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Patrizia Paolini 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 How Can an Artist Respond to Censorship? The Dilemma That Faces Contemporary Creatives in the UK Patrizia Paolini By Published on July 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF In April 2023, my work became the object of censorship—both indirectly and a posteriori . The precipitating incident involved a late middle-aged male performer appearing in a vest, a pair of cowboy boots, and a slightly grubby yet arguably innocuous pair of Y-fronts. The body reveal of such a character had been carefully constructed. It was informed by an aesthetic I share with my ensemble Jesus Paolini Park (JPP), and which makes satirical and critical reference to the biased perception of female versus male and young versus senior bodies. I am a theatre and live performance practitioner who has been based in the UK since 1997. Since 2016, my practice has been linked to Hoxton Hall, an original music hall in the East End of London. At Hoxton Hall, JPP and I developed Ms. Paolini’s Phantasmagoria Cabaret , a “deconstructed cabaret” and the focus of my doctoral research on “Post-Variety & Cabaret,” a theoretical, self-made term describing what I do: a form between genres. Extracts from that work, including the “Y-fronts,” were chosen by the artist and producer Margot Przymierska for inclusion in a programme designed to animate an evening in April 2023 at the Polish Cultural Institute in London. The adverse reaction of The Polish Cultural Institute (“a part of Polish diplomatic mission, dedicated to nurturing and promoting cultural ties between the United Kingdom and Poland”) to the material contrasted strongly with Margot’s judgment and with the work’s reception at numerous showings in Hoxton Hall. It was described by the event’s organizers as “obscene.” It was claimed, by the same organizers, that it had triggered a “recurring nightmare.” The sight of a mature male in Y-fronts was labelled as indecent. As a consequence, Margot was banned from the Institute and her fee significantly reduced. The ramifications of this night, a detailed account of which appears in Cabaret and Decency: How Contemporary Definitions of Cabaret are Shaped By Censorship have not just landed me in the thick of a continually evolving debate on censorship and propelled me into wider-ranging research on the correlation between contemporary censorship and the perennial “high versus low” cultural divide in the UK,(1) but have also caused me to reflect on how the experience may resonate globally, more particularly with the readership of JADT , as well as with the wider theatrical community of the U.S. Philip Fisher’s remark that “excessive behaviour [in the U.S.] is likely to be mirrored by equivalent extremists [in the UK] before too long” prompts the question as to whether the two countries could be mirroring each other, and therefore potentially learning from each other.(2) As Arjun Appadurai’s concept of “global cultural flows” has taught us, the phenomenon of globalization means that theories and ideas are spreading worldwide, from one place to another, with ease.(3) We are both countries where free expression is supposed to be enshrined in law. As a slew of recent articles in the British press point out, in both countries, censorship is creeping in and disturbing arts and artists, causing them to wonder how, or if, to act.(4) What, if anything, can the U.S. learn from the UK? Perhaps the relevance and potential usefulness of my own experience for the American artistic community is to be found in the insights that my reflection offers and the ensuing conversations that were held, rather than in a particular strategy or solution that should be immediately adopted by artists and scholars in the U.S. Any reaction to censorship, it could be argued, is particular to the context and may be dependent on a specific funding situation. Can we afford, in other words, to speak out? As Nicholas Serota told the Financial Times , “the role of Arts Council England is to act as a protector of artistic freedom, and if we don’t have that freedom, then we move towards living in a country where liberty of both thought and voice is constrained,”(5) adding that “we see plenty of places – look at the US now – where direct funding can be withdrawn as a result of a change of government.”(6) The unexpected reaction to what I call “the Y-fronts episode” has led me, both as a researcher and practitioner, to reflect on the current dynamics of censorship in all societies and how: “What we believe about censorship often reveals how we understand society and the self.”(7) In this regard, it would be useful to summarize at the outset the salient aspects of contemporary censorship discourse centered around New Censorship Theory (NCT). In Reimagining Repression: New Censorship Theory and After , Matthew Bunn offers a critical analysis of NCT. Emerging in the latest decades of the twentieth century, NCT’s central objective has been “to recast censorship from a negative, repressive force, concerned only with prohibiting, silencing, and erasing, to a productive force that creates new forms of discourse, new forms of communication, and new genres of speech.”(8) Bunn argues that in this way the controlling effect of censorship [conceived to prevent offences] has been shifted from state control of production and distribution [of speech], onto self-censorship and its dependence on the “market.” It is my hope that by raising questions and offering reflections, the conversations that follow with fellow practitioners and professionals will draw attention to the current censorship discourse and its significance to practitioners and the wider sector. The interviewees introduced below were each asked about censorship as part of the process of my questioning about what actually happened on that April evening in 2023.(9) TESTIMONIES The interviewees responded identically to two aspects of the subject.(10) Firstly, the word “censorship” itself provoked a whole series of hesitations: “Oh! Umm…”, “Oh, dear!”, “Umm!”, “Well... in which sense?”, “Really?”, “Hemm!” and “What do you mean?” This unanimous reaction to the term suggests censorship is not an appealing subject for discussion. Secondly, none of the interviewees were familiar with NCT. Both these reactions seem to indicate that arts professionals in the UK are reluctant to engage with notions of contemporary censorship. While leaving it to the reader to consider the questions that could follow on from this initial observation, it seems significant to note that, before proceeding with the interviews, I received the distinct impression that censorship was not their favourite subject. Interviewees were all asked identical questions. Rather than transcribe the full interview of each interviewee, I report each interviewee’s most distinctive approach to the issue. I have grouped together those who shared the same approach and highlighted similar and contrasting views. Benevolent Approach Expressed no concerns about censorship. John Callaghan British musician, writer, and performance artist. PATRIZIA: Have you ever been censored? JOHN: I don't think my stuff is susceptible to censorship, particularly because…I'm not swearing. I'm not attacking any particular government. I'm just being me.(11) Kieron Jecchinis Classically trained English actor. Graduated from Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1979. Film: Full Metal Jacket (1987). Theatre: West End. Member of JPP ensemble, played Y-front character. PATRIZIA: What do you think about censorship? KIERON: When I go and see some theatre I just find it so refreshing. You just think. Oh, ****. They can say that! And to be able to say that…it's just so affirming. PATRIZIA: …And the Y-Fronts? You’ve become a recurring nightmare to some staff. KIERON: I think there must have been some misunderstanding between the Institute and Margot.(12) Sarcastic Approach Approached the conversation with sarcasm. Margot Przymierska Performer, writer, facilitator and creative producer born in Białystok (Poland) and based in London (UK). Producer of PolBud Cabaret, commissioned by Polish Cultural Institute, leading up to the indirect and a posteriori censorship April 2023 . PATRIZIA: Do you think it makes sense to implement censorship in whatever capacity? MARGOT: …it makes complete sense to have censorship if you want to own the narrative or perspective on a particular thing. And if you want to silence the artist, maybe all the voices that disagree with your point of view. So it's a very useful tool. And, less sarcastically, MARGOT: I think if you want to have censorship, you have to put in place a clear mechanism. As Margot, was the direct recipient of the Y-fronts a posteriori censorship, our conversation expanded: PATRIZIA: What do you think about how the Polish Cultural Institute treated you? MARGOT: A real exercise of power and authority…they needed to appear like they're taking the complaints from the audience members seriously and they have to show to them that they have punished the person who's responsible … They told me – “You breached the contract…if I went to you and I've ordered something and you gave me a different product, you wouldn't have a leg to stand on. We would then refer to that contract. Like we didn't order this.” – Yeah, but, I don't make sausages in Tesco.(13) You cannot order something off the shelf because it doesn't exist. I'm making it fresh, fresh performance and it's not as finite as a sausage.(14) Reactionary Approach Strongly disapprove of censorship. Claire and Roland Muldoon Artists, entrepreneurs, partners in work and in life. Core members of CAST (Cartoon Archetypical Slogan Theatre), UK counterculture and alternative comedy pioneers. PATRIZIA: NCT sees censorship as a positive tool to be used in society, as it facilitates the best way of expressing something without offending anyone… CLAIRE (in a gentle yet direct manner): It can hurt…It hurts people who are the right people to hurt. It is important to express what has to be expressed. ROLAND: I can't imagine it [NCT] working, really. Referring to their long career: PATRIZIA: So, you really were quite troublemakers? ROLAND and CLAIR (finishing each other’s sentence): Oh yeah, usually yeah. Performing, I mean, what else is there? Otherwise there is no point … that's the function (of performing) otherwise…You know, it turns into Hollywood.(15) Subtle, Necessary Approach The following interviewees are both heads of arts and cultural organizations. Stuart Cox Current director of Hoxton Hall, the music hall in Shoreditch, London, originated in 1838, and which has hosted my work since 2016 . PATRIZIA: Since state censorship had been abolished (in the UK), in 1968, who should decide how to control expression these days? STUART: You have to do it….Or the audience will let you know…the artist has to be cautious and question very honestly what might be the impact of their work. PATRIZIA: How do you approach circumstances related to censorship in your role as chief director of Hoxton Hall? STUART: … that basically is my role, in every aspect. So like you know … Do I pay this person this amount of money? What's the impact of that? Do I take this piece on? What's the impact of that? I'm looking at this piece and I see something that had caused me a worry about whether that is right…I have to really think about the decision around things, and that includes why you're telling a person they can't do that at this stage and just be very…true to who you are and those decisions…And I think I would hope that always when I'm facing those decisions, I try to do it with thought. And consider everyone in that process. Inspired by the Muldoon’s opposing view, I say: PATRIZIA: Maybe, rightly or wrongly, I'm sure, it may happen that there may be the need to…or maybe the feeling that it would be right… like we need and want to “break” something. They, the artist wants to do something that…it is a risk because it could…in fact, offend somebody, because it may be important to do so… STUART: You know, I get what you're saying. But…I still think that you have to kind of talk to everyone. You kind of like involve the artists themselves in this conversation…There has to be, I think…to move on something in the centre…and then make the kind of decision about that … In a positive way…(16) Karena Johnson Former Artistic Director and CEO of Hoxton Hall. Since 2022 Head of Creative Collaboration & Learning at the Barbican.(17) PATRIZIA: What’s your thought about current censorship? KARENA: I think it's a tricky time … the Internet and all that … although we might be in a live performance space, actually we still work within a digital landscape and the digital world allows you to say anything you want uncensored. And so the idea that you can behave as you would digitally in real life is not really … A tenable thing to do. PATRIZIA: Did you ever have to enforce censorship? KARENA: I think no, I've never really had to censor anything. Because, I think the work finds the audience that it speaks to… no one is going to come and pitch me something that’s going to be, like racist or sexist or homophobic, because all the organisations I've ever worked in are very clear about that and my politics have aligned very clearly with those institutions. However, it's only in bigger institutions … It's because of visibility. It has other things to deal with like, you know, like funders, like sponsors, like patrons ... Yeah. And I think that conversation, comes up when you have to deal with the bigger institutions... PATRIZIA: Who exercises control, censorship these days? Institutions or culture itself? KARENA: Yeah … big institutions, maybe are controlling or looking after or leading their culture, having different level of responsibility than you do when you've got a fringe venue … Also, I think that there's a very big difference between what an institution and what and artist might think is censorship or not. Is censorship saying you can't do that thing? Maybe, … or … It's not for me. I would say that's just a choice. But for the individual artist … [it] is important … that nobody should ever say no, and that if you're saying no, it's censorship. But I don't think that is actually censorship.(18) Within the industry, Cox’s and Johnson’s professional roles differ from the other interviewees (all artists), in that they operate in a realm between artists and institutions. This seems to influence their similar approach to censorship. To counterbalance the Cox-Johnson approach, we’ll look at another professional in a leading role at a cultural organization: Will Gompertz. The former artistic director of the Barbican Cantre and a former BBC arts editor clarifies his position on censorship by identifying “cancel culture as the greatest challenge facing the arts.”(19) In an interview in Prospect magazine, he responds to the question “What is the greatest challenge facing the arts industry today?” by saying: … it has to be cancel culture. The purpose of the arts is to question, challenge, reflect and enlighten. Great art reveals a truth, and debate and disagreement about the nature of that truth is a function of art. But such is the rallying power of social media, debate is being stifled by self-censorship and fear of disagreeing with the prevailing orthodoxy. Previous generations have fought hard for free speech; so must we.(20) Gompertz held his position as director of the Barbican Centre, from 2021 to autumn 2023. His appointment and resignation were surrounded by controversy. The beginning of his time at the Barbican, when the Centre was dealing with serious accusations of racism within the organization coincided with the need of a “long journey of cultural change at the Barbican”(21) as indicated by The City.(22) Dex reports: “The Centre’s director of Arts and Learning, former Tate and BBC man Will Gompertz, has been hastily elevated to ‘joint interim managing director’”, which lead to Gompertz’s final appointment as artistic director. Shortly before his departure, the Barbican cancelled Resolve Collective’s exhibition in the wake of “anti-Palestinian censorship.”(23) As reported, collective artist Yto Barrada’s statement, “We cannot take seriously a public institution that does not hold a space for free thinking and debate, however challenging it might feel to some staff, board members, or anxious politicians,”(24) indicates the complexity of the event. In a joint statement with Claire Spencer, Gompertz said: “During the run of their exhibition, Resolve Collective and their collaborators have been subject to a number of unacceptable experiences...…we are taking this situation extremely seriously and are currently working with the broader Barbican team to understand the details of what happened.”(25) A few months later Will Gompertz left the Barbican Centre for a much less prestigious position. Official declarations on the reasons for his sudden departure are unavailable. Gompertz’s relevance to this observation is his clear position on censorship, as reported by Prospect in 2023, a position not commonly shared or expressed by people of his profile. Coincidently, Will Gompertz, with the aim of making the Barbican a more inclusive and diverse center for art, education and enterprise, created the position of Head of Creative Collaboration & Learning at the Barbican to which the last interviewee, Karena Johnson, was appointed. Conclusion By bringing together the interviewees’ testimonies, this piece has raised several questions. On the one hand, we have The Muldoons encouraging a self-censorship that aims to protect the “trouble making” nature of the material; “otherwise there is no point.” On the other hand, we have Cox insisting on the importance of self-censorship as a way of being in control of the impact of what the practitioner says, in respect of all involved. Consequently, self-censorship could promote or have an adverse effect on what would be expected to be a controlled outcome. Is it possible, then, contra NCT, that what is called self-censorship could promote unwanted reactions? As a practitioner, it seems necessary to remark on the noticeable division between the Cox-Johnson approach and that of the other interviewees. The preoccupations and responsibilities of heads of arts and culture organizations seem closely correlated with the person in charge of these organizations. Gompertz’s case is a good example of the complexity of control at that level. The Y-fronts episode has unveiled artists’ inability to predict all possible reactions to their work. Also, applying self-censorship could paralyse the artist’s practice altogether if all possible offences should be considered by the artist. The vivid testimony of the final interviewee would perfectly elucidate my thinking. Factual Approach Ridiculusmus A multi award-winning theatre company led by David Woods and Jon Haynes that has been producing seriously funny theatre since 1992. PATRIZIA: What do you think about the Y-fronts episode? And what about censorship currently defined by NCT? JON: It makes me think about a walkabout act David and I did in Dublin in the 1990s. I think he’d nicked the idea from somewhere else. We walked through the streets following each other, joined by a rope tied in a noose around each of our necks. It seemed to be going well. Then a woman sidled up to me and said, “I find what you’re doing offensive because my brother committed suicide the other week.” How could you have applied NCT to that? Just not to have done the act, I suppose. One has to go about one’s practice under the assumption that with anything you do there is always going to be someone somewhere who will find what you do offensive (“And not in a good way,” as the saying goes). But then, following on from that, there will always be someone somewhere who finds the watered down, safe and possibly more insipid version of your original (or nicked) idea offensive as well. Which means that in the end you’re frozen and can’t do anything.(26) References Patrizia Paolini, “How Contemporary Definitions of Cabaret are Shaped by Censorship,” Comedy Studies 16, no. 1 (2025): 118-133. Philip Fisher, “Censorship Rears its Ugly Head”, British Theatre Guide , February 17, 2023, accessed June 4, 2025. https://www.britishtheatreguide.info/features/censorship-rears-its-ugly-head-592 . Arjun Appadurai. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”. Theory, Culture & Society 7, no. 2-3 (1990): 296. Natasha Tripney, “Cancel Cultures: Theatre Censorship Around the World”, The Stage , March 8, 2024, accessed June 3, 2025, https://www.thestage.co.uk/long-reads/cancel-cultures-theatre-censorship-around-the-world ; Lyn Gardner, “How Will Artistic Freedom Endure as Political Tides Shift?” The Stage , April 28, 2025, accessed June 3, 2025, https://www.thestage.co.uk/opinion/how-will-artistic-freedom-endure-as-political-tides-shift-arts-council-lyn-gardner ; Kate Maltby, “Artistic Freedom in our Theatres is Being Lost to Fear and Self-Censorship,”’ The Guardian , October 12, 2024 accessed June 3, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/12/artistic-freedom-in-theatres-lost-to-fear-self-censorship . Arts Council England is a UK government-funded body. Founded in 1994, it is dedicated to promoting the performing, visual and literary arts in England. Nicholas Serota, quoted in Franklin Nelson, “Axing Arts Quangos Risks ‘Liberty of Thought’ Says Nicholas Serota,” Financial Times , April 18, 2025, accessed June 4, 2025, https://www.ft.com/content/4229bcfe-80a4-4a62-b5f8-ec8f11d99976 . Matthew Bunn, “Reimagining Repression: New Censorship Theory and After,” History and Theory 54, no. 1 (2015): 29. Bunn, “Reimagining Repression: New Censorship Theory and After,” 26. The interviews were conducted in accordance with the ethical requirements put in place by the University of Kent. The interviews included in this essay were conducted with ethical approval through the University of Kent, UK. Each participant provided written consent for their names and interview contributions to be published in this essay. John Callaghan, interview by Patrizia Paolini, August 27, 2024 Kieron Jecchinis, interview by Patrizia Paolini, December 7, 2023 A renowned UK superstore. Margot Przymierska, interview by Patrizia Paolini, October 8, 2023. Claire and Roland Muldoon, interview by Patrizia Paolini, August 28, 2024. Stuart Cox, interview by Patrizia Paolini, November 3, 2023. The Barbican Centre is a performing arts centre in the Barbican Estate of the City of London. It is owned, funded, and managed by the City of London Corporation. Karena Johnson, interview by Patrizia Paolini, February 2, 2024. Harriet Sherwood, “Will Gompertz to Become Director of Sir John Soane’s Museum,” Guardian , August 4, 2023, accessed November 20, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/aug/04/will-gompertz-to-become-director-of-sir-john-soanes-museum . Prospect Team, “Will Gompertz: Cancel Culture is Stifling the Arts,” Prospect , May 10, 2023, accessed November 19, 2024, https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/music/61326/will-gompertz-barbican-cancel-culture-arts . Robert Dex, “Racism Row at the Barbican - How Did It Start and What Happens Next?,” Evening Standard , November 15, 2021, accessed November 19, 2024, https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/racism-row-barbican-centre-what-happens-next-b966025.html . The City of London Corporation is the governing body of the Square Mile, dedicated to a vibrant and thriving City. The Barbican Centre is in part of this governing body. Garreth Harris. 2023. “Barbican Exhibition Cancelled in Wake of 'Anti-Palestinian Censorship' Row,” The Art Magazine , June 23, 2023, accessed November 19, 2024, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/06/22/barbican-exhibition-cancelled-in-wake-of-anti-palestinian-censorship-row . Lanre Bakare, “Two Artists Withdraw Work from Barbican Show in Row Over Gaza Talk,” Guardian, March 8, 2024, accessed November 19, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2024/mar/08/two-artists-withdraw-work-from-barbican-show-in-row-over-gaza-talk . Garreth Harris, “Barbican Exhibition Cancelled in Wake of ‘Anti-Palestinian Censorship’ Row,” The Art Magazine , June 23, 2023, accessed November 18, 2024, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/06/22/barbican-exhibition-cancelled-in-wake-of-anti-palestinian-censorship-row . Ridiculusmus, Jon Haynes, and David Woods, interview by Patrizia Paolini, November 28, 2023. Bibliography Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”. Theory, Culture & Society 7, no. 2-3 (1990): 295–310. Bakare, Lanre. “Two Artists Withdraw Work from Barbican Show in Row Over Gaza Talk.” Guardian , 8 March 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2024/mar/08/two-artists-withdraw-work-from-barbican-show-in-row-over-gaza-talk . Bunn, Matthew. “Reimagining Repression: New Censorship Theory and After.” History and Theory 54, no. 1 (2015): 25-44. Callaghan, John. “On Contemporary Censorship.” Interview with author, 27 August 2024. Cox, Stuart. “On Contemporary Censorship.” Interview with author, 3 November 2023. Dex, Robert. “Racism Row at the Barbican - How Did It Start and What Happens Next?’. Evening Standard , 15 November 2021. https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/racism-row-barbican-centre-what-happens-next-b966025.html . Fisher, Philip. “Censorship Rears its Ugly Head.” British Theatre Guide . 17 February 2023. https://www.britishtheatreguide.info/features/censorship-rears-its-ugly-head-592 . Gardner, Lyn. “How will artistic freedom endure as political tides shift?” The Stage . 28th April 2025. https://www.thestage.co.uk/opinion/how-will-artistic-freedom-endure-as-political-tides-shift-arts-council-lyn-gardner . Harris, Garreth. “Barbican Exhibition Cancelled in Wake of ‘Anti-Palestinian Censorship’ Row.” The Art Magazine , 23 June 2023. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/06/22/barbican-exhibition-cancelled-in-wake-of-anti-palestinian-censorship-row . Jecchinis, Kieron. “On Contemporary Censorship.” Interview with author, 7 December 2023. Johnson, Karena. “On Contemporary Censorship.” Interview with author, 2 February 2024. Itzin, Catherine. “CAST (Cartoon Archetypical Slogan Theatre).” In Stages in the Revolution , Routledge, 1980 Maltby, Kate. “Artistic freedom in our theatres is being lost to fear and self-censorship”. The Guardian . 12th October 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/12/artistic-freedom-in-theatres-lost-to-fear-self-censorship . Muldoon, Claire, and Roland Muldoon. “On Contemporary Censorship.” Interview with author, 28 August 2024. Nelson, Franklin. “Axing Arts Quangos Risks ‘Liberty of Thought’ Says Nicholas Serota.” Financial Times , 18 April 2025. https://www.ft.com/content/4229bcfe-80a4-4a62-b5f8-ec8f11d99976 . Paolini, Patrizia. “Cabaret and Decency: How Contemporary Definitions of Cabaret are Shaped by Censorship.” Comedy Studies 16 (2024): 118-133. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2040610X.2024.2404298?src= Prospect Team. “Will Gompertz: Cancel Culture is Stifling the Arts.” Prospect , 10 May 2023. https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/music/61326/will-gompertz-barbican-cancel-culture-arts . Przymierska, Margot. “On Contemporary Censorship.” Interview with author, 8 October 2023. Ridiculusmus, Jon Haynes, and David Woods. “On Contemporary Censorship.” Interview with author, 28 November 2023. Sherwood, Harriet. “Will Gompertz to Become Director of Sir John Soane’s Museum.” Guardian, 4 August 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/aug/04/will-gompertz-to-become-director-of-sir-john-soanes-museum . Tripney, Natasha. “Cancel Cultures: Theatre Censorship Around the World.” The Stage , 8 March 2024. https://www.thestage.co.uk/long-reads/cancel-cultures-theatre-censorship-around-the-world . Footnotes About The Author(s) PATRIZIA PAOLINI (she/her) is a theatre maker and live performance practitioner with over twenty-five years’ experience. Currently, she is working on a practice-based research PhD project, ‘Post Variety & Cabaret,’ at The University of Kent. Her broad career includes many original productions and collaborations. Since 1999, she has been an associate of Ridiculusmus, the award-winning theatre company that has produced, among other acclaimed works, The Eradication of Schizophrenia in Western Lapland . Since 2016, her deconstructed cabaret, Ms. Paolini’s Phantasmagoria Cabaret, has been regularly programmed at Hoxton Hall, London. Her practice is the invaluable, rich terrain, base of her research which focuses on popular performance, the ‘high - low’ cultural divide, and social class dominance’s dynamics. 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.

Talya Kingston Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 2 Visit Journal Homepage Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Talya Kingston By Published on May 19, 2023 Download Article as PDF Patrick Gabridge at Mount Auburn Cemetery. Photograph by Corinne Elicone. 2018. Plays In Place is a Massachusetts-based company that collaborates with museums, historical sites and cultural institutions to commission plays that are fully produced in their space. While re-enactment on historical sites is not uncommon, this company contracts professional playwrights to pull historical information into fully realized stories that allow audiences to more fully engage with the human interactions that happened in different times and contexts. This engagement can bring new audiences in, and open new conversations, thus enlivening the site and making it more relevant in the life of its community. The commissioned playwright is similarly offered a fulfilling creative collaboration that they know from the outset will be both compensated and produced for an audience. It is perhaps unsurprising to learn that a company that centers writers, both creatively and in the budget, is run by a playwright. Producing Artistic Director Patrick Gabridge’s own work is often featured in the repertoire, but as the company has grown, he has commissioned a cadre of other playwrights (including me). Through the creative process he connects us with historical resources, strongly advocates for our creative freedom, and pays us at every stage of development. I sat down with Patrick to talk about his company’s process for developing new works of theater. I’m curious about your original inspiration for starting Plays In Place. Tell me the origin story of this playwright-led company. Plays In Place was inspired from the production of a play called Blood on the Snow that I was commissioned to write for the Bostonian Society for the renovated council chamber at the Boston Old State House. I’ve always loved writing historical work, and I’ve always loved doing site-specific work. This gave me a chance to do both together. It was clear there was a strong hunger from audiences, especially in New England. We sold out that first run before we even opened. We added a week and sold out that week. We came back in the second year for a twelve-week run. Years later, people are still calling that museum regularly asking when the show is coming back! Starting a company made it easier for me to approach other museums. Our goal is creating new site-specific plays in partnership with museums, historic spaces, and other institutions. I’ve founded theatre companies before, but in this particular case, I wanted to found a theatre company where we didn’t have to manage a space or raise money. I didn’t want a development department and I didn’t want a building. Speaking of raising money, can you describe the financial model for playwrights that you’ve developed through Plays In Place and how it differs from the traditional model of play development in this country? There are a few dozen playwrights who operate on commission for larger theatre companies, and they make money that way, and they get their plays produced that way and that’s great. It doesn’t happen for most of us – not all the time anyway! So, the typical model is you write a play on spec, you send it out to a lot of theatres and those may or may not get produced. It’s a scattershot approach to doing your work. It’s nice that you have a lot of control over what you are going to write, but your possibility of getting it in front of an audience, let alone getting paid for it, is pretty small. Even if you are in a position where a theatre company is commissioning you, they might be commissioning a bunch of different writers. They’ll do some development of your plays, and maybe they’ll pick one or two of those plays to fully produce, but maybe they won’t. So, it is good that you got paid and you still have a play that you can shop around somewhere else, but sad if the commission doesn’t end up in a production. What is different about our model is that the commission is part of the development process. We’ve learned to set up our contracts in multiple phases. Typically phase one is writers working with the institution on basic research, to come up with the storyline and structure. In this phase, the writer is paid upfront to come up with a proposal. This puts us in a good spot for phase two: the commissioning to write the plays and one or two in-house readings. And then phase three is rehearsal and production. In general, the institutions we’re working with are not developing a lot of different plays and starting the project because they intend to produce the work. This phased model allows them to raise the money in steps. It’s easier for the institutions to say yes to the partnership if I say to them that phase one is going to cost them $5000 – they might have that money, or a way to get it. Phase Two is significantly more money but it’s not a huge amount, and once we have scripts in hand, it’s easier to raise money for the rest, for the production. Plays In Place can commission playwrights at very competitive terms, especially for shorter plays. There are very few theatres commissioning one-act plays unless the playwrights are very famous. We don’t need our people to be famous, they just need to be good at what they do and willing to collaborate with the partner institution and keep their needs in mind when writing. For example, we are partnering with a historical site, so our production has to connect to the actual history. I like talking about money with writers because I think we don’t talk about it enough, and then we go into our conversations with producers a little ill-informed. Plays In Place mostly develops work in a community, which is different from the somewhat isolated traditional playwriting mode. Can you talk about the development process for writers and other artists, and how we work together with the sites? The process that you and I are involved in now [a partnership with Historic Northampton], as well as the National Parks Service’s Suffrage In Black and White , both involve three writers and we are all meeting somewhat regularly to talk about our work and to coordinate our presentations to the institutions. There is significant independence between each play, but also, I feel that it’s very important as a group to build that project together, so it has some liminal level of cohesiveness. They are plays that are going to sit together in an evening so whatever that meal is going to be for the audience it must be palatable and delivered in some stylistic framework. The model varies quite a bit from project to project. The Historic Northampton plays are shorter and all have the same director, so there will be a unifying feel between them. We are already talking about what shared actors we’re going to use and what the handoff is going to be between the plays. Whereas the Suffrage In Black and White pieces are full-length plays that will each have their own director. Plays In Place acts as a Creative Producer. We work with the teams to kind of tie them together and the writers are part of that tying things together so that we each understand what the other is doing. Having parameters for a writer can be a very stimulating part of the puzzle. We’re solving puzzles. In the traditional theatre the puzzle presented to us is pretty much “here’s a blank stage” and we act like all blank stages are the same, which I think is a fallacy, but it also causes us to create a somewhat generic version of our play. The business model in the traditional theatre is: get your play done at a professional company, have it be very successful, and have it be done by a bunch of other professional companies, and then have it be done by a bunch of community theatres, and then by a bunch of schools, and together that’s going to make you a bunch of money. Which is true when it works out, but you’ve also had to design a play that fits in all those different spaces. Our model is much less practical in some ways, in that if we do our jobs well the play can’t be done nearly as effectively in other places. For example, I just ran Moonlight Abolitionists , which is designed to be done under the full moon at Mount Auburn Cemetery as a concert reading in the dark. A friend of mine saw it and wanted to know if she could do it in her theatre in London. She could, of course, but it would lack the context that the cemetery brings and the atmosphere the moonlight brings. I wrote it for this place and time on purpose. The specificity of what we create as an artistic team is exciting to me. And I’m more interested in that than the ability of it to be done a thousand times elsewhere. It’s a tough question to ask yourself as a writer: would you be ok if this play was only ever done twice? Would it be worth the work? I will say so far, the answer has been yes. The production experiences are so intensely rich that it is worth it. Moonlight Abolitionists directed by Megan Sandberg-Zakian. October 2022. Walking around the site at Historic Northampton before I even had a story was such an inspiration. As a writer, how is the development process different when you are writing for and from a specific place? It depends on what the place is bringing. The plays are still going to be driven by story and character, but how are those stories and characters related to this place? Often the physical action and visual nature, even the sonic nature of the play, is already influenced by the setting. The question I’m always asking as a dramatist is: what is active about this place? As opposed to just a setting. In the plays that we’re writing for Historic Northampton what is interesting is the historic homes, we are in someone’s yard and so there is a familial sense that is going to inform all our writing, as our characters inhabited this neighborhood. The plays that I did at Mount Auburn Cemetery were different. Cemeteries sound like great places to write plays, except for the fact that the things you know the people for are not things they did in that place. This makes it difficult to create present scenes in the space. I wrote ten plays for the cemetery, in two sets of five. The first set was about the natural world, so that involved things that were there like salamanders and mushroom hunters and birdwatchers, all really rooted in the place. The second set of plays tended to be about people who were buried there. So, there is a play that starts out at this giant sphinx monument that is a memorial to the Civil War, but the scene is between the sculptor and the man who commissioned that piece, Jacob Bigelow, who was old and blind at the time. The scene takes place at the arrival of the sculpture, and then the way we made it active is that we know when he arrived, he inspected it with his hands. So, we got permission to bring this old wooden ladder on and the actor is actually feeling the sculpture and asking all these questions and they are in conversation about this object that is there. Matthew C. Ryan and Ken Baltin in Man of Vision . Photograph by Corinne Elicone. The action of the play is strongly influenced by the physical environment, and that in turn determines the structure. A good example is Moonlight Abolitionists . I knew I wanted to write a play to be done under the full moon, and I knew I wanted to write about abolition. So those things come together but then under the full moon, it’s going to be dark, so structurally that sends it towards a concert reading. It wasn’t going to be safe to move people around in the dark. I decided that it was OK if the characters were static physically as long as it was dynamic relationally between them. This decision also allowed the play to encompass a broad range of times. It is performed in the dark and the characters are lit only by their music stands lights, which casts this really eerie glow on the giant sphinx behind them. Lisa Timmel, who was the Director of New Work at the Huntington when I was a Playwright Fellow there, used to say, “structure is destiny” and I think place informs the structure. My mantra is “Don’t fight the site”. Understand where the site is guiding you and use it because you have so much, but if you try to go against it, you can’t win. I could do a play at Mount Auburn Cemetery set on the moon, but why? The audience will have spent all their imagination jumping to this new place. There are things that I can do in these spaces that I could never afford to pay to do. In a theatre I could make a full moon but it’s not going to be the same as a real full moon with the wind blowing on you at 9 o’clock at night in the middle of a cemetery. We also did this play about the Armenian genocide in the Mount Auburn Cemetery and when someone died, they would exit and they would walk away from the action, but the exits would take five minutes! The play would be continuing, and these people would be just walking way off in the background. When we performed at dusk when characters died, they would just wander into the gloom and disappear, in a lighting effect that would take a huge amount of money to replicate in the theatre, but the earth was doing it for us! You also have the dramatic tension in the fact that these events happened in the same place that they are being reimagined and that your audience knows this. Yes! The audience has that feeling, but so do the performers. When we were at Mount Auburn, I knew one of the actresses had gone to visit the grave of one of the people that she had portrayed in the Armenian play, this young woman who had died in childbirth shortly after arriving in America. It’s impossible for that not to deepen your performance as an actor. There is this richness that you feel. When we did Blood on the Snow it was intense because the play depicts this meeting that happened the day after the Boston Massacre, but you’re in the room where this meeting took place 250 years ago and there are 50 audience members crammed in with a dozen cast members but they are all in the room and you can feel the bones of the place all around you. The people feel so alive, and the audience soaks it in. Amanda J Collins and Robert Najarian in Consecration. Photograph by Corinne Elicone. References Footnotes About The Author(s) TALYA KINGSTON is a playwright, dramaturg and educator working primarily in new play development and theatre for social change. She is the Associate Artistic Director at WAM Theatre in Lenox, Massachusetts. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Lucas Skjaret Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 2 Visit Journal Homepage Another Day's Begun: Thornton Wilder's Our Town in the 21st Century Lucas Skjaret By Published on June 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF ANOTHER DAY'S BEGUN: THORNTON WILDER'S OUR TOWN IN THE 21ST CENTURY. Howard Sherman. London: Methuen Drama/Bloomsbury Publishing Place, 2021; Pp. 268. Another Day’s Begun, Howard Sherman’s first full-length book, centers theatre-makers and how they approached Our Town from 2002 to 2019. Sherman is known for his work with the American Theatre Wing, which co-produces the Tony Awards, and his numerous high-profile administrative positions with significant arts organizations, leading to his large social media presence and frequent writing about the industry. His pulse on the American theatre zeitgeist situates his approach to exploring a play such as Our Town . Scholars consider Thornton Wilder’s Our Town as seminal within the American literary and dramatic canon—and Sherman argues effectively for its legacy. Having opened on Broadway in 1938, it explores themes of American life and mortality in the bucolic, fictional New England town of Grover’s Corners from 1901 to 1913. The play ends with Wilder’s spin on the dance macabre ; we learn about the fates of the townsfolk, following Emily as she reflects upon her life as a departed soul. The play was revolutionary for many reasons, as Sherman argues, particularly its infamous opening stage direction: “No curtain. No scenery.” Besides using a bare stage and mimed properties, Our Town is recognized for its narrator-turned-psychopomp, The Stage Manager. Since its premiere, numerous high schools, community theatres, professional producing houses, universities, and audition rooms have visited Grover’s Corners. While Sherman is not a conventional scholar, Another Day’s Begun presents a robust examination of the continued influence of Our Town on storytellers across mediums and genres. Sherman divides his book into two main sections: the history of Our Town , and then a series of interviews with artists who have worked on productions since 2000. Chapter 1, “Building Grover’s Corners,” chronicles the play's development and original reception. Sherman’s writing balances clarity with curation, connecting the play to Wilder’s life and the historical context in which the thrice Pulitzer prize-winning dramatist wrote. The chapter emphasizes the play’s early impact in the United States and abroad post-World War II, noting that it was the first American play produced in Berlin after the war’s end in 1946. Sherman explains the Department of State pushed to produce American plays “vigorously” in both Germany and Japan during the war, with the Army negotiating directly with playwrights rather than through their agents. He quotes Variety describing this move to use “theatre as a means of bringing democracy to presumably truth-starved German teen-agers.” (15) Sherman considers the play’s life from mid-20th century into the 21st century. Chapter 2, “Expanding Grover’s Corners,” analyzes the play’s impact on a much broader scale. Sherman explores its cultural legacy through numerous adaptations, parodies, derivative stories, and references that spread across almost every storytelling medium. While Sherman includes aesthetically similar adaptations (such as the television musical version starring Paul Newman and Frank Sinatra in 1955) and other more robust re-imaginings — including ballet and opera adaptations — he argues for Our Town’s strong influence in popular culture. One example is his analysis of sitcoms such as Cheers , The Nanny , and Growing Pains , which included diegetic performances of Our Town . Sherman notes that these popular citations require the audience’s knowledge to make sense. He cites contemporary references too, like Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s television hit Riverdale, whose first episode has a “decidedly Wilderian feel” and how, in a later episode Veronica Lodge, a character, mutters, “I feel like I am wandering through the lost epilogue of Our Town’ ” as a “throwaway aside.” (40) Sherman smartly traces changing receptions of the play and does not shy away from negative responses, presenting a healthy balancing of perspectives on Wilder’s seminal work. Chapter 2 evidences the ubiquity of Our Town in creative output since its premiere. The book's primary contribution to scholarship sharpens in its second half, titled “ Our Town : Production Oral Histories 2002-19.” Here, Sherman archives interviews with artists who have worked on the play since the turn of the millennium. While he conducted most interviews, the author also includes artist statements transcribed from a 2006 video interview with Paul Newman, who played The Stage Manager in 2002 at Westport Country Playhouse (251). These oral histories, which serve almost as case studies, begin with David Cromer’s groundbreaking 2002 production. Despite its “utter simplicity and lack of artifice,” signaled by having actors wear contemporary street clothes, Cromer carried out a “ coup de théâtre ” on the audience: the Stage Manager, played by Cromer himself, revealed a detailed vintage kitchen with real bacon cooking and full period-specific costuming for Mr. and Mrs. Webb as their daughter, now deceased, visits this memory. (46) Another notable production discussed is Michel Hausmann’s interpretation at Miami New Drama, which incorporated Spanish, English, and Creole – the “three dominant languages of the city.” (167) The book’s strength derives from this variety of focal productions; from professional to educational productions to more avant-garde interpretations, Sherman ensures a diverse portfolio of perspectives. Having interviewed many theatre-makers over his career, Sherman knows to allow the artists to speak directly to readers about their experiences and approaches to Our Town . These interviews are not only archival but insightful about the craft of theatre-making. Sheryl Kaller, who directed Deaf West and Pasadena Playhouse’s 2017 production, for instance, which centered American Sign Language (ASL) and English, noted that their costume design was period-appropriate but “stayed in hues of blue, gray, and white,” a color palette designed to make the actors’ signing more visible. (198) The interviews reflect on disparate practices and contexts of production; readers directly observe how artists of differing backgrounds, resources, and notoriety discuss their artistic approaches to Wilder’s (nearly) century-old play. In his “Epilogue: 11 O’clock in Grover’s Corners,” Sherman summarizes his experiences of researching and writing the book. Beyond words that often came up in the interviews—universal, mundane, favorite, White, greatest, cheesy, and sacred— he was most surprised by how many interviewees confessed they never read it until they worked on it. Our Town, he argues, has thus “permeated the collective consciousness” of American theater and served as a conduit for American cultures. (247) Howard Sherman’s debut publication is well-researched and well-structured. For those who teach American drama, Wilder, or Our Town , the book has pullable sections that one can assign to add context and perspective to a play that many students might see as antiquated, or unrelatable. Another Day’s Begun provides the perfect dramaturgical companion for any director, scholar, or producer about to visit Grover’s Corners. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Sherman, Howard. Another Day’s Begun: Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in the 21st Century. London: Methuen Drama/Bloomsbury Publishing Place, 2021. Footnotes About The Author(s) Lucas Skjaret (he/him) is a third-year MFA Theatre Directing candidate originally from Minnesota. Before his journey south, he worked as a director, costume designer, dramaturg, and teaching artist in the Twin Cities. At Baylor University, he directed Circle Mirror Transformation by Annie Baker; Sam Shepard’s 4-H Club ; Under the Compass Rose , a devised piece; and Men’s Intuition by Itamar Moses. Additionally, he directed the staged reading of Joseph Tully’s new play Mythos of Autumn and co-directed the workshop concert of Favor: The Musical. In Minnesota, Lucas was the founder and artistic director of Market Garden Theatre, in which he directed Another Revolution , My Barking Dog , On The Exhale , and Public Exposure , as well as curated and directed their new works festival, Fresh Roots. He also worked with companies such as Lyric Arts Main Street Stage, Freshwater Theatre, History Theatre, Walking Shadow Theatr Company, Little Lifeboats, The Children's Theatre Company, Park Square Theatre, Artistry, Teater Neuf in Oslo Norway, and others. Lucas received his double B.A. in Theatre Arts and Scandinavian Studies from The University of North Dakota and studied at The University of Oslo’s Ibsen Centre. Lucas is an alumnus of the Directors Lab North in Toronto, Canada and the Kennedy Center Directing Intensive. He has also studied actor pedagogy at The Stella Adler Studio in New York City as well as intimacy direction with Tonia Sima and Theatrical Intimacy Education. As scholar, he has presented work at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, The Comparative Drama Conference, and MidAmerica Theatre Conference, where he also serves as the graduate student representative for the Playwrighting Symposium. His writing has been published in the Texas Theatre Journal and The Communication and Theater Association of Minnesota Journal . His scholarship focuses on exploring performance as identity, translation & adaptation theory, directing practices, arts pedagogy, and Nordic dramatic literature. Lucas is a proud associate member of The Stage Directors and Choreographers Society. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction America Happened to Me: Immigration, Acculturation, and Crafting Empathy in Rags Burning it Down: Theatre Fires, Collective Trauma Memory, and the TikTok Ban “A Caribbean Soul in Exile”: Post-Colonial Experiences of a Jamaican Actor Archiving a Life in Theatre: The Legacy of Michael Feingold Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspapers in New York Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre Another Day's Begun: Thornton Wilder's Our Town in the 21st Century Appropriate Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month MáM Scene Partners Oh, Mary! Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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 18, Fall, 2023 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Report from Germany By Marvin Carlson Published: November 26, 2023 Download Article as PDF A week or so in Germany in May, Covid years excepted, has long been a high point of my annual theatre-going. Although Berlin has often been my focus, the decentralized nature of the German theatre makes available an even richer selection even if one’s visits are limited to theatres only an hour or two train ride from the capital. Thus I began my 2023 visit with a mini-Shakespeare indulgence, beginning with King Lear in Hamburg, followed by Hamlet in Dessau and Macbeth in Dresden. Such a selection is by no means unusual in Germany, where Shakespeare makes an important contribution to the repertoire of almost every professional theatre. One of the results of this is that in Germany, where the director is often the dominant artist, the variety of interpretation, especially of the more familiar works, is almost beyond imagination (or some might say, reasonable justification). Accordingly I booked these productions expecting to see very little resemblance in any of them to the Shakespeare I might see in London or New York, and this indeed proved to be the case. King Lear . Photo: Armin Smailovic. I began with the Lear at Hamburg’s Thalia Theatre, directed by Jan Bosse, who was in-house director there from 2000 to 2005 and has particularly close ties to Hamburg, though he directs regularly at most of the leading German-language theatres. Bosse is now in his mid-50s, the generation of Thomas Ostermeier and Michael Thalheimer. In the fairly predictable cycle of directorial reputations in Germany, leading directors like these, once considered revolutionary, are now generally considered respectable but very much a part of the establishment. In another decade or so, if they are still active, they will probably be considered hopelessly dated by at least the younger generation, as Peter Stein and Claus Peymann were in their time. In the meantime, Bosse is considered a major if somewhat conservative director although his work would appear quite radical in the Anglo-Saxon world. His production begins not in Lear’s palace but in a glittering disco ballroom, where instead of a throne, a shiny musicians’ platform is the focus. Above it a huge half globe with reflecting mirror surfaces provides a visual element that will be ingeniously used in various forms throughout the evening. Lear is the master of ceremonies, making a rather awkward entrance below the globe through a curtain of sequins to seize the microphone. Although he is dressed in full drag, with a brilliant glittering low-cut black gown with a sweeping train, and with deep black fingernails, there is nothing effeminate about him—an aging but still strongly virile figure. The actor is Wolfram Koch, a leading figure in contemporary Germany who recently played a magnificent Prospero directed also by Bosse at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, and the colorful, but gender fluid costumes are the work of Kathrin Plath. The scene is developed as a TV spectacle, with Lear calling up his daughters from their seats in the front row (where they smile and wave as the audience applauds) to present their clearly scripted testimonies on stage. Goneril and Reagan (Anna Blomeier and Tioni Ruhnke) are perfect properties for Lear’s production—elegant model types, with splendidly glittering ball gowns, perfectly coiffed silver hair and of course long black fingernails and striking but subtle makeup. Poor Cordelia (Pauline Renevier, who also plays Edgar) lacks their visual elegance as well as the expected verbal display. She has not even the consolation of a volunteer husband, since Bosse has removed from this production many of the lesser characters, leaving only the three sisters, Lear and the Fool, Kent, Gloucester, Edgar and Edmund (Johannes Hegemann, who also plays Oswald). After the glittering opening scenes, the elegant disco back curtain disappears, and the remainder of the production takes place in a cold black void, the central feature of which is the glittering half dome, which appears in an impressive variety of configurations. Still hanging in the air, it sometimes reveals its back side, essentially as assemblage of wooden supports, forming a kind of rough retreat where the villain Edmund can weave his plots, or the imprisoned King can be kept. Sometimes it sits dome-like on the floor as various characters climb up and down it to gain better positions. On the heath, tilted slightly upward, it becomes the sheltering hovel containing the outcast Edgar. In some scenes this central element is surrounded by a cloud of individual lights hanging from the flies. During the tempest scene, it is pelted by countless small white balls, which suggest a crushing hail, or much more ominously but more metaphorically appropriate, a rain of detached eyeballs. The imaginative and constantly changing design is by Stéphane Laimé. The reduced cast size leaves only leading actors, each of whom turns in a bravura performance. Perhaps especially notable is the flamboyant Edmund, a consummate villain in his flowing black hair, black petal sweater, shiny gold sports pants and cowboy boots. The ethereal Fool (Christiane von Poelnitz) in a yellow jumpsuit layered with gauzy wisps of fabric, hovers about Lear like a bedraggled and ineffective guardian angel, reduced to making ironic comments on a darkening situation. The production is dominated however, by the powerful visual images of Laimé and by the fading ruin of Koch’s Lear, a major addition to his already impressive creations of other monumental figures of the Western theatre. The next two evenings were devoted to other major Shakespearian tragedies, and although quite different from each other, both clearly demonstrated the general stylistic difference that exists between a “conventional” German director like Bosse and many members of the upcoming generation Bosse himself has jokingly referred to as the “pseudo-young savages.” This is not simply a matter of age. Both Phillip Preuss, director of the Dessau Hamlet , and Christian Friedal, director of the Dresden Macbeth , are only five years younger than Bosse, but both are clearly among the “young savages,” firmly on the other side of a distinct stylistic divide in contemporary German directing. This difference has many variations and has been described in many ways, but many German critics would use the term popularized by the theorists Hans-Thies Lehmann in his 1999 book, Postdramatic Theatre . Although the term has been much discussed and debated, the Preuss and Friedal productions would surely be characterized as postdramatic, in opposition to Bosse, despite his radical changes to the play. The central difference is that Bosse still essentially follows the plot and action of the original, respecting its overall narrative construction, while the others assemble and arrange images and motifs from the original or related sources and present these as a visual and oral collage which bears the name of its grounding text, but accepts no responsibility to the narrative contained in that text. The approach is clear from the moment when the audience enters the Dessau Theatre to see the Preuss Hamlet . We see two similar male figures (Niklas Herzberg and Felix Axel Preißler) in dark military garb with sparkling accents, seated downstage at a table. The audience assumption is surely that these are Marcellus and Bernardo, the watchmen whose dialogue has opened Shakespeare’s drama for centuries. In fact as they begin to speak, their lines are not the familiar opening of the play, but a series of unrelated exchanges of apparently free association, in which can be recognized fragments of the play, including parts of Hamlet’s soliloquies. Gradually we come to realize that these are not the guards but a divided Hamlet, out of joint with both his world and himself. In his (their) constant repetitions, false starts and recirclings, he (they) resemble less Shakespeare’s character than such postdramatic protagonists as the couples in Beckett or Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The cast, in addition to these, consists of Stephan Korves, a loud, grotesque, insecure Claudius, Boris Malré as a fawning and servile Polonius, Cara Maria Nagler, who slips back and forth disturbingly but convincingly between Gertrude and Ophelia, and two “utility” men—Sebastian Graf, who plays Horatio, Rosencrantz, an actor and a gravedigger, and his “double” Roman Welzien, who plays Laertes, Guildenstern, another actor and another gravedigger. Lines from the Ghost are spoken by the entire company, often over the heavy booted tread of the unseen spirit. The stage, designed by Ramallah Sara Aubrecht, is in some ways extremely simple, in others highly complex. At the opening the table at the end of which the two Hamlets sit, is a long narrow one, running upstage and disappearing in the folds of a large curtain. On the curtain appears a live video showing a closeup of Claudius, carousing at his wedding banquet, and surrounded by everyone but Hamlet (the video is designed by Konny Keller). This scene actually takes place at the upper end of the long narrow table running down from far upstage, which is the main element of the set, although at this point it cannot be scene in its entirety. The offstage video then follows Gertrude/Ophelia as she leaves the King, climbs onto the table and walks slowly down it to where the Hamlets are sitting. As she comes through the curtains they part and for the first time we see her physically present, as the entire stage, and table is revealed. The effect is increased by a large mirror far upstage behind Claudius. We also for the first time see several other figures, dressed as courtiers, seated along the sides of the table, but soon realize they are actually dummies, somewhat reminiscent of the dead figures in a Kantor production. Most of the action takes place on or (thanks to the tracking live video, beneath this table, which serves as most of the settings of the production. A section in the center can be opened to suggest a grave, which from time to time welcomes the bodies of various actors, who climb in, are covered with dirt, and then climb out again to resume their eternal and repetitive dance of life and death. The other major scenic element is a variety of full stage curtains, of widely varying styles and set at different depths, suggesting a constant play of somewhat arbitrary beginnings and endings. Upon each curtain plays a continuing live video image of the apparently never-ending wedding banquet. Now and then a fleeting image suggests a particular scene –the player king and queen embracing Ophelia lowered into her grave, but these are merely passing images, sometimes repeated, never contextualized, and always embedded in a sea of contentious language. Like all three of the Shakespearian productions I saw, this was accompanied by the almost continuous contributions of a small onstage band with keyboard, strings, and percussion (music by Cornelius Heidebrecht). The continual repetitions and opening and closings of curtains calculatedly gave little indication of an approaching conclusion. On the contrary every effort was made to suggest something of a never-ending dream—perhaps that suggested in Hamlet’s central soliloquy, fragments of which are constantly repeated. Before the production begins, as the audience assembles in the lobby, confused noises are heard from behind the closed doors into the theatre. When the auditorium doors open, the audience enters to find the two seated figures in place on the stage, and projected behind them the live video of the loud and unruly wedding party, which has been going on for some time, and which we heard from outside. Like many post-dramatic creations, the production ends where it began, suggesting that there is in fact no ending. The two Hamlets resume their positions and conversation downstage and the video of the celebration continues on the closed curtain behind them. Eventually, their conversation ceases but the video continues. Perhaps ten minutes passed before the audience decided the performance was over and there was scattered applause, but nothing changed on stage. After another rather long wait a few audience members left, then others. When the house was perhaps half empty I went to the door and waited as others left. It was now about twenty minutes since the last words or live action on the stage, though perhaps a hundred determined spectators remained to watch the unmoving Hamlets and the continuing video projection. Out in the lobby I recognized that the sounds I heard there from inside the theatre were much the same as I had heard before the theatre opened, and I realized that the effect was to suggest that the display within presumably never ended, like the waiting for Godot. One might wonder if so extreme a version of this well-known drama would be well received, and the answer is that although naturally the performance had its critics, this Hamlet was selected by a jury of leading German critics and theorists as one of the ten outstanding productions of the year, and invited to participate in the annual Theatertreffen held later this same month in Berlin. Macbeth . Photo: Sebastian Hoppé. My third Shakespeare, the Dresden Macbeth , was as unconventional as the Dessau Hamlet , but developed from a very different set of assumptions and circumstances. In 2011, Christan Friedel, an actor at the Dresden State Theatre, joined the four members of the pop rock band Arctic Circle 18 to form a new group, dedicated to working in theatre and film as well as on the concert stage. They significantly took their name from Shakespeare, the Woods of Birnam. The first major undertaking of the new group was in providing the onstage live musical accompaniment for a production of Hamlet in Dresden in 2012, directed by Roger Vontobel. Friedel played the title role, for which he created and performed several songs. The group’s second theatrical venture was a collection of dramatic and musical works inspired by various Shakespearian texts and presented in Dresden under the title Searching for William in 2016. As the group’s reputation grew through a series of album releases, tours throughout Germany and Austria, and as far as Elsinore and major concerts, a production of Macbeth itself became inevitable. Like major and minor theatre projects all over the world, however, it fell victim to Covid. Just a week before its scheduled opening in Dresden in 2020 the theatre was closed, and although a much reduced concert version, Searching for Macbeth , was presented later that year for a limited audience, the full production could not be mounted for another two years. At that time it ran for over three hours, as compared to the seventy minutes of Searching for Macbeth and the approximately two and a half hours of both the Bosse Lear and the Preuss Hamlet , both based on much longer texts. Hamlet. Photo: Claudie Heysel. Although more of the original in terms of lines and scenes could be perceived in this production than in the Dessau Hamlet , the Dresden Macbeth was essentially not so much a theatrical production as a no-holds-barred rock concert, with the emphasis not on the music, and even less on the text, but largely on the spectacular visual effects, stunning even for a m ajor German theatre. The witch’s realm was represented by a large open metallic box, filled with a writhing figure, that from time to time rose up out of the stage floor, the first time under the feet of Macbeth and Banquo. The menacing Birnam Woods formed an ever-present threat, both visually and aurally, appearing in countless and ever shifting forms—using video projections, beams of light, and massive moving screens, among other devices. Often hovering over the action was what seemed like a skeletal craft out of Star Wars , lined with machines that engulfed the stage with billowing clouds of smoke and powerful spotlights that could pick out particular actors, usually Macbeth, or in different combinations send down shafts of light that could suggest the walls of an insubstantial room. Certain images, like the bleeding hands, were developed into complex visual sequences, partly live and partly filmic. A striking example was the witches’ prophecy that Banquo would produce many royal descendants—a brief passage in the play—which was elaborated into a complex visual spectacle lasting several minutes and primarily created by film and video technology using the image of an adolescent boy in crown and royal robes splitting, multiplying, and creating increasingly complex visual patterns rather like a kaleidoscope or the dancers in the climax of a Busby Berkley musical. Hamlet. Photo: Claudie Heysel. With all this spectacle the acting contributions of individual performers (there were over fifty of them) made a distinctly lesser impact. Indeed in terms of acting, critics regularly referred to this as a one-man show, not only because Friedel directed, created the music and acted and sang the title role, but also because spots and mikes often picked him out as the only distinct character amid a background of dark and constantly shifting configurations of characters. Like all the rest, however, he remained rather upstaged by the physical production, and his Macbeth was generally considered adequate, though rather conventional and even old-fashioned, considering the competition from the production as a whole. Aside from Friedel, the real stars of the show were the designer, Alexander Wolf, the lighting designer Johannes Zinc, and the video designers Clemens Walter and Jonas Dahl. By and large, the critics considered the production as a success in terms of its technical spectacle and far less impressive as an interpretation of Shakespeare’s play. For audiences, however, the production was a major event, and the show is playing to continuously sold-out houses and standing ovations. Although all the productions I attended in Germany had good audiences, only in Dresden did I have real difficulty in obtaining a seat. Antigone . Photo: David Baltzer. The remainder of my trip was spent in Berlin, where my choices became much more varied. I began with one more major world classic, Antigone , at the Gorki Theatre, which once again demonstrated the liberties taken with such texts in many contemporary productions. The setting, designed by Zahava Rodrigo, was composed of dark billowing cloud-like forms, suggesting perhaps Antigone’s fatal cave or perhaps, given the feminist orientation of the work, a sheltering womb. In it, four Antigone figures (Lea Draeger, Eva Löbau, Julia Riedler, and Ҁiǧdem Teke) and an accompanying musician on an electronic keyboard (Fritzi Ernst) presented what might be described as a highly emotional group therapy session lasting about an hour and 45 minutes. Director Leonie Böhm is well known for her radical revisions of the classics, particularly for her 2019 feminist version of Schiller’s The Robbers , performed, like this Antigone, by four women. Of the Sophocles text, little is left but fragments of the famous choric ode on the wonder of man. The text and actions have been instead developed from the ensemble’s improvisations on the themes of shame, exposure, personal loyalties, physicality and death. Some of the material is clearly improvised, especially when one or another actor directly addresses members of the audience. It is not an easy production to watch, especially the first ten minutes, when not a word is spoken, but the four actresses collect their saliva, play with it rather like chewing gum and mix and smear it on the faces and in the mouths of their partners. In a theatre just recovering from Covid, this sequence provided the audience with a serious initial challenge, and not a few departed. After saliva came shit, the central image of shame, and clearly the most often repeated word in the text. A large pool of the appropriate color and texture provided material throughout the evening for the actresses to smear themselves and each other, and each of them, some nude, at least once immersed herself completely and emerged dripping to continue the performance. Certainly, the audience could sympathize with the often stated feelings of shame and embarrassment expressed by the actresses, but it seemed to me that these feelings were on the whole shared by the audience, and not in a positive way. The Broken Jug . Photo: Arno Declair. My last three evenings were scarcely more conventional, but on the whole more enjoyable. All were at the Deutsches Theater, which on the whole remains the most distinguished of the many major theatres in the capital. On my first night there I saw a German classic, rarely done abroad, Kleist’s The Broken Jug , generally considered among the few major German comedies. The plot concerns a provincial Dutch judge, Adam, who gains access to the bedroom of a local young woman, Eve, falsely claiming that for the proper favors he can rescue Eve’s fiance Ruprecht from military service. Surprised in the bedroom by the fiance, Adam escapes through the window, smashing an heirloom jug prized by Eve’s mother. The play consists of an investigation brought by the mother to reveal the intruder’s identity, a trial in which Adam serves as judge. His increasingly desperate attempts to avoid exposure are finally thwarted by a visiting external official who insists on seeing justice done. Interestingly, this was the only production of the seven I saw that related to its grounding text in a conventional way. Kleist’s sprawling text was cut, and in a few cases slightly updated, but generally faithfully followed, with careful attention to psychological and linguistic nuance. Still, it was definitely a contemporary interpretation. Perhaps most notably, the visiting magistrate who ensures the moral order is no longer a man, but a shrewd, thoughtful, authoritative, and clearly pregnant young woman (Lorena Handschin). Director Anne Lenk has presented a series of popular classic revivals at the Deutsches, and is known for her general faithfulness to the text, with moderate, usually feminist updating. The Broken Jug shows this clearly, with justice at last established by a female judge, despite the best efforts of a corrupt patriarchy (led of course by Adam) to cast all blame on the female victim. The sleazy Adam, his face still revealingly scarred by his encounter with the jug, is beautifully played by Urich Mattius, one of Germany’s most revered actors, and although he dominates the stage, he is ably supported by leading members of the theatre’s famed ensemble, including Lisa Hrdina as the abused Eve, Tamer Tahan as the wronged fiancé, Franziska Machens as Eve’s ranting mother, more concerned with her jug then her daughter, and Jeremy Mockridge as Adam’s faithful but rather dull clerk. Aside from its excellent acting, the production is a visual feast. Scene designer Judith Oswald has created a narrow stage, containing only a row of 14 chairs, facing the audience and close to the footlights. The actors move ingeniously among these chairs such a way as to constantly suggest the shifting relationships among them (Eve and Ruprecht for example, are placed at opposite ends of the row for much of the early action, and gradually coming together as they are reconciled). Immediately behind these chairs is a magnificent still painting filling the entire stage space—a 17 th- century Dutch still life showing a lavishly furnished table, with goblet and play, oysters and ham, peaches, pomegranates and grapes, and even a huge parrot. No such opulence would be found in the home of a Dutch village judge like Adam, but costume designer Sibylle Wallum has created a set of somewhat anachronistic but richly imaginative costumes in the pink, orange coral range which combine beautifully with the opulent background. The following evening I returned to the Deutsches Theatre, to its smaller venue, the Kammerspiele, or more precisely to the stage of the Kammerspiele where seventy or eight chairs had been set up in rows on the revolving turntable in the middle of the stage. Here the audience was turned to different positions where various backstage areas (and occasionally the auditorium itself and the walkways above the stage over our heads) became temporary performance spaces. The production was of special interest to me, Ibsen’s very rarely performed early work, The Pretenders , one of the few Ibsen plays I had never seen. The young director Sarah Kunze argues that Ibsen’s historical drama has been unjustly neglected, but this so-called “limited edition” does not really offer enough of the original to make a strong case. Ibsen’s play owes much to Shakespeare, with a huge sprawling plot and dozens of characters. Everything in this adaptation is vastly reduced—the length, the complex plot, and most striking of all, the characters, reduced to only three actors, who primarily appear as the three central characters—rather like reducing Henry IV to the Prince, Hotspur, and Falstaff. Granted, these characters anchor the action: the two rivals for the crown, the attractive and gifted Haakon (Lorena Handschin), and the dark and manipulative Skule (Natalia Seelig) and the Machiavellian Bishop Nikolas who feeds off of their rivalry (Elias Arens). This distinctly melodramatic edge was even more clearly evident in Arens’ Bishop Nikolas, whose flamboyant delivery, especially in his death scene and his return as a minister from hell, were high points of the production, as they are of the original play. I was pleased to see this theatrical rarity in any form, but the staging, cutting, and presentation in fact left so little of the original that I doubt it many audience members will accept the director’s assertion that she has rediscovered a forgotten gem. Leonce and Lena . Photo: Arno Declair. My final production, back on the mainstage of the Deutsches Theatre, was a new interpretation by Ulrich Rasche of George Büchner’s Leonce and Lena , a popular revival piece in Germany, but almost unknown in the Anglo-Saxon world. Since his groundbreaking innovative production of Schiller’s The Robbers in 2018 Rasche has been hailed as one of the most powerful and original of young German directors, with his highly technological, powerfully lit, and perpetually and obsessively acted reworkings of classic texts. Büchner’s grotesque fantasy/comedy seems far removed from Rasche’s usual dark material, but he brings it unquestionably into his distinctive dramatic world through a striking directorial choice. Very little of the actual text of Leonce and Lena remains in Rasche’s production. It is replaced by extensive passages from other Büchner writings, including his letters, his revolutionary play Danton’s Death, and most significantly a good deal of an eight page call for political revolution, the 1834 Hessicher Landbote , for which the author was charged with treason and forced to seek asylum in France. The stage, designed by Rasche, is typical of his work, a vast essentially dark and empty space, here largely occupied by a massive, constantly revolving turntable, and a striking abstract element, here a huge, steadily shifting monumental lattice screen composed of color-changing fluorescent tubes (lighting by Cornelia Gloth). A chorus of ten actors, all clad in black with only their faces and hands dimly visible in a wash of blue light. Occasionally a chorus member will briefly emerge from the group to deliver a line, but the main body of the chorus remains steadily trudging onward, upon the constantly turning treadmill, slowly chanting the litany of oppressions and injustice making up the notorious pamphlet. Four musicians, placed in the front boxes with synthesizers, provide an appropriately crushing and continuous techno beat to accompany the unrelenting treading and chanting of the company. The effect is undoubtedly a powerful one, but at two and a half hours with no intermission, I found myself as much stunned as energized. This is an impression I often get from Rasche’s work, despite the unquestionable power of his visual imagination. In summary, I found the German theatre as always far more daring, more innovative, and more open to works (especially often neglected historical ones) than the Anglo-Saxon stage, which expands most of its creative energy on musical theatre and otherwise is satisfied as best with formulaic revivals of a handful of mostly English language plays. The German interest in pushing the boundaries certainly does not always work for me, but equally offers new insights into traditional works and into the potential of theatre to relate in new ways to the world around it to make this theatrical culture, so different from my own, continually fascinating. Image Credits: Article References References About the author(s) Marvin Carlson is Sidney E. Cohn Distinguished Professor of Theatre, Comparative Literature, and Middle Eastern Studies at the Graduate Centre, CUNY. He earned a PhD in Drama and Theatre from Cornell University (1961), where he also taught for a number of years. Marvin has received an honorary doctorate from the University of Athens, Greece, the ATHE Career Achievement Award, the ASTR Distinguished Scholarship Award, the Bernard Hewitt prize, the George Jean Nathan Award, the Calloway Prize, the George Freedley Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is the founding editor of the journal Western European Stages and the author of over two hundred scholarly articles and fifteen books that have been translated into fourteen languages. His most recent books are Ten Thousand Nights: Highlights from 50 Years of Theatre-Going (2017) and Hamlet's Shattered Mirror: Theatre and the Real (2016). 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 Report from London (December 2022) Confessions, storytelling and worlds in which the impossible becomes possible. The 77th Avignon Festival, July 5-25, 2023 “Regietheater:” two cases The Grec Festival 2023 The Festival of the Youth Theatre of Piatra Neamt, Romania: A Festival for “Youth without Age” (notes on the occasion of the 34th edition) Report from Germany Poetry on Stage: Games, Words, Crickets..., Directed by Silviu Purcărete Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Jose Fernandez Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 1 Visit Journal Homepage Historical Subjectivity and the Revolutionary Archetype in Amiri Baraka's The Slave and Luis Valdez's Bandido! Jose Fernandez By Published on December 13, 2016 Download Article as PDF The early works of Amiri Baraka and Luis Valdez reflect some of their aesthetic, social, political, and ideological convergences that coincided with the tumultuous period of social protest during the 1960s and 1970s. Both playwrights defined their social and artistic work by engaging with issues of race, ethnicity, justice, and nationalist aspirations for their respective groups at a critical juncture in American history. The death of Malcolm X marked an ideological shift in Baraka’s artistic work when he formed the Black Arts Repertory in Harlem in 1965; for Valdez, it was the Delano grape strike of 1965 that led to the creation of the strike’s artistic unit, El Teatro Campesino (The Farm Worker Theater). Their dramatic work during this influential period of black and Chicano theater was closely connected by their critique of social and economic conditions of marginalized members of their respective groups—blacks living in major urban cities and Chicano farm workers in California. [1] Several scholars have discussed the aesthetic, cultural, and social significance of the works of Baraka and Valdez within their respective groups and the larger American theater tradition, [2] but only Harry Elam has studied their work comparatively. In his study Taking It to the Streets , Elam systematically explores their social protest theater by focusing on their points of convergence and similarities. [3] Elam argues that living in a multi-ethnic society, “demand[s] not only that we acknowledge diverse cultural experiences but also that we investigate and interrogate areas of commonality. Only in this way can we move beyond the potentially polarizing divisions of race and ethnicity.” [4] Cross-cultural studies, Elam adds, should “challenge the internal and external social restrictions and cultural expectations often placed upon critics of color to study only their native group.” [5] My comparative analysis of Baraka and Valdez is informed by Elam’s emphasis on the importance of comparative studies that stress points of convergence between African American and Chicano theater in order to examine the parallels of both groups’ trajectory in their fight for social inclusion that is reflected in their artistic output. In this essay, I examine Baraka’s The Slave (1964) and Valdez’s Bandido! (1981) and how both plays imaginatively challenge prevalent historical narratives of their respective groups by reexamining significant historical events—the legacy of slavery and the aftermath of the U.S.-Mexican War (1846-1848) respectively—through their use of the revolutionary archetype in order to situate the history of African Americans and Chicanos within the larger U.S. historical narrative. An element that distinctively connects The Slave and Bandido! is their use of experimental elements that reflect some of the characteristics associated with postmodernism, such as the challenge of historical accounts by dominant groups, the marginalization and fragmentation of subjects who destabilize a totalizing historical narrative, and in the case of Bandido! , the use of self-reflexivity to disrupt and undermine its own narrative. A comparative analysis of the plays’ emphasis on the history of violence, oppression, and discrimination, and their aesthetic representations of revolutionary figures, reveals points of convergence in the playwrights’ artistic work that in turn reflects larger commonalities within the African American and Chicano theater traditions. The Slave engages with the era of slavery through the representation of Walker Vessels as a revolutionary leader in a contemporary context who carries the legacy of armed resistance dating back to the antebellum era. The Slave innovatively reshapes special and historical chronologies by presenting Vessels at the beginning of the play as a field slave in the antebellum South. The play’s events abruptly move to a race war between a black and a white army at an unnamed city and in an unspecified future. Vessels, now the leader of a black liberation army, returns to confront his ex-wife, Grace, and her current husband Bradford Easley, and to take his two daughters, who live with their mother and remain upstairs sleeping for the duration of the play. Their altercation results in the shooting of Easley by Vessels. As the advancing black army approaches the city and the shelling increases, the house is hit and Grace is fatally wounded. Before the house collapses, Vessels doubts the goals of his revolution and tells Grace that their two daughters are dead, possibly by his own hands. Bandido! recreates the life and myth of Tiburcio Vásquez, a historical outlaw and alleged revolutionary figure, and revisits the plight of Californios , the Spanish-speaking population in California, after the U.S.-Mexican War. Vásquez belonged to a prominent California family of Mexican descent who eventually lost his land and social standing after the war. Vásquez lived as an outlaw in California for years but was eventually captured. Bandido! covers key events in Vásquez’s last two years before his capture and prison sentence for his involvement at a store robbery at Tres Pinos, in Northern California, where three white Americans were killed. The play moves back and forth between vignettes of Vásquez’s life as an outlaw, his romantic life, and scenes at a San Jose jail before his execution. Before his capture, Vásquez confesses his intent to incite a revolution against the Anglo majority in California, but his plan fails to materialize, due in part to his own ambivalence regarding the consequences of a violent revolution. The Slave is often characterized as a representation of the volatile and racially charged politics of the sixties and Bandido! as a reflection of the conciliatory multiculturalism of the eighties; [6] however, both plays grapple with the ambivalence of presenting, to different degrees, the idea of overt armed revolution, which remains an unresolved tension throughout the plays. Although The Slave and Bandido! were originally staged in different periods, [7] Valdez’s play is a continuation of his previous work during the sixties, a time when both playwrights shared similar aesthetic and political views related to people of color’s shared struggle against oppression. It is significant that the revolutionary theme surfaces at a period in the playwrights’ careers when they wrote commercial plays targeted to broader and mixed audiences. [8] Before his more militant period working at the Black Arts Repertory, Baraka wrote critically recognized plays, most notably Dutchman (1964); similarly, when Valdez moved from Delano in order to professionalize El Teatro Campesino troupe, his project reached its peak with the Broadway production of Zoot Suit in 1979. [9] This is a contrast to the period when they produced social protest plays that were performed for predominantly black or Chicano audiences. [10] My analysis of the dramatic texts explores what Jon Rossini describes as the “aesthetic[s] of resistance” inscribed in Bandido! that are similarly applicable to The Slave . [11] The Slave stages a black revolution, and although Bandido! is considered a less confrontational play, or even containing “proassimilationist themes,” as Yolanda Broyles-González maintains, [12] Vásquez explicitly considers inciting an armed revolution in California against whites. Revolution and History in Baraka and Valdez Baraka and Valdez embraced nationalist aspirations for their respective groups and were attracted to revolutionary ideas during the early sixties, an influence that, although clearly reflected in The Slave , is also present in Bandido! Baraka and Valdez, as Elam explains, were not only artists, but also they were activists and social theorists of their respective movements. [13] In their early activism and plays, Baraka and Valdez shared a social and artistic vision that emphasized racial and ethnic consciousness based on militancy and nationalistic ideas. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Valdez acted as one of the intellectual theorists of El Movimiento (the movement), the more militant and nationalistic branch of the Chicano civil rights movement. Valdez’s early writings focused on the development of a Chicano identity embedded with nationalism, indigenous myths, and Catholic symbols. [14] After Valdez moved from Delano, he commented that El Teatro Campesino ’s performances moved beyond farm workers’ concerns and increasingly engaged with other broader social issues such as the Vietnam War and racial discrimination. [15] Both Baraka and Valdez were similarly influenced by the Cuban Revolution, which presented a powerful example of a successful armed uprising in the American continent. In the case of Baraka, he described his travel to Cuba in the early sixties as a turning point. [16] The Cuban Revolution was also an important event for Valdez. Jorge Huerta explains that before his involvement with César Chávez and the farm workers’ strike, Valdez traveled to Cuba in 1964 and became an open sympathizer of the revolution. [17] Although the aesthetic output and social activism of Baraka and Valdez converges in the late sixties and then diverges stylistically and ideologically in the late seventies, the influence of revolutionary thought is similarly present in The Slave and Bandido! The Slave and Bandido! resonate with postmodern premises advanced by Linda Hutcheon and Phillip Brian Harper regarding the history and social position of racial and ethnic minorities in the U.S. As W. B. Worthen has noted, Valdez’s disruption of historical objectivity in The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa (1964) and Bandido! not only takes elements from Chicano history, but its treatment reflects some postmodern characteristics such as the subversion and fragmentation of historical events. Worthen explains the use of the term “postmodern” in his analysis of contemporary Chicano/a playwrights by noting that “the thematics of Chicana/o history plays are inseparable from their rhetoric, typically from the use of discontinuity and fragmentation, appropriation and hybridity, heteroglossia and pastiche. This formal complexity might appear to verge on the blank aesthetic of the ‘postmodern.’” [18] In an earlier and often-cited discussion on history and postmodernism, A Poetics of Postmodernism , Hutcheon argues that a characteristic of postmodern narratives is the author’s challenge of the past as an objective and monolithic reality rather than a constructed set of discourses. Hutcheon describes this type of narrative as “historiographic metafiction,” in which authors both revise and undermine the past as it “reinstalls historical contexts as significant and even determining, but in so doing, it problematizes the entire notion of historical knowledge.” [19] A postmodern interpretation of history, however, does not render the past an undetermined reality; rather, it creates competing views that are open to multiple interpretations. The Slave and Bandido! reflect Hutcheon’s characterization of history as malleable by challenging its objectivity in relation to the past history of their respective groups. Moreover, Harper has argued that the some of the aesthetic works by minority authors can be interpreted as engaging with elements of the postmodern experience, particularly their engagement with marginality. In studying the emphasis on the fragmented and decentralized self that forms part of the postmodern condition, Harper argues that the alienation, despair, uncertainty, and fragmentation characteristic of postmodernism have been present in the work of some minority writers prior to the sixties since their postmodernist tendencies “deriv[e] specifically from [their] socially marginalized and politically disenfranchised status.” [20] The “social marginalization” that creates a “fragmented subjectivity” in these texts, Harper argues, does not stand as the sole characteristic of the postmodern subject; however, social fragmentation should be considered part of such marginalization. [21] The Slave and Bandido! explore two revolutionary archetypes and their condition as marginalized and decentered subjects based on their past and current social limitations. Emerging from groups on the margins of society, the revolutionaries’ call for armed confrontation against whites inventively contests their alienated social position. Amiri Baraka’s The Slave The Slave aesthetically engages with the history of violent militant resistance by minority groups that at times tends to be overlooked in contemporary social discourses in favor of a historical narrative that invokes the nonviolent struggle by civil rights activists. The Slave has commonly been studied as a radical and confrontational social protest play that attempts to raise racial and ethnic consciousness and nationalist sentiments through representations of armed confrontation. [22] The prospect of armed resistance and militant confrontation by some people of color also contributed to social change, and Baraka’s play is significant since it counterweights the prevalent narrative that the social gains of the sixties and seventies by people of color were achieved only through nonviolent resistance. Baraka’s confrontational rhetoric, shared by emerging radical activists such as Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton, is evident in his non-fiction of the early sixties, collected in Home: Social Essays (1965), which condemns the conditions of blacks living in urban cities and the nonviolent methods to solve racial and economic inequality advocated by black civil rights leaders. Baraka defiantly argues that the “struggle is not simply for ‘equality’” but “to completely free the black man from the domination of the white man.” [23] Baraka frames his confrontational stance and social demands based in part on his first-hand experiences dealing with inequality and discrimination in urban enclaves such as Harlem. [24] Echoing the seemingly senseless violence during the race riots in some major urban areas such as Watts, Detroit, and Newark in the 1960s, The Slave mirrors blacks’ simmering frustrations and responses to a deep-rooted sense of despair. The Slave challenges received histories regarding the era of slavery by creatively dislocating and extending the scope of the militancy of the sixties by presenting Walker Vessels both as a revolutionary leader and a slave—presumably a rebel leader—who carriers on the legacy of black armed resistance from the antebellum South. Some critics have focused on how Baraka engages with the era of slavery in an experimental form in other plays such as Slave Ship (1967) and The Motion of History (1976); [25] however, almost no attention has been given to the experimental engagement with history already found in The Slave . [26] Baraka’s play invokes the figure of the slave revolt leader, a figure that prior to the sixties tended to be mediated through the texts of white historians and writers, [27] to address historical misconceptions regarding the treatment of slaves. In his nonfiction, Baraka challenges the myth of the content slave and the attempt at myth-making in historiography and social discourses that present blacks during slavery as passive subjects who “didn’t mind being [slaves].” [28] Baraka rejects this view by emphasizing the tradition of armed slave resistance, since according to Baraka, “the records of slave revolts are too numerous to support” the “faked conclusion” that slaves coexist harmoniously with their masters. [29] Baraka subverts white historiography on stage by invoking the tradition of black self determination dating back to David Walker and armed resistance by slave revolt leaders such as Gabriel Prosser and Denmark Vesey by, as Werner Sollors points out, naming The Slave ’s main character Vessels. [30] Baraka’s use of the slave rebel figure, however, is experimental and differs from other conventional representations of armed resistance by black authors such as Arna Bontemps’s Black Thunder (1936), a fictional recreation of the historical 1800 Gabriel’s Rebellion. In The Slave , Vessels is not the historical reincarnation of Walker or Vesey propelled into the future; instead, Vessels’s initial position in the play as an outspoken and discontent slave is a symbolic figure of resistance who projects the legacy of slave rebellions and violent suppressions into a hypothetical future. The Slave ’s prologue presents Vessels as a character who attempts to articulate his grievances but fails due to