for nine years. He is an associate artist with The Civilians in New York, and he is a member of the artistic staff of the Sundance Institute’s Theatre Lab. He has worked as a dramaturg on several productions by The Blue Raincoat Theatre in Sligo, and has written five adaptations for the company – ALICE IN WONDERLAND, ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, THE THIRD POLICEMAN, AT SWIM TWO BIRDS and THE POOR MOUTH. He has written six plays for Anne Bogart and the SITI Company – BOB, ALICE’S ADVENTURES UNDERGROUND, ROOM, SCORE, ANTIGONE, and TROJAN WOMEN (AFTER EURIPIDES). His productions for children and young people include an adaptation of Neil Gaiman and David McKean’s graphic novel THE DAY I SWAPPED MY DAD FOR A GOLDFISH, THE LITTLE DEER, THE CRIMSON FLY & THE SWAN CHILDREN for the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, and FINN for Mabou Mines in New York. Mabou Mines is an artist-driven experimental theater collective generating original works and re-imagined adaptations of classics. Work is created through multi-disciplinary, technologically inventive collaborations among its members and a wide world of contemporary filmmakers, composers, writers, musicians, choreographers, puppeteers and visual artists. Mabou Mines fosters the next generation of artists through mentorship and residencies. The company was born out of the influences and inspirations of Europe’s seminal avant-garde theater collectives. Before arriving in New York in 1970, the would-be ensemble of Mabou Mines spent five years in Europe observing and studying the working methods of the Berliner Ensemble, the politics of the exiled Living Theater and the demands of physical training with Jerzy Grotowski. Since that time, Mabou Mines has created more than 120 works, including “The Lost Ones,” “Mabou Mines Lear, “ “Peter and Wendy,” “Mabou Mines DollHouse,” and “La Divina Caricatura” and “Lucia’s Chapters,” and has been honored with more than 100 major awards, among them 20 OBIEs, including for General Excellence & Sustained Achievement, MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award, France’s Chevalier Des Artes et Lettres, The Edwin Booth Award, Edinburgh’s Golden Herald Angel Awards, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Fellowship, the Elliot Norton Award, three USA Fellowships and many, many more. The current co-Artistic Directors include Karen Kandel, Mallory Catlett, Carl Hancock Rux and Sharon Ann Fogarty. carlhancockrux.com, @carlhancockrux, maboumines.org, facebook.com/mabouminescompany, @maboumines Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Lynn Deboeck Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 1 Visit Journal Homepage Beyond Text: Theater and Performance in Print After 1900 Lynn Deboeck By Published on December 11, 2023 Download Article as PDF BEYOND TEXT: THEATER AND PERFORMANCE IN PRINT AFTER 1900. Jennifer Buckley. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019; Pp. 278. Beyond Text: Theater and Performance in Print After 1900 challenges the historiography of print media as we have known it and brings together text and performance practices as symbiotic, rather than mutually exclusive. Taking on the rich and contradictory history of “killing off the Book,” Beyond Text calls out anti-textual artists and their use of print media—not to emphasize hypocrisy, but rather to illuminate text’s enduring life in and around the performance art worlds. Jennifer Buckley highlights that the evolution of text has largely been recorded within essentialist narratives that have made trouble by assuming text to be the opposite of performance because it“ precedes, in time, the process of theatrical production; because writers accord it artistic precedence over production; and because its traditional medium is durable and static while performance is ephemeral and mutable” (10). The physical book of Beyond Text is hard-covered, with the image of Carolee Schneemann on the front, perusing a book with her cat, Kitch, on her lap. The binding of this tome creaks at its initial openings, almost as if it has the first line in our interactions. The nine-inch by six-inch pages, with their copious open margins, allow the reader easier access and a bountiful opportunity for note-taking—indeed, it seems to be encouraged. Rather than simply negating what has been documented about print media’s history and its relationship with performance, Buckley’s deep analysis of each performance artist or group she covers allows us as readers to make the journey beyond text with her by taking up how theatre makers have interacted with and made bookworks or engaged with text-based formats. Her arguments include that the avant-garde anti-textualist movement that is often brought forward in discussions of late twentieth century performance is not just limited but is actively limiting what we can know about our own histories because it has not“encompass[ed] the book arts, which are experiencing yet another boom in yet another era when print is supposed to be dying” (24). The book is divided into five chapters with an introduction and a coda. In her introduction, Buckley uses Big Dance Theater’s bookwork Another Telepathic Thing as an entry point for how we have understood the relationship (or, perhaps more accurately, disdain) between performance art mediums and print matter (she bristles at the exclusionist term ‘the book’). In so doing, she simultaneously calls out those of us who have historically ignored print practices and their role in performance and reveals that in fact, bookworks are experiencing yet another explosion in the here and now (one of many since 1900). Each chapter addresses, in chronological order, the evolution of performance-makers’ relationship with text and print. In chapter 1,“A Place for Seeing,” Beyond Text takes up Edward Gordon Craig’s vision of what the theatre could be