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Kaitlin Nabors Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 2 Visit Journal Homepage Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. Kaitlin Nabors By Published on April 18, 2021 Download Article as PDF Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. James Shapiro is a prolific Shakespeare scholar and award-winning author of The Year of Lear: Shakespeare 1606 (2015), A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 (2006) and Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare (2010), among other groundbreaking works. In this latest book, hailed by the New York Times as one of “The 10 Best Books of 2020,” Shapiro turns the tables on Shakespeare theatre history analysis. Rather than asking how America plays into the history of Shakespeare, he’s asking how Shakespeare plays into the history of America. Indeed, Shapiro identifies the reception of Shakespeare and the performance of his works as a vital vein running through controversial moments in American history. The titles of each chapter specify an exact year and topic that consumed that era, presented chronologically, including: “1833: Miscegenation;” “1845: Manifest Destiny;” “1849 Class Warfare;” “1916: Immigration;” “1948: Marriage;” “1998: Adultery and Same-Sex Love;” and, lastly, “2017: Left/Right.” This volume is accessible to theatre practitioners and historians alike, without requiring prior knowledge of either discipline to enjoy and engage with the crucial analysis woven throughout. Expertly-written, Shapiro’s lens feels at the same time historic and timely—as he uses the past to examine the path we took to our present. Several chapters focus on one major instance of Shakespearean performance in a pivotal time in America, before zooming out to provide context leading up to the focal event. In Chapter 3, “1849: Class Warfare,” Shapiro uses the Astor Place Riots and William Macready’s performance of Macbeth that night, for instance, to show Shakespeare at the center of an explosion of American nationalism, a topic also featured throughout newspaper headlines in 2020, the year of publication. This emblematic chapter opens the evening of the Astor Place Riots, placing the reader in the middle of the action; then Shapiro takes a step back to analyze the ways that everyone there— performers, audience, and mob—arrived at that volatile clash between the working-class, the elites, and the government. This chapter highlights the rivalry between American actor Edwin Forrest and British actor William Macready, a rivalry that culminated in the disaster at the Astor Place Opera House and which exposed growing divisions along class and cultural lines. Shapiro takes a different view than other historians, such as Nigel Cliff, arguing that the riots were not the result of Americans rejecting theatre or Shakespeare more broadly, but rather “an intense desire by the middle and lower classes to continue sharing that space, and to oppose, violently if necessary, efforts to exclude them from it” (78). Shapiro beautifully paints a picture of an America struggling through movements grown beyond the control of their leadership, as whole cultural groups experienced exclusion from common spaces and marked divides grew between socio-economic classes. By this chapter’s conclusion, readers can’t help but see unspoken parallels to currents today. Perhaps the book’s greatest wake-up call for American readers comes here, when Shapiro writes, “The Opera House may be long gone, but the divisions remain” (80). Other chapters showcase a perspective on American history that textbooks overlook, revealed by significant encounters with Shakespeare. In Chapter 1, “1833: Miscegenation,” Shapiro looks into the deep-seated racism of former President John Quincy Adams, who on the surface fought for abolition, but whose readings of Shakespeare revealed his anti-blackness when he said, “My objections to the character of Desdemona arise… from what she herself does. She absconds from her father’s house, in the dead of night, to marry a blackamoor” (8). Throughout the chapter, Shapiro presents the two sides of Adams: one in public pre-Civil War leadership positions, arguing for abolition against John C. Calhoun, and the other in his private life, where he is quoted by his mother, Abigail, and famed Shakespearean actress Fanny Kemble, to show disgust for the intermarrying of races, using Othello as a whetstone for his rage. Of Adams, Shapiro writes, “His tentative steps towards becoming an abolitionist seem to have required a counterweight, and he found it in his repudiation of amalgamation. Shakespeare gave him much to work with. By directing his hostility at Desdemona rather than Othello, he was able to sidestep criticizing black men” (20). Shapiro’s analysis underscores that Shakespeare during the abolitionist movement was a scapegoat and incitement for many, most notably a President. The last two chapters catapult the reader into present day, a transition that should feel jarring, as there is a 50-year gap from the previous chapter’s case study. Ironically, the historical jump feels all too natural, as the subject matter of previous chapters has felt so modern. In the final chapter, “2017: Left/Right,” Shapiro expertly ties together all his carefully-chosen examples from earlier chapters, highlighting his premise that in order to critically examine the present, you must first dissect the past. This chapter analyzes the hotly debated production of Julius Caesar , featuring Caesar dressed to vaguely mimic Donald Trump, produced by the Public Theater in 2017. Shapiro synopsizes the controversy surrounding the highly publicized production, consistently reminding the reader that Shakespeare and the Public Theater’s production itself were never the problem, nor its artistic value, but rather the cultural divisions exposed by conversations surrounding the production. Shapiro’s groundwork in prior chapters deftly paves the way for this contemporary case study—culminating in the confusion that the production did not result in ideological arguments, but rather partisan anger concerning optics and perceived personal attacks. Shakespeare in a Divided America ends with this chapter, highlighting America’s evolving cultural schisms through Shakespeare. There’s no epilogue, only Shapiro’s brief Bibliographical Essay, in which he describes his sources and recommends further reading. His spare one-paragraph denouement eloquently meditates on what’s to come, as polarization heightens: “The future of Shakespeare in America, like the future of the nation itself, would appear secure… Yet his future also seems as precarious as it has ever been in this nation’s history” (220). The reader is left here, encouraged to make the same connections Shapiro has given the tools to use Shakespeare as a litmus test for American divisions, using moments of unrest in our past to analyze our present and fathom our future. References Footnotes About The Author(s) KAITLIN NABORS University of Colorado, Boulder Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to "Milestones in Black Theatre" Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration. Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

By Liwaa Yazji | A collection of poems from Syrian playwright and filmmaker Liwaa Yazji. < 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 Three Poems Liwaa Yazji Download PDF This collection of three poems was written in 2015 by the Syrian playwright and filmmaker Liwaa Yazji. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

Dan Colson Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 1 Visit Journal Homepage “What Will Be Changed?”: Maxwell Anderson and the Literary Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti Dan Colson By Published on December 9, 2021 Download Article as PDF The stage directions for Clifford Odets’s 1935 Awake and Sing! call for a “picture of Sacco and Vanzetti” to be hung in Jacob’s room. [1] The picture signals the play’s investment in 1930s radical politics and foreshadows Jacob’s role: the aging Marxist who hopes to pass his communism onto his grandson. Placing Sacco and Vanzetti as a physical image that haunts the entire play is, of course, unsurprising for perhaps the most prominent radical dramatist of the period. Even eight years after their deaths, Nicola Sacco (1891-1927) and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (1888-1927) stood as symbols for the Left. The two men were arrested for an April 1920 burglary and murder in Braintree, Massachusetts. They spent more than seven years in prison as their trial and appeals played out and were executed in August 1927. The story of these two Italian anarchists captured the world’s attention, sparking widespread outrage. Many believed the men to be innocent and far more believed the guilty verdict emerged from a flawed legal process—in the midst of the era’s anti-radical environment, Sacco and Vanzetti were punished for being anarchists, not for any crime they committed. The two immigrants became a cause célèbre for the literary Left, as their perceived mistreatment intersected with the interwar era’s interest in radical politics. In the late 1910s, radical politics were a dangerous proposition: the First Red Scare—culminating with the infamous Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920—saw mass arrests and deportations that sent many American socialists, communists, and anarchists to prison or back to their home countries. [2] This anti-radical environment set the stage both for Sacco and Vanzetti’s arrests and for the outrage that followed: as anarchists, they risked being arrested (and sent back to Italy) at any time, so their arrest for a burglary only a few months after the Palmer Raids appeared to many as too convenient. As their trial unfolded and their lives hung in legal limbo for years, the Left saw in these two purportedly innocent anarchists a rallying cry: their prolonged ordeal reinvigorated the Left, as ardent radicals and soft-hearted liberals found common ground. Amongst those drawn to their plight, we find a large number of the period’s well-known writers: Odets, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mike Gold, Lucia Trent, Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos and countless others wrote about Sacco and Vanzetti. These writers—from a range of political positions—all cast doubt on the perceived justice of their conviction and eventual execution. While Sacco and Vanzetti were still alive, many writers focused their attention on immediate goals: delaying their execution, winning a reprieve from Massachusetts Governor Alvan T. Fuller, calling attention to the trial’s injustice, and swaying public sentiment in ways that might influence the powerful figures who were still in the process of determining the two anarchists’ fate. In short, authors writing up to August 1927 mostly sought to help Sacco and Vanzetti—two men’s lives were at stake. After their deaths, however, writers’ goals shifted. It was too late to save Sacco and Vanzetti, but many Left-leaning writers saw in their ordeal a potent symbol of what was wrong with the United States. This process of interpretation—of establishing the lasting meaning of these events—left us with a number of texts that lament the failures of the American legal system and call for major changes to ensure such a tragic miscarriage of justice would not occur again. None of these works, however, embrace the politics of their subjects. Sacco and Vanzetti were anarchists; they believed the government was irredeemably broken and that no amount of reform could ever remedy the flaws of American democracy. In fact, they were followers of Luigi Galleani, an Italian anarchist who openly espoused violent anti-government actions. [3] As radical and progressive writers interpreted the significance of Sacco and Vanzetti’s plight, however, their anarchism tended to disappear—sublimated to other political agendas that rejected the extremes of anarchism. Despite the fact that many people believed Sacco and Vanzetti were treated unfairly precisely because they were anarchists, authors writing after their deaths minimized their politics, turning them into symbols for the writers’ political and artistic visions. In this essay, I focus on Maxwell Anderson, who wrote two plays about Sacco and Vanzetti: Gods of the Lightning in 1928, just after their execution, and Winterset in 1935, when the two men’s legacy had been almost entirely sublimated to others’ political agendas. Anderson is an interesting figure within the body of Sacco-Vanzetti literature. On the one hand, scholars have rightly recognized Anderson’s dalliance with radicalism which makes him a natural author to take up the topic. On the other hand, Anderson underwent a dramatic, yet prolonged, political transformation—a significant shift toward the Right. His two Sacco-Vanzetti plays appeared in the midst of this transition, as Anderson—like many Left-leaning authors from the period—responded to the rise of fascism and began to drift away from the more strident forms of American radicalism. The plays, then, were written in moments when Anderson still saw Leftist politics and economic policy as potential answers to social injustice, yet they were subsequently inflected by a playwright who gradually distanced himself from the Left. Interpretation of Gods of the Lightning and Winterset have been complicated by Anderson’s political transformation (and, in fact, by Anderson’s own understandings of the plays vis-à-vis radical politics). In what follows, I argue the plays—while different in key respects—demonstrate a consistent political fatalism that can help us better understand Anderson’s relationship to the radical Left. In them, he finds little hope for radical politics, as the plays’ plots turn away from anarchism to other, more personal matters and, in the process, tend toward hopelessness. These two plays thus portend Anderson’s disillusionment with the Left, which does not offer the answers he seeks and cannot redress the injustice he laments. At the heart of this fatalism, however, are his thinly veiled representations of two executed anarchists. Anderson builds his fatalistic political vision on Sacco and Vanzetti, an ubiquitous symbol of the nation’s failures. Doing so required, to a certain extent, abjuring their radicalism. As anarchists, Sacco and Vanzetti rejected the nation outright. To them, there was no remedying legal injustice; the law itself was injustice. Gods of the Lightning and Winterset minimizes this anarchism, offering instead a mélange of vaguely Leftist politics and individualized, largely apolitical, personal strife. According to many, Anderson makes the anarchism that explained Sacco and Vanzetti’s execution impotent, if not irrelevant, in the plays. In this respect, Anderson’s portrayal of the men distills the broader evolution of their literary depictions: stripped of the specificity of their radicalism, Sacco and Vanzetti become generic symbols, manipulated for the political and literary visions of the authors who deploy their image. Ultimately, analysis of anarchism’s appearance in Gods of the Lightning and Winterset reveals a fundamental rejection of their subjects’ politics. Their anarchism is replaced by a sense of hopelessness, and then by a revisioning of the plays’ import: these are not plays about anarchism or anarchist plays; they are plays that happen to be about anarchists. My argument here thus offers us a better understanding of Anderson’s oeuvre (and the role his politics play in it), but also a clearer look at the ways in which Sacco and Vanzetti were deployed by the era’s literary Left as strikingly non-anarchist symbols of the nation’s shortcomings. Anderson’s Uncertain Politics Anderson’s father was a railroad-worker-turned-itinerant-minister, so Anderson’s childhood was marked by frequent moves, an uneven education, and a large dose of Protestantism (which he almost entirely rejected). Though his family often struggled financially and Anderson himself held a number of working-class jobs in his early adulthood, there are no meaningful radical influences in his social sphere during his formative years. He was early drawn to Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, from whom he learned a “distrust for ‘big’ government” and a “sometimes errant individualism.” [4] Then, while at the University of North Dakota, he studied Thorstein Veblen under a socialist professor. [5] In 1912, Anderson, then 23, declared, “I have become a Socialist.” [6] A few years later, in a letter to his life-long friend Upton Sinclair, he describes himself as “Bolshevistic.” [7] During this period, it appeared the “champion of liberty and justice” might embrace the radical Left. [8] Only a few years later, while working for The New Republic , Anderson seemed uninterested in “politics, national or international.” [9] In the 1920s he was a “staunch” liberal “against monopolies and for organized labor.” [10] By the late 1930s, however, he felt forced to choose between “the evils of capitalism” and the “evils of collectivism.” [11] He chose capitalism, and by the beginning of WWII he believed “Communism [was] dangerous,” and a threat to “democratic government.” [12] Eventually, Anderson aligned with Joseph McCarthy and others who contended that “any American member of the Communist Party was a criminal dedicated to overthrowing the government by force.” [13] In Anderson’s authoritative biography, Alfred S. Shivers describes the dramatist as an “individualist and a rebel,” a man with “wide-ranging sympathies.” [14] These sympathies intersected with the Left at moments, but they hardly suggest a man who would write multiple plays about arguably the most famous anarchists in American history. Like many fellow-travelers—individuals who flirted with radicalism, yet never fully embraced the more extreme Leftist politics that largely define “radical literature” from this period—Anderson’s politics transformed as he aged and as his political environment changed. In fact, Anderson’s political journey makes him a paradigmatic example of one type of fellow traveler: he came to socialism early in the twentieth century, when it was the most prevalent brand of American radicalism; he approved of and was drawn to the rise of communism in Russia; he associated with Leftist playwrights such as Odets and the Group Theatre during the 1930s, the heyday of radical literature and theater; he dropped his pacifism during the anti-fascist, pre-WWII era; he turned to American democracy during WWII; [15] and he fully rejected communism during the Cold War. Perhaps predictably then, during the interwar period Anderson’s politics are difficult to define at any given moment. His views were predominantly a mix of American individualism—an anti-institutional, yet malleable distrust for anything that intruded upon one’s “liberty”—and progressive economic ideas (i.e., his prolonged, if incomplete, infatuation with socialism and communism). In some, these dual concerns might combine into an anti-statist, economically egalitarian anarchism (as they did for Sacco and Vanzetti and numerous others from the turn of the century to WWII), but in Anderson, they generated a pendulous politics swinging from radical to reactionary based on the historical moment’s ideological climate. If there is any consistency in Anderson’s political stances, it comes from being “deeply distrustful of all institutional authorities.” [16] At times, this inclination manifests as a belief that the “American government is steadily encroaching on the individual’s rights and independence.” [17] Anderson’s Both Your Houses (1933), for instance, was “intended to be a blast at the Hoover administration.” [18] A critically acclaimed play that won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, it offers relatively overt commentary on the era’s political milieu—especially the rejection of Hoover’s volunteerism and the increasing sense, amongst radicals and progressives alike, that major changes to the American economy were necessary—even if was not staged until after Hoover left office and the nature of the conversation had changed significantly. Anderson’s anti-authoritarian stance has even led some to label Anderson a “libertarian” and an “anarchist.” [19] But even Anderson’s peers were confused by his politics, with Odets once calling him “‘a damned reactionary, a fascist!” [20] By that time, Anderson himself self-protectively embraced detachment from organized politics, claiming merely, “I vote Democratic or Republican as I please.” [21] To this day, scholars continue to struggle to locate Anderson’s politics. As I detail below, some claim he was a socialist, others an anarchist, while others avoid the question altogether. Russell DiNapoli offers the lengthiest consideration of Anderson’s relationship to anarchism, linking the playwright’s politics to William Godwin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and, most strongly, early-twentieth-century American anarchist Benjamin Tucker. [22] In doing so, however, DiNapoli almost entirely distances Anderson from the major threads of American anarchism prevalent during his career. By the 1920s, Tucker’s influence had waned significantly as he turned away from anarchism as a viable political solution. Rather, figures like Galleani, Emma Goldman, and Alexander Berkman held sway in American anarchist circles—they and their followers became the target of anti-radical sentiment because they were the most visible anarchists, and their punishments, in turn, increased their standing within radical circles. This “violent” anarchism, as DiNapoli calls it, achieved ascendency, [23] which is precisely why Sacco and Vanzetti presented such a threat: they were not philosophical anarchists; they advocated for the overthrow of US governance. DiNapoli concludes that anarchism appears in Anderson’s plays more as a “personal philosophy” than an “ideology,” and that “nowhere does the playwright uphold anarchism as it was defined” by prominent anarchists (past or present). [24] In short, Anderson was interested in anarchism, but his politics never reified around it or any other single radical position. Ethan Mordden perhaps sums it up best: “Anderson’s affiliation was anarchist, though he conceded that anarchy [was] out of reach and democracy was flawed but useful.” [25] In keeping with other scholars, Mordden suggests that Anderson was an anarchist who did not really accept the basic premises of anarchism! [26] Ultimately, Anderson is an example of the persistent difficulty in writing about literary radicalism from this period: a dramatist linked to radical and progressive political causes, writing in an era of radical literary politics, but with views detached from the dominant threads of radicalism. Anderson’s plays and his politics embody a not uncommon generic radicalism: though never fully embracing any of the era’s radical ideologies, he was often labeled as radical, and thus is emblematic of intellectuals and writers who drifted left during the period, many of whom were called radical, even when their politics resembled those of Franklin Delano Roosevelt more than Emma Goldman. Like many, the Sacco-Vanzetti affair attracted Anderson, but the motivation for his attraction remains ambiguous. Consequently, scholars who discuss Anderson’s purported radicalism sometimes fall into a type of circular reasoning: they argue that he was drawn to the case because he was a Leftist; therefore, he was a Leftist because he was drawn to the case. His two plays about Sacco and Vanzetti, Gods of the Lightning and Winterset , do not define the complexity of his political journey, nor do they establish him as a staunchly radical playwright. These plays do, however, provide insight into the floating, generic literary radicalism of the 1920s and 1930s. The plays deploy Sacco and Vanzetti as political symbols representative of anarchism, but the nature of these symbols is fragmented and detached from the men’s own lived anarchism. Anderson’s First Anarchists: Gods of the Lightning Gods of the Lightning , which Anderson co-wrote with Harold Hickerson, has been largely forgotten. [27] The play was completed in the spring of 1928, only a few months after Sacco and Vanzetti were executed, staged later that year, and published in early 1929. The play immediately prompted a variety of negative responses to its perceived political transgressions and aesthetic shortcomings: “The Chief of the Licensing Division of the City of Boston, J. M. Case, ruled that [it] was practically ‘anarchist and treasonable’ and should not, therefore, be licensed for presentation in that city”; [28] it was dubbed “a failure” precisely because it was based on the Sacco-Vanzetti case and thus “missed a chance to [be] a decidedly finer play”; [29] and it has since been called “an indignantly one-sided and propagandistic account of social injustice that is practically devoid of literary interest.” [30] Nevertheless, it ran at the Little Theater in New York City for 29 performances in October 1928, and the Group Theatre revived it in 1934, signaling some acceptance from Leftist dramatic circles. Anderson and Hickerson attempt to create a one-to-one corollary to Sacco and Vanzetti in Gods of the Lightning : “Vanzetti becomes Dante Capraro, the gentle and humane Anarchist” while “Sacco is greatly transformed into the native-born American James Macready, a militant International Woodsmen of the World leader.” [31] Jennifer Jones argues that Sacco and Vanzetti “are combined in the character of Capraro, a pacifist organizer,” [32] but Macready clearly also reflects elements of their story and their politics, functioning as a rough amalgam of the two anarchists. While the play does privilege the “American man of action,” [33] Vanzetti’s labor organizing mirrors Macready’s union work, and the similarities between the case and the play favor reading Capraro and Macready as representations of Sacco and Vanzetti, even if their reproduction is inexact and overlapping. The plot similarly veils the Sacco-Vanzetti case in the thinnest veneer, reproducing the Left’s widespread message about the men by depicting the arrest, trial, and execution of Capraro and Macready as a heinous injustice in which the mechanisms of law are distorted and misused to eliminate a radical threat. Certainly, the play attacks the legal system’s failures, but it does not offer a cohesive “left wing message.” [34] Jones and others imagine Anderson set out to write a socialist play—they begin with the assumption that Anderson was a radical. [35] They then analyze the play and find it is not particularly radical in comparison to its radical author. This reading, though, is symptomatic of Anderson’s conflicted politics and his concomitant untidy representation of Sacco and Vanzetti. In addition, these critics’ efforts to evaluate a play about two anarchists by comparing it to the author’s purported socialism, inevitably pushes anarchism to the margins. Gods of the Lightning emerges in the historical moment that Sacco and Vanzetti are transformed from living victims to potent symbols: it marks a politically wavering playwright’s articulation of anarchism to a similarly diffuse, and increasingly generic, vision of radicalism. The unsettled role of anarchism in the play occurs initially through Capraro and Macready who each reject government for different reasons. Macready says “government’s nothing so important. It’s a police system, to protect the wealth of the wealthy.” [36] Though linked to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), his critique of government is purely economic. [37] Macready parrots Vanzetti’s economic ideology without embracing his anti-government stance. Capraro’s political views, on the other hand, are simple anti-state anarchism, as revealed by his testimony during the play’s version of the trial: Salter: Do you believe in capitalism?Capraro: No.Salter: You believe that all property should belong to the workers?Capraro: Property should belong to those who create it.Salter: You are a communist?Capraro: I am an anarchist.Salter: What do you mean by that?Capraro: I mean, government is wrong. It creates trouble.Salter: You would destroy all government?Capraro: It will not be necessary. I would rather wait till it was so rotten it would rot away . . .Salter: You are against this government of ours?Capraro: Against all governments. [38] He denies being a communist, rejects government regardless of its implication in economic oppression, and, elsewhere, eschews all violence: “When you take violence into your hands, you lower yourself to the level of government, which is the origin of crime and evil.” [39] Both Macready and Capraro contain elements of Sacco’s and Vanzetti’s specific lives and political beliefs, yet they “represent the gamut of nonviolent anti-government philosophy and action,” [40] a major deviation from the two Galleanists on which they are based. Perhaps reflecting his own conflicted politics, Anderson juxtaposes non-anarchist Leftism with strict anti-government anarchism (while excluding violence almost entirely), creating a field of indeterminacy. Were the play fully dedicated to a propagandistic retelling of Sacco and Vanzetti’s plight, it likely would end with their execution, or perhaps with a reiteration of the anarchist statements the men (primarily Vanzetti) made as their deaths approached. The play, however, does not end with an execution. Rather, it interprets the events for its audience, recasting the meaning of these purportedly unjust deaths. With the anarchists dead, the play’s final lines are given to Rosalie, Macready’s lover. She expresses the drama’s closing sentiment. The remaining living characters wait in the restaurant while Capraro and Macready are executed. There Rosalie speaks the play’s concluding words: Don’t whisper it! Don’t whisper it! Didn’t you hear me say not to whisper any more? That’s what they’ll want you to do—whisper it—keep quiet about it—say it never happened—it couldn’t happen—two innocent men killed—keep it dark—keep it quiet— No! No! Shout it! They’re killing them . . . Mac—Mac—my dear—they have murdered you—while we stood here trying to think of what to do they murdered you! Just a moment ago you had a minute left—and it was the only minute in the whole world—and now—now this day will never end for you—there will be no more days . . . Shout it! Shout it! Cry out! Run and cry! Only—it won’t do any good—now. [41] All but the last line of Rosalie’s monologue gesture toward martyrdom—a bold call to ensure Macready’s death is not forgotten—but her final sentence turns to fatalism: the deaths have no meaning. “It won’t do any good” to shout of this injustice. Rosalie’s despondency has two ramifications. One is political: if Gods of the Lightning is a propaganda piece, a socialist (or anarchist) play (failed or otherwise), her fatalism contradicts the men’s politics and denies Sacco and Vanzetti any legacy. Contrary to Marxian theory and the lived politics of these two anarchists, nothing can be done; all is hopeless, revolution is impossible. The other is personal: the drama is a tragedy playing out against the backdrop of a politicized trial, not a political tragedy. In this case, sharing the tragedy of their unjust deaths is meaningless, because they are still dead, and Rosalie’s individual sorrow will not be assuaged by any political action. As Michael Schwartz argues, the play evokes “the anger and the fatalism” many felt after Sacco and Vanzetti were executed. [42] This “ultimate grimness,” [43] however, speaks more about those left to process their deaths than about the two anarchists themselves. By doing so, Anderson recast the men’s potential martyrdom as a reason for despair rather than action. And, he ignored Vanzetti’s own words before his execution: “Never in our full life can we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding of man as how we do by an accident.” [44] Despite his looming death, Vanzetti did not give into fatalism, and Gods of the Lightning need not either—Anderson’s politics recast the meaning of these events. Anderson chose to write about two anarchists, but he creates characters who espouse pacifistic anarchism and those who speak for radical labor. He links these two positions through their placement within a legal system that is subject to the play’s critique, yet he concludes by questioning the meaning and the lasting significance of Sacco and Vanzetti’s martyrdom. Anderson chose Sacco and Vanzetti as subject matter, but by exploring their politics through a pseudo-Leftist play that ends on a note either of political fatalism or apolitical loss, he sublimates anarchism. Though his ambiguous political agenda may be tied tenuously to Leftist ideologies, it is clearly not anarchist—it bears little resemblance to its real-life protagonists’ radicalism. Anderson’s Anarchist Trial: Winterset Unlike Gods of the Lightning , Winterset , written and published in 1955, was an immediate critical success, winning the Drama Critics Circle Award, and it continues to hold a secure position in the Western dramatic canon. [45] This success, though, tends to detach all political content from the play. [46] Anderson conceived of Winterset as “an experiment, an attempt to twist raw, modern reality to the shape and meaning of poetry.” [47] In his introduction to the play, he discusses his yearning for a “great theatre in this country,” one that has “outgrow[n] the phase of journalistic social comment and reache[d] . . . into the upper air of poetic tragedy.” [48] While outlining these ambitions, he fails to mention Sacco and Vanzetti. Setting out to write a tragic verse play and thus “establish a new [dramatic] convention, Anderson imagine[d] himself to be participating in a purely literary endeavor with little political import.” [49] According to DiNapoli, Anderson saw the Sacco-Vanzetti subject matter as a sure way to receive publicity in the politically charged 1930s, “and he judged that if he handled the subject in a way that did not infuse the potentially explosive event with newfound political life, a financial success might be achieved.” [50] Steven Richman more generously suggests, “Anderson, long a champion of individual liberties [was] clearly offended” by Sacco and Vanzetti’s plight. [51] Regardless of Anderson’s intent, the notion that Winterset is not a political play has retained remarkable traction: in the seventy-five years since it was written, scholars have focused on the play’s dramatic sources, conventions, and innovations, while frequently minimizing the historical event at its center. [52] It seems that when writing “propagandistic” plays, Anderson established a reputation for “Leftism” that was suspended temporarily when he wrote “pure literature.” [53] Put differently, when considered in the context of dramatic innovation, Winterset is granted a reprieve from the taint of radicalism, but given the overall context of Anderson’s work (including Gods of the Lightning and Both Your Houses ), it is strange to ignore the obvious political overtones in the play. [54] In 1935, Anderson had not yet fully rejected radical politics and he still associated with and was produced by Left-leaning theatre groups. Despite its subsequent sterilization, Winterset no more directly addressed the Sacco-Vanzetti affair and radicalism than did Gods of the Lightning . [55] In Winterset , Anderson again thinly veils his characters. Mio, the play’s protagonist, is the son of Bartolomeo Romagna, a radical fish peddler. Romagna is a conflated image of Sacco and Vanzetti, combining Vanzetti’s vocation (fishmonger) with Sacco’s fatherhood (Vanzetti had no children.). Notably, Romagna never appears in the play’s action: he haunts the text’s dialogue but is not a character; he establishes the link to Sacco and Vanzetti yet is a generic amalgam of both men’s anarchism. Winterset also includes Judge Gaunt, an obvious analog to Webster Thayer, the judge who presided over Sacco and Vanzetti’s trial, rejected several appeals and regularly defended the verdict, and, thus, was subject to particular ire from those who saw the entire ordeal as an injustice. In addition, Garth, Trock, and Shadow represent the real-life Morelli gang who may well have committed the crime for which Sacco and Vanzetti were convicted. [56] Set thirteen years after Romagna’s execution, the play depicts Mio’s search for the truth: he refuses to believe his father capable of murder and having sought the guilty parties for years, he eventually learns of and seeks out Garth, who witnessed Trock kill Romagna. This quest is paralleled by Trock’s efforts to kill anyone who might implicate him in the crime and by Judge Gaunt’s aimless, insane wanderings as he attempts to justify his court’s verdict. These three paths converge on the night of the play’s action, the same night on which Mio meets Miriamne and falls in love, providing a romantic plot which Anderson privileges over the Sacco-Vanzetti backdrop. Radicalism appears early in the play. Trock has come to see Garth, worried that continued interest in the case will lead Garth to confess and implicate him. Garth asks: who wants to go to trial againexcept the radicals? . . .Let the radicals go on howlingabout getting a dirty deal. They always howland nobody gives a damn. [57] Here, Garth gestures toward the continued interest in the Sacco-Vanzetti case but reduces this interest to the “radical” element; many may still take a voyeuristic interest in the case, but only the radicals are still interested in pursuing justice. Mio is aligned with this sustained “radical” interest because he too seeks the truth: No other love,time passing, nor the spaced light-years of sunsshall blur your voice, or tempt me from the paththat clears your name. [58] He seeks the truth because he must: Will you tell me how a man’sto live, and face his life, if he can’t believethat truth’s like a fire,and will burn through and be seenthough it takes all the years there are? [59] Mio does not believe the legal system’s findings, so he rejects them and seeks truth elsewhere; he wants to clear his father’s name, which is all that can be accomplished since Romagna is already dead. At the same time, the judge roams the streets, defending the legal system: Judge Gaunt’s gone off his nut. He’s gotthat damn trial on his mind, and been going roundproving to everybody he was right all the timeand the radicals were guilty—stopping peoplein the street to prove it—and now he’s nuts entirelyand nobody knows where he is. [60] The combination of Mio’s quest for truth contrary to the one produced by the legal system and Gaunt’s insane defense of the trial resemble Gods of the Lightning , suggests a substantive critique of the system that convicted Sacco and Vanzetti. Thirteen years after Romagna’s death (and eight years after Sacco and Vanzetti’s), however, Anderson suspends this critique, reducing it to context for the burgeoning romance between Mio and Miriamne (Garth’s sister), who meet and immediately fall in love. At this point, Winterset ’s attack on the legal system fades as Anderson redirects the action: [61] the play shifts from a pursuit of truth to an establishment of truth secondary to the pursuit of love. Suddenly, the Judge is no longer described as insane and he begins to sound cruel, yet reasonable in his defense of the verdict: I know and have knownwhat bitterness can rise against a courtwhen it must say, putting aside all weakness,that a man’s to die. I can forgive you that,for you are your father’s son, and you think of himas a son thinks of his father. Certain lawsseem cruel in their operation; it’s necessarythat we be cruel to uphold them. [62] As Mio, Garth, Trock, and Judge Gaunt interact, critique of the trial comes to the fore, with the tenement turning into a courtroom: Gaunt slips into his role as judge, calling for Order, gentlemen, order! The witness will rememberthat a certain decorum is essential in the court-room. [63] The fictive Judge Thayer, Morelli gang, and Sacco-Vanzetti family all reenter the legal system, and in this surreal recreation of the courtroom, Mio finds the truth he seeks. Romagna’s innocence and Gaunt’s complicity in the legal injustice are revealed, yet Gaunt still defends the verdict: [64] Suppose it known,but there are things a judge must not believethough they should head and fester underneathand press in on his brain. Justice once renderedin a clear burst of anger, righteously,upon a very common laborer,confessed an anarchist, the verdict foundand the precise machinery of lawinvoked to know him guilty—think what furorwould rock the state if the court then flatly said;all this was lies—must be reversed? It’s better,as any judge can tell you, in such cases,holding the common good to be worth morethan small injustice, to let the record stand,let one man die. For justice, in the main,is governed by opinion. Communitieswill have what they will have, and it’s quite as well,after all, to be rid of anarchists. Our rightsas citizens can be maintained as rightsonly while we are held to be the peersof those who live about us. [65] The romantic plot requires the resolution of critique, so Anderson dramatically retries the case. In the seemingly obvious climax of Mio’s life story, he confirms his father’s innocence, learning that the legal system failed him by succeeding in its main goal, the maintenance of social order. As in Gods of the Lightning , Anderson takes aim at the legal system and finds it corrupt. Mio’s beliefs are confirmed, and he can now spread word of Romagna’s innocence: Wherever menstill breathe and think, and know what’s done to themby the powers above, they’ll know. [66] Just like Rosalie in Gods of the Lightning , Mio calls for the truth to be spread—again dissemination momentarily appears to be the necessary step for redressing legal injustice. Yet Mio does no such thing. From the time he learns the “truth” until the end of the play, Mio’s love for Miramne triumphs over his pursuit for the truth, and the fatalism of Gods of the Lightning reemerges. Winterset ’s fatalism operates on two levels. First, after Mio learns the truth, the value of this truth—and its dissemination—are called into question. Miriamne’s and Garth’s father Edras questions the value of pursuing the issue: What will be changedif it comes to trial again? More blood poured outto a mythical justice, but your father lying stillwhere he lies now. [67] He then fundamentally denies the value of what Mio has learned: “there is no truth.” [68] This dismissal of the play’s revelation intersects with Miriamne’s desire that Mio not reveal Garth’s guilt. She asks Mio to keep their secret and he agrees: I tried to say itand it strangled my throat. I might have knownyou’d win in the end. [69] Second, Mio’s choice of Mariamne over his life-long goal of clearing his father’s name proves meaningless when both characters die at the play’s end. Mio abnegates the hope of “learn[ing] to live like a man . . . to live and forget to hate” and the “truth” for Mariamne, only to lose his life at Trock’s hand. [70] In Winterset , Anderson attacks the American legal system much as he does in Gods of the Lightning , but once again closes on a dual note of personal tragedy and political hopelessness. Any radicalism is sublimated to other concerns. In the earlier play—with its gossamer radicalism mirroring Anderson’s shifting, indeterminate politics—anarchism becomes pacifist, irrelevant, and impotent. In the later one, Sacco and Vanzetti linger as the nearly invisible background for dramatic innovation and poetic tragedy. In both cases, Anderson deploys the anarchists as neutered symbols of injustice: anarchism is sublimated, which in itself is not surprising, nor profound, but in the context of other literature from this period, Anderson’s choices resonate more powerfully. Twice he structured a play around Sacco and Vanzetti; twice he tentatively attacked the legal system’s failures; and twice he minimized the significance of this critique by ending with fatalism. The mere appearance of anarchists in Anderson’s plays does not make him an anarchist. He may have found some aspects of anarchism appealing, but neither of these plays nor his statements about politics suggest that Anderson aligned with the more radical forms of the era’s Left. Rather, he appears as another fellow traveler: someone who flirted with radical politics, yet ultimately sublimated them to his personal, political, and literary vision. Ultimately, Gods of the Lightning and Winterset distill the transformation of Sacco and Vanzetti into potent, yet disarticulated symbols: they continued to signify well after their deaths, but their signification was fully separated from their politics. Their appearance in literature functioned as radical bona fides : touching on the Sacco-Vanzetti affair’s injustice (even briefly) signified attachment to the broadly Leftist movement of the late 1920s and 1930s. Anderson’s plays, though—like much of the literature that shaped the meaning of Sacco and Vanzetti’s legacy—essentially strip anarchism of its power and specificity. Their image is no longer meaningfully anarchist; it simply marks a pseudo-radical shell that could be filled with literary and political content. References [1] . Clifford Odets, Waiting for Lefty and Other Plays , ed. Harold Clurman (New York: Grove Press, 1993), 40. [2] . For a brief history of anti-radical sentiment and laws from this period (with particular focus on anarchists like Sacco and Vanzetti), see Dan Colson, “Erasing Anarchism: Sacco and Vanzetti and the Logic of Representation,” American Quarterly 66, no. 4 (2014): 179-196. [3] . For a detailed analysis of Sacco and Vanzetti’s politics see Paul Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1991). Avrich convincingly argues the two men were Galleanists. Even amongst radicals, Galleani stood out as particularly extreme, so Sacco and Vanzetti were neither the naïfs some have claimed nor merely philosophical anarchists—they were aggressively opposed to all state governance and believed violence was justified to achieve an anarchist society. [4] . Alfred S. Shivers, The Life of Maxwell Anderson (New York: Stein and Day, 1983), 26. [5] . Ibid., 39. [6] . Anderson to John M. Gillette, 15 September 1912, in Dramatist in America: Letters of Maxwell Anderson, 1912-1958 , ed. Laurence G. Avery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 3. [7] . Anderson to Upton Sinclair, June 1919, in Dramatist in America , 13. [8] . Shivers, The Life , 111. [9] . Ibid., 61. [10] . Ibid., 63. [11] . Anderson to Brooks Atkinson, 21 August 1939, Dramatist in America , 90-91. [12] . Anderson to Donald Ogden Stewart, 11 March 1941, Dramatist in America , 110. [13] . Shivers, The Life , 238. [14] . Ibid., 56, 1. [15] . Shivers argues that “Anderson . . . believe[d] that under any conditions except wartime, government was the natural enemy of the average citizen” ( The Life , 198). According to Shivers, “[t]he exigencies of total war had compelled him to reach a truce within his own democratic government” ( The Life , 198). Note the rejection of pacifism linked to the anti-fascism: Anderson was willing to accept both government and war to fight fascism. Like many radicals and progressives from the era, he appears to have accepted the Popular Front logic that moderates, liberals, and radicals must all come together to fight the immediate enemy: the fascists. [16] . Shivers, The Life , 7. [17] . Shivers, Maxwell Anderson (Boston: Twayne, 1976), 137. [18] . Shivers, The Life , 125. [19] Russell DiNapoli, “Fragile Currency of the Last Anarchist: The Plays of Maxwell Anderson,” New Theatre Quarterly 18, no. 3 (2002): 277, 282. [20] . Hal Cantor, “Anderson and Odets and the Group Theater,” in Maxwell Anderson and the New York Stage , eds. Nancy J. Doran Hazelton and Kenneth Krauss (Monroe, NY: Library Research Assoc., 1991), 34. [21] . Anderson to the editor, November 1944, Dramatist in America , 192. [22] . Russell DiNapoli, The Elusive Prominence of Maxwell Anderson in the American Theater (Valencia: Publicacions de la Universitat de València, 2002), 56. [23] . Ibid., 53 [24] . Ibid., 54. [25] . Ethan Mordden, Sing for Your Supper: The Broadway Musical in the 1930s (New York: St. Marten’s Press, 2005), 230. [26] . Turning to Mordden, who does not write extensively about Anderson, captures the ubiquity of this seemingly contradictory view: the notion that Anderson was an anarchist—but one who did not really embrace anarchist views—saturates much scholarship on his plays. [27] . Calling the play “minor,” Shivers’s biography of Anderson almost entirely ignores Gods of the Lightning , and—in a suggestion of how scholars have struggled to deal with the appearance of Sacco and Vanzetti in Anderson’s plays—notes merely that it was “based on an internationally famous legal trial” (Shivers, The Life , 112). [28] . Shivers, Maxwell Anderso n, 106. [29] . Barrett H. Clark, Maxwell Anderson: The Man and His Plays (Norwood, PA: Norwood Editions, 1976), 17-18. [30] . Shivers, Maxwell Anderso n, 106. [31] . Ibid. The play also includes Celestino Medeiros, a convicted murder who confessed to the Braintree crime and claimed Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent. Medeiros’s execution was delayed while Governor Fuller and the Lowell Commission considered his confession alongside other evidence, but ultimately they did not believe his story and he was executed the same night as Sacco and Vanzetti. In the play, “Madeiros [ sic ] is changed into the bleak-minded and fatalistic restaurant owner Suvorin” (Shivers, Maxwell Anderson , 106). [32] . Jennifer Jones, “A Fictitious Injustice: The Politics of Conversation in Maxwell Anderson’s Gods of the Lightning ,” American Drama 4, no. 2 (1995): 83. [33] . Ibid. [34] . Ibid., 107. [35] . Jones, for instance, reads the play as a “socialist drama” that merges “political protest with instinctive American worship of the individual” (89, 83). By claiming Capraro is a condensation of Sacco and Vanzetti and arguing that Capraro’s politics always come second to Macready’s, Jones attempts to demonstrate that the play “eviscerated the beliefs [Sacco and Vanzetti] died for” (94). She builds this argument, however, on the claim that “Sacco and Vanzetti were pacifists,” misreading their anti-war stance as the rejection of all violence (88). Ultimately, she accuses Anderson of focusing on an “American protagonist” at the expense of the “socioeconomic forces of race and class oppression that brought about the death of Sacco and Vanzetti” (93). [36] . Anderson and Harold Hickerson, Gods of the Lightning (London: Longman’s, Green, and Co., 1928), 26. [37] . Jones interprets Macready as an unabashed, liberal individualist who overwhelms Capraro’s anarchism, but Macready is linked to the IWW: he speaks from a political position similar to the one Jones attributes to Anderson. [38] . Anderson and Hickerson, Gods of the Lightning , 78. [39] . Ibid., 26. [40] . Michael Schwarz, Class Divisions on the Broadway Stage: The Staging and Taming of the I.W.W. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). [41] . Anderson, Gods of the Lightning , 106. [42] . Schwartz, ch. 5. [43] . Ibid. [44] . I quote here from John Dos Passos, The Big Money (Boston: Mariner, 2000), 372. Dos Passos regularized the spelling from a reporter’s transcription that originally appeared in the New York World on 13 May 1927. [45] . Winterset was first staged at the Martin Beck Theatre in 1935 and was a “smashing success at the box office” (Shivers, The Life , 149). Its original run lasted 179 performances. The play then toured nationally before returning to Broadway for 16 additional shows. It was turned into a film (directed by Alfred Santell and starring Burgess Meredith) in 1936. The play has not been revived frequently, though it was staged for short runs in Chicago in both 1991 and 2016. [46] . The long-standing tradition of foregrounding Anderson’s purported aesthetic triumphs may well explain the tendency to minimize his play’s political import. [47] . Anderson, “Acceptance Speech for the Drama Critics’ Circle Award to Winterset ,” in Dramatist in America , 295. [48] . Anderson, introduction to Gods of the Lightning , x, vi. [49] . Ibid., xi. [50] . DiNapoli, “Maxwell Anderson’s Misuse of Poetic Discourse in Winterset ,” in Staging a Cultural Paradigm: The Political and the Personal in American Drama , eds. Barbara Ozieblo and Miriam López-Rodríguez (Bruxelles: P.I.E.-Peter Lang, 2002), 101. DiNapoli contends that “[Anderson] knew the topic would entice audiences to see the play” (101). He claims that Anderson’s attention to Sacco and Vanzetti “exploited the Sacco-Vanzetti issue for other than artistic reasons” (101). [51] . Steven M. Richman, “ Winterset and the Recrudescence of Ressentiment,” Nova Law Review 18, no. 3 (1994): 1882. [52] . The body of scholarship on Winterset is quite small given the play’s critical reception in the 1930s. What little research there is largely ignores the play’s focus on anarchism in favor of other theatrical/dramatic concerns. The most common trope is to look at source materials and influences. As early as 1946, Samuel Kliger examined “Hebraic lore” in the play (“Hebraic Lore in Winterset ,” American Literature 18, no. 3 [1946]: 219-232). Explorations of other Biblical influences (Howard D. Pearce, “Job in Anderson’s Winterset ,” Modern Drama 6 [1963]: 32-41), Shakespearean elements (Jacob H. Alder, “Shakespeare in Winterset ,” Educational Theatre Journal 6 [1954]: 241-248 and John B. Jones, “Shakespeare as Myth and the Structure of Winterset , Educational Theatre Journal 25 [1973]: 34-45), and classical references (Frances Abernethy, Winterset : A Modern Revenge Tragedy, Modern Drama 7 [1964]: 185-189 and J. T. McCullen, Jr., “Two Quests for Truth: King Oedipus and Winterset ,” The Laurel Review 5, no. 1 [1965]: 28-35), amongst other allusions and inspirations, followed over the next few decades. After about 1980 work on Winterset is virtually non-existent, excepting the scholars I engage with in this essay. [53] . Shivers, The Life , 148 [54] . In part, Winterset ’s reputation emerges from the contradictions of post-WWII literary scholarship. During the Cold War, anti-communist backlash, scholars were forced to reconcile the play’s reputation as one of the best from the 1930s with its subject matter (Sacco and Vanzetti) and Anderson’s dalliance with the Left. Anderson’s rejection of communism makes the reconciliation possible, but scholars who wished to study Winterset were wise to ignore any political significance in the play that might appear radical. Thus, they focused on the fiction of apolitical formal characteristics. This scholarly juggling act may account for the seemingly disconnected reputations of Anderson (still viewed as a Left-leaning fellow-traveler) and Winterset (long considered a brilliant, yet apolitical play that just happens to be about two anarchists). [55] . Shivers claims “the passage of years since Gods of the Lightning gave [Anderson] the aesthetic distanced he needed in handling the Sacco-Vanzetti case” (Shivers, The Life , 148). In other words, Shivers reads Winterset as an aesthetic object worthy of consideration almost in spite of its subject matter, unlike the earlier play which he virtually ignores. [56] . In his confession, Medeiros implicated the Morelli gang, and many of Sacco and Vanzetti’s other defenders insisted the Morelli gang committed the Braintree robbery as well. Winterset obviously taps into this accusation, as its fictionalized Morellis try to avoid the exposure of their crime. [57] . Anderson, Winterset (Washington: Anderson House, 1935), 14. [58] . Ibid., 50. [59] . Ibid., 70. [60] . Ibid., 15. [61] .Richman rightly argues “the play stands for the proposition that a developed legal system may be seriously flawed” (1869), but after establishing its flaws, the play shifts significantly. [62] . Winterset , 73. [63] . Ibid., 95. [64] . Richman claims Gaunt’s depiction is open to a “sympathetic interpretation” (1882), but such an interpretation would have been difficult to sustain at the time, as outrage lingered almost a decade after Sacco and Vanzetti were executed. [65] . Winterset , 98-99. [66] . Ibid., 99. [67] . Ibid., 109. [68] . Ibid., 117. [69] . Ibid., 125. [70] . Ibid. Footnotes About The Author(s) Dan Colson is Associate Professor of English at Emporia State University. His work has appeared in American Quarterly , American Studies , Radical Teacher , Studies in American Naturalism , Philip Roth Studies , and the AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom , amongst other journals. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience: The Tourist as Actor. Jennifer A. Kokai and Tom Robson, eds. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019; Pp. 292. The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy: Gambling, Drama, and the Unexpected. Edwin Wong. Victoria, Canada: Friesen Press, 2019; Pp. 363. Susan Glaspell’s Poetics and Politics of Rebellion. Emeline Jouve. Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2017; Pp. 258. Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry. Soyica Diggs Colbert. New Haven: Yale, 2021; Pp. 273. The Mysterious Murder of Mrs. Shakespeare: Transgressive Performance in Nineteenth-Century New York “What Will Be Changed?”: Maxwell Anderson and the Literary Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti Theatre of Isolation “A Certain Man Had Two [Kids]”: Tragic Parables, “The Prodigal Son,” and Edward Albee's The Goat “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells [Her] Story”: An Intersectional Analysis of the Women of Hamilton Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

By Marvin Carlson | A comprehensive catalogue of New York City research facilities available to theatre scholars. < Back More Information & Order Details To order a print copy of our pocket edition, go to Lulu (https://bit.ly/theatreresourceslulu) Theatre Research Resources in New York City Marvin Carlson Download PDF Edited by Frank Hentschker and Margaret Araneo Theatre Research Resources in New York City is now in its seventh edition. An essential text for anyone conducting research in theatre and performance in NYC, the book includes a comprehensive list of discipline-specific research facilities, including public and private libraries, museums, historical societies, university and college collections, acting schools, and film archives. Each entry features an outline of the facility’s holdings as well as contact information, hours, services, and access procedures. The book is available in print form in a new pocket edition as well as online. To access the book online, click here. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

Ahmed S. M. Mohammed Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 26 1 Visit Journal Homepage Feminist Periodization as a Structural Component of Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles Ahmed S. M. Mohammed By Published on March 10, 2014 Download Article as PDF "People are products of the time in which they came of age. I know that to be true. In my plays these women are very much of their times." -- Wendy Wasserstein. Most scholarship and critical studies on the dramatic works of Wendy Wasserstein (1950-2006), during her lifetime and after her untimely death at the age of 55, have been largely concerned with her representation of [ . . . ] [scribd id=211700058 key=key-ws65sbip7wqx8bisp3j mode=scroll height=930 width=600] References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Between Blackface and Bondage: The Incompletely Forgotten Failure of The Underground Railroad's 1879 Midwestern Tour “One Live as Two, Two Live as One”: Bert Williams and the Uprooted Bamboo Tree Playwright as Publicity: Reexamining Jane Martin and the Legacy of the Humana Festival Feminist Periodization as a Structural Component of Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles Waiting for Triumph: Alan Schneider and the American Response to Waiting for Godot Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Bennet Schaber Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 1 Visit Journal Homepage “An Art for Which There Is as Yet No Name.” Mobile Color, Artistic Composites, Temporal Objects Bennet Schaber By Published on November 16, 2022 Download Article as PDF “[T]o reduce everything to terms of motion, to see everything passing into everything else by almost insensible gradations, to refuse to accept any firm line of demarcation… this running over of every art into every other art… in all the arts the principle of motion prevails over the principle of repose.”— Irving Babbitt , The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts[1] “Repose is the property of dead things; with the living it is only a passing accident.”— Hiram Kelly Moderwell , The Theatre of Today [2] “What is a life that is in need of being constantly resuscitated?”— Bernard Stiegler , Technics and Time [3] In 1934, Robert Edmond Jones (1887-1954), celebrated stage designer and director, went to Hollywood. There he joined his friend, colleague and former Harvard classmate, producer Kenneth Macgowan, at RKO. At Harvard the two had both been students in George Pierce Baker’s famed English 47 playwriting workshop and later, in New York along with Eugene O’Neill, another Baker alumnus, formed the ‘triumvirate’ of Experimental Theatre Inc., producing over twenty plays in three seasons (1923-6) at the Provincetown Playhouse and Greenwich Village Theatre. These included two landmarks of the new movement in the North American theatre, O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1924) with Paul Robeson and Desire Under the Elms (1924) with Walter Huston, the latter designed and directed by Jones. Both plays would become motion pictures. Jones, like other practitioners of “the new stagecraft,” was celebrated for his use of color in costuming, stage architecture and lighting, and was so part of a “talent pool” courted not only by Broadway, but by the burgeoning retail industry and, of course, Hollywood. He was, then, one of the principals of what in 1928 the Saturday Evening Post called “The New Age of Color.”[4] Jones had come West to serve as “color designer,” a newly created position, for an experiment that turned out to be the first non-animated, three-color, Technicolor film, the Academy-Award winning short, La Cucaracha (Pioneer/RKO 1934) (Fig. 1). For Jones it was, if words are to be believed, a dream come true. “Color has come to stay in pictures,” he wrote in Vanity Fair earlier in the year. “When this issue reaches the press I shall be in Hollywood where I hope to put some of my dreams into color—or properly speaking into Technicolor, for that is the name of the process in which I am interested.”[5] Fig. 1, La Cucaracha (Pioneer/RKO, 1934). Frame grab. A year later, Jones returned to the pages of Vanity Fair , this time to discuss his work as “artistic director” for Pioneer/RKO’s Becky Sharp (1935), the first feature-length Technicolor film, directed by Rouben Mamoulian and, like La Cucaracha, produced by Macgowan (Fig. 2).[6] Fig. 2, Becky Sharp (Pioneer/RKO, 1935). Frame grab. He enthused about the “advent of color in pictures” and situated it not only within the history of film—“images began to move… then they began to speak… now they are taking on all the colors of life…”—but within a world history at once aesthetic and speculative. Technicolor becomes for him a metonymy for technology itself, capable of reaching back to Homer and faithfully reproducing “the wine-dark sea, the rosy-fingered dawn,” but also presaging a future in which images “will step off the screen and appear before you in the round” and that will, finally, “make every human being on this earth immediately present to every other being.” Technicolor signaled a past, revivified in all of its chromatic intensity, and a future, anticipated in its full, living, even utopian dimensions. And he added, “I cannot say why this should be so. But it is the way things seem to be moving.”[7] Vividness and presence, movement and time: Color, or rather, Technicolor, was redolent with and suggestive of all of these. Indeed, color was suggestion itself. In Jones’s words, “it affects us emotionally; it means something to us.” Thus, he adduced an entire chromatic semiotics both natural and cultural: “Light bright colors make us feel gay. Dark sombre colors make us feel sad. We see red; we get the blues; we become purple with rage; green with envy… red and green make us think of Christmas….” In fact, this semiotics of color, bound to a strict but not inflexible set of rules and guidelines, would quickly transform into industrial standards for color films.[8] But if color required these kinds of formal, limiting and organizing procedures, it was because in it there was something else; and that something else, to Jones’s mind at least, would require “artists who will explore the infinite potentialities of the new medium.” That excess element, in order to be expressed, required an analogy that, in the long run, may have been no analogy at all: music. Beautiful color is pleasing to our eyes just as beautiful sound is pleasing to our ears. But, more than this, beautiful color, properly arranged and composed on the screen and flowing from sequence to sequence just as music flows from movement to movement, stirs our minds and emotions in the same way that music does. Color on the screen—mobile color, flowing color—is really a kind of visual music. Or rather, it is an art for which there is as yet no name.[9] Like music, “arranged and composed,” color, mobile and flowing, was a form of flux in excess of any informal patchwork or formal taxonomy of significations. Although immanent to its medium or support, it took on an independence of movement and vibration; and although an optical element of the film narrative, it transcended the order of representation of the fable. Clearly, it could “enhance the action of the drama” or become “an organic part of it….” But in principle, it was irreducible to the technical, regular and inexorable procession of the film machine or to the formal rhythms and progressions of the drama. A color of a dress? Of course. Of the sky? Yes. A metaphor? An association? Certainly. But also something simultaneously more material and more abstract, mobile, flowing. Perhaps this is why it had “no name.” Color, therefore, introduced, or re-introduced, a certain tension into the film that became even more apparent after the premiere of Becky Sharp . Color, like sound before it, re-asserted the cinema as what Rudolf Arnheim would call “an artistic composite,” with its variety of perceptual and formal registers always potentially at war with one another and themselves.[10] Forces of indeterminacy consistently threatened narrative and more general aesthetic coherence, technical feats of astonishment could overwhelm artistic restraint, perceptual and sensory independences could work below or above principles of integration, even the repetitive cycles of reels and frames were potentially at odds with the forward momentum of lengths of film. In short, there was a friction between what might be called avant-garde tendencies and conventional norms; and Jones’s work in theatre design was rooted in both camps. Color semiotics was one thing, mobile color was another. In addition, La Cucaracha and Becky Sharp were “demonstration” films, prototypes for the new three-color Technicolor process. And their need to highlight the process of color itself accentuated these tensions. The demonstration, meant to suggest a certain aesthetic and industrial teleology, in Jones’s words, “the way things seem to be moving,” also suggested its potential opposite, a kind of corrosive, vibrational undoing of that forward momentum. Reviewing the premiere at Radio City Music Hall for the New York Times , Andre Sennwald put his finger on many of these fundamental tensions while echoing Jones’s rhetoric. Although Becky Sharp ’s faults were “too numerous to earn it distinction as a screen drama,” as “an experiment it is a momentous event, and it may be that in a few years it will be regarded as equal in importance of the first talking pictures.” He added: This is not the coloration of natural life, but a vividly pigmented dream world of the artistic imagination. … [T]he most glaring technical fault is the poor definition in the long shots, which convert faces into blurred masses…. [T]here is also a tendency to provoke an after-image when the scene shifts abruptly to a quieter color combination…. At the moment it is impossible to view Becky Sharp without crowding the imagination so completely with color that the photoplay as a whole is almost meaningless. … The real secret of the film resides not in the general feeling of dissatisfaction which the spectator suffers when he leaves the Music Hall, but in the active excitement which he experiences during its scenes.[11] In short, the film’s “excessive demands on the eye” undermined “the film as a whole.” Blurred masses, after-images, active excitement, crowded imagination and the corrosion of meaning rendered nothing but dissatisfaction where conventional aesthetic norms and expectations were concerned. To rectify these alleged “faults” required “accustoming the eye” to color just as “we were obliged to accustom the ear to the first talkies.” What was at stake then, were both forms of perceptual acquaintance and aesthetic integration; the eye and the ear would require re-attunement before they could be made once again to harmonize. Thus, Sennwald took Jones’s vocabulary of dreams, aesthetic teleologies and visual music and gave them a specificity that Jones’s own rhetoric itself seemed to lack. Sound and color did not supplement a lack in the silent, monochrome image. They revivified and exacerbated an old and created and put into motion a new set of tensions, if not quite a new art or an art for which there was as yet no name. Inscribed, silently, in the demonstration were a set of avant-garde aspirations more fusional than integrative, psychologically or physiologically jarring rather than aesthetically pacifying. The sum of the film was exceeded by its parts; and these parts themselves bled through or overflowed into forms of indistinction that gave rise to, not integration, but a fusing of more… parts. Were there really after-images floating in the indeterminate spaces of cuts? Were human figures actually transforming into blurred blocs of pigment? Was this what Jones meant by mobile color? In fact, “mobile color” really did name something, and Jones once knew it, even if by 1935 he had perhaps forgotten. “Mobile color,” Stark Young, playwright and critic, wrote in 1922 in Theatre Arts Magazine , “is a new art and we have no images of speech for it…. But we sit before it with no sense of strangeness, though there may be some novelty. Like all true things in art it is recognizable. We realize its closeness to our dreams.”[12] Here again was the sublime feeling of inexpressibility; and here again were “dreams into color,” and not just in our heads. A year earlier, Young’s co-editor at Theatre Arts Magazine had also written with excitement about “mobile color,” Thomas Wilfred’s experiments with lumia , moving color projections. In the Theatre of Tomorrow , Kenneth Macgowan, Jones’s friend, colleague and the future producer of La Cucaracha and Becky Sharp at Pioneer/RKO, celebrated Wilfred’s clavilux , a console to create moving light projections and a new, luminous, environmental art, as a harbinger of a future, multi-media theatre (fig. 3). Fig. 3, Thomas Wilfred at the Clavilux Jr. (1930). Thomas Wilfred Papers (MS 1375). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. Macgowan explained: In a laboratory on Long Island, Thomas Wilfrid [sic], a naturalized Dane, who is a machinist and a musician as well as artist, has perfected a “color organ” or “claviluse” [sic] which creates upon a plaster screen the most extraordinary, beautiful and moving progression of absolute shapes and colors. Upon a surface stained by light, develop, evolve and pass the most lovely and thrilling of bright shapes produced apparently by prisms and crystals…. Floating in three-dimensional space… they seem to turn inside-out into a fourth. The final effect is utterly apart from the theatre as we know it. It is more of some mystic philosophy of shapes and numbers, come to life, a religion of pure form sprung out of the void.[13] In Huntington, Long Island, Macgowan had attended the same, private clavilux demonstration about which Young wrote the next year. Present too were Theatre Arts Magazine ’s founder, Sheldon Cheney, photographer Francis Bruguière, and designer Hermann Rosse. Rosse, who also experimented with moving color projections, would go on to win an Oscar for artistic direction for the 1930 two-color, Technicolor musical revue, King of Jazz (Universal). Jones, who contributed texts and images to the Theatre Arts Magazine beginning with its inaugural issue, may have also attended the event. But if he was not present, he would have known and read of it and certainly attended later exhibitions. The rhetoric he later deployed à propos of Technicolor clearly echoed the rhetoric surrounding Wilfred’s lumia . Although now a rather forgotten art form, Wilfred’s invention and the performances he gave with it were a vibrant and relevant component of both the avant-garde art world and the popular culture of the twenties.[14] Painters, patrons and musicians all found mobile color provocative and intriguing, an “art of the future,” as Katherine Dreier described it to Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz, Leopold Stokowski and Marcel Duchamp.[15] Sheldon Cheney, the experimental theatre’s leading theorist and exponent in the USA, devoted an entire chapter of his A Primer of Modern Art (1924) to it; and his descriptions, and a series of photographs by Bruguière, amounted to both a verbal and visual essay on its significance and potential futures. Like Young and Macgowan, Cheney too found himself struggling to find an adequate or satisfactory vocabulary with which to describe and take account of this distinctly modern art. And like Young, he recognized immediately a potential contradiction between its hybrid origins and its ambitions toward abstraction. According to Cheney: It is too soon to build up a particularized theory for the art of mobile color; but this much must be said at the outset: it must be, like music, an abstract art. It will have a formal beauty of its own sort, distinctive, shaped by the limitations and possibilities of its medium, colored lights. But it will not ever (let us hope) get mixed up with the aim of representing nature. It would then—awful thought—become a sort of super-colored movie. As in music, where only the cheapest novelties of composition try definitely to imitate the sounds of nature, so in this new art there will be no effort to suggest objective reality.[16] Once again, the encounter with mobile color leads, with a kind of inevitability, to music and the cinema. And Wilfred’s own lexicon encouraged both these intermedial flights and their accompanying anxieties. The Clavilux, according to its creator, was a kind of “color organ,” and each light “composition” was an “ opus .” Thus, despite his best efforts, Wilfred could never guarantee that mobile color would be understood as a strictly, unadulterated visual experience. Its condition as a motile, chromatic, temporal and ephemeral experience underscored its status as an object and phenomenon of flux. Cheney was himself forced to illustrate his essay on the lumia with static, black-and-white photographs, as if mobile color presented not only a foil to linguistic representation but to the visual as well (fig. 4). Fig. 4, Sheldon Cheney, A Primer of Modern Art (1924). Photos by Francis Bruguière. And he concluded his essay not with words or a photograph, but with a reproduction of a painting by Georgia O’Keeffe: Music—Black, Blue and Green (fig. 5). Fig. 5, Georgia O’Keefe, Blue and Green Music (1919/1921). The Art Institute of Chicago. Thomas Wilfred, from Lumia Opus 162. Courtesy of A.J. Epstein. Photo © Clavilux.org Fig. 5a, Georgia O’Keefe, Blue and Green Music (1919/1921). The Art Institute of Chicago. Thomas Wilfred, from Lumia Opus 162. Courtesy of A.J. Epstein. Photo © Clavilux.org Music? Painting? Movie? An art with no name and, more troubling still, an art with no proper image. It was, as Macgowan had pointed out, continually developing, evolving, and passing. But perhaps the very difficulty of representing mobile color was in fact the indication of its most sublime possibilities. What exactly would be wrong with "a sort of super-colored movie?” And was that what Jones and Macgowan had gotten up to in the decade since Cheney’s book? Awful thought indeed. Trying to come to grips with mobile color brought Cheney not to the promised land of medium specificity, abstraction, non-objectivity or aesthetic autonomy. Rather, despite himself, he was drawn along, like Macgowan, Young, and Jones, toward the other arts, in this case, painting, music and the movies. Mobile color highlighted and exacerbated two conflictual but finally inseparable narratives about modern art. Claims about abstraction, about the emancipation of the arts from figuration and their deliverance into their own, particular and distinct media and vocations, invariably found themselves accompanied by claims of hybridity, immixture and confusion.[17] Thus, while critics like Babbitt, Cheney, Arnheim and, most famously, Clement Greenberg (despite their crucial differences) could all broker the legitimacy of modern art on the aesthetic limits first outlined by Lessing’s Laokoon (and to which they invariably referred), another faction (to which Jones and Macgowan belonged) could seek the same legitimacy in the sensuous overflowing of those limits manifest in Walter Pater’s rather paradoxical notion of the Anderstreben , through which the arts “lend each other new forces.”[18] Music, and especially the notion of visual music, could stand in for both tendencies. On the one hand, music was an abstraction. In it everything—perception, sensation, figuration—could be reduced to mathematics: duration, rhythm, interval, vibration. It was its own content. On the other hand, as a metaphor, it drew to it all the other arts and their allied perceptual forms. Music was the source of synesthetic experiences. Like color, it was an experience of “flow” into which memory and anticipation were soldered together. Emotion and diffusion: Cheney was honest enough to acknowledge at least that much: “It is a question whether absolute abstraction is not a will-o’-the-wisp, whether in any work of art (even musical?) the associative processes of memory and recognition are not indissolubly bound up, at least faintly, with aesthetic enjoyment.”[19] Visual music, then, confirmed the nagging suspicion that every attempt to draw the limits of, or the borders between, the various arts seemed to lead to their increasing “confusion,” as Irving Babbitt vehemently complained. No doubt the theatre and the cinema, composites by their very nature and history, were the most susceptible to these contradictions. Like Babbitt and Lessing before him, Rudolf Arnheim was not particularly a fan of aesthetic hybrids, but he saw clearly where Cheney’s, Stark’s and Macgowan’s arguments led: “[E]ven the theatre has been accused now and then of basically being a hybrid…. [A]bsolute theatre, the kind of performance that is sheer stage action… has remained sterile whenever it was attempted and must remain so unless it be stylized to the point of becoming dance or so enriched visually as to become film.”[20] Mobile color accentuated this condition. To think of it as theatre or drama was quite simply to watch theatre disappear into color or music… or cinema. Thus, it brought home the essentially composite nature of theatre itself. The entire spectrum of the arts was the condition of its sense. If Technicolor, at least in Jones’s sense of it, bore the trace of mobile color, that was because it indicated these same compositional tensions at work in the cinema. Sennwald had seen it first-hand. Mobile color could transform figuration into moving blocs of pigment. Chromatic flux, “flowing color,” provoked afterimages that signaled the spectators’ physiological and subjective, and thus ontologically obscure, contribution to the film, what Sergei Eisenstein had called “the brink of cinema,” “fusing stage and audience in a developing pattern” that seemed to lack a proper place.[21] At play then was a dual tendency: towards abstraction and high art, towards aesthetic fusions and the vernacular. This was how nameless arts were born. There was another tension at play in mobile color and this one perhaps brings us to the crux of the matter. On the one hand, the lumia were theatrical, that is they constituted both an art of vision and of volume. In Wilfred’s own words, they were “a three-dimensional drama in space.”[22] This distinguished the lumia from all previous versions of color music, from Pythagoras to Castel, Rimington to Scriabin.[23] And in fact, the inaugural demonstration to the Theatre Arts group brought out, as Cheney explicitly noticed, lumia as spatial art: “the effect of space instead of screen is achieved through the use of a background that is a modification of the stage-dome or cupola-horizon, in place of the flat wall.”[24] What Cheney was describing was the cyclorama that was revolutionizing the lighting effects of the modern theatre in the teens and twenties. A solid, domed, curvilinear background, usually constructed of plaster, the cyclorama enabled sophisticated light and color effects and obviated the need for painted backdrops. With it, the new stagecraft could give up traditional forms of mimesis and dedicate Itself to experiments in image generation. The cyclorama turned the theatre into a continuous field of projections. Plays like those produced by Jones, Macgowan, and O’Neill, could unfold rhythmically in a light that made prior dramatic unities suddenly indistinct if not indiscernible.[25] “Lighting is my music,” the German theatre designer, Ottamar Starke, said. And with the new experiences of theatrical light and space, the new, experimental, theatre became something closer to the flux of rhythmic progression than anything like Aristotelian mimetic dramaturgy. Plays became more episodic, putting momentum and suggestion in place of representation. Stage pictures were no longer produced before a static, painted, representational background.[26] Instead, they unfolded in the animated interplay between moving bodies and mobile light. “Let the stage, by means of its lights, be as alive as the drama itself,” proclaimed Hiram Kelly Moderwell in 1914.[27] “A new theatre and a new art,” wrote Macgowan about the designs of Rosse and Jones, “in which story, action, color, music, pantomime and voice would be fused.”[28] Actors emerged as living presences from their own projected shadows and images (fig. 6). Fig. 6, Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1920), w/ Charles Gilpin performing before the cyclorama (Kuppelhorizont) constructed by George Cram Cook, scene design by Cleon Throckmorton. Provincetown Playhouse, NY (Wikimedia Commons). “The lights and shadows on a human body reveal to our eyes that the body is ‘plastic’—that is, a flexible body of three dimensions,” Moderwell insisted.[29] The future imagined by Jones in which images “will step off the screen and appear before you in the round,” had already happened. Had he forgotten that too? On the other hand, if the lumia resembled theatrical events or proto-happenings, they also constituted a set of distinct compositions, each one an “ opus .” They were thus repeatable, recorded, technical objects the status of which was simultaneously virtual and material, images that required a support in a medium of inscription, like a film. Thus, for each lumia opus there corresponded a “color record,” a glass disc that could be “played” and manipulated on Wilfred’s clavilux (fig. 7). Fig. 7a, Thomas Wilfred, Color Records designed for the Clavilux Junior. Courtesy of A.J. Epstein. Photos © Clavilux.org Fig. 7b, Thomas Wilfred, Color Records designed for the Clavilux Junior. Courtesy of A.J. Epstein. Photos © Clavilux.org Fig. 7c, Thomas Wilfred, Color Records designed for the Clavilux Junior. Courtesy of A.J. Epstein. Photos © Clavilux.org Fig. 7d, Thomas Wilfred, Color Records designed for the Clavilux Junior. Courtesy of A.J. Epstein. Photos © Clavilux.org This is why the analogies with music both made sense and fell short. It was not music as such that was at stake, but recorded music, phonography, with which the lumia perhaps were best compared. A chromo-graphy that was both a semiotic structure and the simultaneous possibility, through recorded repetition, of its technical deconstruction, like but not quite identical to either a modernist painting or a super-colored movie. A lumia opus was a temporal object but not necessarily a narrative or even a conventionally musical one.[30] What it promised, and this cannot be overemphasized, was not meaning as such, a text or a discursive semiotics, but a sensuous experience of color vision in and as time: developing, evolving, passing, repeating. And its inventor was having as difficult a time as anyone finding the means to express what was fundamentally a sensory, mnemo-technical phenomenon. In Wilfred’s own words, the “physical basis” of lumia was: “The composition, recording and performance of a silent visual sequence in form, color and motion, projected on a flat white screen by means of a light-generating instrument controlled from a keyboard.”[31] Composition, instrument, keyboard, all suggested music. Recording, light, sequence, screen, all suggested cinema. Performance linked the two arts, but also suggested the theatricality that had mesmerized the editors of Theatre Arts Magazine . “The lumia artist conceives his idea,” Wilfred wrote, “as a three-dimensional drama unfolding in infinite space.” Mobile color was, like the theatre, like the cinema, a composite art. But it was also a recorded art; and the experience it promised—of emergence, expectation, disappearance and repetition—was bound up with its technical condition: not the time of seeing, but time’s entrance into, and emergence as, the visible. This is why it slipped through Cheney’s hands even as he tried—and failed—to represent it. Its ontology and locus were obscure, like a song or picture you can’t get out of your head (or ear, or eye). Modern art’s afterimage. “The mind of audiences alone can see the created thing as a unity,” wrote drama critic and future film producer, Ralph Block, of motion projections. “It never appears as such on the screen.”[32] And he added, à propos of the cinema proper and as if anticipating Jones’s own hesitations regarding color semiotics: For the camera, movement must be living, warm, vital, and flowing rather than set and defined in an alphabet of traditional interpretation. Like Bergsonian time, it must seek to renew and recreate itself out of the crest of each present moment. It is in this sense that it resembles music.[33] Thinking, in 1935, of Technicolor as “mobile color,” as “flow” and “movement” in search of its proper name, and finally as “visual music,” Jones was reviving and reanimating the lumia experiments and discourses from the previous two decades and, a bit surreptitiously, asserting their continued influence and relevance. He had clearly not forgotten—or at least was not conscious of having not forgotten—his experiences of Wilfred’s invention. He was in fact deploying its memory as the very form through which to mediate his passage from the experimental theatre of the twenties to the experimental, color cinema of the thirties. Visual music was the distributed middle term of a barely suppressed analogy between avant-garde experiments become super-colored movies, and super-colored movies become ecstatic avant-garde events. But what’s more, the cinematic future he was projecting was the perfect image of his theatrical past. Technicolor was revealing his previous life in the theatre as a dream, in some form at least, already come true. Technicolor as technics, a regime of suggestions, associations, memories and anticipations, with all of its futural momentum, was drawing him backward into a composite past. That past too had been inflected by its dreams. What was its future supposed to have been? Was its trace the imagined future of “every human being on this earth immediately present to every other being?” What kind of presence, exactly, were we being asked to imagine? The comparison or analogy of mobile color to music was reminiscent, in fact, of the ways in which the cinema tout court had been phrased as a kind of visual music. “In form and structure, expression by the motion-camera is more like music than anything else,” wrote Block in The Century Magazine . “It streams before the eye as music streams before the ear; it is in a constant state of becoming.”[34] Indeed, as early as 1921 the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY, was collecting photoplays to be analyzed and taught in a curriculum devoted to film scoring. By 1923 Rouben Mamoulian, future director of Becky Sharp , was there, directing the American Opera Company on the Eastman theatre’s stage.[35] But if a film could be scored, was it not because it was, at least in principle, already a form of music: composed, measured, recorded? The film itself, like mobile color, like Wilfred’s color records, was already a visual music, and the so-called “abstract” or “musical” films of Eggeling, Richter, Ruttman, et al . only highlighted what was the case, again, at least in principle, of every film.[36] Thus, color was a kind of addition that, as Jones asserted, simultaneously pushed the cinema forward into a future of ever-increasingly animated or animatic simulacra, and backward towards its halting, uncertain and inchoate origins. It was as if it had always already been a medium of sound and color, and precisely because the technical inscription, the recording, of each of these independent registers of perceptual flux guaranteed their integration (or disintegration), their articulation (or disarticulation) in a singular, technical object or performance. According to Bernard Stiegler, “A film, like a melody, is essentially a flux: it consists of its unity in and as flow…. Cinema can include sound because film, as a photographic recording technique capable of representing movement, is itself a temporal object susceptible to the phenomenological analysis proper to this kind of object.”[37] The discontinuities and fusions, those afterimages and blocs of pigment that Sennwald remarked of Becky Sharp , were not in reality “faults.” They were in fact a kind of contribution to the phenomenology of film as a temporal object. What Jones’s Technicolor experiment demonstrated was that discontinuity and fusion were the technical preconditions for continuity and integration, not their undoing. Technicolor was indicative of the fragility of cinematic continuity and by extension the continuity of the spectatorial consciousness that resonated with it. Experiences of this sort, ecstatic but also critical and analytical, were precious. Every subsequent film experiment with the relation of image to sound, form to color, has confirmed it.[38] The more Cheney and the dramatists, Wilfred and the lumiastes, Jones and the colorists, Macgowan and the cineastes sought out their independent aesthetic identities, the more they encountered the opposite. Continuity required composition. Composition really did mean composites. Block had put his finger on it: the “constant state of becoming” that the cinematic or phonographic or lumia object was, could only find its “unity” in the synthetic becoming of the “mind” with which it resonated. And there might be an infinity of modes of com-positing the two. Like Bergsonian time, again as Block had phrased it, every repetition was both a renewal and the production of the new—an innovation and an opening. Temporal objects were not only the accumulative recordings of what was or had been, they were also futural and anticipatory, “the way things seem to be moving,” as Jones would write in 1935. The theatre and the cinema, the two worlds astride of which Jones found himself in 1934 and 1935, were both increasingly composite arts; and theorists of both had been discovering as much for at least twenty years. During the period between roughly 1910 and 1930, a group of texts devoted to the ‘new’ or ‘advanced’ theatre in Europe and North America and another to the emerging ‘art’ of the cinema converged around a specific cluster of what might be called motifs or themes. These themes, both camps acknowledged, had perhaps as much if not more to do with ideals than with realities; that is, what was at stake was a certain idea of the theatre or of the cinema, and so a certain idea of art in general. Although some of these texts, in examining the ontology of their respective arts, sought to distinguish or disengage themselves from the other, they in general explored their manifest and increasing overlappings and interpenetrations, and not just with one another, but with the entire spectrum of the contemporary arts. For example, Hiram Kelly Moderwell, writing in 1914, could claim that “from an institution of one art the theatre has become, in the space of less than ten years, an institution of all the arts.” The theatre was, in his account, “a series of pictures… a series of architectural designs… rhythmic spectacle… a kaleidoscope of color… a collection of blending sounds.”[39] The next year, William Morgan Hannon and Vachel Lindsay would make nearly identical claims about the cinema. In The Photodrama, Its Place Among the Fine Arts (1915), Hannon explained, “The photodrama is a complex—nay, a truly composite art.”[40] As much as it might distinguish itself from the others, it more importantly included them within its own expansive and dynamic field. Lindsay too, in The Art of the Motion Picture (1915), famously took an intermedial approach to cinema, characterizing it, as his chapter titles indicated, as “sculpture in motion,” or “painting in motion,” or even “architecture in motion.”[41] However, it was Victor Oscar Freeburg who recognized the most direct and compelling link between film and music that would soon characterize the rhetoric of Wilfred’s lumia and Jones’s mobile color. From 1915-1920, Freeburg taught at Columbia University, establishing what would become film studies as a legitimate part of the university curriculum. Freeburg’s The Art of Photoplay Making (1918) stressed the pictorial condition of film; indeed, “pictorial beauty” would serve him as a fundamental criterion of judgment with respect to the new art form. However, for Freeburg, the essence of film was recorded motion. “The essential feature of the motion picture is, of course, that it actually records and transmits visible motion.” He continued: And the photoplay as such is a single composition of these pictorial motions. The cinema composer is the artist who conceives these motions originally, relates them mentally to each other in some definite unity, prescribes and directs their production, and finally unites the cinematographed records into a film, and if the principles of pictorial composition have been applied in the making, this film will reveal pictorial beauty when projected on the screen.[42] If film was indeed a composite art, Freeburg now determined that its author was a “cinema composer.” If the filmmaker was, then, quite properly a composer, that was because a film, as motion, was a temporal object, a continuous but ephemeral art that was also a recording. Like music, a melody, for example, film was not only in flux but of flux. But its status as a recording made of that flux a permanent inscription, an image. In this respect the film was identical to the phonograph record in the grooves of which one could “see,” even “touch,” the image of sound. Freeburg thus anticipated, at least in theory, the color records that would form the material medium of Thomas Wilfred’s visual music. But he had also begun to divine the principles through which Jones’s dream of visual music could come true. The analogy between the phonograph record and the film was multiple and overdetermined, but it is clear that although it enabled Freeburg to consider film as an analog to music and painting, a composed and inscribed visual music, it crucially allowed him to think of film as a kind of writing and its study or analysis as a kind of reading. As early as 1915, he imagined that, perhaps someday, home viewing would become film’s proper sphere, with spectatorial sensitivity and sophistication cultivated through repeated scansions of superior films, in the manner of re-reading great books or listening to classical music on a phonograph. “It may be,” he speculated, “that the motion picture machine will take its place in our homes along with the phonograph.”[43] Freeburg was thereby promoting a modernist Arnoldianism that would add the best that has been filmed and recorded to “the best that has been thought and said.”[44] Today we can see exactly the ways in which his efforts bore fruit. The promise of the phonograph record was not so much the recording of a singular, unique, musical event, but that it could be listened to a second time, and again, repeatedly. One could learn not only to “appreciate” what was inscribed on the disc, but could learn to analyze, as it were, an experience that was its own emergence as such. Call it phono-grammatology. And one could, Freeburg surmised, do the same with a film. Indeed, temporal objects like films, like recorded discs, demanded nothing less. How else could these experiences be made critically accessible to the people who would otherwise simply undergo them as an experience of sense and sensation? Here was a humanist intuition that the human was fundamentally mediated, if not exactly constituted, by the technics that made it present to itself: books, records, films. Wasn’t the claim to them universal? Although he was in no real position to develop his insights in any full, philosophical way, Freeburg did notice clearly some of the consequences and implications of regarding film as both compositional and as recorded. As recorded temporal object, as mnemotechnics, a film was paradoxically both ephemeral and permanent, and in at least two ways. First, although the film was identical to itself qua object from one repetition to the next, it was rather more open and differential as a repeated experience. The spectator was changed with each viewing, so that spectatorial time was developmental and implied a kind of development of the film-object itself. The name for this relationship was “criticism,” as it might be undertaken by “specialists” or “a general public.”[45] Second, composition and recording also implied forms of com-possibility. “In the future, it may be that any given photoplay will be re-filmed over and over again until something like perfection results.”[46] A film was therefore a rather unstable, contingent object. Its fundamental openness implied not only perfectibility, whatever exactly that would be, but critical intervention in the object itself, on the order of say a mash-up, or mixtape or montage. This was the temporal object as the material of its own subversion. If none of this was happening—and it wasn’t, according to Freeburg—that was because commercial modes of exhibition were denying audiences the repeated, open experiences of difference that were the promise of the film. “A play is flashed upon the screen, fades away, and dies with that performance. It lives again somewhere… but not for us. We cannot read it. Nor can we find it again or see it at will.”[47] The mark of Freeburg’s genius was that he was able to discern in the technics of inscription the common element that linked together phonograph, cinematograph and the photoplay text as typescript, as writing. And he brought to bear on these technics a set of criteria drawn from art history and designed precisely to moderate the aleatory dissonances these technics constituted in the multiple dimensions of sound, image and symbolic language, as well as their potential, intermedial crossings. Film, Freeburg divined, was a temporal object, which was why it had to be thought fundamentally as a recording. Although his criteria tended toward the classical if not the conventional, his theory anticipated the modernist experiments with recorded discs by Moholy-Nagy, Duchamp and Wilfred.[48] The latter’s work, if the testimonies of Cheney, Stark, Macgowan and Jones are any indication, supplied for the advocates of the new theatre the occasion to think through the phenomenology of the recorded, temporal object, in the way Freeburg had for film. It is therefore no wonder that the encounter with mobile color invariably led to evocations of music or movies or both. Thus, it could provide the bridge from the living stage to the living color of the cinema. In the cinema, Jones asserted, echoing both Freeburg and Wilfred, color is precisely composed, mobile and flowing, and recorded. Analogy was destiny. In 1941 Jones, who had returned to the theatre after his brief flirtation with Hollywood, published The Dramatic Imagination , a collection of essays that would help solidify his reputation and legacy as a major figure of the 20th-century theatre. The book’s first essay, “A New Kind of Theatre,” however, is primarily a meditation on the cinema. One might have expected him to at least recall his own experiences in Hollywood as a color designer or artistic director. He never mentions them. Instead, he considers film art within what he takes to be the century’s overarching, aesthetic ambition: to create forms adequate to the exploration of subjective life. He cites James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and John Dos Passos, among others, as examples. Contemporary playwrights too, he asserts, are fully engaged in this project, exploring, he writes in his characteristic rhetoric, “the land of dreams.” “They attempt to express directly to the audience the unspoken thoughts of their characters, to show us not only the patterns of their conscious behavior but the pattern of their subconscious lives.”[49] But it is the “motion pictures” that Jones believes constitute the art form most adequate to the representation of subjective reality. “They flow in a swift succession of images, precisely as our thoughts do… They have the rhythm of the thought-stream and the same uncanny ability to move forward or backward in space or time…. They project pure thought, pure dream, pure inner life.” “Some new playwright,” Jones concludes in his typically futural mood, “will presently set a motion-picture screen on the stage above and behind the actors and will reveal simultaneously the two worlds of the Conscious and the Unconscious…. On the stage we shall see the actual characters of the drama; on the screen we shall see their hidden selves.”[50] Visual music has become visual thought, the flow of color assimilated to the flow of images in general. The cycloramic projections of theatrical lighting from which three-dimensional, “plastic” bodies emerged in the twenties, have been replaced by a movie screen before which living actors move, temporarily blind to a truth unfolding behind them but with which they must certainly merge and fuse. Jones never accomplished what he proposed in 1941. We will never know exactly what it might have looked or felt like. Would it have even been in color? But the appearance of hidden selves recalls, in a very poignant way, the Technicolor dream of “the appearance of every human being to every other one.” And suggests that in that previous dream was included the hoped-for presence of each and every human being to themselves. There is thus a therapeutic dimension at work here that is not surprising, given both the psychological armature of Jones’s discourse as well the ways in which color had itself been thought of in therapeutic ways, as chromotherapy, a tradition we can now see that Jones inherited.[51] (fig. 8) Fig. 8, Edwin Babbitt, frontispiece from The Principles of Light and Color (New York: Babbitt & Co., 1878). But as always, Jones’s prediction of a new kind of future cinema-theatre was a barely disguised recollection of the past. In 1922, Jones and Macgowan traveled to Europe on a kind of theatrical fact-finding mission. Attending sixty performances in ten weeks, the two were able to draw conclusions about the current state of the continental stage and compare it to their own experiences in the USA. Their book, Continental Stagecraft (1922)was the result. In a chapter entitled “The Twilight of the Machines,” they praised the increasing irrelevance of stage machinery, of all forms of contraptions, to the advanced theater, and compared the trend with the modern novel. “While Dorothy Richardson, Waldo Frank and James Joyce are taking the machinery out of the novel, the playwrights are making machinery unnecessary for drama.” What Jones and Macgowan have in mind here is a certain identity between the new novel’s direct engagement first with subjectivity, and second with writing itself as the medium through which it emerges as such. The same goes for the new theater, they contend. But here, the encounter is crucially effected through an experience of light. “A new device is lording it in the theater, but it cannot be called a machine. The electric light is not a mechanical thing. It is miraculously animated by something very much like the Life Force, and night by night its living rays are directed to new and unforeseen ends.”[52] What follows from this is the contention that theatrical realism can no longer be considered a mere fidelity to or representation of the actual, but a deep concern with form through which, in a sense, the actual submits itself as material for thought and thus finds itself materially transformed by that thought. The matter of the stage, then, finds itself decomposed and recomposed by the rather more immaterial forces of light and shadow. And this is exactly what Jones was asking from his new kind of theatre, now mediated by his passage through film and Technicolor. The “uncanny ability to move forward or backward in space or time” that he attributes to the cinema, he might also have attributed to the theatre, or the novel, or his considerations and reflections on his own recurring dreams. There is something remarkable about the ability to relive, again and again, nearly identical experiences and to experience them, each time, as new and as open, as generating the ongoing possibilization of life. It is as if Jones is consistently forgetting in order to remember, proposing a dream of the future that was already an accomplishment of the past. But time requires forgetting. If the past did not fundamentally slip away, there would be no place, no occasion for the present. But if there were no memory, no past crystallized or reduced to image or pattern, there could be no anticipation. For what, after all, would we be waiting, anticipating? This is what the phenomenology of the temporal object, its technics, brings into the open. Temporal objects record and thus repeat the emergence of the experience of time as sensation, each one woven into the other. Mobile color was the sublime experience of color as time. Color-technics. Before it was trademarked and subdued—but also, sometimes, explosively renewed—as Technicolor. “What is a life that is in need of being constantly resuscitated?” asked Bernard Stiegler, the philosopher of technical and temporal objects. But he also asked from whence comes the desire to listen to a pop song, or watch a film, again and again… and again. Jones’s career was not a series of re-inventions; it was precisely not that. It was instead a life constantly in need of resuscitation. The pattern is always the same. The announcement of something new, of a dream come to life, that anticipates a future to be achieved, of an art on the brink… of cinema. But that future has already happened. The dream was already in color. So the ground must be cleared, the needle placed back at the record’s edge, the film rewound. And then replayed, but with a difference, each time. This is the shape of consciousness, the pattern of thought and behavior, shaped by temporal objects. The temporality, the melody, the film through which the “already” resuscitates itself as the “not yet.” More importantly—and Jones did not neglect this when he imagined the colors of the Homeric similes—this time precedes us (as archive or history) and extends beyond us (as archive and legacy): “a never-ending stream of images, running incessantly through our minds from the cradle to the grave, and perhaps beyond.”[53] The experience of the emergence of consciousness as time and sensation and ideation thus always harbors a potential emergence into collectives of which consciousness is always already a part.[54] Jones’s experiences with mobile color, including his forgetting of those experiences and their repeated re-emergences, constitute a small chapter in what might be called the historical phenomenology of the technical, temporal object in the 20th century: the grammatization of sense and sensation, the recording of sounds, images and words that played in the theatres, the homes, the automobiles, the elevators, and especially in the heads of people all over the world. These recordings, their deployments of memory and anticipation, helped shape the forms of consciousness of modern men and women; but their status as objects gave those same men and women critical and creative access to those selfsame forms and their always yet-to-be-thought possibilities. Jones dreamed these as multi-media performances; Freeburg as multi-media libraries.[55] The desire of many young people to have these forms back may be more than nostalgia, or perhaps even a nostalgia for the futures and resuscitations these objects of becoming once promised. The apotheoses of mobile color, however, were the extraordinary and even hallucinatory light shows that accompanied the rock and soul concerts at the Filmore, Winterland, Apollo, and the other theatres of the 1960s and 70s. There, fueled by LSD, pot and alcohol, the performers and the audience did find themselves ecstatically on “the brink of cinema,” “fused in a developing pattern” the promise of which may not yet be in default. Bodies really did “step off the screen and appear before you in the round.”[56] Fig. 9, The Grateful Dead, performing before light projections by Heavy Water, Family Dog at the Great Highway, San Francisco, 1970 (Photo Credit: Jim Baldocchi). The pattern of Jones’s life indicates, indeed is symptomatic of, not only the profound effects of technical, temporal objects on the temporal orientation of the organism within the flux of sense and sensation, an orientation that, as Stiegler maintained, could always become a disorientation, but also of the condition and possibility of the critical deconstruction and thus creative re-orientation of those same flows.[57] The experiments with color technics of Wilfred and Jones clearly speak to the latter in profound and poignant ways. And this is why, making sense of what Jones and Wilfred were accomplishing, requires not close readings of the particular films or opuses they produced, but the meta-discourses surrounding them. The aim is to produce partial readings of the three mnemo-technical objects—film, phonograph, lumia —the dispositions and depositions of time and sensation in a technical support of inscription, to which these meta-discourses lent their words. And the stakes remain very high: the inventions and re-inventions of the forms of presence of beings to one another, and to themselves. References [1] Irving Babbitt, The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1910), 214-219. [2] Hiram Kelly Moderwell, The Theatre of Today (New York: Dodd Mead and Company, 1914), 150. [3] Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3. Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 16. [4] Stephen Eskilson, “Color and Consumption,” Design Issues . Vol. 18, No. 2 (2002), 17-29. [5] Robert Edmond Jones, “Dreams into Color,” Vanity Fair , October (1934), 14. [6] The film, which starred Miriam Hopkins, was an adaptation of Langdon Mitchell’s 1899 play, itself an adaptation of Thackeray’s novel, Vanity Fair (1848). [7] Robert Edmond Jones, “A Revolution in the Movies,” Vanity Fair . June (1935), 13. [8] Scott Higgins, “Demonstrating Three-Colour Technicolor: Early Three-Colour Aesthetics and Design,” Film History , Vol. 12, No. 4 (2000), 358-383. [9] Jones, “A Revolution in the Movies,” 13. [10] Rudolf Arnheim, “A New Laocoon: Artistic Composites and the Talking Film,” in Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971[1938]),199-230. [11] Andre Sennwald, “The Screen: The Radio City Hall Presents ‘Becky Sharp,’ the First Full-Length Three-Color Photoplay,” New York Times . June 14 (1935), 27. [12] Stark Young, “The Color Organ,” Theatre Arts Magazine . Vol. 1, No. 1 (1922), 20-21. [13] Kenneth Macgowan, The Theatre of Tomorrow (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921), 122-3. Macgowan’s evocations of the “fourth dimension” and “mystic philosophy” are indications that he had discussed the theoretical bases of the lumia with their inventor. According to Andrew Johnston, Wilfred’s work “was developed out of a desire to achieve an aesthetic experience that was mystical in orientation….” See Johnston’s “The Color of Prometheus, Thomas Wilfred’s Lumia and the Projection of Transcendence,” in Simon Brown et al. eds., Color and the Moving Image (New York: Routledge, 2013), 67-78. [14] Sarah Street and Joshua Yumibe, Chromatic Modernity: Color, Cinema and the Media of the 1920s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 118-120. [15] Keely Orgeman et al ., Lumia. Thomas Wilfred and the Art of Light (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 2017), 24. [16] Sheldon Cheney, A Primer of Modern Art (New York: Tudor Publishing, 1924), 184-185. [17] Noam M. Elcott, “The Cinematic Imaginary and the Photographic Fact: Media as Models for 20th-Century Art,” PhotoResearcher , No. 29 (2018), 7-23. [18] For a powerful account of Lessing and the aesthetic and political stakes of artistic borders, see, W.J.T. Mitchell, “The Politics of Genre: Space and Time in Lessing's Laocoon, ” Representations , No. 6 (Spring, 1984), 98-115. For accounts of Pater and the trespassing of artistic borders, see, Elicia Clements and Lesley J. Higgins eds., Victorian Aesthetic Conditions: Pater Across the Arts (Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave, 2010). Also, Andrew Eastham, “Walter Pater's Acoustic Space: 'The School of Giorgione', Dionysian "Anders-streben," and the Politics of Soundscape,” The Yearbook of English Studies , Vol. 40, Nos. 1-2 (2010), 196-216. [19] Sheldon Cheney, Modern Art and the Theatre (Scarborough-on-Hudson: The Sleepy Hollow Press, 1921), pp. 3-4. [20] Arnheim, 201-2. [21] Sergei Eisenstein, “Through Theatre to Cinema,” in Film Form. Essays in Film Theory (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1949 [1934]), 15. [22] Thomas Wilfred, “Light and the Artist,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , Vol. 7, No. 4 (1947): p. 252. [23] Judith Zilczer, "Color Music: Synaesthesia and Nineteenth-Century Sources for Abstract Art,” Artibus et Historiae , Vol. 8, No. 16 (1987), 101-126. [24] Cheney, A Primer of Modern Art , 186. [25] For an account of the tempos and rhythms common to the new theatre and the contemporary cinema, see John Grierson, “Tempo,” Motion Picture News (1926), quoted in George C. Pratt, Spellbound in Darkness: A History of the Silent Film (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 432–33. [26] On ‘stage pictures’ and their persistence in the theatre and in early cinema, see Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema. Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). [27] Moderwell, 72. [28] Macgowan, 120. [29] Moderwell, 71. [30] The notion of temporal object originates in the early 20th century with the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and the analysis of internal time consciousness. Husserl’s example of a temporal object, that is an object-phenomenon that has to be comprehended in the time of its emergence, was a melody. A melody has to grasped in its unfolding for which each present moment contains both its immediate past (retention) and an anticipation of a future (protention). Bernard Stiegler has demonstrated the ways in which Husserl’s analysis neglects the technics required for the model of consciousness he adumbrates. Stiegler’s example, then, is not the melody as such, but the melody recorded on a disc or on tape. For a clear account of the temporal object as developed by Stiegler, see Matt Bluemink, “Stiegler’s Memory: Tertiary Retention and Temporal Objects,” 3: AM Magazine .com. Thursday, Jan. 23, 2020. [31] Wilfred, 252. [32] Ralph Block, “Motion,” The Freeman , October 27 (1920),157. [33] Ralph Block, “Not Theatre, Not Literature, Not Painting,” The Dial . Vol LXXXII, Jan.-Jun. (1927): 20. [34] Ralph Block, “The Movies versus Motion Pictures,” The Century Magazine , No. 102, October (1921), 892. [35] Tom Milne, Mamoulian (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970),12-13. Mamoulian would also work, like Jones and Macgowan, with Eugene O’Neill, before making the move to Hollywood. [36] Malcolm Cook, “Visual Music in Film, 1921-1924: Richter, Eggeling, Ruttman.” In Music and Modernism. Edited by Charlotte de Mille (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011). See also Akira Mizuta Lippit, Cinema Without Reflection: Jacques Derrida’s Echopoiesis and Narcissism Adrift (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), p. 41: “In cinema, speech echoes already there in the image, even when, presumably, the image is silent…. And the image is already an element of sound.” [37] Stiegler, 12. [38] Deleuze, Gilles, “ Having an Idea in Cinema .” In Eleanor Kaufman and Kevin Jon Heller. Deleuze & Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy and Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 14-22. [39] Moderwell, 17-18. [40] William Morgan Hannon, The Photodrama, Its Place Among the Arts (New Orleans: Ruskin Press, 1915), p. 23. [41] Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (New York: Liveright, 1915). [42] Victor O. Freeburg, The Art of Photoplay Making (New York: Macmillan, 1918),2-3. [43] Freeburg, 6. [44] Peter Decherney, “Inventing Film Study and its Object at Columbia University, 1915-1938,” Film History . Vol. 12, No. 4 (2000), 443-460. [45] Freeburg, 5. [46] Freeburg, 6. [47] Freeburg, 10. [48] To readers familiar with Freeburg’s book, my account may seem somewhat surprising. And it is true that I am concentrating on the early, preliminary observations on film in a text that is quite long. But Freeburg’s remarkable attempt at constructing what amounts to a poetics of the photoplay is dependent—and he knew this—on the technological conditions necessary for forming the judgments that would eventually give rise to that poetics. Thus, his analyses of sensation, emotion and intellection at the cinema, and the deepening of those both independently of one another and as linked in an overall organization of feelings and thoughts, emerge from an attention to a film as the composite, temporal and sensory phenomenon that produces the impression of reality characteristic of these kinds of experiences. In fact, he speculates that that “impression” may, over time, be mistaken for reality in what becomes a “confused memory,” so that in old age one might believe themselves to have had experiences “in reality” that were only ever had at the movies (p. 19). To counter this permanent submersion in and subjugation to the moving image, Freeburg advocates for a kind of film literacy, an attentiveness to the forms of grammatization (the filmic ‘writing’) out of which the film is composed, in order to bring out “beneath the attractive surface… the permanent values of illuminating truth, universal meaning, and unfolding beauty” (p. 25). These are humanist aims, certainly. But they are not the only aims that would logically follow from Freeburg’s essential, early, and in many ways materialist, insight. Indeed, his consistent unwillingness to separate the quasi-independent compositional elements of film from their technical base (from their mnemo-technics) gives rise to many of his crucial observations. [49] Robert Edmond Jones, “A New Kind of Drama,” in The Dramatic Imagination (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1967 [1941]), 16-17. [50] Ibid. 17-19. [51] T. W. Allan Whitfield and Jianne Whelton, “The Arcane Roots of Colour Psychology, Chromotherapy, and Colour Forecasting.” COLOR: research and application . Volume 40, Number 1, February (2015), 99-106. One of the 19th-c. originators of chromotherapy, a kind of theosophical art, was none other than Edwin Babbitt, father of Irving Babbitt, for whom color aesthetics, and his father as well, were anathema. [52] Kenneth Macgowan and Robert Edmond Jones, Continental Stagecraft (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1922), pp. 66-7. [53] Jones 1941, 15. [54] What Stiegler calls, following Gilbert Simondon, “transindividuation.” [55] Anthony Hostetter and Elizabeth Hostetter, “Robert Edmond Jones: Theatre and Motion Pictures, Bridging Reality and Dreams.” Theatre Symposium , Vol. 19 (2011), 26-40. Kevin Brown, “The Dream Medium: Robert Edmond Jones’s Theatre of the Future.” International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media , Vol. 12, No. 1 (2016), 1-10. Steven Marras, “The Photoplay as Emergent Media Form: Victor O. Freeburg and Vachel Lindsay on Photoplay Aesthetics,” Screening the Past , www.screeningthepast.com/2014/12. [56] The phenomenology of these sensory, temporal dynamics extends itself in our own time not only in the ubiquitous retreat of bodies back into screens of all sizes, but to VR and neural mnemo-technical practices as well, some of which perform the kinds of reflexive, critical deconstructions once advocated by Jones, Block, Freeburg, et al. That is, some of these objects (films, installations, etc.) enable us to touch, as it were, the time of our brains. See Mark B. N. Hansen, “From Fixed to Fluid. Material-Mental Images Between Neural Synchronization and Computational Mediation,” in Jacques Khalip and Robert Mitchell, Releasing the Image (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 83-111. [57] On orientation and disorientation in Stiegler, see Patrick Crogan, “Essential Viewing,” Film Philosophy . Vol. 10, No. 2 (2006), 39-54. Footnotes About The Author(s) BENNET SCHABER teaches filmmaking and film theory in the Department of Cinema and Screen Studies at SUNY Oswego, USA, and at the University of Kairouan, Tunisia. He is the editor of Eugene O’Neill’s Photoplays of 1926 ( Eugene O’Neill Review , 40:1, 2019), the author of “Towards a Cinematic O’Neill” ( Eugene O’Neill Review , 42:2, 2021) and “Little Cinemas: Eugene O’Neill as Screenwriter” ( Journal of Screenwriting , 13:1, 2022). Forthcoming essays on theatre critic, film theorist, screenwriter and producer, Ralph Block (1889-1974); and ‘voice’ in silent cinema. bennet.schaber@oswego.edu Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue “An Art for Which There Is as Yet No Name.” Mobile Color, Artistic Composites, Temporal Objects The Anti-Victorianism of Victorian Revivals Tricks, Capers, and Highway Robbery: Philadelphia Self-Enactment upon the Early Jacksonian Stage “The Spirit of the Thing is All”: The Federal Theatre’s Staging of Medieval Drama in the Los Angeles Religious Community The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida, by Karen Jaime. New York City, NY: New York University Press, 2021; 275pp. $28.00 paper. Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton. Chris Jones. London: Methuen Drama, 2019. Pp. 215. Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America. Rebekah J. Kowal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020; Pp. 295. Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife. Kareem Khubchandani. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical; Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity Previous Next Attribution:

Encounter Tea, Arts & Culture's work Community Poetry and Tea in Manhattan, at this year's edition of the Prelude in the Parks festival by The Segal Centre, presented in collaboration with Eastside Outside Community Garden, Manhattan. Prelude in the Parks 2024 Festival Community Poetry and Tea Tea, Arts & Culture Interactive Ceremony, Poetry Saturday, June 8, 2024 @ 2pm Eastside Outside Community Garden, Manhattan Meet at 415 East 11th Street. Eastside Outside Community Garden, Manhattan Presented by Mov!ng Culture Projects and The Segal Center in collaboration with Presented by Mov!ng Culture Projects and The Segal Center View Location Details RSVP To Event * This ceremony is 2pm - 4pm Through the Odes to Common Things, we will share tea and explore poetry from Pablo Neruda and Keorapetse Kgositsile, uncovering our deep bond with nature and the interconnectedness between ourselves. Tuning into nature’s myriad stories could offer us profound insights into navigating our collective journey on our shared planet. Tea, Arts & Culture Tea, Arts & Culture began as a gathering of friends and tea lovers to enjoy nature and tea in the park starting in 2019. Compelled to respond to the rapidly shifting world during the start of the pandemic, they are committed to using tea arts and culture to nurture community and belonging in the face of isolation and to cultivate mindfulness and inspiration in the face of our daily challenges by establishing themselves as a non-profit organization. They believe that they can support communities in need through fostering an appreciation of tea, arts, nature, oneself, and one another. Visit Artist Website Location Meet at 415 East 11th Street. Eastside Outside Community Garden, Manhattan East Side Outside Community Garden (EO) was established as a GreenThumb community garden in 2016. The name of the garden was determined by the students at ESCHS which is next to the garden Before EO became a GreenThumb community garden, from about 2010, the garden was mainly used by ESCHS with other organizations and volunteers, including Earth Matter NY which did composting projects with the high school students (with coordination of the biology/science teachers). The composting projects were not only a general teaching component for the whole class, but also some of the students used the project as part of their PBAT (Performance Based Assessment Tasks)—students at this high school uses the PBAT, at the conclusion of which they would do a powerpoint presentation in front of teacher and guest judges, instead of having to take the Regents Exams. From about 2014, a composting operation called Reclaimed Organics, a program of Common Ground Compost, began collecting and composting food waste at the garden. They use cargo bikes, instead of motor vehicles, to pick up food waste from various locations. Eventually, the garden became an official public drop-off site, through DSNY (Sanitation), for the community to bring their food scraps, 24-7, for composting. Before becoming the East Side Outside Community Garden, the garden was also known as LES Park (Lower East Side Park). Visit Partner Website

Franklin J. Lasik 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 May Irwin Franklin J. Lasik By Published on December 12, 2017 Download Article as PDF May Irwin: Singing, Shouting, and the Shadow of Minstrelsy . Sharon Ammen. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2017; Pp. 296. In 1981, popular culture scholar Anthony Slide wrote, “if May Irwin is remembered at all…it is as a plump, somewhat unattractive actress, bestowing an amorous kiss in a flickering film from the cinema’s infancy” (2). This film was the famous Edison short The Kiss , an 18-second film featuring Irwin and actor John Rice re-enacting a scene from the musical The Widow Jones . Although the film is historically important, it represents a very minor part of Irwin’s resume. In May Irwin: Singing, Shouting, and the Shadow of Minstrelsy , Sharon Ammen goes beyond this brief moment to examine the entirety of Irwin’s career, which stretched from the 1870s to the 1920s. Ammen argues that Irwin deployed a wide variety of strategies both on and off stage from her early days in Tony Pastor’s variety shows to her run of successful comic performances to create and maintain a space for herself on the American stage for nearly 50 years. Ammen’s text is a critical biography of Irwin’s career, organized chronologically over the course of seven chapters. Chapter one traces Irwin from her first stage appearance in upstate New York to her breakout role in The Widow Jones (1895). Ammen connects Irwin’s growth as a performer to her work with figures like Tony Pastor, Augustin Daly, and Charles Frohman. Irwin’s relationship with her sister Flo also figures significantly, as Flo’s sometimes bitter struggle with her sister’s success would vex May until Flo’s death in 1930. Irwin’s performances in comic farces from 1895 to 1914 serve as the focal point of chapter two. Ammen examines the various strategies that Irwin employed throughout her career to connect with audiences. Noting that Irwin frequently succeeded “in spite of the quality of the material” (41), the author describes how Irwin’s personality dominated her performances, and how this charismatic connection between audience and performer forged a bond that transcended lackluster star vehicles. The author also touches on Irwin’s self-deprecation, particularly regarding her weight, a tactic she was certainly not alone in deploying. Chapters three and four both focus on Irwin’s complicated relationship to the most successful aspect of her performances, her coon songs. Ammen begins by connecting the emergence of coon songs, with their blatantly racist characters and imagery, to the perceived incursions African Americans were making into the dominant white culture. The author emphasizes the pivotal role Irwin, who was white but never used blackface, played in popularizing these songs. Delving into the specifics of Irwin’s coon songs, Ammen identifies seven distinct groups of songs from Irwin’s repertoire based on the stereotypes presented, such as the “Greedy Gal” or the “Pathetic Coon.” This analysis spills over into chapter four, which examines Irwin’s performance style, as well as her problematic relationships with African Americans offstage. Ammen’s careful exploration of how coon songs reinforced the burgeoning image of the “urban Negro, ready with a razor to cut anyone who dares encroach on his territory” (108) is well-integrated with her explication of Irwin’s performance style, especially in light of the racist paternalism she displayed toward African Americans in interviews. Indeed, Irwin’s offstage persona is the subject for chapters five and six. In the fifth chapter, Ammen looks at how Irwin turned the private activities of homemaking into a central aspect of her public image. The heart of this chapter is her analysis of Irwin’s cookbook, which included not only recipes but also jokes, anecdotes, and cartoons. Again, Ammen is careful to point out that while Irwin was certainly not the first (nor the last) celebrity to use her fame to sell books, it was the depth of her commitment to connect her domesticity to her professional career that set her apart. Chapter six, on the other hand, examines Irwin’s activities in the public sphere, particularly in politics. The bulk of this chapter is dedicated to Irwin’s support for women’s suffrage, and her related distaste for the temperance movement. Ammen ascribes Irwin’s freedom to espouse her more Progressive opinions without suffering the same backlash that other performers experienced to her facility with women’s sense of humor, “and the connection of this humor to self-awareness rather than feelings of superiority” (149). The final chapter focuses primarily on life after her retirement from the stage, which wound down during the 1920s. Financially sound thanks to her prudent investing, Irwin turned her attentions to upstate New York where she actively tended to her farm until suffering a stroke in 1937 and passing the following year. Ammen concludes the chapter with a brief summary of Irwin’s strategies “that enabled her to establish and sustain her popularity” (170), which she once again connects to Irwin’s association with coon songs, highlighting the casual racism that pervaded these performances. The body of the text is well-written and thoroughly researched, and the author is clearly devoted to her subject; however, there is an epilogue that does not seem to fit with the rest of the study. In this section, Ammen describes two performances she created and performed using Irwin’s material in a contemporary setting. While the premise of reading audience reaction to Irwin’s performance is interesting, the author’s choice to present this as a slimmed-down qualitative study is unsatisfying. This section of the text deserves more attention from the author, but in a different venue, and with more depth. This text, which arrives alongside new biographies of women in American theatre like Ellen Stewart and Ruth Malaczech, offers an historical counterpoint to these more contemporary figures. In exploring the means by which Irwin maintained her place in American popular entertainment, Ammen also connects to continuing research into the history of minstrelsy in popular culture. There are many deserving figures from this era who are just waiting to be (re)discovered, and one can only hope that the scholars who do so treat their subject with the care that Ammen gives May Irwin. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Franklin J. Lasik Independent Scholar 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.

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 21, 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Theatre in Poland, Fall 2025 By Steve Earnest Published: December 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF Theatre in Poland, Fall 2025: Konfrontacje Festival 2025, The Cyrkulacje Festival of Circus Arts and If I Had A Gun I’d Take Them All Down in Lublin and AlphaGo_Lee. Theory of Sacrifice at Studio Theatre and Waiting for Godot at the National Theatre Warsaw. AlphaGo_Lee at Studio Theater, Warsaw. Photo by Natalia Korczakowska Located in eastern Poland, just 100 KM or so from the Ukrainian border is the city of Lublin. The city has a strong legacy of support for people of the Jewish faith as well as being a regional leader in artistic production. The Konfrontacje Festival began as a film/theatre/arts festival in the 1970’s and has now risen to the point of being a major arts festival that attracts numerous art forms, but primarily live performance. Held in Lublin every October, the festival features the work of Polish and international artists and presents the best new trends in European theatre. The Aerial sculpture “The Grodzka Street Man” in Lublin, Poland 2025 Festival centered on Janusz Oprynski, a celebrated Polish director, writer and theatre artist whose work has been featured at the Provisorium Theatre in Lublin for 50 years. Like Grotowski, Oprynski’s production style focused on experimental and “poor” theatre with radical confrontations of political systems. Eventually known for his staging of novels, Oprynski’s best known works include Ferdydurke (from Witold Gombrowicz), The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot (Dostoyevsky), The Kindly Ones (Jonathan Little) and Ice by Jacek Dukaj. Co-founder and artistic director of the Konfrontacje Festival, Oprynski has received numerous European awards for his work including the Konrad Swinarski Award as well as a special award for artistic merit by the City of Lublin in 2025. The Lublin Centre for Culture presented the Theatr Provisorium production of Oprynski’s Ward 6 on the festival’s opening night. Like many of his previous works, Ward 6 featured something of a library setting. Oprynski’s work has been characterized by an “addiction to books” as the post show discussion revealed, but the work itself considered the nature of mental hospitals and the nature of rights and freedoms that had been taken away from (historically) Polish citizens who found themselves imprisoned by Russians into these confined situations. The performance was based on Chekhov's famous short story, "Room No. 6" which was very important for Polish people fighting for freedom for many years and showed how the "abnormal society" locked normal people in hospital. Set in the land of Ulro, (borrowed from Blake) or the land of spiritual suffering, the characters of Ward 6, named only as Mr. G and Dr. R were inhabitants of the land of Ulro, where they suffer for their individuality. They were guarded by Mr. N and spent their whole lives in passionate reading; making their world is a great theater of imagination, a theater of reading books. "By eating books," they swallow the "bitter wisdom" that makes them poignantly lonely. It was Oprynski’s belief that the abnormal society fears such people and locks them up in hospitals and prisons. The performance featured extremely minimalist or “poor” theatre techniques, but the nature of the space allowed for numerous possibilities. The use of projections created a huge library of books on the white paper strips that dangled from the ceiling. Physical books were also included in piles all around the stage as the actors made reference to them throughout. Oprynski noted in the post show discussion that his was a “theatre of books” and that there were both good and bad books in the world. He noted how the works of Dostoyevsky had both been an inspiration for him but also had haunted him for his entire adult life. Janusz Oprynski on the set of Ward 6 post-performance. Photo: Steve Earnest If I Had a Gun I Would Take Them All Down was presented in a smaller studio space at the Lublin Centre for culture and relied only on a video background for its scenic elements. The one-man show was directed by Paul Bargetto and performed and co-conceived by Michael Rubenfeld. Rubenfeld offered the following summary of the plot: “ The play follows the character Time, a Kyiv-based narrator who guides the audience through the city’s streets, weaving together contemporary wartime reality with a century of political violence, memory, and resistance. As spectators walk alongside him, Kyiv becomes both stage and character—a living archive where fences, boulevards, and monuments summon stories of empire, occupation, and the city’s continual fight for self-determination. The frame is intimate and conversational, collapsing the distance between past and present: every location contains a hidden rupture, every building holds the echo of a struggle. At the center of the historical thread is Dmitry Bogrov, a young Jewish Ukrainian anarchist who, in 1911, assassinated Russian Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin at the Kyiv Opera House. The play reconstructs Bogrov’s world—his radicalization, his ideological turmoil, his entanglement with the Okhrana secret police, and his profound loneliness. As the narrator retraces Bogrov’s final movements through the city, the story reveals a man pulled between ideals of justice and the brutal realities of revolutionary violence, culminating in the chaotic moment of the assassination and his swift execution. Running parallel to Bogrov’s story is the narrator’s own life, marked by activism, disillusionment, flight, and return. He recounts encounters with political art movements, the Euromaidan revolution, the Russian invasion of Eastern Ukraine, and the personal cost of resistance—including the loss, exile, and moral ambiguity that accompany armed struggle. Contemporary Kyiv appears simultaneously ordinary and surreal: a place with street musicians and gardens, yet also a place where journalists are assassinated, dissidents are hunted, and air-raid sirens punctuate daily life. Throughout, the play interrogates the ethics of violence, the meaning of freedom, and the weight of memory. It juxtaposes Bogrov’s anarchist dreams with modern Ukraine’s ongoing fight against Russian aggression, questioning what—if anything—political murder can achieve. The piece ends not with resolution but with solidarity: a collective gesture of singing, looking into one another’s eyes, and recognizing shared vulnerability. In this final moment, the audience stands in the city as it is now—scarred, defiant, and alive—asked to consider their own place in history’s ever-tightening circles.” (Michael Rubenfeld) Michael Rubenfeld in If I Had a Gun I Would Take Them All Down. Photo: Paul Bargetto. The production was inspired by the true story of Dmitry Bogrov (1887–1911) – a Ukrainian-Jewish lawyer, double agent, and revolutionary who, in 1911, assassinated Russian Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin (1862–1911) at the Kyiv Opera House. Bogrov was arrested, tried, and executed shortly thereafter. Michael Rubenfeld in If I Had a Gun I Would Take Them All Down. Photo: Paul Bargetto. Through innovative use of video and sound design, the performance immersed the audience in both historical and contemporary Kyiv; retracing the path that led the young Bogrov to his final act, while at the same time reflecting the author’s personal experiences of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. Rubenfeld’s epic nearly two-hour monologue performance was extraordinary. As he led the audience on the journey through space and time of the play’s story his delivery was both informative from a reporter’s standpoint, but also highly personal as one who was invested in the story as an actual participant. Given the nature of the works travel (primarily a walking tour) through the streets of Kyiv, the camera work and Rubenfeld’s careful stage placement blended incredibly well. The resultant cinematic journey allowed the audience to experience the story in real time. Rubenfeld’s personal connection to the material was dynamic, personal and highly moving. If I Had a Gun I Would Take Them All Down was a relevant and compelling performance, especially considering the nature of world events in 2025 when it was presented. Michael Rubenfeld in If I Had a Gun I Would Take Them All Down. Photo: Paul Bargetto. Sponsored by the European Capital of Culture Lublin 2029 and the Adam Mickiewicz Foundation of Poland, our group consisted of numerous theatre scholars, producers and other artistic personnel from New York, Chicago, South Carolina and California and engaged in many events related to the history of Lublin but especially of the historically Jewish nature of the city. Many of the areas that we toured and the sites that were visited are featured in the 2024 movie A Real Pain . The study tour was arranged and coordinated by Tomek Smolarski on behalf of the European Capital of Culture Lublin 2029 and included the numerous performances but also visits to various sites in Lublin as well as neighboring cities like Kazimierz Dolny a medieval settlement with an important Jewish History. The event also included access to several additional performance events. One of these was the Cyrkulacje Festival presented at the Centre for the Meeting of Cultures in Lublin from October 4-10, 2025. Two works were available to be seen by our group – a work by Common Ground and Diaries in Motion, a physical theatre work by a group of young women from numerous European countries. The Cyrkulacje Festival brought together artists living in or originating from Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Belarus, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Ukraine, and Slovakia. The festival is defined by diversity — of styles, aesthetics, and creative voices. The festival is built on exchange and dialogue, creating space for discovery, curiosity, and artistic circulation (yes, that’s where the name comes from!). The festival also hosts discussions, artist talks, and meetings with the jury. These encounters allow audiences to better understand the creative process and offer artists a chance to hear from their audience — and from each other. The program features both full-length productions and short-form pieces. From intimate solos to large-scale ensemble works, the festival showcases the depth and variety of the region’s circus voices. Since its beginnings in 2013, Cyrkulacje has helped contemporary circus artists grow, connect, and take the next steps in their careers. It’s a platform for experimentation, development, and recognition — a space that encourages originality, celebrates craftsmanship, and supports ambitious work. As part of the festival certain participants receive main prizes and special awards, including Best Trick, Audience Award, Media Award, Youth Award, and Partner Engagement Prizes. In 2019, Cyrkulacje was awarded the EFFE Label – a mark of excellence granted by the European Festivals Association. This recognition places Cyrkulacje among Europe’s most innovative and artistically significant cultural festivals. Stunt work with wooden blocks by the members of Common Ground. Photo: Steve Earnest Common Ground is a physical theatre artist collective based in Belgium with members from across Europe, North America and Asia. Performers include Andreas Bartl, Lisa Rinne, Emma Laule, Marius Pohlmann, Evertian Mercier and Zinzi Oegema. The group features immensely skilled physical artists in the areas of trapeze, human stunt work, devised work with physical objects, gymnastics and other related activities. Their hour-long exhibition (not given a specific title for the festival) included the use of numerous hollow wooden squares of various sizes that were carefully designed to create immense stage pictures while supporting (at times) a sizeable amount of weight. The artists manipulated the stage area with long poles, ropes and pulleys to form trapeze areas, climbing areas and shapes and carefully configured areas for the achievement of human stunts. Stunt work with poles and wooden shapes by Common Ground performer. Photo: Steve Earnest Diaries in Motion was produced by Daniel Burow with direction and artistic coaching by Christine Dissmann and Stacy Clark . Four artists from circus schools in Berlin, Montpellier, and Kyiv ( Lera Kutsenko, Daniela Levina, Alina Scharbl, Daria Ilnytska) attempt to answer these questions through the language of contemporary circus . The ninety-minute performance really had no story but certainly aimed toward meaning as the performers took the audience on a moving journey through “dreams and struggle, led by the desire for freedom,” as stated in the program. According to the production team the work aimed to tell the story of a generation forced to stand up for its most essential values - a performance that tells a tale of transformation from isolation and constraints to rebellion and collective strength. The four female artists were all highly trained acrobatic artists capable in the areas of floor work including German wheels and other rolling devices, flying work with a lyra, silks and other aerial devices in addition to any other related physical performance related elements including general stage movement and delivery of occasional lines of text. The nature of the work was based in strong athleticism and skill and the main goal, in addition to the potential story aimed at by the tone and nature of the background music, was the pure display of learned skill in the various disciplines. The performers measured up to the highest of world standards with their abilities in these areas and the sold-out audience witnessed breathtaking feats of physical work that can be achieved by only a small percentage of the world population and the highly athletic nature of the event appealed to both lovers of performance works as well as those more interested in sports and the display of highly skilled athletes. The blending of these two worlds was what characterized Diaries in Motion . Diaries in Motion Performers. Photo: Steve Earnest Diaries in Motion performers on a lyra. Photo: Steve Earnest The city of Warsaw is something to behold for all lovers of European travel and the National Theatre firmly represents the Polish nation’s desire to present theatrical art at the highest world level. The Royal Palace of Science and Culture include numerous theatre spaces with one company named, the Studio Theater. However, some confusion exists at times because the National Theatre of Poland, about fifteen minutes away by car or train, also has a Studio Theater. Both companies are included in the following section. AlphaGo_Lee at Studio Theater, Warsaw. Photo by Natalia Korczakowska Located in the beautiful Palace of Culture and Science in the city center of Warsaw AlphaGo_Lee : Theory of Sacrifice was presented at the Studio Theater. Directed by the company’s Artistic Director Natalia Korczakowska, the work considered a popular Korean board game – AlphaGo and dealt with the actual historical story of the 2016 match between Korean Go master Lee Sodal and the computer program itself in an AI format. The event, which took place at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul, represented the fight between humanity (represented by Lee) and Artificial Intelligence, as represented by the AlphaGo game. The stage production detailed the events of the actual historical occurrence of the event, which was organized by Google and streamed live to the very large Chinese market who wanted to witness the ultimate battle between humanity and AI. The work is based on research by Natalia Korczakowska, who visited Seoul, Tokyo, and London, meeting with Go experts such as Prof. Chihyung Jeon (KAIST), Prof. Chihyung Nam (Myongji University), and members of the Korean Baduk Association. Their insights inform the production’s symbolic texture, embedding the Korean perspective at its core. Lee Sedol’s philosophical reflections—his belief that Go is an art form created from nothing by two human minds—resonate as the emotional heart of the piece. Korczakowska’s incredible conceptual approach was supplemented by lighting and live video by Rafal Paradowski, animation by Marcin Kitty Kosakowski, choreography by Sung Im Her, spacial arrangement and costumes by Marek Adamski and music by Marcin Lenarczyk and Dominik Ossowski. The production featured the use of an onstage camera crew that captured the scenes using 2 – 4 onstage cameras from various angles with the camera feed then projected onto numerous screens in live time. The lighting, sound and staging all contributed to an extremely well realized visual mise en scene that very capably revealed both very intimate scenes in addition to very high energy dance and public scenes that really stretched the nature of the performance. The stage itself became a monumental gaming space where the characters’ lives became the source of the game. Behind the scenes power plays by the leaders of Google DeepMind (based in London) were contrasted with bursts of dance, technological imagery and humans grappling with the depth and power of artificial intelligence. Intense dance scenes in AlphaGo_Lee . Photo by Natalia Korczakowska Presented at the Studio Theatre of the National Theatre of Warsaw, Waiting for Godot was presented in the Studio Space of the National Theatre Warsaw. The production played to sold out audiences for nearly three years and featured numerous well renowned Polish actors, many known for their numerous film and television credits, in addition to their stage credits in major Polish theatre companies. The work was directed by Piotr Cieplak with scenic, lighting and costume design by Andrzej Witkowski . The Studio Theatre of the National Theatre has a specific (and quite unusual) physical layout. Consisting of a 300-seat frontal view theatre that seemed to be designed with the Elizabethan theatre in mind, it had doors on either side of the backstage wall and a rather large discovery space in the middle. The discovery space was quite large in both size and depth, and several scenes were realized in that area, though the effect was not always successful as the concept of place was not clearly designated in the work. In addition, a stage left door, just past the entry area for audience members, was a part of the physical space but was used at numerous times in the production. This spacial arrangement was curious as it blurred the concept of place, awkwardly blending the practical nature of the exit with the world of the play. Mariusz Benoit (Estragon), Jerzy Radziwiłowicz (Vladimir), Bartłomiej Bobrowski (Lucky), Cezary Kosiński (Pozzo). Phot. Marta Ankiersztejn So many elements of this performance were surprising, and the work took on an usually serious tone with very little comic action. From the outset Estragon’s struggle to take off the boot seem a bit disingenuous and unrealized. The actors seemed to stand outside of their roles and comment on them in quasi-Brechtian fashion, which given the background of director Cieplak, would offer some explanation for the stylistic choices made. Mariusz Benoit and Jerzy Radziwilowicz seemed oddly cast in the roles as the as their performances were very dry and highly understated. Pozzo and Lucky (Cezary Kosinski and Bartlomiej Bobrowski, respectively) did little to rescue the dryness of the production’s tone. Anytime I see Waiting for Godot , it is with the intent that I am seeing an amazing universal work that, at its center, speaks so clearly to so many areas of the human experience and condition. I was incredibly hopeful but not completely satisfied in the overall achievement of this production. Sadly, I feel that much of the difficulty of the production came from the unusual and rigidly defined nature of the Studio Theatre space. Mariusz Benoit (Estragon), Jerzy Radziwiłowicz (Vladimir), Bartłomiej Bobrowski (Lucky), Cezary Kosiński (Pozzo). Phot. Marta Ankiersztejn The study tour curated by Smolarski was incredibly stimulating and included numerous theatrical and historical events worthy of a much longer and more detailed report. This rather short overview just manages to offer a partial view of the highly invigorating and varied nature of the arts scene in just two of Poland’s important centers for the arts and the brief nature of the trip (only 6 days) only allowed for a short glimpse into the incredibly diverse and highly supported work that happens in Poland. The country clearly prioritizes the arts and that spirit permeates all work that is both produced or presented there. 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 Theatre in Poland, Fall 2025 Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 21 Robert Wilson’s Moby Dick at Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf, Summer 2025 Dramas of Separation at Festival d’Avignon 19th Edition Polyphonies of the Present: The Pulse of the Almada Festival Summer 2025 in London, England The Tragic Ideal of Eternal Youth: Folk Myth on the Modern Stage International Theatre Festival of Sibiu 32nd Edition Review of Samuel Barber’s Vanessa by Ópera do Castelo Radu Afrim and his House Between the Blocks Report from Berlin Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

NOELLE GHOUSSAINI presents A shadow of light: a ritual gathering at the PRELUDE 2024 Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center CUNY. PRELUDE Festival 2024 A shadow of light: a ritual gathering NOELLE GHOUSSAINI 4-4:50pm Thursday, October 17, 2024 The Segal Theatre RSVP A shadow of light: a ritual gathering offers a mystical experience of homecoming. Bringing together embodied meditation, a collective altar, performance & ritual, we gather in sacred connection to honor our bodies, spirits, ancestors & our natural belonging to each other & the earth. Rooted in the belief that communal sacred spaces are essential to our collective wellbeing and liberation, participants are invited to both witness and take part in this ritual gathering. An iteration of a shadow of light was explored & developed at the Mercury Store in 2023. 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). Noelle Ghoussaini (she/her) creates performance, ritual and sacred gathering with and for community. Each embodied experience aims to nurture freedom in the very fabric of our being; cultivating connection with our inherent belonging to the world around and within us. Noelle works at sites ranging from public parks to detention centers, from theatres to community spaces. As a Lebanese-American who grew up across three continents, Noelle is dedicated to collective liberation & decolonial creative practice; her visions thread together artistic and sacred spaces of homecoming. www.noelleghoussaini.com @noelleghoussaini Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2024 See What's on

Encounter Anh Vo's work Weather in Brooklyn, at this year's edition of the Prelude in the Parks festival by The Segal Centre, presented in collaboration with . Prelude in the Parks 2024 Festival Weather Anh Vo Dance Sunday, June 9, 2024 @ 3pm Brower Park, Prospect Place, Brooklyn Meet at the Shirley Chisholm Circle Presented by Mov!ng Culture Projects and The Segal Center in collaboration with Presented by Mov!ng Culture Projects and The Segal Center View Location Details RSVP To Event As an ongoing offering to the unknowability of the weather, the work attempts to sit with what it means to be a small living being—a smallness so intolerable that it must be projected outwards, bottling the weather into the stuff of small talk. Anh Vo Anh Vo is a Vietnamese dancer and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. They create dances and texts about pornography and queer relations, about being and form, about identity and abstraction, about history and its colonial reality. They receive their degrees in Performance Studies from Brown University (BA) and New York University (MA). Vo is currently a 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow. Described by the New York Times as "risky, erotic, enigmatic and boldly humorous," their choreographic works have been presented nationally and internationally by Target Margin Theater, The Kitchen, Performance Space New York, Brown University, Production Workshop, Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (Madrid), greenroom (Seoul), Montréal arts interculturels (Montréal), among others. Their artistic process has received support from Jerome Hill Foundation, Brooklyn Arts Council, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Women and Performance, New York Live Arts, Leslie-Lohman Museum, GALLIM Dance, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Jonah Bokaer Arts Foundation, and the Performance Project Fellowship at University Settlement. As a writer, they focus on experimental practices in contemporary dance and pornography. Their BA honors thesis, which examines the intersection of pornography and choreography in policing sexual subjectivities, is nominated for the Distinguished Thesis Award. Their texts have been featured on Recess Art (USA), Walker Reader (USA), Women and Performance (USA), Real Life Magazine (USA), Critical Correspondence (USA), Protocols (USA), The Indy (USA), Etcetera (Belgium), Blackness and the Post-modern (Finland), The Theatre Times (Canada), and South East Asian Choreographers' Network e-book (Vietnam). Visit Artist Website Location Meet at the Shirley Chisholm Circle Visit Partner Website

Watch Somber Tides by Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. Somber Tides is a cry from the species, startled into survival against the elements. One last breath before being trampled by the Earth or maybe conversely a battle to wage against winds and tides clutching on before extinction.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Somber Tides At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Saturday May 17th at 11am (as part of the Short Film Program) and also be available to watch online on the festival website till June 8th 2025. RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. You may RSVP above to get a reminder about the Segal Film Festival in your inbox. Country Canada Language No Dialogue Running Time 12 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film Somber Tides is a cry from the species, startled into survival against the elements. One last breath before being trampled by the Earth or maybe conversely a battle to wage against winds and tides clutching on before extinction. About The Artist(s) Choreographer and filmmaker Chantal Caron's visual signature has always been inspired by the St. Lawrence River and the natural elements that make up its ecosystem. Her works are inspired by the living and embodied in contemporary dance. A member of the Order of Canada and recipient of CALQ's "Artist of the Year" award in 2023, her short films have been selected and awarded around the world since 2015 for their unique aesthetics. Get in touch with the artist(s) distribution@bandesonimage.org and follow them on social media Official Site : https://bandesonimage.org/distribution/catalogue-de-films?view=article&id=10 FILM FACEBOOK : https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61564890205177 PROD FB : https://www.facebook.com/fleuveespacedanse PROD INSTA : https://www.instagram.com/fleuve_espacedanse/ DISTRIB FB : https://www.facebook.com/BandeSonimage DISTRIB INSTA : https://www.instagram.com/bandesonimage/ 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

Alexis Riley 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 Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism. Kirsty Johnston. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 240. Alexis Riley By Published on November 8, 2018 Download Article as PDF Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism . Kirsty Johnston. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 240. Kirsty Johnson’s Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism is an invaluable resource. Having previously written Stage Turns: Canadian Disability Theatre , Johnston offers in her latest book an impressive range of approaches to disability theatre scholarship. Beginning with disability theorist Tobin Sieber’s assertion that modern art is preoccupied with twisted bodies, Johnston asks what considerations might emerge when framing disability as a key feature of modern drama. Her provocation ranges from critiques of twentieth and twenty-first century drama featuring themes of disability to contemporary performances created by artists with disabilities. In order to achieve this breadth, Johnson divides the book into two parts. The first section lays the groundwork for the critique ahead, providing a well-structured and accessible overview of disability studies aimed at a wide readership. Chapter one contextualizes disability theatre as a social project that simultaneously constructs and critiques popular representations of disability. As examples, Johnston points to the American-based groups Phamaly and DisAbility Project, the British companies Extant Theatre Company and Graeae Theatre Company, and the Australian Back to Back. Johnston uses this overview to inform her work in the second chapter, “Critical Embodiment and Casting.” Here, she queries the ethics of actor training and casting practices specific to disability theatre. While noting that different bodies require different material considerations, Johnston observes that contemporary performance practices often assume a normative body, rendering the rehearsal process inaccessible to performers with disabilities. Additionally, disabled characters are often portrayed by able-bodied actors, furthering exclusion while engaging in uncritical representations of disability. Chapter three, “Staging Inclusion,” argues for a reconfiguration of normative production practices in order to accommodate a wider range of bodies and abilities. Johnston closes this section of the book with an examination of Graeae Theatre Company’s productions of Federico García Lorca’s Bloodwedding and Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera , as well as Theatre Workshop Scotland’s production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame . Through these case studies, Johnston demonstrates the prevalence of characters with disabilities within twentieth and twenty-first century dramatic literature, and how careful attention to these representations can prompt fruitful readings of familiar scripts. Johnston refutes critics’ claims that configure disability as added layers to understanding modern drama. Rather, she suggests that these layers are “important features of the text that have been there all along” (106). While the first section offers readers a clear, single-authored, scholarly argument, the second section, “Critical Perspectives,” deviates from this form, featuring two critical essays, an interview, and a script. This sharp shift in structure might make readers crave more connective tissue, yet the multifaceted nature of the section exemplifies how Johnston’s critical considerations might be taken up by scholars and applied to modern drama. “Critical Perspectives” opens with “‘Every Man His Specialty’: Beckett, Disability, and Dependence.” Written by Michael Davidson, author of Concerto for the Left Hand , this chapter employs disability theorist Lennard Davis’s concept of dismodernism to show that Beckett’s inclusion of disability serves to position the modern subject as disabled. Ann M. Fox’s chapter is a standout of the volume, generously offering an alternative perspective of The Glass Menagerie through a disability studies lens. Fox persuasively argues that an understanding of disability history, when applied to production practice, highlights the material conditions of disability that inform Laura’s actions in Tennessee Williams’s play. This reading suggests how future productions might position Laura as an empowered individual when presenting the audience with a nuanced critique of disability. One successful strand of Johnston’s investigation is her attention to disability theatre companies, particularly Graeae Theatre Company. Taking the form of an interview with the company’s artistic director, Jenny Sealy, chapter seven provides a probing profile of the company. Here, Johnston asks Sealy a range of questions about the company’s mission, training methods, and production practices, focusing on Blood Wedding and Threepenny Opera . Although the introduction to the interview format requires an adjustment in reading style that is largely unmarked, the chapter effectively integrates previous material, providing examples of how theoretical inquiry shapes production practice. Drawing on earlier discussions of The Glass Menagerie , the final chapter is comprised entirely of the script of Shattering the Glass Menagerie , a play that Terry Galloway, M. Shane Grant, Ben Gunter, and Carrie Sandahl first performed in 2003. The performance toggles between discussions by Sandahl and Galloway (playing themselves) and performances of scenes from The Glass Menagerie , bringing critique to bear in live performance. Curiously, the book ends with the script, not a formal conclusion. Perhaps this is strategic in that Johnston resists presenting disability theatre as a monolith, instead taking a multi-vocal, multi-genre approach to the subject that honors its contested and relatively new status as a field within theatre and performance studies. Furthermore, the arc Johnston builds throughout the book serves as a primer for future disability scholarship. Indeed, Johnston’s strength as a scholar lies in her consistent focus on grounding theories of disability in rigorously-researched theatrical practice. The wide range of resources provided in the text, including a robust collection of endnotes, positions Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism as a foundational text for scholars and artists from performance, history, literature, and disability studies. References Footnotes About The Author(s) ALEXIS RILEY University of Texas at Austin 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 21, 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Summer 2025 in London, England By Amy Hamel Published: December 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF While the primary goal of being in London this past summer was professional development - participating in quality acting classes for both stage and screen and taking a plethora of dance classes of various styles and levels – another goal was to pack in as much live theatre as possible. The shows on the agenda before arrival were Hamlet and Hail to the Thief (a mash-up with Radiohead), and whatever was playing in the West End theatres or at the Globe Theatre. Anything that could be seen in the United States was not on the list of desired theatre attendance. The programs, exquisite theatres, and their fascinating architecture, as well as the impeccable service and ushering, were just some of the notable differences that made the experience unique. Within three weeks, we saw 11 plays and one Mod Ballet. The following is a reflection on a few of the productions witnessed, with the first two being featured for their amazing stories, soundtracks, choreography, and technical specialties. Photo Credit: Johann Persson Hamlet Hail to the Thief, by the Royal Shakespeare Company in co-production with Factory International, was adapted by Christine Jones with Steve Hoggett, music by Radiohead, and additional orchestrations by Thom Yorke (lead singer of Radiohead). When I was in Stratford-upon-Avon in 2006, I saw Romeo and Juliet by this company with tap dancing as the fight scenes, and it was evident that the actors were uncomfortable and not as skilled in that style of movement as they were with the spoken text. Nearly twenty years later, this current production completely redeemed my skepticism in movement or choreography in Shakespeare, and I will never be able to see any other production of this iconic play without thinking of this one! Oddly enough, it was just about that time, twenty years ago, when this particular Hamlet project began. The music, lights, imagery, projections, fight choreography, and ensemble performance blended Shakespeare’s text with Yorke’s orchestrations of Radiohead’s album Hail to the Thief to near perfection. The stage environment included amplifiers and speakers used as scenic elements along with blocks and pedestals, all synced together to create this epic, rock concert-infused, one-of-a-kind interpretation of the tale of the Danish prince. Photo: Johann Persson When first walking in, the dimly lit, fog-covered stage was filled with long trench coats hanging suspended all over the stage, floating as though you could see old ghosts in a cemetery. King Hamlet’s ghost appeared in the projections on the upstage wall, and then the coats disappeared into the fly space. The set of the thrust stage was primarily bare, featuring a two-story platform along the upstage wall where people could climb one of two ladders to sit or stand above. Additionally, two singers appeared in bookending doorways on the top floor space when it was time for them to sing. There were three separate plexiglass booths on the bottom floor for the band, with the drummer in the center booth. The choreography, by Jess Williams, featured several unique dances, physical gesture work, and distinct movement vocabularies, like the dance where the players portray the royals, upon Hamlet’s insistence, told through a contemporary style ballet. In Act Two, Scene Two, when Hamlet and his school buddies Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are in dialogue, they are also in a series of leaning movement sequences, showing that just when they think Hamlet’s thoughts are moving one way or another, then they will lean in opposition or lean towards him to gain his trust. Then the childlike, adventurous dancing to some of Yorke’s music established a deeper relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia than is seen or heard in the text, representing the length and depth of their friendship, consequently making Hamlet’s rejection of Ophelia all the more heartbreakingly powerful. Examples of clever fight choreography and staging by fight director Kev McCurdy were seen when Hamlet confronts Gertrude in her own bedroom, and Hamlet kills Polonius in the supposed wardrobe; there was no furniture, but through movement, it provided clarity to the storytelling. The final fight between Hamlet and Laertes was also well-choreographed and contained a variety of fighting styles, including wrestling, which required perfectly timed dance-like partnering. There were moments when it was somewhat unclear as to what was happening due to the addition of strobe lights, but one moment of clarity in the fight was Gertrude’s grotesque reaction to the poison she drinks as she violently spewed blood everywhere, especially onto the combatants, making for an extremely gory stage picture. As the fight concludes, death falls upon most of the stage. Horatio, touchingly portrayed by Alby Baldwin, cradles Hamlet’s body on the floor and delivers his final speech. The long trench coats from the top of the play, as the cemetery, began to lower down into their original suspended state, and as the final word was spoken, an audible latch was released, and all of the coats dropped to the floor. Blackout, followed by an audience-wide gasp. A moment that is now forever connected in my memory to this play. Samuel Blenkin’s embodiment and delivery of the young prince, Hamlet, contained just the right balance of fire and finesse, teen angst and grief-driven, dutiful son seeking vengeance. It is a role that can easily be portrayed as very whiny, snobby, or the actor “milks the cow” for sympathy and becomes annoying. That was not the case here. His engagement with the audience made it feel as though we were the only ones whom he could trust, and even though most knew the ending of the story, he made us have hope that it would end differently. His singing of Yorke’s music and text was effortless, and his voice floated as though his thoughts were flowing through the space. It helped that actors Paul Hilton as Claudius and Claudia Harrison as Gertrude did their jobs exceedingly well, being so disgustingly evil, giving us more reasons to root for and like Hamlet. What made this production even more memorable was the treatment and portrayal of the role of Ophelia, hauntingly performed by Ami Tredrea. Before reading more of the director’s insight regarding this tortured character, it was evident that she was receiving some extra attention. Through her movement, physical gestures (her arms were almost always lifted as if she was always in a state of surrender), her singing in her madness, and her repetition of Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” speech, connecting their grief with the same conflict of life, the performance was stunning. Lights for Ophelia have four clear lines creating a box around her, with the box sizes differing depending on who she is speaking to, or who is verbally putting her in a box. The projections on the back wall during her descent into madness showed flowing water, and the sound of rain and water, and as she finished repeating Hamlet’s speech, the box of light became a rectangle and established an opening in the stage with water appearing to cascade into it. Ophelia lay down beside it and simply rolled into the space and disappeared. This is one of the only productions that I have experienced where Ophelia’s death is shown on stage, and it has left another lasting impression. Romaya Weaver as Player Queen and James Cooney as Player King in Hamlet Hail to the Thief . Photo: Johann Persson Pete Townshend’s Quadrophenia, A Mod Ballet with orchestral score, based on the album and movie of the same name, was presented by Sadler’s Wells, Extended Play, and Universal Music UK. Written by Pete Townshend. Directed by Rob Ashford. Choreographed by Paul Roberts. Music Direction and Orchestration by Rachel Fuller, with Orchestrator Martin Batchelar. Set Designer, Christopher Oram. Costume Designer, Paul Smith. Video Designer, Yeastculture.org . All of the above are important to mention, as each of those components coming together so spectacularly is what made this piece special. I was familiar with the story due to personal connections with one of the actors in the 1979 film, and I had heard that Pete Townshend was talking about this potential project, where the story would be brought to life again through dance. So, when I saw the poster for this show around London, that the show had come to fruition, and that it was with Sadler’s Wells (another artistic viewing bucket list), it went straight to the top of the must-see list. It did not disappoint! The company of Quadrophenia in Act One’s closing scene in a London Basement Club . Photo: Johann Persson Set in 1960s London and Brighton, Quadrophenia follows Jimmy, a young man navigating life and love, unhappy in his factory line job and determined to become more. In his search for his identity, he finds release in music, dancing, going to clubs, and doing drugs. He becomes a Mod, a subculture of the time and place characterized by tailored suits, their love for modern jazz music, and riding scooters, specifically Lambrettas. The rivalry with another subculture called the Rockers, known for their love of rock music and motorcycles, serves as the backdrop for his story. The super short version of the plot is that a childhood friend of Jimmy’s becomes a Rocker, some Rockers hurt one of Jimmy’s Mod friends, and the childhood friend becomes the target of the Mod’s retaliation. All while Jimmy chases after his dream girl who belongs to another Mod with no clear chance of having her. This sends Jimmy further into a personality crisis, and the rival groups into historic riots on the beaches of Brighton. Lead dancer, Paris Fitzpatrick as Jimmy, is joined by four other male dancers who represent different facets of Jimmy’s personality: the TOUGH GUY, the ROMANTIC, the LUNATIC, and the HYPOCRITE. At the top of the show, we see all 5 men standing on the Brighton Beach rock, doing a series of lifts, and actually showing the portrayal of the end of the show, where a vital decision is about to be made. Then the set transitions to a psychiatrist’s office, and the audience is transported to a week earlier in the story, when the character first learns of the multiple facets. Stuart Neal as the FATHER and Kate Tydman as the MOTHER/Dance Captain in Quadrophenia . Photo: Johann Persson As Jimmy’s journey progressed, many characters would dance with him, depending on the environment or the situation. For example, in scenes at the club when he was infatuated with the main Mod Girl that everyone wanted to be with, then the ROMANTIC would be incorporated into the dance, or at the end, when Jimmy sees one of the top Mods working as a bellhop, then the HYPOCRITE danced with them. There were times at the beginning when the other facets dancing along were confusing. It took a couple of scenes to realize this theatrical convention and understand the distinction of when Jimmy was dancing with another character, one of his fantasies, one of his facets, or all of those. It was a pioneering and dynamic approach with a compelling and lasting effect, especially once it became clearer, and the stellar performances of Fitzpatrick and this ENSEMBLE cast contributed to Jimmy’s story being so effectively told. Along with Rachel Fuller’s amazing orchestration, with select instruments used to interpret the original rock score, and captivating choreography, this production relies on intricate technical aspects to enhance the storytelling. From projections and fly work that transport Jimmy on a drug-induced train ride that leaves the audience feeling like they too are tripping, to sets with trap doors where dancers can disappear into a booth in a diner, and Jimmy can dance with his reflection outside of the diner. From a large rotating rock that represents Brighton Beach, to a bed that looks like only one person is in it when magically two more emerge, all the sets provided unique dance canvases, heightened the movement theatrically, and provided insight into Jimmy’s thoughts. Glimpses of Jimmy’s home life are shown through dances between his MOTHER and FATHER that express their marriage and working-class struggles, and one imposing militaristic style of movement and formations of men in a memory dance of his father’s time in WWII. The same rock used for Brighton is also used in the Father’s War memory dance, and some of the men are depicted fighting up a hill or marching off the edge. Company of Quadrophenia . Photo: Johann Persson Jimmy and his childhood friend (turned Rocker) and their friendly bench dance in Act One, stood in stark contrast to the later Brighton Beach Riot where the teen angst driven choreography, much like the similar rivalry of the Shark and Jets, was reminiscent of West Side Story , and included vivid stage pictures to exhibit the violence of the fight. The father’s war memory, the diner dance with escape booth where Jimmy fantasizes about the Mod girl and her dreams and dances with the ROMANTIC too, the 5 guys on rock at top of show representing Jimmy and his personalities, the train ride while tripping, 2 couples dancing on the beach in time period swimwear with partnering that closely resembled the movement of classical ballet, and the club scenes with its specifically stylized, 1960s dance vocabulary, complete with the most fabulous time appropriate costumes and LaDuca shoes! As Townshend’s notable, and the production’s final song “Love Reign O’er Me” is played, the final scene too is played out with Jimmy on the giant rock where the show began. The continued use of projections filled the stage with images of the moving sea and waves crashing on the rock. Jimmy is left alone in his emotional turmoil and faced with the final decision as to which facet he will let have control, determining his next movements. He jumps and the audience is led to believe that he has taken his life, but as the score triumphantly crescendos, Jimmy triumphantly climbs back up atop the rock, choosing to not allow his story to end in tragedy, and leaving the audience with a glimmer of hope for the young character and with an awesome soundtrack replaying in our heads. The following three plays were selected for their topics, themes, and messages that linger and continue to raise questions, as quality theatre can do. Themes of these plays demonstrated cultural and societal relevance to today’s situations, addressing race, gender, social, and economic issues, and the numerous perspectives they hold. The standouts featured next were the Playwrights, Directors, and Actors' performances Retrograde was written by Ryan Calais Cameron, directed by Amit Sharma, and played at the astonishingly gorgeous Apollo Theatre. Closing performance, June 14, 2025. This production was so thoroughly enjoyed that I purchased the script afterward, conducted further research on acting legend Sidney Poitier and the topics of the Red Scare and the House Un-American Activities Committee, and I rewatched his 2002 Honorary Oscar acceptance speech, which brought another level of appreciation for the man and his part in history in the arts, especially in America. The set was that of a 1950s office of a New York City NBC network television lawyer. The small cast of three includes Sydney Poitier, a screenwriter, Bobby, and the network lawyer, Mr. Parks. Ivanno Jeremiah as Sidney Poitier in Retrograde . Photo Credit Johann Persson This ninety-minute play encompasses some personal history of Poitier, his humble beginnings, how he got his break on Broadway, and covers information on his (then) current life, wife, and family for which he was responsible for feeding and providing. Bobby had brought Poitier to the lawyer’s office under the pretext that Poitier would be signing a contract for a new television show he was writing and just needed him to meet with the lawyer for proper protocol. Both Bobby and Poitier were shocked to discover his true intentions as he began to ask the rising star about his American allegiance and his political affiliations, bearing in mind that this was a time of communist threat to the American way of life and the rise of the civil rights movement to which Poitier was known to have had connections. The lawyer’s objective was to get Poitier to sign not just a loyalty oath, but a document that would disavow his political associations and specifically denounce his friend and hero, Paul Robeson, creating a moral and ethical dilemma that could hold great consequences with either final decision. All three actors gave compelling performances and easily held the audience captive for the duration of the production. Ivanno Jeremiah’s embodiment of Poitier was breathtaking. Playwright Ryan Calais Cameron is quoted to say of his performance, “People who knew Poitier told me that Ivanno Jeremiah was almost possessed by his spirit”, and with this play, Cameron tackled the topic of race and politics in the 1950s with the same grace and respectful manner as Poitier himself. Oliver Johnstone as Bobby and Stanley Townsend as Mr. Parks in Retrograde. Photo Credit: Johann Persson. Giant , was written by Mark Rosenblatt and directed by Nicholas Hytner. The cover of the program has a picture of the lead actor, John Lithgow, and displays the one-word title, with a tear or rift in the letter “a” in the graphics, along with the name of the theatre, Harold Pinter Theatre, previously known as the Royal Comedy Theatre. We attended an invitation-only, full-dress rehearsal featuring the understudies of the six-character cast. Instead of being taken in by the celebrity of the immensely talented Lithgow, this experience allowed me to truly see the play for what it is and the message it brings. It also allowed a glimpse into the life of an understudy in the West End. As one who began her career and Broadway experience as a swing, I have the utmost respect for those who are waiting in the wings or the dressing rooms, staying ready for the unknown, hanging on to every possibility. Much was learned about understudy life as a working actor on the West End and how it differs from that of Broadway and American Actors' Equity rules. The play left me seeking more information about Roald Dahl, his “complex legacy” (Rosenblatt), and pondering the question the play asks: “at what point does one stop being the victim and start becoming the aggressor?” It demonstrates how one’s life experiences can shape one’s opinions, beliefs, and perspectives on another’s culture, and it even had me questioning some of my own beliefs concerning this topic. John Lithgow in Giant. Photo Credit: Johann Persson. Giant is set in the summer of 1983, in Roald Dahl’s family home, which is under construction. Dahl’s UK publisher, along with his mistress of eleven years, now fiancée, is discussing an upcoming book release, illustrations, and anticipating the arrival of his NY publisher. The NY publisher has sent a young female assistant, Jessica Stone, to try and connect with the writer in hopes of persuading him to make a public apology for what some believed to be an antisemitic book review he had recently written. Dahl and Stone bond over their own children and the fact that both of their young ones suffered from debilitating illnesses (Dahl losing his child to that illness); however, it does not take long for Dahl to pick up on the clues that Miss Stone’s original name was Stein and that she herself is Jewish. Ultimately, the arguments are built with powerful monologues revealing their own truths and bringing up convincing points that one can’t help but weigh both sides and sympathize with them, and yet also be offended by both as well. John Lithgow as Roald Dahl and Aya Cash as Jessica Stone in Giant. Photo Credit: Johann Persson After the main blow-up at the end of Act One, Act Two consisted of Dahl talking to his houseworkers: a male groundskeeper and a female cook. It appears at first as though he is trying to get others’ views, but in reality, he is trying to get them to back him up. In the conversation with the cook, the audience discovers that she, too, is Jewish. Dahl stubbornly continues his soapbox rant, he offends her, she exits the stage, and at the end of the play, when he calls for the cook again, she does not return; it is discovered that she has left the house. After which Dahl is alone and sneaks to his phone to make a call. The audience is led to think that maybe he has seen the others’ side and felt the non-verbal statement of the cook’s departure; instead, he doubles down on his original statement, leaving us in thoughtful shock in this final moment of the play. Mrs. Warren’s Profession, was written by George Bernard Shaw, directed by Dominic Cooke, and played at the Garrick Theatre , s tarring Imelda Staunton and her real-life daughter Bessie Carter. This ninety-minute, no intermission, controversial “problem play” and its history have much to offer in the way of discussion on the topic alone. The commentary is mostly on the artistic choices in the casting, the set, the visual imagery, and how those creative decisions impact the message of the play. In this case , celebrity was important in contributing to the dramatic impact of this show. As Bessie Carter herself puts it in an interview in the program, “Our relationship is adding a subconscious kinetic level”, and indeed it did, as they brought this dramatic classic to life. Vivie, the daughter and recent Honors Mathematics graduate of the University of Cambridge, first appears barefoot, free, and fun. The estranged mother, Mrs. Kitty Warren, arrives well-dressed and classy, and the tension is immediately felt. The four male characters are Rev. Samuel Gardner, his son Frank, who is involved romantically with Vivie but also flirts with her mother, Mrs. Warren’s business partner Sir George Croft, who is also attracted to Vivie, and Mr. Praed, an architect, friend of Mrs. Warren, and potential suitor for Vivie. There is an ensemble of silent women, of different sizes and ethnicities, all dressed in white undergarments, who, through their physicality in acting, appear to age or grow with the daughter character. They do not engage with Vivie, but rather observe, and it is not quite clear who these women are or their significance at the top of the play. The ethereal set had a low-hanging ceiling, over a circular rotating platform with a grassy knoll, garden flowers, and a white bench. The silent ensemble shows up in between scenes and changes the set by first moving the flower arrangements and bench while the stage rotates to become another garden, then changing after the next scene to take away all flowers to create an open field between the characters’ homes. Eventually, the ensemble of women even rolls up the grass to create a blank, open, bare stage, making room for the final scene’s staging, where a back wall, shaped in a semi-circle with a solo door, was lowered down onto the stage, two desks and chairs, and a waste basket were added to create Vivie’s office. Bessie Carter and Imelda Staunton in Mrs. Warren’s Profession . Photo Credit: Johann Persson As the play’s physical environment gradually wasted away, it exposed more and more truths of Mrs. Warren’s past, the decisions she made that were vital to her survival (which also provided funds for her daughter’s education), scandals like the discovery that Frank may have been Vivie’s half-brother, and other situations that reveal the relational dilemma Vivie is faced with in the decision to embrace her mother and her profession. At one point, it seemed as though Vivie understood her mother’s reasons for her life decisions and even praises her resilience, but in the end, once she learns that her mother is still running the “business” even though she doesn’t need to, Vivie not only rejects her mother but also disowns her. The final scene, which took place in Vivie’s office, offered Mrs. Warren’s last desperate plea to be in each other’s lives. Mrs. Warren was closer to “her girls” and has been more of a mother figure to them than to her own daughter. This, coupled with the casting of real-life mother/daughter dynamics, made the scene even more poignant. Vive’s education came from the work of the girls, and although she has been proposed to by her mother’s much older business partner, she is resolute in her determination to do her own work in an office and not take the easy or privileged route. This was made more obvious with the director’s decision to have the silent ensemble of women enter the office and stand on the other side of the desk after Mrs. Warren’s dramatic departure, reminiscent of Ibsen’s “door slam heard round the world”, and with that final powerful image, it is abundantly clear who these women were and that they had been supporting Mrs. Warren by providing for Vivie throughout the play and their collective lives. That imagery gives life to the unseen yet crucial characters in this story, adding another level of depth to the play’s significance. The brilliance that is Ismelda Staunton and Bessie Carter and their gripping, heart-wrenching performances, especially in the final scene, is a master class in listening and being truly present. This, partnered with Dominic Cooke’s direction of the literary classic, easily qualified this as one of the strongest shows of the summer. In conclusion, the range of theatrical experiences I encountered over the summer in London—comprising physically based pieces, new plays, and contemporary adaptations of classics—was truly extraordinary. From the innovative reimagining of Hamlet Hail to the Thief to the diverse performances across venues like the Royal Shakespeare Company and Sadler’s Wells, each production offered a unique perspective on storytelling and artistry. The combination of compelling narratives, powerful soundtracks, and mesmerizing choreography demonstrated the richness of live theatre and its power to connect with audiences on multiple levels. Whether through classic adaptations, fresh interpretations, or pioneering biographical pieces, the brilliant performances in every production highlighted London’s vibrant theatre scene, emphasized the importance of live art in fostering creativity and inspiration, and provided audiences much to talk about. This journey through England's theatrical landscape undoubtedly enriched my experience, offering invaluable insights and lasting memories that will continue to influence my personal and professional growth in the performing arts. Image Credits: Article References References About the author(s) Amy Hamel, (AEA, MFA Acting from University of North Carolina Greensboro, BA Theatre Arts from Palm Beach Atlantic University) is a performing artist, director, choreographer, and educator, currently serving as Visiting Lecturer of Theatre at Palm Beach Atlantic University, in West Palm Beach, Florida, teaching courses in both the Theatre and Dance departments. Her performance credits extend from regional theatres across the United States, and cruise ships around the world, to the lights of Broadway as a member of the historic closing company of the original production of CATS, at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York City. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Theatre in Poland, Fall 2025 Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 21 Robert Wilson’s Moby Dick at Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf, Summer 2025 Dramas of Separation at Festival d’Avignon 19th Edition Polyphonies of the Present: The Pulse of the Almada Festival Summer 2025 in London, England The Tragic Ideal of Eternal Youth: Folk Myth on the Modern Stage International Theatre Festival of Sibiu 32nd Edition Review of Samuel Barber’s Vanessa by Ópera do Castelo Radu Afrim and his House Between the Blocks Report from Berlin Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Martin E. Segal Born July 4, 1916 in Vitebsk, Russia. Died August 5, 2012 in New York City. (click here to read the New York Times Obituary ) Officer, Board and Committee Memberships: Founder (1939), The Segal Company, international consultants and actuaries for employee benefit plans; President, 1939-1967; Chairman, 1967-1991; Chairman Emeritus and consultant – 1991-2012 Founder and Chairman, Board of Directors – The New York International Festival of the Arts, Inc., 1985 until discontinuation in 2002 The American-Scandinavian Foundation – Trustee, 1986-1991; Advisory Trustee, 1991-2012 The ASCAP Foundation – Member of the Board of Directors, 1997-2003 American Theatre Wing – Member of Advisory Committee/Tony Voter, 2000-2008 Board of Hospitals, City of New York – Member of the Board, 1962-1970 City Center of Music and Drama, Inc. – Member, Board of Directors and Chairman of the Executive Committee, 1971-1974; also Treasurer, 1974; Governor Emeritus – 1974-2012 Commission for Cultural Affairs of the City of New York (predecessor to Advisory Commission for Cultural Affairs)– appointed by Mayor Beame as first Chairman, 1975-1977 Cultural Assistance Center (predecessor to Alliance for the Arts) – Founder and President 1974-1982; Chairman, 1982-1984; named Honorary Chairman in 1984 Film Guild of New York – Founder (1940-1941) The Film Society of Lincoln Center, Inc. – Founding President and CEO, 1968-1978; Founder and President Emeritus, 1978-2012 The Glenridge Performing Arts Center, Sarasota, Florida – Member, Board of Advisors, 2004-2012 The Graduate School and University Center of The City University of New York – Member, Board of Visitors, 1983-1996 Member, Board of Trustees, The Graduate Center Foundation, Inc., 1996-2008 Vice Chairman, 2003-2008 Harvard University – Member, Visiting Committee, School of Public Health, 1979-1992; Member, Dean’s Council, School of Public Health, 1990-2006; Member, Board of Advisors, Center for Health Communication Mentoring Program at School of Public Health, Harvard School of Public Health, 2003-2012 The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton – Trustee, 1972-1991 (positions included member of Executive Committee, Chairman of Finance Committee and Chairman of Review Committee); Trustee Emeritus, 1991-2012 The Library of America – Founding Advisor, 1984-2012; Sole Honorary Member of the Board of Directors, 2005-2012 Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Inc. – Vice Chairman, 1978-1981; Chairman, 1981-1986; Chairman Emeritus, 1986-2012 Mayor’s Committee on Cultural Policy, NYC – Chairman, 1974 The George Meany Center– Member, Board of Trustees, 2001-2010; Trustee Emeritus, 2010-2012 Mount Sinai Hospital – Trustee, 1966-1970 Museum of Modern Art – Member, Board of Trustees, and Chairman, Exhibitions Committee 1978-1981 (retired from Board) Musica Sacra – Member, Honorary Council, 2001-2012 National Building Museum – Member, Board of Directors, 1983-1991 National Urban League – Member of National Board, 1961-1970; Vice President, 1967-1970; Chairman of the National Urban League’s First Equal Opportunity Day Dinner, November, 1961 New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation – (Mayor Lindsay’s first appointee), Member of the Board, Chairman of Finance Committee and Member of Executive Committee, 1970-1972 Office for the Arts at Harvard – Member of Advisory Committee, 1993-1999; Member of Council, 1999-2012 The Public Interest – Founding Member; Publication Committee, 1965-2002 (The Public Interest discontinued publication in 2005.) Public Radio International (formerly known as American Public Radio) – Founding Member, Board of Directors, 1981-1994; Director Emeritus, 1994-1998; Counselor at Large – 1998-2012 Helena Rubinstein Foundation, Inc. – Member, Board of Directors, 1972-1995 S.L.E. Lupus Foundation – Member, Board of Directors, 2000-2012 The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, Inc. – Member, Board of Directors, 2000-2004; Member of Executive Committee, 2002-2004 The Studio In A School Association – Member, Advisory Board, 1988-2012 Theatre Development Fund – Member, Advisory Council, 1992-2012 Town Hall Foundation – Member, Advisory Council, 1986-2012 Young Audiences, Inc. – Member, National Board, 1979-2012 Mr. Segal was Organizing Co-Chairman of the International Conference on the Future of Arts Education – November 11-13, 1999 He was General Chairman of “Night of 100 Stars II” (first AIDS benefit – The Actors’ Fund of America– held on February 17, 1985). In 1979, Mr. Segal was co-chairman of the mission to lay the basis for cultural exchanges between the United States and China via the Center for United States-China Arts Exchange; visited China with the U.S. delegation, as co-chairman, for this purpose (March 8-23, 1979). Mr. Segal served on the Advisory Council of the Center for United States-China Arts Exchange from 1982-1988. He served on the Board of the Fund for the City of New York from 1978-1987 and was Chairman of its Public Service Awards Committee in 1978 and 1979. Mr. Segal was a Partner, Wertheim & Co. from1967-82 and President (1972-1975) and subsequently Chairman (1975-1982) of Wertheim Asset Management Services. He is a former columnist for the Associated Press. Honorary Degrees: New York University – Doctor of Humane Letters (1988) The Juilliard School – Doctor of Humane Letters (2006) Graduate Center of The City University of New York – Doctor of Humane Letters (1979) Mannes College of Music – Doctor of Music (1976) Pratt Institute – Doctor of Humane Letters (1976) Long Island University – Doctor of Humane Letters (1986) Manhattan School of Music – Doctor of Music Honoris Causa (1999) Commendations and Awards (in order received): International Film Importers and Distributors of America (1973) The Municipal Art Society of New York – Certificate of Merit “for his innumerable contributions to the well-being of the City…” (1974) Third Street Music School Settlement – Award for Service to Music (1981) Museum of the City of New York – Annual Award of Distinction, in recognition of outstanding contributions to the cultural life of New York (1982) Mayor’s Award of Honor for Arts and Culture – New York City (1982) Concert Artists Guild Award (1983) League of Women Voters of the City of New York Education Fund Award, in recognition of his leadership and public service to the cultural life of New York City” (1984) Royal Swedish Order of the Polar Star, King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden (1984) Ministry of Culture of The French Government – Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters (1984-2005) The International Center in New York, Inc. – Distinguished American of Foreign Birth Award (1985) Alumni and Friends of LaGuardia High School – annual Award for leadership in the arts community (1985) Alumni Association of the City College of New York – John H. Finley Medal (1985) Board of Directors/Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts – established annual Martin E. Segal Awards (1986) Town Hall – Friend of the Arts Award (1987) Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Inc. – First Directors Emeriti Award (1987) Songwriters’ Hall of Fame – Patron of the Arts Award (1988) National Federation of Music Clubs – Presidential Citation (1989) Creative Arts Rehabilitation Center – Public Spirit Award (1989) New York State Governor’s Arts Award (1989) The Graduate School and University Center of The City University of New York – President’s Award (1990) The National Arts Club – Medal of Honor (1992) Lincoln Center Laureate Award (1997) Museum of the City of New York – Our Town Treasure Award (1998) Arts Roundtable – Award of Honor (1998) Citizens Union of The City of New York – Civic Leadership Award (1998) The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center – CUNY Graduate Center (2000) The Acting Company – The Joan Warburg Humanitarian Award (2001) S.L.E. Lupus Foundation Award (2001) Alliance for the Arts – Honoree (2004) The American-Scandinavian Foundation – Honoree, 2004 The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center – Honoree (2005) New York Landmarks Conservancy – Living Landmark (2005) Ministry of Culture of The French Government – Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters (2005) The American Academy of Arts and Letters – Presidential Citation of Distinction (2009) The American-Scandinavian Foundation – Award for Distinguished Public Service – (2010) Club Affiliations: The Century Association The National Arts Club The Pilgrims of the United States

Winners Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 2 Visit Journal Homepage Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Winners By Published on May 12, 2021 Download Article as PDF The Errol Hill Award is given by the American Society for Theatre Research in recognition of outstanding scholarship in African American theater, drama, and/or performance studies, as demonstrated in the form of a published book-length project (monograph or essay collection) or scholarly article. The book or article must deal with African American theater history, dramatic literature, or performance studies (research on dance, acting and directing, public performances, i.e., parades, pageants, etc.). 2020: Kemi Adeyemi, University of Washington, Seattle, “Beyond 90°: The Angularities of Black/Queer/Woman/Lean,” Women and Performance 29:1 (February 2019). 2019: Joshua Chambers-Letson, Northwestern University, After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer Color of Life, New York University Press Honorable Mentions Joanna Dee Das, Washington University in St. Louis, Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora, Oxford University Press Christian DuComb, Colgate University, Haunted City: Three Centuries of Racial Impersonation in Philadelphia, Michigan University Press Shane Vogel, Indiana University, Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze, University of Chicago Press 2018: Kellen Hoxworth, Dartmouth College, “The Many Racial Effigies of Sara Baartman,” Theatre Survey 58:3 (September 2017). 2017: Renee Alexander Craft, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, When the Devil Knocks: The Congo Tradition and the Politics of Blackness in Twentieth-Century Panama (Ohio State University Press, 2016). Honorable Mentions Christen Smith, University of Texas at Austin, Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence, and Performance in Brazil (University of Illinois Press, 2016). T. Carlis Roberts, UC Berkeley, Resounding Afro Asia: Interracial Music and the Politics of Collaboration (Oxford University Press, 2016). 2016 : Uri McMillan, UCLA Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (New York University Press, 2015). Honorable Mention Adrienne Macki Braconi, Harlem’s Theatres: A Staging Ground for Community, Class, and Contradiction, 1923-1939 (Northwestern University Press, 2015). 2015 : Paige McGinley, Washington University in St. Louis, Staging the Blues: From Tent Shows to Tourism (Duke University Press, 2014) Honorable Mention Faedra Chatard Carpenter, Coloring Whiteness: Acts of Critique in Black Performance (University of Michigan Press, 2014). 2014: Kathleen Gough, Kinship and Performance in the Black and Green Atlantic (Routledge, 2013). Honorable Mentions E. Patrick Johnson & Ramon Rivera-Servera, Solo/black/woman: scripts, interviews and essays (Northwestern University Press, 2014). Macelle Mahala, Penumbra: The Premier State for African American Drama (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 2013 : Diana Rebekkah Paulin, Imperfect Unions: Staging Miscegenation in US Drama and Fiction (University of Minnesota Press, 2012). 2012 : Bernth Lindfors, Ira Aldridge: The Early Years 1807-1833 (University of Rochester Press, 2011). Honorable Mention Brandi Catanese, The Problem of the Color[blind] (Univesrity of Michigan Press, 2011). 2011: Harvey Young, Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body (University of Michigan Press, 2010). 2010 : Tavia Nyong’o, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 2009: Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Duke University Press, 2008). 2008: Cedric Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theatre and Film before World War II (University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 2007: Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Performing Race, Gender, and Nation in the Trans-Atlantic Imaginary (Duke University Press, 2006). 2006: Jill Lane, Blackface Cuba, 1840 – 1895 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). 2005: Harry Elam, The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson (University of Michigan Press, 2004). 2004: E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Duke University Press, 2003). 2003 : Thomas DeFrantz, Dancing Many Drums (University of Wisconsin Press, 2002). 2002: David Krasner and Harry Elam, Jr., eds., African-American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader (Oxford University Press, 2001). 2001 : Kimberly W. Benston, Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American Modernism (Routledge, 2001). 2000: George A. Thompson, Jr., A Documentary History of African Theatre (Northwestern Univeristy Press, 1998). 1999: Jill Lane, “Blackface Nationalism, Cuba 1840-1868.” Theatre Journal 50, no. 1 (1998). 1998: David Krasner, Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African American Theatre, 1895-1910 (Macmillan Publishers, 1997). 1997: Annemarie Bean, James V. Hatch, and Brooks McNamara, eds., Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth Century Blackface Minstrelsy (Wesleyan University Press, 1996). References Footnotes About The Author(s) Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to "Milestones in Black Theatre" Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration. Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

LESLIE CUYJET, FRANCESCA D'UVA, MORIAH EVANS + KATIANA GONÇALES RANGEL presents Group Date: a conversation at the PRELUDE 2024 Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center CUNY. PRELUDE Festival 2024 Group Date: a conversation LESLIE CUYJET, FRANCESCA D'UVA, MORIAH EVANS + KATIANA GONÇALES RANGEL 6-6:50 pm Thursday, October 17, 2024 Elebash Recital Hall RSVP Join us for a conversation between Prelude 2024 artists Leslie Cuyjet, Francesca D’Uva, Moriah Evans, and Katiana Gonçales Rangel. Prelude 2024 features artists working in different corners of the New York performance scene. These Group Date conversations present an opportunity to foster connections, new and otherwise, between the festival’s featured artists. 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). Leslie Cuyjet is a performer, artist, and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. More information at lesliecuyjet.com 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. Moriah Evans positions choreography as an expansive social process. Drawing on somatic choreographic practices and feminist critiques of dance and visual culture, her works expand dance beyond the visible, to explore different ways of sensing both ourselves and our relationships to one another. In Evans’ practice, one work leads to the next, each project forming a chapter in her ongoing process to inspire transformation–both physical and psychosocially–through action. Evans creates site-specific performances, theater-based productions, gallery and museum-based participatory installations, symposiums, theoretical texts, and curatorial projects. Recent works include: Remains Persist (MOCA LA, CA, 2023; Performance Space New York, NY, 2022); Out of and Into: PLOT (Museion, Bolzano/Bozen, Italy, 2023); Rehearsals for Rehearsal (Public Art Fund, NY, 2022); RESTOS (Espacio Odeon, Bogota, Colombia, 2021); REPOSE (Beach Sessions, ΝY, 2021); Be My Muse (Pace Live, NY, 2021; Hirshhorn Museum, DC, 2018; FD-13 Minneapolis, 2017); Configure (The Kitchen, NY, 2018) and Figuring (SculptureCenter, NY, 2018). Evans has been honored with (among others): a 2023-2024 Hodder Fellowship, a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2017 Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Grants to Artists. Evans initiated The Bureau for the Future of Choreography (2011-ongoing)—a collective investigating participatory performance. She was Editorial Director, Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor of Movement Research Performance Journa l (2013-2022); Tanzkongress Curatorial Advisor (2017-2019); Dance & Process Co-Curator (The Kitchen, 2016-2023). Evans has a BA in Art History & English, Wellesley College, and MA in Art History, Theory, and Criticism from UCSD. Katiana Gonçales Rangel is a performer, director and educator from Brazil based in NYC. They have been creating independent theater work since 1998. Their most recent work Ama The Diver (2023/2024), in collaboration with Jim Fletcher and the cellist Lori Goldston, was performed in NYC, Portland and Seattle. Katiana has been creating documentary theater work with immigrant New Yorkers since 2014 with Incoming Theater Division (ITD), a branch of the company New York City Players, and has been ITD director since 2020. In 2024, the group performed La Casa de Bernarda Alba in Spanish language directed by Richard Maxwell. Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2024 See What's on

David Bisaha and Pria Ruth Williams 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 Censorship/Public Censure and Performance Today: Special Issue Introduction David Bisaha and Pria Ruth Williams By Published on July 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF By David Bisaha and Pria Ruth Williams, Special Issue Editors This special issue turns toward censorship at a time in which both the definitions and mechanisms of censorship are changing in the United States. Theatre historian John Houchin, in Censorship of the American Theatre in the Twentieth Century , argues that “attempts to censor performance erupt when the dominant culture construes its laws, rituals, and traditions to be in the process of significant change . . . such behavior is indicative of a conservative society, one whose energy is used to maintain its political, moral, and social infrastructure.”(1) In such societies, the impulse to consolidate and enforce values of propriety becomes a powerful, flexible tool of cultural battle. In this issue, we consider censorship in the Americas, with an emphasis on the changing nature of censorship and discourses of censorship and censure experienced by performing artists today. Indeed, in the time between the call for this special issue and its publication, a great deal has changed in the United States. We have seen an authoritarian regime installed in the Executive Branch that is being backed up by a conservative-majority Supreme Court. The ways in which language has been censored by the government is terrifying, impacting the right to bodily autonomy, the ability to speak openly in criticism of the U.S. or Israeli governments, the ability to do science and forecast the weather, the continuation of grants for research and university work, public health, and more. Recent politics demonstrate just how much local, state, and federal governments are now willing and eager to start policing theatre content at multiple levels and with the heavy hammer of authoritarian control. While much of the focus has been on issues of drag performance and gender, these cases are also an obvious testing ground. Based on historical precedent and current actions, it is likely that censorship will continue to expand under the Trump regime. Theatre scholars in the U.S. are going to need to reexamine the ways in which the field has faced censorship in the past and from across the globe to understand the strategies and tactics needed to avoid self-censoring our art and scholarship, and to face the threats of authoritarian power and control. Quickly . However, the connotative and denotative meanings of the term “censorship” are not fixed properties. In a time of increasingly authoritarian power, it is important to interrogate how and why the term is being deployed. In 2006, Janelle Reinelt wrote of censorship in the context of the United States’ “War on Terror”: I have become increasingly uneasy in the wake of an upsurge in the rhetoric of censorship used to describe many actions by different agents, acting for different reasons and under quite different—sometimes extenuating—circumstances. ‘Censorship’ has become a common-sense catchword; since everyone knows what it means, merely to name it is to proclaim it. I worry about these imprecise uses of the term because today in the West we find ourselves increasingly concerned about the erosion of freedoms of expression, considered as rights. Now more than ever I think we must be alert to how we use the term and what, exactly, we mean by it. The performing arts become a flashpoint for issues of censorship once again, as they have many times in the past. For that reason, we theatre and performance scholars must think about this terminology with special care, since historically and presently it appears performatively within our discipline.(2) The “common-sense catchword” quality of the term has only expanded in the nearly two decades since Reinelt’s writing. Claims of censorship apply a specific rhetorical frame to one’s situation. Censorship is predominantly viewed as a negative force to be resisted, though circumstances in which censorship would be acceptable if not widely acclaimed could be imagined. To claim censorship is to position the value of free speech against other cultural values, which might include national security, public morality, decency, ethical treatment and education of children, and social justice. At a time when specific words, ideas, and people’s identities are being legislated against by state and federal forces, thinking about the boundaries of censorship may seem like scholarly hair-splitting. Direct, obvious censorship is an urgent problem, yet it is occurring simultaneously with other claims of censorship, which may be designed to distract from, or to gain, other goals of policy or cultural acclaim. Because the concept of censorship is deployed by many different forces and for many different reasons, unpacking its various definitions and applications is crucial. We must resist harmful censorship, but we further suggest that absolute positions, opposing censorship whenever the concept is invoked, risks rewarding bad-faith applications of the term. Mindful of the ways in which digital media and socially networked culture have changed both our methods of censorship and attempts to resist it, we built the concept of public censure into the call for this special section. Media campaigns exposing and critiquing censorship have long been a tactic of resistance, but public outcry made via the internet has profoundly shaped the US culture in sometimes dangerous and even deadly ways.(3) Internet-powered public censure—calls for boycotts, “cancellation,” doxxing, or other resistance that might lead to violence—may be a new phenomenon. What has changed are the locations and tactics of power, not the core principle that censorship is an exercise of power. Houchin’s “conservative society,” one invested in maintaining old systems of order, has enlisted new forms of censorship in its pursuit of power over culture. One of the elements we noted in building this special issue (section) was that many works defer censorship in time and/or place. This may be because the more easily apprehended versions of censorship are those that are not currently unfolding around us. Indeed, the call for this special issue participated in this definition of the concept by referring to the past. For scholars and critics, “true” censorship retains iconic examples in the past or the not-here, in the censorship of European Renaissance courts, authoritarian book burnings, and Hollywood’s Hays Code, or—as depicted in Paula Vogel’s Indecent (2016)—in the combination of producer-led and justice-backed obscenity trials dating from the early twentieth century. But these are not always the most present or pernicious forms of censorship encountered today. This issue gathers articles and reflections on the varying ways that censorship and censure have been used in theatre. Nic Barilar’s article explores the performance history of Séan O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned , which premiered in Lafayette, Indiana the year after it was removed from the 1958 Dublin International Theatre Festival lineup because of religious censorship. Barilar explores the way that the Lafayette Little Theatre’s production engaged in “prosthetic memory” during their 1959 production. The history of censorship provided a timely reason for choosing to produce the play, but as Barilar shows, the memory of censorship also produced confusing political and aesthetic distortions. The theatre company sought to amplify its conservative, anti-communist, “All-American” values while differentiating itself from an old-world Ireland beset by religious traditionalism, sectarian conflict, and socialist politics. Donia Mounsef examines several case studies from the censorship of drama in Canadian theatre. By exploring several moments since the 1970s in which community groups have engaged in calls for the closure or removal of works, Mounsef explores the complexities of “community-based censorship” and argues that “self-inflicted or socially sanctioned suppression…reshapes public discourse with new imperatives.” In addition to full-length articles, we also sought out shorter pieces based on case studies; both shorter pieces included here further explore the boundaries of censorship in theatre and performance. Rowan Jalso offers a brief survey of contemporary censorship in the United States with respect to educational institutions; Patrizia Paolini compares a set of interviews she conducted after experiencing her own censorship during Ms. Paolini’s Phantasmagoria Cabaret , an experimental cabaret performance in London de-programmed due to controversy over depictions of the partially nude body of an older male performer. Finally, we conclude our issue with a roundtable on censorship, featuring three ATDS members joining the editors to discuss recent experiences with censorship on campus and to theorize tactics for engaging with censorship and censure at the university level: in performance, in the classroom, and as administrators and activists. As we continue to navigate our current political turmoil, it may be a good time for us all to reflect on the ways in which censorship derives its power from fear: notably, the fear of future negative action, the loss of liberty or funding or reputation. Thus, censorship makes institutions cautious and individuals afraid to speak—perhaps especially in ways that can be recorded or published. With this issue, we invite you to consider the roles that censorship and public censure play in our lives at this pivotal time in history, and how, as scholars, artists, and teachers, we can help each other navigate and/or mitigate their impact on our work, our lives, and our pedagogy. References John H. Houchin, Censorship of the American Theatre in the Twentieth Century , Cambridge (2003), 1. Janelle Reinelt, “The Limits of Censorship,” Theatre Research International 32:1 (March 2007), 3; emphasis added. Indeed, it is possible that Mahmoud Khalil’s warrantless arrest by ICE for speaking about the Palestinian genocide was caused, in part, by the social media and internet calls for his arrest by two organizations: Betar US and Canary Mission: Shapiro, Eliza (March 9, 2025). “ICE Arrests Pro-Palestinian Activist at Columbia”. The New York Times . Footnotes About The Author(s) DAVID BISAHA (he/him) is an Associate Professor of Theatre at Binghamton University, SUNY. He currently researches theatre design history and the more recent history of immersive and participatory performance. His book American Scenic Design and Freelance Professionalism was published in 2022 by Southern Illinois University Press. PRIA RUTH WILLIAMS (she/her) is an Instructional Associate Professor at the University of Mississippi and teaches for both the Department of Theatre & Film and the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies. Her research has focused on the Living Theatre company's early period between 1947 and 1963, feminist critiques of theatre and film, and the work of playwright Mac Wellman through the lens of cognitive science. She also makes music as These Liminal Days and can be found on most streaming services and at https://theseliminaldays.com . 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.

Michael Y. Bennett Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 28 1 Visit Journal Homepage New Directions in Dramatic and Theatrical Theory: The Emerging Discipline of Performance Philosophy Michael Y. Bennett By Published on March 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF There has been rising interest in theatre studies in employing and turning to philosophy. Unlike previous trends in literary (and theatrical) studies over the past couple-plus decades that read literature via “Critical Theory” and/or “Cultural Studies”—a collection of thoughts, ideas, and texts (generally) from Continental Philosophy/the Continental tradition, taught most predominantly in English departments—currently, theatre studies has very successfully been reading theatre through philosophers who are routinely studied in philosophy departments, such as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Wittgenstein. Representing major figures in classical, modern, and contemporary philosophy, theatre studies has done quite well in the past decade-plus, compiling a veritable (i.e., for academic work) barrage of noteworthy studies exploring the intersection between theatre and philosophy. ( NOTE : This is NOT A VALUE JUDGEMENT about “Critical Theory,” “Cultural Studies,” and Continental Philosophy!!! After all, my first book, Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd (2011), relies heavily on re-reading plays associated with the absurd through an up-to-date understanding of a major Continental philosopher, Albert Camus. I am just stating the simple fact that the philosophers in the Continental tradition are much less-likely to be taught in philosophy departments, especially in the United States, than philosophers not in the Continental tradition.) Philosophers in the analytic tradition have thought quite a bit, and for quite some time, about fiction/literature (and, often, the theatrical character, Hamlet, is used as an example) to pose and answer questions about, especially, the existence of fictional entities. Until very recently, however, there has not been that complimentary (mirror-image) approach taken by scholars in theatre studies (broadly defined) to think about issues of philosophy to answer questions posed in theatre. That is not to say that philosophy (broadly defined) has not influenced or been employed in theatre studies. Quite the contrary, in fact, as there have been, largely, two separate, but slightly overlapping “movements” within theatre studies that had employed/been connected to philosophy. First, in the late-1970s to early 1990s, there were a number of studies in theatre semiotics (most notably, Elaine Aston and George Savona, Theatre as Sign System: A Semiotics of Text and Performance ; Marvin Carlson, Theatre Semiotics: Signs of Life ; Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama ; Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Semiotics of Theater ; Marco de Marinis, The Semiotics of Performance ; and Patrice Pavis, Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of Theatre ). And, then, from the mid-1980s to the early-2000s, a number of studies in the phenomenology of theatre came out (most notably, Bert O. States, Great Awakenings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theatre (1985); Stanton B. Garner, Jr., Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama (1994); and Alice Rayner, To Act, To Do, To Perform ). These two “movements,” if you will, paved the way for the (current) third wave (or “movement”) of philosophy seen in theatre studies: the recent rise in studies, starting in the late-2000s, that rely (mostly) on the lenses of classic and modern philosophy and philosophical aesthetics through which to read theatre. This emerging discipline has been named “Performance Philosophy.” This emerging discipline has been strengthened by the online network of the same name of over 2,000 academics ( http://performancephilosophy.ning.com ); an online, peer-reviewed journal of the same name, which is connected to this online network; and a book series of the same name published by Palgrave Macmillan, also connected to this online network. Some of the initial titles in the book series are reflections of the continued dominance of thinkers from the Continental tradition (for example, Žižek and Performance (2014) and Adorno and Performance (2014) represent two of the book series’ initial five offerings). However, part of the reason that Performance Philosophy has emerged is due to its origins, if you will, in philosophical circles and also the number of recent books that successfully have studied theatre alongside philosophers from the classical, modern, and contemporary periods (not associated with philosophy in the Continental tradition). Much of this recent discourse exploring the overlap between theatre and philosophy began in philosophical circles, particularly in the field of philosophical aesthetics . In 2001, in a special symposium in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , David Z. Saltz, James R. Hamilton, and Noël Carroll all discussed the relationship between text and performance in theatre. In short, Saltz and Carroll argue that an element of interpretation is needed in order to create performance (and, therefore, the text is, something of, the original that that is interpreted in order to make the performance, which is a once-removed artistic expression), while Hamilton suggests that performance is a unique art form. The following year, in 2002, John Dilworth, in both American Philosophical Quarterly and the The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , suggests that the notion of “representation” helps explain the nature of both dramatic text and theatrical performance, where a play is a type and performance is a token of that type. These debates set the stage for the groundbreaking 2006 collection, Staging Philosophy , edited by David Krasner and David Z. Saltz, in which the essays explore a wide range of topics examining the intersection between philosophy and the theatre. This collection, in turn, paved the way for nine monographs exploring this intersection between theatre and philosophy. Hamilton’s The Art of Theater (2007) is a further-developed book of the above-mentioned essay that is rooted in analytic philosophy and makes an argument that theatrical productions are not re -productions of a dramatic text, but are their own art form. Paul Woodruff’s The Necessity of Theater (2008) is a philosophical meditation on how to make (good or bad) judgments about theatre, connecting these judgments to a larger question of ethics. Freddie Rokem’s Philosophers and Thespians (2010) explores specific, historical encounters between philosophers and those in the theatre arts. Martin Puchner’s The Drama of Ideas (2010) argues that a case can be made that drama extends from Plato, rather than from Aristotle (as has been the traditional argument). My book, Words, Space, and the Audience: The Theatrical Tension between Empiricism and Rationalism (2012) argues that in order to make meaning out of theatre, the epistemological tension between understanding a play empirically and understanding it rationally must be explored. Darren R. Gobert’s The Mind-Body Stage (2013) investigates how, after Descartes, the Cartesian mind-body duality and notions of subjectivity were explored in theatre. Tom Stern’s Philosophy and Literature (2014) is an introductory survey of the overlap between theatre and philosophy. Pannill Camp’s The First Frame (2014) explores how the rise in natural philosophy in France, which looked more to Isaac Newton’s theories of physics than Descartes’ metaphysical notions of subjectivity, contributed to re-imagining the theatre space. And Spencer Golub’s Incapacity (2014) reads drama and art (broadly defined) through Wittgenstein’s notion of “pain behavior,” which Golub adapts as “performance behavior,” to investigate the public expression of private experience. As these recent books demonstrate, the study of philosophy has become (appropriately so) the latest breakthrough in theatre studies. What is exciting about this, TO ME, is not that there is an interest in turning to philosophers not in the Continental tradition, but that a whole “new” 2,500-year-old-plus discipline is at our disposal and in our realm of consciousness. That means one thing: “new” ideas (to those of us in the theatre world)! This can only re-invigorate our excitement, our studies, and the possibilities of inquiry! This essay is an adaptation and an expansion of a short section in the following article: Michael Y. Bennett. “Theatrical Names and Reference.” Palgrave Communications 1, Article number: 14005 (2015). doi:10.1057/palcomms.2014.5: < http://www.palgrave-journals.com/articles/palcomms20145 > References Footnotes About The Author(s) Michael Y. Bennett is Associate Professor of English and affiliated faculty in Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He is the author of The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre and Literature of the Absurd (2015); Narrating the Past through Theatre (2012); Words, Space, and the Audience (2012); and Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd (2011). Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Comment New Directions in Dramatic and Theatrical Theory: The Emerging Discipline of Performance Philosophy Changes, Constants, Constraints: African American Theatre History Scholarship Reflections: Fifty Years of Chicano/Latino Theatre Strangers Onstage: Asia, America, Theatre, and Performance Transgressive Engagements: The Here and Now of Queer Theatre Scholarship Thinking about Temporality and Theatre Musical Theatre Studies “Re-righting” Finland’s Winter War: Robert E. Sherwood’s There Shall Be No Night[s] Star Struck!: The Phenomenological Affect of Celebrity on Broadway Performing Anti-slavery American Tragedian Murder Most Queer The Captive Stage Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

721 Decatur Community Garden, 11233 Brooklyn, NY PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE AUTUMN Prelude in the Garden: Study for Prophecy for 22nd Century Petra Zanki Dance Company Dance 45-60 minutes 5:00PM EST Friday, October 27, 2023 721 Decatur Street, Brooklyn, NY, 11233, USA Free Entry, Open to All 721 Decatur Community Garden, 11233 Brooklyn, NY RAIN DATE: Sat. Oct 28 at 3:00 PM. In case of rain, this event will happen on Saturday 10/28 at 3:00 pm Concept: Petra Zanki Choreography: Petra Zanki in co-creation with dancers Dance interpretation: Isabelle Goodman , Luyan Li – Lili , Evelyn Tejeda . Original music composed and live performed by: Stanford Reid , SoulCODE , and Nico Tower . A garden, a countryside within a city, a train away from New York concrete, an opportunity to reconnect and gather. With ourselves, and between ourselves. That’s it, it’s ok. I can breathe. Blending different genres and styles, Zanki combines themes of art and healing with music and dance to explore the kinds of communities we want to envision in a post-Pandemic world. Working in co-creation with three New York musicians and three dancers, in the garden, Petra creates three choreographic solos using Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons violin concerti as an inspiration. Each dancer together with one musician enters in dialogue with one part as an inspiration for their own contemporary version of, this time, Fall. How do dance, ambient, Hip hop, rhythm & jazz, and sound healing connect to Fall, and all of them to me and me to you? Expect soul healing, magic, and joy. Content / Trigger Description: Photo Credit: Tanya Nowossjolova @nowossjolka Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Esther Kim Lee Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 28 1 Visit Journal Homepage Strangers Onstage: Asia, America, Theatre, and Performance Esther Kim Lee By Published on March 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF When I was writing my dissertation in the late 1990s, I would tell anyone who would ask that my topic was Asian American theatre. I was ready with my elevator speech tinged with obligatory graduate student’s anxiety, but mostly, I was excited to share how I was interviewing artists around the country for the project. “Actors, playwrights, communities, and producers!,” my voice would rise. Some people politely responded with “that’s interesting,” which could mean many things, but often, I would get an answer that ran something like, “oh, I love kabuki!” I would have no choice but to smile and say, “me too” because it was true and because I had to think about my follow up response. How aggressively do I explain that Asian theatre is different from Asian American theatre? How do I detail the links between Asian American theatre and other American ethnic theatres? Should I describe the stereotype of the perpetual foreigner and how it represents the exclusion of Asian Americans in the imagining of America? Or do I present a crash course on the East West Players, the first Asian American theatre company founded in 1965 in Los Angeles? Depending on the circumstance and my mood, my response varied, but generally, I tried my best to explain the significance of documenting a part of American theatre history that had been overlooked. While I grew tired of explaining my project, I also fantasized about titling my yet to be written book “Strangers Onstage” to recall Ronald Takaki’s seminal book, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (1990). Most Asian immigrants crossed the Pacific Ocean, not the Atlantic. Because of their visual and geographic strangeness compared to European immigrants, they were excluded from citizenship, accused as disloyal, interned, and disenfranchised from all sectors of the society. Theatre was no exception. American theatre, as Karen Shimakawa has brilliantly argued, has functioned as a major site of “national abjection” of Asian Americans. Feeling like a stranger myself, I wanted to tell the story of other strangers who collectively built Asian American theatre while hoping to bridge different disciplines, including Asian American studies and theatre and performance studies. On that metaphorical bridge, I had the fortune of meeting scholars, both senior and emerging, who shared my scholarly mission and who also felt like strangers in a field that was still not legible to many. Together, however, we knew the field had much potential for multiplicity of research agendas, theoretical growth, and critical intervention. In the past five years, several books have been published as a full demonstration of that potential. The titles include: Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns’ Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Empire (2013); Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson’s A Race So Different: Performance and Law in Asian America (2013); Sean Metzger’s Chinese Looks: Fashion, Performance, Race (2014); Eng-Beng Lim’s Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias (2014); and Ju Yon Kim’s The Racial Mundane: Asian American Performance and the Embodied Everyday (2015). The books showcase innovative interdisciplinary approaches and nuanced understandings of how race, body, geopolitics, history, and performance intersect. It is an incredibly formative time for those of us writing about the relationship between performance and “Asia.” I believe we are witnessing the emergence of a new field that has yet to be named. I can try to name it, although none of them are completely satisfactory: Asian diaporic performances; transnational performance in the Asias (to borrow Lim’s plural noun); and Asian/American performances (although I wince at the thought of using the slash). The difficulty in naming the field stems from the fundamental shift in how the authors pose their questions. Two decades ago, the questions I asked about Asian American theatre were about representation and empowerment onstage: for instance, how can we let Jonathan Pryce perform in yellowface makeup in Miss Saigon when talented Asian American actors do not even get to audition for the role? While such questions of representation and empowerment are still relevant, the books I mention above ask readers to look beyond the stage and to reexamine all concepts. Performance, for instance, is not simply a mode of representation, but it is an episteme. Instead of looking at performance as an object of study, as I did for my dissertation, the authors use performance as a methodological tool to examine how meaning is created both on and off stage. Similarly, Asia is not a stable geographical location but a constructed concept that connotes power structure and positionality. The books examine the interplay between the quotidian and the theatrical and between racialization and the performative to address broader questions of gender, sexuality, politics, and law. For instance, Burns uses the term puro arte to explore how the Filipino/a performing body is central to understanding the US-Philippine imperial relations. Metzger, on the other hand, focuses on fashion to trace how American perception of China has changed in the past 150 years. In all of the books, the performance of everyday, or what Kim calls the mundane, is central to identifying what is a stake in body politics. Indeed, what is at stake now? Perhaps an answer to that question can be found in how all of the authors variously describe their subjects of study as ironies, paradoxes, and ambiguities. Lim, for example, describes the Asian native boy during colonial encounters as a “critical paradox” because he embodied contradictory fantasies and fears and because his identity can be described only as queer and performative, both of which are paradoxical concepts to begin with. Chambers-Letson focuses on the legal paradox of demanding assimilation of Asian Americans while passing exclusionary laws. What can we learn from these paradoxes? Come to think of it, “stranger onstage” is also a paradoxical idea. The theatrical stage demands an illusion of reality that promises to make the stranger familiar. The stranger is still onstage, the recent books seem to say collectively, except the stage is much broader, and the stranger has many questions. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Esther Kim Lee is Associate Professor in the School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of Maryland. She is the author of A History of Asian American Theatre (2006) and The Theatre of David Henry Hwang (2015). Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Comment New Directions in Dramatic and Theatrical Theory: The Emerging Discipline of Performance Philosophy Changes, Constants, Constraints: African American Theatre History Scholarship Reflections: Fifty Years of Chicano/Latino Theatre Strangers Onstage: Asia, America, Theatre, and Performance Transgressive Engagements: The Here and Now of Queer Theatre Scholarship Thinking about Temporality and Theatre Musical Theatre Studies “Re-righting” Finland’s Winter War: Robert E. Sherwood’s There Shall Be No Night[s] Star Struck!: The Phenomenological Affect of Celebrity on Broadway Performing Anti-slavery American Tragedian Murder Most Queer The Captive Stage Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.