his position as a field slave, which reflects his social marginality. The prologue purposefully obscures chronological time as Vessels appears as an “ old field slave ” who is “much older than [he] look[s] . . . or maybe much younger” at different periods during the play. [31] Vessels initially takes the form of a seer, elder statesman, or a black preacher, but as he attempts to express his thoughts, he grows “ anxiou[s] ,” “ less articulate ,” and “ more ‘field hand’ sounding ” (45). Scholars agree on the cryptic nature of Vessels’s opening speech; [32] nonetheless, Vessels’s restlessness and belligerent intent while still a slave is evident when he remarks that “[w]e are liars, and we are murderers. We invent death for others” (43). Vessels’s condition as a slave makes him unable to articulate a coherent message; as a result, his inability to effectively communicate marginalizes him and, at the same time, connects him to the emerging restlessness and frustration among disenfranchised blacks that finds a physical expression in an altered social context in the play’s subsequent acts. Signaling the ineffectiveness of rhetoric, Vessels turns to physical violence as a tool to address his social grievances. Vessels’s initial position as a “ field hand ” is significant for Baraka in the context of slaves’ hierarchies and class distinctions among blacks since he believes that the source for black liberation in past and contemporary times will be carried out by marginalized subjects rather than blacks in relative positions of authority or class standing. In the introduction to The Motion of History , Baraka makes the distinction between slaves who were “house servants and petty bourgeoisie-to-be” and “field slaves” who represented the majority and the authentic revolutionaries. [33] Hence, Vessels’s initial position as a marginalized field slave connects him to the majority of disenfranchised blacks rather than to the black middle class leaders of the civil rights era, who in Baraka’s view, asked blacks to “renounce [their] history as pure social error” and look at “old slavery” and its legacy of social and economic disparities as a “hideous acciden[t] for which no one should be blamed.” [34] Vessels’s position as a field slave functions as a social critique of black civil rights leaders and their methods, thus presenting a clear ideological contrast between his radical militancy and their nonviolent social activism. The Slave destabilizes dominant historical narratives of slave suppression on stage by presenting a decentered subject who carries the legacy of armed resistance and has the potential to challenge the status quo through open revolution. The play’s first act propels Vessels into a contemporary city in the 1960s where he becomes the leader of a “black liberation movement” who is able to mount an effective military offensive against whites (58). As Larry Neil observes, Vessels in the contemporary context “demands a confrontation with history. . . . His only salvation lies in confronting the physical and psychological forces that have made him and his people powerless.” [35] Vessels refers to the source of his actions when he maintains that he is fighting “against three hundred years of oppression” (72). Vessels, moreover, echoes the intent of former slave rebel leaders such as Nat Turner when he boasts that he “single-handedly. . . promoted a bloody situation where white and black people are killing each other” (66). Neil contextualizes the violence depicted in The Slave by arguing that despite Western society’s aggression toward the oppressed, “it sanctimoniously deplore[d] violence or self-assertion on the part of the enslaved.” [36] Vessels’s armed resistance—taken as a continuation of past instances of slave rebellion—figuratively subverts the historical record since an organized and open slave revolt in the U.S. did not last more than a few days. The Slave attempts, as Baraka notes in his often-cited essay, “The Revolutionary Theatre” (1964), to take blacks’ revolutionary “dreams and give them a reality”; [37] as a result, Baraka’s play goes beyond the representation of the militancy and radicalism of the sixties by creating a fictional counterview of the historical record of slave revolt suppressions. Despite the inclusion of a race war in The Slave , the play shows the limits of a military and bloody confrontation between blacks and whites on stage; instead, it concentrates on the tension between Vessels’s revolutionary goals and his ambivalent feelings toward whites due to his former acceptance of racial pluralism. Although the war has been raging for months and has tangible consequences, since it is noted that Vessels’s “noble black brothers are killing what’s left of the city,” or rather “what’s left of this country” (49), it is only alluded to intermittently rather than enacted. The war serves mainly as a background to the verbal abuse, physical violence, and aggression in the living room among Vessels, Grace, and Easley. [38] The animosity between Vessels and Grace derives also in part from Baraka’s radicalization and his own personal struggles to reconcile his black nationalism and his marriage to Hettie Jones, a white woman. [39] The emotionally charged scenes and recriminations between the three characters expose the simmering feelings of rage and racial animosity that remained under the surface before the war. The Slave presents a clash between a black radical and a white liberal, and Vessels’s confrontation with Easley symbolizes his attempt to overcome his past and continue his revolution. Samuel Hay maintains that in The Slave and other plays of the same period, “Baraka repeats Baldwin’s theme [in Blues for Mr. Charlie (1964)] that burning all bridges to white liberals is the first step toward liberation.” [40] Vessels does not direct his hatred against prejudiced whites but against Easley, a college professor with a “liberal education, and a long history of concern for minorities” (52). Consequently, Vessels’s shooting of Easley represents the end of possible coexistence between blacks and whites, echoing the radical view—embraced by Malcolm X and other black militants—that white liberals could not contribute to the struggle for black liberation. Grace realizes, however, that in trying to overcome his former relationships with whites, Vessels risks destroying himself and his family. Even though Vessels’s role as a revolutionary leader fulfills a long-awaited dream and struggle for liberation that has extended for centuries—exactly what Baraka exhorts in “The Revolutionary Theatre”— The Slave depicts the revolution’s toll on Vessels and his inability to successfully navigate his own racial allegiances. [41] The Slave ’s ending ultimately negates Vessels’s prospects for a successful revolution—even within the fictional setting created by the play—and reveals the fate of his family when he asserts that his two daughters are dead, most likely by his own hands. Following the death of Easley, the fate of his children in The Slave ’s final scenes becomes the focus of attention; however, Vessels’s actions and statements suggest that he arrived at Grace’s house with the intention of ending his children’s lives. Vessels mentions at different times that he returned to Grace’s house because he “want[s] those children” (65), but the stage directions at the beginning of act one suggest that he could have already taken their lives before confronting Grace. After the shelling increases and the house is hit, Grace is fatally hurt. When Grace asks him to “see about the girls,” he repeatedly tells her that “they’re dead” (87, 88). Scholars are divided regarding the fate of the children, suggesting that they could have died in the burning building, Vessels could have taken their lives, or that the scene is vague and unclear. [42] Although the play’s ending appears perplexing, Vessels’s seemingly incomprehensible actions gain meaning by taking into consideration that he arrived to Grace’s house with the premonition that his revolutionary fight may not succeed. During a moment of weakness or sincerity, Vessels confesses to Grace: “I was going to wait until the fighting was over . . . until we have won, before I took [the children]. But something occurred to me for the first time, last night. It was the idea that we might not win” (68). Baraka in later years conceded that some of his plays preceding Malcolm X’s death, including The Slave , were “essentially petty bourgeois radicalism, even rebellion, but not clear and firm enough as to revolution.” [43] Based in part on Baraka’s own acknowledgement that Vessels lacked revolutionary conviction, some scholars have described Vessels’s fight as futile. [44] Jerry Gafio Watts inconclusively suggests that the ambiguous fate of the children is “more annoying than provocative,” leaving the ending of the play without “any resemblance of meaning.” [45] Vessels’s actions and the fate of his children, however, achieve an important symbolic meaning in the context of Vessels’s former self as a slave when, during the antebellum period, some slaves took the extreme action of ending their children’s lives in order to spare their fate as slaves. The ending of The Slave inventively engages with the era of slavery by drawing parallels with tragic episodes during the antebellum era such as the well-known case of Margaret Garner, a runaway slave, who took the radical measure of taking her daughter’s life before her capture as an alternative to slavery, an episode masterly rendered in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). Henry D. Miller observes that in Baraka’s plays, characters “are not human beings at all, but political abstractions.” [46] Although the absence of Vessels’s daughters during the play may suggest a metaphorical interpretation of these characters, his disturbing actions toward them are also pragmatic, as Vessels reasons that the fate of non-whites may be in jeopardy after a possible military victory by the white army. Vessels returns to Grace’s house because he believes he is “rescuing the children” from an unspecified danger (69); his rescue takes the form of a desperate form of protection. Morrison’s use of Garner’s story continued a tradition in antislavery writing that called attention to slaves’ attempts to gain their freedom since, according to Paul Gilroy, the “horrific” story of Garner was often used by some abolitionists to raise awareness for the antislavery cause. [47] In a similar manner, and in relation to calls for a black revolution in the sixties, Vessels’s seemingly incomprehensible actions in The Slave dramatize the way in which oppressive race relations cornered individuals into taking desperate actions, as Garner’s story also demonstrates. As a result, the children in The Slave represent the unfulfilled aspirations of a black revolution just as Garner’s daughter symbolizes slaves’ negated freedom. In Baraka’s rendering of this parallel episode, Vessels’s dreams for liberation are shattered for him and his children as they ultimately perish, and he returns to his slave-like state at the end of the play. Beyond reflecting Baraka’s radicalization and frustration regarding the marginalized conditions of urban blacks during the sixties, The Slave craftily contextualizes its radical and militant message by merging Vessels’s revolutionary aims with historical instances of armed resistance by blacks. The play’s endurance rests in its reminder that the gains for social recognition during the sixties were not only achieved through acts of nonviolent resistance, but also through the prospects of violent confrontation. Aesthetically, The Slave uses innovative techniques that reflect postmodern anxieties in relation to the challenge and subversion of dominant historical narratives about the era of slavery; Vessels’s discomforting revolutionary message that stresses militancy, nationalist aspirations, and radical actions in the face of racial oppression stands as a form of historical memory that reflects the contentious history of race relations—not only during the sixties but also at different junctions in American history. The play’s engagement with the position of marginalized subjects and their past history of resistance found in black theater is similarly present in the Chicano theater tradition. Luis Valdez’s Bandido! Critical discussions of Valdez’s works are often divided within the framework of Valdez’s collaboration with El Teatro Campesino and his post-80s projects; however, Bandido ! has not been commonly explored as the continuation of the nationalist and revolutionary themes and creative engagement with history already present in his pre- El Teatro Campesino play, The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa , which introduced the use of the archetypal revolutionary for the first time in Chicano theater. [48] Scholars have pointed out that the characters of the two brothers in Shrunken Head , Joaquín and Belarmino, reflect—and physically appropriate—characteristics of two historical figures of resistance, Joaquín Murrieta and Francisco Villa. [49] The ethos of Villa is staged both in a “realistic” and “surrealistic” manner as their father, Pedro, allegedly fought alongside Villa during the Mexican Revolution while Belarmino acts literally as the missing head of Villa. [50] The play is explicit in relation to Villa’s symbolism as a “peasant outlaw” and as “revolutionary giant.” [51] Shrunken Head shows an imaginative treatment of history and the revolutionary figure that is recovered and situated within an American historical context in Bandido! [52] The emphasis on the history of the Southwest in Bandido! serves to reclaim past events of war and conquest and to situate early Mexican Americans within a geographical space neglected to them in prevalent historical narratives. Huerta correctly notes that with Bandido! , Valdez offers Chicanos a historical “presence in the state of California.” [53] Previously the largest group in the state, Californios were considerably outnumbered only a decade after the discovery of gold in 1848. They faced social and economic discrimination—and more importantly—they lost most of their land and social position despite the protections granted in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Before the 1860s, Californios owned the most valuable land in California, but “by the 1870s, they owned only one-fourth of this land” and by “the 1880s Mexicans were relatively landless.” [54] The historical Vásquez traced his ancestry to the first Californios who arrived in the eighteenth-century, and his loss of land and social status forms the basis and context for Vásquez’s actions in Bandido! ; he mentions that a “hundred years ago, [his] great grandfather founded San Francisco with [Juan] De Anza. Fifty years ago José Tiburcio Vásquez was the law in San José”; [55] but Vásquez laments that he “cannot even walk the wooden side-walks of either city without a leash” (110). Vásquez’s reversal of fortune represents the fate of Californios after the U.S. annexation of the territory. Valdez’s play challenges dominant narratives of the U.S. westward expansion that exalts the economic success stories of white Americans by focusing on Vásquez as a marginalized subject who, similar to Vessels in The Slave , revolts against the social order. In the introduction to Bandido!, Valdez subverts such narratives by contending that the “American mythology” that constitutes the history of the Old West remains “ under constant revision ” (97). Bandido! presents an alternative interpretation to the meaning and symbolic significance of Vásquez despite, or because of, his ominous ending since, as Valdez also notes, Vásquez holds the distinction of being the last man to be publically executed in California in 1875 (97). There has been a shift in analyses of Bandido! from looking at the play as a distortion of history to reevaluating the play as recontextualizing history and questioning its neutrality. Scholars and reviewers who saw the 1994 staging of Bandido! were critical about what they perceived as “revisionary history” (89). [56] Broyles-González, for instance, argues that the plight of the historical Vásquez in Bandido! is “wholly distorted by omissions.” [57] Valdez’s intent, however, is to take advantage of the malleability of historical accounts—as the play’s introduction suggests—to create his own revolutionary archetype. As a contrast to Baraka’s loose amalgamation of figures of resistance in The Slave , Bandido! is based on the historical Vásquez; however, rather than simply contesting negative historical characterizations and presenting the true Vásquez, Valdez’s play carves its own figure of resistance based on competing interpretations. Although the revolutionary dimension of the historical Vásquez has been disputed by historians, [58] the revolutionary figure in Bandido! —just as in The Slave —is used as a symbol of resistance able to embody, as Huerta notes, Chicano’s “struggle against oppressive forces.” [59] Rossini rightly observes that Vásquez in Bandido! stands as a rebel archetype since Valdez “reject[s] the easy label of criminal and tak[es] seriously Vásquez’s revolutionary potential.” [60] The representation of Vásquez in Bandido! is more complex than a simple revisionist rendering of Vásquez’s life on stage; rather, Bandido! ’s portrayal of Vásquez reflects what scholars such as Juan Alonzo have identified as the reconceptualization of the figure of the nineteenth-century outlaw and bandit after the eighties. [61] Bandido! balances two seemingly contradictory accounts in relation to the historical character of Vásquez and presents two Vásquez figures: a bandit innocent of shooting three Americans who becomes a figure of nonviolent resistance, and an armed rebel who attempts to incite a revolution in California. On one hand, Bandido! rejects the simplistic characterization of Vásquez as a petty thief and makes him a symbol for Californios against the American expansion into the Southwest that similarly echoed the nonviolent actions by Chávez during the Delano strike in the 1960s. In Bandido! , Vásquez acknowledges his “twenty years as a horse thief and stage robber,” but contends that his “career grew out of the circumstances by which [he] was surrounded” (127). Vásquez’s actions reflect the changing circumstances of Mexican Americans as he adds: “I was thirteen when gold was discovered. As I grew to manhood, a spirit of hatred and revenge took possession of me. I had many fights in defense of what I believed to be my rights and those of my countrymen” (127). In the play’s early scenes, Vásquez acts as a scrupulous bandit who restrains himself from shooting victims during his raids. Vásquez informs his band before the raid at Tres Pinos that his “[f]irst cardinal rule” is “no killing” (116). When Vásquez is captured and sentenced for his involvement in the robbery, his hanging takes the form of an act of arbitrary justice, but also symbolizes the limits of passive resistance by Mexican Americans after the annexation of California. On the other hand, Bandido! employs the rebel figure inscribed in the history of Mexican Americans in the Southwest to articulate a message of resistance. Valdez connects Vásquez’s rebellious actions to early California outlaws such as Murrieta and “Mestizo” revolutionaries such as Villa already present in his militant play The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa . [62] As the play progresses, Bandido! imaginatively uses Vásquez’s revolutionary potential—whether historical or fictional—to insert a militant message as Vásquez shares his plans to begin a revolution in order to liberate California from U.S. control. After the raid at Tres Pinos, Vásquez is once again on the run when he reaches the San Fernando Mission. There, he finds refuge in the estate of Don Andrés Pico, a historical figure, who during the U.S.-Mexican War “defeated the U.S. Cavalry at the Battle of San Pasquel [ sic ]” (138). [63] During their meeting, Vásquez invites Pico to join him in fighting Americans one more time when he confesses: “I’m talking about a revolution. With a hundred well armed men, I can start a rebellion that will crack the state of California in two, like an earthquake, leaving the Bear Republic in the north, and [a] Spanish California Republic in the south!” (137). Vásquez, however, is subsequently captured without enacting his plan. The scene is significant for its symbolism since Vásquez’s desire to begin a revolution is explicit. Rather than resolving these two facets of Vásquez’s life—as an innocent outlaw and a revolutionary— Bandido! purposefully complicates these two competing narratives. An element that differentiates The Slave and Bandido! is that Valdez’s play self-reflexively exploits and interrogates the facts and myth of Vásquez’s life as it accentuates and undermines the play’s own historical significance through the use of parody and the inclusion of fragmented and competing narratives within the play. Hutcheon explains that “[p]arody is a complex genre, in terms of both its form and its ethos. It is one of the ways in which modern artists have managed to come to terms with the weight of the past.” [64] Bandido! creates two parallel narratives through the “play within a play” device in which some of the play’s scenes are a reenactment of a play written by Vásquez himself about his life staged by Samuel Gillette, a theatrical “impresario,” while Vásquez awaits his sentence in a San Jose prison (98, 100). Gillette’s artistic vision, when reenacting Vásquez’s life on stage, and the writing and rewriting of Vásquez’s own story in Bandido! examine and parody the process of theatrical representation and historical certainty. Hutcheon describes parody as the “perfect postmodern form” since “it paradoxically both incorporates and challenges that which it parodies.” [65] Under this view, Bandido! calls attention to Vásquez’s significance while simultaneously undermining the veracity of such assertion. A marked difference between The Slave and Bandido! is that although both plays revolve around the possibilities of armed resistance and revolution by minority groups against a larger white population, the style of The Slave is tragic; in contrast, Bandido! combines realistic elements with melodrama. [66] Huerta, for example, argues that Bandido! is divided in two distinct sections and explains that “[w]hen we are with Vásquez in the jail cell, we are observing the real man; when the action shifts to the melodrama stage we are sometimes watching the Impresario’s visions and sometimes we are actually watching Vásquez’s interpretation.” [67] Other scholars, however, have observed that the line between the melodrama sections and the realistic jail scenes becomes blurred and problematic as the play progresses. [68] The use of melodrama, ultimately, adds an additional dimension to Vásquez as a multifaceted character. Bandido! weaves Vásquez’s competing nonviolent and revolutionary message as Vásquez himself directly writes and rewrites his own story while in jail, thus mediating a set of seemingly contradictory positions. After the first staging of Vásquez’s play by Gillette, Vásquez complains about Gillette’s emphasis on his private life as “melodrama” where Vásquez’s alleged romantic exploits are accentuated through his relationship with Rosario, a married woman (109). Rather than resolving the tension between Vásquez’s personal life and his public persona, Valdez’s play self-reflexively exploits the apparent contradictions. Gillette expresses skepticism regarding Vásquez’s desire to prove his innocence during the killings at Tres Pinos and to enhance his pacifist stance, while at the same time trying to incite an armed revolt that reflects his revolutionary aspirations. When Vásquez and Gillette are negotiating the terms for staging Vásquez’s play in San Francisco, Vásquez tells Gillette: “If I’m to be hanged for murder, I want the public to know I’m not guilty” (110). Gillette objects to this request as he wonders: “Twenty years as a vicious desperado and never a single, solitary slaying?” (110). At the same time, Gillette agrees to buy Vásquez’s revised play and stage it in San Francisco but with “none of this Liberator of California horseshit” since he would “be laughed out of the state if [he tries] to stage that” (140). Vásquez’s own crafting of his story and Gillette’s assistance as theater producer and businessman combine to mediate the play’s layered message. Despite its revolutionary message, Bandido! portrays an unsuccessful revolution as Vásquez questions his actions due to his ambivalence regarding his intent to incite a revolution and his hybrid cultural identity as he decides—before his execution—to avert an armed confrontation. Before Vásquez’s capture, Cleodovio Chávez, one of Vásquez’s band members, is attracted to the possibility of gathering a group of armed men and “slaughter[ing] every gringo [they] meet” since he reasons, “[I]f they’re gonna hang us, it might as well be for something good—not petty thievery” (145). In a subsequent scene, Vásquez averts the possible confrontation by sending a letter to Chávez, who has not been captured, asking him “not to get himself and a lot of innocent people killed” (150). The possibility for armed confrontation—which is set in motion in The Slave —is averted in Bandido! due to Vásquez’s own hybrid cultural identification as a Californio and an American. A significant gesture in Bandido! is that although Vásquez was chased in his homeland and persecuted by American authorities, he considers himself a product of his mixed Mexican and American background. Vásquez displays what Ramón Saldívar has identified as an “in-between existence” present in Mexican American narratives since the formation of the U.S.-Mexican border. [69] In Bandido!, Vásquez has the opportunity to stay in Mexico, but he returns to California; when asked about his motives, Vásquez responds that he has “never relished the idea of spending the rest of [his] days in Mexico” since California is “where [he] belong[s]” (138). The character of Vásquez signals a transition in Valdez’s drama from presenting the memory and ethos of Villa, a Mexican revolutionary, in The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa as an archetypal figure to Vásquez in Bandido! , a Mexican American figure of resistance, who belongs to the history of the U.S. and the Southwest. Conclusion The Slave and Bandido! use innovative dramatic techniques that reflect postmodern concerns in post-sixties minority theater regarding the malleability and fragmentation of historical narratives to question historical representations of their respective marginalized groups. Both plays reclaim previously overlooked figures in dominant historical discourses and offer them agency to recreate and alter the historical memory of each group. The plays transform marginalized subjects, from a slave and an outlaw, respectively, into revolutionary figures to create a historical continuity between previous instances of armed resistance and revolt from past to contemporary times. Both revolutionary leaders engage, in different degrees, in a quest to gain their freedom and previously negated historical spaces—a black nation and an independent California respectively—that can be achieved through violent means. The Slave and Bandido! revolve around the haunting memory of race relations in the U.S. and episodes of armed resistance by altering historical narratives as Baraka’s contemporary revolutionary figure carries the history of slave rebellions, while Valdez’s play disrupts historical representations by allowing its revolutionary figure to write and rewrite his own legacy. The Slave and Bandido! ultimately present unfulfilled revolutions even in their fictional settings and show a similar ambivalence regarding their revolutionaries’ actions and intents toward whites. Despite its representation of a race war, The Slave is less radical than commonly assumed since Vessels struggles unsuccessfully to jettison his previous racial pluralism and his past relationships with whites. Vásquez in Bandido! similarly struggles to incite a revolt against whites in light of his hybrid cultural identity. Although both plays appear to respond to different social and political historical periods, they interrogate and grapple with ever-present questions of race and ethnic identity, and the position of people of color in the U.S., that continue to define American society in contemporary times. The Slave and Bandido! represent an instance, among others, in which the themes, tropes, and techniques used by black and Mexican American playwrights and writers after the sixties converge to show that some of the aesthetic work by authors of color share deeper commonalities. References [1] The term Chicano/a refers to individuals of Mexican descent living in the Southwest. For a detailed description of the social and political connotations of the terms Chicano/a, Mexican American, and Mexican in the context of Chicano theatre, see Jorge Huerta, “When Sleeping Giants Awaken: Chicano Theatre in the 1960s,” Theatre Survey 43, no.1 (2002): 23. [2] See Jorge Huerta, Chicano Theater: Themes and Forms (Ypsilanti: Bilingual Press, 1982), 11-45; Yolanda Broyles-González, El Teatro Campesino: Theater in the Chicano Movement (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 3-35; Jorge Huerta, Chicano Drama: Performance, Society, and Myth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 26-44; Larry Neil, Visions of a Liberated Future: Black Arts Movement Writings (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1989), 62-78; Jerry Gafio Watts, Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 259-90; and Henry D. Miller, Theorizing Black Theatre: Art Versus Protest in Critical Writings, 1898-1965 (Jefferson: McFarland, 2011), 179-216. [3] Elam’s expansive analysis covers their one-act and extended plays from 1965 to 1971, concentrating on their plays’ shared themes and elements such as the influence of the social context, the content and form of the dramatic texts, and their performing spaces. Harry J. Elam Jr., Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 17. [4] Ibid., 4. [5] Ibid., 7. [6] Watts, Amiri Baraka , 82-83; and Broyles-González, El Teatro Campesino , 235-36. [7] The Slave opened in the St. Marks Playhouse in Greenwich Village in December 1964 while Bandido! was first staged in San Juan Bautista in 1981, and then at the Mark Taper Forum in California in 1994. Miller, Theorizing Black Theatre , 205; and Jon D. Rossini, Contemporary Latina/o Theater: Wrighting Ethnicity (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), 88-89. [8] See Broyles-González, El Teatro Campesino , 232; Watts, Amiri Baraka , 83; and Werner Sollors, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a “Populist Modernism” (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 134. [9] Huerta, Chicano Theater , 61; Broyles-González, El Teatro Campesino , 170-71, 189. [10] Scholars have discussed the role of audiences in relation to The Slave and Bandido! by focusing on Baraka’s goal of creating a black militant consciousness and Valdez’s attempt during the eighties to avoid the confrontational rhetoric characteristic of El Teatro Campesino ’s plays. See Guillermo E. Hernández, Chicano Satire: A Study in Literary Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), 50; Broyles-González, El Teatro Campesino , 172-73, 229, 235-36; and Watts, Amiri Baraka , 83. [11] Rossini, Contemporary Latina/o Theater , 92. [12] Broyles-González, El Teatro Campesino , 235. [13] Elam, Taking it to the Streets , 3. [14] Valdez states in his manifest-poem, Pensamiento Serpentino (Serpentine Thoughts), that “To be CHICANO is to love yourself / your culture, your / skin, your language.” “Pensamiento Serpentino,” in Luis Valdez—Early Works: Actos, Bernabé and Pensamiento Serpentino (Houston: Arte Publico, 1990), 175. [15] Luis Valdez, “Notes on Chicano Theatre” in Luis Valdez—Early Works , 10. [16] Baraka wrote about his experiences visiting the island and witnessing first-hand the results of the revolution led by “a group of young radical intellectuals” much like himself; “Cuba Libre,” In Home: Social Essays (New York: William Morrow, 1966), 38; See also, Amiri Baraka, Conversations with Amiri Baraka , edited by Charlie Reilly (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 132; and Komozi Woodard, A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) & Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 52-54. [17] Huerta, “When Sleeping Giants Awaken,” 25. [18] W. B. Worthen, “Staging América: The Subject of History in Chicano/a Theatre,” Theatre Journal 49, no. 2 (1997): 103. [19] Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory and Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988), 89. [20] Phillip Brian Harper, Framing the Margins: The Social Logic of Postmodern Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 3. [21] Ibid., 28-29. [22] For discussions on The Slave , see Sollors, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones , 134-138; Lloyd Brown, Amiri Baraka (Boston: Twayne, 1980), 147-50; Neil, Visions of a Liberated Future , 67-74; Watts, Amiri Baraka , 78-84; and Miller, Theorizing Black Theatre , 205-11. [23] Amiri Baraka, “Black Is a Country,” in Home: Social Essays , 84. [24] Amiri Baraka, “Cold, Hurt, and Sorrow (Streets of Despair),” in Home: Social Essays , 94-95. [25] Watts, Amiri Baraka, 269-73, 445-49. [26] In his analysis of The Slave , Brown discusses briefly the significance of Vessels’s position as a “field slave” as an archetypal figure of black militancy. Brown, Amiri Baraka , 150. [27] Thomas R. Gray, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831) (Baltimore: Lucas & Denver, 1831), 6. Gray describes Turner during his 1831 slave rebellion in Virginia as “fiendish” and “savag[e]” and guided by a fundamentalist vision of retribution and conflict enacted in religious scriptures. [28] Amiri Baraka, “Street Protest,” in Home: Social Essays , 98. [29] Ibid., 98. [30] Sollors, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones , 135. [31] Amiri Baraka, The Slave in Dutchman and The Slave: Two Plays by LeRoi Jones (New York: Morrow, 1964), 43, 44. All subsequent references are indicated in parenthesis. [32] For discussion on The Slave ’s prologue, see Sollors, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones , 137; Watts, Amiri Baraka , 78-79; and Miller, Theorizing Black Theatre , 209-210. [33] Amiri Baraka, introduction to The Motion of History and Other Plays . (New York: William Morrow, 1978), 13. See also, Amiri Baraka, “What Does Nonviolence Mean?” in Home: Social Essays , 137. [34] Baraka, “What Does Nonviolence Mean?,” 135, 137. [35] Neil, Visions of a Liberated Future , 70. [36] Ibid., 71-72. [37] Amiri Baraka, “The Revolutionary Theatre,” in Home: Social Essays , 211. [38] Neil correctly observes that The Slave “is essentially about Walker’s attempt to destroy his white past. For it is the past, with all of its painful memories, that is really the enemy of the revolutionary.” Neil, Visions of a Liberated Future , 70. [39] As Baraka comments in his Autobiography , his increasingly militant stance against whites opened a chasm between him and Hettie Jones, which forms the basis of the confrontation between Vessels and Grace in The Slave . The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka (New York: Freundlich Books, 1984), 195-96. [40] Samuel A. Hay, African American Theatre: A Historical and Critical Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 95. [41] Years later, Baraka observed that Vessels’s revolutionary goals were hindered due to his inability to shed his past. Baraka asserts that going “through the whole process of breast-beating, accusations, and lamenting meant” that Vessels still had “a relationship with his wife, with his past.” Conversations , 134. [42] See Miller, Theorizing Black Theatre , 210; Watts, Amiri Baraka , 82-83; Hay, African American Theatre , 95; and Sollors, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones , 137. [43] Baraka, Introduction to The Motion of History , 12. [44] See Watts, Amiri Baraka , 80; and Sollors, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones , 136. [45] Watts, Amiri Baraka , 83. [46] Miller, Theorizing Black Theatre , 210. [47] Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 66. [48] Huerta describes the significance of Shrunken Head since it marked the first time that “a Chicano playwright began to explore the idea of being marginalized in this country” and “became the first produced play written by a Chicano about being Chicano.” “Looking for the Magic: Chicanos in the Mainstream,” in Negotiating Performance: Gender, Sexuality, and Theatricality in Latin/o America , ed. Diana Taylor and Juan Villegas (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 38. [49] See Jorge Huerta, introduction to The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa in Necessary Theater: Six Plays about the Chicano Experience , ed. Jorge Huerta (Houston: Arte Publico, 1989), 143-44; Huerta, Chicano Theater , 53-54; and Worthen, “Staging América,” 111, 118. [50] Luis Valdez, The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa in Necessary Theater , 154. [51] Ibid., 155, 160. [52] Huerta points out that Valdez’s experimental style in Shrunken Head “set the tone for all of [his] later works, none of which can be termed realism or realistic” ( Chicano Drama , 60). Similarly, the importance of history for Valdez was closely connected to Chicano identity and this theme is present at different stages during his career. Reflecting on the role of history within the Chicano movement, Valdez explains that he and other Chicano artists during the 1960s were “forced to re-examine the facts of history, and suffuse them with [their] own blood—to make them tell [their] reality.” “La Plebe,” in introduction to Aztlán: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature , ed. Luis Valdez and Stan Steiner (New York: Knopf, 1972), xxxi. [53] Huerta, Chicano Drama , 30. [54] Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos , 2nd ed. (New York: Harper, 1981), 104. [55] Luis Valdez, Bandido! In Zoot Suit and other Plays (Houston: Arte Publico, 1992), 110. All subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. [56] Rossini discusses the negative reviews by theater critics of the 1994 staging of Bandido! in Contemporary Latina/o Theater , 89-90. [57] Broyles-González, El Teatro Campesino , 232. [58] The historical Vásquez was aware of the symbolic meaning of his actions and told at least one reporter about his intent to incite revolution in California. Before his execution, however, “Vásquez made no claim of being a revolutionary and offered no excuses for his lengthy criminal career” and “never took any steps to carry out a revolt against the Anglo majority.” John Boessenecker, Bandido: The Life and Times of Tiburcio Vásquez (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010), 372. [59] Huerta, Chicano Drama , 31. [60] Rossini, Contemporary Latina/o Theater , 92. [61] Juan J. Alonzo. Badmen, Bandits, and Folk Heroes: The Ambivalence of Mexican American Identity in Literature and Film (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009), 135-39. [62] Valdez, “La Plebe,” xxvi-xxvii. [63] The Battle of San Pasqual was a short-lived battle of the U.S.-Mexican War fought between Stephen Kearny’s troops and a group of Californio lanceros (California lancers) led by Andrés Pico. After a brief scrimmage, the battle turned into a standoff with Kearny’s brief siege of the village of San Pasqual. John S. Eisenhower, So Far from God: The U.S. War with Mexico: 1846-1848 (New York: Random House), 222-26. [64] Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York: Methuen, 1985), 29. [65] Hutcheon, Poetics , 11. [66] For discussions on Valdez’s use of melodrama in Bandido!, see Huerta, Introduction to Zoot Suit . In Zoot Suit and other Plays , 18; Worthen, “Staging América,” 113-15; Huerta, Chicano Drama , 29-30; and Rossini, Contemporary Latina/o Theater , 78-87. [67] Huerta, Chicano Drama , 30. [68] See Broyles-González, El Teatro Campesino , 137, 232; Worthen, “Staging América,” 114; and Rossini, Contemporary Latina/o Theater , 89. [69] Ramón Saldívar, Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 17. Footnotes About The Author(s) DR. JOSE FERNANDEZ is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Western Illinois University. His articles have appeared in the Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association and Interdisciplinary Literary Studies . His current research focuses on the commonalities and points of convergence among African American and Latino/a authors after the 1960s. Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Curtis Russell Editorial Assistant: Christine Snyder Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Comment Historical Subjectivity and the Revolutionary Archetype in Amiri Baraka's The Slave and Luis Valdez's Bandido! Calculated Cacophonies: The Queer Asian American Family and the Nonmusical Musical in Chay Yew's Wonderland August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle: Critical Perspectives on the Plays. Edited by Sandra G. Shannon. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016; Pp. 211. Performance, Identity, and Immigration Law: A Theatre of Undocumentedness. By Gad Guterman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014; Pp. 236. Kitchen Sink Realisms: Domestic Labor, Dining, and Drama in American Theatre. By Dorothy Chansky. Theatre History and Culture Series. Series editor Heather Nathans. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015; Pp. 620. Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: Body, Brain and Being. Edited by Nicola Shaugnessy. London: Bloomsbury, 2013; Pp. 300. Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience. Edited by Clelia Falletti, Gabriele Sofia, and Victor Iacono. Performance and Science: Interdisciplinary Dialogues Series. Series editors: John Lutterbie and Nicola Shaugnessy. London UK, New York NY: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 260. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

By Nehad Selaiha, Marvin Carlson | Nehad Selaiha chronicles the rise of the Free Theatre Movement in Egypt in the late 1980s. < 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 Selected Essays: New Directions Nehad Selaiha, Marvin Carlson Download PDF In this book, Nehad Selaiha (1945-2017), a distinguished scholar and prominent critic, chronicles the rise of the Free Theatre Movement in Egypt in the late 1980s and traces its stormy course and many battles as well as the artistic development of the young independent troupes and artists who have made it a reality against great odds. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

Bess Rowen and Benjamin Gillespie Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage Editorial Introduction Bess Rowen and Benjamin Gillespie By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF As 2024 comes to a close, we are grateful for the contributions, collaborations, and interactions we have had through this journal. Although uncertain times lie ahead, we remain committed to the importance of the exchange of new ideas, the rigor of peer review, and the indefatigable forward motion of the field of Theatre and Performance Studies. This issue’s array of articles, book reviews, and performance reviews once again provide a snapshot of the dynamic work happening all around us. We begin with Catherine Heiner’s piece, “A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play ,” which examines the gendered expectations about Black women upon which Jeremy O. Harris’s play relies. Using a post-show discussion as an entry point, Heiner’s work puts comedic discourse into conversation with discussions of race and gender to perceive Slave Play in a new light. Alisa Zhulina’s essay, “Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita : Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov,” also challenges gender norms, this time by putting adaptations of Lolita from two queer feminist playwrights into context alongside society’s rife relationship with the source material. Zhulina specifically highlights the challenges and taboo of Lolita in live performance. The following essay, “‘It’s Cumming yet for a’ that’: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century” comes from Thomas Keith, whose thoughtful meditation on Alan Cumming’s work on the dance theatre piece Burn mixes adept performance analysis with historical context. Finally, Allan Johnson’s “Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin ’s Alternate ‘Theo Ending’” brings fresh attention to the 1972 musical with a dramaturgical focus on its use of the popular device of metatheatricality together with psychology The next two entries come from a new series of interviews which will run over the next several issues of JADT called “Queer Voices.” Each involve a conversation with a contemporary queer theatre maker or writer. Our first two pieces feature Jim Wilson in conversation with renowned Tony Award-winning playwright and performer Harvey Fierstein and Bess Rowen speaking to Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright James Ijames. We end our issue with the book and performance review sections, which continue to reflect the scholarly and production offerings of the current moment. In this issue, our performance review section is serving a rather somber purpose. As many of our readers know, New England Theatre Journal has been forced to shutter after decades of close coverage of regional theatre in that area of the country. When Stuart Hecht approached the editors to ask if he could find a home for the completed performance review section–which, in NETJ , covers entire seasons of programming instead of specific performances–we were proud to oblige, despite the unfortunate circumstances. We are running that section intact with introductions and assistance from both the journal’s editor, Stuart Hecht, and the performance review section editor, Marti LoMonaco. We are also happy to report that JADT will continue to partner with the editors of NETJ to make sure that these theatres still receive coverage going forward. We hope that you enjoy JADT ’s rich offerings this issue and that readers will be inspired to submit new work. Our Spring special issue will be on the topic of Censorship, so stay tuned for that eerily timely topic. But, as Tennessee Williams would say, “ En Avant! ” This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) BESS ROWEN (PhD) is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Villanova University. She is also affiliate faculty for both Gender & Women's Studies and Irish Studies. She is a member of Actors' Equity and an intimacy choreographer. Her first book, The Lines Between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment (2021) focuses on affective stage directions. Her next book project looks at the theatrical archetype of the “mean teenage girl.” Other recent work can be found in Milestones in Staging Contemporary Genders & Sexualities , Theatre Survey , and The Eugene O'Neill Review , among other publications. She also serves as the LGBTQ+ Focus Group Representative at ATHE and as the Co-Editor of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre . BENJAMIN GILLESPIE (PhD) is Doctoral Lecturer in Communication, Gender Studies, and Theatre at Baruch College, City University of New York. His essays and reviews have been published in Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, Theatre Survey, Theatre Topics, Performance Research, Canadian Theatre Review , and a wide range of scholarly anthologies. He is currently editing two volumes: Split Britches: Fifty Years On and Late Stage: Theatrical Perspectives on Age and Aging , both to be published by the University of Michigan Press. He is Co-Editor of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre . Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Encounter Kinesis Project dance theatre's work Bridge Matter / The Reach in Manhattan, 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 Bridge Matter / The Reach Kinesis Project dance theatre Dance Friday, June 7, 2024 @ 6pm Inwood Hill Park, Gaelic Field, Manhattan Use the 218th street and Indian Road entrance of the park. We'll guide you from there. 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 Kinesis Project brings new life into Inwood Hill Park with this excerpt of Bridge Matter/The Reach, created specifically for the park and Kinesis Project's uptown community, audiences will be led along pathways, waterways and bridge views with gorgeous dancing and the live music of Grammy Award winning musician, Johnny Butler. Bridge Matter / The Reach is a second collaboration with the research of geoscientist Dr. Missy Eppes and her colleagues, studying how our shifting climate is affecting even the bedrock of our earth. Featured Image Credits: Sabrina Canas Kinesis Project dance theatre Kinesis Project dance theatre is a non-profit organization that creates site specific dance performances and facilitates educational programs. The company produces large-scale, space-changing and unexpectedly intimate dances. Kinesis Project is at the forefront of the international discussion of placemaking, art engagement with diverse communities and the cultural imperative of art in public spaces. Kinesis Project dances are inspired by Riker’s questions about the world around us. Those questions are excavated and answered through a generative, collaborative process with the dancers and designers of Kinesis Project. As the work moves into a site, Riker focuses on the expanse, scope and depth of the environment. Dances then further evolve based on the site, resulting in unique and custom performances in each space that the company enters. Aimed at democratizing contemporary dance for audiences at all ages and demographics, Kinesis Project injects movement and stillness into unusual and inspiring places, pushing the boundaries of how people see and interact with that space. As an educational and outreach organization, Kinesis Project teaches dance and creative thinking in schools, leads non-dancers in community movement making activities, and brings dance into public spaces. As a producing organization, Kinesis Project dance theatre founded Women in Motion, a platform to support female choreographers in New York City. Visit Artist Website Location Use the 218th street and Indian Road entrance of the park. We'll guide you from there. Visit Partner Website

