Kevin T. Browne Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Contemporary American Monologue: Performance and Politics Kevin T. Browne By Published on May 27, 2018 Download Article as PDF The Contemporary American Monologue: Performance and Politics . Eddie Paterson. New York: Methuen, 2015; Pp. 232. The Contemporary American Monologue: Performance and Politics by Eddie Paterson offers comparative analyses of solo performance artists Spalding Grey, Laurie Anderson, Anna Deavere Smith, and Karen Finley. In his introduction, Paterson clearly lays out his arguments and the organization of the book, which focuses on the connections between “two trajectories – solo performance as an integral part of US culture, politics, and media, and monologue as it appears in Western dramatic traditions” (1). He examines these artists’ works as uniquely American, at once belonging to their time and commenting upon it as if observing it from a distance. In their own fashion, each of these artists performs politics as a critique of turn-of-the-century neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism, and the assumed rightness of privilege inherent in these ideologies. Paterson is an Australian who came of age after these artists had achieved canonization, and he delivers his analyses with what he calls “the almost obscene benefit of hindsight and with a vision of American culture and performance that comes from afar and…is already mediated and filtered” (3). It is ironic that Paterson describes these solo artists as finding their form and meaning in performance, as distinct from and apart from traditional dramatic literature, and yet finds himself examining them from a remove, without having seen them live. Paradoxically, this vantage point serves him well. While his theoretical and historical contextualization and analysis are strong, and his scholarship is thorough, he is at his best when offering vivid and immediate close-reading descriptions of the performances of these artists. In his introduction, the author identifies three key features that distinguish the work of these American solo artists from the monologue genre in Western dramatic tradition: parody – ironic commentary on contemporary history and politics; mediatization – the works engage with and are often consumed as video (and sometimes audio) reproductions; and personae – the privileging of the performing personality over traditional character. In all four cases, the reliability of narrator and narration is a central issue. The first two chapters of the book provide historical context for the works of the American solo artists. First, Paterson traces the monologue as a genre in Western drama chronologically from the Greeks and Romans through the modernists and post-modernists. Building on the work of previous scholars such as Deborah R. Geis, he notes the direct relationship that monologue affords between the speaker and the audience, which often serves to disrupt and subvert narrative. Not surprisingly, Paterson finds in Brecht, Pinter, and especially Beckett the radical transformation of the monologue that informs contemporary work. In the second chapter, Paterson changes direction by arguing that the influences that gave rise to American solo performance owe less to the Western dramatic tradition and more to the oratorical tradition of political speeches, religious sermons, and the like. The “American Jeremiad” tradition began early in the development of the nation to define and uphold the status quo, especially to link together religious fervor with capitalist energies. Nevertheless, progressive voices such as those from the Abolitionist and Civil Rights movements have also used these rhetorical techniques. It is these “anti-mainstream American voices” (45) that connect most closely to the solo artists, who each receive a chapter of analysis in the main part of the book. In examining Spalding Gray’s “confessional monologue,” Paterson notes that Gray’s best-known works, though originally performed live, have been widely disseminated as films and recordings. Paterson seems to have experienced them only in this way. The author posits that the “mediatization and the mass production of these monologues has been examined for the way they break down distinctions between high art and commodity culture” (55). In Gray’s conflation between the stage persona and the “‘real-live’ self,” (59) the charismatic performer ironically presents himself as both authentic and unreliable, obliquely critiquing American politics and culture while simultaneously confessing his complicity “through the eyes of a self-consciously privileged persona: a white, middle-class, Anglo-Saxon male” (55). In contrast to Gray, with his table, chair, and glass of water, Laurie Anderson’s “post-punk monologue” achieves parody by situating her small lone body within massive multi-media environments. Paterson nonetheless recalls the textual content of these technological performances. Focusing on her works from the 1980s, the author shows how they represent a critical response to Reagan-era social and economic policies. Sampling, cutting, and pasting serve to fragment narrative, and electronic voice alteration and androgynous appearance further deconstruct, confuse, dehumanize, and unsex the Anderson persona. Anna Deavere Smith is unique in this group as a solo performer of verbatim documentary theatre and as directly tied with the American civil rights tradition of monologue performance. Paterson finds that in her “rights monologue” explorations of race, class, and the diversity of American lives and attitudes, Smith’s work is neither overtly ironic nor self-reflexive. Yet, Paterson argues, Smith’s implied objectivity deserves critique. The authenticity of the speaker—who is never the performer herself—is asserted within the performance by her remarkable imitative skills. Still, Smith is the curator, selecting, editing, ordering, and performing. Her “acting practices,” Paterson says, “present identity as changeable, performative, and negotiated,” (116) thus enabling “ironic consideration of neo-liberal and neo-conservative ideology” (125). The persistent disconnection between herself and her subjects is deliberate. Paterson gives Karen Finley’s flamboyant, colorful, and transgressive performance the name of “radical monologue” because of the degree to which “she joyfully deploys and subverts multiple personae, non-linear texts and the wholesale rejection of coherent dramatic character” to “critique American culture and politics” (128). Paterson’s descriptions vivify the ways in which text and performance engender meaning and how “the real life persona of ‘Karen Finley’ intermingles with the personae performed in the spoken texts” (133). While Paterson quotes some of the more outrageous utterances in the works and notes how Finley’s membership in the NEA 4 made her famous, he understates the radical use she often makes of her own body (such as the infamous smearing of chocolate and honey over her naked self) as a site of ideological contention. The book’s closing chapter, “Future Monologue,” serves as a summation and conclusion. Paterson predicts the lasting effects of the modes of performance that he dubs “post dramatic” and “post monologue.” This theatrical landscape continues to break down distinctions between the fictional and the real and offers powerful theatrical means of interrogating the cultural assumptions of power. Paterson’s work is a significant addition to the critical studies of these four particular artists, the historical framework that contextualizes them, and the monologue form. Those who are led by the title to expect a monologue sourcebook for actors (as I was) will encounter much more. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Kevin T. Browne University of Central Arkansas Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Stages of Struggle and Celebration: A Production History of Black Theatre in Texas Immersions in Cultural Difference: Tourism, War, Performance Stage for Action: U.S. Social Activist Theatre in the 1940s Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America: The Legacy of Alan Schneider as Beckett’s American Director The Contemporary American Monologue: Performance and Politics Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left Introduction: Mediations of Authorship in American Postdramatic Mediaturgies Kaldor and Dorsen's "desktop performances" and the (Live) Coauthorship Paradox Ecologies of Media, Ecologies of Mind: Embodying Authorship Through Mediaturgy Dropping the Needle on the Record: Intermedial Contingency and Spalding Gray's Early Talk Performances #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS: Weaponizing Performance of Identity from the Digital to the Physical Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Khalid Y. Long 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 A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Khalid Y. Long By Published on April 27, 2021 Download Article as PDF Glenda Dickerson (1945-2012) is often recognized as a pioneering Black woman theatre director. [1] A more expansive view of her career, however, would highlight Dickerson’s important role as a playwright, an adaptor/deviser, a teacher, and as this essay will illustrate, a progenitor of feminist theatre and performance theory. This essay offers a brief rumination on how Dickerson made a Black feminist intervention into feminist theatre and performance theory as she became one of the earliest voices to intercede and ensure that Black women had a seat at the table. [2] Glenda Dickerson’s intervention into feminist theatre and performance theory appears in her critical writings. Accordingly, these essays illustrate her engagement with Black feminist thought and elucidate how she modeled a feminist theatre theory through her creative works. Dickerson, along with other pioneering feminist theatre artists, “reshaped the modern dramatic/theatrical canon, and signaled its difference from mainstream (male) theatre.” [3] Dickerson’s select body of essays prompted white feminist theorists and practitioners to be cognizant of race and class as well as gender in their work and scholarship. [4] Moreover, Dickerson’s writings serve a dual function for readers: first, they offer an entryway into her life and creative process as a Black feminist artist. Secondly, they detail her subjective experiences as a Black woman within the professional worlds of theatre and academia. Feminist Theatre Theory: A Brief Overview of Inclusion and Exclusion Emerging as both an analytical tool as well as a methodology, feminism has been one of the foremost theoretical apparatuses to shape the field of theatre especially as it has called scholars’ attention to the dynamics of gender and sexuality. The scholars and critics, such as those mentioned below, who have contributed to founding and shaping a feminist theatre theory are diverse in their historical ideas, cultural approaches, and theoretical foregrounding. While there is no singular definition or description of feminist theatre theory to encapsulate such a wide-ranging array of positions, a brief overview of the legacies of some of the most significant contributors may help to situate Dickerson’s contribution to the field. Some of the foundational voices to assist in establishing feminism as an area of study within theatre/drama and English programs during the early part of the 1980s include Dinah Louise Leavitt, Helen Krich Chinoy, Linda Walsh Jenkins, and Helene Keyssar. As Elaine Aston notes, their texts had an impact on the field of theatre studies, however, they focused mainly on the playwrights and theatre practitioners who came to prominence during the 1970s. Aston maintains, “Studies of this kind were instrumental in making feminist and/or women’s theatre work visible but, to develop this, what was needed […] was a more fully rehearsed critical response critical frameworks appropriate for feminist analysis and ‘looking’.” [5] The scholars to heed Aston’s call were Sue-Ellen Case, Jill Dolan and Lynda Hart, among others. In Theatre & Feminism, Kim Solga provides a summary of the ground-breaking studies, including the works of Case, Dolan, and Hart, arguing that their scholarship indelibly changed the field of theatre studies and theatre practice by forging a relationship between feminist theory and theatre/performance. Solga singles out the year between 1988 and 1989 as “a watershed for feminist performance theory and criticism.” [6] The year witnessed the publication of some of feminist theatre’s major works: Sue-Ellen Case’s Feminism and Theatre , Jill Dolan’s The Feminist Spectator as Critic, and Lynda Hart’s edited collection, Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women’s Theatre . As this quick survey suggests, scholars, critics, and practitioners sustained a commitment to deconstructing the landscape of male privilege that positioned women on the margins or, in many cases, excluded them entirely from the histories of theatre and performance. Even though feminist theatre theory advanced theatre studies and practice, most of the earlier scholars and critics to develop a feminist theatre theory were predominantly white women concerned with gender , rather than race as a determining factor. And even though theatre scholar Sandra L. Richards pressed the issue back in 1991, declaring that it was “time that white women and men began to participate in the project of bringing more black women’s writing and theatre work to critical attention,” [7] the concerted efforts of white feminists still marginalized the lived experiences of Black women and other women of color. Within early theoretical studies of feminist theatre, the inclusion of women of color seemed an afterthought. A Return to 1987 Dickerson’s first significant contribution to the burgeoning field of feminist theatre and performance theory appeared in 1987—predating Solga’s “watershed” moment for feminist scholars and artists. During the 1987 pre-conference of the Women and Theatre Program, a focus group of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, Dickerson delivered her groundbreaking speech, “The Cult of True Womanhood: Toward a Womanist Attitude in African-American Theatre.” [8] With this speech, Dickerson infused a Black woman’s voice into the field of theatre and performance while simultaneously theorizing a Black woman’s subjectivity. Dickerson made her speech the same year that pioneering Black feminist scholar Barbara Christian wrote her pivotal essay, “The Race for Theory,” in which she suggests that we “read the works of our writers in our various ways and remain open to the intricacies of the intersection of language, class, race, and gender in the literature.” [9] Just as Christian called for a new way to nuance Black women’s cultural productions (i.e., fiction, poetry, novels, etc.), Dickerson led the charge in theatre to reverse what she identified as Black women being “triply locked out: by class, by race, and history.” [10] Dickerson’s and Christians’ declarations underscores their engagement with the theory of intersectionality (foreshadowing Kimberlé Crenshaw’s coining of the term in 1989). Dickerson’s concern with the “silenced voice of the woman of color” [11] fueled her mission to reclaim and re-center Black women’s voices and image through performance so that they no longer had to “depend on an often-distorted illustration.” [12] Throughout “The Cult of True Womanhood,” Dickerson also evokes the names of early “race women” [13] such as Sojourner Truth, Maria Stewart, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as more contemporary writers, cultural critics, and activists such as Lucille Clifton, Mary Helen Washington, Eleanor Traylor, and Winnie Mandela. Dickerson’s essay draws on Black feminist theory and literary criticism. As Lisa Anderson notes in Black Feminism in Contemporary Drama (2008) and La Donna Forsgren discusses in In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatist of the Black Arts Movement (2018), Black feminist theory and literary criticism helped to propel a new critical language that, in turn, formulated a method to read and analyze Black feminist aesthetics within a plethora of literary and artistic mediums and genres. Dickerson’s “The Cult of True Womanhood” essay also invokes the concept of “womanism.” She writes, “I went searching with Alice Walker for ‘our mothers’ gardens.’ That’s when I became a womanist. So, naturally I had to incorporate her salty definition. . .” [14] Womanism encompasses the concept of being “Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. […] Traditionally universalist…” [15] Theatre scholar Freda Scott Giles writes about Dickerson’s manifestation of womanism within her works: “Some feminists have given the impression that much of the feminist movement is fixated on the victimization of women; womanism resists that notion. The big picture is liberty and justice for all. The goal of freeing society from racism, classism, and sexism is mutually exclusive.” [16] A number of revolutionary Black feminist and womanist writers including Gloria I. Joseph and Audre Lorde have asserted that Black feminism, as well as womanism, offers a globally-inclusive framework. As early as 1979, Lorde called for feminist-activists (regardless of gender identity) to overthrow the ideologies that have contributed to racist, classist, and sexist attitudes and practices both in the United States and abroad. For example, in her essay, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” Lorde contends that feminist theory is not complete “without examining our many differences, and without a significant input from poor women, Black and Third World women, and lesbians.” [17] Lorde’s theoretical manifesto calls for a liberatory praxis unequivocally focused on the absence of Black women, poor women, queer women, and third world women’s experiences, among others, from larger feminist discourses. Like Lorde, Dickerson also takes a global perspective with her work. In “The Cult of True Womanhood” she writes: When you start reading ancient myths and womanist literature and traveling to countries where the people look like you, you gain a so-called global perspective. Not only is the language of oppression the same the world over; the anguish of women is echoed around the world and resonates from continent to continent. The torture of mothers who lose their daughters to rape, war, drugs, poverty; the suffering of women who are tortured and die in Latin American prisons; the untimely death of young women who are killed by drunk drivers or yuppie lovers in New York’s Central Park and then twice victimized by the courts and press: these women are sisters in suffering, fixed on the fangs of the two-headed serpent. Their silenced voices, their stilled tongues are symbolized for me in the illegal banning of South Africa’s Nomzamo Winnie Mandela, whom the people call “Mother of the Nation.”[18] Seen in this light, Dickerson’s artistic mantra mirrors Lorde’s manifesto as she strove to create a theatre that materializes what Lorde considers “differences” among women’s lived experiences. This appears most clearly in Dickerson’s final artistic work, The Kitchen Prayer Series, a trilogy of performances inspired by the tragic events of 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror. Centered around the question, “What is it like for women all around the world to live with war and terror daily?” Dickerson’s triptych interrogates how women from across the globe, navigate a world where war and terror are quotidian experiences. Several white feminist scholars have recognized Dickerson’s contribution to the developing field of feminist theatre studies. [19] For example, in the introduction to Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre Sue-Ellen Case writes about Dickerson’s essay, “The Cult of True Womanhood”: Dickerson amplifies the audacity of that voice and its strength within a critique of the form of the drama – its predilection for heroes – particularly heroes of a certain gender and class. From the pleasures of those audacious roots, Dickerson creates a theatre, as a director, and a theory of the theatre, as a feminist theorist. Dickerson’s move illustrates one way in which the social movement and the feminist theorist/theatre practitioner traverse a common terrain – the pleasure of a historical moment, a material condition moving with the gestures of the stage and the dynamics of performative forms.[20] Interestingly, Case does not explicitly name race as a factor within Dickerson’s theoretical framework. Instead, she focuses on gender and class. However, by calling out the “historical moment, a material condition,” as a “common terrain” Dickerson negotiates, Case makes the point that Dickerson’s theory, as well as her theatre are formulated through materialist feminism which aims to critique the “conditions of class, race, and gender oppression, and demands the radical transformation of social structures.” [21] Additionally, Case makes an important observation by calling attention to Dickerson’s role as an innovative feminist performance maker. As Dickerson laments, “Gone was the pompous director’s gaze, absent the royal director’s chair.” [22] Renouncing a longing to sit among the “ranks of directors,” Glenda Dickerson declared herself a “PraiseSinger.” “A true PraiseSinger,” Dickerson explains, is a guardian of the archetypes of her culture’s collective unconscious. Her function is not to invent but to rediscover and to animate. From this day forth, I will be concerned not with acts, and scenes and curtains; but with redemption, retrieval, and reclamation. The chair in which I sit will no longer be called the director’s chair, but the blood-bought mercy seat. From that seat, my work will be a mission, my goal will be a miracle.[23] With Dickerson denouncing the patriarchal throne of the director in her pioneering essay, she emerges as one of the earliest women theatre artists to use a Black feminist lens to reconsider the position of the director and their function. Final Thoughts I hope that this essay will shed light on Dickerson’s role as an audacious critical theorist and excavate her from the hidden cracks of (theatre) history. A closer look at her other essays – written at various periods throughout her career – would further illustrate her deepening commitment to Black feminist theatre as well as Black feminist epistemology. As both her critical writings as well as her creative works demonstrate, Dickerson challenged conventional modes of theatre making while also using theatre as a platform to bring marginalized, silenced, and forgotten people center stage. Dickerson’s scholarly and artistic works offer a model for those looking to subvert the dominant paradigms. References [1] When Dickerson is referenced in studies that address African American theatre or Black women in theatre such as Errol Hill and James V. Hatch’s A History of African American Theatre (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003) or Anthony Hill and Douglas Q. Barnett’s Historical Dictionary of African American Theatre (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009), it is usually a small survey of her work as a director. Anne Fliotsos and Wendy Vierow’s reference book, American Women Directors of the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008) also provides a broad survey of Dickerson’s work in the theatre that is premised on interviews Fliotsos conducted with Dickerson. [2] My larger project in progress offers a richer exploration of Dickerson’s career, from her start as a student of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s to her final creative project The Kitchen Prayer Series before her untimely death in 2012. [3] Elaine Aston, An Introduction to Feminism and Theatre (New York: Routledge, 1995), 57. [4] Dickerson’s essays include: “The Cult of True Womanhood: Toward a Womanist Attitude in African-American Theatre” which was first published in Theatre Journal (vol. 40, no. 2, 1988) and republished in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre edited by Sue-Ellen Case (New York: Methuen, 1988); “Wearing Red: When a Rowdy Band of Charismatics Learned to Say ‘NO!’” in Upstaging Big Daddy: Directing Theater as if Gender and Race Matter , edited by Ellen Donkin and Susan Clement (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993); “Rode a Railroad that Had No Track” in A Sourcebook of African-American Performances edited by Annemarie Bean (London and New York: Routledge, 1999); and “Festivities and Jubilations on the Graves of the Dead: Sanctifying Sullied Space” in Performance and Cultural Politics , edited by Elin Diamond (London and New York: Routledge, 1996). [5] Elaine Aston, “Foreword,” in Feminism and Theatre , ed. Sue-Ellen Case (New York: Methuen, 2014), ix -x. [6] Kim Solga, Theatre & Feminism (New York: Palgrave), 16. [7] Sandra L. Richards made this statement in a paper she delivered, “Women, Theatre, and Social Action,” at the ‘Breaking the Surface” conference/festival held in Calgary, November 13-17, 1991. I learned of Richards’ paper, and subsequently her quote, from Lizbeth Goodman’s book Contemporary Feminist Theatre: To Each Her Own (London and New York: Routledge, 1993) . [8] “The Cult of True Womanhood: Toward a Womanist Attitude in African-American Theatre” was later published in Theatre Journal in 1988 and in 1990 re-published in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre , edited by Sue-Ellen Case. I am utilizing the published version of Dickerson’s speech and will therefore refer to it as a written essay. [9] Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory,” Cultural Critique , no.6 (1987): 53. [10] Glenda Dickerson, “The Cult of True Womanhood: Toward a Womanist Attitude in African-American Theatre,” in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre , ed. Sue-Ellen Case (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1990), 110. [11] Dickerson, “Cult of True Womanhood” 110. [12] Khalid Y. Long, “The Black Feminist Theatre of Glenda Dickerson,” in The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance , ed. Kathy A. Perkins et al (New York: Routledge), 183. [13] In her book, Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women , Black feminist studies scholar Brittney C. Cooper defines the phrase “race women” as “the first Black women intellectuals [and activist]. As they entered into public racial leadership roles beyond the church in the decades after reconstruction, they explicitly fashioned for themselves a public duty to serve their people through the diligent and careful intellectual work and attention to proving the intellectual character of the race” (11). [14] Dickerson, “The Cult of True Womanhood,” 115. [15] Alice Walker, In Search of Mother’s Garden: Womanist Prose , 1st ed. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), xi. [16] Freda Scott Giles, “Glenda Dickerson’s Nu Shu: Combining Feminist Discourse/Pedagogy/Theatre,” in Contemporary African American Women Playwrights: A Casebook , ed. Philip C. Kolin (New York: Routledge, 2007), 141. [17] Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984), 111. Lorde’s essay was first delivered as a speech at a conference in 1979 honoring Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex , and later published in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa (page missing?). The essay was republished in Lorde’s collection Sister Outsider . [18] Dickerson, “Cult of True Womanhood” 115. [19] Similar to Case, Ellen Donkin and Susan Clement, the editors of Upstaging Big Daddy: Directing as if Gender and Race Matter, consider Dickerson a “godmother,” noting that her “intellectual and artistic courage and generosity have given us permission to think past the limits of our own cultural identification as white women and to begin investigating the way Big Daddy crosses into communities of color,” 5. [20] Sue-Ellen Case, “Introduction,” in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1990), 4. [21] Aston, Feminism and Theatre , 9. [22] Dickerson, “The Cult of True Womanhood,” 118. [23] Ibid., 118. Footnotes About The Author(s) KHALID Y. LONG is an assistant professor of theatre and coordinator of theatre studies at Columbia College Chicago. Khalid has published essays in Continuum: The Journal of African Diaspora Drama, Theatre and Performance as well as the Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance . His forthcoming scholarship includes essays in Theatre Design & Technology , TDR: The Drama Review , and Critical Essays on the Politics of Oscar Hammerstein II edited by Donald Gagnon. Khalid has also contributed essays to Black Masks , a long-established black theatre magazine. Khalid’s current book project is a critical study of Black feminist artist Glenda Dickerson. 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.