and the bookworks he created. Buckley establishes the trajectory of text as non-linear with Craig’s banishment of playwrights and his contradictory use of much older media, such as wood engraving. She examines Craig’s written intentions to “exhibit" and “show” actors what he wanted in performance, rather than resort to speech since he saw words as having only “technical” status—though perhaps useful for notation. Chapter 2, “Scoring Theatre,” takes the notation idea from Craig and connects it to Lothar Schreyer’s ideas around how to score theatre in a way that others could reasonably emulate. Schreyer’s system, Spielgang , was an attempt to do this and Buckley dissects the technique, revealing how it was used in specific performances and how it affected art writ large in its elevation of the notation-system’s use to a spiritual endeavor intended to help create reproducible community works ( Gemeinschaftswerk ). Chapter 3 shifts forward in time yet again, but in this instance, Buckley pulls the thread of community works forward to look at a theatre collective in lieu of individuals. The Living Theatre and their publication negotiations are detailed in this chapter, highlighting how ironically Julian Beck and Judith Malina used the printed works they published commercially to establish their agenda of anti-texualist and anarchist performance principals. Chapter 4 returns to an individual, Carolee Schneemann, and is titled “The Body in the Book” for her ability to“see and articulate the conceptual and material intersections between her visual artworks, performances, and publications” (126). From Schneemann’s Interior Scroll to her work with the Beau Geste Press, Buckley traverses the evolution of print media through the microcosm of a single performer/art-maker to demonstrate a collaborative kinetic aesthetics that invites participation from the reader/viewer. Chapter 5 also investigates the use of participation of spectators in the immersive work of Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s Códices . Buckley considers how his codices serve as border sites and kits for participants to encounter the “other” in “participatory identity rituals” as “good bordercrossers” and as “models for the usefully creative appropriation of others’art” (195). In her Coda, Buckley firmly asserts (which, by this point, she no longer has to) that print matter will have a future relationship with performance, the shape of which she does not wish to speculate about. It is telling that a full 15% of the book—the remainder after the Coda and before the bibliography—is notes. For those with the intention, time, and appetite to delve into this printed work further, Buckley provides fodder from her extensive archival research. Beyond Text teaches that text work and live performance are“no longer locked in a Darwinian struggle for precedence, [but] coexist under the rubric of the performatic...” (197) This monograph provides a valuable contribution to the fields of Performance Studies, Print Media and disciplines that straddle the two. As I closed this book, my thoughts drifted back to one of Craig’s performance descriptions:“‘And then a pause... a perfect balanced thought is poised before us, and all is still... All is accomplished. Silence. All rests...’” (36) Revelatory and well-researched, Beyond Text ends with so much potential energy vibrating within and beyond its covers and performance histories—waiting to be experienced again and again. References Buckley, Jennifer. Beyond Text: Theater and Performance in Print After 1900. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019. Footnotes About The Author(s) Dr. Lynn Deboeck is an Associate Professor of Theatre and Gender Studies at the University of Utah. She earned her PhD in Theatre and a Graduate Certificate in Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies from the University of Kansas. Her research interests include reproductive women on stage, gender and representation in performance, pedagogy in higher education and feminist theatre. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Community Circles and Love Triangles: Gun Violence and Belonging in Oklahoma! and West Side Story Decommissioning the School-to-Prison Pipeline: Anna Deavere Smith’s Notes from the Field and Dominique Morisseau’s Pipeline More than a Props List: Redefining Material Culture as Survival and Pleasure in Lynn Nottage’s Ruined The Politics of Trance: Victoria Woodhull and the Radical Reform of Platform Mediumship Beyond Text: Theater and Performance in Print After 1900 Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theatre Made Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era Performance in the Zócalo: Constructing History, Race, and Identity in Mexico's Central Square from the Colonial Era to the Present Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Curtis Russell Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 1 Visit Journal Homepage Musical Theatre Books Curtis Russell By Published on December 11, 2017 Download Article as PDF Actor-Musicianship . Jeremy Harrison. London, New York: Bloomsbury, 2016; Pp. 220. The Complete Book of 1940s Broadway Musicals . Dan Dietz. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015; Pp. 591. Musical Theatre Song . Stephen Purdy. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2016; Pp. 284. A relative newcomer to theatre studies, musical theatre scholarship has proven a fertile and comprehensive field of inquiry, as three recent publications illustrate. Though none is a monograph, each makes an important contribution. Dan Dietz’s The Complete Book of 1940s Broadway Musicals is a historical compendium that will prove a useful source for historians, practitioners, and enthusiasts, while the other two books, Actor-Musicianship by Jeremy Harrison and Musical Theatre Song by Stephen Purdy, are how-to guides for performers, each jumping off from a clear historical perspective. Including The Complete Book of 2000s Broadway Musicals , published this year, Dan Dietz has now chronicled seven decades of Broadway musical theatre history. This period doesn’t represent the entirety of the genre, but it does encompass its crystallization as a quintessential American art form, and The Complete Book of 1940s Broadway Musicals covers the decade often seen as, to use Dietz’s own word, “seminal” (xi) in that development. In his introduction, Dietz repeats the common assertion that Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! (1943) represents the institutionalization of the so-called integrated musical (though he doesn’t use the term), which “utilized plot, character, song, and dance to create a unified evening of storytelling” (xi). Scott McMillin, David Savran, and others have refuted this idea, pointing to the Kern-Bolton-Wodehouse Princess Theatre musicals of the 1910s, Sissle and Blake’s Shuffle Along (1921), Kern and Hammerstein’s Show Boat (1927), and shows with music and lyrics by the Gershwin brothers such as Girl Crazy (1930) and Of Thee I Sing (1931) as earlier examples of the integrated form. As Dietz’s volume makes clear, however, no decade prior to the 1940s produced such a large number of canonical productions. These include Cabin in the Sky (1940), Pal Joey (1940), Lady in the Dark (1941), Carousel (1945), Annie Get Your Gun (1946), Street Scene (1947), Brigadoon (1947), Finian’s Rainbow (1947), Kiss Me, Kate (1948), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1949), and early “concept musicals” like Allegro (1947) and Love Life (1948). These shows, as well as the other 261 musicals that opened on Broadway during the 1940s, receive the same detailed consideration in The Complete Book of 1940s Broadway Musicals as in Dietz’s other historical volumes. Listed in chronological order, each entry includes the following information about the musical: theatre name, opening and closing dates, number of performances, advertising tag lines, creative team and performer names, number of acts, setting information for book musicals, musical number titles, source material information where applicable, details on revivals or London transfers, award information, and publication and recording information. Most of this data is, of course, available online, but nowhere is it obtainable in such concise, accessible fashion. What sets the series apart, though, is Dietz’s expository critical writing for each entry. His mini-essays summarize critical reception of the plays and offer historical context. Unfortunately, there isn’t much social or analytical commentary, which would be generative for a decade that included so many shows that broke new ground for how they represented race and gender. In addition, the tome features a bibliography and several appendices, including chronologies by season and classification (revue, book musical, etc.), a list of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas performed during the period, a discography, a list of other productions of the decade that employed music, a list of published scripts, and a grouping of shows performed by venue. If the chronicle doesn’t in any way trouble the notion of what qualifies as a “Broadway musical,” the sheer amount of information on display and ease of use justifies its value. Jeremy Harrison’s much slimmer, practice-oriented Actor-Musicianship also employs a historical lens, but explores a performance convention rather than a specific time period. Exemplified in recent American theatrical production by John Doyle’s Broadway stagings of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd (2005) and Company (2006), the phenomenon of the actor-musician, according to Harrison, is as old as the theatre itself. He traces its contemporary iteration in chapter one, “From the Bubble to Broadway,” though to the “counter-theatre movement” embodied by Joan Littlewood and Ewan MacColl’s Theatre Union (later Theatre Workshop) in 1936. There is an understandable British bias to the book; Harrison is a British performer-scholar currently running the Acting and Actor Musicianship program at Rose Bruford College in London. Littlewood and MacColl, who had extensive experience in the British folk tradition, sought to reverse what they saw as a separation of actor and musician, “informed by the gradual emergence of specialism in the processes of theatre making” (1). Harrison traces a line from the Theatre Workshop to the work of Glen Walford’s Bubble Theatre in 1972, which toured to London’s outer boroughs with The Blitz Show . Like the Theatre Workshop’s Oh, What a Lovely War! , The Blitz Show had an explicitly populist political agenda and was designed to appeal to both working- and middle-class audiences. Harrison identifies the guitar-playing actor-musicians in The Blitz Show as being key to its populist appeal, because of the conceit’s “simplicity and connection” (5). John Doyle’s actor-musician staging of classic American musicals at the Watermill Theatre in Newbury emerges in Harrison’s narrative as central to the institutionalization of actor-musicianship, previously a marginal, leftist practice, as “the British take on the American musical theatre form” (26). In chapter two, “Jack and Master,” Harrison attempts a definition of the actor-musician: is she “an actor who plays a musical instrument; or is she a musician who acts” (37)? For him, this question is of more pragmatic than phenomenological importance because it affects labor conditions and contracts, and the ways in which a performer positions herself relative to the “pervasive notion of specialism that has shaped the processes and pedagogies that apply to theatre and production” (37). He doesn’t come down firmly on either side, but he acknowledges that this is a much more pressing issue in the UK than in the US; in the United States “musicianship has simply become another skill to acquire or brush up” (56). Chapters three through six, filled with exercises developed by Harrison over the course of his long career as an actor-musician, make up the practical portion of the book: “Training the Actor-Musician: An Introduction,” “Directing Actor-Musicianship,” “Choreographing Actor-Musicianship,” and “Musically Directing Actor-Musicianship.” Chapter seven, “A Young Theatre,” is somewhat capacious despite being only a few pages long. It is a grab bag of ideas that didn’t fit elsewhere in the book, looking at youth theatre case studies, beatboxing as actor-musicianship, and Philip Auslander’s Liveness as an argument for actor-musicianship. Actor-musicianship is clearly making inroads in professional practice; last season it was an essential component of both staging and story in two new musicals on Broadway, School of Rock and Bandstand . Harrison’s volume should then be of interest to anyone studying, teaching, or training in contemporary acting practice. Musical Theatre Song , by Stephen Purdy, is subtitled “A Comprehensive Course in Selection, Preparation, and Presentation for the Modern Performer.” The book also begins with a historical survey, this time of the musical theatre genre itself, from 19 th century minstrelsy up to the 2013-14 Broadway season. Its title gives a good indication of Purdy’s verbose, welcoming tone: “Introduction to Song Selection and Historical Context: What You Should Know (and Why You Should Care).” Harrison makes the same specious argument as Dietz does about Oklahoma! , but this chapter, nearly a quarter of the entire book, makes a strong and refreshing argument for thinking historically as a performer. Purdy’s presumed audience is “the modern professional and aspiring professional theatrical singing actor,” for whom the path to “stage worthiness…is…the mysterious concoction of labor and love that it has always been to dyed-in-the-wool devotees,” (xxi) but now requires a higher level of versatility and virtuosity than ever before. Purdy’s system is organized with the goal of de-mystifying that path. The book is divided into three sections: I. Song Selection, II. Song Preparation, and III. Song Presentation. Each chapter includes a portion called “Get It Done,” which has questions and activities based on the chapter’s content. Further chapters break the process down in minute, step-by-step detail, covering everything from table work to interior monologue and objectives to posture. Purdy employs song examples both canonical (“Maria” from West Side Story , “Much More” from The Fantasticks ) and non-canonical (“Perfect” from Edges , Journey’s “Separate Ways”). The book’s contemporaneity is most evident in its discussion near the end about song performance on social media and YouTube. Far from bogging the performer down with minutiae, though, Purdy’s system is meant to help her “[B]e the pot of gold. Be the inexplicable ‘it.’ Be the surprise” (276, emphasis in original). With its combination of historicity and practicality, Musical Theatre Song , like Actor-Musicianship , will be of interest to both educators and performers. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Curtis Russell The CUNY Graduate Center Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue May Irwin American Musical Theater Musical Theatre Books New York's Yiddish Theater Chinese Looks Reclaiming Four Child Actors through Seven Plays in US Theatre, 1794-1800 The Illusion of Work: The Con Artist Plays of the Federal Theatre Project On Bow and Exit Music Legitimate: Jerry Douglas's Tubstrip and the Erotic Theatre of Gay Liberation Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

People This is your Services Page. It's a great opportunity to provide information about the services you provide. Double click on the text box to start editing your content and make sure to add all the relevant details you want to share with site visitors. Whether you're offering multiple services, courses or programs, you can edit this space to fit your website's needs. Simply double click on this section to open the content manager and modify the content. Explain what each item entails and add photos or videos for even more engagement. Staff Members Visiting Scholars Board of Directors Volunteers Staff Members Martin E. Segal Theater Center Frank Hentschker Executive Director & Director of Programs e. fhentschker@gc.cuny.edu Marvin Carlson Director of Publications e. mcarlson@gc.cuny.edu Ann Kreitman PRELUDE 2023 Co-Producer e. ann4prelude@gmail.com Taylor Everts PRELUDE 2023 Co-Producer e. taylor4prelude@gmail.com Gaurav Singh Nijjer Digital & Web Consultant e. gauravnijjer@gmail.com Former staff members Andie Lerner (Co-Producer, 2021-23) Tanvi M. Shah (Co-Producer, 2021-23) Journal for American Drama & Theatre Naomi J. Stubbs Co-Editor e. fhentschker@gc.cuny.edu James Wilson Co-Editor e. mcarlson@gc.cuny.edu David Samran Advisory Editor e. ann4prelude@gmail.com Kiera Bono Managing Editor e. taylor4prelude@gmail.com Ruijiao Dong Assistant Managing Editor e. gauravnijjer@gmail.com Former staff members Names go here Journal: European Stages Naomi J. Stubbs Co-Editor e. fhentschker@gc.cuny.edu James Wilson Co-Editor e. mcarlson@gc.cuny.edu David Samran Advisory Editor e. ann4prelude@gmail.com Kiera Bono Managing Editor e. taylor4prelude@gmail.com Ruijiao Dong Assistant Managing Editor e. gauravnijjer@gmail.com Former staff members Names go here Journal: Arab Stages Naomi J. Stubbs Co-Editor e. fhentschker@gc.cuny.edu James Wilson Co-Editor e. mcarlson@gc.cuny.edu David Samran Advisory Editor e. ann4prelude@gmail.com Kiera Bono Managing Editor e. taylor4prelude@gmail.com Ruijiao Dong Assistant Managing Editor e. gauravnijjer@gmail.com Former staff members Names go here Staff Members Research Scholars Recent Visiting Research Scholars Naomi J. Stubbs Co-Editor e. fhentschker@gc.cuny.edu James Wilson Co-Editor e. mcarlson@gc.cuny.edu David Samran Advisory Editor e. ann4prelude@gmail.com Kiera Bono Managing Editor e. taylor4prelude@gmail.com Ruijiao Dong Assistant Managing Editor e. gauravnijjer@gmail.com See the full list of former visiting research scholars here. Board of Directors Board of Directors Advisory Board Jane Alexander Victoria Bailey Roger Berlind Louise Hirschfeld Cullman Blythe Danner Sharon Dunn John Guare Todd London Marsha Norman Antje Oegel Harold Prince Paul Segal Stephen Sondheim Paula Vogel Robin Wagner Edwin Wilson Robert Wilson Founding Members in Memoriam Cy Coleman Hume Cronyn Tony Randall Roy A. Somlyo Wendy Wasserstein Robert Whitehead August Wilson Editorial Board Marvin Carlson David Savran James Wilson IN MEMORIAM: Martin E. Segal (1916-2012) Daniel Gerould (1928-2012) Executive Director/Director of Programs Frank Hentschker Segal Board Marvin Carlson Seward and Cecelia Johnson William P. Kelly Joseph LoCicero Board of Directors Volunteers If you are interested in helping with Martin E. Segal Theatre Center events and programs, please contact us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu. Past volunteers Names go here

Watch Acting by Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. Sophie Fiennes' richly detailed and immersive film offers privileged access to the vital experience of making theatre with pioneering practitioners Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod of the ground breaking international theatre company Cheek By Jowl. In a derelict Gothic mansion on the outskirts of London, we join eight actors - four Macbeths and four Lady Macbeths - for 11 days with Cheek By Jowl. Working in pairs, they investigate key scenes and soliloquies from Shakespeare’s Scottish tragedy. But this film is not about the play. It’s about being offered a different position from which to view acting and theatre - of seeing text newly animated in ways more subtle, surprising, revelatory and various than even the most dedicated theatregoers might have considered possible. Within the labyrinthine remains of the building, we watch with increasing fascination as actors and spaces combine to give Shakespeare’s words seemingly infinite new lives.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Acting At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Friday May 16th at 1:20pm. RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. You may RSVP above to get a reminder about the Segal Film Festival in your inbox. Country United Kingdom Language English Running Time 144 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film Sophie Fiennes' richly detailed and immersive film offers privileged access to the vital experience of making theatre with pioneering practitioners Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod of the ground breaking international theatre company Cheek By Jowl. In a derelict Gothic mansion on the outskirts of London, we join eight actors - four Macbeths and four Lady Macbeths - for 11 days with Cheek By Jowl. Working in pairs, they investigate key scenes and soliloquies from Shakespeare’s Scottish tragedy. But this film is not about the play. It’s about being offered a different position from which to view acting and theatre - of seeing text newly animated in ways more subtle, surprising, revelatory and various than even the most dedicated theatregoers might have considered possible. Within the labyrinthine remains of the building, we watch with increasing fascination as actors and spaces combine to give Shakespeare’s words seemingly infinite new lives. About The Artist(s) Cheek by Jowl is the international theatre company of Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod. Its landmark productions, performed in more than 50 countries in the 44 years since the company was founded, have influenced the creation of theatre and the experience of audiences the world over. Actors including Adrian Lester, Tom Hiddleston, Ralph Fiennes, Tom Hollander, Olivia Williams, David Morrissey, Gwendoline Christie and Matthew Macfadyen all developed their talent working with Cheek by Jowl in their early careers. Get in touch with the artist(s) martin@lonestarproductions.co.uk ; shanihinton@me.com and follow them on social media https://www.cheekbyjowl.com/, https://www.instagram.com/wearecheekbyjowl/, http://www.lonestarproductions.co.uk/, https://www.instagram.com/sophiefiennesofficial/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse

I. B. Hopkins Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 2 Visit Journal Homepage Our Town I. B. Hopkins By Published on July 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF Our Town By Thornton Wilder Directed by Shawn Sides CRASHBOX Austin, TEXAS November 15, 2024 Reviewed by I. B. Hopkins You would be forgiven for remembering Thornton Wilder’s Our Town as quaint. The Pulitzer Prize-winning staple of the American dramatic repertoire has so frequently been produced by schools and community theatres since it premiered in 1938 that its edge—at least in recollection—may have dulled somewhat from sheer exposure. The play depicts a small New Hampshire town going about its everyday routines in the early twentieth century and takes pains to stress its ordinariness at every turn. In their recent production, Austin-based theatre collective the Rude Mechs articulated a desire to neither reinvent nor see something new in the classic. Instead, the company rather puzzlingly advertised, “We’re gonna try as hard as we can to do it as Wilder intended.” This statement of intent acknowledges the company’s long history of remixing classics, such as their “fixing” Shakespeare series or locating transcendence in Tennessee Williams’s bit parts in The Method Gun . Doing Our Town “as Wilder intended” decidedly breaks from their punkish approach to adaptation, intimating that there may be more lurking beneath its inoffensive surface than audiences might assume. For director Shawn Sides and company, the appeal and enigma of Our Town seemed to be distilled in its first-person plural title. Situated in the intimate and unadorned CRASHBOX performance warehouse in Austin’s gentrifying Eastside neighborhood, the environment gratifyingly contrasted the traditional Americana of Wilder’s fictional Grover’s Corners. The rural, church- and family-centered, and presumed white world of the play is ostensibly incompatible with the Texas capital’s progressive and multiethnic brand of urbanism. Far from tritely extolling the universality of love or family, however, the script effectively doubles down on local particularity by specifying that the actors portraying townspeople be verbally identified by their names. Inasmuch, the Rude Mechs’s gambit to fulfill Wilder’s intentions also highlighted casting choices that reflect Austin’s diversity, though this was more than just presenting an array of bodies on stage that vary along dimensions of race, gender expression, and size. In the context of the Performing Garage-like setting, the production’s execution of the script’s instruction to narrate actors’ names also points up Our Town ’s striking anticipation of later experimental theatre works and the long tradition of ensemble-driven, devised performances. The original play has famously absent scenery, but this production went further with rehearsal-quality furniture, no affected New England accents, and costume designer Aaron Flynn’s inconspicuous, contemporary choices. In her gray jeans and dark neutral top, for example, Mrs. Webb could easily have been out shopping at H-E-B, the local central Texas grocery store. Seeming to strip even the costumes of their costumey-ness announced a certain rejection of the play’s lingering pretenses, an escalation of Wilder’s first stage direction: “No curtain. No scenery.” This design scheme deviated notably from many productions, including both the 1938 premiere and the 2024 Broadway revival. In short, Sides and the cast worked to countermand any sense that Grover’s Corners might serve as an idyllic Anytown, USA or a parable for human experience. Without altering a word of Wilder’s text, they redirected abstract nostalgia to focus on the here and now simply by subtracting production elements that suggested early twentieth-century New Hampshire. What was left in the compact space was a room full of Austinites, many of them longtime members of the local arts community. This staging seemed to find the Rude Mechs attempting to manifest our town , the one to which they and the audience belong, and which has undergone such tremendous growth and changes since the collective formed twenty-five years ago. To that end, dividing the Stage Manager role among four of the collective’s co-producing artistic directors (Madge Darlington, Thomas Graves, Lana Lesley, and Alexandra Bassiakou Shaw) most directly manifested the production’s sense of diffusion, the our -ness of Our Town. Even casting that resists the avuncular, “hat on and pipe in mouth” type indicated by Wilder affords a great deal of stage time and power to a single, starring role. By dividing these place-setting and contemplative monologues among a quartet of performers speaking in unhurried, matter-of-fact tones, this Our Town defamiliarized the warmth of small-town life, which continually brought the audience back to presence in the CRASHBOX. The Stage Manager, it is important to recall, is not nostalgic in the text, and the chorus of narratorial voices served to heighten their somewhat clinical distance from the emotional churn of the story even as they also amplified the poetic turns of Wilder’s language by rendering them less conversational. Functionally, they contrasted the diegetic events among the Grover’s Corners denizens, adding a layer of oblique commentary to elevate the townspeople’s lives. Correspondingly, the cast of eight other actors committed to a meticulous style of realism in their performances to cast the townspeople in relief. In this respect, Rommel Sulit (Doc Gibbs), Liz Fisher (Myrtle Webb), and Eric Ramos (George Gibbs) excelled in the precision of their psychologically rich, clearly motivated acting choices, providing a sharp distinction between the everyday world and the narration hanging above it. Ceremoniously presiding at a remove from the townspeople’s lives, the multi-voiced Stage Managers spoke directly to the audience with a gentle insistence that this is, in fact, their town. Their seated positions in the inner ring of the audience and sober tones underscored the emotional distance between the audience and the townspeople, the unbridgeable gap between past and present which is also famously dramatized in Emily’s return in act 3. Like Emily, the audience only gets a bitter glimpse at the quiet beauty of this community for a short time. Kira Small (“Emily”) and Eric Ramos (“George”) in Our Town. Photo courtesy Rude Mechs. There are limits, however, to just how much literalized community this interpretation of the script can manage. At select intervals, tertiary roles had been pre-distributed to willing audience members, who then read a few lines. Even when audibly delivered, this bid to draw the audience more tightly into the town also made Wilder’s script appear ungainly and overfull when the joke or the flash of poetry did not land. Staging the production in the round more effectively delivered on the aim to make the Austin community its subject, and Brian H. Scott’s lighting design complemented the arrangement by keeping most audience members’ faces visible as they sat alongside members of the cast. Simply repositioning a minimal number of chairs instantly placed spectators at eye level and quite close in (variously) a kitchen, a pew during a wedding, and, finally, the local cemetery. No flashiness nor trickery, just thoughtful staging. The straightforward theatricality of such gestures bespoke underlying faith in the principle behind the script’s iconic use of pantomime. If a certain action can represent stringing beans even when no beans are present, then the simple turning of a chair should just as effectively transport the scene to a new location. When artfully applied, this technique denaturalized the relationship between actors and their earthly trappings, suggesting that verisimilitude is not as vital as human striving in performance. Wilder’s fixation on what he has the Stage Manager call the world’s “straining” does, in fact, reach for the universal, and—intended or not—this urge’s tension with the reality of theatre’s constraints to here, now, and us characterized the production’s finest moments. Lana Lesley, for instance, as the town drunk and choir director Simon Stimpson, conducted the offstage choir in Act 1 with tremendous fervency down a corridor that left her visible to only perhaps a quarter of the audience. Later, when Simon spoke from the dead, his lines about “what it was to be alive … To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another” bit with particular ruefulness because Lesley’s zeal portrayed his ennobling passion for his art alongside his dependence on alcohol. The quick but bitter sensation that not every member of the audience could have seen this character so fully exemplifies the production’s refreshingly unsentimental take on the play’s plea to appreciate life while we can. On their website, the Rude Mechs write, “We’ll be using what we learn about Our Town to make a completely new piece in 2025/26.” Taken together with the stated goal of matching the playwright’s intent, we might best understand this production as a genuine experiment by one of America’s most consistently innovative performance collectives to systematically examine Wilder’s script, to understand its workings but also to find out through doing how the line between its familiar quaintness and its persistent darkness might be drawn. In the process, they may have discovered that the redrawing, the return, the perennial reperformance of Our Town is the very thing that keeps Grover’s Corners weird. References Footnotes About The Author(s) I. B. HOPKINS is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin, where he also earned his MFA in playwriting. He has been the recipient of a Fulbright Grant and Michener Fellowship. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Modern Drama , Theatre Annual , Theatre Journal , and the E3W Review, as well as Austin arts publications. Hopkins’s dissertation, titled “Bad Actors,” explores the aesthetics of historical drama and adaptation in depictions of the U.S. South. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Censorship/Public Censure and Performance Today: Special Issue Introduction Remembering Censorship in the World Premiere of Seán O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned: Lafayette, Indiana, 1959 The Stage as Networked Battleground: Dissent and Censorship in Contemporary Canadian Theatre and Performance Censor/Censure: A Roundtable Which of These Are Censorship? The Divide Between Prior Restraint and Soft Censorship How Can an Artist Respond to Censorship? The Dilemma That Faces Contemporary Creatives in the UK The LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project: A Roundtable Conversation Life is Drag: Documenting Spectacle as Resistance An Interview with Rachel Rampleman Middle Eastern American Theatre: Communities, Cultures, and Artists. Michael Malek Najjar. Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2021; Pp. xvi + 237. Lessons from Our Students: Meditations on Performance Pedagogy. Stacey Cabaj and Andrea Odinov. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 126 Choreographing Dirt: Movement, Performance, and Ecology in the Anthropocene. Angenette Spalink. Studies in Theatre, Ecology, and Performance Series, no. 3. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 116. Fauci and Kramer Our Town Frankenstein Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Timmy is being bullied at school because of his favorite backpack—a bright pink backpack full of little ponies from his favorite TV series. Daniel and Irene try to confront the brutal school bullying that Timmy endures. A school that protects its bullies and a couple that tries to do the best for their child will witness how Timmy escapes to an imaginary universe to protect himself from the insufferable reality. With Marissa Ghavami, Montgomery Sutton Directed by Kimi Ramírez Written by Paco Bezerra Translated by Marion Peter Holt PRELUDE Festival 2023 READING The Little Pony Marissa Ghavami, Montgomery Sutton, Kimi Ramírez Theater English 60 Mins 4:30PM EST Friday, October 13, 2023 Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All Timmy is being bullied at school because of his favorite backpack—a bright pink backpack full of little ponies from his favorite TV series. Daniel and Irene try to confront the brutal school bullying that Timmy endures. A school that protects its bullies and a couple that tries to do the best for their child will witness how Timmy escapes to an imaginary universe to protect himself from the insufferable reality. With Marissa Ghavami, Montgomery Sutton Directed by Kimi Ramírez Written by Paco Bezerra Translated by Marion Peter Holt This reading is in partnership with, and to benefit, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit Healing TREE. It is done in cooperation with Theatre Authority Inc. Healing TREE (Trauma Resources, Education & Entertainment) advocates healing from abuse and trauma rather than coping with the symptoms, in order to transform lives and, ultimately, society. They achieve this by providing trauma-focused resources and education and by producing and partnering with relevant film, television, and theatre, empowering the social change necessary to create a healing movement. Website: www.healingtreenonprofit.org Facebook: Facebook.com/healingtreenonprofit.org Instagram: @healingtreeorg You can learn about Healing TREE’s life-saving programming and their current need for support, as well as make a donation, here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/healingtreeorg Content / Trigger Description: Marissa Ghavami (they/she) is an Iranian-American, queer artist, advocate and creator based in NYC. Most recently, they played Khalilah, opposite Tony Winner KO (Karen Olivo), in a workshop of Siluetas, part of 4xLatiné Off-Broadway. Up next on stage, they can be seen as Jessie in Divine Riot’s Cry It Out this November. Film/TV highlights include starring in the feature film The Gift of Christmas, alongside Academy Award Nominee Bruce Davison, and roles in Paramount’s Not Fade Away, with James Gandolfini, and on CBS’s Without A Trace; as well as singing on NBC’s It’s Showtime at the Apollo. Marissa has also sung at Joe’s Pub (alongside Tony Nominee L Morgan Lee), Birdland (alongside Academy Award Winner and Tony Nominee Ariana DeBose) and 54 Below. Voiceover/Commercial/Print highlights include Audible, McDonald's, Ford, JCPenney, Belvedere, PepsiCo, Girl Scout Cookies and KFC. Marissa co-produced the feature film Mass, starring Ann Dowd, Martha Plimpton, Jason Isaacs and Reed Birney. Mass premiered at Sundance, was acquired by Bleecker Street, had a theatrical release, won the Robert Altman Award, was a Gotham, Critics Choice and BAFTA nominee and is now streaming. They produced and co-wrote the short film Silk, directed by John Magaro (Carol, The Big Short), an Official Selection at the Academy Award Qualifying Reel Sisters of the Diaspora Film Festival, among others. Marissa is the Founding Executive + Artistic Director of the nonprofit Healing TREE (Trauma Resources, Education & Entertainment). They are a national public speaker, a healing trauma-focused coach for artists and a trauma consultant for productions. They are a Queer Writer Fellow at Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and an Artists Striving To End Poverty (now Arts Ignite) Fellow and participant in the Artist As Citizen Conference at Juilliard. They are a Founding Company Member of Divine Riot, a new theatre and film company that defies convention. They are also an avid meditator, vegan and cat parent. AEA, SAG-AFTRA. www.marissaghavami.com @marissaghavami www.healingtreenonprofit.org @healingtreeorg www.divineriot.org @adivineriot Montgomery Sutton (he/him) is an actor, director, playwright, and educator. LONDON: Twelfth Night (Shakespeare’s Globe); OFF-BROADWAY: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (New York Classical Theatre); REGIONAL: One Man, Two Guvnors (Florida Studio Theater), Oswald (Casa Manana), Shakespeare in Love, Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest (Shakespeare Dallas), Henry V (Cape Fear Regional Theatre), Measure for Measure, Richard III, Love’s Labours Lost, King Lear (Trinity Shakespeare Festival), Pericles, The Winter’s Tale (Seven Stages Shakespeare Company), Booth, Gruesome Playground Injuries (Second Thought Theatre), Tomorrow Come Today (Undermain Theatre), The Temperamentals (Uptown Players), On the Eve (Theater Three). FILM/NEW MEDIA: 1865 podcast; Skindiving; Trouble with Women. He has directed for the Gilbert Theater, Rude Grooms, Junior Players, Seven Stages Shakespeare Company, and written and directed several short films including Between the Lines (winner, Best Screenplay; nominee, Best Director). His plays and adaptations include Advent (semi-finalist, O’Neill National Playwrights Conference), Ruins, two versions of Antigone (verse and modern), Oedipus, Broken Water, Your Colonel, and Moonlight Gospel which have been produced and developed with the Gilbert Theater, Kitchen Dog Theater, Metropolitan Playhouse, EBE Ensemble, and Salt Pillar Productions. He is on faculty for the Atlantic Theater Company/NYU and has taught for the Shakespeare Theater Association, World Shakespeare Congress, Shakespeare Dallas, the Gilbert Theatre, Junior Players, Dallas Children’s Theater, Cape Fear Regional Theatre, New York Shakespeare Company, and Rude Grooms. He received his BFA from NYU / Atlantic Acting School and was a member of the International Actors Fellowship at Shakespeare’s Globe. montgomerysutton.com Paco Bezerra is one of Spain’s most exciting dramatists. His awards include National Literary Drama Award in 2009, The Calderon de la Barca National Theatre Prize in 2007, and the Eurodram Award 2014. Paco's plays and writings have been translated into several languages and are being produced all over the globe. He trained as an actor at William Layton Theater Laboratory Madrid and read Theatre Science and Dramaturgy at the Royal School of Dramatic Art of Madrid (RESAD). Marion Peter Holt (1924-2021) remains a leading translator of contemporary Spanish and Catalan theatre. His translations have been staged internationally and by regional and university theatres throughout the United States. A member of the Real Academia Española since 1986, he was an emeritus professor of The City University of New York and visiting lecturer at the Yale School of Drama and Barcelona’s Institut del Teatre. Dr. Holt’s many translations include publications by The Martin E. Segal Center. Kimberly “Kimi” Ramírez is a professor, playwright, and critic with an M.F.A. in Playwriting and a Ph.D. in Theatre & Performance whose writing has been published and presented internationally. They are affiliated with The City University of New York, Speranza Theatre Company, Macondo Writers Workshop, Lucille Lortel Awards, Talkin' Broadway, and are a member of the Dramatists Guild. Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on