Laurence Senelick 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 The Anti-Victorianism of Victorian Revivals Laurence Senelick By Published on November 4, 2022 Download Article as PDF A striking phenomenon of American theatre in the late 1920s is the spate of revivals of Victorian drama which continued well into the next decade. These “reconstructions” were far from antiquarian. The texts were streamlined, the acting arch and the audience reaction uproarious. Spectators of the Jazz Age chose to guffaw at the ostensible innocence of the Gilded Age. These ventures had been prepared for by newspaper cartoons and memoirs that had drenched the “Gay Nineties” in an aura of roseate nostalgia. The new versions of nineteenth-century melodrama and burlesque were, however, greeted by the mockery of a generation eager to reject the values that led to the Great War. In this light, the revivalists of a past generation’s popular entertainment partook, sometimes deliberately, sometimes unwittingly, of the anti-Victorian sentiment endemic in the postwar period. Audiences applauded their own sophistication in having left such benighted attitudes behind. While these attitudes lingered, the more sober mood that accompanied the Depression led to a more affectionate retrospect of the recent past. The Gay Nineties The Gay Nineties is exclusively an American term for the last decade of the nineteenth century, a period known in Britain as the Mauve Decade or the Naughty Nineties, in France as la belle Époque and in Germany as die Kaiserzeit. Its coinage is attributed to the illustrator Richard V. Culter (1883-1929) who so entitled the series of pictures he first published in the Ogden, Utah, Standard Examiner in April 1923, and which were continued in the humor magazine Life from 1925 to 1928. A selection was published in 1927 by Doubleday, Page, as The Gay Nineties. An Album of Reminiscent Drawings. The sub-title is revealing. Culter’s line drawings belong to the genre of “the dear, dead days beyond recall” and depict the world as seen from the perspective of an uncritical adolescent. It envisages idyllic, small-town life, uncomplicated and innocent in its pleasures. An American adult who had lived in the 1890s might have recalled a less glowing scene: a decade bookended by the floods of Johnstown and Galveston, that endured the Panic of ‘93 and the subsequent three-year economic depression; the rise of the yellow press and gutter journalism; the spread of Jim Crow laws, disenfranchisement and lynching throughout the South; the Spanish-American War and the advent of American imperialism; the reign of the trusts, child labor, brutal treatment of workers and dissidents; and various sensational trials, including that of Oscar Wilde. However, the differences effected over a mere generation had been so revolutionary that the pre-war past had taken on a romantic hue: a world dominated by the horse had become automated, radio had intruded into the home, and the European conflict had provided a sharp dividing line between what was considered bygone and what was thought to be up-to-date. The new decade was dubbed by journalists “The Roaring Twenties,” persuaded that their era was more urbane, dynamic and knowing than its forebears. Culter’s benign vision of the late Victorian period was quickly blurred by condescension. Bill’s Gay Nineties, a speakeasy with a parodic turn-of-the-century motif, opened on East 54 th Street in 1924, its walls covered with lurid pictures from the Police Gazette and similar period broadsides (the association of the 1890s with the growth of professional sports, especially baseball and boxing, became a commonplace). [1] The following year John Held, Jr. (1882-1958), famous for caricaturing the adolescents of the ‘20s as sheiks and shebas, [2] began to publish a series of linoleum cuts of the “Gay ‘90s” in the New Yorker . Unlike Culter’s rose-colored, mildly ironic interpretation, Held’s pictures with their crudeness and lurid captions were in tune with the newly-founded magazine’s vaunted sophistication. They implied that the world of our grandfathers had been absurd in its conventions, backward in its moralizing, and laughable in its notions of art and beauty. [3] These graphic mementos rapidly crystallized iconic signifiers of a period dimly if at all remembered by twenty- and thirty-year-olds: waxed handlebar moustaches and moustache cups, barber-shop quartets and singing waiters, the Gibson girl and wasp waists, sleeve garters and high-button shoes, straw boaters on men and ostrich plumes on women, sentimental piano ballads, horse-drawn vehicles and tandem bicycles, beer in pails and beefy chorines. As with the songs shoe-horned into the Hoboken revivals, specific decades became merged in a general impression of what was “Victorian.” [4] The earliest glimpse of this trend on Broadway would seem to be a sequence entitled “The Old Timers” in The Greenwich Village Follies of 1922 . A quintet, including the female impersonator Bert Savoy, parodied singing waiters and parlor ballads. The rendition of “Good-bye to Dear Old Alaska” by the writer John E. Hazzard (1881-1935), in walrus moustache and ill-fitting dress suit, was reported to be one of the hits of the evening. [5] However, full exploitation of Victoriana had to wait until Jerome Kern’s musical Show Boat (1927), based on Edna Ferber’s best-selling novel of the previous year. Its action moves from 1887 to the 1893 World’s Fair to the present, the most memorable moments taking place in the earliest period. Ferber herself had been attracted by show boating as “one of the most melodramatic and gorgeous bits of Americana” [6] that deserved to be memorialized. She concocted a pseudo-domestic melodrama The Parson’s Bride, which, in the musical, is turned into a mock play within a play. In his score for both the stage version and the 1935 film, Kern imbedded such gas-lit crowd-pleasers as “Goodbye, My Lady Love” and “After the Ball.” Yet the line in “Ol’ Man River,” “the land ain’t free” suggests an ante-bellum South. A general wash of Victorianism plays over the musical. Audiences are hard put to say, at any given moment, just when the action is taking place. The popularity of Show Boat may have inspired Mae West to capitalize on the Nineties in Diamond Lil, which opened on Broadway on 9 April 1928. West’s career was in a precarious position; her plays Sex (1926), The Drag (1927) and The Pleasure Man (1928) had been prosecuted and closed and she had even spent a brief time in jail. Respectable playgoers avoided her shows. At this juncture it may have occurred to her that moving her sinning protagonists to a dimly-recalled bygone era might provide just the quantum of distance to make them seem safely picturesque. Although Diamond Lil touches on such raw topics as white slavery and drug addiction, the class conflicts and seething confrontations that appear in her first draft were excised in the final version. Diamond Lil takes place on a Bowery refashioned to exploit modern New York’s fondness for its rough-and-ready past. Herbert Asbury’s popular history The Gangs of New York had been published in 1927, providing the creative team plenty of well-researched local color and anecdotal incident. [7] Effort was made to reproduce an authentic period barroom and a honky-tonk singer’s apartments, leading the English impresario Charles Cochran to declare “ Diamond Lil catches exactly the spirit of the Bowery as I first knew it in 1891, with its bosses, thugs, procurers and cops.” [8] The effect, reported the New York World , was the “garishness of a lurid lithograph seen under a flaring gas jet, and that is probably just the reason it was such good fun.” [9] What in its time might have been regarded as tawdry and objectionable, ripe for slum clearance, had taken on a sheen of glamor. The same mist of reminiscence that had softened the contours of the past in Culter’s vignettes now invested a crime-ridden rookery like the Bowery with an aura of innocent festivity. Few of the audience members would have been familiar with its gritty reality. The New York World report continued. For those of us few remaining New Yorkers who have a sentimental if somewhat hazy recollection of the Bowery, Diamond Lil contains a wealth of entertainment in the lusty and lewd enthusiasm with which it paints the under world of the ‘90s. Somebody with a genuine sense of that atmosphere has created those Bowery scenes of ten cent revelry with an authority just as honest as the Moscow Art Theater’s studies of Chekhov, and much nearer home.[10] There is a peculiar contradiction lurking in this statement. The reporter, while admitting his memory is faulty and roseate, nevertheless claims for Diamond Lil ’s ambience the psychological and scenic naturalism of Stanislavsky (he and the Art Theatre had visited New York in 1923). What the writer purports to remember as lived experience is informed by a sedulous but fictional reconstruction. As Marybeth Hamilton has put it in her study of West, in Diamond Lil the truth of this past had been “mediated by old-time popular entertainments, formed by melodramas, stories and song.” [11] (She might also mention the pictorial precursors). At this time books on popular ballads of the period by the musicologist Sigmund Spaeth were widely available, [12] so “The Bowery” from the Gilded Era musical comedy A Trip to Chinatown (1891) and the tearjerker “She Was Poor But She Was Honest” were sung from the stage of Diamond Lil. West had tapped into the brisk current of nostalgia, allowing her to draw her audiences from a diversity of classes and tastes. Diamond Lil raised her from a provocative pariah into a Broadway star and was the only one of her plays to be filmed. A Hoboken Idyll Show Boat and Diamond Lil were contemporary fictions that exploited the Victorian ambience. The first influential revival of an actual Victorian play took place in what might be deemed off-off-off-off Broadway. In the mid-1920s a quartet of men-about-Manhattan who styled themselves the Three-Hours-for-Lunch Club discovered Hoboken. They found that a short ferry ride to the New Jersey shore could bring them to a neighborhood rich in fine riverine views, hearty German cuisine and a potent beer neglectful of the Eighteenth Amendment. They dubbed the region, with a nod to Shakespeare’s faulty geography in The Winter’s Tale , “the last Seacoast of Bohemia.” [13] New York City in this period, with fourteen daily newspapers in English alone and seventy legitimate playhouses, could well support a flourishing subculture of talented bohemians. Of the well-connected members of the Lunch Club, Cleon Throckmorton (1897-1965) was the most closely associated with progressive dramatic movements; as a designer for the Provincetown Playhouse, he was celebrated for his scenery for plays on African-America themes: The Emperor Jones (1920), All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1922) and Porgy (1923). The Club’s founder, Christopher Morley (1890-1957), bibliophile, novelist and gourmand, was a columnist for The New York Evening Post and editor of The Saturday Review of Literature. British-born Harry Wagstaff Gribble (1896-1981 had been, from 1918, one of Broadway’s most-employed playwrights and directors, with a specialty in revue. The least of these was Conrad Milliken (dates unknown), a theatrical lawyer and dabbler in poetry. On one of their gastronomic jaunts to Hoboken Throckmorton ventured on to Hudson Street and came upon the old Rialto Theatre (pronounced Rye-alto by the locals), its nineteenth-century interior shrouded in dust. The four men, who had a soft spot for Victoriana, leased and restored, without renovating, the 750-seat playhouse. They decided to revive popular commercial plays that had recently closed on Broadway, without regard to expense, featuring a semi-professional stock company in one-week runs. In their publicity they played up the ease of reaching Hoboken, the lack of traffic, the plenitude of parking. [14] Their first venture was Kenyon Nicholson’s play of circus life, The Barker, which had ended its Broadway run in June 1927. It reopened in Hoboken on Labor Day, 3 September 1928, to a local audience and failed to make expenses. The enterprise was chiefly social, the performance followed by beer and pretzels, recitations of such parlor favorites as “The Face on the Barroom Floor” and “Dress Me Up Fair for the Ball, Marie.” After a succession of seven more lightweight plays, [15] increased word of mouth and ingenious newspaper advertising allowed the amateur impresarios to expand to two-week runs of Morley’s new satire on the League of Nations Pleased to Meet You, George Abbott’s recent comedy-melodrama Broadway and a sentimental chestnut of 1903 appropriate to the locale, Old Heidelberg, about the romance between a German prince and a beerhall waitress . An ambitious forty-week season was planned. The New Stagecraft had been prominent for a decade, promoting innovations in playwriting, design and directing. Names such as Stanislavsky, Chekhov, Craig, Appia and Copeau were bandied about by would-be theatrical progressives. News of the Provincetown Playhouse, the Washington Square Players, and the Neighborhood Playhouse filled the drama columns of newspapers and magazines. Although Throckmorton was associated with these movements, the Lunch Club regarded its Hoboken venture to be a counterblast to pretentious would-be reformers. It protested that it was preserving the American tradition of the ballyhoo producer, the Barnums and Belascos. In a contrarian mood, Morley proclaimed their enterprise to be “not a ‘little’ theatre, nor an ‘arty’ theatre nor an ‘amateur’ theatre in a cellar or a stable or a wharf or an attic,” for the Rialto was “a house redolent of the showman atmosphere.” [16] Almost unique among ‘groups of serious thinkers,’ our escapade had about it no flavor of Little Theatre or Drama League, no intention of uplift, or either shocking or improving Public Taste. Our subconscious notion was that the theatre had been improved entirely too much; that its essential ingredient of harmless fun had almost been forgotten.”[17] Even the watered-down symbolism of the French playwright Henri Lenormand, regularly produced by the Theatre Guild, was considered too highbrow for their repertoire. Having reveled in “crook plays” and light comedy, they were about to discover melodrama. After Dark One series of John Held’s linoleum cuts, called “When the Theatre Was Fraught with Romance,” offered cartoon versions of turn-of-the-century hits: Sapho, Ben Hur, The Heart of Maryland, Florodora and various vaudeville acts. The Hoboken team went even farther back in its exhumation of bygone drama. Throckmorton claimed that he had run across a lithograph of Dion Boucicault’s After Dark a Play of London Life (1868) in a second-hand bookstall and thought it might be an appropriate offering for the Rialto. (He had already revived Anna Cora Mowatt’s comedy Fashion [1845] for the Provincetown Players in 1925. [18] ) A sensation drama in which the hero is tied to the tracks and saved by a plucky girl from an oncoming locomotive, After Dark was already implanted in the recesses of the popular imagination. Finding a script was not easy; the only one available was a hand-written text in the New York Public Library which provided a photostatic copy. The fourth act was missing and had to be cobbled together from part-scripts. Morley tacked on a new subtitle, Neither Wife, Maid nor Widow, added jokes and changed English references to American ones. [19] (This last emendation would have been supererogatory if they had chosen Augustin Daly’s Under the Gaslight , which had served as Boucicault’s model, for it is set in New York.) [20] Nearly a dozen period songs were inserted, from the cloying ballad “Gentle Annie” and the uproarious “McSorley’s Twins” to a blackface minstrel troupe rendering “Stand Back, I Am Here,” as the audience joined in the chorus. The intention was to have After Dark run three weeks to be followed by Morley’s dramatization of his novel Where the Blue Begins . Morley later claimed that the Boucicault play had been meant as a Christmas gift to the long-standing working-class habitués of the Rialto. Tickets were distributed to factory workers and telephone operators and Morley praised the locals’ balanced response. At first, “the house, subconsciously perceiving the delicacy of the equilibrium, thrilled with laughter that had its overtones of fine appreciation, and even a sort of tender wistfulness for the old Currier and Ives era the play symbolized.” He always denied mounting the play tongue-in-cheek or encouraging the audience to mock the performance, although he had to admit that “Hissing the villain, and marking time to the songs with hands and feet, grew up spontaneously from the very first performance.” Throckmorton the director had told the actors, “Whatever you think about it, play it straight. Anyone trying to kid his part with get a notice at once.” [21] The reviewers duly noted the conscientiousness of the staging and the earnestness of the players. [22] The managers of the Hoboken Theatre Company were well aware that they were not inventing a fad but cleverly exploiting it. Morley even remarked in print that The Rialto has “the Bowery atmosphere of Diamond Lil .” [23] Even so, the entrepreneurs were surprised to find they had a hit on their hands. The smart set from Manhattan began to throng the Twenty-third Street ferry-boats, mail orders for tickets reached 2,500 a day, and calls for reservations were so demanding that six telephones had to be installed. Soon the problem arose of restraining audience exuberance which grew so unbridled it kept stopping the show. Any fat patron coming down the aisle was greeted with cheers. [24] The sensational railway scene provoked hilarity and calls for the locomotive to tip over. Tossing small change on stage had to be warned against by the character Old Tom lest actors be harmed, and to still the ever-increasing tumult, the program carried a printed slip calling on the spectators “to draw the line between appreciative merriment and mere noisy interruption.” [25] Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times attributed the runaway success to the festive nature of the evening and the absence of the usual taboos of theatre-going. Unwittingly, he suggested, the audience was echoing Morley’s dismissal of high-minded drama by revelling in the grandiloquent claptrap. Broadway, choked with “gutter plays” and eternal complaints of the theatre’s decadence, was being bested by the “good, clean fun” of the quartet’s initiative. [26] Historically, only the attendees of court or religious theatre had been constrained by decorum and protocol; public theatres had traditionally been sites of immediate and vociferous response. After Dark, in Atkinson’s opinion, was returning the dramatic event to its origins. Unswayed by such an objective analysis, the Hoboken Chamber of Commerce protested against “the unselfconscious conduct” of the “Park Avenue carriage trade audiences…rowdyism and the cheap buffoonery and crude witticisms of self-constituted wags…creating a source of annoyance to the serious and well-intentioned theatregoer…’hooligans’ in search of liquor and ‘whoopee’” which spilled on to the sidewalks and carriage-ways. [27] Considering that Hoboken had traditionally been the playground of sailors on leave and the working class on weekends, the bacchanalian excesses of the Rialto’s moneyed public must have been uninhibited indeed to call forth such objections. The element of class conflict can also be read in this complaint: the resentment of New Jerseyites against the chronic denigration of their state by New Yorkers. Morley responded that the experiment was so new that its effects had taken the founders themselves by surprise. He too deplored the invasion of touring “sophisticates” and the “prematurely knowing.” He later declared that once Manhattanites had made a fad of the revivals he ceased to take pleasure in them; the society crowd “could not appreciate the depth, the delicate charm and the sincerity of this old Victorian drama.” Their life is “so unhappy, so empty, so fatuous, that when they come to something homely and fine, they feel a compulsion to prove it something else.” Fortunately, he noted, three months in they lost interest, and for the rest of the run “we haven’t seen a real smart person in the house.” [28] Despite the aldermen’s complaints, the unlooked-for commercial success led to the quartet being solicited by Jersey City businessmen to set up shop there. Morley bought a foundry around the corner from the Rialto as the impresarios’ headquarters and issued passports to the Free State of Hoboken. He announced that in partnership with millionaire entrepreneur Otto Kahn he had plans to build an apartment house for artists and writers on the banks of the Hudson. [29] Relenting, in September 1929 the city fathers embedded a plaque in front of the Rialto commemorating the 335 th performance of After Dark . [30] Another unexpected development was a brief recrudescence of the prolific Irish playwright Dion Boucicault and the genre of melodrama. The actor Clarence Derwent staged two Sunday-night performances of The Octoroon (1859) with an interpolated scene from London Assurance (1841) to benefit the Eleonora Duse Fellowship. Publicity stated that it would be performed “in the manner of one given at the Old Winter Garden in 1859.” [31] Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, particularly in the theatre, Augustin Daly’s prototype for After Dark , Under the Gaslight (1867), opened at Fay’s Bowery Theatre in Chinatown in May; reporters on opening night noted the sharp contrast between “gaping hobos and bread-lines’ and “Rolls Royces, Hispano-Suizas and Isotta-Franschinis.” [32] Once again audiences flocked intending to split their sides when the cardboard train shot out of the wings. The admonitions to restraint from the stage were word-for-word the same as those at the Rialto. However, in contrast to Hoboken, the actors were prone to overdo the histrionics and the house’s high spirits seemed less than spontaneous. [33] A conventional response to Victorian melodrama was beginning to coalesce. Under the Gaslight ran only three weeks before the theatre burned down on June 5. The managers of the Rialto were faced with the quandary of what to put on if and when After Dark ever ended its run. They considered pursuing the Victorian line with a musical comedy like The Belle of New York (1897) or innovating with an adaptation of Anatole France’s satirical novel The Revolt of the Angels (1914) or bucking the trend with The Age of Consent, a new play about adolescent sex. [34] Regrettably, Morley admitted, the public identified the Rialto so closely with melodrama that other genres were foreclosed, so Boucicault’s The Streets of New York (1858) and Joseph Arthur’s Blue Jeans (1890, the one with the hero menaced by a buzz-saw), moved to the top of the list. [35] The Black Crook Meanwhile, the empire-building quartet took a lease on the larger, forty-three-year-old Lyric Theatre down the block from the Rialto, featuring The Black Crook as the attraction, although at first it was merely a name to the managers. In histories of American show business The Black Crook is invariably if erroneously cited as the first true musical comedy and, more accurately, as the progenitor of the “leg show.” [36] A jerry-built extravaganza of 1866, The Black Crook grafted troops of chorines in stockinette onto a creaky Faustian framework, added hummable music, and somehow created a long-lived, much revived blockbuster with a reputation for raciness. Morley drastically reduced the chorus and the libretto, inserted such anachronistic favorites as “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay,” and built up the special effects of a thunder machine and a great incantation scene. In his words, “this innocent old outrage, as quaint as a lacy Valentine, considered obscene in the 60’s and 70’s, is now a perfect bliss for children.” [37] The first night, 11 March 1929, played to standing room from 9 p.m. to 1:30 a.m., but the difficulty of getting home from Hoboken in the wee hours failed to discourage another storming of the box office. For all Morley’s disclaimers about the insensitivity of Manhattan playgoers, The Black Crook seems to have been tailored to their tastes and elicited the same vociferous response. As in an English Christmas pantomime, the playgoers shouted “Watch out” when the villain closed in on the hero. Isadora Duncan-style dancers, a classical ballet and a dog act were imported, while Morley placed Rabelaisian advertisements weekly to lure the suckers in. The reviewers complained that the actors were now lampooning the show. It was not “the ‘Black Crook’ revived or reproduced, or whatever you choose to call it, but a burlesque of the old ‘Black Crook’ with a lot of modern trimmings.” [38] The question arose, Is it worth the effort? The Hoboken enterprise was now such a notorious phenomenon that The Black Crook was immortalized by an Al Hirschfeld cartoon in the New York Herald Tribune for 3 March 1929 and in lithographs by Eugene Fitsch (1892-1972), an Alsatian-born instructor at the Art Students League. By June 200,000 spectators had seen the two revivals, and Morley was announcing an ambitious new season for the sister theatres, alternating drama, comedy and music, old and new. [39] Melodramas under consideration were English, Sims’ and Pettitt’s Harbor Lights (1888) and Wilkie Collins’s No Name (1879). A tour to Detroit and Chicago was contemplated once After Dark closed in Hoboken, and a similar road show to Boston was in store for The Black Crook . An intimate offering The Shoestring Revue was also in the works. [40] While The Black Crook was still running, however, progress on the ambitious projections of the Hoboken Theatrical Company hit a speed bump. The lawyer Milliken withdrew from the partnership and sued his erstwhile colleagues over royalties for After Dark, leading to appeals and protracted litigation. [41] When the 1929/30 season began, Morley and Throckmorton followed Crook with a less ingenuous piece of exploitation. A famous shipwreck of the Star of Bengal in 1908 had been made the centerpiece of a faked autobiography and a best-selling novel by the actress Joan Lowell (1902-1967) who falsely claimed to be the captain’s daughter and the only woman amid an all-male crew. Her husband (for two years) Thompson Buchanan (1877-1937) turned this farrago of mendacity into a dramatic vehicle for her. Although the reviewer for Morley’s alma mater Haverford reported an enthusiastic opening night audience and predicted success for his production of Star of Bengal , the professional press found it unfunny and an inappropriate successor to the Hoboken follies. Ironically, Variety labelled it “too old-fashioned” even to be picked up by the movies. [42] In interviews Morley then played up the Rialto’s new offering, a Civil War melodrama The Blue and the Gray, or War is Hell , [43] but audiences stayed away in droves. The critics thought it provided the same pleasures as its precursors but the public had been soured by The Shoestring Revue and Star of Bengal. Ultimately, the iceberg on which all these productions foundered was the same that proved fatal for society at large: the stock market crash of 29 October 1929. By February 1930 the Hoboken Theatre Company had to declare bankruptcy. Despite the munificent box-office receipts of the past year, lavish spending, the Rialto’s mortgage and the treasurer’s mismanagement all contributed to the failure. [44] The theatre was rented to one Patsy de Mensa, who staged Italian plays and musicals there until he bought the building outright in 1943. [45] Against the Victorian Grain Examined more closely, the popularity of these retrievals of Victorian artefacts has to be attributed to something more pungent than nostalgia, especially, as we have seen, the audiences for the most part were not retrospecting to a past they had experienced. Rather, the responses are ripples off the wave of anti-Victorianism that swept in as that period ebbed and that crested with the disillusionment of the Great War. The attack on Victorian values, part of a lack of confidence in society’s professed ideals in general, was spearheaded by social scientists. As a result of the cultural relativism preached by the Columbia school of anthropology, that bulwark of Victorian morality, the nuclear family, was seen to be crippling to the individual and subversive to progress. These academic ideas were disseminated in Middletown by Robert and Helen Lynd (1929), which revealed the heartland to be a hotbed of bad marriages, divorce and insufficient incomes; the book’s statistics bolstered the devastating fictions of Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson. The literary historian Van Wyck Brooks, in The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920), cited the novelist as a victim of Victorian values, whose genius had been stunted by an antipathetic cultural environment. [46] Ideas developed in Europe bolstered this attitude. Overthrowing the Victorian establishment was a deliberate goal of the Bloomsbury coterie. Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918) served as an abattoir to butcher the most sacred cows of the British Empire, and he followed it with an irreverent biography of Victoria herself. His insistence that her society’s evangelical bent had led directly to the Great War stoked hostility towards the previous generation. Sigmund Freud read Strachey’s book to be a direct Oedipal attack on religion. [47] The impact of Darwin on the Victorians was replicated by that of Freud on their grandchildren, with the difference that Darwin had been resisted and Freud was enthusiastically welcomed. Touted by popular journalism, the Viennese doctor became a cultural totem worshipped even by those who never read a word he wrote: his ideas made it fashionable to discuss sex out in the open and to label the hypocritical virtues of the previous century as inhibitions and repressions. [48] In this respect, Brooks Atkinson’s analysis of the exuberant participation in the melodrama revivals was on target: audiences were throwing off the traces, turning the aisles of the playhouse into the kind of “wild party” normally fueled by bootleg liquor. They were proclaiming “ nous avons changés tout cela, ” making a declaration of independence from the black-and-white moralizing and Protestant ethics played out in the melodramas. Morley’s innocent merriment spilled off the stage to become the Saturnalia of the Roman games. The Wall Street crash did not immediately shock the American theatre-going public into a new sobriety or a fresh evaluation of the Victorians. A surprise hit of London’s West End in 1927 had been Marigold , a sentimental comedy by L. Allen Barker and F. R. Pryor, set in the Scotland of 1842. The philosophic critic Charles Morgan dismissed it as merely a pleasant way to spend an evening, “a welcome epilogue to a good dinner.” [49] Nevertheless, it ran for a year and a half in London and was seen by over 500,000 people, attracted as much by the quaintness of the crinolines as by its mawkish plot. New York audiences would have none of it. When Marigold was transferred to Broadway in 1930 it folded after thirteen performances. It would seem that the sentimentality of their great-grandfathers was still anathema to cynical New York playgoers. However, as the Depression settled in for a long stay, Americans slowly revised their opinion of their bewhiskered ancestors. The eminent Victorians whom Lytton Strachey had skewered were now apotheosized in biographical dramas. The Lady with the Lamp (about Florence Nightingale) and The Barretts of Wimpole Street (about the Brownings; both English, both 1931) were hugely successful in the same season that Marigold flopped. [50] Just as the New Deal was being legislated into existence and crowds were singing “Happy Days Are Here Again,” Laurence Housman’s Victoria Regina (1935) made a star of Helen Hayes. Even Eugene O’Neill surprised the critics in 1933 with Ah,Wilderness!, a paean to the kind of small-town life the Lynds had excoriated but Culter’s pictures had idealized. Viewed from the depths of an economic disaster, the alleged simplicity of that horse-drawn, gas-lit world held great appeal. It should be noted, however, that these were modern dramas, written and performed in a style acceptable to contemporary playgoers. The demise of the Hoboken venture did not spell the end of burlesque revivals of Victorian melodrama entirely. Lawrence Langer (1890-1962), one of the founders of the Theatre Guild, opened his New York Repertory Company at the Country Westport Playhouse on 19 June 1931 with Boucicault’s Streets of New York , and moved it to the Forty-Eighth Street Theatre in October. The audiences, conditioned by its precursors, indulged in unbridled hilarity at the musty stagecraft and outworn conventions, but the press also noted how Boucicault’s thrusts at bankers and devalued stocks hit home. [51] Nor had Morley stabled his own hobby-horse. In November 1935, the Theatre of Four Seasons, a playhouse for wealthy suburbanites in Glen Cove, Long Island, was inaugurated with his adaptation of Edward Stirling’s The Rag-picker of Paris (1848) , a bowdlerization of Félix Pyat’s sensational Le Chiffonier de Paris . Morley’s “new revised and re-edited” version abridged the play even more drastically, gave it a subtitle The Modest Modiste and studded it with stale puns and anachronistic references, winking at the jaded playgoer he had once scolded. [52] Pyat’s original had been saturated with democratic outrage and attacks on capitalism; Morley’s adaptation was, however, a high society event, the well-heeled guests at the farthest remove from both les misérables of Paris and the proletariat of Hoboken. [53] However, the most enduring specimen of the mock-the-melodrama genre occurred during the depths of the Depression and a continent away from Broadway and the Jersey shore. With the repeal of Prohibition, a couple of actors who had been playing stock in New York and Pennsylvania, Preston Shobe (1897-1978) and Galt Bell (1900-1949), moved to the West Coast (Bell was a native Californian). They came up with the idea of staging the 1843 temperance drama The Drunkard or The Fallen Saved by W. H. Smith, seating the audience at tables where they could drink beer and eat from a buffet while hissing, cheering and joining in the chorus. [54] Hoboken’s Rialto and Lyric theatres had been traditional proscenium playhouses, but this effort was to be located in an actual beer-garden. After tryouts in Carmel and Santa Barbara, Shobe and Bell opened The Drunkard , at the Theatre Mart in Los Angeles on 6 July 1933. Plans for a future repertoire, including a socialistic Uncle Tom’s Cabin, never came to pass, because it sold out for weeks in advance. Perhaps the Hollywood crowd, many of whom had benefitted from the coming of sound to turn their backs on live theatre for work in the studios, enjoyed denigrating something they saw as passé . Whatever the case, The Drunkard became a must-see for celebrities: Boris Karloff suggested an ever-changing olio of songs between the acts and W. C. Fields made it a centerpiece of his movie The Old-Fashioned Way (1934) . Even the Federal Theatre Project jumped on the bandwagon, trucking its own variants around the country. Referring to another revival of The Drunkard at the American Music Hall on 55 th Street in New York, the reviewer John Mason Brown pinpointed the attraction: “Of course making fun of antique melodramas is no longer the sport it once was. But for those who like to hear the songs of a bygone era and enjoy the irony of drinking beer in comfort at the same time they are laughing at a ridiculous sermon on the subject of a drunkard’s degradation and redemption,” it makes for a pleasant evening. [55] It constituted an exorcism of Prohibition. The Los Angeles Drunkard ran for decades, serving as the American version of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap (1954), and closed only when the Fire Department insisted on a reduction in the size of the audience. No longer financially viable, The Drunkard closed on 17 October 1959, with a record of 9,477 performances. [56] On its twenty-first anniversary in 1953, the press had noted that it had beaten the record of the Broadway run of Life with Father . [57] Life with Father had begun as a series of comic reminiscences by cartoonist Clarence Day Jr (1874-1935) of his stock-broker father in the 1880s. The first piece appeared in The New Yorker in January 1933, and two years later a collection of the essays was issued. After Day’s untimely death, the musical-comedy librettists Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse wrought them in a play which opened at the Empire Theatre on 8 November 1939. The entertainment confected out of the magazine essays was a tintype of an upper middle-class New York family during the presidency of Grover Cleveland. The paterfamilias is a Republican financier of conservative, not to say retrograde, values. Although the comedy is gently subversive of its hero’s old-fashioned views, it allowed audiences to bask in the glow of prosperous domesticity while feeling superior to the autocrat of the breakfast-table. Eleven road companies brought it to two hundred and fourteen cities across the continent. Life in Father had, by its closing on 15 June 1947, chalked up 3,224 performances on Broadway alone. Once the record run had ended, it was made into a Technicolor film with William Powell in the lead. Although Life with the Father had not begun as a play, the values it enshrined were similar to those expressed in other contemporary dramatic recreations of the Victorian era. As an authority figure, Day senior and the mores of his well-upholstered milieu are subjected to ridicule tempered with affectionate forbearance. Explaining the work’s inclusion in a Best Plays anthology, the critic John Gassner wrote, “For all the pudder raised by dour anti-‘escapists,’ the remembrance of things past remains justifiable human indulgence, and I have often felt, as who has not, that what matters in escape is less what we escape from than what we escape into.” [58] When Life with Father opened, Pulitzer Prizes for 1938 and 1939 had been awarded to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, a paean to the everyday as lived in obscure villages, and Robert E. Sherwood’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1939), a tribute to frontier integrity. Coming out of the Depression and on the eve of a worldwide conflagration, American audiences seemed to be seeking in their none-too-distant past for positive values, moral and inspirational. These prize-winning dramas partook of and benefitted from the same psychological climate that produced the successful revivals and nostalgia plays dismissed or overlooked by critics. The long runs and commercial success of The Drunkard and Life with Father suggest that, on the US stage, anti-Victorian mockery and Victorian nostalgia had found a modus vivendi for co-existence. References [1] Bill’s Gay 90s stayed in operation until 2012. “Bill’s Gay Nineties – The History” . Bill’s New York City. Archived from the original on March 30, 2012. [2] Held’s cartoons, appearing as magazine covers, posters and advertising, were considered to be the graphic equivalent of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fiction, defining a jazz-crazed generation of flappers and ‘varsity Romeos. [3] Held’s drawings were collected in 1931 (New York: Ives Washburn) and reprinted by Dover Books in 1972 as The Wages of Sin and Other Victorian Joys & Sorrows [4] A frequent example of this is the use of Offenbach’s galop infernale from Orphée aux enfers of 1858 to score cancans supposed to characterize the Gay Nineties. The practice is endemic in movies. [5] W. J. D., “Several Sparkling Song Gems Are Born with the Latest Edition of Greenwich Village Follies,” The Music Trades 44, 1 (1 July 1922): 42. [6] Edna Ferber, A Peculiar Treasure (NY: Doubleday, 1938). The chapter on Show Boat appears on 217-304. [7] It is also the foundational source for Martin Scorsese’s film of the same name. One historian’s complaint that Scorsese conflated three decades into one could be made of most show-business evocations of “the Victorian age.” Vincent DiGirolamo, “Such, Such Were the B’hoys,” Radical History Review 2004 (90): 123-41. [8] Quoted in advertisement for Diamond Lil in Variety (22 Aug. 1928): 71; in Marybeth Hamilton, When I’m Bad, I’m Better. Mae West, Sex, and American Entertainment (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 107. [9] New York World (10 April 1928): 18, quoted in Hamilton, When I’m Bad , 110. [10] Ibid. [11] Hamilton, When I’m Bad, 117. [12] Barber Shop Ballads and How to Sing Them (1925); Read ‘Em and Weep and Weep Some More, My Lady (both 1927); and “Gentlemen, Be Seated!” (on blackface minstrelsy, 1928). [13] The chief accounts are Christopher Morley, The Seacoast of Bohemia (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1929) and Born in a Beer Garden or, She Troupes to Conquer. Sundry Ejaculations by Christopher Morley, Cleon Throckmorton and Ogden Nash and Certain of the Hoboken Ads with a Commentary on Them by Earnest Elmo Calkins (New York: Foundry Press, 1930). Also see J. Brooks Atkinson, “Hilarities,” New York Times (11 Nov. 1928): 135; and “The Theatre in Hoboken,” TIME (25 May 1929). [14] “Christopher Morley Revives the Hoboken Theatre,” Scarsdale Inquirer 9,46 (5 Oct. 1928): 1. [15] What Anne Brought Home, The Spider (both 1927), The Squall (1926), The Last of Mrs Cheney , The Poor Nut (both 1925), Bulldog Drummond (1921) and The Octopus (1928). Two are comedies; the rest are thrillers or “crook” plays. [16] Morley, Seacoast of Bohemia, 9. Christopher Morley’s papers are deposited at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin. [17] Morley, Seacoast of Bohemia , 20. Even their advertising pamphlet contained the disclaimer: “This is not a highbrow theatre, nor an arty theatre, nor a clinic for the exploration of the obscure woes of the nervous system.” [18] Kenneth McGovern, “Developing a Repertory Theatre,” Art & Decoration 23 (May 1925): 47, 80. [19] Cleon Throckmorton, “Putting the O.K. in Hoboken” and Morley, “She Troupes to Conquer,” both in Born in a Beer Garden , 62, 34-36 [20] The litigation over whether Boucicault had plagiarized Daly’s Under the Gaslight lasted for thirteen years. See Edward S. Rogers, “The Law of Dramatic Copyright II,” Michigan Law Review 1, 3 (Dec. 1902): 185-89. After Dark was never copyrighted, but William A. Brady, who had purchased the performance rights from Boucicault, tried unsuccessfully to enjoin the Rialto directors from producing it. “W. A. Brady Warns ‘After Dark’ Producer,” New York Times (5 Dec. 1928): 18. [21] Morley, “She Troupes to Conquer,” 37, 39. [22] “’After Dark’ revived,” New York Times (11 Dec. 1928): 40. [23] Morley, The Seacoast of Bohemia , 9 . [24] Compare the cry “Norm!” in the television sitcom Cheers . [25] “After Dark’ revived.” [26] J. Brooks Atkinson, “In the Free State of Hoboken,” New York Times (10 Feb. 1929): 113. [27] “Hoboken Criticizes Morley Audiences,” New York Times (12 April 1929): 22. [28] In a speech to a packed audience at Columbia University. “Morley Glad to Be Rid of New York Patrons, ‘Too Stupid’ to Appreciate Hoboken Revivals,” New York Times (23 July 1929): 21. [29] “The Theatre: in Hoboken.” [30] “Morley Buys Foundry to Aid Hoboken Drama,” New York Times (24 Mar. 1929): 20; “Tablet for Boucicault,” New York Times (3 Sept. 1929), 34. [31] “The Octoroon Revival,” New York Times (4 Mar. 1929): 24; “The Octoroon’ at 70 is still affective [sic]” New York Times (13 Mar 1929): 37. The Octoroon enjoyed a full month’s revival by the Phoenix Theatre in 1961, and then a radical rethinking by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins as An Octoroon in 2016. [32] “Boucicault Redivivus,” New York Times (24 Mar. 1929): 133. [33] J. Brooks Atkinson, “Bowery Melodrama,” New York Times (3 April 1929): 36. [34] “Morley to resume acting. Will appear as Old Tom in ‘After Dark’ in Hoboken” New York Times (1 July 1929): 36; “War Play for Hoboken,” New York Times (29 July 1929): 36. [35] Morley, “She Stoops,” 42-43. After Dark finally closed in November 1929, nearly a year after it had opened. Morley played old Tom in the last three performances. “’After Dark’ to close,” New York Times (27 Nov. 1929): 34. [36] The legend began with its author C. M. Barras, The Black Crook. A Most Wonderful History (Philadelphia: Barclay, 1866). The historian of light opera Kurt Gänzl has devoted many of his Kurt of Gerolstein blogs to correcting the record; e.g., 4 Oct. 2016, 8 Oct. 2016, 17 June 2018, 18 June 2018, 20 June 2018. [37] Morley, “She Stoops.” 48. Also see Ogden Nash, “Up and Down the Amazons or, The Black Crook from Behind; a Travelogue” and Earnest Elmo Calkins, “Mr. Morley Writes His Own” in Born in a Beer Garden . [38] “’Black Crook’ Revived with Lovely Chorus,” New York Times (19 Mar. 1929): 33; “The Theatre: in Hoboken.” [39] “News and Gossip of the Times Square Sector,” New York Times (30 June 1929): XI. [40] “’Black Crook’ to Close,” New York Times (30 May 1929): 26; “’Black Crook’ Reopens in Hoboken,” New York Times (10 Sept. 1929), 38; “’Shoestring Revue’ in Rehearsal,” New York Times (3 Nov. 1929): 11. [41] “Hoboken Producers Face Royalty Suit,” New York Times (26 June 1929): 33; “Gribble v. Hoboken Theatrical Co.,” Court of Chancery 17 December 1929. [42] “Morley’s ‘Star of Bengal’ Scores Success in Opening,” Haverford News (30 Sept. 1929): 1; Variety (Oct. 2, 1929): 2; “Theatre: New Play in Hoboken,” TIME (7 Oct. 1929); Oakland Tribune (11 Oct. 1929): C3. [43] “Civil War in Hoboken,” New York Times (5 Jan. 1930): X2. Although Morley claimed it was written by an anonymous war veteran and offered a prize to anyone who could identify the author, it is likely that he devised it to fit the theatre’s needs. There is no independent record of such a play. [44] “Morley’s Theatre in Bankruptcy Plea,” New York Times (4 Feb. 1930): 22; J. Brooks Atkinson, “Hoboken Blues,” New York Times (9 Feb. 1930): X1. [45] “Hoboken Theatre Sold. Scene of Morley’s Plays,” New York Times (7 Dec. 1943): 1. The Lyric was sold in 1931 and demolished in 1959. [46] Stanley Cohen, “The Assault on Victorianism in the Twentieth Century,” American Quarterly 27, 5 (Dec. 1975): 604-25. He later expanded this as Rebellion Against Victorianism: The Impetus for Cultural Change in 1920s America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). [47] Todd Avery, “’The Historian of the Future’: Lytton Strachey and Modernist Historiography Between the Two Cultures,” English Literary History 4 (Winter 2010): 841-66. [48] F. H. Matthews, “The Americanization of Sigmund Freud. Adaptations of Psychoanalysis Before 1917,” Journal of American Studies 1, 1 (Apr. 1967): 39-62; Ernest W. Burgess, “The Influence of Sigmund Freud upon Sociology in the U.S.,” American Journal of Sociology 70 (Nov. 1939): 356-75. [48] In 1917 the columnist Heywood Broun had speculated on what Little Eva’s death scene in Uncle Tom’s Cabin would be like if Stowe’s characters had read Havelock Ellis and tried to interpret the child’s dream of angels by means of Freud. “What Mrs. H. B. Stowe Ought to Have Known,” New York Tribune (18 Feb. 1017): 40. [49] Charles Morgan, “The English Stage – ‘Marigold’ and Seymour Hicks,” New York Times (29 May 1927): X1. Also see Duncan Monks, “’The Return of the Crinoline’ in the Age of Anti-Victorianism, c.1918-39,” Academia . Marigold became the first play to be televised in the UK. [50] The Lady with the Lamp , about Florence Nightingale, was an English import which had opened in London in 1929, starring Edith Evans. [51] “Meet Mr. Boucicault,” New York Times (4 Oct. 1931): 110; “Laugh Gales Greet Revival of Old Play,” Women’s Wear Daily (7 Oct. 1931): I, 17. A musical version of The Streets of New York by Charlotte Moore opened off-Broadway in late 2021. [52] “Society Sees New Playhouse Opened,” New York Times (12 Nov. 1935), 23. Morley published the text (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1937). [53] In 1937 Throckmorton resuscitated his revival of Fashion ; and a year later, the WPA presented Clyde Fitch’s Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines (1901) which ran only a fortnight in New York. [54] “Galt Bell, 49, revived ‘Drunkard’ on Coast.” New York Times (7 July 1949): 25. Ten Nights in a Barroom had been revived at the John Golden Theatre in New York in 1932 but held the boards for only 37 performances. [55] John Mason Brown, “The Drunkard,” quoted in John W. Frick, Theatre, Culture and Temperance Reform in Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 195-96. [56] “Theatre’s Seven-Year-Old Drunkard,” TIME (17 July 1939); “’The Drunkard’, L.A.’s Favorite Melodrama,” Los Angeles Daily Mirror (21 June 1947); “’The Drunkard,’ Final Curtain Falls After Historic 26-year Run,” Victoria (Texas) Advocate ( 19 Oct. 1959): 1; Larry Harnisch, “The Drunkard,” Los Angeles Daily Mirror (14 July 2008). [57] “’The Drunkard,’ 21 Years in Los Angeles, Still Off Wagon After 7,451 Performances,” New York Times (7 July 1953): 23. [58] John Gassner, “Introduction,” Best Plays of the Modern American Theatre Second Series , ed. John Gassner (New York: Crown Publishers, 1947), xxix. Footnotes About The Author(s) LAURENCE SENELICK is Fletcher Professor Emeritus of Drama and Oratory, Tufts University, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the editor of The American Stage in the Library of America and recipient of the George Jean Nathan award for dramatic criticism. His most recent books are Jacques Offenbach and the Making of Modern Culture (2018), The Final Curtain: The Art of Dying on Stage (2022) and a translation of Balzac’s The Fraudster (2022). 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:

What is the role of academia in the new landscape of theater and performance after Black Live Matters, We See You W.A.T., The Time of Corona and the Climate Catastrophe in a radically changing political landscape? Should academia mirror, theorize, reflect and document — or influence, shape and actively participate in the change we want to see? PRELUDE Festival 2023 PANEL Academia and NYC Performance Tomi M Tsunoda, Daniel Irizarry, Solana Chehtman, Alexis Jemal, and Sylvaine Guyot 4:30PM EST Monday, October 16, 2023 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All What is the role of academia in the new landscape of theater and performance after Black Live Matters, We See You W.A.T., The Time of Corona and the Climate Catastrophe in a radically changing political landscape? Should academia mirror, theorize, reflect and document — or influence, shape and actively participate in the change we want to see? Featuring Tomi M Tsunoda , Daniel Irizarry , Solana Chehtman, Alexis Jemal, and Sylvaine Guyot. Content / Trigger Description: Tomi Tsunoda has spent most of her career as a director, deviser, designer, and producer of independent performance, developing sustainable systems for performing artists to self-produce work outside of institutional contexts. This included the creation of Breedingground Productions, which shepherded more than 200 projects over the course of ten years. She is one of 17 artists worldwide who are certified in all levels and disciplines to teach Soundpainting, the universal sign language for live composition created by jazz composer Walter Thompson. Her current projects combine both practical and critical work in dramaturgy, progressive arts pedagogy, fiber art, literary non-fiction, eco-philosophy, and facilitation, putting these fields into conversation as a way to address sustainable practice and systemic change. Tomi is currently serving as Chair of Undergraduate Drama at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, having previously served as Director for Playwrights Horizons Theater School, Head of the Theater Program at NYU Abu Dhabi, Education Director for the Powerhouse Training Program at Vassar College, and as faculty and guest artist at several additional schools and conservatories. Daniel Irizarry is a Puerto Rican born International Experimental Theatre director, actor/performer and educator based in NYC. His work embraces highly stylized visceral acting, pataphysics, a celebration of GERMS & consensual audience participation. He is the Artistic Director of One-Eighth Theater and full time Lecturer at MIT Music & Theatre Arts. In his most recent work, he directed and performed the final project for the historic closing of the New Ohio Theatre titled, ‘Ultra Left Violence’ written by Robert Lyons. Other notable credits directed and performed; The Maids by Jose Rivera (New York Times Critics pick); UBU by Adam Szymkowicz (Time Out NY Critics pick), world premiere of Busu by Mishima at Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theatre Festival, YOVO by Robert Lyons in NYC, Poland, Cuba, South Korea & My Onliness by Robert Lyons at New Ohio Theatre in NYC (One of the best performances Off-Broadway in 2022 by Theatermania and nominated for a 2023 HOLA award for best Outstanding performance by a lead actor. Over his career he has directed, performed and taught in Turkey, India, Germany, Japan, Lithuania, Italy, Romania, UK, Colombia, among others. Most notably at: Folkwang University in Germany, Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey and Seoul Institute of the Arts in South Korea. He holds an MFA in Acting from Columbia University, a BA in Drama at The Universidad de Puerto Rico where he has returned to teach at both. Solana Chehtman is a cultural producer and engagement curator born in Buenos Aires and based in New York City since 2012. She is currently the Director of Artist Programs at Joan Mitchell Foundation, where she supports artists with unrestricted funding and professional development through the Joan Mitchell Fellowship, as well as in their long term career stewardship via the Creating a Living Legacy (CALL) program. In the past decade, Solana has partnered with a wide range of cultural organizations across the performing and visual arts to create new opportunities for artists and avenues for public participation in the arts. Prior to joining the Foundation, she served as inaugural Director of Creative Practice and Social Impact at The Shed, and as Vice President of Public Engagement at Friends of the High Line. Solana received a BA in international studies at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, and holds an EdM in education policy from Teachers College, Columbia University. She was an adjunct Professor at the MA in Arts Administration at Baruch College, City University of New York between 2018 and 2021. Alexis Jemal, LCSW, LCADC, MA, JD, PhD, associate professor at Silberman School of Social Work-Hunter College, is a critical-radical so(ul)cial worker (practitioner, scholar, researcher, educator), social entrepreneur, and artivist who specializes in racial justice, radical healing, wellness, and liberation. Dr. Jemal grounds her research and scholarship in her Critical Transformative Potential Framework that develops critical consciousness and taps into radical imagination to convert consciousness into action that heals and transforms people, relationships, and environments to support everyone’s humanity to the fullest extent possible. This framework guides the development and implementation of multi-(from the molecular to the macro) level, holistic, socio-cultural, psychosocial, bio-behavioral health interventions that incorporate clinical practice, advocacy, and community and cultural organizing. She teaches courses at the master’s level in clinical practice, critical social work practice, and human behavior, and at the doctoral level in arts-based, participatory action, intervention research and public scholarship. Sylvaine Guyot is Professor of French Literature, Thought & Culture at NYU, New York, since 2021. At Harvard University, Guyot acted as the Chair for TDM Theater, Dance & Media next to her tenure at the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures. As a theatre director, she co-founded La Troupe (Harvard) and Le Théâtre de l’homme qui marche (Paris, France). She is currently developing a lecture-performance on understudied early modern female writing. Her research interests focus on seventeenth-century tragedy and spectacle culture, the history of the body and emotions, the politics of performing arts, and the formation of cultural institutions. Publications include Racine et le corps tragique (PUF, 2014) and Databases, Revenues, and Repertory: The French Stage Online, 1680-1793 (MIT Press, 2021). She is a coleader of the Comédie-Française Registers Project. She has also published articles on contemporary docu-plays that tell the stories of the under- and unrepresented. Photo credits: Tomi Tsunoda. Photo courtesy of the panelist. Daniel Irizarry. Photo courtesy of the panelist. Solana Chehtman. Photo courtesy of the panelist. Alexis Jemal. Photo courtesy of the panelist. Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Bradley Stephenson Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 27 2 Visit Journal Homepage Capable Hands: The Myth of American Independence in D.W. Gregory's The Good Daughter Bradley Stephenson By Published on April 23, 2015 Download Article as PDF From 1892 until 1954, Ellis Island was the gateway for immigrants seeking American citizenship. Over twelve million individuals passed through the federal immigration station, underwent rushed and haphazard examinations, and eventually entered the country. Many had their names changed and ethnicities homogenized. But many thousands more were rejected for various reasons, including the likelihood that an individual would become a public charge. Historian Kim Neilsen has argued that this clause “clearly assumed that bodies considered defective rendered them unable to perform wage-earning labor.” [1] Physical or cognitive differences were literally marked in chalk on people’s backs as they passed by the inspectors, and markings such as PH (physically handicapped), X (possible mental illness), and S (senility) were grounds for rejection and deportation. [2] Strong, able bodies capable of working independently and earning wages were considered crucial criteria for American citizenship. Such assumptions of ability and dependency in relation to American identity have permeated American culture and artistic cultural representations to the extent that they have developed to mythic proportions. However, many artists are beginning to challenge these cultural assumptions and the oppressive structures which undergird them. D.W. Gregory is a Washington D.C. based playwright who has written dozens of plays, many of which are set in rural and working-class America. She is a resident playwright at New Jersey Repertory Co. and a member of Playwrights Center in Minneapolis. Gregory is also a teaching artist and founding member of The Playwrights’ Gymnasium in D.C., and she has worked as a theatre critic for The Washington Post . Her plays have garnered numerous awards and have been developed and performed throughout the United States at theatres including New Jersey Repertory Co., Actors Theatre of Louisville, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Co., and others. She conducted an interview with Caridad Svich that was recently published in the collection 24 Gun Control Plays published by NoPassport theatre alliance. [3] Drawing upon her working class roots, her plays often explore “the disconnect between the dream and reality of American blue collar experience ,” and also “frequently present an unseen offstage character as well – the economic and political forces that shape the individuals on stage.” [4] In addition to predominantly female protagonists, disability is a powerful force that permeates her plays in unique ways that challenge traditional representations of disability in drama and can offer up new paradigms for representation, understanding, and inclusion of different forms of embodiment. D.W. Gregory’s 2003 play The Good Daughter , originally produced by New Jersey Rep and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, is a story of love and rebellion set in rural Missouri between 1916 and 1924. Critic Bob Rendell described the world premier as “a multifaceted, thought provoking traditional American play which stirs echoes of Eugene O’Neill;” others have noted similarities to William Inge’s Picnic . [5] The play also elicits echoes of King Lear as it tells “the story of Ned Owen, a pious Missouri farmer whose only hope is to see his daughters settled and his farm pass to the capable hands of one of their sons.” [6] Ned is a widower with three daughters, aged fourteen, nineteen, and twenty-one at the start of the play. The eldest daughter, Esther, survived childhood polio and now walks with a limp. Rudy Bird, a shy neighboring farmer, comes to the Owen estate to propose to Cassie, the beautiful middle daughter who has just fallen for Matt McCall, the dashing and worldly merchant trying to convince the locals to buy into a government-funded levee project to prevent floods in the Missouri River. Over the course of eight years and a great war, daughters leave home, shun suitors, get married, and get pregnant, yet nothing happens the way Ned wants it to. Highlighted with Brechtian super-titles, peppered with bible verses, and bookended by torrential floods, The Good Daughter is an epic yet intimate family tale of “a part of the country where change comes slowly, and at great price” (iii). [7] Ned’s desire for “capable” male heirs becomes a dominant trope in the play that influences how Ned treats his three daughters, their suitors, and the land itself, and also how those objects respond to their treatment and find new expressions of agency. This essay analyzes how D.W. Gregory explodes the myths of independence and the American Dream by subverting traditional dramatic representations of disability in The Good Daughter , exploring the intersections of gender, dependency, disability, and the environment. The notion of an American identity can be thought to have formally begun with the Declaration of Independence. This was the first formal, public statement about who Americans are as a collective people: we are independent. [8] As such, the notion of dependency has been anathema to American identity since the arrival of the pilgrims. The rags-to-riches characters of Horatio Alger earned their mythical status and their financial rewards by hard work and determination, not asking for help. Yet “dependency” itself, some would argue, is an ideological term that shapes social perspectives just as much as describing them. [9] Some political conservatives argue that government entitlement programs are equivalent to hand-outs and lead to a dependency that is detrimental and contrary to the spirit of America. [10] Historian and political scholar Rickie Solinger claims that dependency, as epitomized by welfare programs, “is the dirtiest word in the United States today.” [11] To be dependent on another person for survival or day-to-day functioning is a social embarrassment and a cultural flaw that needs to be eradicated, or at least hidden away from public sight. [12] Independent American thinking holds that dependent people have no need to be educated, either, since they have no chance of success in American life , so it is no surprise that people with disabilities generally received no education, were hidden from view (if the family was able to afford such institutionalization), and if they could not be medically “cured,” then they were kicked out and forced to be beggars. The result was a great cultural anxiety towards public disability. Disability scholar Alison Kafer explores some of these cultural anxieties surrounding disability in American culture, suggesting that disability (especially when coupled with female-ness) is viewed in the United States as “an unredeemable difference with no place in visions of the future.” [13] To be disabled, and especially to be a disabled woman, was to be disqualified from the American dream and its notions of progress, independence, and ability. This worldview was especially powerful during the early twentieth century, the age of immigration, and the time in which D.W. Gregory set her play. In The Good Daughter , Ned Owen’s obsession with hard work, moral purity, and traditional family hierarchy is representative of an American conservatism that relocates the American Dream into a more personalized vision of happiness and home. When James Truslow Adams coined the phrase “the American dream” in 1931, he explained it as “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement.” [14] This notion of physical and mental ability as prerequisite for opportunity also assumed maleness and whiteness and was, for the most part, unquestioned throughout most of American history. Douglas Baynton has observed how this primacy of ability has been central to the justification of inequality in American history. Accusations that women were incapable of being educated or that racial minorities had smaller, defective brains are based upon the assumption that the white, able-bodied, heterosexual male was both “normal” and ideal. [15] In most cases, Baynton explains, the defense against these injustices was to argue, for example, that women are strong enough to be educated or that racial diversity is not correlative with deficient brains. However, neither the oppressor nor the oppressed ever questioned the assumption that lack of disability is prerequisite for participation in civic life. The question was only who was or was not able enough to have social and political rights. Until the disability rights movements of the late twentieth century, lack of disability was always considered part and parcel to full citizenship in America. It is not surprising, then, that Franklin Delano Roosevelt would not be allowed to be seen publicly in his wheelchair. As Paul Longmore describes it, “The capacity to function as a true American, an independent moral agent, is predicated upon physical and economic self-sufficiency.” [16] The disabled were not invited. Although we still have room to grow, Americans have come a long way in terms of who gets to participate in civic life, but it is within this pre-civil rights cultural understanding of disability that Gregory sets her play. Painted on the “rich canvas of our [American] history,” Gregory’s characterizations in The Good Daughter have been described by critics as both complex and compelling. [17] Since losing his wife during the birth of their third daughter, Ned Owen stayed focused on his biblical Christian faith, tending his farm, and protecting his daughters the best way he knows how. He is a deeply flawed but loving man; he is no villain. Although Ned fits rather neatly into classical tragic constructions, his eldest daughter Esther, disabled by childhood polio, does not. Victoria Ann Lewis and other scholars have noted the use of disability in drama and literature as a character trait that immediately identifies a disabled character as either victim or villain. [18] These portrayals of disability – Tiny Tim, Captain Hook, Laura Wingfield, Darth Vader, Charlie Babbit, and many others – stem from a medicalized understanding whereby disability is a flaw to be cured, overcome, or eliminated. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder argue that the use of disability in this way in literature and drama as “an opportunistic metaphorical device” affects the way that people living with disability live and understand their lives. [19] Metaphorical representations of disability affirm and shape discriminatory attitudes from pity to euthanasia. According to Lewis, “the metaphor of disability has been so successful in the imaginative arena that it now functions as real.” [20] The modern cultural imagination now perceives disability in life the way it has been depicted in literature, that people with disabilities can either be heroic sufferers or bitter cripples, or perhaps objects of inspiration when they overcome their disability to succeed in life. D.W. Gregory, however, resists these traditional tropes in her portrayal of disability. While Esther’s polio has given her a limp, it has not reduced her to a metaphor within the play. In act one, during a dinner scene, Ned is overly protective of Esther, the oldest daughter, age twenty-one at the start of the play. Though Esther has prepared the meal on her own for the family with no assistance, Ned orders Cassie, the rebellious middle daughter, to fetch him and Esther a “cuppa water” so as not to over exert her older sister (19). Though Cassie makes backhanded comments suggesting that everyone in the family is more than able to get their own beverage or take care of their own business, Ned insists that Cassie rehearse her domestic activities, including ostensibly taking care of the weak, since he believes Cassie is shortly to become engaged. The subtle protectiveness towards Esther is a sign that Ned perceives her as weak and in need of special care, or rather, in need of his pity towards her. Scholars and historians like Paul Longmore and Joseph Shapiro have thoroughly described the role that pity has played in the charity-driven marginalization of people with disabilities. [21] Ned treats Cassie the toughest since he sees her as the most able to perform her role: marry and have children. Ned’s special treatment of Esther could be perceived as favoritism or privilege of the elder or favorite child, but eventually it becomes clear that Gregory is crafting his patriarchal, ableist behavior as motivated by fear and pity not only towards Esther’s disability, but also to all three of his daughters. In act two, seven years later, there is a similar dinner scene, but the relationships have shifted significantly. Esther is still living at home and tending the house, but she also holds down a part time job in a local store. Rachel, the youngest daughter, now twenty-one years old, is married and very pregnant. Ned now behaves overly protective towards his pregnant daughter rather than Esther. Since Cassie ran away seven years ago at the end of the first act, and Esther is still unfit for marriage in his opinion, Rachel is his last hope at fulfilling his American dream and having someone (male) to pass his farm on to when he dies. Yet it is not just an effort at protecting the unborn child. Rachel’s mother died in childbirth – a loss Ned has mourned for over twenty years – and he recognizes how potentially deadly a pregnancy can be. Gregory makes the subtle connection between Esther’s and Rachel’s disability in a brief exchange among all three sisters. Cassie comments to Rachel: CASSIE : Such a change in your life, havin’ a baby. Someone dependin’ on you for everythin’. And what if you ain’t fit for it? RACHEL : Who says I ain’t fit for it? CASSIE : I didn’t mean – ESTHER ( cutting her off ) Rachel is as fit as anybody I know. (76) Esther recognizes the perception that both she and her pregnant sister are unfit for independent living and quickly cuts off the accusation. The infantilization and pity inherent in dependency is part of the American perception towards disability as weakness and flaw. There is even some contemporary debate and controversy about the consideration that pregnancy might be considered a temporary disability for purposes of insurance claims, discrimination practices, and/or parking places. [22] In any case, whether or not pregnancy is legally or socially considered a disability, Rachel eventually lashes out at the all-consuming nature of the pregnancy: “The baby, the baby, that’s all I ever hear is the baby” (92); she feels as if her life has become the condition itself. Ned considers the pregnant Rachel to be unable to adequately care for herself, and as such she is in need of his charitable protection. Ned is exhibiting what Lewis calls a kind of “colonial missionary attitude toward the disabled subject” that is reflective of a “larger social pattern in which the non-disabled expert […] controls the life options of the disabled person.” [23] Ned feels that he knows best and must control the actions and behaviors all three of his daughters for their own good, since he sees them as impaired and unable to do so themselves. This behavior stems from the terrifying prospect raised by disability that humans might not be in control of their own destinies. As Longmore puts it, “Disability imperils the American myth of the sovereignty of the self.” [24] If the story stopped there, if the daughters capitulated to their father’s demands, Ned’s victimizing behavior would simply be another portrayal of ableist American colonialism and the use of disability as narrative metaphor to justify oppression masked as benevolence. But Gregory does not stop there. Cassie returns from her self-imposed exile and Rachel offers her some tea, but Ned objects, saying, “‘Rachel. Let Esther do that. Rachel.’ Rachel ignores him and brings the tea tray ” (65). In this brief act of defiance, Rachel momentarily reclaims her own subjectivity. It is a very subtle move, but in doing so Rachel defies the able-bodied expert, the doctors and telethon hosts who think they know what is best for disabled people and how to cure or protect them. However, a glass of tea does not a cultural revolution make; and the sexism of Ned expecting a woman to serve him tea still remains relatively unchallenged. These small acts of subjectivity, of asserting that being disabled is not the same as being useless, incapable, unfit, helpless, or voiceless, of claiming “nothing about us without us,” these small acts are the shifting of stones that can eventually lead to moving mountains. [25] In The Good Daughter , Ned believes deeply that independent capability (read ability) is at the heart of a Bible-based American life. He quotes liberally from the Christian Bible throughout the play and never strays from his able-bodied valuations of home, hearth, and hard work. Ned soon discovers that these abelist assumptions are not fully ingrained in his three daughters. Esther has taken over many of the homemaking responsibilities since her mother died fourteen years earlier. Though she has a mild flirtation with Rudy Bird, the neighboring tenant farmer, Ned assumes that Esther’s disability essentially renders her unfit for marriage or her own family: NED : Esther ain’t never gonna marry. You know that. CASSIE : She ain’t so bad lookin’ if she’d just smile once in a while. NED : No man gonna marry a crippled girl. Man wants a girl can give him a family. CASSIE : Not every man. NED : Any man worth havin’. Now, that’s a painful thing for her to accept. But it’s a hard, sad fact of this world. Just like it’s a hard, sad fact of this world that a girl who puts off settlin’ on one fella or another pretty soon ends up with no fella at all. (24) Cassie, the rebellious middle daughter, does not perceive Esther’s limp as a disqualifier for marriage, nor does Cassie think that marriage and childbearing are the only viable life options for a woman in the new century, but Ned takes the assumption that Disability historian Paul Longmore has critiqued, “that disability corrupts one’s capacity for responsible choices.” [26] Solinger agrees and argues that dependency, especially in women, is seen as “inconsistent with sensible choices.” [27] Ned is insistent on instilling his patriarchal version of common sense and teaching what he thinks are the truths of life: that every woman needs a man, and crippled girls can’t produce a family. Thus Cassie needs to settle down and start a family – since Esther cannot do so and the youngest daughter, Rachel, is still a little too young – so that Ned’s version of the American dream can be fulfilled and passed on to an able-bodied, male heir. Ned’s views and behavior represent the way ableist attitudes can establish and reinforce barriers that are disabling. This social model of disability – that regardless of impairments or physical difference, one only becomes disabled when social constructions or physical barriers (such as lack of curb cuts or accessible transportation) prevent one from equal participation – is a socially significant mode of understanding disability, one that provides an important corrective to more oppressive and problematic medical models. The social model serves to implicate society in the nature of disability, calling for reasonable accommodations so that everyone can engage with society independently regardless of differential embodiment. Many scholars, including Tobin Siebers, are critical of a purely social model, arguing that it does not pay enough attention to the lived realities of different bodies. [28] In The Good Daughter , the behavior of Ned’s daughters is a critique of a purely conceived social model (as well as moral or medical models) by bringing more attention to the reality of their interdependence without ignoring the power of ableist expectations to impede social agency. In this way, Gregory is perhaps resignifying independence in ways similar to Ed Roberts and the early disability rights activists of the 1970s, changing the definition of independence to mean what is possible for you with the right assistance. Gregory’s representations and explorations of disability in The Good Daughter can thus influence how we understand the nature of independence itself by challenging Ned’s ideology of ability. Ned’s assumption that disability makes Esther incapable of bearing children and having a family represents the desexualization of disability that is prominent in American culture. Many scholars have noted and explored the way people with disabilities have been desexualized throughout American history. [29] From the forced sterilization of people with cognitive and developmental disabilities and the eugenics movements of the early twentieth century to assumptions that young women paralyzed in a car crash will no longer need her birth control pills (since what “normal” guy would want to sleep with a paraplegic?), the relationship between sex and disability has been anxiously ignored at best and surgically outlawed at worst. [30] As recent as 2010, a young couple was married in New York state, but because they are living in a state-sanctioned group home and have mental disabilities, they are not allowed to share a bedroom (lawsuits by the couple’s parents are still pending). [31] Abby Wilkerson notes how “a group’s sexual status tends to reflect and reinforce its broader political and social status.” [32] Sexual agency is thus correlative with political agency and respectable social standing. In Ned’s perspective, Esther’s body has been physically and culturally pathologized by her polio. In the eyes of her father (who is representative of an ableist American culture), her marked body is inherently flawed and no longer fit for sexual participation in marriage, or, by extension, any subjective participation in American culture outside the protective enclave of her father’s home. Since Esther is viewed as unable to marry and have children, she also cannot fulfill what Ned believes is God’s plan for her gender. Ned’s deep faith contributes to his fears that his middle daughter, Cassie, might also become lost in the same stigmatized state of childlessness, so he forces her to read a Bible passage from 1 Timothy 2:14-15. “Adam was not deceived. But the woman bein’ deceived was in the transgression […] Notwithstandin’, she shall be saved by childbearin’, if they continue in faith, charity and holiness with sobriety” (25). Cassie is hesitant as she reads, yet she still submits to her father’s patriarchy at this early point in the play. This bible verse is Ned’s warning to Cassie that in order to avoid Esther’s tragic condition, Cassie must fall in line and submit to male authority, marry, and have children. Otherwise she cannot be saved, just like a desexualized and physically disabled Esther cannot be saved. Ned’s ableism has not only desexualized and pathologized Esther’s body, but it has also damned her to hell. In this regard, disability is both socially and morally constructed, and Ned sees Cassie’s rebelliousness and desire to reject marriage as equally disruptive as Esther’s polio. He couldn’t save Esther from her polio, but perhaps he can save Cassie from herself. This patriarchal and charity-driven attempt at control simultaneously desexualizes and strips agency from his daughters. Ned’s world, dominated by fear, patriarchal conservatism, and able-bodied privilege, is girded by an extremely oppressive power matrix in which his three daughters and their suitors must navigate. However, Gregory is not content to simply portray or exploit oppressive power structures in her play. She works subtly through her female characters and the ecological environment to radically explode these power structures from within. Esther could remain single and lonely and become a tragic or heroic sufferer, a common trope for disabled characters throughout literature. She could be rescued by a charitable man, like the neighbor Rudy Bird or the idealistic merchant Matt McCall, and try to fulfill her God-given calling as a procreative woman. These would be the traditional paths that disabled dramatic characters might follow. Gregory leads us down that path before radically reorienting our perception. At the end of act one, Ned has arranged for Rudy Bird to marry Cassie, whom he deeply loves, but Cassie is in love with Matt McCall. When she asks Matt to run away with her, he reveals that he is going off to fight in the war, so she runs away by herself. Seven years later, in act two, Cassie comes home to help Rachel with the end of her pregnancy, and Matt is now courting Esther. When Cassie reappears, however, Matt is still not fully over his heartbreak until (or perhaps even though) she brings him closure face to face and encourages him to do right by Esther. At dinner the next evening, after Matt and Esther had some alone time, everyone assumes Matt was going to propose to Esther, but when she returns alone, she begins to cry: NED : I knew it! RACHEL : Esther. What happened? NED ( to Rachel ): I’ll tell you what happened… He let her go! That’s what! CASSIE : He didn’t ask? NED : I knew he’d never ask. CASSIE : I thought sure he’d ask! ESTHER : HE DID ASK! He did ask! ( a beat ) I said no. CASSIE : You turned him down? RACHEL : Esther. What in the world. Why? ESTHER : I ain’t gonna be the one who’s settled on. I will not have a man who’d marry me out of duty. Or pity […] I ain’t gonna be no man’s second choice. (89-90) Like Cassie says to Rudy early in the play, Esther says “no.” She has the opportunity to be “rescued,” to get the happy ending and “overcome” her disability through marriage where she can become a wife and perhaps mother and pass as “normal” in her American culture. But she says no. She rejects pity. She defies her father’s assumptions about her, and she defies an American culture that defines her agency in terms of her womb and the symmetry of her appendages. In her cry of “no pity,” Esther makes a powerful and political action that asserts her own subjectivity in terms that she defines for herself. Ned’s reaction to Esther’s rejection of Matt’s proposal is particularly telling, especially if he is viewed as a representative of the ableist American cultural milieu. First, when Esther cries, he claims he knew that Matt would never propose, reiterating his previous claim that “no man gonna marry a crippled girl” (24). Then, he shifts and adopts an “I told you so” attitude to try to spin the situation back towards his culturally normative corner. Ned tries to regain control of the situation and solidify the dominance of his perspective, but Esther will have none of it: NED : Maybe this is for the best, Rachel. I worried how Esther’d take to marriage. RACHEL : She’d take just fine, Pa. NED : Marriage is a strain on a woman. Esther’s frail. ESTHER : Frail? NED : I know it’s a painful thing to accept, but Esther, maybe you ain’t really fit for marriage. ESTHER : Ain’t fit? I do a full day of work. Never ask nobody to do nothin’ for me. Every spring I put in that garden by myself. Clean this house top to bottom, carry half the furniture out into the yard. Don’t you tell me I’m too frail. Don’t you tell me I ain’t fit. Nobody knows what they’s fit for till they try it. (91) Ned tries to reshape the event to fit his previous explanation of reality, that Esther is dependent and thus unfit and unable to have cultural agency. Yet Esther claims she has never asked for help or needed help. In this moment, it appears as if Gregory is simply writing Esther to reject her own disability, to claim traditional independence, and to accept the vilification of dependency as anathema to American identity. This could be a highly problematic character twist and would indicate that Ned’s ableism has permeated deeper into Esther’s worldview than originally thought. But yet again, Gregory craftily subverts this easy and oppressive plot device. But this time, she uses an Act of God. Ned’s fears are part of a carefully constructed house of cards that Gregory has structured in the play. Ned is afraid of God’s punishment; he is afraid that his daughters will not produce an heir to his estate; he is afraid that Cassie will run off and abandon her womanly obligations; he is afraid Rachel might have the same pregnancy problems that took his wife; and he is afraid of the technological progress that is happening in the agricultural community within the play. Abby Wilkerson has said, “Beneath the moral stigmas attached to pathologized bodies lies fear: the fear of bodily alteration, and even death itself – and to the extent that the singular human body represents the body politic, the fear of social upheaval and chaos, the loss of all social order.” [33] This is the fear that undergirds Ned’s – and perhaps by extension, America’s – ableist attitudes and behaviors. Ability is understood as part of the American status quo; it is prerequisite for, and part of, stability. Gregory imagines this chaos and loss of social order through visions of the natural world, the farms, and the ecology of Missouri river. Critic Bob Rendell describes, “The entire play has a backdrop of drought, flood, the mechanization of agriculture and a growing ability to bend nature to our will.” [34] Matt McCall’s job is to convince the local farmers to support the construction of new levees to rein in flood waters. The biblical images of floods and rain are prominent constructions in the play which highlight notions of complete human impotence and complete ecological destruction. However, the relationship of these images to disability is somewhat less obvious. The notion of disability as personal catastrophe is a common trope in literature and drama, as well as in social situations. A person’s disability is seen as either something to be heroically overcome, or something that consumes her with bitterness, hence the victim and villain tropes described by Lewis and discussed earlier. Disability is seen as a personal tragedy, or perhaps, a kind of natural disaster that could befall a person. This understanding of disability as a kind of natural disaster permeates traditional dramatic literature, much contemporary thought, and Ned Owen’s world view. But Gregory subverts this traditional calamitous mode of understanding disability by juxtaposing it against literal images of natural disasters. For farmers like Ned, the Missouri river is the giver of life and the bringer of destruction. Independent human efforts to control it are unable to rein in its mighty power. The river can give, and the river can take away. And when the river floods, it becomes a natural disaster – like Ned’s view of disability – that can wash away all of our efforts of forging the American dream. This is how Gregory depicts Ned’s world view. He clings to his own power to outlast the flood by refusing help from his family to get to higher ground. If he accepts their help, he believes, he acknowledges his lack of independence and his unworthiness to have the American Dream, which for Ned is a bigger disaster than a deadly flood. The understanding of disability as natural disaster is related to the moral or religious model of disability depiction, “in which the physically different body is explained by an act of divine or demonic intervention.” [35] But in The Good Daughter , the divine intervention serves not to explain disability and by extension dependency, but rather the Act of God purges the rejection of disability and dependency, in a way that disavows the whole notion of independence itself as a fallacy. In the torrential floods that bookend the play, Ned comes face to face with a kind of natura ex machina that is the great equalizer to the exaltation of independence. As the waters rise, Ned stays put in the barn, refusing to accept the help of his family. As Longmore describes the denial of dependency in relation to disability, “Americans cling to visions of absolute personal autonomy and unlimited individual possibility while, it seems to many of them, their power over their individual lives evaporates like a mirage.” [36] Ned has survived many floods before, on his own, and he believes he will survive this one just the same. But in fact, the only way to survive is to accept his interdependence with those loved ones trying to help him make it to safety before the levees break. Esther realizes the value, necessity, and ubiquity of interdependence and makes it to safety with her family. Ultimately she is able to resist Ned’s world view. Clinging to his notions of independent moral superiority, the lights fade on Ned as the flood waters rise. With this Act of God, Gregory turns the tide on the myth of independence and claims the necessity of interdependence in life and death. Eva Feder Kittay acknowledges not only that independence is a fallacy, but it is contrary to the human condition, and refusing to acknowledge this fact is unjust and has damaging effects on people and relationships. She says, Independence, except in some particular actions and functions, is a fiction, regardless of our abilities or disabilities, and the pernicious effects of this fiction are encouraged when we hide the ways in which our needs are met in relations of dependencies. On the other hand, this fiction turns those whose dependence cannot be masked into pariahs, or makes them objects of disdain or pity. It causes us to refuse assistance when it is needed. It encourages us either to deny that assistance to others when they require it or to be givers of care because we fear having to receive care ourselves. In acknowledging dependency we respect the fact that as individuals our dependency relations are constitutive of who we are and that, as a society, we are inextricably dependent on one another. [37] We are all inextricably interdependent, and the notion that dependency is grounds for marginalization and evidence of loss of subjectivity is not only a fallacy, but a rejection of the reality of the human condition and a pernicious perspective that can hurt everyone. In The Good Daughter , Ned clings to his notions of independence that have splintered his family as the flood waters crash around him. His death is not tragic because he never has a realization or change of heart. His death is becomes heartbreaking because Cassie and her unborn child stay with him, refusing to accept the help of their family. In one sense, Cassie’s death could be read as a kind of self-sacrificial womanhood, refusing to let her father die alone, affirming our interdependence in life and in death. But it is also possible to read Cassie’s actions as being just as pitiable as Ned’s, in that they both so attached to traditional notions of independence that they reject the possibility of life (however messy it may be) in an interdependent community with their family. Just before the calamitous resolution of the play, Cassie and Rudy have a heart to heart about why she left and where their true feelings lie. Cassie confesses that her journey was one of self-discovery: CASSIE : I just had to see what was out there. RUDY : See where the river took you. CASSIE : This is as far as it went. RUDY : River took us all places we didn’t expect. (96-97) Her quest took her back home, back to her father, and she sits with him in the final moments, ready to die tragically with her father and her unborn child because she failed to find what she thought was true independence. Her quest for independence teaches us that the ecology of our American Dreams defy expectations. The disability rights movement has gone a long way in changing cultural perceptions of ability and redefining independence to included interdependence, but these cultural notions were decades away from being brought to the public eye during the time in which The Good Daughter was set. For Ned Owen, the perception of disability in his family – Esther’s limp, Cassie’s rebellion, Rachel’s pregnancy – became a damaging metaphor that caused him to doubt his own future and his own version of the American dream. However, Gregory ultimately reverses this paradigm and explodes Ned’s American dream from the inside out, exposing the fallacy of independence and reclaiming notions of interdependent subjectivity that are inherent and positive aspects of disability. Esther initially appears to be cast as the innocent victim, but she is not. She is a caretaker in the family as well as a care-receiver, she chastises her sisters for their misbehavior, and speaks up against her own mistreatment. Though her circumstances may conspire against her subjectivity, her quest for agency within her oppressive and pitying father’s worldview serves not as a metaphor but rather as an embrace of the lived realities of her culturally situated experiences with disability. Gregory’s subversion of literary tropes and dramatic constructions of disability are demonstrative of a subtle but tectonic shift that is happening in mainstream dramatic representations of disability, exploding the myth of independence within cultural ecologies of American identity. References [1] Kim E. Neilsen, A Disability History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012), 108. [2] Neilsen, A Disability History, 104. [3] D.W. Gregory, “The Artist as Activist – Take it to the Street or to the Stage?” in 24 Gun Control Plays , ed. Caridad Svich and Zac Cline (Southgate CA, NoPassport Press, 2013), n.p. The interview was originally written for her blog before being published in this collection. [4] http://www.dramaticpublishing.com/AuthorBio.php?titlelink=10106 accessed 8 May 2012. [5] Bob Rendell, “A Very Good Daughter World Premiers at New Jersey Repertory,” www.talkinbroadway.com , accessed 8 May 2013; and Robert L. Daniels, “Legit Review: The Good Daughter,” Daily Variety Gotham , November 12, 2003. [6] http://dwgregory.com/ . Accessed 8 May 2013. [7] D.W. Gregory, The Good Daughter, unpublished PDF manuscript (2003). Used by permission. All subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. [8] I use the first person pronoun “we” not to be exclusionary, patriotic, or culturally ego-centric, but simply because I am an American citizen and I can only write from my own perspective. Using third person descriptions of Americans seems inauthentic and unnecessarily distancing from my lived experience. [9] Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, “A Genealogy of Dependency : Tracing a Keyword of the U.S. Welfare State,” in The Subject of Care: Feminist Perspectives on Dependency , edited by Eva Feder Kittay and Ellen K. Feder (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002), 15. [10] http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/11/the-2013-index-of-dependence-on-government accessed 7 July 2014. [11] Rickie Solinger, “Dependency and Choice: The Two Faces of Eve,” in The Subject of Care: Feminist Perspectives on Dependency , edited by Eva Feder Kittay and Ellen K. Feder (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002), 61. Solinger argues that “dependency” is coupled with “choice” in ways that continue to keep women vulnerable to control and censure. [12] For more perspectives, analysis and unpacking of notions of dependency, care, and disability, see Eva Feder Kittay and Ellen K. Feder, eds., The Subject of Care: Feminist Perspectives on Dependency (Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002). [13] Alison Kafer, “Debating Feminist Futures: Slippery Slopes, Cultural Anxiety, and the Case of the Deaf Lesbians,” in Feminist Disability Studies, ed. Kim Q. Hall, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 222. [14] James Truslow Adams, The Epic of America (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1931), 404 (my emphasis). For a fascinating and nuanced analysis of the American dream in relation to dramatic criticism , see Cheryl Black, “‘Three Variations on a National Theme’: George O’Neil’s American Dream , 1933,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 22 no. 3 (2010), 69-91. [15] Douglas C. Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History” in The New Disability History, ed. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umanski (New York: NYU Press, 2001), 33-57. [16] Paul K. Longmore, “Conspicuous Contribution and American Cultural Dilemmas: Telethon Rituals of Cleansing and Renewal,” in The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability, ed. David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 137. [17] Rendell, www.talkinbroadway.com . [18] Victoria Ann Lewis, ed., Beyond Victims and Villains: Contemporary Plays by Disabled Playwrights (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2005). The portrayal of disability in cinema is more well documented than in theatre. See, for example, Christopher R. Smit and Anthony Elms, eds., Screening Disability: Essays on Cinema and Disability (New York: University of America Press, 2001); Martin Norden, Cinema of Isolation: a History of Physical Disability in the Movies (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994); and Sally Chivers and Nicole Markotić, eds., The Problem Body: Projecting Disability on Film (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2010). [19] David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 47. [20] Victoria Ann Lewis, Beyond Victims and Villains, xxi. [21] Longmore, “Conspicuous Contribution.” Joseph Shapiro, No Pity: How the Disability Rights Movement is Changing America (New York: Times Books, 1993). [22] See, for example, Shawn Dean, “Accessible Parking for Pregnancy? Count Me Out,” EasyStand blog, www.blog.easystand.com , 11 April 2011, accessed 8 May 2013; and Stacie Lewis, “Do You Consider Pregnancy a Disability?” Baby Center Blog, www.blog.babycenter.com , 10 January 2012, accessed 8 May 2013. [23] Victoria Ann Lewis, Beyond Victims and Villains, xvii. [24] Longmore, “Conspicuous Contribution,” 153. [25] “Nothing about us without us” was another rally cry during the disability rights movement. [26] Longmore, “Conspicuous Contribution,” 152. [27] Solinger, “Dependency and Choice,” 75. [28] See Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008). [29] See, for example, Margarit Shildrik, Dangerous Discourses ; Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); and Kim E. Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States . [30] See Abby Wilkerson, “Disability, Sex Radicalism, and Political Agency,” in Feminist Disability Studies , ed. Kim Q. Hall (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). [31] Frank Eltman, “Disabled Rights: Couple Fights for Right to Live Together at Group Home,” Associated Press, www.huffingtonpost.com , May 7, 2013. Accessed 9 May 2013. [32] Wilkerson, “Disability, Sex Radicalism, and Political Agency,” 195. [33] Wilkerson, “Disability, Sex Radicalism, and Political Agency,” 193. [34] Rendell, www.talkinbroadway.com . [35] Lewis, Beyond Victims and Villains, xxi. [36] Longmore, “Conspicuous Contribution,” 154. [37] Eva Feder Kittay, “When Caring is Just and Justice is Caring: Justice and Mental Retardation,” Public Culture 13 no. 3 (2001), 570. Footnotes About The Author(s) BRADLEY STEPHENSON earned his Ph.D. in theatre at the University of Missouri. He has also earned a Master of Divinity and a Masters in science education from Wake Forest University, as well as a Masters in theatre from Northwestern University. He has been published in journals such as Ecumenica , Studies in Musical Theatre , and Theatre Topics . His current scholarship explores the intersections of disability and identity in dramatic literature. Bradley is also a director, playwright, actor, husband, and father. Guest Editor: Jonathan Chambers Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Phoebe Rumsey Editorial Assistant: Fabian Escalona Advisory Board: Bill Demastes Amy E. Hughes Jorge Huerta Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Beth Osborne Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Esther Kim Lee Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction (JADT 27.2, 2015) The Best Actor for the Role, or the Mythos of Casting in American Popular Performance Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men Capable Hands: The Myth of American Independence in D.W. Gregory's The Good Daughter Rooting Out Historical Mythologies; William Dunlap’s A Trip to Niagara and its Sophisticated Nineteenth Century Audience. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Brian Eugenio Herrera Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 27 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Best Actor for the Role, or the Mythos of Casting in American Popular Performance Brian Eugenio Herrera By Published on April 23, 2015 Download Article as PDF Casting — the process whereby actors are assigned to particular roles — has largely eluded historical and theoretical inquiry. Casting’s iterative impact lends it a peculiar ephemerality. Once a role is cast, the complex array of criteria informing that decision — not only the methods and techniques of talent assessment but also the interpersonal dynamics, rumors, reputations, and “business” considerations — recedes in importance as the work of performance-making ostensibly begins. Indeed, despite its inarguable centrality in the performance-making project, the inevitably idiosyncratic sequence of events that comprise the process of how this or that actor did (or did not) get the part routinely evades the archive. I contend that such archival evasions are enabled by what we might call a “mythos of casting,” a constellation of interconnected beliefs and assumptions that have evolved within American popular performance over the last century or so. This “mythos of casting” cloaks within mystery the historical practices – by turns material, creative and proprietary – that guide how an actor’s labor is (and is not) valued as a commodity. This “mythos of casting” simultaneously provides ideological rationale for the acknowledged inequities in the allocation of the paid and unpaid labor of actors while also sustaining faith that the apparatus of casting can (and sometimes actually does) work to identify the “best” actor for a given role. The “mythos of casting” also guides most academic conversations about casting, which typically operate within one of three discursive modes: the logistical, the (non) traditional, and the mystical. [1] Logistical discourses of casting might be found most frequently on the “practice” side of the theory-practice divide in theatre studies, with conversations about how to audition (or how to run auditions) eliciting conversation and study in the acting studio, the production meeting, or the rehearsal hall. Such discussions, and the written works engaging them, typically rehearse, explicate or strategize the nuances of disparate audition structures, and are often guided by the premise of “entering the profession.” [2] Traditional — or, more aptly, “Non-Traditional” — discussions emphasize how casting operates as a mode of what scholar Angela Pao calls “both social action and artistic exploration” in which the assignment of a particular actor to a role might “dislodge established modes of perceiving,” perhaps especially with regard to the enactment of cultural identity in performance. [3] Both the logistical and non-traditional discourses of casting prioritize how practitioners might intervene in casting’s machinery to achieve particular ends. By contrast, the third discourse of casting, perhaps the most ubiquitous of the three, fixates on casting as an almost mystical process that defies easy explanation. Such “mystical” accounts arrive in a variety of formulations but always with a fascination for a kind of magic at play within casting decisions. Some such accounts emphasize the “special sight” of creative intuition wherein an ineffable mix of circumstance, luck and discernment combine to guide the director (or teacher, or casting director, or whoever) to the inspired insight that a particular actor is “right” for the role. Often responding to what Joseph Roach describes as “the easy to perceive but hard to define quality possessed by abnormally interesting people” sometimes referred to as “it,” [4] this response informs an inspired confidence like that described by producer Arthur Hornblow recalling his casting Marilyn Monroe in her first featured film role, “As soon as we saw her we knew she was the one.” [5] Other mystical accounts proffer casting as a kind of alchemical mastery, usually on the part of the genius director, in which art manifests from a deftly assembled configuration of actors. As film director John Frankenheimer famously quipped “casting is 65% the battle.” Director Martin Scorsese later upped the ante, noting that “More than 90 percent of directing is the right casting,” while a recent textbook Fundamentals of Film Directing offered a more conservative assessment, noting that “Casting is 50% of the director’s work.” [6] Casting’s mystical discourses also take fantasy form in the myriad speculative fictions spun within the “what if” scenarios rehearsed in discussions of “miscasting.” From sensational lists like “12 Actors Who Almost Had the Part” and “What If? ‘Pulp Fiction’ Near-Miss Casting” to entire books dedicated to Hollywood’s All-Time Worst Casting Blunders , the fantastic genre of the “what if” casting tale stands among the most recurring in popular performance lore. [7] Most mystical discourses of casting, however, fixate upon the moment an actor is assigned a role as the signal moment wherein the magic of performance is conjured. Indeed, while logistical and non-traditional discourses of casting propose strategic interventions into the casting process, mystical discourses instead marvel at the ineffability of casting, fetishize the shrouds of secrecy that sustain casting’s unknowable mysteries, and wonder at the transformative power summoned by whoever happens to be the one deciding which actor is to become the role. Mystical discourses of casting hint that mere mortals can never truly know why this or that actor got the part and imply that occasional peeks behind the casting curtain will only ever reveal a partial story. These mystical discourses suggest that some greater power is at work in both the methods and madnesses of casting, and that ours is not to wonder why. The many mysteries of casting might explain why the topic of casting remains so captivating to so many. Indeed, casting’s purported unknowability — that no one can never truly know how casting happens — incites the most passionate conversations about the process, whether in speculative games about who would be better in the role, or in moments of aesthetic outrage (or schadenfreude ) over miscasting, or in impassioned outbursts of sometimes politicized fervor within critiques of incidents of exploitation, exclusion or unfairness in casting. Yet, even in such incisive and searching conversations, most assessments of casting controversies resolve with shrugging demurrals or simple judgments of the sort proffered by the author of one best-selling theatre appreciation textbook, who writes “There is good casting and bad casting and, of course, there is also inspired casting.” [8] The persistence of some version of this reductive good/bad/inspired matrix in even the most sophisticated conversations about casting might well reflect some awareness of the many interpersonal, proprietary, and contractual complexities that all factor into the invisible calculus guiding any casting decision. (Can anyone inside or outside the process ever really, truly or fully know why someone got a part?) Even so, this recurring fixation places too much emphasis on casting’s unknowability (its “mystery”) with too little attention to the power at play in any casting decision. As the default resolution for any and every conversation about casting, the good/bad/inspired matrix both sustains the mysterious power of casting even as it also contributes to the ongoing mystification of the material practices of casting — the mechanisms, techniques and assumptions routing the process to that final casting decision — rendering such practices beyond the archive and thus exempt from historical analysis. To discern casting’s archive and thus evince its history, performance historians and theorists might explicate the three principles most routinely invoked to explain, excuse or justify the capricious operations of the casting apparatus: equitable access to opportunity, artistic autonomy, and meritocratic achievement. Over the last century or so, these contradictory premises have come to operate in dynamic tension as a “mythos of casting,” which simultaneously sustains creative faith in the capacity of the casting apparatus to identify the best actor for a given role even as it cloaks the material practices of casting in mystery. As I take up each of these principles — equity, artistry, meritocracy — in turn below, I briefly detail how each principle guided the formation of the contemporary repertoire of casting practices as I also chart the enduring conceptual contours of the “mythos of casting.” Equity The peculiar notion that casting should be fair appears to have emerged from two distinctively twentieth century points of origin. On the one hand, the growing power of actor unions within the industries capitalizing on American popular performance amplified particular questions of equity. On the other, the extraordinary and rapid expansion of educational theatre programs at the secondary, post-secondary and pre-professional level intensified concerns about access. Over time, the belief that the casting process should be equitably accessible to all eligible or deserving performers became one of the guiding ideals of the American casting process and a foundational tenet of the mythos of casting. Concerns about fair and equitable access instigated the formation of actor unions in the United States in the nineteenth century, as producers started to hire actors to “play as cast” for only a particular production (and often without guarantee of compensation for rehearsals, truncated runs, or special wardrobes and skills). Worried that they might be shut out of their seasonal “lines of business” employment, professional actors agitated to protect their access to secure employment opportunities. As these nascent actor unions continued to fight for recognition in the early twentieth century (in both the theatre and in the emerging film industry), their organizing efforts shifted from equitable employment access and toward working conditions, wage scales and enforceability of contracts, concerns which animated the historic Actors’ Equity Association [AEA] strike in 1919. [9] In the decades that immediately followed AEA’s 1919 victory, concerns about equitable access to employment did occasionally reassert themselves within the union, perhaps most fractiously in the Depression years with the 1934 formation of the Actors’ Forum (an ad hoc pressure group of member actors who sought cooperative benefits and a minimum wage for all members) and the 1935-39 operation of the Federal Theatre Project (which rankled union leadership by employing non-union actors). [10] Yet it was not until the post-World War II years, and amidst growing national concerns about civil rights and desegregation, however, that actor unions – in what one historian has called a “gradual politicization” [11] – reasserted their inceptive investment in equitable access to employment. During the 1940s and 1950s, subcommittees within all the major actor unions began to advocate for fair and equitable access to employment opportunities for minority union members, especially actors of African descent. Through initiatives like the Negro Employment Committee in the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the Committee on Negro Integration in the Theatre in Actors’ Equity Association (AEA), these committees gathered and published data about the number and kind of roles available to minority actors, rehearsing and deploying strategies of advocacy that endure to this day. [12] Activist actors also, through such endeavors as AEA’s Integration Showcase (staged in 1959), argued for and demonstrated casting techniques that modeled ways of hiring actors of African descent for roles not specifically written with a black actor in mind. [13] This work by actor advocates within their unions in the 1940s and 1950s anticipated the work of AEA’s Non-Traditional Casting Project (which reanimated the premise of the Integrated Casting Committee by expanding it to also include Latina/o, Asian American, and Native American actors, as well as disabled actors). [14] This practice of assembling data and insisting that industrial casting norms adapt to rank and file realities also animated the institution of the “open audition.” The practice of the “open audition” was instituted in the 1970s to insure that all union (or union eligible) actors had access to at least one general audition for every production (or producing season) undertaken under union contract. Even though these “open call” auditions have often come over time to be regarded by many as cumbersome and hollow rituals of union compliance, the institutionalization of the open call, as well as the actor union advocacy that compelled it, not only derived from but also fortified a foundational ideal within the mythos of casting – that equitable and transparent access to the casting apparatus benefitted all actors. While midcentury actor unions worked within the entertainment industry for equitable access to opportunity for professional actors, the massive expansion of educational theater programs that boomed in high schools, universities and pre-professional training programs in the post-World War II era exerted an even more substantial influence on the idea that the casting process should be fair. Yet, in the 1940s and 1950s, no consensus existed among theatre educators about how to balance the competing priorities of fairness, efficiency and quality when assigning roles in a school or community setting. Most midcentury theatre educators advocated for some version of “tryouts.” The 1948 Play Production Primer (published in 1951 by the Mutual Improvement Association of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints ) defined the “tryout” as “a method of selecting talent for a cast. Either parts read from the play, or [a] display of general ability.” [15] In the spring of 1948, a series of short essays in Dramatics Magazine (then a publication addressing both high school and university theatre programs) discussed a striking array of “tryout” strategies. Some, like Blandford Jennings of Missouri’s Clayton High School, instructed students to “come prepared to read anything of their choice for a minute or two” because “reading at sight from an unfamiliar text is no fair indication of the true ability of a young reader.” [16] Others, like Esther McCabe of New York’s Salamanca High School, approached the casting of a play as “a lesson in democracy, reliability and human relationships” and assigned roles by student vote, subsequent to a full reading and discussion of the play. [17] Sam Boyd of West Virginia University affirmed the merits of “competitive reading tryouts” for their “spirit” and the “salubrious, unprejudiced attitude” they encouraged, [18] while Carnegie Mellon’s Talbot Pearson scoffed at even trying to select a single best practice. “There are so many methods of trying out the available players,” Talbot insisted, “that no rules can safely be applied” and “to list the dozen or more differing approaches would serve no practical purpose.” [19] Perhaps notably, none of these educators used the word “audition” to describe their preferred casting method. Where the word “audition” does appear with some frequency at midcentury is in the advocacy work of organizations like the American Theatre Wing and Theatre Communications Group, especially as such emerging, non-commercial but professional organizations explained their affiliation with professional training programs. For Isadora Bennett, the publicity director of the American Theatre Wing from the later 1940s through much of the 1950s, the audition represented the most effective point of connection between the professional theatre and those aspiring actors emerging from university and other training programs (like the American Theatre Wing’s own Professional Training School which enrolled hundreds of students at the time, most under the GI Bill). In a widely referenced 1955 essay published in Educational Theatre Journal , Bennett affirmed the importance of centralized auditions for “trained” actors so that such actors might be introduced to what she termed the “machinery of casting” and “the ‘technique’ of job-hunting.” [20] For Bennett, such auditions — in which aspiring professional actors might offer a concentrated display of their ability using brief, prepared excerpts from well-regarded plays — promised to serve as “aptitude tests given by warm and friendly but severe experts.” By the end of the 1950s, the idea that a concentrated and pre-prepared demonstration of aptitude before a panel of experts might be the most efficient means of talent assessment had begun to circulate more broadly and had begun to be termed an “audition.” In 1964, Michael Mabry — then the Executive Secretary of the fledgling Theatre Communications Group (TCG) — advocated for the institutionalization of a national audition, to be held annually in Chicago, as the most effective means of “keeping visible on a national scale” all American actors, not only those actors based in New York or Los Angeles but also those “committed…to seasonal employment with resident companies” while also including the “outstanding graduates of educational theatre.” [21] Thus, the significant midcentury influence of actor unions, in tandem with the rise of the educational theatre industrial complex, rehearsed the perhaps incongruous but nonetheless deeply entrenched notion that casting should be fair, and thereby also anchored the ideal of equity as a central tenet within the mythos of casting. Artistry Still, at play in every conversation about providing equitable access to actors, the mythos of casting also activates the question of whose authority guides the assignment of actor to role. For the actor, the casting process is their opportunity “to be cast” in a production and thus be given the equitable opportunity to work; for the one doing the casting, however, the casting process can take on additional valences of creative authorship, artistic autonomy and freedom of expression. In his genre-defining college textbook Introduction to the Theatre (1954), Frank Whiting of the University of Minnesota argued for the “executive ability” of the director: “Many factors must be considered in casting [and] many systems of tryout have been evolved, ranging from well-rehearsed, memorized scenes to informal interviews. None are perfect. All have advantages and disadvantages.” [22] Most educators publishing in Dramatics through the 1950s agreed that the directorial discernment should balance the pedagogic and artistic ambitions in a school production and that such judgment should remain the primary guide the final assignment of actor to role. Even Esther McCabe, whose proposed model of electoral casting marked the most dramatic departure, affirmed that she as director “reserved the right to change an unsuitable choice” once the election results were tallied. [23] Toward the end of his career, iconic theatre director Harold Clurman saw few artistic merits, for either actor or director, in the midcentury turn toward what he called the “absurd” and “arduous” “‘open market’ method of casting” in American theatre. [24] Such critiques of the American casting apparatus had been foundational in Clurman’s theatrical philosophy since the late 1920s, when “he prophesied that ‘immediate future of the theatre is in the actor,’ who must reject ‘type-casting’ for ‘long painful self-training.’” In co-founding the influential Group Theatre, Clurman sought a permanent ensemble company in which there would be only small parts and no star actors. Within a decade, however, the challenges of casting proved an unexpected drag on the galvanizing vision of the Group Theatre’s ensemble structure, as the number interested actors persistently far exceeded the available roles. The situation inspired Clurman to exclaim, in 1939, “Every piece of casting in the Group is a tragedy.” [25] Even so, several decades later, in his widely taught 1972 memoir of the craft On Directing , Clurman maintained his faith in the transformative potential of the ensemble as he drew unfavorable comparisons between the atomizing mechanisms of American casting (in which the actor worked as a freelancer, playing only as cast) and those used by the permanent repertory companies of Europe. Because “the American theatre has no such companies,” Clurman railed, “We proceed on the basis of ‘piecework’: for every new production an entirely new cast must be found – somehow, somewhere.” He continued, “The main business of casting [in the United States] is accomplished by means of auditions or readings,” which Clurman characterized as “a species of theatrical shopping” wherein the actor is “reduced to a commodity and gradually comes to regard himself in that light.” [26] Clurman’s contemporary and sometime colleague Elia Kazan also disliked the American casting apparatus. When asked by an interviewer about his preference for prepared auditions or cold readings, the director retorted, “I don’t do it that way. Well, sometimes I do, if it’s for a bit, but… [it] usually gets you misinformation.” [27] Where Kazan dismissed the American casting apparatus for its ineffectiveness, Clurman disdained its disruption of the creative process and its imposition of artificial, inhumane and confining limits on the artistic autonomy of the director. By so emphasizing the intangible authority of creative and executive discernment as essential to directorial autonomy, Clurman and Kazan, alongside their less famous educational counterparts, also mystified casting a constitutive and sacrosanct feature of a director’s artistic expression. By the 1990s, however, the question of whether such casting decisions were an independent expression of a performance-maker’s creative authority garnered a different measure of critique. High-profile casting controversies (like that surrounding the 1991 Broadway production of Miss Saigon ) amplified how “traditional” casting habits rehearsed by the “open market” impinged upon employment opportunities available to minority and women performers. Legal scholars Jennifer L. Sheppard, Heekyung Esther Kim and Russell K. Robinson each separately examined whether a hypothetical plaintiff might challenge a particular casting decision as employment discrimination under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which held, in part, that employer prerogative was inadequate justification for favoring one identifiable group over another in matters hiring; in tandem, the scholars also assessed whether casting decisions might be considered protected speech under the First Amendment. Though their discussions remained in emphatically hypothetical (especially given the tricky and unresolved legal question of whether entertainers were rightly considered employees under federal law), all three scholars agreed that any legal challenge to a casting decision under employment law would certainly confront (and likely fail) the test of whether a director’s or producer’s casting decision might be considered a form of creative expression and, thus, a form of protected speech. For Russell K. Robinson, “our constitutional commitment to free speech does not exact a wholesale abandonment of antidiscrimination requirements,” [28] while both Kim and Sheppard advocated for voluntary shifts in casting practice and aesthetics so that, as Sheppard concluded, “employment opportunities for minority actors may be increased, while artistic freedom is preserved.” [29] (283). Thus, as casting became increasingly understood as a constitutive feature of a theatre-maker’s creative expression, claims of artistic authority, autonomy and freedom also animated the mythos of casting in American popular performance. Meritocracy The “open market” of American casting, which Isadora Bennett so celebrated and which Harold Clurman so loathed, was itself premised on the third core principle of the mythos of casting: meritocracy. Indeed, embedded in the mythos of casting is the promise that equitable access to the casting process permits the best performers to be seen, thereby presumptively enabling directors, producers and others to identify those performers best equipped to execute their artistic vision. Underlying this promise lay the ideal that, if the flow of supply and demand could be effectively marshaled, the best actor would certainly get the role. Indeed, this meritocratic ideal — matching the best actor to the role — bridged the democratizing impulse of equitable access to casting opportunities with the discerning exactitude of artistic autonomy. But even such an emphasis on finding the “best actor” for the role was itself a noteworthy, twentieth century turn. It is an intriguing historical coincidence then that the same years that remake the American casting process as something of an “open market” also mark the arrival of several high profile contests in which the notion of “best actor” falls into particular relief within the American entertainment industries. Beginning with the Oscars in the 1920s (continuing with the Tonys in the 1940s, the Obies in the 1950s and all the way through SAG’s “The Actor” in the 1990s), these notably ritualized, annual anointings of actors as “the best” emerge as a peculiarly hallmark facet of American popular performance. To be sure, competitions among actors were not an innovation of the twentieth century, with stories reaching all the way back to the acting competitions in fifth century Athens. Even so, most previous historical contestations among actors — whether between La Clairon and Madame Dumesnil in eighteenth century Paris or between Forrest and Macready in the New York of 1848 — also staged a contestation over distinctions of region, social class, aesthetics, and philosophy, with the embodied work of actors manifesting those particular divisions. Yet, in these twentieth century American contest, this multitude of best actors are so named not for enacting cultural values but for the cultural value of enactment itself. These many annual rituals also verify the meritocratic ideal of “best actor” that animates the American casting process. Within the mythos of casting, the anointing of “best actor” connects all segments in the great theatrical chain of being, drawing a connection between the tween actor pretending in her bedroom to the acclaimed icon accepting her trophy in a glittering televised ceremony. Arriving as a sort of post-dramatic conclusion to the ostensible performance, every “best actor” award tacitly ratifies the effective (and largely hidden) operation of a casting mechanism that first delivered this particular actor to the very role that then earned them the honorific of “best actor.” The “best actor” trophy then stands as a tangibly material symbol of the twined ideals of equity, artistry and meritocracy that mutually constitute the mythos of casting in American popular performance. The mythos of casting might be invoked to sustain aspiring artists in the leanest times; likewise, it might be summoned to sustain a perhaps illusory sense of affinity amidst a casting controversy. Even among those who maintain diametrically opposed points of view over the best way to determine who the best actor for the role might be, the mythos of casting affirms that the quest for the best actor remains an ideal worth pursuing. At once a lubricant and a palliative, as much a weapon as it is a shield, the mythos of casting works to provide assurance not only that there is a method to the madness of the casting process but also that the machinery of casting works. All the while, the mythos of casting continues to accomplish its primary purpose – to mystify the actual working conditions of actors, especially as they labor to find work. References [1] A noteworthy and productive departure from this pattern can be found in Daniel Banks, “The Welcome Table: Casting for an Integrated Society,” Theatre Topics 23 no. 1 (March 2013), 1-18. [2] The pioneering template of this genre is Michael Shurtleff’s Audition: Everything an Actor Needs to Know to Get the Part (New York: Walker Publishing, 1978); a more contemporary model might be Jen Rudin’s Confessions of a Casting Director: Help Actors Land Any Role with Secrets from Inside the Audition Room (New York: It Books, 2013). [3] Angela Chia-yi Pao, No Safe Spaces: Re-casting Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in American Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 2. [4] Joseph Roach, It (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 1. [5] Claire Boothe Luce, “The ‘Love Goddess’ Who Never Found Any Love,” LIFE Magazine (August 7, 1964), 64. [6] Stephen B. Armstrong, ed., John Frankenheimer: Interviews, Essays, and Profiles (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013): 89; as quoted in Casting By , directed by Tom Donahue (2013; Brooklyn, NY: First Run Features, 2014), DVD; and David K. Irving, Fundamentals of Film Directing (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publishing, 2010), 30. [7] Treye Greene, “12 Actors Who Almost Had the Part,” Huffington Post , 24 January 2013, accessed 5 December 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/24/actors-recast-in-movies_n_2543452.html; David Weiner, “What If? ‘Pulp Fiction’ Near-Miss Casting,” ET Online , 13 November 2013, accessed 5 December 2014, http://www.etonline.com/movies/140840_What_If_Pulp_Fiction_Near_Miss_Casting/; and Damien Bona, Starring John Wayne as Genghis Khan: Hollywood’s All-Time Worst Casting Blunders (New York: Citadel Press, 1996). [8] Robert Cohen, Theatre, 5 th Edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005), 535. [9] For usefully comparative summaries of early twentieth century actor union activity, see Sean P. Holmes, “All Work or No Play: Key Themes in the History of the American Stage Actor as Worker,” European Journal of American Studies 2 (2008), online; and Pamela Robertson Wojcik, “Typecasting.” Criticism 45 no. 2 (Spring 2003), 225-26. For an aptly detailed narrative account of the 1919 AEA strike and its impact on the union, see Robert Simonson’s Performance of the Century: 100 Years of Actors’ Equity Association and the Rise of Professional American Theater (Applause: New York, 2012), especially 14-61. [10] An efficient overview of AEA’s conflicts with both the Actors’ Forum and the Federal Theatre Project can be found in the epilogue to Sean P. Holmes, Weavers of Dreams, Unite!: Actors’ Unionism in Early Twentieth-Century America (University if Illinois Press: Urbana, 2013), 173-178. See also Simonson, 72-73. [11] Holmes (2013), 177. [12] Stephen Vaughn, Ronald Reagan and the Struggle for Black Dignity in Cinema, 1937-1953, The Journal of Negro History 77 no. 1 (Winter 1992), 8-9; “Committee on the Integration of the Negro in the Theatre,” Box 36 Folder 1, Actors Equity Association Records, Tamiment Library/Wagner Archives, Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, New York University. See also the “Equality” chapter in Robert Simonson’s Performance of the Century , 44-173. [13] “‘Integrated Showcase’ Well Performed, but Did Show Prove Its Point?,” Variety (22 April 1959): 78, 82; “Orson Bean Rebuts on ‘Integration’; Says Race Consciousness Is Brief,” Variety (29 April 1959), 69-74. [14] See Angela Pao’s account in tandem with that of Ana Deboo’s briefer summary in, “The Non-Traditional Casting Project Continues into the ’90s ,” The Drama Review 34 no.4 (Winter 1990), 188-191. [15] Play Production Primer: A Handbook for the Beginner or the Experienced Drama Director and All Who Are Curious About That Alluring World Behind the Footlights, Revised Edition. (Salt Lake City, UT: General Boards of the Mutual Improvement Association, 1948),185. [16] Blandford Jennings, “Rehearsing the School Play,” Dramatics Magazine (March 1948), 9-10. [17] Esther McCabe, “Casting One-Acts in a Small High School,” Dramatics Magazine (February 1948), 13. [18] Sam Boyd, Jr. “Techniques of Play Rehearsal,” Dramatics Magazine (April 1948), 6-7. [19] Talbot Pearson, “Rehearsal Procedures,” Dramatics Magazine (May 1948), 6-7. [20] Isadora Bennett, “The Training Program of the American Theatre Wing,” Educational Theatre Journal 7:1 (March 1955), 32. [21] Qtd. in Richard Schechner, “Ford, Rockefeller, and Theatre,” The Tulane Drama Review 10:1 (Autumn 1965), 35. [22] Frank M. Whiting, An Introduction to the Theatre (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1954), 157. [23] McCabe, 13. [24] These quotations are drawn, variously, from Harold Clurman, On Directing (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 65-68. [25] Helen Krich Chinoy, The Group Theatre: Passion, Politics and Performance in the Depression Era (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 14, 252. [26] Harold Clurman, On Directing (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 65-68. [27] Elia Kazan, Kazan on Film: The Master Director Discusses His Films , ed. Jeff Young (New York: Newmarket Press, 2001), 130-131. [28] Russell K. Robinson, “ Casting and Caste-ing: Reconciling Artistic Freedom and Antidiscrimination Norms ,” California Law Review 95, no. 1 (2007), 4. [29] Heekyung Esther Kim, “Race as a Hiring/Casting Criterion: If Laurence Olivier was Rejected for the Role of Othello in Othello, Would He Have a Valid Title VII Claim?” Hastings Communication and Entertainment Law Journal 20 (1997-1998), 397-419; and Jennifer L. Sheppard, “Theatrical Casting – Discrimination or Artistic Freedom?,” Columbia-VLA Journal of Law & the Arts 15 (1990-1991), 267. Footnotes About The Author(s) BRIAN EUGENIO HERRERA ’s work examines the history of gender, sexuality and race within and through popular performance. He is author of Latin Numbers: Playing Latino in 20th Century US Popular Performance (Michigan) and The Latina/o Theatre Commons 2013 National Convening: A Narrative Report (HowlRound), as well as articles in Theatre Journal , Modern Drama , and TDR . Herrera is presently developing a scholarly history of casting in American entertainment. He is Assistant Professor of Theater at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts. Guest Editor: Jonathan Chambers Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Phoebe Rumsey Editorial Assistant: Fabian Escalona Advisory Board: Bill Demastes Amy E. Hughes Jorge Huerta Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Beth Osborne Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Esther Kim Lee Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction (JADT 27.2, 2015) The Best Actor for the Role, or the Mythos of Casting in American Popular Performance Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men Capable Hands: The Myth of American Independence in D.W. Gregory's The Good Daughter Rooting Out Historical Mythologies; William Dunlap’s A Trip to Niagara and its Sophisticated Nineteenth Century Audience. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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

Jennifer Goodlander Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 2 Visit Journal Homepage Representation from Cambodia to America: Musical Dramaturgies in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band Jennifer Goodlander By Published on May 23, 2022 Download Article as PDF For many, Cambodia and Cambodian American identities remain “unrepresentable.” [1] Jonathan H. X. Lee troubles the relationships between Southeast Asian, American, and specific national identities to suggest a rethinking of identity that might “arise from calibrating subjectivities and internal-alchemies of memories, histories, and visions.” [2] For people from Cambodia, questions of citizenship or status further come into play when considering how the United States shares responsibility for genocide because its policy of bombing the Cambodian-Vietnamese border instigated the political situation that allowed Pol Pot to come to power. Additionally, recent US immigration policy has resulted in the deportation of hundreds of Cambodian Americans to Cambodia, even though many of them have no memory of their “home” land. How then does Lauren Yee in her new play Cambodian Rock Band ( CRB ) craft a moving story of a father and daughter in Cambodia while complicating discourses about Cambodian and Cambodian American identities and responsibility? One of the top ten most-produced plays in 2019 in US professional theatres, CRB will go on a highly anticipated national tour in 2022. The play tells the story of Neery, who is working in Cambodia to help bring the top villains of the Khmer Rouge to justice, and her father, whom she discovers is one of the few survivors of the regime’s infamous prison, S-21. Although physical violence is not completely absent from the play, it is not the focus of emotional or narrative impact. [3] Music moves the play from family drama into larger discussions of truth and healing, memory and politics. Cathy J. Schlund-Vials names this complicated relationship “Cambodian Syndrome,” “a transnational set of amnesiac politics revealed through hegemonic modes of public policy and memory.” [4] The often illusionistic play destabilizes truth through music. Jill Dolan describes the limits of illusionism and focuses on primarily the visual and textual apparatus of representation that might be used to destabilize hegemonic readings. [5] I am proposing using music outside the limits of Brechtian tactics; it is music, not the bodies onstage, that offers the dramaturgical means for representation. Musical dramaturgy examines the way music functions, beyond invoking emotion or creating atmosphere, within a theatrical production; “what music does , rather than what is .” [6] Often, within musical dramaturgy, the focus is primarily, or even solely, on how music lives within or creates the dramatic text. [7] I expand this notion, because music, like the stage itself, is “haunted,” to borrow Marvin Carlson’s term. [8] In CBR , lyric, melody/harmony, cultures, and histories inform what we hear and what that sound means. The play opens with a live band on stage playing two songs before the house lights dim and the dialogue begins. The bouncy, joyful sound of “Cyclo” (both the name of the song and of the band) begins in the diatonic scale commonly used by American rock bands. This is in contrast to the opening refrain of the next song “Uku,” which features a pentatonic scale, the five-note scale that often suggests an “Asian” sound to the listener. A haunting flute dances lightly against the rhythm of the guitar and is complemented by percussion that invokes sounds of distant thunder or gunfire. A female singer adds another level of sound, as her voice invokes a feeling of longing. The words are in Khmer, but the sound suggests the meaning, even without translation: The windy season makes me think of my villageI think of the old people, young people, aunts and unclesWe used to run and play, hide and seekBut now we are far apart [9] This pair of songs challenges and supports various misconceptions of Asian identities as Other and complicates global connections between Asia and the United States. Music serves as a backbone for the play and a significant element of the story; the songs are a mix of Cambodian and American radio-hits from the past and new compositions by the California-based group Dengue Fever. The audience experiences the music in the immediate present, but the music invokes the past and another culture through language and sound. Just as the music jumps across time and locale, the story of Cambodian-born Chum reconciling his relationship with his American daughter Neery explores different cultural values and intertwined histories. Yee’s deep obsession with the music of Dengue Fever inspired her to write the play, but as the play developed, the music also became central to the play’s dramaturgy. The songs do not always propel the action forward, as it would in a musical, but director Chay Yew explains, “the music is actually another character in Lauren’s play.” [10] Discussions of the play often mention that the music makes the play accessible because rock music would be familiar to an audience generally unfamiliar with Cambodia—“music is universal and defies borders.” [11] I argue that the music does more than make the play accessible. In this essay, I use CRB as a case to explore how musical dramaturgies might articulate complex Asian identities that complicate the limits of visuality. Similarly, recent scholarship on Asian and Asian American identities also focuses on the aural. [12] I use music, as Daphne Lei describes, to move identity from a binary of Asian/Asian American to a neither/nor state where “the past is ‘forgotten’ but the future is not yet reached,” and ends with the hope that “interlinked Asian and American ethnicities can be created, negotiated, and performed.” [13] I argue that the music within the play offers an alternative means to engage some of the complex relationships between Southeast Asia and the United States and mirrors a similar need for engagement within scholarship between Asian performance and Asian American performance. From the beginning, the play establishes the limits between visual versus aural regimes of knowledge. As the opening music concludes, everyone is seated and the house lights dim. A man appears onstage to thank and introduce the band. He says, “From their first, last, ONLY album, recorded in Phnom Penh, April 1974. A tape that—like so much of Cambodia’s music of the time—no longer exists,” then he changes his tone, “but that’s not what you think of when you think of Cambodia, is it? YOU think of something a little more like this.” [14] The man clicks through several slides of Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge that the stage directions describe as “Black and white. Gruesome.” [15] The images are from Cambodia in 1975-1979, when the Khmer Rouge, the name commonly given to Cambodia’s Communist Party, attempted to turn the country back to Year Zero. They emptied the cities, abolished the currency, dismantled education, and sought to eliminate any reference to the past or foreign influence. More than two million Cambodians died, some from starvation or illness, but many were also killed for petty crimes, such as stealing food. The country’s elite prisoners, including artists and intellectuals, were held at detention centers where they were tortured, forced to confess their “crimes,” and driven out of town to dig a shallow grave before they were killed. More than 20,000 people are thought to have been tortured and executed at Tuol Sleng (commonly called S-21), a former high school in Phnom Penh. When the Vietnamese liberated the city, only seven people were left alive in the prison. [16] Now a museum, Tuol Sleng represents both the power and limits of visual representation. This site of both horror and later attempts at reconciliation is one of the most popular tourist sites in Cambodia. When I visited in 2016, I was overwhelmed by the hundreds of photos hanging on the walls—mug shots of victims and documentation of the torture they endured. Scholar and Khmer Rouge survivor Boreth Ly describes how “the Khmer Rouge was very visually focused. It was a scopic regime that enforced visual surveillance on its victim and deliberately traumatized and destroyed their vision.” [17] When he was twelve years old, he and his grandmother finally returned to their home after four years of forced labor. The house was empty, and they searched for any photographs of their relatives, but they were all gone. He contrasts this loss with the multitude of photos at Tuol Sleng, documenting the prisoners who were executed. [18] These photographs have circulated globally in museums, books, and online as the primary representation of the genocide. Michelle Caswall, describes how, “a complex layering of silencing is revealed” [19] and “Because of both the transformative power of the creation of these mug shots and the complete oppressiveness of Tuol Sleng as a total institution within a totalitarian state, there are no whispers of the victims in these records; the photographs, like the dead they depict, remain frustratingly silent.” [20] The problem is that the images confound the viewer and render the victim silent. Yee engages the problem of visual representation through the many overt mentions of photographs and seeing in the play. The man in the opening is Kaing Guek Eav, or Comrade Duch as he was known, the head officer of S-21. [21] He taunts the gruesome images of the genocide—“boring,” “tragique,” “genocide, genocide, genocide, boo,” and threatens that he is always “watching watching always watching.” [22] Later, Neary realizes that her father, Chum, is likely the eighth survivor featured in a photograph. She confronts him; he confirms his identity but refuses to testify. Chum argues that the truth cannot be found in a photograph, and that if Duch is guilty, so is he. In a flashback, Yee suggests that the photographs that really matter are the ones that never existed. Chum delayed his family’s escape so his band could record the last song on their album. They want to take a photograph, but they forgot to bring a camera; there was no photo and there was no escape. These examples illustrate the complicated ways that visual evidence is threatening, unreliable, and incomplete. Another method is required to sort through the various relationships between Cambodia and American identities in the play and music offers that means. Two songs played within the prison space towards the end of the play are especially effective at dramatizing this history. Chum is eventually arrested and brought to S-21. He tries to hide his identity by claiming he is a banana seller, but he eventually ends up in a room with Duch himself. Duch asks about some words that Chum wrote and learns that they are the lyrics to Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” Duch orders Chum to play the song, but Chum requires a guitar because, “I just want you to hear how it’s supposed to be played. So you know the absolute truth,” and for the first time in months, the sound of music calms Duch and allows him to sleep. [23] Chum’s words echo Dylan’s own feelings that a song is more than its lyrics; “they’re meant to be sung, not read.” [24] Dramaturgically the insertion of this quintessential American anti-war song echoes perceptions about the futility of the American effort in Southeast Asia, and especially Cambodia. Even though Dylan conceived of this song as a big statement to unite the civils rights movement and folk music, many critics dismissed it as an “empty gesture” with “little political relevance.” [25] Perhaps Duch is lulled to sleep by this reminder that likewise America has little relevance and is unlikely to come save the suffering people in Cambodia. While in prison, Chum writes, and on the night of his scheduled execution, he plays one last song, “Hammer and Nail,” the first half of which is in English: Something old Something new Something borrowed And something blue Couldn’t keep me from trying and fighting Doing everything I can To somehow end up with you again. You can call me a fool And I know that I am Won’t let you slip through my fingers Just like sand [26] On the surface, the song is about a pending wedding and a possible break-up, but the singer promises to fight for his love. Musically it bridges the sound of American folk and Cambodian surfer rock. From the first line, “Something Old,” until “just like sand,” the chord progression moves slowly up the scale, and structurally is not unlike the Dylan song. The second part repeats the lyrics in Khmer, but this time with back-up singers adding an angelic, otherworldly quality. In the context of the scene, it is about fighting for life, about fighting for something bigger than oneself. The play ends with Chum and his daughter playing “I’m Sixteen,” originally by Ros Serey Sothea, together in the prison/museum. Sothea was one of the most beloved singers of Cambodian rock before the Khmer Rouge, and “I’m Sixteen” functions as an anthem connecting Cambodians to the past. Also, this mesmerizing anthem both inspired and is featured on Dengue Fever’s first album. [27] The song and the moment onstage combine to create a kind of, to borrow Sean Metzger’s term, “temporal folding,” where “subjects emerge in a relation of figures through one another, through actions in the present associated with those in the past” that allows for a simultaneous representation of past/present and Asian/Asian American. [28] The staging reinforces the power of music, as the stage lights shift to indicate that the sun is coming up and the stage directions read “behind them, the sun rises higher and higher, blinding us. We see the bandmates’ silhouettes as they rock out to one last song.” [29] Sight is obliterated, and representation happens in the music alone. Postscript Since the world premiere of CRB in 2018, the context of the show and even this article has changed, making the play’s message even more imperative, and music continues to be the crux of representation. On July 20, 2020, in response to cancelled productions due to Covid–19 shutdowns and the growing Black Lives Matter protests after the death of George Floyd, Lauren Yee and Joe Ngo [30] announced the #CRBChallenge . Ngo articulated a debt to the Black civil rights movement and the intertwined histories of rock music: “Who hasn’t borrowed Afro-Caribbean beats?” [31] The challenge called for singers around the world to recreate songs from the show or Cambodia more generally in order to raise awareness about and to fundraise for organizations working for both Black and Cambodian American communities. The resulting videos, with #CRBChallenge , demonstrate a multi-faceted connection to the play, its story and music, and the depth of talent among Asians and Asian Americans. References [1] Ashley Thompson, “Forgetting to Remember, Again: On Curatorial Practice and ‘Cambodian Art’ in the Wake of Genocide,” diacritics 41 no. 2 (2013): 82-109. [2] Jonathan H. X. Lee, “Southeast Asian Americans: Memories, Visions, and Subjectivities,” in Southeast Asian Diaspora in the United States: Memories and Visions, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow , ed. Jonathan H. X. Lee, Cambridge Scholars Publisher (Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom: 2014), 1. [3] The script calls for several scenes of torture and violence, however, I have read hundreds of reviews and these scenes are not the focus and rarely mentioned. [4] Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 13. [5] Jill Dolan, Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 1-3. [6] Kim Baston, “Not Just ‘Evocative’: The Function of Music in Theatre,” Australasian Drama Studies 67 (2015), 5. Emphasis in original. [7] Carl Dahlhaus and Mary Whittal, “What is a Musical Drama?” Cambridge Opera Journal 1, no. 2 (1989): 95-96. [8] Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). [9] Lauren Yee, “Cambodian Rock Band,” American Theatre 35, no. 6 (July/August 2018), 49. The songs used in the production are written by Dengue Fever. In my descriptions of the music, I am relying on my memory of the 2019 production at the Victory Gardens, Chicago, IL, directed by Marti Lyons, and the cast album that was released in May 2020. [10] Donatella Galella, “Listening to Cambodian Rock Band: An Interview with Lauren Yee and Chay Yew,” Performance Matters 6, no. 2 (2020), 127. [11] Ibid., 130. [12] For more on Asian American identities and accents see Shilpa Davé, “Racial Accents, Hollywood Casting, and Asian American Studies,” Cinema Journal 56 no. 3 (2017): 142-147. Also for insight on performing race and the music of Dengue Fever see Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, A Race So Different: Performance and Law in Asian America (New York: New York University Press, 2013), especially chapter 5. Spoken word as music, which playwright Chay Yew calls the “nonmusical musical,” is also key to identity in Stephen Hong Sohn, “Calculated Cacophonies: The Queer Asian American Family and the Nonmusical Musical in Chay Yew’s Wonderland ,” The Journal of American Drama and Theatre 29, vol. 1 (2016). [13] Daphne Lei, “Staging the Binary: Asian American Theatre in the Late Twentieth Century,” A Companion to Twentieth Century American Drama , ed. David Krasner (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 301-317. [14] Yee, CRB , 49. [15] Ibid. [16] David P. Chandler, Voices From S-21: Terror and History In Pol Pot’s Secret Prison (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). [17] Boreth Ly, “Of Performance and the Persistent Temporality of Trauma: Memory, Art, and Visions,” positions: east asia cultures critique 16, no. 11 (2008), 118. [18] Ibid., 115-116. [19] Michelle Caswell, Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory, and the Photographic Record in Cambodia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), 7. [20] Ibid., 158. [21] For a history about Duch and his trial, see Alexander Laban Hinton, Man Or Monster?: The Trial of a Khmer Rouge Torturer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). [22] Yee, CRB , 50. [23] Music as a tool of survival is perhaps taken from the real-life story of Arn-Chorn-Pond whose life was saved because he played music for the Khmer Rouge. This story is retold by Patricia McCormick in the novel Never Fall Down (New York: Balzer + Bray, 2012). [24] Dylan quoted in Larry Starr, Listening to Bob Dylan (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021), 1. [25] Starr, Listening , 34. [26] Yee, CRB , 65. [27] Nic Cohn, “A Voice from the Killing Fields,” The Guardian , 19 May 2007, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2007/may/20/worldmusic.features (accessed 25 January 2022). [28] Sean Metzger, “At the Vanishing Point: Theater and Asian/American Critique,” American Quarterly 63, no. 2 (2011), 279. [29] Yee, CRB , 69. [30] Ngo, whose parents are Chinese Cambodian and survived the Khmer Rouge, played the original Chum in CRB and has recreated the role for numerous productions. [31] “Welcome to the CRB Challenge! #CRBChallenge ,” Facebook, 5 July 2020, https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=282008519582298 (accessed 20 January 2022). Footnotes About The Author(s) Jennifer Goodlander is an Associate Professor at Indiana University in the Department of Comparative Literature. Jennifer has published numerous articles and two books: Women in the Shadows: Gender, Puppets, and the Power of Tradition in Bali (Ohio University Press, 2016) and Puppets and Cities: Articulating Identities in Southeast Asia (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2018). Her current research looks at transnational Southeast Asian identities as expressed in performance, literature, and art. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration Introduction to Asian American Dramaturgies Behind the Scenes of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies On Young Jean Lee in Young Jean Lee's We're Gonna Die by Christine Mok Representation from Cambodia to America: Musical Dramaturgies in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band The Dramaturgical Sensibility of Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap and Cambodian Rock Band Holding up a Lens to the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists: A Photo Essay Theatre in Hawaiʻi: An “Illumination of the Fault Lines” of Asian American Theatre Randall Duk Kim: A Sojourn in the Embodiment of Words Reappropriation, Reparative Creativity, and Feeling Yellow in Generic Ensemble Company’s The Mikado: Reclaimed Dance Planets Dramaturgy of Deprivation (없다): An Invitation to Re-Imagine Ways We Depict Asian American and Adopted Narratives of Trauma Clubhouse: Stories of Empowered Uncanny Anomalies Off-Yellow Time vs Off-White Space: Activist Asian American Dramaturgy in Higher Education Asian American Dramaturgies in the Classroom: A Reflection Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