Watch VIDEO 50 + DEAFMAN GLANCE by Robert Wilson at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2026. A double program of two essential early video works by Robert Wilson, screened together. VIDEO 50 (1978, 52 min) VIDEO 50 is an extraordinary video sketchbook — a highly original, visually dramatic, and frequently humorous collection of one hundred abbreviated episodes produced for television. Unfolding as an uninterrupted series of thirty-second vignettes, the work is characterized by deadpan theatricality, symbolist imagery, surrealist juxtapositions, and the repetition of key visual motifs. Indelible images, precisely composed — a man teetering above a waterfall, a floating chair, a winking eye, a parrot against the New York skyline — are accompanied by an architectural sound score that uses spoken phonetic patterns in place of recognizable words. Fusing his surprising visual logic and sense of temporal manipulation, Wilson creates a work of startling wit and poetry. The film anticipates both the aesthetics of music video and the rhythms of contemporary short-form visual media, while remaining entirely its own singular creation. DEAFMAN GLANCE (1981, 27 min) This haunting work for television has been excerpted and adapted from Wilson's five-hour silent opera of the same title, which premiered in Iowa City in 1970 and became an international sensation at its 1971 Paris run. The video tells a stark and stylized story of murder, using time and space, light and movement, and isolated sound in place of spoken words. A somber, menacing woman washes white dishes and a gleaming carving knife, pours milk into a glass, and then slowly attacks two young boys — not a word of dialogue uttered throughout. The ritualistic action moves from a spartan kitchen through the silent halls and stairways of a lonely house, existing in a space between ancient Greek tragedy and contemporary tabloid headline. Terrifying yet not violent, real yet symbolic, the work harbors deep paradox: pacing reduces action to abstraction; morality and mortality remain deliberately ambiguous. Total running time: approximately 85 minutes. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents VIDEO 50 + DEAFMAN GLANCE Robert Wilson At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2026 Screening Information This program will be screened on May 30 at 6:15 PM, and June 4 at 6:45 PM, at Anthology Film Archives RSVP Please note that these screenings are ticketed and require prior registration at the Anthology Film Archives website. Country United States Language English Running Time 85 minutes Year of Release 1978 / 1981 About The Film A double program of two essential early video works by Robert Wilson, screened together. VIDEO 50 (1978, 52 min) VIDEO 50 is an extraordinary video sketchbook — a highly original, visually dramatic, and frequently humorous collection of one hundred abbreviated episodes produced for television. Unfolding as an uninterrupted series of thirty-second vignettes, the work is characterized by deadpan theatricality, symbolist imagery, surrealist juxtapositions, and the repetition of key visual motifs. Indelible images, precisely composed — a man teetering above a waterfall, a floating chair, a winking eye, a parrot against the New York skyline — are accompanied by an architectural sound score that uses spoken phonetic patterns in place of recognizable words. Fusing his surprising visual logic and sense of temporal manipulation, Wilson creates a work of startling wit and poetry. The film anticipates both the aesthetics of music video and the rhythms of contemporary short-form visual media, while remaining entirely its own singular creation. DEAFMAN GLANCE (1981, 27 min) This haunting work for television has been excerpted and adapted from Wilson's five-hour silent opera of the same title, which premiered in Iowa City in 1970 and became an international sensation at its 1971 Paris run. The video tells a stark and stylized story of murder, using time and space, light and movement, and isolated sound in place of spoken words. A somber, menacing woman washes white dishes and a gleaming carving knife, pours milk into a glass, and then slowly attacks two young boys — not a word of dialogue uttered throughout. The ritualistic action moves from a spartan kitchen through the silent halls and stairways of a lonely house, existing in a space between ancient Greek tragedy and contemporary tabloid headline. Terrifying yet not violent, real yet symbolic, the work harbors deep paradox: pacing reduces action to abstraction; morality and mortality remain deliberately ambiguous. Total running time: approximately 85 minutes. Director / Artist: Robert Wilson Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) About The Artist(s) Robert Wilson (October 4, 1941 – July 31, 2025) was an American director, playwright, and visual artist who fundamentally reshaped experimental theater over more than five decades. Born in Waco, Texas, he studied at the University of Texas before moving to New York, where he trained at Brooklyn's Pratt Institute and founded the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, a performance collective that became the incubator for his early landmark works. Wilson's theater — often described as a "theater of imagery" — is distinguished by its radical reimagining of theatrical time and space, its use of exquisitely composed light and movement in place of conventional narrative, and its synthesis of visual art, music, dance, and text into unified stage pictures. His work sits at a radical distance from naturalism: performers move with ritualized, slow precision, language is treated as sound as much as meaning, and the stage itself functions as a living painting. His breakthrough came with Deafman Glance (1970), a six-hour silent opera that electrified Paris audiences and prompted the Surrealist poet Louis Aragon to describe Wilson as the fulfillment of Surrealism's deepest aspirations. Throughout the 1970s Wilson created a series of epic-scale works that redefined theatrical duration, culminating in his collaboration with composer Philip Glass on Einstein on the Beach (1976), a five-hour opera that premiered at the Avignon Festival and later played the Metropolitan Opera. It is widely regarded as one of the defining works of 20th-century performance. Over the following decades Wilson collaborated with an extraordinary range of artists — Tom Waits, William S. Burroughs, Heiner Müller, Lou Reed, Susan Sontag, Laurie Anderson, Willem Dafoe, and Marina Abramovic, among many others — while also directing canonical texts by Shakespeare, Beckett, Wagner, Ibsen, and Ionesco. He staged productions at the world's leading theaters and opera houses, including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Berliner Ensemble, the Thalia Theater Hamburg, La Scala, and the Salzburg Festival. Alongside his theater work, Wilson was a prolific maker of video art. Beginning in 1978 he produced a series of innovative television works including VIDEO 50, DEAFMAN GLANCE, and STATIONS, transposing his theatrical visual language into the moving image. He also created an extensive series of Video Portraits of figures including Lady Gaga, Brad Pitt, and Mikhail Baryshnikov. In 1991 Wilson founded The Watermill Center on Long Island, a "laboratory for performance" housed in a former Western Union research facility on the edge of the Shinnecock Reservation, which continues to host residencies, exhibitions, and productions. His drawings, sculptures, and installations are held in major collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, the Whitney Museum, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Wilson received numerous honors throughout his life, including Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, the Drama Desk Award, Obie Awards, and a 1986 Pulitzer Prize nomination. He died on July 31, 2025, at the age of 83. Get in touch with the artist(s) and follow them on social media Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2026 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here

Kristin Moriah Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 2 Visit Journal Homepage Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left Kristin Moriah By Published on May 27, 2018 Download Article as PDF Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left . Malik Gaines. New York: NYU Press, 2017; Pp. 248. It begins with a bold proposition. In Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left , scholar-practitioner Malik Gaines suggests that performance is a radical act and that black performances can amend “dominant discourses that manage representation and constrain the lives they organize” (1). Gaines analyzes this phenomenon “against the archives of three complicit registers, each of which engages a history of radicalism”: blackness; the sixties; and the transnational route between the United States, West Africa, and Europe (2-4). This configuration also permits Gaines to consider the “ties between visuality and power’s organization” (7). Thus, Gaines’s book uses interdisciplinary means to assess a range of stunning black cultural artifacts. Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left adds to the field of black performance studies by providing crucial context for some of the most significant acts of black performance in the mid-twentieth century and by firmly rooting black performance studies within the even broader field of black diasporic studies. In the first chapter, Gaines considers the political nature of jazz singer Nina Simone’s onstage performances in the 1960s. In chapter two, he probes the plays of Efua Sutherland and Ama Ata Aidoo and illustrates the complexities involved in the production of dramatic work meant to express a singular African identity. Gaines then directs his attention towards Günther Kaufmann and finds that the black German actor “problematizes the representation of national identity” on screen (96). In the final chapter, he illustrates the ways black drag queen Sylvester bolstered the Cockettes’ transgressive performances. In each of these contexts, with their strong transnational connective tissue, Gaines finds that black performance troubles hegemonic discourses surrounding race, gender, sexuality, and nationhood. Transnational black performance signifies black diaspora even as it disrupts audience expectations and political rhetoric. The geographic locations that comprise Gaines’s investigation include the United States, Ghana, and West Germany. Individually, these sites represent central nodes in studies of black diasporic cultural circulation, including those that take the current African migration crisis into consideration. Their triangulation here is significant. Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left unites these various strains of black studies and makes strong claims for why they should be brought to the forefront simultaneously. In doing so, Gaines maintains that the interplay between these three sites demonstrates the way the theorization and performance of blackness in the United States acted as a touchstone for black diasporic subjects and white audiences the world over. In order to ground his project within the broader field of performance studies, Gaines responds to Afro-pessimist critiques of Marxian analyses à la Frank Wilderson. Gaines’s investigation of Nina Simone’s radical performance work can be considered alongside other recent contributions to the field of black studies, including Shana Redmond’s Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora . And yet, few critics besides Gaines have attempted to tease out the Brechtian implications of Nina Simone’s stagecraft. While the relationship between African Americans and Ghanaians during the 1960s might be well known, thanks to the work of scholars like Kevin Gaines, the work of Ghanaian playwrights like Efua Sutherland and Ama Ata Aidoo remain relatively unexamined. Furthermore, Gaines investigates the hypervisibility of blackness in West Germany during the late 1960s and early 1970s by way of Afro-German actor Günther Kaufmann’s work with famed director Werner Fassbinder. Gaines’s afterword also takes contemporary Venice into consideration through his critique of the 2015 Venice Biennale and reminder that even in rarefied spaces, performance is always political. The result of these transnational case studies is nothing less than a reframing of the terms by which we understand the 1960s, the Nixon era, and our current political reality. Within this complex schema, the chapter entitled “The Cockettes, Sylvester, and Performance as Life” initially appears to be an outlier. A predominately white performance group who were active in the 1970s, the Cockettes push the boundaries of Gaines’s study regarding both time span and subject matter. But the chapter works precisely because it is excessive. The Cockettes’ inclusion allows Gaines to underscore the temporal excesses of the 1960s as well as the ubiquity of blackness on the American stage, even in its most marginalized outcroppings. The performative interventions of black drag queen Sylvester provide ample food for thought here. Gaines delineates the contrapuntal position of Sylvester against the political nuances of the San Francisco drag scene, with its origins in Brechtian forms of street theatre. Given the growing popularity of television shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race and increasing mainstream interest in drag performance, this chapter is perhaps a much-needed reminder of the black presence in politicized drag work. Gaines brings liminal performances of blackness like Sylvester’s into the critical fold while paying particular attention to the work of black feminist critics. His methodology involves a consciously political citational practice. For instance, Gaines claims that his first chapter contributes to the “emerging field of Nina Simone Studies” (22) and references critics like Daphne Brooks. Saidiyah Hartman’s Lose Your Mother helps to frame the second chapter. Tina Campt’s Other Germans is a notable influence on chapter three. In this way, Gaines’s work provides an essential model for advanced students and scholars in the field. Gaines is especially concerned with how radical black performance challenges the limits of visuality or turns the certainty that often attends visuality on its head. As such, music and the political potential of sound in the abstract to express blackness in radical ways become focal points. He argues that “music has served as a cultural and formal context that supports the kinds of multiplicitous expressions” (193) he sees in 1960s performance. So, for instance, Gaines insists on Nina Simone’s “quadruple consciousness, a dexterous deployment of authorship, presence, and voice that exceeded the prohibitions of race and gender while performing those terms” (23). Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left will appeal to scholars who recognize the impact of sound on performance, or Sound Studies writ large, as well as musicality at its baseline. Malik Gaines’s position as both a practitioner and a scholar lend a unique depth to this study, applying black performance theories and techniques to twentieth-century cultural objects across a transnational framework. His text reveals a striking sensitivity to the subtle frequencies on which black performance operates and is an important addition to the expanding black performance studies canon. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Kristin Moriah Grinnell College Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Stages of Struggle and Celebration: A Production History of Black Theatre in Texas Immersions in Cultural Difference: Tourism, War, Performance Stage for Action: U.S. Social Activist Theatre in the 1940s Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America: The Legacy of Alan Schneider as Beckett’s American Director The Contemporary American Monologue: Performance and Politics Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left Introduction: Mediations of Authorship in American Postdramatic Mediaturgies Kaldor and Dorsen's "desktop performances" and the (Live) Coauthorship Paradox Ecologies of Media, Ecologies of Mind: Embodying Authorship Through Mediaturgy Dropping the Needle on the Record: Intermedial Contingency and Spalding Gray's Early Talk Performances #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS: Weaponizing Performance of Identity from the Digital to the Physical Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

NOELLE GHOUSSAINI presents A shadow of light: a ritual gathering at the PRELUDE 2024 Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center CUNY. PRELUDE Festival 2024 A shadow of light: a ritual gathering NOELLE GHOUSSAINI 4-4:50pm Thursday, October 17, 2024 The Segal Theatre RSVP A shadow of light: a ritual gathering offers a mystical experience of homecoming. Bringing together embodied meditation, a collective altar, performance & ritual, we gather in sacred connection to honor our bodies, spirits, ancestors & our natural belonging to each other & the earth. Rooted in the belief that communal sacred spaces are essential to our collective wellbeing and liberation, participants are invited to both witness and take part in this ritual gathering. An iteration of a shadow of light was explored & developed at the Mercury Store in 2023. LOBSTER Nora loves Patti Smith. Nora is Patti Smith. Nora is stoned out of her mind in the Chelsea Hotel. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is her mind. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is an out-of-use portable classroom in the Pacific Northwest, and that classroom is a breeding ground for lobsters. LOBSTER by Kallan Dana directed by Hanna Yurfest produced by Emma Richmond with: Anna Aubry, Chris Erdman, Annie Fang, Coco McNeil, Haley Wong Needy Lover presents an excerpt of LOBSTER , a play about teenagers putting on a production of Patti Smith and Sam Shepard's Cowboy Mouth . THE ARTISTS Needy Lover makes performances that are funny, propulsive, weird, and gut-wrenching (ideally all at the same time). We create theatre out of seemingly diametrically opposed forces: our work is both entertaining and unusual, funny and tragic. Needylover.com Kallan Dana is a writer and performer originally from Portland, Oregon. She has developed and presented work with Clubbed Thumb, The Hearth, The Tank, Bramble Theater Company, Dixon Place, Northwestern University, and Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute. She is a New Georges affiliated artist and co-founder of the artist collaboration group TAG at The Tank. She received her MFA from Northwestern University. Upcoming: RACECAR RACECAR RACECAR with The Hearth/Connelly Theater Upstairs (dir. Sarah Blush), Dec 2024. LOBSTER with The Tank (dir. Hanna Yurfest), April/May 2025. Needylover.com and troveirl.com Hanna Yurfest is a director and producer from Richmond, MA. She co-founded and leads The Tank’s artist group TAG and creates work with her company, Needy Lover. Emma Richmond is a producer and director of performances and events. She has worked with/at HERE, The Tank, The Brick, and Audible, amongst others. She was The Tank’s 2022-23 Producing Fellow, and is a member of the artist group TAG. Her day job is Programs Manager at Clubbed Thumb, and she also makes work with her collective Trove, which she co-founded. www.emma-richmond.com Rooting for You The Barbarians It's the Season Six premiere of 'Sava Swerve's: The Model Detector' and Cameron is on it!!! June, Willa, and (by proximity) Sunny are hosting weekly viewing parties every week until Cameron gets cut, which, fingers crossed, is going to be the freakin' finale! A theatrical playground of a play that serves an entire season of 'so-bad-it's-good' reality TV embedded in the social lives of a friend group working through queerness, adolescence, judgment, and self-actualization. Presenting an excerpt from Rooting for You! with loose staging, experimenting with performance style, timing, and physicality. THE ARTISTS Ashil Lee (he/they) NYC-based actor, playwright, director, and sex educator. Korean-American, trans nonbinary, child of immigrants, bestie to iconic pup Huxley. Described as "a human rollercoaster" and "Pick a lane, buddy!" by that one AI Roast Bot. 2023 Lucille Lortel nominee (Outstanding Ensemble: The Nosebleed ) and Clubbed Thumb Early Career Writers Group Alum. NYU: Tisch. BFA in Acting, Minor in Youth Mental Health. Masters Candidate in Mental Health and Wellness (NYU Steinhardt: 20eventually), with intentions of incorporating mental health consciousness into the theatre industry. www.ashillee.com Phoebe Brooks is a gender non-conforming theater artist interested in establishing a Theatre of Joy for artists and audiences alike. A lifelong New Yorker, Phoebe makes art that spills out beyond theater-going conventions and forges unlikely communities. They love messing around with comedy, heightened text, and gender performance to uncover hidden histories. She's also kind of obsessed with interactivity; particularly about figuring out how to make audience participation less scary for audiences. Phoebe has a BA in Theatre from Northwestern University and an MFA in Theatre Directing from Columbia University's School of the Arts. The Barbarians is a word-drunk satirical play exploring political rhetoric and the power of words on the world. With cartoonish wit and rambunctious edge, it asks: what if the President tried to declare war, but the words didn't work? Written by Jerry Lieblich and directed by Paul Lazar, it will premiere in February 2025 at LaMama. The Barbarians is produced in association with Immediate Medium, and with support from the Venturous Theater Fund of the Tides Foundation. THE ARTISTS Jerry Lieblich (they/them) plays in the borderlands of theater, poetry, and music. Their work experiments with language as a way to explore unexpected textures of consciousness and attention. Plays include Mahinerator (The Tank), The Barbarians (La Mama - upcoming), D Deb Debbie Deborah (Critic’s Pick: NY Times), Ghost Stories (Critic’s Pick: TimeOut NY), and Everything for Dawn (Experiments in Opera). Their poetry has appeared in Foglifter, Second Factory, TAB, Grist, SOLAR, Pomona Valley Review, Cold Mountain Review, and Works and Days. Their poetry collection otherwise, without was a finalist for The National Poetry Series. Jerry has held residencies at MacDowell, MassMoCA, Blue Mountain Center, Millay Arts, and UCROSS, and Yiddishkayt. MFA: Brooklyn College. www.thirdear.nyc Paul Lazar is a founding member, along with Annie-B Parson, of Big Dance Theater. He has co-directed and acted in works for Big Dance since 1991, including commissions from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Old Vic (London), The Walker Art Center, Classic Stage Co., New York Live Arts, The Kitchen, and Japan Society. Paul directed Young Jean Lee’s We’re Gonna Die which was reprised in London featuring David Byrne. Other directing credits include Bodycast with Francis McDormand (BAM), Christina Masciotti’s Social Security (Bushwick Starr), and Major Bang (for The Foundry Theatre) at Saint Ann’s Warehouse. Awards include two Bessies (2010, 2002), the Jacob’s Pillow Creativity Award (2007), and the Prelude Festival’s Frankie Award (2014), as well an Obie Award for Big Dance in 2000. Steve Mellor has appeared on Broadway (Big River ), Off-Broadway (Nixon's Nixon ) and regionally at Arena Stage, Long Wharf Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, Portland Stage and Yale Rep. A longtime collaborator with Mac Wellman, Steve has appeared in Wellman's Harm’s Way, Energumen, Dracula, Cellophane, Terminal Hip (OBIE Award), Sincerity Forever, A Murder of Crows, The Hyacinth Macaw, 7 Blowjobs (Bessie Award), Strange Feet, Bad Penny, Fnu Lnu, Bitter Bierce (OBIE Award), and Muazzez . He also directed Mr. Wellman's 1965 UU. In New York City, he has appeared at the Public Theater, La Mama, Soho Rep, Primary Stages, PS 122, MCC Theater, The Chocolate Factory, and The Flea. His film and television credits include Sleepless in Seattle, Mickey Blue Eyes, Celebrity, NYPD Blue, Law and Order, NY Undercover, and Mozart in the Jungle. Chloe Claudel is an actor and director based in NYC and London. She co-founded the experimental company The Goat Exchange, with which she has developed over a dozen new works of theater and film, including Salome, or the Cult of the Clitoris: a Historical Phallusy in last year's Prelude Festival. She's thrilled to be working with Paul and Jerry on The Barbarians . Anne Gridley is a two time Obie award-winning actor, dramaturg, and artist. As a founding member of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, she has co-created and performed in critically acclaimed works including Life & Times, Poetics: A Ballet Brut, No Dice, Romeo & Juliet, and Burt Turrido . In addition to her work with Nature Theater, Gridley has performed with Jerôme Bel, Caborca, 7 Daughters of Eve, and Big Dance, served as a Dramaturg for the Wooster Group’s production Who’s Your Dada ?, and taught devised theater at Bard College. Her drawings have been shown at H.A.U. Berlin, and Mass Live Arts. B.A. Bard College; M.F.A. Columbia University. Naren Weiss is an actor/writer who has worked onstage (The Public Theater, Second Stage, Kennedy Center, Geffen Playhouse, international), in TV (ABC, NBC, CBS, Comedy Central), and has written plays that have been performed across the globe (India, Singapore, South Africa, U.S.). Upcoming: The Sketchy Eastern European Show at The Players Theatre (Mar. '24). Noelle Ghoussaini (she/her) creates performance, ritual and sacred gathering with and for community. Each embodied experience aims to nurture freedom in the very fabric of our being; cultivating connection with our inherent belonging to the world around and within us. Noelle works at sites ranging from public parks to detention centers, from theatres to community spaces. As a Lebanese-American who grew up across three continents, Noelle is dedicated to collective liberation & decolonial creative practice; her visions thread together artistic and sacred spaces of homecoming. www.noelleghoussaini.com @noelleghoussaini Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2024 See What's on

Watch The Making of a Monologue: Robert Wilson's Hamlet by Marion Kessel at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2026. This behind-the-scenes documentary reveals how Robert Wilson created his extraordinary one-man production of Hamlet, drawing on rehearsal footage, performance documentation, and intimate access to Wilson's working process. Where the companion film Hamlet: A Monologue presents the finished production, The Making of a Monologue traces the path that led there — showing how Wilson approached the challenge of embodying every character in Shakespeare's play alone, how he developed the physical vocabulary for each figure, and how he structured the text to operate simultaneously as interior monologue and theatrical event. The film captures the rich, multi-dimensional texture of Wilson's creative process: the painstaking attention to gesture and movement, the interplay between visual composition and spoken text, and the way Wilson works backwards from spatial and visual problems rather than forward from psychological or narrative ones. For viewers who have seen the production itself, the film provides an invaluable counterpoint — a view into the work that lies behind the finished image. For those coming to Wilson's theater for the first time, it serves as a thoughtful and accessible guide to a distinctive way of making performance. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents The Making of a Monologue: Robert Wilson's Hamlet Marion Kessel At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2026 Screening Information This film will be screened on June 1 at 8:45 PM, at Anthology Film Archives RSVP Please note that these screenings are ticketed and require prior registration at the Anthology Film Archives website. Country Germany Language English Running Time 62 minutes Year of Release 1995 About The Film This behind-the-scenes documentary reveals how Robert Wilson created his extraordinary one-man production of Hamlet, drawing on rehearsal footage, performance documentation, and intimate access to Wilson's working process. Where the companion film Hamlet: A Monologue presents the finished production, The Making of a Monologue traces the path that led there — showing how Wilson approached the challenge of embodying every character in Shakespeare's play alone, how he developed the physical vocabulary for each figure, and how he structured the text to operate simultaneously as interior monologue and theatrical event. The film captures the rich, multi-dimensional texture of Wilson's creative process: the painstaking attention to gesture and movement, the interplay between visual composition and spoken text, and the way Wilson works backwards from spatial and visual problems rather than forward from psychological or narrative ones. For viewers who have seen the production itself, the film provides an invaluable counterpoint — a view into the work that lies behind the finished image. For those coming to Wilson's theater for the first time, it serves as a thoughtful and accessible guide to a distinctive way of making performance. Director: Marion Kessel Featuring: Robert Wilson About The Artist(s) Marion Kessel is a documentary filmmaker who has worked in the documentation of theater and performance. The Making of a Monologue, her behind-the-scenes account of the creation of Robert Wilson's solo Hamlet, draws on extensive rehearsal access to provide one of the most illuminating records of Wilson's working methods available on film. Get in touch with the artist(s) and follow them on social media Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2026 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here

By Meghan Duffy, Daniel Gerould | A bibliography of critical studies in english on the theory and practice of comedy in drama, theatre, and performance. < 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 Comedy: A Bibliography Meghan Duffy, Daniel Gerould Download PDF A Bibliography of Critical Studies in English on the Theory and Practice of Comedy in Drama, Theatre, and Performance “Comedy has been particularly unpropitious to definers,” declared the great dictionary maker Dr. Johnson, and the German novelist and aesthetician Jean Paul quipped, “Definitions of the comic serve the sole purpose of being themselves comic.” Accepting the challenge, the keenest minds have been drawn to the debate about the nature of comedy and attracted to speculation about its theory and practice. For all lovers of comedy, Comedy: A Bibliography is an essential guide and resource, providing authors, titles, and publication data for over a thousand books and articles devoted to this most elusive of genres. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

Watch JJ by Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. JJ. (film) follows Ami & Popo's journey to New York in the spring of 2022. In the footsteps of Jill Johnston (1929-2010), the two investigators meet people who knew Jill as a dance critic, Jill as a radical lesbian, Jill as a performer, and more. Jill's many facets provide access to lesbian heritage, the place of lesbians in art, and bodies in activist spaces.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents JJ At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Thursday May 15th, at 2:20pm. RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. You may RSVP above to get a reminder about the Segal Film Festival in your inbox. Country France Language English, French Running Time 71 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film JJ. (film) follows Ami & Popo's journey to New York in the spring of 2022. In the footsteps of Jill Johnston (1929-2010), the two investigators meet people who knew Jill as a dance critic, Jill as a radical lesbian, Jill as a performer, and more. Jill's many facets provide access to lesbian heritage, the place of lesbians in art, and bodies in activist spaces. About The Artist(s) Pauline L. Boulba & Aminata Labor are multi-disciplinary artists. They met at the Dance department of Paris 8 University in 2016, during the mobilization against LaLoiTravailEtSonMonde (Labor Law), and have since developed a wide range of complicities and relationships. From militant collectives to radio broadcasts, from performances to text writing, from painting sessions to inter-species walks, they make art and life spaces for questioning, singing, making a mess, sharing, watching and much more. Their work has been presented together or separately at the Centre Pompidou (Paris), Centre National de la Danse (Pantin), Villa Arson (Nice), Festival Salmon (Barcelona), Den Frie (Copenhagen), Théâtre de l'Usine (Geneva). Between 2020-2024, they created artworks dedicated to Jill Johnston: JJ, a performance ; JJ, a film ; JJ, a book. They also showed a duo-exhibition Jill ou Face, at les Capucins, Centre d'Art d'Embrun (France). Get in touch with the artist(s) jj.film2023@gmail.com and follow them on social media Pauline L. Boulba is a dance performer and researcher. Aminata Labor performs and draws. They met at Paris 8 University in 2016 during the mobilization against LaLoiTravailEtSonMonde and have since developed various forms of complicity and relationships. From activist collectives to radio shows, performances,text writing, painting sessions, and interspecies walks, they make art and life spaces for questioning, singing, zbeuler, sharing, watching, and much more. Their artistic activities are mostly subsidized by public institutions and are part of the intermittent regime. From 2020 to 2024, they are conducting a vast investigation into Jill Johnston with the JJ project, which takes the form of a play, a book, and a film. It is for the latter that they collaborate with Lucie Brux, multifunctional editor, archive geek & queer films, comrade in struggle. Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse

The Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) is an annual event showcasing films drawn from the world of theatre and performance. The festival presents experimental, emerging, and established theatre artists and filmmakers from around the world to audiences and industry professionals. 2026 Festival The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at CUNY's Graduate Center presents the 10th edition of the Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP), running May 28 – June 5, 2026, in partnership with Anthology Film Archives. The 2026 festival is co-curated by Tomek Smolarski with Frank Hentschker. This milestone anniversary edition brings together a bold international program of new films alongside a major retrospective celebrating Robert Wilson , who passed away in 2025 at the age of 83. A selection of films will be screened in-person at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center (free, first-come first-served ) on May 28th, 30th and June 1st , with a selection of films will be screened at Anthology Film Archives ( ticketed ) from May 29th to June 5th. Festival Lineup Bob Wilson's Life & Death of Marina Abramovic Giada Colagrande Hamlet: A Monologue Franco Laera Obsessed with Light Sabine Krayenbühl & Zeva Oelbaum Robert Wilson In Situ Pauline de Grunne The Black Rider Theo Janssen & Ralph Quinke WATERMILL 1993 + WATERMILL CENTER BYRD HOFFMAN SUMMER PROGRAM 2009 Stefan Kurt / Tomek Jeziorski Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera Mark Obenhaus In-I In Motion Juliette Binoche Overture for KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE Robert Wilson / Filmmaker Unknown Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars Howard Brookner The Making of a Monologue: Robert Wilson's Hamlet Marion Kessel Ewa – The Last Lesson Andrea Mura / Federico Savonitto Monk in Pieces Billy Shebar Palestine Comedy Club Alaa Aliabdallah / Charlotte Knowles Robert Wilson on Screen Screenings at Anthology Film Archives Unbound John English / Tom Garner Firebird Irina Patkanian / Marion Schoevaert Museum of the Night Fermín Eloy Acosta Respoken Sidney Ken / Thai Phirun Hul STATIONS + LA FEMME À LA CAFETIÈRE + LA MORT DE MOLIÈRE Robert Wilson VIDEO 50 + DEAFMAN GLANCE Robert Wilson Screening Schedule at The Martin E. Segal Center (365 5th Ave, New York) Google Maps (free and open to all, first-come first-served) Thursday May 28 6:00 pm Short Opening 6:10 pm Monk in Pieces by Billy Shebar & David C. Roberts (USA / Germany / France, 2025, 94’) 7:50 pm Q&A with Billy Shebar 8:20 pm Reception — Wine & Cheese RSVP Day 1 Saturday May 30 12:00 pm Unbound by John English & Tom Garner (Spain, 2024, 91’) 1:40 pm Respoken by Sidney Ken & Thaiphirun Hul (Cambodia, 2024, 26’) 2:15 pm Palestine Comedy Club by Alaa Aliabdallah & Charlotte Knowles (Palestine / UK, 2024, 97’) 4:00 pm Museum of the Night by Fermín Eloy Acosta (Argentina, 2025, 88’) 5:45 pm In-I In Motion by Juliette Binoche (France, 2025, 156’) RSVP Day 2 Monday June 1 5:00 pm Firebird by Irina Patkanian & Marion Schoevaert (USA, 2026, 23’) 5:30 pm Ewa - The Last Lesson by Andrea Mura & Federico Savonitto (Italy / Poland, 2025, 66’) 6:40 pm Obsessed with Light by Sabine Krayenbühl & Zeva Oelbaum (USA, 2025, 90’) RSVP Day 3 Robert Wilson on Screen Anthology Film Archives (32 2nd Ave, New York) Google Maps (Ticketed, please see AFA website) RSVP Friday May 29 6:45 pm Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera by Mark Obenhaus (1984, 58’) 8:45 pm Overture for KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE (1972, 80’, Silent) Saturday May 30 6:15 pm Video 50 + Deafman Glance (1978 / 1981, ~85’) 8:30 pm Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars by Howard Brookner (1987, 90’) Sunday May 31 5:30 pm Stations + La Femme à la Cafetière + La Mort de Molière (1982 / 1989 / 1995, ~90’) 8:00 pm The Black Rider by Theo Janssen & Ralph Quinke (1990, 120’) Monday June 1 6:30 pm Hamlet: A Monologue by Franco Laera (1997–2000, 95’) 8:45 pm The Making of a Monologue: Robert Wilson's Hamlet by Marion Kessel (1995, 62’) Tuesday June 2 6:30 pm Stations + La Femme à la Cafetière + La Mort de Molière (1982 / 1989 / 1995, ~90’) 8:45 pm Bob Wilson’s Life & Death of Marina Abramovic by Giada Colagrande (2012, 57’) Wednesday June 3 7:00 pm Robert Wilson In Situ by Pauline de Grunne (2017, 90’) 8:45 pm Watermill 1993 + Watermill Center Summer Program 2009 by Stefan Kurt / Tomek Jeziorski (1993 / 2010, ~65’) Thursday June 4 6:45 pm Video 50 + Deafman Glance (1978 / 1981, ~85’) 9:00 pm Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera by Mark Obenhaus (1984, 58’) Friday June 5 6:45 pm Overture for KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE (1972, 80’, Silent) 8:45 pm Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars by Howard Brookner (1987, 90’) This summer, in collaboration with the Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance, The Robert Wilson Estate & Trust, and The Watermill Center, Anthology presents an extensive film series celebrating the work of the great theater artist Robert Wilson, who passed away in 2025 at the age of 83. Wilson was a towering figure in experimental theater over the past fifty years, an astonishingly prolific and inventive artist who was responsible for such landmarks of 20th century performance as “The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud” (1969), “Einstein on the Beach” (1976), and “the CIVIL warS” (1984), as well as legendary, highly singular productions of everything from Shakespeare’s “King Lear” and Wagner’s “Parsifal” to Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape”, Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros”, and Heiner Müller’s “Hamletmachine”. Wilson collaborated with an astonishing range of artists, musicians, writers, and actors (William S. Burroughs, Willem Dafoe, Philip Glass, Lou Reed, and Tom Waits, to name just a few), and in 1991 founded The Watermill Center on Long Island, a “laboratory for performance” that continues to host performances, exhibitions, and residencies, and to develop productions, up to the current day. One of the hallmarks of Wilson’s work is his ambitious, highly expressionistic, and always defiantly anti-naturalistic style, and his full embrace of every imaginable dimension of the theater: performance, music, costume and set design, and so on. His drive to explore multiple forms and modes of expression led him to make numerous moving-image pieces over the course of his career, including important early video works like VIDEO 50 (1978), DEAFMAN GLANCE (1981), and STATIONS (1982). He also personally oversaw the filming of many of his most important theater productions. This series includes his own films and videos, a sampling of the filmed versions of his productions, and several documentaries made about his life and work over the years, such as Mark Obenhaus’s definitive chronicle of perhaps Wilson’s most famous work, EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH, and Howard Brookner’s revealing portrait film, ROBERT WILSON AND THE CIVIL WARS. Read More About The Festival The Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) is an annual event showcasing films drawn from the world of theatre and performance. The 2026 festival is co-curated by Frank Hentschker and Tomek Smolarski. The festival presents experimental, emerging, and established theatre artists and filmmakers from around the world to audiences and industry professionals. From its inaugural edition in 2015 to its present-day hybrid avatar, The Segal Film Festival for Theatre and Performance (FTP) has served as a platform for recorded works that span the length and breadth of the performing arts. Festival Founder and Executive Director of the Martin E. Segal Theater Center, Frank Hentschker shares his inspiration for creating the festival: “Film and digital media are an integral part of theatre and performance. I am surprised that there is not a film festival out there right now focusing on theatre and performance. I thought ‘why not create one’?” In the time before Corona, the Segal Film Festival had evolved into the premier US event for new film and video work focusing on theatre and performance. Its mission was to invite experimental and established theatre makers to present work created for the screen – not filmed archival recordings – to audiences and industry professionals from around the world. Now, after a year and a half of digital and hybrid theatre offerings, the festival must take on a new meaning. The festival has held on to its mission of being a free and open-to-all event accessible to everyone. The 7th edition of the festival was held digitally in March 2022, and featured 80 films from 30 countries. For queries, feedback and any more information get in touch with us at segalfilmfestival@gmail.com Meet The Curators Tomek Smolarski Co-Curator Tomek Smolarski is a cultural manager, producer, and curator with over 20 years of experience producing international cultural events and building bridges across disciplines through cultural diplomacy. His work spans theater, film, and performance, and he has collaborated with leading U.S. institutions including BAM, MoMA, Lincoln Center, Anthology Film Archives, MoMI, Pacific Film Archive, and La MaMa Theatre, among many others. Frank Hentschker Co-Curator Frank Hentschker, who holds a Ph.D. in theatre from the now legendary Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Giessen, Germany, came to the Graduate Center in 2001 as program director for the Graduate Center’s Martin E. Segal Theatre Center and was appointed to the central doctoral faculty in theatre in 2009. Currently executive director and director of programs at the Segal Center, Hentschker has transformed the center into the nation’s leading forum for public programming in international and U.S. theatre and theatre studies; each year, he curates and produces more than forty events—staged readings, lecture-demonstrations, symposia, works-in-progress, and conversations with theatre scholars, theatrical luminaries, and emerging voices in the international, American, and New York theatre scenes. Among the vital events and series he founded at the Segal Center are the World Theatre Performance series; the annual fall PRELUDE festival, which features more than twenty New York–based theatre companies and playwrights; and the PEN World Voices Playwrights Series. Hentschker also led CUNY’s nineteen performing arts centers in founding the CUNY–Performing Arts Consortium (C–PAC), producing the consortium’s first joint festival in 2009. Hentschker edited the MESTC publications Jan Fabre: I Am A Mistake, Seven Works for the Theatre (2009) and New Plays from Spain (2013), and he served as president of the board of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art from 2005 to 2009. Before coming to the Graduate Center, Hentschker founded and directed DISCURS, the largest European student theatre festival existing today; he acted as Hamlet in Heiner Müller’s Hamletmaschine, directed by the playwright; performed in the Robert Wilson play The Forest (music by David Byrne); and worked as an assistant for Robert Wilson for many years. with special thanks to Jed Raphael (Anthology Film Archives); Clifford Allen; Christof Belka & Noah Khoshbin (RW Work, Ltd.); Paige Laino & Nicole Martorana (The Watermill Center); Brian Belovarac (Janus Films); Rebecca Cleman, Karl McCool, and Jooyoung Park (EAI); Pauline de Grunne; Tomek Jeziorski; Stefan Kurt; Franco Laera; Edward McCarry (Cinema Guild); Mark Obenhaus; Ralph Quinke; and Elena Rossi-Snook (NYPL).

Watch Red Day by Besim Ugzmajli at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. Arsa, a deaf little girl, and her mother Dodona, an ex-actress, want to be part of “Festival of Performance”. Arsa is not on the list of participants but she and her mother are ready to do everything, only to show up on stage and present their unique story, which ends bloodily. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Red Day At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Besim Ugzmajli Theater, Film This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks, as well as screened in-person on May 20th. About The Film Country Kosovo Language Albanian Running Time 15 minutes Year of Release 2022 Arsa, a deaf little girl, and her mother Dodona, an ex-actress, want to be part of “Festival of Performance”. Arsa is not on the list of participants but she and her mother are ready to do everything, only to show up on stage and present their unique story, which ends bloodily. https://filmfreeway.com/projects/2177983 About The Artist(s) Born in 1986 in Ferizaj, Republic of Kosovo, Studied in University of Prishtina, Faculty of Arts – Film and TV Directing. He has worked as writer and director in the biggest film company in Kosova, and in these last years in his own company Figurina Film’s, where he made his most awarded short films such as: Forgive me, The Path, Beyond the Gates. Get in touch with the artist(s) ugzmajlibesim@gmail.com and follow them on social media https://filmfreeway.com/projects/2177983 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

Emma Futhey Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism. Catherine Burroughs and J. Ellen Gainor, editors. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 652. Emma Futhey By Published on May 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism. Catherine Burroughs and J. Ellen Gainor, editors. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 652. Editors Catherine Burroughs and J. Ellen Gainor, along with their contributors, collect eighty-nine women’s voices in The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism . Spanning works between third century BCE and 2020, the anthology introduces readers to a wide variety of cultural and historical backgrounds. The anthology came out of a working group session at the American Society of Theatre Research conference in 2018 and responds to questions concerning the effect of women’s writing on conceptions of drama and performance broadly; the ways the selected materials converse with or reframe scholars’ understanding of settled dramatic theory and criticism; and how these works “contribute to, or help us to revise, extant understandings of drama and performance in relationship to history and culture” (3). With materials including letters, scrapbooks, manifestos, interviews, speeches, plays, essays, and testimonies, the anthology successfully reshapes traditional understandings of what constitutes criticism and theory and highlights voices previously absent from the conversation. Burroughs and Gainor follow a familiar structure in the anthology. After the introduction, the selected materials are organized in a generally chronological order, beginning with St. Perpetua’s visions circa 203 CE and ending with excerpts from Indigenous Canadian playwright Émilie Monnet’s 2020 play Okinum . Every primary source material is paired with a short introductory essay by a contributing scholar, situating the source author in the dramatic criticism spectrum. The editors avoid grouping by country, nationality, genre, or historical period; rather, the excerpts flow into each other without labels imposed with academic hindsight. This is a strength of the anthology, as it brings women across different eras and countries into conversation with each other. Source authors are named where possible, but some are known only by “Anonymous.” Pseudonyms are also prevalent, particularly in the entries prior to 1900, which reminds us of how often women masked their creative and vivid interrogations of theatre and performance in maleness. One such case is Michael Field, the pseudonym of aunt and niece collaborators Katherine Harris Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper better known for their poetry. Contributor Jill R. Ehnenn positions them within the closet drama tradition, with their perspective focused entirely on expressions of feeling. Ehnenn frames the selected prefaces as not just theatrical exercises for the mind but a “dedication to Dionysian passion” (148), with feeling and emotion resonating throughout the excerpted materials. The preface to The Tragic Mary draws attention to the known emotional qualities of Mary Queen of Scots, laying the groundwork for Field’s closet drama: “The wife of Darnley and of Bothwell will be various to various natures throughout the ages: for like Helen she never grows old; . . . It is therefore possible for a dramatist to … justify the version of her as it has come to himself” (151). In this, Field teases out a string of commonality across the anthology. Whether writing under pseudonyms, as anonymous authors, or under their own names, those included in the anthology strive to understand the hows and whys of theatre and performance’s impact in our lives. A significant highlight of the anthology is the presence of artists such as Rose Yuen Ow, a Chinese-American vaudeville performer, and Alice Childress, a Black American playwright and actress often in the shadows of Lorraine Hansberry and Adrienne Kennedy. Their voices, excerpted her in interviews and essays, bring attention to the multiplicity of experiences for women in twentieth-century American theatre. As introduced by Krystyn Moon, Ow was part of a performance tradition that normalized Chinese racial and gender stereotypes on stage, sometimes alienating the performers’ friends and family but also subverting their typecasting “with their use of contemporary dress, perfect English, modern dance moves, and witty repartee” (313). Having Rose Yuen Ow’s voice in interview form demonstrates the impact of the everyday working performer in the field and how the performer embodies theory without formal language or knowledge. While Ow made her career in vaudeville work despite the barriers and stereotypes working against her, Alice Childress pushed for a theatre and culture that broke down those barriers, particularly for the Black community. Childress, as contributing scholar Meenakshi Ponnuswami writes, emphasized “the artist’s responsibility to the community” and the need for a national Black theatre (287). Her selected writings voice the conflict many artists from marginalized communities face when working in the United States: a desire to create authentically, balanced with the economic realities of needing to live. In “But I Do My Thing,” Childress argues that “a black theater here and there does not signify ‘turning away’ from commercial television, motion picture, and theater markets of the U.S.A. It is one reaction to being turned away ” (294). Later, she states plainly that “a culture can be no better than the people from whom it springs,” which reflects struggles for equity in representation across all aspects of theatre in the U.S. (294). In Childress’s writing on entertainment, capital, and culture, Ow’s words reverberate: “Because Chinese were performing, so they came to support us. In Vancouver, even the Chinese consulate came. I got mad when they won’t sell me a ticket for them to sit downstairs” (317). Over sixty years on from Childress and Ow, theatre academia and practice alike still struggle with representation, inclusion, and who merits inclusion. Although the field has made moves to correct these imbalances, these efforts are still in nascent stages. In light of such imbalances, it is incredibly valuable to have the presence of theorists such as Amal Allana, Mojisola Adebayo, Spiderwomen Theatre, and Velina Hasu Houston, who engage readers in different theatrical traditions and the ways that colonialism and imperialism intersect with gender, sexuality, and performance. The paired essays highlight how Western views on dramatic theory and criticism often leave little room for Indigenous or intercultural perspectives. As Lindsay Lachance notes in her essay on Émilie Monnet, works from these thinkers help us “see how embodied knowledge, lived experiences, land-based work, and language revitalization influence both the structure and the content of a piece” (589). The included authors construct theories based not just on gender and sexuality but as opportunities to disentangle Western patriarchal thought and develop their own praxis. In the excerpts from matchabook , Velina Hasu Houston says “I have never sought to impose it upon the Western canon… Whether or not [it] is considered to be in any Western canon … it addresses aspects of history and identity to which an inquiring mind would want to be exposed” (564). Lachance’s and Houston’s remarks gesture at the overarching theme of the anthology: membership in the canon is perhaps not the issue. Reinserting these works back into the conversation exposes the field to perspectives that heighten the understanding of dramatic theory and criticism overall. As expansive and inclusive as it is, the collection favors Anglo-American perspectives. This is particularly evident in pre-nineteenth century pieces, though Burroughs and Gainor do note this limitation in their introduction. They understand that it would be impossible to have any sort of wide-ranging anthology that covered every iteration and voice in women’s theatre theory and criticism. In acknowledging this imperfection, they state that they “profoundly hope that [it] will prompt new or renewed attention to an even more expansive body of works by women and woman-identified authors worldwide” (3). While this is a promising invitation for scholars to engage further, it is an all-too-familiar sentiment which feels behind the times for 2024 and today. This does not take away from the anthology’s accomplishments, nor does it erase the diversity of scholars included as contributors. It is, however, a reminder of how far the field of theatre theory and criticism must go in how it defines theory and criticism and who they include in the conversation. The sheer amount of material in The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism is worth the investment. Burroughs and Gainor worked diligently to curate a collection reflective of women’s impact in theory and criticism, with a concerted effort towards recovered or underrepresented voices. Even with its limitations, the anthology should become a cornerstone for new visions of theatre theory and dramatic criticism. References Footnotes About The Author(s) EMMA FUTHEY is a Faculty Associate, Writing and Humanities, at Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences. She teaches introductory courses in the humanities and electives in performance and gender. Her current book project explores performances of womanhood in public spheres of influence in Antebellum Boston. She has presented her research on nineteenth and twentieth century theatre and gender at ASTR, MATC, ATHE, and American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS). She received her PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from Tufts University and holds an MA in Theatre Education from Emerson College and a BA in Theatre Studies from the Pennsylvania State University. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue 100 Years of Du Bois: “Principles of a Real Negro Theatre” and “Criteria of Negro Art” “One Great and Fine Mode of Expression”: On W. E. B. Du Bois and the Exigencies of Black Drama and Theatre Reflections on Fundamental Principles An Expansive “Us”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Pan-Negro” Theatrical Vision W. E. B. Du Bois’s Krigwa Little Negro Theatre Movement in Harlem and Beyond It Was All a Dream: Shifting Du Boisian Notions in Richard Wesley’s The Talented Tenth Teaching August Wilson in an Age of Democratic Decline: Du Boisian Imperatives and Black Pedagogy Across Campus and Community Debbie with a D Talks Theatre with a T The Wild Duck Picnic at Hanging Rock Last Call: A Play with Cocktails The Dinosaurs The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism. Catherine Burroughs and J. Ellen Gainor, editors. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 652. Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation. Julius B. Fleming Jr. New York: New York University Press, 2022; Pp. 301. The Theatre of Paula Vogel: Practice, Pedagogy, and Influences. Lee Brewer Jones. New York: Methuen Drama, 2023; Pp. 194. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Erika Guay 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 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. Erika Guay By Published on July 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF Choreographing Dirt provides an explorative space where performance art intertwines with ecology, specifically highlighting the importance of dirt in performances. This text is to date one of five in the Routledge Studies in Theatre, Ecology, and Performance Series (STEP). Angenette Spalink’s inclusion in this series perfectly aligns with the larger goals of STEP by exploring global intersections of theatre, ecology, and performance studies. In four chapters, each examining a different case study, Spalink provides diverse examples of choreographic elements through performance and how those address the myriad of ecological materials that display biogeocultography , a term coined by the author to describe the movement of dirt in biological, geographical, and cultural ways. This text is a true academic dive into ecocritical research, movement, and dirt. The introduction is invaluable in providing a framework for understanding the fields of biogeocultography and performative taphonomy , or how the movement of ecological matter creates “biological, geographic, and cultural meaning” and how the existence of “ecological matter on stage and page—e.g., dirt—‘does’ something" (16). Spalink sets up the text’s overarching goal to display how interactions of performative taphonomy with humans ultimately show that “the performer is not always human” (4). Thus, the entire text centers on each case study and expands upon how human interaction and ecological matter in each performance challenges traditional frameworks of theatrical production and ecological divisions. Starting with Suzan-Lori Parks’ The America Play, Chapter 1 provides a solid beginning of the exploration of dirt in a literal sense. This chapter primarily focuses on the movement of Parks’ characterization of Abraham Lincoln and how the repeated act of digging holes creates a ritual that reflects the power dynamics of America’s racial and classist past (28). Spalink’s examination of this 1994 production provides historical context to dirt, highlighting the connections of dirt to America’s past racialized practices of linking those who work with dirt as lower class, immoral, and uncivilized, thus justifying the treatment of those populations as “an expendable commodity and contaminant” (31). Chapter 2 focuses on dance in Pina Bausch's 1975 staging of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring . This study offers a detailed dive into the peat moss that covered the stage in this production, including context for the global ecological importance of peat. Spalink notes that this particular piece has no record of where the peat came from, nor what happened to it after the production (52). As I listened to the music while reading the chapter, it set the tone for the historiography, helping me envision the original performance from the descriptions, while also highlighting the importance of productions to consider the full cycle of production work and materials from page to stage to post-production. Chapters 3 and 4 display a culmination and enhancement of Spalink’s text. These final chapters are overall stronger in their content due to the inclusion of production shots and primary research. Spalink had previously presented the information in Chapter 3 at Earth Matters on Stage in 2012 with the Stage Manager of the production who provided their personal experience and interviews with the company, and the information in Chapter 4 includes observations from her personally attending the production and conducting interviews with the Director. In Chapter 3, Spalink explores the 2010 performance of Eveoke Dance Theatre's Las Mariposas , “an imaginative adaptation of Alvarez’s novel, which tells the story of the Mirabal sisters, who led an underground resistance – known as the Fourteenth of June Movement – in the 1950s, against Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo” (59). This piece involved boxes of dirt symbolizing the graves in which the sisters die and are buried. The use of dirt not only enhances the performance and meanings of the production but also adds to the post-show process, both in terms of time and impact to the cast. The cast felt the connection to the dirt beyond that of a prop or scenic piece, unable to feel finished with the night’s performance until the dirt was restored to their bins (60). Spalink’s study reiterates that working with dirt through intimate taphonomy, or the relationship of the performer with the lifecycle of the dirt, changes the perceptions and relationships performers have with dirt. Thus, the dancers become dirt, and, therefore, we must question whether the dirt can become human (66). Chapter 3 brings up the practical issue of what can be done with the dirt after a production concludes, allowing us, the reader, to again consider the full cycle of materials utilized in performance. The last chapter, Chapter 4, culminates with an examination of Iván-Daniel Espinosa’s Messengers Divinos , a Butoh performance in 2018 that utilized dirt with fungi, which prompted dancers to attune how their actions impacted—and, in turn, reacted to—the mycelium present. The mycelium transcended past the original concept of “dirt,” elevated on day one of rehearsal as a vital performer and even consumed by the performers to fully realize the life cycle needed to encompass the dancers in the full food web of the fungi. Spalink uses this study to “consider how performance practices might incorporate (speculative) ecological ethics” (78). Spalink notes that some of the ecomaterials were sourced from a lab while others from the forest, but all were returned to their original homes after, thus keeping the production honest to their “eco-ethical obligation” (92). By the end of Choreographing Dirt , I found myself linking many of Spalink’s thoughts to ecoscenography principles—a call to performance creators to consider the impact of our materials and the full cycle of how those materials are sourced, used, and reused. Spalink calls on readers to question if the impact and use of these ecological materials on stage hold more value than the use of these materials which simply leaves them in their natural state. The text also allows us to question dirt beyond the basics of the technical challenges: yes, dirt onstage can create physical challenges for theatrical spaces, equipment, and audiences. But having real dirt asks us to consider our relationship with dirt, how dirt “becomes” part of us, and what makes up that dirt (all the way to a microscopic level); real dirt also challenges us to view dirt itself as a performer. Other texts in the Routledge series also ask readers to consider their impact and intersection with natural elements, and so Spalink’s text is in the right place for this research and interdisciplinary approach to movement, dance, and performance. References Footnotes About The Author(s) ERIKA GUAY is an Associate Professor of Theatre at SUNY Plattsburgh and the Book Review Editor for USITT TD&T . She originally hails from Virginia and holds a B.A. from Gettysburg College, along with an M.F.A. from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She is a member of the United States Institute for Theatre Technology (USITT), the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Association (KCACTF), Phi Beta Kappa, and Alpha Psi Omega. Her current research focuses on ecoscenography and sustainability in theatre design. She also enjoys her farm, raising sheep and cows, gardening, and making maple syrup. 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.

Donatella Galella 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 Introduction to Asian American Dramaturgies Donatella Galella By Published on May 21, 2022 Download Article as PDF “Look, this country’s a disaster in so many ways,” actor Raymond J. Lee belts with ferocity in David Henry Hwang and Jeanine Tesori’s 2019 musical Soft Powe r. [1] Yes! At the concert celebration of the Kennedy Center’s fiftieth anniversary in 2021, he softened, “Look, this country’s still hurting in so many ways.” [2] Yes . With increased public attention to rhetorical and physical attacks against Asians and Asian Americans, works like Soft Power have received more attention, and this very issue on “Asian American Dramaturgies” has felt more urgent. But does the price of admission to the stage and legibility to the public need to be a spectacularization of recent anti-Asian violence? As #StopAAPIHate trended on social media, it was exhilarating and exhausting to witness some colleagues come into consciousness and care about the existence of systemic anti-Asian racism, given how histories of colonization, incarceration, and assimilation haunt Asian Americans. Still, Lee delivers his next line in Soft Power with hope held over a long note, “But we have the power to change.” [3] Asian American theatre and Asian Americanist thinking offer criticality and possibility. As Dorinne Kondo writes in Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity , “Dramaturgical critique deploys research, theory, and scholarship for reparative ends.” [4] Ambivalence remains, because even as representation matters, visibility politics must go beyond the surface. In this special issue, the first that the Journal of American Drama and Theatre has dedicated to Asian American theatre and performance, I asked, “What can Asian American dramaturgies do? What can we do with Asian American dramaturgies?” The following pieces offer a range of answers. Inspired by Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather Nathans’s co-edited 2021 special issue “Milestones in Black Theatre,” “Asian American Dramaturgies” consists of short pieces from interviews with artists to interventions in academia. To set the stage, the issue begins with a roundtable of Dorinne Kondo, Esther Kim Lee, Josephine Lee, Sean Metzger, Karen Shimakawa, and myself reflecting on the field of Asian American theatre and performance studies. The following dramaturgical readings give much-needed attention to the politics of whiteness and possibilities of music and history in Young Jean Lee’s and Lauren Yee’s plays (Christine Mok, Jennifer Goodlander, and Kristin Leahy with Joseph Ngo). A photo essay and interviews put the spotlight on major Asian American theatrical institutions and on Hawaiian artistic-political epistemologies (Roger Tang, Jenna Gerdsen, and Baron Kelly). kt shorb, Al Evangelista, and Amy Mihyang Ginther consider their own artistry and writing as putting Asian American dramaturgies into practice from strategies of re-appropriation to refusal and deprivation. Bindi Kang and Daphne Lei provide inside looks into their crucial dramaturgical work on recent Asian American theatrical productions. In the final piece, Ariel Nereson brings readers back to Kondo and Yee and invites us all to teach Asian American dramaturgies. Including this introduction, these fifteen contributions join the past fifteen articles that JADT has published with some engagement of Asian American theatre and performance, from analyses of US dramas performed in Asian countries to meta-critiques of canonical Asian American plays in the US theatre landscape. I share this bibliography in order of publication: Brian Richardson, “Genre, Transgression, and the Struggle for (Self) Representation in U.S. Ethnic Drama,” JADT 8, no. 3 (Fall 1996): 1-18. Hsieh-Chen Lin, “Staging Orientalia: Dangerous ‘Authenticity’ in David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly ,” JADT 9, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 26-35. Robert Ji-Song Ku, “‘Beware of Tourists if You Look Chinese’ and Other Survival Tactics in the American Theatre: The Asian(cy) of Display in Frank Chin’s The Year of the Dragon ,” JADT 11, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 78-92. Byungho Han, “Korean Productions of A Streetcar Named Desire ,” JADT 13, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 36-51. Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, “Listening with the Third Ear: Kabuki, Bharata Natyam and the National Theatre of the Deaf,” JADT 14, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 35-43. Dan Kwong, “An American Asian in Thailand,” JADT 14, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 44-54. Dan Balcazo, “A Different Drum: David Henry Hwang’s Musical ‘Revisal’ of Flower Drum Song ,” JADT 15, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 71-83. Jon D. Rossini, “From M. Butterfly to Bondage : David Henry Hwang’s Fantasies of Sexuality, Ethnicity, and Gender,” JADT 18, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 55-76. John S. Bak, “Long Dong and Other Phallic Tropes in Hwang’s M. Butterfly ,” JADT 21, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 71-82. Ashis Sengupta, “‘Coming Out of the Closet’: Re-reading The Boys in the Band and On a Muggy Night in Mumbai ,” JADT 22, no. 1 (Winter 2010): 33-50. Kee-Yoon Nahm, “Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men ,” JADT 27, no. 2 (Spring 2015), https://jadtjournal.org/2015/04/24/visibly-white-realism-and-race-in-appropriate-and-straight-white-men/ . Wu Wenquan, Chen Li, and Zhu Qinjuan, “Arthur Miller: Reception and Influence in China,” JADT 27, no. 3 (Fall 2015), https://jadtjournal.org/2015/11/20/arthur-miller/ . Esther Kim Lee, “Strangers Onstage: Asia, America, Theatre, and Performance,” JADT 28, no. 1 (Winter 2016), https://jadtjournal.org/2016/03/23/strangers-onstage-asia-america-theatre-and-performance/ . Stephen Hong Sohn, “Calculated Cacophonies: The Queer Asian American Family and the Nonmusical Musical in Chay Yew’s Wonderland ,” JADT 29, no. 1 (Fall 2016/Winter 2017), https://jadtjournal.org/2016/12/17/calculated-cacophonies-the-queer-asian-american-family-and-the-nonmusical-musical-in-chay-yews-wonderland/ . Arnab Banerji, “Finding Home in the World Stage: Critical Creative Citizenship and the 13th South Asian Theatre Festival 2018,” JADT 32, no. 2 (Spring 2020), https://jadtjournal.org/2020/05/20/finding-home-in-the-world-stage-critical-creative-citizenship-and-the-13th-south-asian-theatre-festival-2018/ . I offer warm thanks to my comrades who made this special issue possible. The guest editorial board members Arnab Banerji, Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns, Broderick Chow, Chris A. Eng, Esther Kim Lee, Sean Metzger, Christine Mok, and Stephen Sohn offered careful feedback to the authors and encouraging words, emojis, and punctuation marks to me. Managing Editors Dahye Lee and Emily Furlich communicated clearly and attended well to details. Co-Editors Jim Wilson and Naomi J. Stubbs patiently answered my questions. Book Review Editor Maya Roth thoughtfully reached out and curated her section to engage with our issue’s theme. Finally, I appreciate the American Theatre and Drama Society membership that elected me, enabling me to propose and edit this special issue. Asian American dramaturgies have unfinished work to do, not for mere inclusion but for radical shifts in telling stories, redistributing resources, and knowing differently. As the author-character DHH concludes in Soft Power with fragile optimism, “Good fortune will follow. If we somehow survive,” the ensemble intones, “In America.” [5] References [1] Play and lyrics by David Henry Hwang, music and additional lyrics by Jeanine Tesori, “Soft Power,” Public Theater Opening Night Draft, 11 October 2019, 92. [2] Reynaldi Lindner Lolong, “Democracy,” YouTube video, 2 October 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKdj3jQTatc (accessed 30 April 2022). [3] Hwang and Tesori, 92. [4] Dorinne Kondo, Worldmaking: Race, Performance and the Work of Creativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 197. [5] Hwang and Tesori, 93. Footnotes About The Author(s) Donatella Galella is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Riverside. She researches how systemic racism shapes contemporary American theatre from the ways white institutions capitalize on blackness to the persistence of yellowface in musicals. Her essays have been published in journals including Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism and books including Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture, and Identity and Casting a Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Her book America in the Round: Capital, Race, and Nation at Washington DC’s Arena Stage (University of Iowa Press) was an Honorable Mention for the 2020 Barnard Hewitt Award from the American Society for Theatre Research and a Finalist for the 2020 Outstanding Book Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. 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.

Martha Schmoyer LoMonaco, emerita Fairfield University 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 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Martha Schmoyer LoMonaco, emerita Fairfield University By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Yale Rep’s The Far Country. Photo: T. Charles Erickson Wish You Were Here Sanaz Toossi (5-28 Oct) The Salvagers Harrison David Rivers (24 Nov-16 Dec., world premiere) Escaped Alone Carol Churchill (8-30 Mar) The Far Country Lloyd Suh (26 Apr-18 May) Yale Rep enjoyed its first normal season since the COVID pandemic shuttered its doors for almost a full two years, from February 2020 through January 2022. This season, for the first time, audiences were not required to wear masks, and it is clear that Yale is still re-thinking and re-inventing the way it produces theatre, following its September 2021 declaration “to advance anti-racist training and production by focusing on the well-being of the School of Drama/Yale Rep community, increasing emphasis on process and quality and decreasing emphasis on product and quantity.” All production choices, from scripts through casting and artistic leadership, reflected a determination to make work by and for a diverse a range of people. Yale also hired, rehearsed, and gave full playbill credit, with printed biographies, to an Understudy Cast for each show, thus providing a safety net for the principal actors along with opportunities for more actors to embody these roles. Yale had a spectacular season opening with Sanaz Toossi’s Wish You Were Here about six Iranian women friends preparing each other for marriage and new lives between 1978 and 1991, a period of political and cultural upheaval in Iran. The stellar cast and artistic leaders—playwright, director, and scenic designer—were largely Iranian American and not previously affiliated with Yale, unusual for Rep productions. They also were deeply committed to the Woman Life Freedom movement ( womanlifefreedom.today ) and on opening night, the actors returned to the stage to share scripted remarks on gender discrimination and inequality in Iran in a post-show commentary that reinforced the major themes of the play. The flexible set, by Iranian scenic designer Omid Akbari, featured a large living room with handsome, over-sized white furniture and a prominent upstage wall with Islamic geometric patterning to suggest the upper-class status of the characters; the set would transform to signal the rise in social turmoil over time. All six actors gave robust performances as women whose lives revolve around their deep, passionate friendships, made manifest through verbal and physical intimacies. They loved talking about penises, their “pussies,” and body hair (in one scene Nazanin, the lead character, was shaving her legs with wax, which she unsuccessfully tried to get her friend to rip off) and enjoyed caressing each other with impunity. The play provides a fascinating window into the lives of these women, largely cut off from the world through religious and social strictures, who are most alive through their interactions with each other. The world premiere of Harrison David Rivers’s The Salvagers , commissioned by Yale Rep and developed and supported by Yale’s Binger Center for New Theatre, opened in late November. The script centers around Boseman Salvage Senior and Boseman Salvage Junior, an estranged father and son who are only 14 years apart in age, Junior being the product of a teenaged couple, now divorced, and the three women in their lives: Junior’s mail-carrier mother, Nedra; his co-worker and potential love interest, Paulina; and Senior’s current lady, Elinor, a substitute teacher. It was a difficult show to sit through; despite strong performances by the all Black cast, the characters were largely unsympathetic as they allowed their unhappiness and frustration to erupt in a steady stream of invective and angry outbursts. There were some interesting visuals, which are a hallmark of Yale Rep’s shows, created by current students and faculty in the David Geffen School of Drama’s excellent design and theatre technology programs. The Salvagers is set in Chicago and the famous elevated trains, which Junior rides to and from his job daily, were theatrically realized by intricate lighting on passenger seats moving on tracks back and forth across the stage. Junior also spent a lot of time shoveling snow and it was fascinating to witness falling snow being scooped up and traveling airborne through the set. Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone , set in a classic English backyard garden, beautifully designed by Lia Tubiana, focuses on the quotidian conversations of four British women in their 70s, according to a textual note by Churchill, enjoying camaraderie as they sip afternoon tea. Mrs. Jarrett, played by African American actor LaTonya Borsay in a bit of non-traditional casting, abruptly launched into monologues about the coming apocalypse, rendered scenographically through dramatic shifts of time, space, and environment with lighting, designed by Stephen Strawbridge, projections by Shawn Lovell-Boyle, and sound by Sinan Refik Zafar. Eventually the three other women, ably performed by Mary Lou Rosato, Sandra Shipley, and Rita Wolf, also are afforded monologues to express their own fears and insecurities. The one-hour play veered from idle chatter to moments of hilarity, as when they broke into a rousing rendition of Ray Charles’s “Hit the Road Jack,” to expressions of disquiet and uncertainty, a feeling that eventually permeated the entire theatre. Escaped Alone left us with more questions than answers, which, one suspects, was precisely Churchill’s intent. Lloyd Suh’s The Far Country deals with Chinese immigrants stranded at a detention center on Angel Island in San Francisco harbor, with little hope of attaining the U.S. citizenship they so fervently desire. The action bounces back and forth between Guangdong Province, China, and Angel Island, both stunningly rendered by Kim Zhou (scenery), Yichen Zhou (lighting), and Hana S. Kim (projections). The mostly Asian American acting company, especially Tina Chilip and Hao Feng as the mother and son at the center of the tale, did a superb job under the sensitive direction of Ralph B. Peña. It’s a talky play set in the early 20th century that unveils sanctioned racial bigotry under the Chinese Exclusion Act, in force from 1882 until the mid-1960s. Next season, the Rep will expand its offerings to five shows: the world premiere of Falcon Girls by Hilary Bettis; Whitney White’s Macbeth in Stride , a co-production of The Philadelphia Theatre Company, Shakespeare Theatre Company, and Brooklyn Academy of Music; Eden by Steve Carter; a new adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector by Yura Kordonsky; and Notes on Killing Seven Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Board Members by Mara Vélez Meléndez. 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.

Sharyn Emery Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 2 Visit Journal Homepage Stages of Struggle and Celebration: A Production History of Black Theatre in Texas Sharyn Emery By Published on May 28, 2018 Download Article as PDF Stages of Struggle and Celebration: A Production History of Black Theatre in Texas . Sandra M. Mayo and Elvin Holt. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016; Pp. 341. The history of black theatre in the United States tends to be analyzed as a product of the coasts, from New York City during the Harlem Renaissance to San Francisco during the Black Arts Movement. In the twenty-first century, we continue to look to Broadway and off-Broadway as significant sites for study, yet the development of black theatre runs throughout the US. Stages of Struggle and Celebration: A Production History of Black Theatre in Texas by Sandra M. Mayo and Elvin Holt turns the spotlight on the state of Texas and its remarkable history of community theatre, from small amateur groups to professional theatre companies. The book provides a historical overview of black-run companies in five cities: San Antonio, Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston, complete with a chronological list of productions for each company in each year of its existence. Most of these theatres have all-black administrators and produce mainly—though not exclusively—plays by black playwrights from throughout the African diaspora. Mayo and Holt emphasize that the book is “a people’s story” (xii) that honors and builds upon the work and scholarship of others, including James Hatch, Erroll Hill, Samuel Hay, and Leslie Sanders, even as it provides new insights. Holt and Mayo begin by noting a gap in scholarship in both general black theatre historiography and the study of the black experience in Texas. Before turning to parallels between the growth of black theatre in Texas and in the country at large, the authors carefully explain black theatre aesthetics and influences. Black theatre in Texas presents a significant challenge to the narrative of Texas’s own cultural identity, which is dominated by violent stories featuring white male heroes, often to the exclusion of minoritized people. Thus, Mayo and Holt create space for a new narrative, one that places black artists at the center of the cultural development of Texas. In Stages of Struggle and Celebration , the existence of these highly professional and successful black companies proves the significance of their work. The text also uncovers the close, fruitful relationships between black theatres and the black church, and between black theatres and historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in Texas. Part I of the book establishes the theoretical framework of black theatre, providing a helpful overview of the debates as to what “black theatre” actually is. Beginning with W. E. B. Du Bois’s “criteria for Negro theatre,” Mayo and Holt trace the debate through the scholarship of Paul Carter Harrison and Mikell Pinkney, and the aesthetic theories of August Wilson. The afterword pulls together theory and praxis, evaluating the book’s research and history through the lens of the five questions: who, what, where, when, and why. These sections are beneficial for any reader unfamiliar with the history of black theatre, dating back to the Jim Crow era and moving toward the present day. Part II contains one chapter about each of five major cities in Texas using specific companies to represent the history of black theatre in each area. In the preface, the authors acknowledge that the availability of archival materials and other research sites vary widely by city and individual company. This means that in each chapter, some of the write-ups are much shorter than others, due to the disorganized nature of most of the companies’ archives. Yet the authors make the most of what they have, including detailed performance histories, racial/ethnic demographic information of each city, and, in some cases, frank analysis of problems that affected companies and their ability to stay productive. Examined side by side, these companies share many striking similarities. Plays such as Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and Endesha Ida Mae Holland’s From the Mississippi Delta are performed regularly. The section concludes with a list of plays by African-American Texans. Chapter one focuses on San Antonio and offers the most interesting history of the entire book due to the longevity and variety of institutions in this city. Theatre began here earlier than in most other cities, at the turn of the twentieth century. Today, several companies, including the nearly 100-year-old Carver Community Cultural Center and the Hornsby Entertainment Theatre Company produce full seasons of theatre, sometimes in collaboration with local churches or other arts foundations. Chapter two explores black theatre in Austin, the only city in the book that does not currently have an active black theatre. The most recent company, Progressive Arts Collective, saw its founder pass away in 2005, and then it closed in 2012. Holt and Mayo use this example to unpack some inherent difficulties in sustaining a black regional theatre without regular funding and public support. When a theatre company runs almost entirely on volunteer power, it remains on the precarious edge between survival and failure. Dallas emerges as the city with the most theatrical companies as well as the largest population of African Americans. Chapter three covers two currently active companies in depth, the African American Repertory Theatre (AART) and the Black Academy of Arts and Letters (TBAAL), which is most famous for its collaborations with Tyler Perry. Perry began working with TBAAL in the late 1990s and developed several of his characters and scripts there that would later appear in his feature films. Chapters four and five cover Fort Worth and Houston, respectively. Fort Worth contains just two companies, allowing the authors to discuss thoroughly the Jubilee Theatre, which continues to produce work. In Houston, the authors uncover the Thespian Society for “Cullud Genman,” likely a minstrel troupe from the 1860s, but focus mainly on two currently operating companies, the Ensemble Theatre and the Encore Theatre. Stages of Struggle and Celebration is not a critique of persons involved in running the companies, or an evaluation of the companies’ productions, although the authors do analyze why certain companies failed to maintain funding and include some media reviews where available. Instead, this text is a chronological, mainly favorable rundown of the important work done by black theatre companies in Texas. This is a book for students and scholars to use as a starting point for further research. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Sharyn Emery Indiana University Southeast Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Stages of Struggle and Celebration: A Production History of Black Theatre in Texas Immersions in Cultural Difference: Tourism, War, Performance Stage for Action: U.S. Social Activist Theatre in the 1940s Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America: The Legacy of Alan Schneider as Beckett’s American Director The Contemporary American Monologue: Performance and Politics Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left Introduction: Mediations of Authorship in American Postdramatic Mediaturgies Kaldor and Dorsen's "desktop performances" and the (Live) Coauthorship Paradox Ecologies of Media, Ecologies of Mind: Embodying Authorship Through Mediaturgy Dropping the Needle on the Record: Intermedial Contingency and Spalding Gray's Early Talk Performances #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS: Weaponizing Performance of Identity from the Digital to the Physical Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch In-I In Motion by Juliette Binoche at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. In 2007, French actress Juliette Binoche and British dancer-choreographer Akram Khan stepped away from their established careers to embark on a bold artistic experiment. Over six months, they co-created In-I, an intense, boundary-pushing performance they would go on to stage 100 times around the world. Today, Juliette Binoche returns to that intimate journey. From the first spark of inspiration to the final applause, she retraces the emotional and creative arc of a singular collaboration. Drawing on dozens of hours of previously unseen footage, she reflects, as a filmmaker, on the nature of artistic creation, the vulnerability and exhilaration of taking risks, and the personal transformation they demand. . The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents In-I In Motion At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Juliette Binoche Screening Information RSVP Country France Language French, English Running Time 125 minutes Year of Release 2026 About The Film About The Retrospective In 2007, French actress Juliette Binoche and British dancer-choreographer Akram Khan stepped away from their established careers to embark on a bold artistic experiment. Over six months, they co-created In-I, an intense, boundary-pushing performance they would go on to stage 100 times around the world. Today, Juliette Binoche returns to that intimate journey. From the first spark of inspiration to the final applause, she retraces the emotional and creative arc of a singular collaboration. Drawing on dozens of hours of previously unseen footage, she reflects, as a filmmaker, on the nature of artistic creation, the vulnerability and exhilaration of taking risks, and the personal transformation they demand. About The Artist(s) Juliette Binoche was born in Paris. She loves travelling like someone who might have come from the four corners of the earth. In her blood run Polish, Brazilian and Flemish platelets. As a child, she loved making things, crafting, tinkering even. She brought her hands together, believed in the happiness of living, in saving snails, in warming up cold dolls. And then, to play was to escape. Escape from the loneliness of boarding schools, from recurring nightmares, creating moments of joy in playgrounds, in the pitch-black night of dormitories. At the age of four, she preferred whispering games to sleep. Her fragmented family brought her closer to angels. High up in the sky, like Dumbo, she no doubt chose her father and mother, who bathed in the world of the arts. With them, she lived at the heart of creative love. Her father’s theatrical tours awakened in her the desire for itinerant sharing. As a teenager, her cheeks aflame, Juliette had a band of friends with whom she performed theatre in the countryside with her mother: Jean-Philippe, Francine, Florence and Isabelle. But life meant she had to leave behind the valleys of Loir-et-Cher, the fruit trees, and the long evenings under immense sunsets. The nostalgia of that countryside, with its nourishing quality, became a touchstone throughout her life. Moving to Paris, baccalauréat in hand, she began theatre classes with Jean-Pierre Martino at 17 and Véra Gregh at 18. They helped her break down her will, to make room for silence, for another kind of openness. Casting after casting, hoping to fulfil her dream of becoming an actress, she was chosen to play her first major role in Rendez-vous by André Téchiné — a provocative, solitary film. The Cannes Festival became the palace of her public consecration, where the spiral of her life took flight. Her instinctive path through global creation has given Juliette Binoche a singular aura among filmmakers of a borderless constellation: Michael Haneke (Austria), David Cronenberg and Abel Ferrara (United States), Olivier Assayas, Leos Carax and Claire Denis (France), Amos Gitaï (Israel), Naomi Kawase and Hirokazu Kore-eda (Japan), Krzysztof Kieślowski (Poland), Hou Hsiao-hsien (Taiwan), Trân Anh Hùng (Vietnam), Abbas Kiarostami (Iran)… Crowned with the most prestigious awards (Academy Awards, BAFTA, César, Best Actress prizes at Cannes, Berlin and Venice…), Juliette Binoche does not, however, seek virtuosity. She prefers a mysterious link between her inner world and the desire to give of herself, perhaps encouraged, as Louis Malle noted after Damage, by “the love affair between her and the camera, a presence and an intensity that are staggering.” The great range of her performances in Bruno Dumont’s films — from austerity (Camille Claudel, 1915) to burlesque (Slack Bay) — illustrates her taste for freedom and her courage in constantly questioning herself in the fire of her performances. She seemed destined for an uncompromising auteur cinema when Jean-Luc Godard spotted her in 1984 for Hail Mary, but Juliette Binoche was unafraid to venture elsewhere: Godzilla by Gareth Edwards or Ghost in the Shell by Rupert Sanders, which she says she chose as a wink to her children. The success of Anthony Minghella’s nine-Oscar-winning The English Patient, along with Philip Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Lasse Hallström’s Chocolat, established Juliette Binoche as a truly international actress, recognised worldwide. Yet her need for renewal in her creations always drives her further towards freedom. Her shifts and turns make her elusive. She takes her destiny into her own hands in cinema as well as theatre (Andrei Konchalovsky, Ivo Van Hove, Wajdi Mouawad), devotes herself to music (It’s Worth Living with Alexandre Tharaud), to poetry as to painting (Portraits In-Eyes, published by Place des Victoires), to dance (In-I with Akram Khan) and, most recently, to directing her first documentary film In-I In Motion (2025). Get in touch with the artist(s) tiphaine@miaoproductions.fr and follow them on social media N/A Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here In-I In Motion Juliette Binoche His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua MONK IN PIECES BILLY SHEBAR JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã FIREBIRD Irina Patkanian/Marion Schoevaert Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Ewa The Last lesson Andrea Mura & Federico Savonitto Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse

Watch MONK IN PIECES by BILLY SHEBAR at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. Meredith Monk – composer, performer, and interdisciplinary artist – is one of the great artistic pioneers of our time, yet her profound cultural influence is largely unrecognized. With Monk’s music at its center, and featuring interviews with Björk and David Byrne, Monk in Pieces is a mosaic that mirrors the structure of Monk’s own work, and illuminates her wildly original vocabulary of sound and imagery. As a female artist in the male-dominated downtown arts scene of the 1960s and ‘70s, Monk had to fight for recognition and resources. Early reviews in The New York Times were vicious and sexist: “A disgrace to the name of dancing,” wrote one critic, and “so earnestly strange in a talented little-girl way,” wrote another. Yet as her celebrated contemporary, Philip Glass, says, “she, among all of us, was – and still is – the uniquely gifted one.” In the film’s final chapters, Monk faces mortality. We see her warily entrust her masterpiece, ATLAS, to director Yuval Sharon and singer Joanna Lynn-Jacobs for a new production at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. For 60 years, Monk has directed and performed in all of her music theater works; now she must learn to let go. What will happen to such singular work after she is gone? . The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents MONK IN PIECES At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by BILLY SHEBAR Screening Information RSVP Country USA/GERMANY/FRANCE Language English Running Time 95 mins. minutes Year of Release 2025 About The Film About The Retrospective Meredith Monk – composer, performer, and interdisciplinary artist – is one of the great artistic pioneers of our time, yet her profound cultural influence is largely unrecognized. With Monk’s music at its center, and featuring interviews with Björk and David Byrne, Monk in Pieces is a mosaic that mirrors the structure of Monk’s own work, and illuminates her wildly original vocabulary of sound and imagery. As a female artist in the male-dominated downtown arts scene of the 1960s and ‘70s, Monk had to fight for recognition and resources. Early reviews in The New York Times were vicious and sexist: “A disgrace to the name of dancing,” wrote one critic, and “so earnestly strange in a talented little-girl way,” wrote another. Yet as her celebrated contemporary, Philip Glass, says, “she, among all of us, was – and still is – the uniquely gifted one.” In the film’s final chapters, Monk faces mortality. We see her warily entrust her masterpiece, ATLAS, to director Yuval Sharon and singer Joanna Lynn-Jacobs for a new production at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. For 60 years, Monk has directed and performed in all of her music theater works; now she must learn to let go. What will happen to such singular work after she is gone? About The Artist(s) Billy Shebar is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker known for High Noon on the Waterfront (2022), with John Turturro and Edward Norton, which premiered at the Telluride Film Festival and was broadcast on TCM and HBO; and Dark Matter (2007), starring Meryl Streep, which won the Alfred P. Sloan Prize at Sundance. He collaborated with animator Bill Plympton on The New York Times viral web series Trump Bites (2018-2020) and with animator Yoni Goodman on the three-part crime series Doctor’s Orders (2021). Get in touch with the artist(s) shebar@110thstreet.com and follow them on social media https://zeitgeistfilms.com/film/monk-in-pieces,https://monkinpieces.com/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here MONK IN PIECES BILLY SHEBAR JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã FIREBIRD Irina Patkanian/Marion Schoevaert Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Ewa The Last lesson Andrea Mura & Federico Savonitto Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua

Watch FIREBIRD by Irina Patkanian/Marion Schoevaert at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. FAIRY-DOC, in stop motion animation Once upon a time, there was a Firebird, who was caught and caged by the Father of the Motherland. To free herself, she laid him the egg of immortality from his seed. She lost her feathers and hid deep in the woods, weaving lace from snowflakes. Once upon today, the Father of the Motherland saw her lace on TikTok and waged a war to find and marry her. Dancing at the wedding, Lacemaker turned back into the firebird and burned the citadel down. . The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents FIREBIRD At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Irina Patkanian/Marion Schoevaert Screening Information RSVP Country USA - UKRAINE Language English Running Time 23 minutes Year of Release 2026 About The Film About The Retrospective FAIRY-DOC, in stop motion animation Once upon a time, there was a Firebird, who was caught and caged by the Father of the Motherland. To free herself, she laid him the egg of immortality from his seed. She lost her feathers and hid deep in the woods, weaving lace from snowflakes. Once upon today, the Father of the Motherland saw her lace on TikTok and waged a war to find and marry her. Dancing at the wedding, Lacemaker turned back into the firebird and burned the citadel down. About The Artist(s) Irina Patkanian is an award-winning filmmaker, a Fulbright scholar, Professor of Film and Media Arts at Brooklyn College/CUNY, and the co-founder of In Parentheses, Inc. Irina Patkanian makes hybrid (fiction/nonfiction) films questioning history with poetry, memory with animation, performance with behavior. Irina’s films have screened at 150+ film festivals worldwide, incl. DOC NYC, Ann Arbor, STARZ Denver, Palm Springs, Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival and many others, winning 20+ awards. Her work has been supported by fellowships and grants from NYSCA, NYFA, Made in New York, Tow, Blaustein, Troy and Jerome Foundations; as well as artist residencies at the Obermann Center, MacDowell, the Millay Arts, Ucross Foundation and the Art Studios of Key West. Marion Schoevaert has been developing her own style of physical theater for 25 years in New York, Seoul and France. She has directed, produced and choreographed more than twenty theater shows, operas and shadow plays, blending dance-theater, rhythmic text and live music. She works with artists from all disciplines and genres: painting, video, jazz, tango, hip hop, sports, martial arts, propaganda, graffiti, etc. to create visceral and raw emotional response from both actors and audiences. Marion Schoevaert has created illustrations for 33 Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic. She has produced the successful Koltès New York Festival (7 plays) in New York and has directed a North Korean mass dance propaganda play with 2 orchestras and 100 actors, blending North and South Korean texts, music and style together. She has created 3 theatre companies in New York, Seoul and France. Get in touch with the artist(s) irinapatkanian@gmail.com and follow them on social media www.inparentheses.org/firebird Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here FIREBIRD Irina Patkanian/Marion Schoevaert Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Ewa The Last lesson Andrea Mura & Federico Savonitto Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã

Watch Ewa The Last lesson by Andrea Mura & Federico Savonitto at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. After sixty years of theatrical and performative research, Ewa Benesz decides to leave Italy and return to Lublin, the city she fled in the 1980s during Polish martial law. The advancement of age forces her to discontinue her workshops, which involve people from all over the world. Ewa Benesz must say goodbye to her students, some of whom have maintained a relationship with her that has lasted for decades. Ewa's theatrical practice and research draw from a tradition and methodology that can only be transmitted personally, so there is a strong risk that her knowledge will be lost forever. In her return to Poland, Ewa confronts the silent weight of a life spent away from home, in a journey that is simultaneously an ending and a return to her origins. Polish actress, holds a BA from the University of Lublin and a diploma of the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Warsaw. She worked in the Instytut Aktora -Teatr Laboratorium managed by Jerzy Grotowski in Poland and she met Peter Brook. After fled the country due to the Martial Laws she collaborated with Rena Mirecka in the paratheatrical projects until 1996 – carried out in Europe, Israel and America. Since 1997 she has conducted her peculiar paratheatrical and theatrical workshops. She lives in the Sardinian mountains, where she conducts a practical research inspired by the ancient Sanskrit Vedic texts and cosmogonist myths.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Ewa The Last lesson At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Andrea Mura & Federico Savonitto Screening Information RSVP Country Italy, Poland Language italian, polish Running Time 67 minutes Year of Release 2025 About The Film About The Retrospective After sixty years of theatrical and performative research, Ewa Benesz decides to leave Italy and return to Lublin, the city she fled in the 1980s during Polish martial law. The advancement of age forces her to discontinue her workshops, which involve people from all over the world. Ewa Benesz must say goodbye to her students, some of whom have maintained a relationship with her that has lasted for decades. Ewa's theatrical practice and research draw from a tradition and methodology that can only be transmitted personally, so there is a strong risk that her knowledge will be lost forever. In her return to Poland, Ewa confronts the silent weight of a life spent away from home, in a journey that is simultaneously an ending and a return to her origins. Polish actress, holds a BA from the University of Lublin and a diploma of the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Warsaw. She worked in the Instytut Aktora -Teatr Laboratorium managed by Jerzy Grotowski in Poland and she met Peter Brook. After fled the country due to the Martial Laws she collaborated with Rena Mirecka in the paratheatrical projects until 1996 – carried out in Europe, Israel and America. Since 1997 she has conducted her peculiar paratheatrical and theatrical workshops. She lives in the Sardinian mountains, where she conducts a practical research inspired by the ancient Sanskrit Vedic texts and cosmogonist myths. About The Artist(s) Andrea Mura Italian director and producer with a background in Philosophy and a diploma from the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. His documentary work, with works such as “Nodas” (2015) and “Transumanze” (2021), explores the dialogue between memory, popular traditions and contemporaneity. His films have gained recognition at numerous international festivals, including RAI Film Festival (Bristol), Primed (Marseille), See You Sound (Turin), Visioni Italiane (Bologna) and DocuMed (Tunis). As a producer, he has collaborated on Ginko Film projects, including François Xavier Destors and Alfonso Pinto's “Toxicily” (France-Italy, 2023) and Giulia Camba's “Oplà” (Italy, 2024). Since 2014, he has shared the artistic direction of the Sole Luna Doc Film Festival in Palermo with Chiara Andrich. Federico Savonitto Documentary director. A graduate of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, he has long held the position of teaching tutor at the CSC - Sede Sicilia, taught filmmaking, and made several documentaries such as La fine che non ho fatto (2011), La città sconosciuta (2013), Pellegrino (2017), In un futuro aprile (2019), Not Available - It's about Yann Keller (2022), An Invisible Enemy (2022) The Secret Plan (2024) that participated and won awards at several international festivals, such as Biografilm Festival, Giornate degli Autori, DOK Leipzig, Locarno Film Festival, Listapad, DOC- Cévennes, Festival dei Popoli, Trieste Film Festival, Trento Film Festival, Ortigia Film Festival, Asolo Art Film Festival. Get in touch with the artist(s) info@ginkofilm.it and follow them on social media https://www.ginkofilm.it/en/film/the-last-lesson/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here Ewa The Last lesson Andrea Mura & Federico Savonitto Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir

Book Reviews Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 2 Visit Journal Homepage Writing, Acting, and Directing Book Reviews By Published on June 4, 2017 Download Article as PDF Susan Kattwinkel, Editor Acting in the Academy By Peter Zazzali Reviewed by Jennifer Joan Thompson Directing Shakespeare in America By Charles Ney Reviewed by Deric McNish Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines By Jessica Silsby Brater Reviewed by Catherine M. Young The Theatre of David Henry Hwang By Esther Kim Lee Reviewed by David Coley If you know of a publication appropriate for review, please send the information to current book review editor Susan Kattwinkel at kattwinkels@cofc.edu . A list of books received can be found at www.susankattwinkel.com . References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Acting in the Academy The Theatre of David Henry Hwang Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines Directing Shakespeare in America Writing, Acting, and Directing Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti's Marrathon Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene Tú eres mi otro yo - Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy & the AnthropoScene Introduction to American Theatre and Performance in the Anthropocene Epoch Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.