By Stéphanie Bérard, with Frank Hentschker | An anthology of six contemporary Francophone Caribbean plays. < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the TCG Bookstore or Amazon.com. You can also get in touch with us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu New Plays from the Caribbean Stéphanie Bérard, with Frank Hentschker Download PDF New Plays from the Caribbean Segal Center Publication 2023 The Segal Center anthology New Plays from the Caribbean unveils the rich and diverse production of contemporary Francophone Caribbean theatre, allowing new dramatic voices to be heard and to travel around the world. The creative and innovative mixing of styles and languages (French and Creole) by playwrights from Haiti, Martinique, and Guadeloupe represent the next wave of politically engaged Caribbean theatre. The plays tell the stories and histories of contemporary Caribbean people by exploring passion, desire, and the collective experience of trauma and loss after a natural disaster. The plays denounce social, racial, and gender violence by staging real-life dramas and documentary theatre. The anthology is composed of six plays: - Adoration (L'Adoration) by Jean-René Lemoine (France/Haiti), translated by Amanda Gann; - And the Whole World Quakes/Chronicle of a Slaughter Foretold, (De toute la terre le grand effarement ) by Guy Régis Jr.(Haiti), translated by Judith Miller - Ladjablès-Wild Woman (Ladjablès) by Daniely Francisque, translated by Danielle Carlottu-Smith - Family (Une vie familiale) by Gaël Octavia, (Martinique) - Street Sad (Trottoir Chagrin ) by Luc Saint-Eloy (Guadeloupe), translated by Josh Cohen - The Day My Father Killed Me (Le jour où mon père m'a tué) by Magali Solignat and Charlotte Boimare (Guadeloupe), translated by Amelie Parenteau. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

By Daniel Gerould | A volume of previously uncollected writings by Daniel Gerould from Comparative Literature, Modern Drama, PAJ, TDR, SEEP, yale/theater and other journals. < 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 Quick Change Daniel Gerould Download PDF 28 Theatre Essays and 4 Plays in Translation A volume of previously uncollected writings by Daniel Gerould from Comparative Literature, Modern Drama, PAJ, TDR, SEEP, yale/theater and other journals. Quick Change includes essays about Polish, Russian and French theatre, theories of melodrama and comedy, historical and medical simulations, Symbolist drama, erotic puppet theatre, comédie rosse at the Grand Guignol, Witkacy’s Doubles, Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, Mrożek, Battleship Potemkin, and other topics. Translations include Andrzej Bursa’s Count Cagliostro’s Animals, Henry Monnier‘s The Student and the Tart, and Oscar Méténier‘s Little Bugger and Meat-Ticket. Foreword by Richard Schechner Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

Eric M. Glover 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 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented Eric M. Glover By Published on April 29, 2021 Download Article as PDF The 1991 Lincoln Center Theater (LCT) production of Langston Hughes (1902-67) and Zora Neale Hurston’s (1891-60) 1931 antimusical The Mule Bone represents a milestone in Black theater history. The 1991 production resurrected a historical collaboration between two major Black artists and it used their work to offer a pointed critique of the 1990s New Jim Crow and US carceral system. In The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity , Raymond Knapp argues that in an antimusical, Black performers direct and turn the form back on itself by ironically reflecting the conventions of the genre. [1] The Black performer in an antimusical simultaneously deals critically with the form as a system of white supremacy while engaging in song and dance. In the brief exploration below, I focus on two episodes in The Mule Bone —the first, a trial set in a Black church, and the second, a song that depicts Black stowaways on train cars. Each suggests how the original 1931 work and its 1991 adaptation make milestone interventions in performing the policing of Black bodies in the Jim Crow and New Jim Crow eras respectively. Hughes and Hurston, like activist Michelle Alexander, had new ways to address problems, such as violence against and surveillance of black bodies, if only readers had paid close attention to their alternatives to practices that would produce the profit-driven prison industrial complex. Animated by a staged reading held in 1989 at the Rites and Reason Theatre (RRT), [2] Providence, where playwright and director George Houston Bass [3] laid the groundwork for reimagining the The Mule Bone, Lincoln Center picked up where Rites and Reason left off. Lincoln Center gave the antimusical the presentation that had eluded its authors back in the 1930s in part because of The Theatre Guild’s Theresa Helburn’s conceptual bias against it and in part because of the falling out between Hughes and Hurston during their collaboration on the work. Thus the 1991 production of The Mule Bone becomes significant for premiering a book and a score written, directed, choreographed, and designed largely by a Black creative team. Bass wrote a prologue and an epilogue introducing Hurston as a character, composer Taj Mahal set five of Hughes’s previously published poems to music, director Michael Schultz and choreographer Dianne McIntyre helped performers give characters body and voice, and scenic designer Edward Burbridge and lighting designer Allen Lee Hughes transformed the physical setting of Broadway’s Ethel Barrymore Theater into Jim Crow-era Eatonville. [4] Building on the early Black musicals of Eubie Blake, Will Marion Cook, and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Hughes and Hurston levy a critique of Jim Crow in everyday life—a critique thrown into bold relief against what Michelle Alexander calls “the New Jim Crow,” the mass incarceration that builds on the legacy of Jim Crow using custom and law to secure a disproportionate amount of Black people incarcerated through the three-strikes rule for violent-felony convictions and the War on Drugs. [5] Thus, the Lincoln Center production marks a milestone in Black theater because Schultz and McIntyre’s interpretation helped to reclaim Hughes and Hurston’s places as radical political philosophers. Hughes and Hurston’s The Mule Bone , based on Hurston’s short story, “The Bone of Contention” (1929), about a political and religious fight between Baptists and Methodists, tells the story of a bromance between two figures in 1924 in Hurston’s hometown, Eatonville, in Orange County, Florida. In the short story, Dave, an angler, a Baptist, a hunter, and a local Nimrod, and Jim, a hen thief and a Methodist, do not have a bromance. In the musical Dave and Jim are transformed into a Baptist and a cakewalker and a guitarist and a Methodist, respectively. The events of The Mule Bone unfold around Dave and Jim’s characters. “Ain’t they playin’ somewhere for de white folks?” Daisy Taylor, the object of both Dave and Jim’s affections, asks. [6] Dave and Jim arrive from a performance engagement in a nearby all-white town and they treat the citizens of Eatonville to song and dance. They perform their song, “But I Rode Some,” with Dave dancing the cakewalk and Jim playing the guitar. Their desire to win Daisy drives the action forward but Dave stands in the way of Jim’s desire. Daisy chooses Dave but Jim lams him over the head with a mule bone in anger. Jim must stand trial before a judge and jury of his peers. “Now, who’s gonna take me home?” Daisy asks. [7] Act 2 takes place in the Macedonia Baptist Church which also serves as the courtroom. As James R. Grossman notes, “African-Americans in general looked to the church as an institution independent of white domination,” [8] suggesting that in this instance the church may have offered a site to administer Black rather than white justice. Joe Clarke, mayor of Eatonville, presides at the bench and other citizens serve in the capacities of defense counsel (Reverend Simms), prosecution (Elder Long), and town marshal (Lum Boger). The church gallery is full of Dave and Jim’s supporters, the division between Baptists and Methodists becoming more and more pronounced. Joe finds Jim guilty of assault against Dave and makes Jim leave town, rehabilitate himself, repent for his sins, and return in no less than two years. “We colored folks don’t need no jail,” Lounger, a citizen of Eatonville, declares. [9] However, Dave and Jim repair their relationship and run away together. The Mule Bone illuminates how theater invited Dave and Jim, the characters in the antimusical, to survive and thrive under Jim Crow. Dave and Jim earn their living by performing for white audiences. [10] Dave and Jim’s songs, framed as diegetic performances, clue the audience in to the fact that they are in control of who they are and what they want: “Dem foots done put plenty bread in our moufs,” Jim says of Dave’s dancing. Dave replies, “Wid de help of dat box, Jim,” referring to Jim’s guitar playing. [11] Given that they have to contend with “two competing forces: the demands to conform to white notions of black inferiority and the desire to resist these demands by undermining and destabilizing entrenched stereotypes of blacks onstage [sic],” the audience sees “Dave” and “Jim” in the imaginations of white audiences juxtaposed against the “real” Dave and Jim. [12] Dave and Jim’s proxies, Hughes and Hurston, transform the minstrel stereotype that Dave and Jim perform to undertake social justice. Through their songs and dances, Dave and Jim imagine alternative worlds for themselves. For example, they re-create their subjugation by white audiences in “But I Rode Some” but they also ironically find their antidote to the internalization of white supremacy. Dave and Jim’s “But I Rode Some” tells the story of a stowaway on a train captured and beaten by a white conductor, before being thrown in jail and shoved onto a chain gang: First thing I saw in jail Was a pot of peas. But I rode some, But I rode some. First thing I saw in jail Was a pot of peas. But I rode some, But I rode some. The peas was good, The meat was fat, Fell in love with the chain gang jus’ for that, But I rode some. (90) Hughes and Hurston reflect on the fact that Black people in the 1920s-30s often experienced denial of a sense of place and displacement by taking up themes of escape and resistance in the musical number. Even in the face of violence, Dave and Jim resist: “Grabbed me by the neck, /And led me to the door, /Rapped me cross the head with a Forty-Four, / But I rode some!” [13] The song structure itself has roots and routes both in the era of slavery and freedom and influenced other genres of popular music around the world. [14] Illicit travel by passenger train, often called “riding the blinds,” offered a dangerous way for Black passengers to experience a thrill of autonomy. They parked their bodies between the locomotive tender (coal car) and the “blind” end of a baggage car to hitch rides from the South to the North and everywhere in between. If conductors caught a Black person riding the blinds, conductors would (literally) throw the passenger from the train. [15] Through its strategic use of irony and subversion, the antimusical The Mule Bone is as much about the affective and cognitive powers of representational visibility as it is about Black people’s resilience. It was important to Hughes and Hurston that their Black audience saw a community of Black characters enjoying and loving life–Jim Crow be damned–self-governing their city and supporting its citizens. Looking at its 1931 and 1991 histories alongside each other invites scholars of Black theater to imagine how artists working more than half a century apart have deployed their creative powers to combat patterns of systemic racism that echo across the decades. References [1] Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity (Princeton UP, 2006), 91. [2] Rites and Reason Theatre, based in the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University, is dedicated to producing continental African and diasporic stage works. [3] Bass, in his capacity as Langston Hughes’s estate’s executor, wrote two scenes for the production and he edited a critical edition of the script. [4] As directed by Schultz and choreographed by McIntyre, the opening night cast of the original Broadway production assembled the floor and the walls of a general store which also served as a jook joint with barrels and crates. A train track, beginning off stage left in the fly loft, formed a semicircle around the general store. The opening night cast also assembled the Macedonia Baptist Church which also served as the courtroom, including multiple rows of pews that faced downstage center, a stained-glass window upstage center, and the bench located downstage right. A community of Black people developed through song and dance in some of the most arresting musical numbers in the video of The Mule Bone that is on file at the Theater on Film and Tape Archive at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, New York. [5] Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010), 55-56. [6] George Houston Bass and Jr. Henry Louis Gates, Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life (Harper Perennial, 1991), 58. [7] Bass and Gates, 99. [8] Robin D. G. Kelley and Earl Lewis, To Make Our World Anew: A History of African-Americans since 1880 (Oxford UP, 2005), 90. [9] Bass and Gates, 78. [10] Musician Kenny Neal, a 1991 Theater World Award winner for acting, played the role of Jim and Eric Ware played the role of Dave. [11] Bass and Gates, 125. [12] David Krasner, Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African-American Theater, 1895-1910 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 1. [13] Bass and Gates, 89-90. [14] It follows what blues musicians refer to as the A-A-B pattern where the first, second, fourth, and fifth lines repeat and the remaining respond. [15] Kusmer, 144. Footnotes About The Author(s) ERIC M. GLOVER Swarthmore College 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.

Bernth Lindfors 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 Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Bernth Lindfors By Published on April 30, 2021 Download Article as PDF The British Newspaper Archive continues to offer a fruitful research tool for scholars wishing to study reviews of performances by actors on the British stage. I used this remarkable resource extensively when preparing biographies of the famous Black performers Ira Aldridge and Samuel Morgan Smith, [1] and I go back to it from time to time whenever new microfilms of old papers from the nineteenth century are added to it in order to see if there are any reports or anecdotes about these two actors that I might have missed. Sure enough, I have found two documents that shed some new light on Aldridge, and I offer them here in tribute to Errol Hill’s pioneering research on black actors. The first of these accounts appeared in London’s Weekly Dispatch on February 10, 1828 as a contribution on “Metropolitan Oddities” focusing on “The African Roscius,” the name ironically bestowed upon Aldridge by the London Times in its racist review of his debut in the role of Oronooko at the Coburg Theatre on October 10, 1825. Aldridge had made his initial debut in London at age seventeen five months earlier in a condensed production of Othello at the smaller Royalty Theatre in the East End, performing under the pseudonym of Mr. Keene, a deliberately playful allusion to the surname of Edmund Kean, one of England’s greatest tragedians, famous for his portrayal of Othello. Aldridge kept this facetious stage name until the real Kean collapsed on stage while playing the Moor at Covent Garden Theatre on March 25, 1833, and managers called upon Aldridge to replace him in the same role in the same theatre two weeks later. He was then billed both honestly as Mr. Aldridge and dishonestly as “a Native of Senegal,” possibly a ploy to validate his identity as a true African performer. This charade led to a controversy so bitter that it kept Aldridge off the London stage for the next fifteen years. He had already spent eight years seeking to turn what was meant as a racial insult into a praise name, and he persisted in assuming this honorific title alluding to Roscius, a great Roman actor, for the remainder of his career. When he started appearing at the Royalty Theatre, advertisements described him as a “Gentleman of Colour from the New York Theatre,” [2] and press reports on his subsequent provincial tours spoke of him as having “attained considerable celebrity in America,” [3] a gross exaggeration. One playbill in Bristol went so far as to claim erroneously that he was “known throughout America by the appellation of the African Roscius, a performer of Colour, whose flattering reception at New York and throughout all the principal Theatres in America has induced him to visit England professionally.” [4] This was more media puffery. Later in 1826, when he was finding it difficult to secure engagements and had become nearly destitute, Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post and the Theatrical Observer; and Daily Bills of the Play actively sought to solicit funds that would enable him to return to America. [5] In these early years he was known to have moved to England from the New World, not directly from Africa. So the article in the Weekly Dispatch two and a half years later purported to clear up some of the confusion surrounding this unusual stranger. It may have been the first biographical article published on him in Britain and deserves to be remembered both for its errors as well as its truths. The author of this piece, identified only by his initials—W.L.R.—was William Leman Rede, the younger brother of Leman Thomas Rede, author of The Road to the Stage (1827). Both brothers enjoyed active careers in the theatre, William initially as a young actor and journalist who “speedily established himself in high favour as a critic on all matters connected with the drama. None better could distinguish between talent and pretension; none better adjust the intricate balance between the practiced charlatan and the unpractised man of promising merit.” [6] He had written a few early plays and novels and later became a very prolific playwright, specializing in popular farces and melodramas. At the time he wrote about Aldridge, he was only twenty-six years old, just six years older than Aldridge himself. Having seen so young an actor performed remarkably well in a variety of roles, Rede went to interview him in order to collect information on his background and previous experience. Here is his scoop on this surprising American African: THE AFRICAN ROSCIUS The London Stage has alternately presented every novelty that Europe can afford—we have had rope-dancers and wire-walkers, that performed all sorts of apparent impossibilities—we have had men-monkies, real dogs, horses, and elephants—even the less civilized quarters of the globe have supplied us with the phenomens [ sic ], and those lofty domes in which they profess to “hold the glass up” to nature, have been made the arena for tumblers. Novelty and merit are not twins, yet they are sometimes simultaneously produced, and the subject of my present article is one instance of this desirable conjunction. The visiters [ sic ] of the Coburg must all remember the genuine Oronooko [,] Gambia, &c., who appeared there about three years since—his late efforts have been made in the provinces, and, as it is said, he is shortly to appear at Covent Garden Theatre, a sketch of him and his adventures may prove acceptable. FREDERICK WILLIAM KEENE (the African Roscius) is the son of the Rev. W. Keene, who, though an African by birth, is a Protestant Minister in New York, and has the care of the souls of a large number of blacks; his wife (my hero’s mother) was a Creole, and the Roscius, I believe, the “first fruits” of their union, was born in New York (24th July 1807). His early days it would be difficult to describe, unless my readers were acquainted with the pastimes followed by the juvenile in the United States. At an early age, he shewed a predilection for the drama, and when about 15, joined some Gentlemen “of his own rank and complexion,” in a Theatrical scheme; they were a sort of a chess-board company—half black half white. The theatre was situated in Green-street, New York, and their first play was Richard the Third , the principal characters by four blacks, i.e. Duke of Gloster [ sic ], by the Roscius; King Henry , by Mr. Bates; Richmond , Mr. Hewlett; Buckingham , Mr. Jackson; Lady Anne (the fair Lady Anne)! by a negress , called Miss Sukey Stevens; and the Queen , by a brown fair one yclept Miss Dixon. These performers of colour were set off by the appearance of a white Tressel — (Mr. Lamb). The Roscius made a decided hit, and, after a few more trials, set out on a starring tour in Boston—where he played Othello , with a black Desdemona and a white Emilia . He then returned to New York and appeared at the Park-street Theatre as a star ; he ran through a round of characters in different parts of the United States, and then embarked for England—but, ere I follow him thither, another word of the Green-street Theatre. It was a desideratum in New York—where a large portion of the inhabitants are virtually, if not actually, excluded from the other playhouses on no plea but their colour; the prices were as follows—Boxes, 8s., (5s. English)—Pit, 4s.—Gallery, 2s. The company were most respectable—unlike some damsels of our drama—amid the black ladies there were no light characters. Mr. Mathews, in his piece of pleasantry, entitled “A Trip to America,” has described the performance of Hamlet at this theatre; now “I have been most accurate in my researches;” and finds that this story has only one fault; i.e.—that it is not true Hamlet was never performed at Green-street; it was, indeed, rehearsed for a Miss Johnson’s benefit, but never played. When Mathews visited the theatre, Pizarro was the play, and my hero was Rolla . One anecdote will suffice to show the genuine innocence (call it not ignorance) of the company. Fortune’s Frolic was got up, and Robin Roughhead (a Yorkshireman) played by a negro, who studied it from an Irishman, and went through the part with a fine Cork brogue: In this farce, there is one character who delivers some eight or ten lines—this part is marked in the cast as “a clown”—Messieurs of the somber hue, who had no notion of any clown but a pantomime one, such as they had seen at Price’s theatre, absolutely dressed this character a la Grimaldi! Some of the technical phrases of the drama, and portions of the texts, were perversely retained by them, though, in their mouths, they sounded paradoxical; for instance, Othello , bending over a Desdemona , as black as a crow, exclaimed— “Yet I’ll not shed her blood, nor scar That whiter skin of her’s than snow.” Let me return to the Roscius—he came to London, and drew crowded houses at the Coburg, where a piece, called The Negro’s Curse , was prepared for him by Milner. Since then he has been at Edinburgh, Glasgow, Bath, and Bristol—at Manchester and Liverpool seven times, and he is now in Birmingham. Whilst in Scotland he met Mr. C. Kemble, who, I am informed, undertook to procure him an opening at Covent-Garden. The strongest point of his acting is intense feeling—not violent, but deep—there is a pathos even in his colloquial tones peculiar and affecting. Our first meeting was in High Holborn, where he had collected a mob round him by his extravagant laughter at the braying of a donkey, an animal he had never seen in America— Othello and Zanga are his favourite parts—but Mungo is, perhaps, his chef-d’oeuvre —his style of humour is totally different from that of any other performer—his drunken scene is a thing by itself—the very personification of liberty run mad—and presents a lively image of what we might conceive to be the folly of the Spartan slaves, when they had their one day of unrestrained freedom, both in speech and diet. The African Roscius (notwithstanding his faults and mannerisms) is an actor of great natural powers; he practices no tricks to catch applause, and rather under than over acts. His talents, and the singular circumstances in which he stands in the profession he has chosen, are claims upon kindness. His line is a limited one; and, I trust, if any prejudice arises on his appearance, it will be one favourable to him. He is a stranger, untaught, unaided, totally friendless in this country, and, with nothing to rely on but his talent, which is of an order that practice in the metropolis will render great. Some of the biographical details given here are known to be accurate; for instance, Aldridge’s date of birth, his father’s profession, his own predilection for the drama at an early age, and his involvement in a multiracial “Theatrical scheme” in New York. But his father’s name was Daniel, not a name that began with a W, and Rede wrongly assumed that Aldridge was the firstborn child in his family (he had a brother, Joshua, born seven years earlier). [7] However, Rede’s article contains one fact that has never before been mentioned by others: that Aldridge’s mother was “a Creole.” In those days the term spanned a range of different meanings. According to the Oxford English Dictionary , a Creole could indicate someone white, black, or a person of mixed racial ancestry. A creole white was usually “a descendant of European settlers, born or naturalized in those colonies or regions [of the West Indies or America] and more or less modified in type by the climate and surroundings.” A creole negro was “a negro born in the West Indies or America, as distinguished from one freshly imported from Africa.” [8] Since the Manhattan Death Libers records that Aldridge’s mother Luranah, mistranscribed in this source as Lavinia, was born in Delaware and buried in the cemetery of the black church her husband served, theatre scholars may assume that she belonged in the latter category of creoles, but cannot be certain that she had no mixed blood. [9] After all, Aldridge himself, during his initial performances at the Royal Coburg, was often described as not very dark-skinned. The Times said “The gentleman is in complexion the colour of a new half-penny, barring the brightness.” [10] The British Press confidently declared “Mr. Keene is a Creole.” [11] And when he came back to London to appear at Covent Garden, there was a good deal of commentary on his color being light brown or dark olive, and of an “oily and expressive mulatto tint” which “seems to show that he has European blood in his veins.” [12] Rede had never been to New York, but he knew a little about the “African Theatre” where Aldridge had made his start as a professional actor because a year earlier he had watched the comedian Charles Mathews mock and mimic a ludicrously inept “African Tragedian” he claimed to have seen butcher the role of Hamlet there. This was one of the most memorable satirical character sketches he performed in his popular one-man show Trip to America , which opened at the English Opera House on March 25, 1824. Mathews’s African was not a caricature of Aldridge in performance. Rather, it was a parody of the acting style of James Hewlett, the principal actor at that theatre. But when Aldridge started performing at the Coburg, some theatergoers went there expecting to see the actor Mathews had famously lampooned. Rede knew better, having spoken with Aldridge, but for more details on his acting career, he had to rely on whatever Aldridge told him, some of which was more fanciful than factual. There has been some good research done on New York’s African Theatre in recent decades, including studies by Errol Hill, George Thompson, Shane White, and Marvin McAllister. [13] By comparing what these scholars have said with what Aldridge told Rede, contemporary scholars may gain a better understanding of how Aldridge chose to present himself to the public and how that public responded to what they saw in him. The African Theatre originally grew out of the African Grove, a cabaret or “public garden” intended for the enjoyment of New York City’s black community. Opened in the summer of 1821 by William Alexander Brown, a West Indian, it offered drinks, music, and dramatic entertainments to its patrons, who initially met at Brown’s Thomas Street home in Lower Manhattan. After neighbors complained about the noise, Brown moved thirteen blocks further north to his home at the corner of Bleeker and Mercer streets a few months later. However, the space offered seating for only fifty people and audiences proved thinner, so in November or December of 1821, Brown decided to move his troupe again, this time south to a tavern or hotel in Park Row facing City Hall Park and next door to the well-established Park Theatre. Unfortunately for Brown, Stephen Price, the business manager at the Park Theatre, did not like having such competitors on his doorstep, especially since they were now performing three times a week and drawing white as well as black audiences. He sent in hecklers to disrupt performances by throwing firecrackers onto the stage and even arranged for police to raid the theatre one night and arrest all the actors. In order to be released, the actors had to promise that they would never act Shakespeare again. This kind of harassment led Brown to lease an empty lot on the east side of Mercer Street near Broadway and build a proper playhouse with seating for hundreds that opened in mid-July 1822. (Greene Street, mentioned by Rede, sat one short block west of Mercer.) Unfortunately, the harassment resumed almost immediately. On August 10 th , a mob of white ruffians interrupted a performance, assaulted the actors, and vandalized the playhouse. Brown and his actors boldly fought back. Police arrested and charged eleven of the white rioters, some of them circus workers in the city, but the case against them was eventually dismissed. To make matters worse, a severe yellow fever epidemic had started to spread throughout the city, and by early October Brown’s theatre, now called the American Theatre, had to close. Brown took his players to Albany, where they performed for the rest of the year. Surviving playbills indicate that several performances were mounted at Brown’s new theatre in the spring and early summer of 1823, but by mid-July Brown was bankrupt. Several members of his troupe stayed together and gave scattered performances in 1824, but they had to find other venues for their entertainments. [14] What was Aldridge doing during these three years? At what point did he join the African Theatre company and take part in their performances? Theatre scholars cannot confirm this precisely. His name does not appear in any of the documents concerning the company, but he may have performed under a pseudonym since his father did not approve of such sinful behavior and wanted him to be a preacher rather than an actor. But statements made by others who knew him and also by Aldridge himself suggest that he was indeed attached to Brown’s theatre company for a time. Philip A. Bell, one of his classmates at the African Free School, recalled some years later that Aldridge left school in 1822 and joined Brown’s American Theatre in 1823 after seeing a Shakespeare performance there. [15] In an autobiography Aldridge published around 1848, he claimed that his first visit to a professional theatre, specifically the Park Theatre, had “fixed the great purpose of his life, and established the whole end and aim of his existence. He would be an actor.” [16] So he “fell to work and studied the part of Rolla, in the play Pizarro , and in that character he made ‘his first appearance on any stage.’ This was at a private theatre, where he was singularly successful, and all his fellow-performers were of his own complexion” [17] —in other words, Brown’s theatre. Brown’s troupe produced Pizarro at the Hampton Hotel next door to the Park Theatre in the winter or spring of 1822, but James Hewlett played Rolla (not Aldridge). However, a second performance of Pizarro staged by Brown’s company in Albany on December 19, 1823 may have given Aldridge the opportunity to replace Hewlett in that heroic role. [18] So Bell and Aldridge’s accounts may contain some elements of truth. Aldridge also reported that he had also once played a love-sick Ethiopian Romeo opposite an Ethiopian Juliet with the same supporting cast, but there remains no hard evidence in the extant literature on the African Theatre to support this claim. [19] How reliable was the information that Aldridge gave Rede? Richard III was among the first plays ever performed at the African Grove, the pleasure garden that Brown had created for the black community. Brown staged it three times in September and October 1821 and a fourth time in January 1822, but in at least two of the performances Hewlett played the leading role supported by Mr. Bates and Mr. Jackson but not by any of the other actors and actresses Rede names in his account. In fact, none of the female performers, except Miss Dixon who later appeared in The Poor Soldier , appear to have been employed by Brown, and it seems extremely unlikely that Aldridge (thirteen years old and still at school at that time), would have been recruited to play a major role in a Shakespearean play. However, he could have become an active member of the troupe while still young, for James McCune Smith, who also had gone to school with him, reported years later that upon graduating, Aldridge, “being of a roving disposition,” had briefly shipped out on a brig. “Shortly after his return home, Brown’s theater was opened, and Ira, with his brother Joshua, took to the stage; but their father, finding it out, took them away from the theater.” [20] It remains tempting to speculate that the two actors, listed as Hutchington and J. Hutchington, performing as Buckingham and Lord Stanley in at least one of the African Theatre’s productions of Richard III , might have been these two delinquent youths. Hutchington also earned a part as a Castilian Soldier later in the African Theatre’s first performance of Pizarro . [21] In any case, Aldridge subsequently defied his father and rejoined Brown’s troupe. The rest of what Aldridge told Rede about his career in the United States appears the kind of inflated fiction that P.T. Barnum famously called Humbug or Bunk. He had never performed before Charles Mathews at the African Theatre. In fact, Mathews had never attended a production there; instead, James Hewlett had performed privately for him in the spring of 1823, inspiring Mathews’s skit of an ignorant African Tragedian in Trip to America . Aldridge also never appeared as a star at the Park Theatre, nor is there any record of him playing Othello in Boston or running through a round of characters in different parts of the United States. Aldridge could tell funny stories about other black actors at Brown’s theatre, one of whom had imitated a Yorkshireman with an Irish brogue, and another who botched lines as Othello, but these too may have been little more than highly embellished anecdotes. But Rede’s recitation of Aldridge’s impressive string of previous appearances on stage on his provincial tours seems very accurate. Indeed, over a twenty-month period after leaving London in December 1825, Aldridge had performed not only at Brighton, Bristol, Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Liverpool, and Birmingham—the major cities Rede mentions—but in at least seventeen smaller towns and villages along the way. During this time, rumors circulated that he planned to appear at Drury Lane and Covent Garden in London, but in mid-1826 his nemesis Stephen Price had become lessee of Drury Lane and remained there for the next four seasons, depriving Aldridge of that opportunity. Charles Kemble ran Covent Garden as an actor-manager and proprietor, but from 1826 to 1829 the theatre struggled with serious financial difficulty, so he probably could not have afforded to take a risk on a black actor. Rede’s article suggests that he saw that this young actor had talent and merited public attention. The last paragraph of Rede’s report in which he describes watching Aldridge perform offers a shrewd, insightful assessment of his salient abilities and minor defects. Later eyewitnesses confirm Aldridge possessed “great natural powers” as a tragedian and comedian, and one who might with further practice become still greater. But Rede need not have pitied him for being “totally friendless in this country” because Aldridge was happily married to a British woman, and two British actors he had met in New York, Henry and James Wallack, had encouraged him and helped launch him in London. Plus, by this time Rede himself had become his good friend. [22] Actually, Rede had already become so good a friend that when Aldridge announced his decision to experiment as the lessee of a theatre in Coventry on March 3, 1826 (three weeks after the publication of Rede’s essay), he said he had invited Rede to serve as his stage manager. Their collaboration included acting as well as managing the motley crew of performers and musicians they hired. Their brave experiment in running a theatre lasted barely two months, for by the end of April and beginning of May each had moved on to performer elsewhere, Aldridge in Worcester, Rede in York. I found a second source of new biographical information on Aldridge in the Carlisle Journal of April 16, 1889. It comes in the form of an amusing eyewitness report by a gentleman who recalled having seen Aldridge perform a scene from Othello at his school forty-one years earlier: Looking last week over a collection of old play bills which was in the library of the late Mr. John Clarke Ferguson, I noticed one which referred to the performance of Ira Aldridge, “the African Roscius,” in the Theatre Royal at Carlisle in the year 1848. Ira Aldridge was a man of colour—a veritable “black man”—who could assume the part of Othello without the use of burnt cork, and I have often laughed at an incident that occurred during his visit to Carlisle. He came to our school to give some recitations. It was a hot summer’s evening, and the windows of the schoolroom, which looked upon the neighboring street, were thrown wide open for the purposes of ventilation, while the boys sat listening with rapt attention to the African Roscius while he gave some scenes from Othello . He was in the midst of his address to the Senate and describing the arts by which he had wooed and won the gentle Desdemona, when a noisy fellow in the street began a most terrible row by ringing a big bell and calling “Fresh herrings!” with a loud, hoarse voice. We tittered at the curious mixture of Shakespeare and costermonger; but Ira went manfully on. So did the fresh herring merchant. My story being done She gave me for my pains a world of sighs— continued the tragedian. “All alive! Just come in!” vociferated the costermonger. Ira hesitated a moment, but resumed— She swore, in faith, ‘twas strange, ‘twas passing strange, 'Twas pitiful, ‘twas wondrous pitiful, “Fresh herrings! Fresh herrings!” came booming through the window once more. The “dusky Moor,” already perspiring at every pore, with ill-concealed indignation made one final struggle— She wish’d she had not heard it— But the fresh herring man was noisier than ever— “All alive! Alive!” and the bell gave another loud clang. The blood of the African Roscius was now up. Unable longer to constrain himself he broke off in the middle of the sentence, rushed from the stage, and behind the wings we could hear him shouting—no longer the musical blank verse of the poet, but— “Stop that row, you rascal, or I’ll come and choke you with a mutton chop!” The coster was evidently taken aback for a moment by the apparition of the negro’s head through the open door; but he soon recovered his equilibrium and his voice, and the altercation which ensued helped—to the school, at least—give an amusing turn to the entertainment.[23] This prompted a response in the Carlisle Journal on 24 April the following week by another former schoolboy who remembered the same incident but also provided additional information on the black actor: A Kendal correspondent writes: — “Your notes on Ira Aldridge, the African Roscius, have interested me greatly as I knew that robustuous [sic] actor very well in Edinburgh many years ago when he played the part of Aaron, the Moor beloved by Tamora, in Titus Andronicus .[24] These remarks affirm that Aldridge made an indelible impression on audiences young and old. He could amuse schoolboys with a comical tirade and years later could remind them of the vigor with which he portrayed Aaron not as a villain but as a romantic hero. Such memories of Aldridge like the ones described in this essay, preserved in newspapers of the day, merit resurrecting and adding to the documentary record of his life and experiences. References [1] My biography of Aldridge was published in four volumes by the University of Rochester Press between 2011 and 2015. The one I wrote on Morgan Smith was published by Africa World Press in Trenton, NJ in 2018. [2] There was no theatre by that name in New York City. [3] Brighton Gazette , 15 December 1825. [4] Playbill held at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. The same notice appeared in the Bristol Mercury , 20 January 1826. [5] Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post , August 31, 1826; Theatrical Observer; and Daily Bills of the Play , 2 September 1826. [6] “Recollections of Leman Rede,” New Monthly Magazine and Humorist , new series 80 (1847): 102-09. [7] Bernth Lindfors, Ira Aldridge: The Early Years ((Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2011), 21. [8] These definitions are drawn from The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 601. [9] Lindfors, Ira Aldridge , 20. [10] London Times , 11 October 1825. [11] British Press , 11 October 1825. [12] English Chronicle , 11 April 1833; Morning Chronicle , 11 April 1833; Town Journal , 14 April 1833; the direct quotations are taken from the Globe and Traveller , 11 April 1833, and the Observer , 11 April 1833, respectively. [13] One of the first reliable accounts was given in Errol Hill’s Shakespeare in Sable: A History of Black Shakespearean Actors (1984). Then came A Documentary History of the African Theatre (1998) by George A. Thompson, Jr., a New York City librarian who tracked down 134 published and unpublished sources that told much of what was happening there. Next was Shane White’s Stories of Freedom in Black New York (2002) and Marvin McAllister’s White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentleman of Colour: William Brown’s African and American Theater (2003). Each provides insightful commentary on the significance of Brown’s theatre, White writing as a historian of black New York, McAllister as a theatre historian and performance theorist. [14] I have been following George Thompson’s chronology throughout this portion of the narrative. [15] Philip A. Bell, “Men We Have Known: Ira Aldridge (1867),” Elevator (San Francisco), 2, and reprinted in Ira Aldridge: The African Roscius , ed. Bernth Lindfors (Rochester: Rochester University Press, 2007), 49. [16] Memoir and Theatrical Career of Ira Aldridge, the African Roscius (London: Onwhyn, [1848]), and reprinted in Ira Aldridge: The African Roscius , ed. Bernth Lindfors (Rochester: Rochester University Press, 2007), 13. [17] Ira Aldridge: The African Roscius , ed. Bernth Lindfors (Rochester: Rochester University Press, 2007), 14. [18] H.P. Phelps, Players of a Century: A Record of the Albany Stager (Albany: Joseph McDonough, 1880), 56. [19] Memoir and Theatrical Career of Ira Aldridge , 14. [20] James McCune Smith, “Ira Aldridge,” Anglo-African Magazine , 2, no. 1 (January 1860), 27-32, and reprinted in Ira Aldridge: The African Roscius , ed. Bernth Lindfors (Rochester: Rochester University Press, 2007), 37-47. [21] See George A. Thompson, Jr., A Documentary History of the African Theatre (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 70 and 228, for further details. [22] For further information on Aldridge’s theatrical activities in New York, London, and on his first tours of the British provinces, see Lindfors, Ira Aldridge and the books by Hill, Thompson, White, and McAllister cited in footnote 13. [23] Carlisle Journal , 16 April 1889. [24] An Edinburgh playbill shows that Aldridge performed as Aaron there on 24 July 1850. Footnotes About The Author(s) BERNTH LINDFORS Professor Emeritus, University of Texas at Austin Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf ISNN 2376-4236 Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to "Milestones in Black Theatre" Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration. Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 20, 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage The 2025 Festival International New Drama (FIND) at Berlin Schaubühne By Dan Poston Published: July 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF The Schaubühne’s Festival International New Drama (FIND) is well known in Berlin theater circles as a bright spot in the season. This year almost all of its productions sold out. The festival offers an intelligently curated and manageably compact chance to see exciting, internationally buzzy theater companies and their new productions without having to leave the city or go in search of different dates and touring schedules around town. The mix of plays and companies for 2025 was admirably balanced between highlighting a particular artist (the French director Caroline Guiela Nguyen), drawing together interestingly relatable work from other artists, and featuring chances to see new, experimental work by lesser known theater makers of the sort one might find at a larger “fringe” festival. FIND presented productions from 6 countries that, taken together, created a picture and conversation about new forms of naturalism, autobiography, and documentary theater, specifically about artists’ attempts to depict lives and situations that do not generally fall under the gaze of mass culture and its normative myths. All in all, the festival avoided the frequent paradoxical feeling of provinciality that can accompany efforts at “internationalization” in the cultural space—an achievement that speaks, again, to the intelligence of the Schaubühne’s current operation. Part of that cosmopolitan intelligence was an unadvertised concentration of theater pieces (4 out of 12) from Belgian companies representing different language and cultural groups—Flemish, Walloon, Burundian, and Spanish—whose histories and identities intersect complexly with the long tradition of Belgium’s own status as an “artificial” center and result of international negotiation. “Belgium” as a questioned place of belonging and citizenship in the festival could be taken as an abstract mirror for the ambivalent belonging-place of “Childhood”, another site and alleged protected center of contemporary societies that seems to cover so many silent figures of the sort the festival sought to foreground and bring to public speech. On the first night of the festival (Friday, April 4), I attended a piece in the new ground-floor performance complex, “Ku’damm 156”, just next door to the Schaubühne’s main building. The refreshingly still roughly renovated former retail space has an expansive, open “black box” layout, with several adaptable playing areas promising flexible Schaubühne use for the next, presumably leased years. The Walloon actor Cédric Eeckhout’s memory play, Héritage , was a perfect aesthetic fit for the new facility; both site and play a featured a well-designed mixture of minimalism and leftover, consumerist clutter and formlessness. Héritage picks up on Eeckhout’s earlier work about his mother (Jo Libertiaux), who in this production appears as a co-star and is, in part, also doubly portrayed by the son, Eeckhout in drag. In the post-show discussion, it was pointed out that the play could be compellingly performed in the future by actors who have no biographical connection to either Libertiaux or Eeckhout. Indeed, adding to the subtle formal arrangement and layering of Eeckhout’s tastefully faux- informal production is the sense that the play’s two characters are sculpted allegorically in a literary fashion out of their differing last names. Libertiaux (Jo) sits square in the center of her temporary temple, listening and visibly choosing to repeat lines that are fed to her in an agreeably friendly and slightly ironic manner that captivatingly suggests her support for her son and art, her modest bemusement with being the evening’s subject and shape-giver, and, yes, her freedom from the cult and regime of theater. The on-stage Eeckhout (Cédric) eeks out indeed an independent identity through various positionalities and rhythms in relation to his mother, whom he places sometimes as conversational mirror, sometimes as central dominating planet or star for his own calmly awkward or “hysterically” frenetic orbit. It is a simple story that partially celebrates and partially mourns its muse’s never-laureled status as historically avant-garde: a suburban hairdresser in the early 1980s emancipates herself from a stifling married life in a big house and raises her sons independently, while maintaining an ambivalent, non-reactionary relation to her former husband, partially for the sake of her sons and partially for the sake of (what it used to be common to call) complex humanity and love. Liberty (as Muse) on Her Throne: Jo Libertiaux in Héritage (© Bea Borgers) Héritage pays homage to the unknown heroism of people like Jo, who move history incrementally forward through strong, difficult, and sometimes joyful independent living. At the same time, the piece is a nuanced, honest, and multi-layered meditation on actual adult European gay male identity and the historically split social formation of “Generation X” divorce kids. In Eeckhout’s contemplative dance between the personal and the mass, the planet of littered electronic goods produces an intimately remembered, screened projection of ultimate—but only temporary—transcendence: bicycling up above it all with a wrinkly, vulnerably abject brown alien, the children accompanying ET were lifted temporarily (Cédric remarked) up into the popular gaze by Spielberg’s ingenious use of spectacle to transform the a domestic divorce drama into a 1980s blockbuster. Like ET, the “non-theatrical” Jo of Eeckhout’s bio-drama is treated, in Brechtian fashion, as a fount of reluctant wisdom; a reminder of mortality, love, and fragility in the general tempest; the subject of dispassionately extractive science; and a nostalgically restored mother goose for everyday misfits. Minimally mimicking the Spielberg sprezzatura of cloaking artificial intellectual arrangement in the bedazzlement of deployed cliche and nutritiously flavored schmalz, Eeckhout choppily smooths and composes Cédric’s generational statement-story using a dusty wedding-gift plastic blender from the 70s. That blender—a smart, developed postmodernism sturdily manufactured throughout the latter half of the last century—still quietly works in the age of optimally personalized, saturated Jamba Juice from perfectly ethically sourced ingredients on every city corner. Enhanced by Pauline Sikirdji’s skillfully modulated mixed-on-stage music, the production was the highlight of the festival for aesthetic achievement. Cédric as His Mother in Héritage (© Bea Borgers) The following night, I saw two comparatively maximalist productions in the main building of the Schaubühne. The Swiss director Milo Rau, who is now based in Vienna after a five-year stint in Belgium, brought his Flemish-speaking cast of mostly children from the NTGent to Berlin in order to stage a much bloodier divorce story, one also based on real events. Medea’s Children combines the classical myth of Medea with the true-story criminal case of Geneviève Lhermitte, whose horrific murder of her five children shocked Belgium in 2007. Rau’s discursive meta-drama plays exquisitely with our contemporary, indulgently simultaneous embrace of “innocence” and rejection of classical tragedy’s proscription against on-stage violence. The play opens with an extended, ironic mimesis of classical tragedy’s nachträgliche narration—the method by which it produces and suppresses the obscene. Pretending to forego dramatic business in favor of our era’s supposed post-analytical efficiency, the audience is teasingly welcomed into an “after-talk” about the production of Medea’s Children that they are told they have just seen. The ensemble’s only live adult member, Peter Seynaeve, conducts a discussion with the production’s six child actors that touches—with sprinkled moments of humorously precise, rhapsodic over-intellectuality delivered by the reflective children—on classical and modern dramaturgy, from Aeschylus to Beckett. The joke of children virtuously and monstrously performing adult routines never gets old as Rau inverts the classical Greek theater’s presentation of children as mute figures. The children’s production coach, Dirk, fails to appear (like Godot, one of the children remarks at the end of the play) except on video in the role of “Dr. Glas”. But that video only appears once the fine, opening “after-talk” breaks and the curtain opens, the nightmare of the production restarting in response to the children’s enthusiastic desire to re-perform parts of the play again, including its most violent scenes. Rau’s theater of bare (moral) cruelty, already famous for its controversial use of child actors to re-enact incredible violence against other children (in his earlier 5 Easy Pieces ), covers itself in a thick aesthetic of irony, saturated scenic design, and meta-theatrical discourse. The absorptive set of Medea’s Children , designed by ruimtevaarders (Karolien De Schepper, Christophe Engels), looks almost like a surrealistic dreamscape— Strandkorb at the end of time—waiting for the liquid element of the children’s massively spilled blood to transmogrify the solid half-architectures and extra-large back-drop video projections into satisfying art. Moving in and between these open scenic units, the talented children of Rau’s ensemble re-enact what is journalistically known about Amandine’s relationship and crimes, taking on both adult and child roles and often imitating videos previously shot on location with adult actors. Through this layered, interrupted, and always-again alienated dramatic storytelling, the audience witnesses key scenes in the tale of Dr. Glas’ long-term, pederasty-tinged financial support and live-in relationship with Amandine’s husband, whose trip to North Africa with the older man apparently drives Amandine to the gruesome, premeditated murder of their children. Where Tarantino coyly promised and demurred in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood , Rau goes for the full, long, real-time gore-porn shot. As the stage action lingers in excruciating naturalism, the child playing Amandine calls each of the other five children individually into a room and inefficiently strangles them, clobbers them over the head, and cuts their throats for minutes at a time. The remaining children are immersed in watching a film in an adjoining room. Medea on the Beach (© Michiel Devijver) The violence done and prodigious realistic blood spilt, the after-talk element of the show and the conceit of an actor/child-training Lehrstück is restored: the children discuss their mimetic techniques and reflect on mortality, as if not just Aristotle but actually Plato had counterfactually won the argument over tragedy and the right use of role-playing. The audience, meanwhile, partially covered their eyes or walked on shaking aged legs out of the theater, supported by strangers, friends, colleagues, and theater personnel. The tenderness and care displayed in the audience—a young dating couple squirmed and took turns lightly blocking each other’s vision—produced an engrossing contrast with the scene of painstaking human slaughter and unfathomable maternal betrayal on the stage. That shared split reality between demanding allegorical art and humbly surviving audience was another highpoint of the festival and a trope of its lived and performed reality. The audience’s palpable concern for the experiences and futures of the real child actors on stage (and their peers more extensively), along with the realization that actual paramedics were racing through the city to help a patron who had fainted, produced a complex object for theater’s contemplation, though one somewhat aside from Rau’s cunning depiction of a society of over-inexperienced people learning to repeatedly, virtually investigate and enact real existential blasphemies of human extinguishment. The Children Act Out and Talk Back in Rau’s Medea’s Kinderen (© Michiel Devijver) With only a few minutes in between, I walked to the other main auditorium at the Schaubühne to see the Caroline Guiela Nguyen’s LACRIMA . That 3-hour drama also thematized a marital split and the difficult repercussions for a child. Here, though, the mode was tense, neoliberal realism, in which the overweening mythic violence of a harsh but supposedly personally liberating system disfigures the characters’ lives without the cathartic exaggeration of witnessed slaughter. Following the multiple suggestions of the title, LACRIMA is a distributed crime story, where the tears of the overworked choral protagonists materialize as sewed-in drops of sparkling organic embroidery within a luxuriously celebrated, complexly interwoven social fabric. In the end, the over-heaviness of all those choral pearl-lives only slightly diminishes the glittering, televisual perfection of the symbolic wedding dress worn by an English princess for the world to admire. The play’s unremitting, hard surface tells the hidden back-story of the production of that dress, throwing light into one small backstage corner behind the sumptuous festivities of the internet era’s plutocratic crème de la crème. In the society depicted, though not in Nguyen’s serious play, the overarching comic spectacle of a fairy-tale royal union glossily covers a crime whose moment, perpetrator, and location fugitively diffuse. The fictionalized, social documentary-drama exposes many acts of not-exactly-criminal domination and exploitation, but the only villains are distant and cartoonish, their dramaturgical remove suggesting that if we saw further into their lives, we might find privileged people also caught up in a systemic stress melodrama. A spoiled English princess—whose presence in the play is only manifested by a faraway voice giving a condescending, self-satisfied voiceover and briefly participating in a carefully arranged conference call—orders the elaborate dress that is the show’s centerpiece. In Nguyen’s feminist dramaturgy, the princesses’ cartoonishness stands in for the never- or not-yet-quite-realized, cross-gendered inheritance of the patriarchal Leviathan role: picture the kingly, absorbing figure of Hobbes’ frontispiece now replaced by the floating heroine of Super Mario Brothers, clad in virginal, virtuous white. The dress itself serves as the symbolic object for the drama’s finer gestures of reflection on artmaking in the professionalized cultural industry. The commercial plot shows the high-end costuming order gratefully received by a flamboyantly kowtowing, famous, and psychotically ambitious fashion designer (another cartoon systemic villain, played by Vasanth Selvam) whose small artisan shop in Paris must quickly deliver a real wearable object meeting the designer and the princess’s extreme imaginative wishes and demands. Everything is ethical, of course!ô, which leads to further layers of exploitation, strain, and plutocratic distance from the dirty work of transforming earthy material into shine. That is, any certifiably disavowed crimes are pushed deep into the lower muddy links of the neo-colonial supply chain, which, the play suggests, looks remarkably like the old (sometimes historically also perfectly ethical) pre-neocolonial supply chains. Marian and Her Atelier Ensemble Make the Dress in Nguyen’s LACRIMA (© Jean-Louis Fernandez) With so many people—spiritually collapsed by the pressure-religion of industrial careerism—competing for haute-couture jobs in the Paris of the real world, the central miracle of the show is Marion, the remarkably even-keeled and humane head of the Paris atelier. Nguyen’s martyr to eurosocialist achievement-productivity seems to honorably preside over a diverse workshop where everyone (except for the complexly acted but bad, resentful husband-employee, played by Dan Artus) cooperates and looks morally good doing it. In Marion’s benign, performing-to-death aura, the show’s Sorkin-esque realism reproduces the neo-moral, work-life championship’s banning of all but diminutive, fleeting shadows, or irrepressible “horrendous human complexity”, from its bright lights. Maud Le Grevellec plays Nguyen’s Snow White figure with compelling minimalism, breeding in the audience the show’s main suspense: will the actor ever get the chance to show Marion totally flipping out? The plot-spoiling answer is, no, this would be unprofessional. Nguyen has reinvented the Marian devotional mystery play for our moment of 21 st -century economic structures and feminism. As it is, Marion absorbs all the stress of the cumulative distributed crimes—some of which she may even commit—so that the evil consuming princess does not have to, since appearing stressed would also be unprofessional for an envied public actor leading a marvelously crowned life. When this too-isolated, too-rigidly-suppressing, working Snow White overdoses and enters a death-like sleep, she is rescued by the miracle of love, though not by the bad-employee/ex non-Prince Charming but by her intelligently empathetic daughter (Anaele Jan Kerguistel). We never see very far into Marion’s (or anyone’s) psyche in the rigorously paced play, but we are assured by various eye glimmers and in general by the skilled ensemble acting that psyches exist, although what the use of them is anymore only the LLMs can say. We catch the mostly unspoken admiration and loyalty of the Dwarves —respected international laborers—towards Marion as they work. Even the manager (Selvam) and the extraordinarily talented embroider (Charles Vinoth Irudhayarajof) the specialized shop in Mumbai with which Marion subcontracts do not really complain; everyone is so professional, except for bad husbands and school-age adolescents, who are still learning. As it turns out, then, even the exceptions that prove the rule are exceptionally completely functional. Several subplots partially unfold in this environment of tremendous work intensity, one of which closely documents the lives of a storied traditional lace workshop in Avençon. The overriding point is that no one has the time to challenge various forms of suppression and domination and to have a full personal life. The tight, moving-parts realism of the play formally mimics the world it seeks to portray, leaving the audience with a feeling of breathlessness inside of which fuller emotions are suffocated. The cast is kept busy with the clockwork of fast, choreographed scene changes and this and that and this and that (a dynamic set design by Alice Duchange). The pacing aspires to Mission Impossible, with miserable Zoom work calls and stagnant simmering structural conflicts replacing exciting M6 gadget debriefs and crashing, shooting, bombs-exploding airplane dangles. No one has a cigarette or a joke or a bout of world-melting sardonic depression. The persistent loud heartbeats of tense electronic tonal music keep the audience physically chained to the incessant tension, as if we are acoustically connected to the pacemaker of an unconsciously sadistic, overwhelmingly empathetic physician. Even during intermission, a loud announcement informed the audience that we only had a few minutes to perhaps stand up in place, we should not leave the room. The Schaubühne has a world-historically well-behaved audience in comparison with the bulk of theater history’s more balking audiences; one suspected in true horror that most of us were cultural workers with career anxieties. The play, in other words, was an allegory of cultural and artistic demand, the harshness of the overweening, perfectionist superego leading to a decision by the on-stage figure of the artist (Marion) to purposefully ruin a magnificent, collective cultural work. In Marion’s warped climactic vision, the dress—overwrought and misshapen by displayably “ethical” ambition—was already ruined and had to be salvaged, but of course it was not ruined: it was a realistic, distorted reflection of the culture and its structures, if only the artisan and the artist would let the princess be clothed faux-perfectly in the asymmetry of her blithe wishes and the heavy world, a true work of art. But the art of the play emerges when Marion unaccountably repeats her manic, high-stakes gesture to salvage the dress’s warped pearl embroidery. It is an entirely irrational repetition, the one that confesses her psyche: Snow White finally smothers the evil princess’s controlling spell in a mime-like bout of doubled, only slightly frenetic ironing. Not to worry, though, the princess holds her frame (being more than the dress, though figured just as flat), the televised wedding proceeds splendidly, and the play audience was released from the voiceover’s control—scurrying agreeably into the lobby for a drink. In some after-part of the fable, Marian may get fewer orders and will now consider taking Saturday afternoons off for a while, until her daughter goes to university to major in STEM. Perhaps a bit shy the next day, lest I should find myself again submersed under the princess’s acoustic persecution, I watched the festival’s edition of Streitraum (a periodic Schaubühne talk series) at home via a live public video feed. Carolin Emcke proved a very competent moderator, sitting with her two guests in plain chairs before the open nightmare beach-cave landscape of Medea’s Children to discuss government funding for the arts. With an unremarked-upon visual backdrop suggesting the obvious danger of too much reliance on political or state funding for artistic work, Gesche Joost, the relatively new president of the worldwide Goethe Institute (and professor of Design Research at Berlin’s University of the Arts), and Rau, wearing his hat as the Artistic Director of the Wiener Festwochen, traced certain edges and tarried conversationally square in the transparent middle of Overton’s window of current theater political discourse. Despite the talk series’ title, there was no fighting, though plenty of clubbing. Joost shared her experiences gathering and sharing cultural intelligence from Goethe Institute’s elaborate global root system, and Rau expressed genuine excitement-concern about a select collection of international political issues. Everyone affirmed that the limits of solidarity are definitely drawn when it comes to art and cultural institutions suffering cuts, expressing though not stating an apparently agreed-upon economic theory (I can’t say which one of a few that I have heard) in which more money should be produced by someone who is obviously evilly holding it back—perhaps that Princess again! Emcke drew perhaps the festival’s biggest laugh when she pointed out that queerness for her personal history/autobiography had to do not just with abstract political commitment but with fairly uncontrollable, undeniable, even at times unwelcome and very embodied sexual desire. In other not long-ago epochs, one could have expected artists and cultural producers in Berlin to pick up on the laugh and think about the economic problem of art funding drying up as linked to the current festival’s notable sexlessness. Out of the abyss, there at the festival’s midpoint, the professionally behaving audience really did laugh just a tad too much at Emcke’s irrepressible remark, a fact that temporarily raised the question whether the general festival’s Lehrstückey dispotif toward its audience gegenüber —as in most art productions these days—was not a sociological reversal. Two days later, Consolate’s confessional ritual-piece , ICIRORI , was playing at the festival. The audience arriving at the new “fringe” retail space of the Schaubühne campus was told to wait in the bar lobby of the main theater building. At the appointed start time, Consolate, a Walloon-Burundian actor and artist, appeared and invited anyone who had suffered under systemic racism to accompany her into the other new space across the courtyard, with anyone not so identified to wait behind for the invitation of the ushers. The bulk of the audience waited quietly, contemplating the gesture of inviting outreach that also surfaced assumptions of privilege, while a small group walked with the artist across the way into the playing space. Consolate’s ICIRORI (© Mathis Bois) In a few minutes, the ushers urged the large mass of us who had remained in the bar lobby to join the others in the theater. There in a large black box space we sat on cushions laid out on low risers that formed a square, with an open playing space before us and a tilted mirror above (an effective minimalist set design by Micha Morasse). Consolate began to perform a mixed personal and social ritual with narrative, audio, and video sequences describing what she remembers and what she has reconstructed and learned about her own infancy and childhood. The audience was held and honored by the bravery and generosity of the performer’s honesty about a lived traumatic past, but also by the strong dramaturgical sensibility of the piece’s alternating opacities and clarities, storytelling, documentation, and re-enactment. In 1993, Consolate’s parents were murdered after the outbreak of a civil war in Burundi, and the four-year-old Consolate, who had survived by hiding in the woods with her sister, was found and then brought to Belgium, where she was adopted by a white family. Nearly three decades later, Consolate—already a trained theater artist—received an unexpected notice from a surviving family member in Burundi and travelled back to meet the family with whom she had shared her earliest years. The reunion was partially documented in a moving video sequence that Consolate uses in the piece to show the warmth, humor, and real recollections shared by a family separated for decades after a sudden, chaotic outbreak of extreme violence. A word in Kirundi, Consolate’s original language, “ICIRORI” signifies a self-reflexive investigation of the past in order to move forward. The piece has the feel of a world-opening invitation from stranger—whom one might ordinarily see on the street or speak to at a restaurant— into their private room of meditation and autobiographical struggle to simultaneously overcome unimaginable early loss and still find, in the daily fast-ticking of contemporary urban European life, the existentially necessary balance between confronting larger violent, unjust systems and building up one’s own life and identity. Some of the most affecting moments dealt with Consolate’s recollection of attempting to commune with her deceased parents—to remember and hear their voices—as a child growing up in Belgium. These moments were a reminder that childhood and even infancy are not just an amnesia, neither in a general sense nor in the constructed sense of repressing exceptional early injury: that in the imposed “forgetfulness” of childhood live—and still live—languages, loved people, and crucial stories, utterances, and singing that bind us more firmly to larger fabrics than any subsequently experienced matrix can or will. A mood of surprising and shared strong gentleness, anger, perseverance, guilt, and respectful grief marked the hour-long piece. It concluded with the chance for the audience, if they wished, to recite in the name of Belgium a multilingual apology that Consolate had not received, in spite of a formal petition requesting recognition that adoptions like hers had been a form of human trafficking. As the play ended, Consolate left the space, and the audience was invited to leave some dried Burundian peas, which we had received along with a bandage upon entering the theater, next to an old outfit of children’s clothes that lay on the ground. Quietly, individually and in couples and small groups, the audience gave back an offering and a wish, some sustenance and encouragement to the living spirit of the child who had outgrown and left behind the outfit on the theater floor, the same clothes in which Consolate had originally traveled to Belgium. The immersive and deeply affecting group ritual—partially paying witness to an artist’s story and process and partially an exercise in group saying and doing—had a quick liturgical follow-up in the sermon-like quality of the Elevator Repair Service’s American revival re-performance of James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr.’s 1965 debate at the Cambridge Union Society. The 2021 ERS production based its verbatim dramatization on the first hour or so of the BBC-televised event at the traditional student debate club—including the opening speeches of two student debaters (played by Gavin Price and Christopher-Rashee Stevenson) as well as those following by Baldwin and Buckley. Greig Sargeant, who provided the concept for the piece, portrays Baldwin with a sympathetic, ghostly dignity, drawing the audience’s obvious sympathy, but it is a critic’s unloved duty to witness how much we depend on villains, and in this sense Ben Jalosa Williams’ playing of Buckley, the festival’s most concretized villain, merits praise for its consummate attention to detail and rhetorically nuanced, precise character study. Omitting the three final student debaters on each side of the proposed resolution, the production cuts to the announcement of the landslide vote of the 1965 audience in favor of the resolution that was proposed by the Baldwin side. One of the most important debates in the Civil Rights Era, the debate took up the resolution “The American dream is at the expense of the American Negro.” While the speeches by Baldwin and Buckley are the obvious centerpieces—and striking feats of rhetoric provocatively resonant with the contemporary polarized discourses in the US and elsewhere—the student speeches and the entire 1960s British university culture of formal debate add to the fascinating thought-piece that the reenactment play provides. As highlighted in the text of Baldwin’s speech, the discomfort of debating American race relations in a British setting suggested welcome cultural complexity for the central European audience, for whom facilely superior condemnations of immoral politics overseas are an everyday part of public life, as they are in most places around the world, presenting the paradox of moral hatred and xenophobia as practiced at times in the name of liberal and internationalist commitment. The First Student Debater on the Buckley Side in Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge (© Joan Marcus) In a common scenic trope of contemporary theater productions, the John Collins-directed production restaged the original debate using much colder and darker aesthetics than the 1965 version. This very popular mode of minimal, distanced scenography, which significantly predates the pandemic (by half a century), suggests analytical separation, scientific isolation, medical sanitation, and, overall, darkness, whatever that is when it is not just the absence of diffuse light or a lazy overuse of black paint. The production would have been very different if it had included the clubby coziness of the original debate setting with the speakers and the hearers crammed together in a basic bodily sociality that one rarely sees anymore in high cultural spaces, except for those that have been taken over by mass tourism. The audience (rather than leaning on each other’s shoulders to get a good look) sat in fixed black tiered seats at a good remove from the action, and the debaters themselves stood isolated from one another and anyone else at several yards of empty distance. The sense of danger created by such a theatrical arrangement was curious, given the overriding consensus both in the room in 1965 and certainly among the FIND audience. The message seemed to be that we had to learn to mistrust each other even more, which did have the effect that one heard the arguments and threats made on both sides of the debate with a certain icy clarity. The iciness of the main event was to a certain degree then reversed in a short closing, imaginary scene between James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry in the former’s living room. The two famous writers joked and commiserated warmly and informally about their experiences as Black Americans and public intellectuals reacting to outrageous events and trying to formulate the best ways forward for their lives, solidarities, and politics. The epilogue-like scene transitioned at times to a faux-unscripted conversation of the two actors (Sargeant and April Matthis) playing those characters, giving the audience some history of ERC and their own engagement with it. The actors related how they had become the company’s first African-American members after being hired to play (what they hilariously parodied as strange, stereotypical, and inhuman) Black characters in ERC’s 2008 production of The Sound and the Fury . The play ended with Hansberry/Matthis bemoaning the theater’s white liberal audiences and prescribing that they should all rather become white radicals. The moral was clear, though not specific, and then it was time again not for Battle Hymn of the Republic karaoke and rows of muskets but rather for orderly lines of patient patrons at the bar, scattered tapas in the lobby, network chatting, and unknown things clicked on eager smartphones. James Baldwin/Greig Sargeant and Lorainne Hansberry/April Matthis Catch (Us) Up After the Debate (© Joan Marcus) After the sermon, it was time for music, which Nguyen’s latest production—playing at the festival in the annex “Studio” space as a preview of its upcoming first run in Strasbourg—served up in welcome plenty. If Nguyen’s LACRIMA (discussed above) carried the perfectionist weight of being her debut production as the Artistic Director of the Théâtre National de Strasbourg, her Valentina showed signs of deft breakage and form-relaxation, suggestive of new directorial tracks and accomplishment. The genre was still contemporary stress melodrama, whose existentially symbolic situation is the busy working person on a long tense call (including unbearable, cramped-muzac-filled holds) with a powerful institution’s call center. The dosing of calculated, repetitive music as deployed emotional manipulation in that everyday situation merges into Nguyen’s realism, which characteristically keeps a steady, heart-beating soundtrack of minimal tones running over scenes that are hyper-realistic without ever being allowed to fall (or lift?) into the shadows and awkward dirty corners of naturalism. But in Valentina , the realism is shaped by the form of the vignette, putting Nguyen’s latest work more fully into conversation with the beguiling aesthetics of Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil. In terms of melodrama, a quintessentially 19 th -century form, Rau’s Medea’s Children communes with dark gothic melodrama, while LACRIMA transplants the melodrama of the desert into the dry, extremely well-lit urban working spaces in which a few stark professionals dance a battle of the wills (surrounded by a colorful but whirling and vanishing chorus) with only a small number of actual steps and a stereotypically schematic conflict, but plenty of rhythm, coordination, and sensory overload. Valentina , meanwhile, looks melodramatically from France not westward towards the new desert-to-be-conquered of high-on-supplements Silicon Valley, but eastward, to the “folk” melodrama and its nostalgic imagination of suffering Easten Europe, a place where time once existed. Valentina and Her Friend Learn to Navigate Contemporary France (© Théâtre national de Strasbourg) The thematic focus and genre work well with Nguyen and her company’s signature style of blending amateur and professional actors into a seamless ensemble. Chloé Catrin gave a pitch-perfect performance as the overscheduled yet caring-underneath French doctor, a character who could have been LACRIMA ’s Marion working her sneaked-in second job. The exuding warmth and dedication of the Franco-Romanian actors playing the fairy tale parts of the small struggling nuclear family—the grievously sick mother (Loredana Iancu), musician father (Paul Guta), and compassionately and resourcefully intelligent school-age heroine-daughter (Angelina Iancu/Cara Parvu)—carried the show and allowed it one of the widest emotional pallets displayed in the festival. There is something still to be said for charm and for love steadily maintaining and opening connection across the ravages of impersonal economic and societal structures, even though such a remark is usually greeted by a stern and humorlessly murderous look from a truer adherent to politically dedicated theater. Truly renewing charm and love may even still exist in majoritarian communities and contexts, but here it is the trope of the impoverished east that allows these priceless cultural, human values to break sonically and (a)rhythmically through the general Nguyen style of running-through heart-beat music and crowded screenal doubling on stage. One can take a breath when someone plays the violin because the musician (generally) must as well, and there one has something basic, an allowance to live, even if evil and manipulation and systemic villainy are everywhere. In Valentina , the father plays the violin, works, loves his child and wife, supports their urgent trip and long independent stay in France to seek medical care, and seems even to be a nice, charismatic person, salt of the earth. Maybe this was the most radical figure on Berlin’s stages all year, tucked away in an annex space, with an apparatus of ideological excuse about documentary theater and real sociological research ready at hand, just in case anyone filed a lawsuit about having heard a non-Brechtian, apolitical, organic gentle melody at the theater. Other very Nguyen tropes repeated in Valentina : a topography of fairy tale meeting documentary naturalism; the mother-saving Deus-ex-machina miracle-work of the young daughter, who in the new play can learn the language of modern bureaucratic France, medical science, and the world more quickly than her kind ailing mother; the “Gift of the Magi” pain of people falling into tragic silence in order to try to help, support, and shield others, or just do their jobs responsibly and sustainably; and the foregrounding of competent, creative, hard-working, and compassionate women, young and old, heroically absorbing abundant, more-or-less crushing systemic pressures with “exemplary” nuance, resolve, fortitude, sharpness, and—somewhat above all—steady, committed management, or quietly non-reactionary sovereignty. The long list of qualities and adjectives signifies the “stuff” inside Nguyen’s central dramatic figures, which generally has to be shown by extremely subtle acting, given that all of those feelings and conflicts inside are not given space to emerge more expressively or enunciate themselves at length verbally: hence, the so-far defining aesthetic tension between overlaid neoliberal stress and burgeoning-up melodrama, with the formal and thematic positionalities often reversed. Caroline Guiela Nguyen (© Manuel Braun) The chorality of the festival continued with a final performance of Уя (Nest) , a piece in Kyrgyz and Russian by Chagaldak Zamirbekov and his Bishkek ensemble. A select social portrait of modern Kyrgyzstan, the work is based upon interviews that Zamirbekov and the cast conducted with contemporaries hailing from diverse regions and groups around their country. A naked man (Zhusupbek uulu Emil) crouches in a large tin wash basin at the center of the small set, which opens in three directions to the audience, creating from the outset a sense of intimacy or privacy-invasion, of being brought into a tiny urban flat where a group of interconnected strangers live. The canny, engaging set was designed by Marat Raiymkulov and Malika Umarova and adapted for the Schaubühne space by Ulla Willis. The intimate feeling produced by the layout of audience and tiny set reproduces, to an extent, the sense of a play set in a private apartment—a situation the company often uses in their home city. Produced in a tucked-away box in Ku’damm 156, the piece proceeds as a sequence of six mostly confessional, autobiographical monologues, with some limited interaction between the disparate flatmates. The founder of an orphanage and shelter for young mothers—Tursunbaeva Gulmira, playing a split ancient and middle-aged Kyrgyz cousin to Mother Courage—presides over the flat and the scene, sometimes forcefully engaging audience members to sweep and hold various everyday objects as she gruffly keeps the flat in tidy shape and gets the other characters moving about. A Mother Bathes and Dries A Son in Уя (Nest) (© Ilya Karimdjanov) All of the characters are remarkable and passionately making their way through a complex life, but the play’s temporary spotlight on each of them sequentially also reveals the patina of urban invisibility that cloaks them in ordinary life. Even the militant nationalist (Zhusupbek), whose uniform and brash carriage seem violently out of place in the provisional community, fades and disappears again in the shifting constellation of actors using, fixing, abandoning, and returning to a questioned national home. That collective home and small-enough shelter of experience—of a mild lawyer and religious scholar whose exiled father was a radicalized Islamicist, a struggling but dancing Shisha-bar waitress, and a sometimes-activist and international worker—is threatened, as Asylbek kyzy Zeres’ cosmopolitan, politically discontent character puts it, both by Russian aggression and Western race-based non-solidarity. The aporias in the sequential monologue form repeat the aporias in the various national and international stories that the characters utilize to shape their identities: a useful reminder that even the glocally connected events that we call cities and nations, into which we were all spilled again after the festival, cohere also out of important remembered, forgotten, or never known excisions. So much tailoring for a planetary dress that wants to eat us all just a little stitch at a time or for the dreamy intricate today-costume of a still young and even forgetfully blithe world, whatever humans are or may have been. Image Credits: Article References References About the author(s) Dan Poston (PhD Theatre and Performance from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York) is an Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literatures at the University of Tübingen. His monograph, Joseph Addison: An Intellectual Biography , was published in 2023 by the University of Virginia Press. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents The 2025 Festival International New Drama (FIND) at Berlin Schaubühne Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 20 Willem Dafoe in conversation with Theater der Zeit The Puzzle: A new musical in the Spoleto Festival, Italy presented by La MaMa Umbria Varna Summer International Theatre Festival Mary Said What She Said The 62nd Berliner Theatertreffen: Stories and Theatrical Spaces That Realize the Past, Present and Future. Interview with Walter Bart (Artistic Leader, Wunderbaum Collective & Director, Die Hundekot-Attacke) from the 2024 Berliner Theatertreffen Duende and Showbiz: A Theatrical Odyssey Through Spain’s Soul Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Martha Schmoyer LoMonaco, (former) Editor, New England Theatre in Review Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage New England Theatre in Review Martha Schmoyer LoMonaco, (former) Editor, New England Theatre in Review By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF The mission of New England Theatre in Review ( NETIR ) is to document the history of producing theatres in the New England states by assessing their artistic merits, how they reflect and respond to their audiences and immediate communities, and how they fulfill their position as regional leaders supporting the growth and maturation of American theatre. Our reviewers write one-thousand-word essays that address the theatre’s full season of productions; administrative and business practices as sustainable institutions; and gender, ethnic, race, and LGBTQ+ equity, both in hiring practices and season programming. At the top of each essay is a full list of the shows, with production dates, from the 2023-24 season. Readers of this edition of NETIR who are interested in the previous history of these theatres are encouraged to consult the back issues of New England Theatre Journal. In the aggregate, these astute chronicles of the work of major American producing theatres, including American Repertory Theater, Barrington Stage, Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre, Hartford Stage, Huntington Theatre, Long Wharf Theatre, Portland Stage, Shakespeare & Company, Trinity Repertory Theatre, Vermont Stage, and Yale Repertory Theatre, provide an on-going critical history that is unique in American theatre scholarship. NETIR has been particularly assiduous in documenting theatre during and after the coronavirus pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, and the resurgence of Black Lives Matter and its manifestations via “We See You White American Theatre” and other activist movements. The exigencies of the pandemic, coupled with the equally urgent need to reform theatre structure and practice along anti-racist lines, promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) both on and off stage, became the twin foci for theatres across America from 2020-21 forward. Since we are still in the post-pandemic, post-reckoning era, with many theatres continuing to struggle to regain the audiences, funding, and community support of the pre-COVID years, our reviewers continue to assess the health and well-being of their theatres right now. Have theatres changed the number, type, and/or style of plays produced; revamped artistic and administrative personnel that impact programming and operations; published new guidelines and/or DEI measures? Are virtual productions still happening? Are COVID regulations (masking, vaccinations, etc.) still in place in whole or in part? Is there any sense of “back to normalcy” or, perhaps, a new normal, whatever that may mean? This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) MARTHA S. LOMONACO is a theatre director, historian, and writer. She is Professor Emerita of Theatre and American Studies at Fairfield University, where she was resident director and ran the theatre program for thirty-four years. She is the author of two monographs Every Week, A Broadway Revue: The Tamiment Playhouse, 1921-1960 and Summer Stock: An American Theatrical Phenomenon ( Choice 2004 Outstanding Academic Title) and an edited collection, Theatre Exhibitions , volume thirty-three of Performing Arts Resources . She has been editor of New England Theatre in Review since 2010. Marti holds a doctorate in Performance Studies from New York University. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper by Ellen Callaghan at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. Directed/Filmed/Edited: Ellen Callaghan Featuring: Veronica Viper Theme Music: Leeni Ramadan Born and raised on the Lower East Side of New York City, Veronica Viper spends her time plotting the destruction of the sense of “normalcy”, opening the close minded with the force of a crowbar and challenging the ignorant to stare into the sun that is her bosom. Nightshades is an ongoing series that not only highlights different artists around New York by giving insight into who they are and what they do, but also gives people an inside peek into a world with a different freedom, expression, creativity, and passion, even as it’s changed over the past few years–a city making art at night. One night of filming with one artist and one filmmaker. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Ellen Callaghan Documentary, Film, Performance Art, Other This film will be available to watch online May 16th onwards for 3 weeks, and it will also be screened in-person on May 20th. About The Film Country United States Language English Running Time 10 minutes Year of Release 2023 Directed/Filmed/Edited: Ellen Callaghan Featuring: Veronica Viper Theme Music: Leeni Ramadan Born and raised on the Lower East Side of New York City, Veronica Viper spends her time plotting the destruction of the sense of “normalcy”, opening the close minded with the force of a crowbar and challenging the ignorant to stare into the sun that is her bosom. Nightshades is an ongoing series that not only highlights different artists around New York by giving insight into who they are and what they do, but also gives people an inside peek into a world with a different freedom, expression, creativity, and passion, even as it’s changed over the past few years–a city making art at night. One night of filming with one artist and one filmmaker. Directed/Filmed/Edited: Ellen Callaghan Featuring: Veronica Viper Theme Music: Leeni Ramadan About The Artist(s) Ellen is a queer director, editor, producer, and head of MAEV--a film production company operating out of Brooklyn, New York. She has conceptualized and created everything from music videos and TV commercials to documentary and narrative films. Her passion is film, and she hopes to use her filmmaking skills to help make a positive impact in the world. Get in touch with the artist(s) ellen@thisismaev.com and follow them on social media https://www.ellencallaghan.com/, https://thisismaev.com/, IG: @this.is.maev, IG: @classiccallaghan Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou