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Elizabeth M. Cizmar 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 Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble Elizabeth M. Cizmar By Published on May 12, 2021 Download Article as PDF Ernie McClintock (1937–2003), director, acting teacher, and producer, grounded his work in the Black Power concepts of self-determination and community, but in pursuing a more inclusive theatre company, he departed from common practices of the Black Arts Movement. This departure can be attributed to his queer positionality, which has left him on the fringes of Black Arts Movement scholarship. McClintock founded four institutions: in Harlem, the Afro-American Studio for Acting & Speech (est. 1966), the 127 th Street Repertory Ensemble (est. 1973), and the Jazz Theatre of Harlem (est. 1986); and in Richmond, Virginia, the Jazz Actors Theatre (est. 1991). A landmark Black theatre institution, the 127 th Street Repertory Ensemble ran from 1973 to 1986, demonstrating that the spirit and work of the Black Arts Movement extended well beyond 1975, the generally accepted end date of the movement. Over more than four decades in socially and politically charged environments, McClintock established actor training rooted in Afrocentricity, [1] teaching Jazz Acting in the classroom and the rehearsal hall, which he considered an important training ground for actors. In this article, I argue that McClintock’s theatre subverted two established norms: the English repertory model and the male-dominated, heteronormative representations of the Black Arts Movement. McClintock’s legacy challenges assumptions that the Black Arts Movement was broadly misogynist and homophobic. Therefore, my work is in conversation with scholars who aim to dispel such assumptions including La Donna Forsgren, Khalid Yaya Long, Mike Sell, and James Smethurst. In the early 1980s, McClintock continued to produce Black revolutionary drama, such as Amiri Baraka’s one acts, while incorporating queer, womanist, and Afro-Caribbean voices into his seasons. The trilogy of plays performed in 1982, a pinnacle season for McClintock, exhibits progressive inclusion while upholding Black Power’s principles of self-determination and community. The 127 th Street Rep wanted to represent what Paul Carter Harrison calls the “kaleidoscope” of African diasporic memory. [2] By bringing queer, Afro-Caribbean, and womanist voices together into one space, McClintock’s theatre displayed a rich variety of Blackness. Black revolutionary drama stood side by side in his classroom and in his season planning with these more diverse voices, demonstrating that there was room for inclusive practices in the Black Power movement. These inclusive practices relate to his versatile season selection programming but also extended to his casting practices. McClintock employed actors from a variety of backgrounds and identities who were often left on the fringes of the Black Theatre Movement including queer artists, immigrants, and Harlem residents who, prior to joining McClintock’s company, broke the law to make ends meet. Rather than approaching his company as a monolithic representation of Blackness, he invited each actor to leverage who they were as individuals while simultaneously acknowledged overlaps of experience within the “kaleidoscope”. His productions answered the movement’s call to establish institutions outside the white gaze and use theatre as a mode of social change in Black communities. However, as an openly gay man, whose long-term partner, Ronald Walker, was also his technical director, McClintock stood as an outlier in the movement. Marc Primus, historian and co-founder of the Afro-American Studio, noted in an interview that he, Walker, and McClintock were “twice-marginalized” for being Black and gay. [3] Ernie McClintock’s legacy provides a history of early Black queer activism in the theatre within a movement that was not known for embracing the LGBTQIA+ community. Although homophobic attitudes were common in the Black Power movement, as they were across the United States, McClintock’s career and biography, relationships with other artists, acting technique, and groundbreaking productions dispel notions of monolithic homophobia in Harlem in the 1960s. The 1982 season emblematizes McClintock’s Afrocentric aesthetic, leveraging and revising the repertory model as a pathway for inclusion. McClintock made subversive choices, amplifying voices often left out of the Black Arts Movement, including Afro-Caribbean, Black womanist, and queer Black masculine ones. This essay uses the 127 th Street Repertory Ensemble’s 1982 season to analyze how jazz aesthetics upended the English repertory model. This season included Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain (1967), Ntozake Shange’s Spell #7 (1979), and Peter Shaffer’s Equus (1973). “We Respectfully Challenge You”: Subverting the English Repertory Model Jazz Acting, a technique and directorial strategy, affords performers the opportunity to consider shared experiences while also celebrating individuality. William J. Harris identifies the jazz aesthetic as “a procedure that uses jazz variations as paradigms for the conversions of white poetic and social ideas into black ones,” [4] disrupting hegemonic structures and promoting Black modes of expression. Just as the jazz aesthetic converted white ideas, McClintock subverted the English repertory model, which allowed him to emphasize multiple Black perspectives in a given season, transforming a white institution into a Black one. Developed in the early twentieth century, repertory theatre is defined as “plays in rotation . . . offered to the public on a regularly changing basis.” [5] A company will typically perform a different play each night, supplemented by premieres of new plays. Repertory theatres in Europe and the United States did not typically produce plays by Black playwrights. Figure 1: 127th Street Repertory Ensemble’s 1982 season poster Source: Errol Hill Collection, Dartmouth College The plays produced at the 127 th Street Rep over twelve seasons [6] were discordant with white narratives; the 1982 season featured Afro-Caribbean, womanist, and queer voices. These representations were uncommon in both the white Western theatrical tradition and the Black Theatre Movement. Equus , for example, was written by a British playwright, but McClintock revised the story to center on Black queer sexuality in the US. Although other companies produced Walcott’s dream play and Shange’s homage to Black city life, it was rare to have all these voices represented under one roof, tying together themes of dreams, desperation, and desire (see figure 1). In publicity materials, McClintock states: We present theatre that is INTRIGUING, STIMULATING, PROVOCATIVE, RELEVANT, and TRUTHFUL. The same as most Black theatres. But, our way of presenting is the big difference. We give you BEAUTY, STYLE, DARING, SURPRISES, CONTROVERSY, SENSUALITY along with high artistic standards. In other words, our theatre is IMMEDIATE, TODAY, VITAL,VIVID, AND VIRILE. We respectfully challenge you to three (3) daring adult evenings of dreams, desperation and desire.[7] The plays from the period traditionally understood to frame the Black Arts Movement, 1965–1975, embraced a Black revolutionary philosophy advanced by Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal. Amiri Baraka’s The Revolutionary Theatre , published in 1965, foregrounds both the aesthetic and the tangible, calling for artists of African descent to come together and create art that connects to a Black cultural, spiritual, and historical dimension and works to destroy “the white thing.” [8] Neal famously quotes Don L. Lee, saying, “[w]e must destroy Faulkner, dick, jane [ sic ], and other perpetuators of evil. It’s time for Du Bois, Nat Turner, and Kwame Nkrumah…” A hypermasculine attitude began to overshadow the revolutionary acts of these artists, and much of the literature and theatre of the Black Arts Movement included homophobic slurs and violence against women. [9] Whatever the levels of misogyny and homophobia within in the movement, it is irrefutable that queer plays were largely absent from other well-known Black Theatre Movement institutions such as the New Lafayette Theatre, the New Federal Theatre, and the Negro Ensemble Company. McClintock’s queer positionality provided a unique vantage point to create space for Black actors of various backgrounds, genders, and sexual orientations. The 1982 theatre season drew crowds to the Renny Theatre in Harlem, earning the ensemble nineteen AUDELCO [10] nominations (see figure 2). Dreams, Desperation, and Desire in Harlem Dream on Monkey Mountain takes place on a nameless Caribbean island where Makak, a prisoner, has been conditioned by colonizers to disparage his race. In the end, he beheads a white apparition that has been haunting him and frees himself from his infatuation with whiteness. Dream’s inclusion challenged monolithic notions of Black identity, but McClintock’s inclusive practices did not stop at play selection; they also extended to the makeup of his ensemble. McClintock’s production included Afro-Caribbean actors, who were not typically hired in peer institutions. Figure 2: 127th Street Repertory Ensemble’s 1982 AUDELCO Award nominations Source: Errol Hill Collection, Dartmouth College Lola Louis, an actor from the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, earned several AUDELCO nominations during her tenure at the 127 th Street Rep, including best actress for Errol John’s Moon on a Rainbow Shawl (1957). In an interview, Louis emphasized that other directors did not typically include Caribbean plays in their seasons, let alone cast Caribbean actors. For Dream, McClintock asked Louis to devise a silent character so her perspective could be included in the story, which was written as an all-male cast. To prepare, Louis implemented Jazz Acting character observations, walking the streets of Harlem and observing homeless folks. She described the character she developed as constantly in motion, “fishing through things and looking at people.” [11] The audience recognized this character as belonging to Harlem, although the play was rooted in West Indian culture. To incorporate a female character on the margins of society further complicated and enriched Walcott’s play, and, for McClintock, was part of the “kaleidoscope” of his Harlem community. McClintock’s unorthodox vision of Dream yielded praise from the critics. Lionel Mitchell’s NY Amsterdam review stated, “‘Dream on Monkey Mountain’ reveals a fine rep company.” [12] He goes on to say that the ensemble is “an excellent group that has done a tremendous amount of homework, and who, despite slim grants and money problems, persists in doing some of the best theatre going!” [13] Mitchell’s review and the praise he received from critics and audiences demonstrated the success of McClintock’s directorial aesthetic. McClintock chose a play that provided an Afro-Caribbean perspective, cast actors not typically hired, and devised an additional character who was an outlier in society. By casting an immigrant actor to play a devised homeless character, McClintock instituted the inclusive practice of considering actors and figures typically left on the margins of society. His eccentric practices paid off, earning the 127 th Street Repertory Ensemble five AUDELCO nominations, including a nomination for Lola Louis for Best Supporting Actress. Womanist poet-playwright Ntozake Shange describes her play Spell #7 , which focuses on Black women’s experiences, as “in the throes of pain and sensation experienced by my characters responding to the involuntary constriction of their humanity.” [14] Shange’s piece centers on a group of nine young actors, dancer-singers, and writers guided by a magician in coming to terms with their identities in a white supremacist society and embracing the richness of their Blackness. During the height of the Black Theatre Movement, women playwrights were largely left out of neighboring theatres, but from his early days of teaching in 1966, McClintock saw immense value in bringing a womanist perspective to the Harlem theatre community. One of the most memorable aspects of McClintock’s production of Spell #7 is its focus on Black women’s relationship to beauty. In reaction against the trend of processed hair in the 1940s and 1950s, the 1960s saw a reawakening of Africanity as many women and men celebrated their African roots, fashioning dashikis and Pan-African styles along with natural Afros and textured hair. Shange explores this dilemma of beauty as it relates to Black authenticity and femininity. Yusef A. Salaam acknowledged this in his review: “an antidote which says that the African woman/African nation must look in the mirror and start liking what she/it sees.” [15] Jazz Acting asks actors to integrate their lived experiences into character creation so the performers enriched their characters with their own experiences as Black women. McClintock’s experience as both a queer man and a proponent of Black nationalism living in a white supremacist system helped him straddle these binaries. Trust is an essential component of Jazz Acting. Members of the ensemble must trust each other if they are to feel safe to bring their own lived experiences to their art. McClintock’s breathing and articulation exercises were designed not merely to teach actors how to project on stage but also to help them develop the self-confidence to access their individual voices. Bolanyle Edwards, who portrayed maxine in Spell #7 , explained that voice training “was part of his technique to loosen up the articulators and to breathe. It’s getting in touch with who you are.” [16] This approach countered commonly held ideas about what constituted “a good voice.” McClintock states, “Contrary to the beliefs of some, it is not ‘white’ or ‘European’ to speak well. At the same time, the Black idiom should be used as much as possible but the actor must theatricalize his vocal efforts.” [17] In McClintock’s production, the actors focused on finding rhythm and tempo from a place of individual truth to theatricalize vocal expression. As the third play in rep, McClintock’s production of Equus revised a white European play to tell a story of Black queer sexuality. The Black Theatre Movement offered a paucity of plays exploring Black queer sexuality, so McClintock reimagined Shaffer’s Broadway hit with a dual focus on the Black Power principles of self-determination and community. Equus became a story about Black repressed sexuality and, in certain moments, showed audiences the beauty of male queer sexuality and the inner struggle of a gay teenage boy in a fundamentalist household. The actors executed this vision through both ensemble work and self-expression. The bold choice to bring this taboo subject matter about a marginalized group to the stage astonished audiences, and theatre patrons made the pilgrimage to Harlem to witness Gregory Wallace play Alan Strang and see the six nearly naked Black men who played the ensemble of horses. Part of the production’s depth is attributed to the absence of a Black buck stereotype, [18] a stereotype that suggests Black men are barbaric, aggressive, and feral. As Cornel West explains, “White fear of Black sexuality is a basic ingredient of white racism.” [19] Instead, McClintock understood the relationship between Alan and his favorite horse, Nugget (played by Jerome Preston Bates), as a tragedy of repression and oppression interspersed with moments of reverence for the Black body. In an important departure from the Broadway version and in a move crucial to subverting the Black buck stereotype, the horses did not wear masks. By unmasking the horses and providing space for the actors’ self-expression, McClintock created nuance and humanity instead of a one-dimensional stereotype of sexual aggression. The staging of the production reflected jazz aesthetics by converting “white poetic and social ideas into black ones.” [20] An essential component of jazz is the work of creation, and this directorial style brought this into every aspect of the theatre. McClintock’s actors recall that this creative experimentation with the work never stopped, even in production. For example, in a rehearsal one week prior to opening, McClintock blasted jazz music to create a sexually charged environment. [21] The director also staged Equus in a way that maintained focus on the ensemble, having all the actors sit on the edge of the stage in plain sight of the audience. [22] This staging emphasized the collective rather than the individual, standing in opposition to the star-centric productions on Broadway. [23] McClintock’s aesthetic valued process over product, a stark contrast to commercial theatre that uses rigid blocking to ensure theatre goers have the same performance night after night. Conclusion The 127 th Street Repertory Ensemble’s productions in the early 1980s reveal that McClintock’s play selection and directorial approach modeled a more inclusive theatrical enterprise. Inclusion extended to Black women, queer folks, and Afro-Caribbean identities. Through jazz aesthetics and the revision of the English repertory model into a Black repertory theatre, McClintock brought together three plays representing three distinct Black perspectives while still remaining firmly rooted in Black nationalist precepts of self-determination and community. McClintock revolutionized the model to present a multiplicity of identities and challenged the actors to navigate the nuances of those identities through the practice of Jazz Acting. By featuring Dream on Monkey Mountain , Spell #7 , and Equus , McClintock expanded the possibilities of Black theatre and welcomed marginalized voices, offering artists and educators a model for our own artistic and pedagogical practices References [1] Molefi Kete Asante, The Afrocentric Idea, rev. and exp. ed. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), xiii. Afrocentricity is defined as placing African ideals at the center of any study of African culture and behavior, situating Africans as subjects rather than objects of human history. [2] Paul Carter Harrison, Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 7. [3] Marc Primus, Interview by Elizabeth Cizmar, August 25, 2015. [4] William J. Harris, The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985), 13. [5] George Rowell and Anthony Jackson, The Repertory Movement: A History of Regional Theatre in Britain (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 1. [6] Ernie McClintock Resume. 2000. Box 53, Folder 11. Barksdale Theatre Records, 1945–2006 (bulk 1954–2004). Accession 41088, Business Records Collection, The Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia. [7] Publicity materials from the Private Collection of Geno Brantley. [8] Larry Neal, “The Black Arts Movement,” Drama Review 4, no. 12. (Summer 1968): 30, doi: 10.2307/1144377. [9] Scholars such as La Donna Forsgren have uncovered the critical contributions women made to the Black Arts Movement. Women such as Sonia Sanchez, Barbara Ann Teer, J. E. Franklin, Martie Evans-Charles, and others advanced Black feminist and womanist perspectives within the Black Nationalist movement. See In Search of Our Warrior Mothers and Sistuhs in the Struggle . [10] Vivian Robinson established the AUDELCO organization in 1973 to support the performing arts in Black communities, with annual awards acknowledging excellence in Black theatre. AUDELCO has continued to produce an annual award show in Harlem to honor African American achievements in theatre. McClintock was a co-organizer of the first AUDELCO ceremony, held at the Afro-American Studio for Speech & Acting. For more information, see www.audelco.org. [11] Lola Louis, Interview by Elizabeth Cizmar, September 2, 2015. [12] Lionel Mitchell, “Dream on Monkey Mountain Reveals Fine Rep Company,” NY Amsterdam , July 24, 1982, 36. [13] Mitchell, “Monkey Mountain,” 36. [14] Ntozake Shange, Three Pieces (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), 69. [15] Yusef A. Salaam, “Spell #7 : Antidote for Abuse of Black Image,” NY Amsterdam , July 3, 1982, 34. [16] Bolanyle Edwards, Interview by Elizabeth Cizmar, August 25, 2015. [17] Ernie McClintock, “Perspective on Black Acting,” Black World May 1974, 79–85. [18] Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons , Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks (New York: Continuum, 2001), 10. Donald Bogle traces stereotypes from their inception to contemporary manifestations. Bogle argues that Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation cemented this stereotype in the social conscience. [19] Cornel West, Race Matters (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 86. [20] Harris, Poetry and Poetics , 13. [21] Gregory Wallace, Interview by Elizabeth Cizmar, September 16, 2015. [22] Abiola Sinclair, “McClintock’s ‘Equus’ in Theatrical ‘Mane-Stream,’” NY Amsterdam , August 7, 1982, 50. [23] John Gruen, “Equus Makes a Star,” New York Times, October 27, 1974, 1. Footnotes About The Author(s) ELIZABETH M. CIZMAR Assistant Professor, Vanderbilt University 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.

DeRon S. Williams 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 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. DeRon S. Williams By Published on April 9, 2021 Download Article as PDF 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. Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration , edited by Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, is a collection of adroitly composed essays committed “to engaging and interrogating the vastness of McCraney’s theatrical imagination, the singularity of his writerly voice, the incisiveness of his cultural insights and critiques, the creativity he displays through stylistic and formal qualities, and the unorthodoxies of his personal and professional trajectories” (3). There is no absence of scholarship about Tarell McCraney’s award-winning, imaginative plays, and screenplay, Moonlight ; however, this is the first full-length project for McCraney scholars to examine, practitioners to reference, and pedagogues to engage. Well-researched and curated, this book serves as an excellent foundation for multi-faceted study through its series of essays, interviews, and commentaries. The volume is interdisciplinary in scope, focusing on one of the 21st century’s most significant and singular playwrights, highly regarded for his deeply entrenched cultural and symbolic writings and intergenerational mix of emotionally adept Black characters. Opening with a career chronology, editor Sharrell D. Luckett underscores the trajectory of McCraney’s life as an artist and activist, a cornerstone to his “unprecedented success” (4). This simple yet effective addition coupled with editor Isaiah Wooden’s fascinating introduction helps contextualize McCraney’s lived experiences and rise to fame. The title of Wooden’s introduction, “Ogun Size Enters; or, An Introduction,” draws on McCraney’s dramaturgical practice of spoken stage directions. Like McCraney, Wooden’s introduction reemphasizes and reinvigorates the “investment in an idea of ‘theatre as community’” (9). He uses this section, then, to establish a communal foundation across critical scholarship, performance practice, and pedagogy by orienting readers to previously explored themes and topics. Subsequently, Wooden outlines the book’s overall structure, which he says they organized to “draw attention to some of the repetitions, revisions, resonances, and reverberations reflected in and across McCraney’s oeuvre” (12). There are eleven essays in this collection, evenly distributed among the first two sections, followed by a series of interviews in the third. “Part 1: Space, Faith, and Touch,” features six informative, interesting critical essays. Collectively these essays contemplate the ways in which McCraney “queries and queers spatial, spiritual, and haptic matters” (12). While most of the authors explore these themes within Head of Passes , Wig Out! , Choir Boy , The Breach , and Moonlight , two also offer a greater understanding of McCraney’s dramaturgical approach by investigating the artist’s affinity for Miami and his treatment of time. Donette Francis’s “Juxtaposing Creoles: Miami in the Plays of Tarell Alvin McCraney” introduces the phrase “Black southern hemispheric epics,” a notion that suggests that McCraney’s topographical dramaturgy, despite locale, has a “Miami sensibility.” Francis “brings together the triangulation of the Black, southern, and hemispheric in order to grasp all the relevant geopolitical and cultural frames necessary to read place in McCraney’s oeuvre” (21). Equally as important is editor David Román’s essay “The Distant Present of Tarell Alvin McCraney,” where he revisits his 2014 American Quarterly article, which he explains “was written primarily as an introduction to McCraney and his dramaturgy” (53). For Román, McCraney’s use of time, specifically the notion of “the distant present,” forces us to consider when the contemporary moves from now to then,” through the character’s embodiment of “historical values of their communities while refining their own individual perspectives and points of view” (63). The essays in “Part 2: Brothers, Sisters, and the Gods among Us” examine McCraney’s Brother/Sister Plays ( The Brothers Size , In the Red and Brown Water , and Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet ) and dramaturgical devices. Perhaps the most enlightening among this strong set of essays are GerShun Avilez’s “Scenes of Vulnerability: Desire, Historical Secrecy, and Black Queer Experience in Marcus; Or the Secret of Sweet ” and Jeffrey McCune’s “One-Size Does Not Fit All: Voicing Masculinities in a Pursuit of ‘Freedom.’” Avilez attends to the ways in which McCraney explores the dilemmas of queer existence and establishes McCraney and his work, with particular attention on Marcus, as a part of a genealogy of Black queer writers. In doing so, he brilliantly divides the conversation into two, first, focusing on “social vulnerability” and secrecy as a way of connecting “Black individuals with same-sex desire(s)” (116); and, second, concluding with a discussion of how embodied encounters “interpenetrates vulnerability” and “define queer life” (116). In contrast, McCune’s article looks at the notion of masculinity in McCraney’s plays and the various ways in which he “teaches us to read Black masculine performance and space” (169). Introducing the phrase of canonical black masculine narrative, a notion that “configures masculinity as a singular production” (169), McCune examines McCraney’s use of spoken stage directions “to interrupt and reprimand conventional audience theatrical readings” (171). Unlike earlier sections, which are more scholarly, “Part 3: Art, Creation, and Collaboration” deviates from the anthology’s established form, introducing readers to McCraney’s various collaborators. I found this section to be particularly useful for practitioners—and the field’s grasp of 21st century theater-making. Several of his recurrent collaborators in the last two decades, including Tina Landau, Robert O’Hare, and Teo Castellanos, just to name a few, present insights into McCraney’s developmental and performance process. This section is followed by “Tarell Alvin McCraney, in His Own Words,” where McCraney briefly engages in conversation with all three of the editors. This strikingly succinct interaction unearths the essence of McCraney by mostly avoiding questions of process and production and focusing on his mere existence. Like the Career Chronology, this section serves as a bookend to a selection of well-crafted essays that ushers in new, interesting aspects to explore. Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration is an exceptional text, offering a concrete foundation for McCraney scholars, practitioners, and novices. As a result of its interdisciplinary approach, the book extends beyond theatre and performance studies, as it critically engages fields of religion, culture, gender, and sexuality. Ultimately, the strength of this book lies in how it frames the complexities of McCraney’s Black radical imagination and extraordinarily cultural storytelling through the investigation of his “various dramaturgical strategies and theatrical devices” (8). References Footnotes About The Author(s) DERON S. WILLIAMS Eastern Connecticut State University Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to "Milestones in Black Theatre" Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration. Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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

Erith Jaffe-Berg 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 Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. Erith Jaffe-Berg By Published on April 8, 2021 Download Article as PDF Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative , edited by Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, presents a powerful, multifaceted record of historical and contemporary casting practices from leading American artists and scholars. The book casts an intentionally wide net, reflecting on how various communities, including Middle Eastern, Native American, African American, Latinx, as well as multilingual and disabled communities, have been impacted by the politics of casting. The book is relevant for theater artists, critics, administrators and educators of institutions that fund and produce theater. In Casting a Movement , the writers offer incisive analysis of the ways race and representation define meaning in the theatre, aiming to understand how race and racism have been reinforced and institutionalized through casting practices. Casting a Movement intentionally includes both theatre practitioners and scholars and opens with three introductory essays by Liesl Tommy, Syler, and Banks, respectively, which offer a framework and language for the subsequent 21 contributions. Reflecting on an award-filled career of directing on and off Broadway and television, Tommy underscores the importance of language in articulating social and political nuances that inform questions of casting. Syler emphasizes that “casting is inherently a political act” that is never neutral because the decision about which bodies to include already communicates information that “evokes cultural assumptions associated with skin color, gender, sexuality, and ability” (4). Banks revisits the metaphor of “the welcome table,” present in both a Spiritual and James Baldwin’s unfinished final play, as an aspiration for an inclusive space (both physical and ideational) in which artists of various backgrounds are invited to engage in each other’s art-making. In this essay originally written in 2012, Banks interrogates such terms as “nontraditional” or “color-blind casting” that anticipate the powerful expressions of “We See You, White American Theater” ( www.weseeyouwat.com ) published in 2020. Following these introductory essays, the book’s first part traces a trajectory from the language of “colorblind casting” to “color conscious casting.” Appropriately, this first part begins with Ayanna Thompson, whose writing about Shakespeare and classical productions has exposed the persistent falsity of “colorblindness” in theatre pedagogy (34). Next, Justin Emeka traces his own journey as a director: “[b]y reimagining the presence of Black and Brown life within the context of Eurocentric plays, I use theater as a tool to teach people to look for Black and Brown life where they have been trained by omission to ignore it” (47). In the third essay Brian Eugenio Herrera discusses the persistence of “whitewashing,” or the use of white actors in casting when the roles were originally written for non-white characters as a pernicious mechanism of erasure (51). In the volume’s second part, Arab-American playwright Yussef El Guindi, artistic Director Torange Yeghiazarian (Golden Thread Productions), and scholar Michael Malek Najjar consider challenges for Middle Eastern American/North African American actors in the academy, in training programs, and in the professional setting (72). As Najjar puts it in reference to August Wilson’s touchstone essay “The Ground on Which I Stand:” “Wilson’s view on African American theatre [about the pernicious effect of colorblind casting] is a helpful guide for other minoritarian theater communities” (76). Aptly, since actor Christine Bruno points out, “[d]isabled people are America’s largest minority, representing twenty-five percent of the population,” the book’s third part focuses on issues of casting and disability. Bruno, Carrie Sandahl, and Victoria Lewis consider efforts by advocacy groups on behalf of actors of color and those with disabilities (85). Sandahl makes a clarion call for those in the academic and professional theatres to take shared “responsibility for improving opportunities for theater artists along the whole pipeline”—from educational programs to the theatre, film and television industries (94). The book’s fourth part widens its perspective even further to address casting and multilingual performance, an often-neglected topic. This part, opens with a poetic rumination on storytelling and cultural ownership by playwright Caridad Svich. Next Eunice S. Ferreira and Ann Elizabeth Armstrong argue the benefits of multilingual theater for developing an audience attuned to and welcoming of difference. Reflecting the growing role of Native American theatre in the last decade, the fifth part highlights the pluralism of Native American theater voices. Ojibwe and Oneida performance artist Ty Defore (Gilzhig), echoes the previous section and offers a poem, “Journey,” that suggests paths for greater connection across diverse communities. This is an especially important chapter symbolically and ideationally for a book that calls for the imperative of intersectionality in addressing world challenges. Jean Bruce Scott and Randy Reinholz (Choctaw) discuss the evolution of the Native Voices at the Autry as a theatre that places Native narratives centrally to create “a more inclusive dialogue about what it means to be ‘American’” (147). Courtney Elkin Mohler articulates decolonial practices in contemporary Native theater. In the sixth part, the book turns to questions of stereotype in casting processes. Mei Ann Teo, for instance, acknowledges in our historic moment “a sea change” when “Asian American and Asian heritage stories are finally being told in the mainstream” (173). In powerful affirmation of intersectionality, Dorinne Kondo analyzes what she calls the “reparative creativity” of artists of color who use “multiracial collaboration and cross-racial casting” as strategies of resistance to exclusion in the theater industry and society (177). “Refusing a neat ending,” in her words, Donatella Galella sees an ongoing process of fighting for improved conditions of people of color and “cross-racial casting as a struggle over power—representation and the redistribution of roles” (191). The book’s final part reverberates with many of the themes across essays, asserting a politics of inclusion and visibility evoked by Canadian/American playwright Elaine Ávila’s title “Reaparecer” (reappear). The section ends with Priscilla Page’s essay on Collidescope: Adventures in pre- and Post-Racial America and Brandi Wilkins Catanese’s further analysis of the ongoing performance project— juxtaposing it with Daniel Banks’s working through of the welcome table. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative is a timely work whose significance goes beyond the discipline of theater to add to the national conversation on institutionalized racism. Read alongside recent political, social and artistic developments, including the Black Lives Matter movement, theatre closures precipitated by COVID-19 and the political upheavals of the Trump presidency, it remaps the field. How we want to return to theatre-making, how we will address questions of equity, diversity and inclusion in the face of persistent racism and institutionalized white supremacy are driving issues for the artist-writers in this important anthology. References Footnotes About The Author(s) ERITH JAFFE-BERG University of California, Riverside Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to "Milestones in Black Theatre" Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration. Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Richard Hayes 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 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. Richard Hayes By Published on April 9, 2021 Download Article as PDF 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. Kurt Eisen’s excellent The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage appears as part of the Methuen Drama Critical Companions series, a series that “covers playwrights, theatre makers, movements and periods of international theatre and performance” and gives “attention to both text and performance” in critical surveys of the work of individual authors. Other contributions to the series include books on Beckett and Tennessee Williams and on the American stage musical and twentieth-century verse drama in England. Eisen here gives a succinct but rich account of O’Neill’s plays, captures well the breadth and range of O’Neill’s achievement, outlines key thematic concerns, and opens up interesting questions for both established scholars and those new to O’Neill’s vast, endlessly intriguing body of work. Essays by William Davies King, Alexander Pettit, Katie Johnson and Sheila Hickey Garvey offer additional and complementary critical perspectives. A comprehensive bibliography identifies all the major critical works and also points towards useful further reading. In other words, the book is a fine addition to the large volume of material in print on O’Neill as well as a suitable beginning point for students and scholars. From the beginning, Eugene O’Neill took himself and the American theatre seriously: one is struck, in placing O’Neill in the company of other Modernists, by how little mischief there is in O’Neill and how lacking the work is in frivolity. Every play appears to have been mined from the earth through earnest labor and is presented with the utmost sincerity, and it is this purposeful determination to shape a modern American theatre from the ground up, play by play, that defines his contribution. Even O’Neill’s apprentice works, many of them terrible, show serious intent. These early failures (such as Thirst , Fog , A Wife for a Life , ‘Ile ) were attempts to “sort out themes and situations that interested him dramatically” (25), says Eisen in an exemplary examination of O’Neill’s work to 1920 and, to some extent, these themes and situations interested him throughout his career. Revisiting the early plays having read Eisen, one is struck by how much of the master-works ( The Iceman Cometh , Long Day’s Journey into Night , A Moon for the Misbegotten ) are contained within these trial pieces. Eisen convincingly frames a consideration of these lifelong themes and situations around a distinction between “modernity” and “modernism”, the latter “both an expression and critique” of the former. O’Neill’s restless experimentation was part of his search for “a unifying principle in the absence of a guiding theology or traditional values adequate to prevailing conditions of American modernity.” In the end, O’Neill “affirmed the American theatre as a heterotopian counter-site where one can more powerfully imagine other lives and the otherness of one’s own life” (69), defining through his will alone the modern American stage as something more than the “hateful theatre of my father,” as he famously described the nineteenth-century American stage. We follow this “modernity-modernism” thread through a series of linked, themed essays, an approach that allows the reader to draw from disparate and separate phases in O’Neill’s work very profitably. The themes—they may be summarised as: America, gender, race, family—are helpful in identifying all sorts of possibilities for more detailed conversation and research. In the chapter called “New Women, Male Destinies: the ‘Woman Plays’”, Eisen gives careful consideration to, amongst others, Anna Christie , Strange Interlude , and A Moon for the Misbegotten and notes some of O’Neill’s limitations as an artist. O’Neill’s final works seems to concede “his inability to fully represent women on stage”: over his career, O’Neill “creates a powerful if distorting lens into the lives of women in modern America, rooted equally in O’Neill’s personal emotional mythology and the gender typology of an American theatre tradition he could never completely experiment beyond” (92). In “‘Souls under Skins’: Masks, Race, and the Divided American Self,” Eisen offers very interesting reflections on O’Neill’s use of masks in the context of race. Eisen’s insightful comments on A Touch of the Poet and Irishness are of particular interest to this reader and prompt a reconsideration of O’Neill as an Irish playwright. Eisen is persuasive in “Transience and Tradition: O’Neill’s Modern Families” in his remarks on Beyond the Horizon (a critical play for O’Neill) and rightly argues for the Tyrones in Long Day’s Journey as O’Neill’s “consummate representation of an American family as both fully exposed and forever concealed, tragic in their confrontation with and retreat from American modernity” (140). The complementary essays are terrific. King considers the construction of the notion of “O’Neill” and an “O’Neill play” as a kind of spontaneous “personal branding.” Pettit in his look at O’Neill as a literary—as much as a dramatic—artist concludes that “O’Neill found a text-bound, literary model of drama that allowed him to exercise the sort of control whose elusiveness all playwrights must to some degree lament” (172). Johnson’s essay on The Emperor Jones teases out some aspects of the early productions and complements Eisen’s own treatment of the play in suggesting that Paul Robeson in his performance “embodied the modernist tensions inscribed onto black men” (182). Garvey offers an interesting consideration of Tony Kushner’s productive and lifelong “dialogue” with “the greatest of all America’s playwrights” (197). Omissions are minor. Eisen says nothing about Hollywood as both expression and vehicle of American modernism and of O’Neill’s relationship with the movies. He is good on Ireland and the Irish in his relatively brief but solid consideration of A Touch of the Poet mentioned above, as well as in relation to other plays, but says very little about the influence of the Abbey players on O’Neill – O’Neill’s experience of the Abbey on tour in 1911 has been acknowledged as instrumental in shaping his aesthetic. More too could have been said about Kenneth McGowan and the “triumvirate.” But this is to quibble. There is much to recommend this book. Tragically it is to be Kurt Eisen’s last; he died prematurely (aged just 61) in 2019. A former President of the Eugene O’Neill Society, he made an important contribution to O’Neill studies and to the study of modern American theatre and this book adds to and strengthens that legacy. It is a terrific introduction to O’Neill, will be accessible to undergraduate students coming to O’Neill fresh and still raises new questions for those more familiar with this great playwright’s work. References Footnotes About The Author(s) RICHARD HAYES Waterford Institute of Technology, Ireland Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to "Milestones in Black Theatre" Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration. Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Heather S. Nathans 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 Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Heather S. Nathans By Published on May 12, 2021 Download Article as PDF During the fall of 2020 I had the privilege of interviewing a group of groundbreaking scholars in Black Theatre: Harry Elam, Jr., E. Patrick Johnson, David Krasner, Bernth Lindfors, Sandra Richards, Sandra Shannon, and Harvey Young . Asking each of these distinguished colleagues the same four questions, I invited them to share their insights into the current state of the field, describe important milestones they have marked, and suggest those that have yet to be documented. What a gift it was to spend time with these generous colleagues and to hear their perspectives on the state of Black Theatre and Performance. The essay below represents a synthesis of roughly eight hours of live interviews as well as written responses to my questions. Additionally, in some instances, the interviewees mentioned works by rising generations of scholars and I reached out to those colleagues for their thoughts. I have included the comments of those who were able to respond in a concluding section entitled “Afterviews,” featuring Julius Fleming, La Donna Forsgren, Donatella Galella, Douglas A. Jones, Jr. , and Adrienne C. Macki. Certain themes echo throughout the comments below: The need to embrace Black Theatre as a site of both joy and resistance; the need to explore and document uncharted histories that lie outside traditional definitions or sites of “theatre,” and the opportunities to create more intersectional narratives of Black theatremakers. I offer my thanks to everyone involved for making the time to share their insights and for laying out a number of pathways and challenges for students and scholars studying Black Theatre’s past, present, and future. What critical junctures in the field of Black Theatre have yet to be marked? David Krasner began with a call to expand and complicate the Black Theatre canon by delving back into the archives for long-forgotten or lost works: “Scholars need to consider what they do with the scripts that never received production—for example, the Black radical left works of the 1930s that often got buried or went unperformed due to political pressure.” Krasner cited earlier manuscript versions of Theodore Ward’s The Big White Fog or of Langston Hughes’s Mulatto that reveal the extent to which authors had to compromise their original visions. He asks, “What might an exploration of these texts reveal about the ongoing political discourses of this formative era in Black theatre and performance? Artists of the 1960s often critiqued what they imagined as the timidity of earlier generations, without grasping the levels of censorship those earlier playwrights faced on a daily basis.” He also pointed researchers towards Bert Williams and George Walker’s unproduced play, Just Like White Folks , which they could never get produced. Krasner describes Black artists walking, “a razor’s edge of how far you can push things – what you can say and what you can’t.” He invites scholars to explore, “what did artists want to say and how did they get their messages across despite the restrictions they faced?” As he notes, “Errol Hill and Jim Hatch really set the trend of exploring what performers had to do to get audiences and how they worked the system.” Bernth Lindfors emphasized the new directions that the field of Black Theatre Studies has taken since he first began his research into nineteenth-century Black star Ira Aldridge many years ago. Lindfors honors Errol Hill’s emphasis on the experience of Black actors beyond the US. He hails it as “essential in imagining the impact of Black performance outside the minstrel traditions and legal restrictions that hampered its growth in the US throughout the nineteenth century. Yet Aldridge continues to dominate the scholarly imagination, and in many ways, valorizes the narrative of exceptionalism so often attached to Black performers.” Just as Krasner urges research into less-familiar texts, Lindfors encourages scholars to explore the stories of lesser-known Black artists (as he has done in his most recent study, The Theatrical Career of Samuel Morgan Smith ), declaring, “Populating the history of Black theatre with their stories not only reveals the number of Black artists who managed to establish successful careers in a white-dominated industry. It can reveal patterns of collaboration and legacies of interracial performance traditions as well.” E. Patrick Johnson laughingly notes that he gives the “answer people would expect” about the critical junctures still to be marked in the field: the influence of LGBTQIA+ artists in Black theatre, as well as the impact of Black women and feminist interventions in Black theatre history. And, he adds, “Black queer theatre history has yet to be told in its fullness,” underscoring the importance of recognizing artists who either self-identified as queer or who likely were (such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston). Johnson pays tribute to the “plethora of Black queer artists producing work during the 1980s that we lost to AIDS, including Marlon Riggs, or the artists whose work explicitly explored the Black queer experience of that time, including the Pomo Afro Homos theatre troupe (1990-1995).” He also notes that Lorraine Hansberry’s queer identity had only been “celebrated very recently.” Sandra Shannon suggests that scholars of Black theatre are beginning to see the fruits of decades of labor and documentation, but that, “the inflection point we see at the moment – with the combination of the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, the murder of so many Black Americans, will inevitably transform our future scholarship on Black theatre in ways we can’t even begin to imagine.” She adds that, “the moment we’re in has put race relations front and center and has dispelled any illusions about what Obama’s election accomplished.” She stresses the need to see the “big picture” on confronting systemic racism through Black theatre. Shannon wryly acknowledges the irony that, “Black artists have always used moments like this to create revolutions,” suggesting that “We may even see the creation of a new cycle series,” (referencing August Wilson’s 10-play history of Black America). Sandra Richards invites scholars of Black Theatre in the Americas to rethink their chronologies, asking, “Where do we start? With Yoruba traditions? With the Middle Passage, to put it on the slave ship as various African aesthetics merged into new genres, all marked by trauma?” Richards asks, “where do we learn what Black is?” She looks to colleagues like Kathy Perkins who have helped to make visible the histories of production at HBCUs, or institutions like the University of Iowa, that contributed to the training of Black theatre artists (particularly designers, who are so often overlooked in chronicles of Black theatre history). Richards reminds contemporary Black artists and scholars that they, “may be following in someone’s footsteps and not realize it,” simply because that history remains undocumented. For her, that lack of historical context robs contemporary scholars and artists of a crucial sense of heritage—of a “family tree” that confers an important sense of belonging . Harry Elam, Jr. ’s comments echo Richards’s call to remember the “family tree,” as he observes, “Are we in a critical juncture now ? There is a tendency to focus on the contemporary in Black Theatre, rather than looking back . We have to mark our history.” Elam points to the rise of “neo-slave plays,” including those by Suzan-Lori Parks, Brandon Jacobs Jenkins, and Jeremy O. Harris, and the ways in which they, “look back at history as a way to reckon with it.” He ponders what scholars might take away from this irreverent approach to playing with history. Like Shannon, Elam also questions how the pandemic crisis will impact opportunities for new Black playwrights to make their mark, asking, “How will rising authors get seen” when theatre makers often privilege the more familiar and established Black writers? Harvey Young argues, “More attention could and should be paid to intersectionality, specifically Blackness and latinidad as well as Blackness and transgender identity. Although there have been important early studies in performance studies and communication studies—such as E. Patrick Johnson and Ramón Rivera-Servera’s terrific edited collection Blacktino Queer Performance and C. Riley Snorton’s stellar monograph Black on Both Sides , there needs to be more scholarship in those disciplines and also an equivalent set of smart, sophisticated writings that specifically center theatre. Furthermore, gender and sexuality, when indexed by race, should not be assumed (as topics) to exist primarily in the disciplines of performance studies or American Studies.” Young notes that, “It is difficult to conceive of latinidad without Blackness or African diasporic presence. This is increasingly apparent in the writings of mainstream authors (such as Junot Diaz). We need to more fully interrogate how and why scholarship on latinidad sometimes seems to deliberately erase or render invisible Blackness even as it offers nuanced, sophisticated ways of considering performances of whiteness and/or indigeneity. Certainly, the similarities of Blackness and Brownness is hinted at in Jose Esteban Munoz’s posthumously published Sense of Brown —in which Munoz (thanks to the keen editorial work of Joshua Chambers Letson and Tavia Nyong’o) links the affective resonance of being and feeling Black and Brown. Blackness and Brownness influence and build upon one another. It might be helpful to think of Blackness and Brownness as twins, perhaps fraternal, which influence and inspire one another with shared roots (and occasionally overlapping diasporic routes). Of course, there are myriad examples in which Blackness is Brownness, co-existing and overlapping within the same body.” How might we document the ways that Black theatre scholars and artists are remapping the field? How have you experienced shifts in the profession? Krasner highlights efforts to shift scholarly attention away from, “familiar urban centers towards less familiar regions such as St. Louis or Seattle that provided homes to active Black theatre artists and companies. By focusing on the performers, designers, dancers, and crew who made those regional theatres possible, contemporary researchers can illuminate rich histories that lie beyond the familiar Broadway-oriented narratives.” As he observes, “There are pockets of local Black theatre history that reveal wonderful acts of resistance and wonderful work.” Lindfors echoes Krasner’s suggestion to look beyond the familiar US circuits, but he directs attention, “beyond the borders of North America to a focus on Black mobility as a productive line of inquiry.” He points to recent studies such as Bill Egan’s African American Entertainers in Australia and New Zealand and Kathleen Chater’s Henry Box Brown: From Slavery to Show Business that looks at the experience of a Black American entertainer in Victorian England. In addition to telling the histories of Black artists in cities beyond familiar urban theatre centers, Johnson argues that, “there is so much Black theatre happening in informal spaces, not on formal stages,” and he highlights the recent scholarship of Koritha Mitchell and Julius Fleming that invites readers to frame alternate spaces for Black theatre. Richards sees Black Theatre becoming, “more inclusive as queer studies and explorations of trans and non-binary identities” intersect with current scholarship. She points to the work of E. Patrick Johnson and a generation of rising scholars who have expanded the parameters of Black theatre studies. She also stresses the expansion of research around Afro-Latinx intersections, Diasporic Studies, and Gender Studies, and their exciting potential to shape future research in the field of Black Theatre. Musing on the terminology that will emerge to define the new directions in the field, she queries, “ Is diaspora the correct term for a new generation?” Shannon points to the work of scholars like Harvey Young, Tavia Nyong’o, Jonathan Shandell, Donatella Galella, Douglas A. Jones, Jr., Koritha Mitchell, La Donna Forsgren, Nicole Hodges Persley, Sandra Mayo, Soyica Diggs Colbert, Adrienne Macki, and Brandi Catanese as part of a critical reimagining of Black theatre history, illuminating the milieu and context of Black dramas. Shannon sees these scholars delving into the histories of the communities that inspire Black theatre and how theatre in turn serves and supports these communities, “these scholars are taking the primacy off the stage and focusing on theatre as an ecosystem.” Like Krasner and Johnson, Shannon also points to the need to document theatre work being done at all levels in the Black community. With the passion that marks her Wilson scholarship, she exclaims, “I want to understand it all!” Like Shannon, Elam salutes Soyica Diggs Colbert, Douglas A. Jones Jr., Harvey Young, and other Black Theatre scholars, “who are changing what we look at.” He also praised editors such as LeAnn Fields of the University of Michigan Press for making books on Black Theatre Studies visible across the profession, and credits Fields, along with Colbert, Young, and others with expanding definitions of Black Theatre beyond the stage to encompass broader definitions of performance. Elam notes particularly the need to look at failures as well as successes in telling the histories of Black Theatre: “Think about things that didn’t work. What reverberations did they create? When we don’t look at failures, we erase histories and we erase legacies of repetition and cycles of learning. Don’t imagine these things never happened. Tell their stories.” As Elam argues, scholars can look at histories of failed attempts to understand how Black Theatre emerged in its present forms. Young points to the opportunities offered by new technologies to document Black Theatre histories: “What is needed is a digital mapping project to better identify and chart the nodal networks of influence and inspiration to reveal how structures (archives, institutes, centers, funding initiatives) have been created to preserve the history and bolster the future possibilities of Black performance.” He adds that achieving a critical mass will prove as important as any new technologies: “A small number of people in the academy research and work specifically in Black theatre. This paucity means that single individuals build entire branches, whole genres, of study. While it is a testament to their rigor that a handful of names have become synonymous with the objects of their study (Sandra G. Shannon’s work on August Wilson’s dramaturgy is a clear example), it is important for collectives to form to engage future researchers in an effort to further these explorations (the August Wilson Society, co-founded by Professor Shannon is a prime example). Each one, Bring one. The work that Monica White Ndounou has done with her Craft Institute, in partnership with Dartmouth College, has helped to brings artists and scholars into conversation with the aim of impacting professional theatre and the academy. It is meaningful that Brandi Wilkins Catanese and thereafter La Donna Forsgren, as editors of Theatre Survey , will frame the conversations on theatre studies through the year 2024.” What and whose legacies have we begun to recognize and where does vital work remain to be done? Like Johnson, Krasner emphasizes the opportunity for researchers to explore and elevate “community” theatre histories in reclaiming legacies of Black theatre and performance. Asking how scholars can uncover the “invisible traditions people come from,” he described not only the community-based performance histories, “but early traveling circuits, Black gay cabarets, and the lives of those artists who had to stay invisible in order to stay safe.” As he argues, “You have to piece the stories together and use your imagination to think about what they went through.” He adds that historians need to, “think about where they see themselves in the story.” Johnson asks, “How do we document informal spaces where Black performance happens?” For Johnson, oral histories, rudimentary recordings, playbills, photos can start to fill in histories, but for pieces created in “non-traditional” spaces, documentation remains a significant issue. Johnson salutes contemporary social media for, “supporting documentation and distribution,” yet he expressed a significant concern about the urgent need to create an archive (and he is part of a Mellon-Sawyer Seminar Grant to develop a Black Arts Archives). For Johnson, “If the works are not documented, how do we provide evidence they occurred?” Lindfors invites scholars to “trace the histories of artists such as Dusé Mohamed Ali, editor of The African Times and Orient Review and The Comet , as well as an actor, playwright, activist, and theatre critic (who once interviewed Oscar Wilde). While much has been written about Ali in the context of literary and political histories, few have focused on his contributions to African theatre. What might a study of Ali’s theatre career reveal about the development of British Black Theatre history and historiography?” Shannon ’s role as President of the August Wilson Society offers her unique insights into the curation of Black theatre histories. She hopes to continue to document the impact of the “Wilsonian Warriors” – the artists, directors, designers, and other theatre-makers whose collaborations with Wilson continue to ripple across the field and to inspire rising generations. Richards recalls her own start in the field of Black Theatre when she had to seek out colleagues like Margaret Wilkerson after graduate school because neither her undergraduate nor her graduate program offered courses in Black or African American theatre and there was “no one else” to offer her guidance. She marks the shift in the profession that has brought Black Theatre into a sharper focus alongside Performance Studies in ways that have, “created more breathing space and more intellectual opportunities.” She also hails, “the push towards Black Theatre of the Americas ,” that she sees emerging across the field. She named colleagues including Douglas A. Jones Jr., La Donna Forsgren, and Koritha Mitchell among those doing exciting work to push the field into new conversations. Young points to developing areas in Black Theatre scholarship, “There has been a considerable effort over the past two decades to spotlight and recognize the work of Black women theatre makers. We are all indebted to the editorial work (as well as to the professional practice) of Kathy Perkins, whose anthologies have made it easier to access the writings of Black women dramatists. Koritha Mitchell’s spotlighting of women writers will inspire a new generation of researchers to consider Black women’s theatrical and performance literature. In addition, recent explorations into the life and theatre of Lorraine Hansberry, by Soyica Diggs Colbert and Imani Perry, are cementing Hansberry’s place within the canon of internationally significant playwrights.” However, he adds, “there is much to be done with regard to exploring Blackness within national theatre cultures. Significant research needs to be done on Black Canadian theatre. The critical study of performance by underrepresented groups (with the possible exception of First Nations theatre) in Canada remains at a nascent stage. Maureen Moynagh’s important edited collection, African-Canadian Theatre , helpfully charts the landscape. There is an emerging body of critical scholarship on contemporary Black British theatre but the volume of work does not compare with that centering African American theatre. However, Lynette Goddard has been an enviably effective champion of this necessary work and alongside other scholars, such as Deidre Osbourne and Mary F. Brewer, has created an impressively substantial critical core. In addition to continued exploration of the Caribbean influence inherent in the works of Lloyd Richards, Trey Anthony, and Winsome Pinnock among others, it is helpful to spotlight the ongoing theatre in the Caribbean, including but not limited to Jamaica.” Have you uncovered a milestone from the past whose impact scholars have yet to realize? In thinking about milestones, legacies, and the call to think about where he sees himself in the stories he explores, Krasner acknowledges his privilege in being a “Jewish boy from Brooklyn,” who feels the responsibility to bear witness to the racism he saw growing up and that he sees around him still. He argues that “scholars can connect to those who can no longer speak for themselves,” and they can honor the artists, “who refused to run away” from overwhelming racism and discrimination. Citing Ada Overton Walker, Krasner hails her bravery: “How good, how brave, how savvy, and how determined she must have been to succeed.” As he contends, “Performance can find the cracks in the walls. You can burn a manuscript, but performance finds a way.” Lindfors describes the moments that Errol Hill reached out to him with encouragement to keep going in his quest to document Ira Aldridge’s career. He mentioned one moment in particular when Errol was terribly ill, yet took the time to reach out and inspire him. He asks, “How can we offer the same generosity, support, and validation to the scholars of today? And can we bear in mind how meaningful it is to have our scholarly ‘heroes’ recognize our work?” Elam echoes Lindfors’s gratitude to the researchers and artists who paved the way for contemporary scholars, including Errol Hill (whom he described as an inspirational “model of rigor”). Hill was renowned as both a scholar and an artist, enjoying a career as a playwright, performer, and director, and Elam recognizes the importance of “ making theatre as well as studying it.” He asks, “Are we creating opportunities for these rising scholars to do work in labs that will help them understand their subjects in new ways?” He stresses the vital relationship of theory to practice as critical in thinking about and with Black Theatre. Elam also envisions a field which honors its past and nurtures its future – underscoring the importance of making those support networks visible so that new generations of scholars never feel isolated. Johnson salutes another group of “heroes,” shifting his lens towards the “unsung heroes in the curation of Black performance who were critical to making sure that the history of Black Theatre happens .” He also looks ahead to the “next frontier” in Black theatre – exploring the impact of sexuality gender and mapping the “whole genealogy of Black theatre made possible by artists like George C. Wolfe, Robert O’Hara, and Michael R. Jackson.” As Johnson notes, “We’re now seeing lots of Black queer artists creating – so many people whose work grew out of the art created in backyards, community centers, churches, and other spaces where Black artists found space and voice.” Shannon declares, “Black theatre has the potential to heal – how can we use Black theatre to show the way forward in this moment?” She invites colleagues to take advantage of this, “call to arms moment,” arguing that “subversive acts are necessary to deal with hegemonic structures.” She cites the current moment as, “particularly ripe for Black women who have become heroines and who are establishing their legacies.” Like Richards, she also reminds contemporary scholars to pay attention to the power of HBCUs, and to “reach up to claim and tout the value of these institutions.” Richards points to the COVID-19 crisis and the many other challenges shaping the professoriate as the next milestone to mark in the field of Black Theatre. She asks, “Where are we going after the pandemic when professional opportunities will have shrunk, but the need to do and to document Black Theatre will not?” Afterviews Each of the scholars I interviewed mentioned a number of newer voices that have begun to shape discourses on Black Theatre. The “ Afterviews ” below showcase some of their responses to the question: “Where do you think the field of Black Theatre is headed in the future?” Julius Fleming: “What will Blackness be?” “What will blackness be?” As I reflect upon the futures of Black Theatre and Performance Studies, this prescient question from literary and performance theorist Fred Moten looms. An aesthetic and political tradition, black theatre and performance has allowed us to probe what blackness is and what blackness might be. Because the construction of the modern world relies on the extraction and abstraction of black bodies, the critical attention that Black Theatre and Performance Studies pays to the body will be vital to understanding, critiquing, and reconfiguring the known world and its futures—and to discovering new worlds and otherwise possibilities. From expanding uses of digital technologies within live theatre to staging plays that spotlight the State’s uneven, race-based practices of State care in the wake of natural disaster, black theatre and performance consistently engages the most innovative tools and pressing social concerns that animate the “now.” And the concerns of the “now,” we know, are the animate legacies of various pasts and the building blocks of times that are yet-to-come. In this sense, what excites me most about the future of Black Theatre and Performance Studies is that it will become an even more radical and robust enterprise, one that expands what we know and how we know it. Mirroring the nature of its object of study (i.e., performance), the field will remain unruly and innovative—on the run as it were. And yet, it will continue to negotiate the structural threat of disappearance and ephemerality ignited by the harrowing rise of increasingly anti-intellectual societies. But whatever the nature of those times that are yet-to-come, Black Theatre and Performance will be a site to which we can continue to turn to understand what blackness is and might be, which is also to say what the world is and might be. Douglas A. Jones, Jr. “ “Hurston’s Call” Two recent publications explore theatrical practices that emerged from the sociality of everyday black persons that pay little to no regard for how such practices comported with mainstream tastes or courted sanction from black elites and other bourgeois gatekeepers. These books—Chinua Thelwell’s Exporting Jim Crow: Blackface Minstrelsy in South Africa and Beyond (UMass) and Rashida Shaw McMahon’s The Black Circuit: Race, Performance, and Spectatorship (Routledge)—offer exemplary historiographies of how Black performance cultures are often at their most inventive and nourishing when they refuse to organize themselves around the white gaze. Thelwell’s examination of Black minstrels forging Black diasporic networks of care across continents and Shaw McMahon’s of thriving African American theatre makers outside and against majoritarian institutions reveal the importance of studying Black performance that traffics in (sociocultural) politics that easily offends prevailing critical opinion. In “Characteristics of Negro Expression” (1934), Zora Neale Hurston called on critics to carry out these very sorts of investigations—our sensibilities be damned! For a host of intellectual and institutional reasons, Black Theatre and Performance Studies has generally pursed tacks more in line with W.E.B. Du Bois’s cultural theories. But Thelwell’s and Shaw McMahon’s fantastic new books show the importance of decentering Du Boisean frameworks for those thinkers like Hurston formulated. Such an approach recovers undertheorized Black performance genealogies and, accordingly, helps redress several of the class, political, and regional biases that continue to organize our field. Heeding Hurston’s call is both urgent and necessary: my hope is that it will shape methodologies and archival priorities in Black Theatre and Performance Studies for decades to come. Adrienne C. Macki: “Clarion Call” Certainly, the Black Lives Matter movement has prompted important global conversations. Black Theatre and Performance will continue to build upon that momentum as it remains at the forefront of this clarion call to promote a more inclusive space advancing diverse, underrepresented, and often disenfranchised perspectives. Of course, this is a divisive time, but I am interested in choosing to embrace radical optimism and recognize Black Theatre and Performance’s labor to mobilize audiences. I have long been interested in activist community-based theatres that employ theatre as a transformative space to promote conversation, healing, equity, and action. Simultaneously, white institutions, white leadership, and white audiences must listen and be vigilant while working towards understanding as well as acknowledging their privilege. Such steps are necessary to topple white supremacy. It sounds simplistic, but I am taking seriously the need for radical change and I am thinking about what concrete actions would look like on a practical level. Towards that end, the recent institutional practice of circulating statements that “we stand in solidarity…” is insufficient; it pays lip service to issues of equity that have plagued the field for far too long. It is high time for theatre organizations and allies to implement real change. Action is imperative to dismantle anti-black racism. Silence is complicit. Accordingly, in this context, Black Theatre and Performance has the potential to cultivate tangible opportunities for communities to rebuild, reconnect, and reimagine equity and inclusion. Likewise, the field may assume an explicit and central role in guiding academic, community, and professional theatres. Donatella Galella: “Read, Cite, and Commit” Black scholars are doing brilliant work in the field of Black Theatre and Performance, and all of us should engage with it. A lot of current scholarship carefully considers affect to understand Black spectatorship and survival. La Donna S. Forsgren’s award-winning essay on The Wiz reveals the pleasures of queer Black feminist viewing practices. Ashon Crawley reminds us of the importance of Black joy in a context that spectacularizes trauma. To identify and navigate “know-your-place aggression,” Koritha Mitchell encourages us to center on Black success and frame white violence as a reaction. At the same time, anger can be useful, as Nikki Yeboah cites Audre Lorde and offers her play The M(O)thers , which encourages audiences to link personal stories of Black mothers to larger patterns of police anti-Blackness and to propel anti-racist action. Black creativity as research also emerges in new scholarship that challenges the normative academic book structure of analyzing one case study per chapter with allegedly objective distance. In Ezili’s Mirrors , Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley follows the lwa to sing multi-voiced Black girl ways of knowing. E. Patrick Johnson similarly follows Miss B., playing with meanings of honeypot and presenting oral histories of same-gender-loving Black women in the U.S. South. This is but a fraction of the exciting work that will shape the future of the field. I am eager to learn more, and I hope that more scholars will read, cite, and commit to radical Black politics from reparations to prison abolition. La Donna Forsgren: “Agitate for Change” While the need to produce life-sustaining art may seem especially urgent during the Black Lives Matter movement of today, the reality is that creating and disseminating Black art has always been vital to our survival as a people. As such, I am cautiously optimistic about the future of black theatre and performance. I envision the rising generation of Black theatre artists creating new works and manifestos that speak to the needs of our community. Manifestos such as “We See You, White American Theatre”—incited by the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests—have created space for critical thought and action to obliterate systemic racism from our professional and university stages. I envision rising scholars also attending to the material realities of what it means to be Black in America and amplifying works produced at historically black theatres, many of which will not survive years of scarce funding compounded further by the financial devastation of a global pandemic. Despite my optimistic vision, I also understand that systemic racism intrenches every aspect of our society. To revolutionize our field, we must agitate for change beyond the appearance of inclusivity. History has shown that granting a select few Black artists and scholars “a seat at the table” does not change the nature of the table. If we do not take action now, this newfound interest in Black art and scholarship will slip through the cracks of history as a passing “trend,” going gently into that good night. I want scholars to reconsider what constitutes the “archive” and reclaim heretofore marginalized works of Black women and LGBTQ+ members of our community. I want historically Black theatres to sustain the next generation of artists and thrive. I want Black artists and their allies to use this moment to dismantle all oppressive behaviors and practices of the past and envision a new, truly equitable future. If we can do this; I envision another great era of Black cultural flowering. BIOS: Harry J. Elam, Jr , currently the President of Occidental College, is the author and co-editor of seven books, including the award-winning The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson (University of Michigan Press, 2006), and dozens of journal articles and book chapters. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as the College of Fellows of the American Theatre. The Association for Theatre in Higher Education awarded him its highest recognition, the Distinguished Scholar Award, and he is the recipient of the Career Achievement Award from the American Society for Theatre Research. Elam has also directed professionally for more than 25 years, including Tod, the Boy, for the Oakland Ensemble Company, and Blues for an Alabama Sky for Theaterworks in Palo Alto, winner of Drama-Logue Awards for Best Production, Best Design, Best Ensemble Cast and Best Direction. He also has directed several of August Wilson’s plays, including Radio Golf, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Two Trains Running, and Fences . Julius B. Fleming, Jr. is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he specializes in African American literary and cultural production and black performance studies. Fleming is currently completing his first book manuscript, entitled “Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Refusal to Wait for Freedom,” under contract with New York University Press. He is also beginning work on a second book project that explores the new geographies of colonial expansion and their impact on Afro-diasporic literary and cultural production. Having served as Associate Editor of Callaloo and Black Perspectives , the award-winning blog of the African American Intellectual History Society, his work appears and is forthcoming in American Literature , American Literary History , South Atlantic Quarterly, Callaloo , The James Baldwin Review , and The Southern Quarterly . La Donna L. Forsgren is an Associate Professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre; concurrent faculty in the Gender Studies Program; and affiliate faculty in the Department of Africana Studies. She currently serves as Vice President/Conference Planner for the Mid-America Theatre Conference. Her first book, In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement, investigates the works and careers of Martie Evans-Charles, J.E. Franklin, Sonia Sanchez, and Barbara Ann Teer (Northwestern University Press 2018). Her second book, Sistuhs in the Struggle: An Oral History of the Black Arts Movement Theatre and Performance (Northwestern University Press 2020) explores the art and activism of pioneering black women intellectuals of the 1960-1970s . She has contributed articles to journals such as Theatre Survey, Theatre Topics, Continuum, and Callaloo, as well as book chapters in The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance (Routledge, 2019), Teaching Critical Performance Theory in Today’s Theatre Classroom, Studio, and Communities (Routledge, 2020), The Great North American Stage Directors (Bloomsbury Methuen, forthcoming), and Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism (Routledge, forthcoming). Her current book project explores queer black feminist spectatorship in contemporary musical theatre. 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 book America in the Round: Capital, Race, and Nation at Washington DC’s Arena Stage 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. Patrick Johnson is is Dean of the School of Communication and Annenberg University Professor at Northwestern University. A member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Johnson’s work has greatly impacted African American Studies, Performance Studies, and Gender, and Sexuality Studies. He is the author of several books, including Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (2003); Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—An Oral History (2008); Black. Queer. Southern. Women.—An Oral History (2018); Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women (2019), in addition to a number of edited and co-edited collections, essays, and plays. Douglas A. Jones, Jr. is an Associate Professor at Rutgers University, where he is also Assistant Dean of Humanities. He is the author of The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North (Michigan 2014); co-editor of the essay collection Race and Performance after Repetition (Duke 2020); editor of the special issue of Modern Drama 62.4 “Slavery’s Reinventions” (Winter 2019). He is currently writing a book on black minstrelsy and its role in the production of African American literary modernism; an essay from that project appears in Theatre Journal 73.2 (2021). David Krasner has taught acting, directing, and theatre history for 40 years. He is currently Chair of Theatre at Five Towns College in Long Island, New York, where he oversees the BFA Program in Musical Theatre, Acting, and Design/Tech. He is the author and editor of eleven books, three dozen articles, and over sixty book and performance reviews, ranging from theatre history, dramatic literature, a two-volume history of modern drama, acting, theatre and philosophy, theatre in theory, and a two-volume history of African American Theatre. He has twice received the Errol Hill Award from the American Society for Theatre Research for the best work on African American Theatre, and in 2008 he received the Betty Jean Jones Award for the best teacher of American theatre and drama. He has served, and continues to serve, on a dozen editorial advisory boards, including Stanislavsky Studies, Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, African American Review , and Theatre Annual . He has been the co-editor of the University of Michigan Press’s series Theater: Theory / Text / Performance since 2006. Bernth Lindfors, Professor Emeritus of English and African Literatures at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote biographies of Ira Aldridge and Samuel Morgan Smith after retiring from teaching in 2003. His earlier theatrical research focused on works by African playwrights such as Wole Soyinka, Ola Rotimi, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Hubert Ogunde and Mbongeni Ngema, most of whom wrote their plays in English. He also published two books that dealt with African entertainers who performed in Europe and the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business (Indiana University Press, 1999) and Early African Entertainments Abroad: From the Hottentot Venus to Africa’s First Olympians (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014). Adrienne C. Macki is an Associate Professor in Dramatic Arts, Faculty in the Institute for Africana Studies, and American Studies Program at the University of Connecticut. She teaches courses in gender and performance, Black theatre, African American women playwrights, sports and performance, and introduction to theatre. She enjoys developing new work for young audiences and has authored numerous articles and essays. Her book, Harlem’s Theaters: A Staging Ground for Community, Class, and Contradiction, 1923-1939 (Northwestern UP, 2015) received the 2016 Errol Hill Award, Honorable Mention, for Outstanding Scholarship on African American Performance from the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR). She has served on the boards of the American Theatre and Drama Society, the Black Theatre Network, and on the Executive Committee of the American Society for Theatre Research. Adrienne received her B.A. in Theatre from Middlebury College, Masters in Theatre Education from Emerson College, and Ph.D. in Drama from Tufts University. Sandra Richards is Professor Emerita at Northwestern University. Her research specialties include African American, African, African Diaspora, and American theatre and drama, she has authored Ancient Songs Set Ablaze: The Theatre of Femi Osofisan and numerous articles on a range of black dramatists. Richards is co-editor (with Sandra Shannon) of the MLA Handbook of Approaches to Teaching the Plays of August Wilson . She was also part of the editorial term of Kathy A. Perkins, Renee Alexander Craft, and Thomas F. DeFrantz that produced The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance (2018). From 2001-2004, she held the Leon Forrest Professorship of African American Studies that supported research and publication on issues of cultural tourism to slave sites throughout the Black Atlantic. In 2007 ATHE recognized her as an Outstanding Teacher of Theatre in Higher Education, while ASTR honored her with its Outstanding Scholar award in 2017. Sandra G. Shannon is Professor Emerita of African American Literature in the Department of English at Howard University, is widely considered the leading authority on playwright August Wilson and a major scholar in the field of African American drama. She is the author of two book-length studies, numerous essays, and chapters on African American literature, in general, and, more specifically, on August Wilson and his American Century Cycle plays. She has also served as Editor and Co-editor of four essay collections. Dr. Shannon is a Founder member of the August Wilson Society, and, since 2006, has served as its President. She is a Fellow of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre–so honored in 2018 for being a “distinguished achiever in professional and educational theatre.” She was elected by this body to serve as its next Dean (beginning in 2022). In 2018, Dr. Shannon was awarded the prestigious Winona Fletcher Award from the Black Theatre Network for her “academic excellence in theatre scholarship.” Dr. Shannon is currently Artist-in-Residence at Pittsburgh, PA’s August Wilson African American Cultural Center where she serves as a chief consultant for the Center’s forthcoming state-of-the-art interactive exhibit, August Wilson: A Writer’s Landscape. (For a complete list of her publications see: https://works.bepress.com/sandra-shannon/ . Harvey Young is Dean of the College of Fine Arts at Boston University. His research on the performance and experience of race has been widely published in academic journals, profiled in the New Yorker , the Wall Street Journal and the Chronicle of Higher Education . As a commentator on popular culture, he has appeared on CNN, 20/20, and Good Morning America as well as within the pages of the New York Times , Vanity Fair and People . He has published seven books, including Embodying Black Experience , winner of “Book of the Year” awards from the National Communication Association and the American Society for Theatre Research. His forthcoming edited collection (with Megan Geigner) Theatre After Empire will be published in 2021. He is Immediate Past President of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and has served as Trustee/Board Member of the African American Arts Alliance of Chicago, American Society for Theatre Research, Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra and Yale Club of Chicago. References Footnotes About The Author(s) HEATHER S. NATHANS Professor, Tufts University Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to "Milestones in Black Theatre" Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration. Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Nicole Hodges Persley 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 Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Nicole Hodges Persley By Published on May 11, 2021 Download Article as PDF Nicole Hodges Persley : I want to end this special issue for JADT with a discussion about the praxis of Black artist-scholars and what sustainability looks like in the wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter. How do we sustain ourselves as we navigate teaching online, losing people we love, fighting against racial inequality, systemic racism, and for many of us raising families, running small companies, and working full time? How do we imagine a praxis that will allow us to do the social justice work we want to do with our various platforms and stay alive? Errol Hill showed us so much about creating space for interdisciplinary work and juggling the life of an artist-scholar, but his role was very different as a Black man. For Black women working in the entertainment and academic industries, our labor is often contested and invisible. At the same time, we are often charged to help “diversify” our academic institutions in ways that are taxing and distracting from our art-making. So, that’s the quick version of what I would like to discuss today. If we can have a quick roll call for the reader giving us your name, title, institution, and a few of the slashes you inhabit as an artist scholar. We’ll start with Monica, Stephanie, Lisa and then Eunice. I should note for this interview that Monica and I are past Presidents of The Black Theatre Association. We are all members of BTA. Eunice is the current VP and Conference Planner of BTA for 2021-2022 and will be incoming President in 2023. Monica White Ndounou : I’m Dr. Monica White Ndounou. I’m an associate professor of Theater, affiliated with Film and Media Studies and African and African American Studies at Dartmouth College, and I am currently in the Boston area. I am also an actor and director and the founding Executive Director of The CRAFT Institute as well as a founding member of the National Advisory Committee for The Black Seed Initiative. Nicole and I are also co-founders of Create Ensemble. Stephanie Leigh Batiste : I’m Professor Stephanie Batiste, I am an associate professor in the English department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I’m affiliated with Theatre and Dance, Comparative Literature, and Black Studies. I was joint-appointed to Black Studies for more than a decade…then I decided to opt for just one job. But I do extensive research in Black performance and I’ve written a few plays. I’m a poet, and a performer and theater-maker like the rest of you. Lisa B. Thompson : I’m Lisa B. Thompson, Dr. Professor, “Play Prof.” I’m a professor, playwright, and now emerging screenwriter. As of September 1, 2021, my title will change to the Patton Professor of African & African Diaspora Studies University of Texas at Austin. I’m also affiliated faculty in Theatre and Dance, English, Women and Gender studies, and the Warfield Center for African and African American Studies. Eunice S. Ferreira : I’m Eunice Ferreira. I am an Associate Professor of Theater at Skidmore College affiliated with Black Studies, Intergroup Relations, and Latin American and Latinx Studies. I do work on translation/multilingual theater, mixed-race performance, theater for social change, and theater of the African diaspora. I’m a director, actor, and specialist in Cape Verdean performance. I’m the Vice President and Conference Planner of the Black Theater Association. Nicole Hodges Persley : Thanks, everyone. For our readers, I am Nicole Hodges Persley. I am jointly appointed at the University of Kansas in African and African American Studies and American Studies I am courtesy faculty in Theatre and Dance, Women Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Latinx Studies. I also work with the Kansas African Studies Center. I’m the incoming Director of Museum Studies. We have the only masters of African American Studies and Museum Studies in the nation. I’m the Artistic Director of KC Melting Pot Theater in Kansas City, Missouri. I asked us to talk about our affiliations and titles, not as a CV roll call but more so as a way to delineate the multiple slashes that we occupy as artist-scholars who teach and make Black Theater. We all do multi-modal performance work in and outside of academia. In this issue, we have used Hill’s centennial to inspire conversations about milestones. Many of you know Hill was at Dartmouth and was a professor of Black theater. 1. Everyone here teaches, writes, performs, and directs Black theatre. Can you speak to your connection to Errol Hill’s work and how it resonates in this particular moment for you? Lisa B. Thompson : I am most taken by Errol Hill’s role as both an artist and scholar. So the fact that he was not only a but as a scholar, he did some of the “heavy lifting” for the field of Black theater permits me to hold both of those identities myself. I’ve not shared this yet, but I’m developing an Artist/Scholar Initiative to make “us ” (artist/scholars) more legible. We have to be intelligible to both the theatre community and the academy. For years I’ve been convening artist/scholars panels at academic conferences (American Studies Association, Association for Theatre in Higher Education, and Black Theatre Association) to make us more visible and intelligible to the academy and to show how our creative work counts as scholarship. The Artist/Scholar Initiative will not only highlight the work of current artist/scholars but it will also celebrate our artist/scholar ancestors such as Errol Hill. Nicole Hodges Persley : Wonderful. Yes, we need to situate our work within this larger genealogy of Black artist-scholar work. We can just flow here in our response order. Monica White Ndounou : Considering that I’m on the faculty at Dartmouth right now, and, to the best of my knowledge, the first Black woman to be tenured in the Theater department, Errol Hill paved the way for me in that space. And I do not take it lightly. Also, for those who may not know, there is an Errol Hill collection on campus at Rauner Library, where all of the research materials he collected throughout his lifetime and career are available to researchers. I use it in my courses with my students. For example, I created a course called “The Making of 21st Century Exhibits: Curating a National Black Theatre Museum” a collaboration with Hattiloo Theatre in Memphis, TN. I was awarded a $50,000 DCAL Experiential Learning Grant which enabled me to take my students to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, where they visited the Black Theater exhibit there. Having learned about Black theater and performance history throughout the term, they returned to campus and used the Errol Hill collection to curate an exhibit on Black Theater on campus. And Grace Hill, Errol Hill’s widow, came to campus to see the exhibit, and she brought the family back to see it too. When she reached out to tell me how happy she was to see how we were using the materials, it meant a lot to me, because that was one way to pay homage to his contribution to my development as a scholar and an artist. Stephanie Leigh Batiste : I remember when I was in a transitional moment in my career when I was moving from a Cultural Studies perspective that was mostly history and literature-based to a career that was also theater and performance-based that Hill’s research and scholarly curation were something of a revelation. One of the things I most loved about Hill’s Theater of Black Americans (1980) was the tone and the detail and the specificity and the rigor of the approach. It seemed an approach that was not about integration…that was not about Western theatre…but took Black theater movements and practices on their own terms rooted in African practices and violent colonial histories. And yet he outlined the power of Black theater as a form of historical criticism and protest. It was absolutely foundational for approaches to Black theater that followed. It gave me permission to look in a particular way at what black people were doing in performance in defining Blackness, Black thought, and experience. His was a sophisticated and rigorously argued deployment of a revolutionary consciousness. The grace, directness, and force of his writing, so particular to Hill, was inspiring. When I started looking around for other scholars that were like him, there were few. The links between ritual, Carnival, and drama that he gave us in his research have been so central to performance studies and the connecting of black performance in the Western Hemisphere. His linking of ritual to the stage, which is now such common sense for us, takes us to performance studies and allows us to think about embodiment, identity, performance broadly as social as well as professional practice. Eunice S. Ferreira : Yes, Stephanie, the scope of Hill’s research continues to be a model for so many of us who not only want to talk about performance more broadly but also want to cross oceans to do so! Hill was a model of a scholar artist working on transnational blackness –Caribbean, African, and African American theater. As a first-generation Cape Verdean American, whose creoleness, multiraciality, and notions of blackness are rooted in a rich African diasporic culture, Hill’s body of work gave me permission of sorts to pursue research on Cape Verdean theater. I know it might sound a little strange that I felt I needed permission but I remember finding The Jamaican Stage, 1655-1900 at McIntyre and Moore, a favorite used bookstore when I was a grad student. I still had not settled on my dissertation topic and Hill’s book, along with some other aha moments that semester, made me realize, in the Africanist sense of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o landmark book, that I had not yet finished decolonizing my mind. Since I was not grounded in Black liberation studies as an undergrad and was not necessarily getting the affirmation I needed in my performance studies course, I had to be awakened in a sense, to be shaken out of a Eurocentric mindset that valued specific historiographical approaches and topics. Seeing that blue book looking back at me from that shelf gave me a vision and blessing for my work on the Cape Verdean stage and I’m reminded of that moment every time I turn around and see it on my bookshelf. I think we all need people around us who tell us “go on, do the work, it’s important and you’re the one to do it” and Hill was one of those voices. Nicole Hodges Persley : Absolutely, I would agree. The paths that Hill paved for us created a really interesting landscape of African & African diasporic theatre. His legacy charges other artists to pick up the mantle and to follow the clues that he leaves there for us. Particularly, I love the fact that he’s not limited. Hill makes us think about blackness in this multicentric way. He left interpretation and imagination open to what Black theater scholarship could be. I think he tells us “Do what you need to do to tell the story you need to tell.” 2. I’m wondering if you can talk about your resistance to definitive historical representations of Black Theatre and how you tell the stories of Black Theater in your teaching or arts practice, particularly now as we are all teaching in a converging racial and health pandemics. Monica White Ndounou : It depends on the course, because I teach black theatre in a lot of different ways. I teach black theatre through acting classes and history, literature, and criticism courses. I may also teach black theatre through a project I’m directing or do something completely different, like the museum course I mentioned earlier. And so it really depends on the angle that determines what I’m teaching at the intersections. So, for the museum course, I really wanted my students to think about the power of institutions and institution building within the context of Black theatre; to question: who controls the narrative and the institutional framework and resources? And how does that relate specifically to Black theatre? The way I’m teaching black theatre, at this moment, compared to how I may have taught pre-COVID, or even before the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, which is part of a continuum of Black liberation movements, all of that informs the way that I’m going to approach it. Ultimately, I never teach the same course the same way twice. Nicole Hodges Persley : That’s jazz. Billie Holiday said she would never sing the same song the same way twice. Prescriptive and prescient for this moment. Lisa B. Thompson : I agree. I think we’re all adjusting. This special issue comes out at a heightened moment but this is not new terrain. The history of African American theater is intrinsically tied to fights against anti-black violence and quests for liberation even before BLM. It’s part of our jobs as Black theatre artists and scholars to make sure folks know that history and the kinds of persistent interventions Black theatre artists have done in the past and continue to do from Angelina Grimké to Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), from Lorraine Hansberry to Charles Fuller, from August Wilson to Lynn Nottage. Eunice S. Ferreira : Certainly not new terrain, Lisa, but this particular moment emboldened me and my pedagogy in new ways – and yes, it was an intervention! This past fall 2020 when I received a new assignment at Skidmore to teach the second course in our required theater history survey sequence, I decided that Black Theater would provide the framework – that Black, Indigenous and artists of color would take center stage, that I would prioritize artists whose works were rooted in justice and social change. I was also teaching my elective Black Theater course in the same semester and, regardless of the course title, I zoomed into all of my classes that semester as a professor of Black Theater. It was a powerful post-tenure learning moment for me. It was part of my resilience and resistance – to make it all Black Theater – if not in content, then in pedagogy, practice, and in my own sense of calling of what it means to be a teacher during a pandemic within a pandemic. Nicole Hodges Persley : I think how we approach the subject and teaching is dynamic. And I don’t think probably any of us have a singular way that we go about teaching it. For me, Hill’s work is a great spine for the body of Black theater and performance. Does it need supplementation for Black women and LBGTQ approaches and content? Yes, of course. For me to give a student who has never had any idea that Black people have been making theatre before a Hill book or anthology means I open a work to them that shows how much Black theater artists have accomplished way before. A Raisin in the Sun is usually their central reference point for Black Theater. Stephanie Leigh Batiste : It’s a beautiful spine. I find Harry Elam, Jr.’s African American Theater and Performance very helpful. There are a lot of compendiums that strive to start at the beginning and take us to a present. Many feel very conservative to me. In a lot of ways methodologies of theater, study impact the stories about theater that we hear. We see this too, in the archive, in the way that archives are organized. They craft an order of argumentation and organization that sometimes challenges theoretical experimentation in research. Hill seemed able to do such eclectic work in his career because professionalization of the academic sphere hadn’t reached the level of regimentation what it has today, where you’re burdened with producing an extended book-length study, and spend an absorbing five to ten years writing it. And then you start all over again. And so it strikes me that the opportunity for a lot of that variety, the open approach, and sampling that he was accomplishing has changed. I feel like these things are interconnected in your question: history, archive, argument, teaching, and the nature of being a researcher, writer, and producer in the profession. I find when I teach theater, usually in a literary critical class, that I’m pulling together a hodgepodge of resources to gather what I need. Aligning theatrical and performance studies work to think about blackness is really a curation project for me. One of the classes I teach is called performance of literature, where I teach students an embodied theory of criticism and performance-based in abstract and theatrical jazz techniques. Together we adapt different canonical literary pieces that seem challenging and foundationally theatrical to me, like Jean Toomer’s Cane and Nella Larsen’s Passing. I collaborated with Omi Osun Joni L. Jones UT Austin to experiment with Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha — and we both worked with Toni Morrison’s Sula. Eunice S. Ferreira : I had never imagined teaching Black Theater without live theater attendance as part of the students’ learning experience. I know that we all had to make that adjustment due to COVID, but even before the pandemic, I had to find new ways to curate, as Stephanie so eloquently stated, experiences for the students. How will I teach Black Theater at a predominantly white institution in upstate New York when I may not be able to depend on the availability of Black Theater in the region? My answer was “look to Black Theater, Eunice, look to Black Theater!” Meaning, I needed to shift my mode of thinking ingrained in me from early undergrad days from the “go see a play” model to centering the very core elements of the expressive black arts – where do we find Community? Ritual? Music? Dance? Visual Arts? Aren’t those some of Hill’s arguments for a national Trinidadian theater? Speaking of art, we have a gorgeous contemporary museum on campus called The Tang Teaching Museum that has played an integral role in my Black Theater class. Students have created original theater pieces inspired by the artwork of artists of Africa and the African diaspora and performed them throughout the museum. We also unpack ideas about race, class, and access to museum spaces. Through performance as research strategies, ritual, and community building, students study those who have come before them as they also draw from the elements I mentioned to adapt and create their own work. Embodied learning and the visual arts are central elements. So, too, is the need to move beyond the physical or virtual walls of many theater departments in order to teach Black theater. Lisa B. Thompson : I definitely come at Black theatre history from the viewpoint of an artist first, because I did not train in theater. I trained in cultural studies and wrote my first play in my doctoral program. I learned about Errol Hill doing research for my advisor was Harry Elam, Jr. I’m thankful that I learned about early Black theatre from him, and from conducting research for African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader that he co-edited with David Krasner. For the kind of courses I teach, there’s no anthology in any field of black studies that works for me, so I’m always bringing together essays, books, films, and plays to create what I call “intellectual collages.” I understand the importance of us having these foundational documents and Hill also talks about the seminal works, but I also think there are some really beautiful ways in which we can push against that by putting texts from different eras in conversation with each other. I like to disrupt the linear narrative. My foundational texts are more theatrical. My touchstones or bookends that led me as a Black feminist artist scholar are Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide /When the Rainbow Is Enuf and George Wolfe’s Colored Museum. For me, those plays break up notions of the well-made play and gave me the freedom to revel in the brokenness of Blackness as well as the power and grace. I like to discuss and highlight the artists that present that brokenness in theatre, not as a site of trauma but a place to build from and heal. Errol Hill is brilliant, but he’s very put together and in a way that I am not. I’m messy and I love the messiness of Black theatre. Nicole Hodges Persley : Exactly that—I love the brokenness—fragmentation-syncretic approach to Black theater-making performance and scholarship. My work on sampling, and remixing as theoretical prisms through which we can really reimagine identity formation and racial historicity. I love to think about unsettling the messy and multiple histories. Eunice S. Ferreira : I, too, love the remix and sampling as frameworks and frequently use that on syllabi and exercises. In fact, Nicole, I draw upon your own hip-hop pedagogy in doing so. And in the spirit of #CiteBlackWomen , started by Christen A. Smith, I trust that anyone inspired by “intellectual collages” will cite Lisa B. Thompson! 3.In your practice as artist-scholars, what is necessary for you to sustain the work that you do in this historical moment? Eunice S. Ferreira : One of the things I needed to do during this pandemic was lean into an amazing community of friends and scholar artists in all sorts of different ways – especially Black women scholar artists in my circle. COVID restrictions and teaching online also provided an opportunity to expand community building for students in my Black Theater course by introducing them to early-mid career scholar artists making good trouble in their work and teaching. So, if it’s ok, let me give a shout out to the class visitors who not only gave students a vision of a community of Black scholars but also personally stood in the gap for me when I had several family emergencies this past fall: Shamell Bell, Kaja Dunn, Justin Emeka, Khalid Long, Sharrell D. Luckett, and Isaiah Wooden. I have to lean into community, not competition. The cut-throat academic model is soul-sucking and destructive to my spirit. Nicole, this is one of the many reasons I support the work you and Monica are doing with Create Ensemble. This is why we need The Craft Institute and The Black Seed. Let Black Theater lead the way. Monica White Ndounou : Thanks, Eunice. So many folks are doing important work. I agree with you about the importance of community. Initially, I was going to say I need a lab, a place where I can experiment and test out the theories I’m developing and encountering in my work and collaborations. But a lab may be too sterile for what I have in mind. I think it’s more of an incubator or sanctuary, a safe space for healing and blossoming, a place where I can go and be with my thoughts and work, to commune with other scholar-artists and practitioners to explore the possibilities of our creativity and scholarship in practice. Stephanie Leigh Batiste : That is a great question! Can I say first that I love that we’re deep in theoretical conversation with regard to your concept of sampling. In the Intro to the first collection called Black Performance I: Subject and Method that I edited for The Black Scholar (Fall 2019, vol. 49.3), I use the concept of “beat juggling” from my colleague, Gaye Teresa Johnson (2013). The beats of songs and samples from familiar tracks actively cut into each other in hip hop DJ practice create a place from which we can look for and retrieve newly framed and different histories that each of those mixed moments embeds. The blended memories and histories become lilypads in time that give us new provocations for Black identity-making. We break up linear time. Music and theatricality become grounds for self-invention. Nicole Hodges Persley : Absolutely. I cannot wait to talk to you more about it. I’m excited that Sampling and Remixing Blackness in Hip-Hop Theater and Performance is out this fall with the University of Michigan. It has been a long process, but I think it is relative to what we are experiencing in our current moment with performative allyship, self-reinvention, care, etc. Lisa B. Thompson : I can’t wait to read your book, Nicole! What is necessary for me in this moment is working in the community with other artist scholars and building with local Black artists, especially Black women. I can say the same for my scholarship. I’m part of a writing group with an inspiring and supportive group of diverse scholars who have sustained me during the pandemic. I feel so fortunate to have all of these beautiful folks along with me on this journey. 4.Could you share with readers what you need as an artist scholar to stay creative in the midst of converging health and racial pandemics in American history? Lisa B. Thompson : We have been fighting for such a long time. We are all exhausted. I haven’t had enough rest. None of us have especially if you’re a Black/artist scholar fighting in two realms to be heard. Watching all of the death unfold around us daily as we also push to make our lives and work visible has been overwhelming. I have been keeping a list of everything I need to stay creative. We need self-care and community care. There are revolutionary possibilities in creativity. We also need time away. We need a funded residency for Black artists scholars. I would like it to create a MacDowell, Millay Colony, Hedgebrook type of space where we can meet, dream, work, and be taken care of—have food delivered to our studios, take long walks, sit by a lake, stare at trees—the whole nine. I would love us to be pampered as we create. I would like it to include childcare if someone has minor children. There’s lots of chatter online about the role of Black art at this moment that I feel is necessary but I’d like for us to have more of those conversations in-house and in-person with other Black creatives and intellectuals. Not because we are afraid of airing our dirty laundry but because having these conversations on social media or whispered behind folks’ backs can be damaging. Growth sometimes happens under a microscope or spotlight but it often impedes our evolution and understanding. Let’s call folks in ways that nurture and support our collective growth and creativity. That’s another form of community care. Stephanie Leigh Batiste : I agree. I also want our people’s art to be seen. I want there to be some kind of a “not YouTube” archive. Maybe this is part of one of the things you’re working on Monica, a curation, a site of curation, where new artists and artists who can’t manage to get themselves on a big stage can share their work in the community. We need places to process these states of ongoing trauma that are not an academic conference or in our scholarship. We need to have a continuing live archive of new and experimental work that isn’t being condoned by the mainstream institutions, social and institutional violence, and the status quo. I would like people to be able to imagine themselves as breaking form; as innovating for the stage in ways that are unencumbered by what’s needed to sell a ticket. Our practice of being alive is not in producing the same thing over and over again or creating in the same form over and over again. And we know that the black avant-garde has been instrumental in pushing work and becoming the foundation for the white avant-garde in this country, who are celebrated and marked as the threshold for the transformation of form. But that’s not necessarily or predominantly where the form has changed. Traditional forms have been manipulated and innovated by Black communities whose works were appropriated and then re-presented. And so that force of innovation gets stifled and smothered for not having an achievable outlet or the confidence of proclaiming one’s own creativity. I worry that artists don’t think that there’s a future for their work. This moment seems largely nihilistic in our confrontation with these medically and socially annihilating forces. I’m hoping that the digital realm gives us a place for work. And so in that sense, I feel like I want more stages. I want more stage time. I want more production and trained tech support. I want more black actors who feel like they have the time and the energy and access to make work. You know, art, art-making is operating like a privilege, instead of a thought system. I want us to be free to think about theater as a thought system; that drama is like music–if we lose it, something in us dies, I want us to be able to practice together experimentally and vigorously in collaborative learning laboratories. Eunice S. Ferreira : This question is a difficult one. You asked what do I need and I was raised in a tradition that taught me to always focus on what others need. I am very much wired for being in the community and everything that Lisa and Stephanie said resonates very deeply with me. I try to bring a holistic approach to my teaching and I’m going to take what Stephanie has offered – encouraging students to think of art as a “thought system” and not as a privilege. And I desperately need the resources, space, and time for self-care listed by Lisa. I want to be able to do my work without having to deal with the relentless forces of systemic racism in academia on top of the violence and loss of lives scrolling on my daily news feed. And of course, institutions can assist with practical support such as funding artistic collaborations that we lead, course releases and leaves to do scholarly and creative work or immerse oneself in an intensive. Oh, that sounds so nourishing! But perhaps the most important thing I need right now to stay productive and creative is to not be weighed down by despair and to stay grounded in joy. When I share the call of joy with students, I’m also reinforcing that for myself. Pedagogy rooted in joy. And a retreat. Monica White Ndounou : We really need the ecosystems of arts and entertainment and their corresponding educational programs to be overhauled, repaired, and carefully curated for any of the work we’re doing right now to be sustained. Overhaul education and formal training programs by de-centering work that reinforces white supremacy, institutionalized racism, and anti-Blackness. Rebuilding programs to recognize the intrinsic value of Black people, People of the Global Majority, and our contributions to every aspect of American society and the larger world is more likely to produce scholarship and theatre that more accurately represents the demographics of the nation and the world.As I learned through our collective work on The Black Seed, the philanthropic community can make a big difference by actively addressing an ongoing history of inequitable funding. This is critical when considering, “of the $4 billion in philanthropic support from foundations to arts organizations, 58% of that goes to the largest 2% of organizations; all white-led. The other 98% of organizations split the last 42% and arts organizations serving communities of color shared only 4% of that pie. The median budget size of the 20 largest arts organizations of color surveyed by the DeVos Institute is 90% smaller than their mainstream counterparts, and more than half of these organizations were operating in 2013 with budget deficits.” Formal training, industry practice and funding have to change for the better. If things persist as they are or return to so-called “normal”, my work as an artist and educator is at risk and so are the lives and livelihoods of so many of our colleagues and collaborators. This is one of the most consequential moments of our lifetimes and we need to seize it. Nicole Hodges Persley : Thank you all so much for sharing your musings about your practice as artist-scholars, your engagement with the work of Errol Hill, and the things you are doing to sustain your practice in the wake of Black Lives Matter and COVID-19. I so appreciate the opportunity to have the cipher with you. I am hopeful that the readers will explore the creative work of each artist here. We are designing new ways to be Black Theater scholars in the 21st century. We are working in multi-modal interdisciplinary ways. We are in and outside the academy. We are in the undercommons of the entertainment industry. Please check out the websites, Instagram, and Facebook pages of our artist-scholars. References Footnotes About The Author(s) NICOLE HODGES PERSLEY Professor, Tufts University Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to "Milestones in Black Theatre" Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration. Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans 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 Introduction to "Milestones in Black Theatre" Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans By Published on May 11, 2021 Download Article as PDF This special issue of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre was initially envisioned as a celebration of the inimitable Errol Hill’s contributions to Black Theatre in American history. Hill’s centennial asks us to reflect on the long history of American performance and the impact of Black lives on the American theater. Errol Hill did not revise American theater history by making it more “inclusive.” He challenged the systemic racism of American theater by providing evidence of a thriving Black arts practice that helped to shape the foundations of American theatrical traditions from musical theater to dance. However, when colleagues from the American Theatre and Drama Society, the Black Theatre Association, and the Black Theatre Network began developing this issue, we were all reeling from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. We did not have the theater to help us process this international trauma and loss. Theaters around the world were shuttered indefinitely due to pandemic lockdowns and quarantines. ATHE’s 2020 conference was supposed to take place in Detroit, Michigan, one of the country’s most densely populated Black cities. Instead that summer found us mourning and grappling with death and darkness via Zoom. Facing our limitations, fragilities, anger, and discontents, we attempted to make sense of what we were experiencing as a collective of theater-makers while paying close attention to the racially specific atrocities the pandemic and perpetual climate of anti-blackness did to our Black and Brown colleagues and friends. While we formulated this issue, we watched the ongoing international public protests in response to the murder of George Floyd. The daily theatrical loop of trauma and death streaming onto our phones, tablets, televisions, and Zoom screens felt unbearable. By August of 2020, an unconscionable number of Americans had lost their lives to COVID-19 with those numbers disproportionately representing deaths in Black and Brown communities. At the same time, international audiences witnessed the unrelenting barrage of anti-Black deaths including Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Elijah McClain. As every day seemed to bring a deluge of fresh pain or disaster, colleagues from across ATDS, BTA, and BTN came together to support a group of scholars whose work documents Black Theatre’s histories of resistance, pride, courage, and triumph. Working on this special issue of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre celebrating “Milestones in Black Theatre” has opened up opportunities to reimagine the parameters of the field. It has also highlighted the inadequacy of one journal issue to represent all of the extraordinary accomplishments and developments in Black Theatre Studies. Rather than curating a more traditional journal format with four or five articles, we deliberately broke open the structure to encourage short thought pieces, manifestos, explorations of new work, interviews, roundtable discussions, and reimaginings of familiar material. We also sought to represent a broad swath of scholars in Black Theatre — both well-established voices and those newer to the conversation. Additionally, we developed a Spotify playlist to accompany the issue (available at: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6GVG9zV2bK1JC9Xn1kzhS6?si=9ea0067b0eb1409d ). This playlist invites readers into a sonic landscape as an alternate methodology and archive. It asks how we can think through milestones and approaches in new and unfamiliar ways? We hope that it will inspire you to add songs or to curate your own lists around your research. We launch the issue with a series of interviews from award-winning scholars and leaders, including Harry Elam, David Krasner, E. Patrick Johnson, Bernth Lindfors, Sandra Richards, Sandra Shannon, and Harvey Young. Their numerous contributions to Black Theatre Studies adorn many of our bookshelves and grace our syllabi. Each of these scholars in turn hailed a host of new voices—marking the rise of successive generations in the field and those are included in a section entitled “Afterviews.” A cluster of articles from Elizabeth Cizmar, Baron Kelly, Khalid Long, and Nathaniel Nesmith offers new insights into histories of Black artists, including Glenda Dickerson, Earle Hyman, Elaine Jackson, Ernie McLintock, Frederick O’Neal. A pair of short essays by Michelle Cowin Gibbs and Eric Glover presents contrasting interpretations of Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes’s The Mule Bone . Two manifesto-style pieces from Omiyemi Green and Lisa Thompson confront assumptions about career trajectories in Black Theatre and the academy, Black Theatre pedagogy, and the particular challenges Black women have faced in the field. Another cluster of essays by Bernth Lindfors, Olga Sanchez Saltveit, and Isaiah Wooden prompts readers to expand their theoretical and methodological lenses, including rethinking familiar documentary sources, boundaries between Black and Latinx theater, and how scholars can mine the archive for previously undiscovered treasures. We close the articles section with a roundtable discussion that reflects on the role of the artist-scholar in the current moment. It looks back on the legacy of earlier artist-scholars, including Errol Hill, and it also asks how contemporary artist-scholars imagine their legacies. We invite readers to envision new possibilities that will not be measured only against what we have now. The issue closes with a special selection of book reviews focusing on new directions in Black Theatre, compiled by JADT Book Review Editor Maya Roth, as well as a list of the Errol Hill Award-winning books and articles over the past twenty-three years. The Errol Hill Award, launched in 1997, recognizes, “outstanding scholarship in African American theater, drama, and/or performance studies, as demonstrated in the form of a published book-length project (monograph or essay collection) or scholarly article” ( astr.org ). We hope that this special issue will prompt debate and will also invite those just beginning their work in Black Theatre into the field. We also hope that it will serve as a useful benchmark for the historical moment in which we find ourselves. References Footnotes About The Author(s) NICOLE HODGES PERSLEY Associate Professor, University of Kansas HEATHER S. NATHANS Professor, Tufts University Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to "Milestones in Black Theatre" Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration. Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Heather S. Nathans 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 Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Heather S. Nathans By Published on May 11, 2021 Download Article as PDF In 1986, during my first year at Dartmouth College, I had the good fortune to take a seminar on Black Theatre with Professor Errol Hill (1921-2003). [1] More than thirty years later I still count myself lucky to have had my introduction to the history of Black Theatre under Errol’s guidance. His rigorous scholarship and penetrating questions helped to set the standards for my own further explorations of Black Theatre History over the coming years, and I still remember our final chat many years later at a 2002 ASTR conference when he was asking me about the progress of my new book on slavery and US theatre. Errol would have been 100 years old this year. A century after his birth, he still stands as one of the giants in the field of Black Theatre scholarship. His landmark History of African American Theatre with Jim Hatch (1929-2020), his work as a playwright, his foundational study, Shakespeare in Sable , his pioneering book, The Jamaican Stage, 1655-1900 , his many edited collections of plays by Black dramatists, as well as his monumental Theatre Collection, now housed at Dartmouth College—all of these contributions have shaped the development of the field in innumerable ways for thousands of scholars and students who never had the chance to meet him. For those who did have the chance to work with him, his mentorship proved equally invaluable—generous and exacting in equal measure. The award that bears his name with the American Society for Theatre Research has recognized more than thirty outstanding works in Black Theatre since its launch in 1997. (The list of those winners is included in the Book Review section of this issue and can also be found on the ASTR website at astr.org.) What I miss most—even thirty-five years after our first encounter in Hanover, NH—is the bellow of laughter that would erupt from this most dignified and handsome of men, transforming him into a joyous figure always ready to welcome new colleagues to the field. I spoke recently with his wife, Grace Hope Hill—his partner in his life, his research, his theatrical productions, and over many years of travel and adventure. I said how much I still missed his laugh. Grace exclaimed, “His laugh was so loud.” She also shared a story of Errol’s early days that links to so many of the themes shared in this issue about the need to support and document Black Theatre. In the 1950s, the University of the West Indies in Jamaica received a 300£ donation from a British bookstore owner (at Foyles Bookshop) and Errol, then serving as a “Drama Tutor” in the program, headed out into communities across Jamaica to develop new works by regional authors. As Grace recalls, “He helped with the writing, directing, and acting… We worked with very limited funds and did everything ourselves. Errol was so passionate that he brought everyone along with him.” That statement sums up Errol’s contribution to Black Theatre Studies so beautifully – for both those who knew him and those who never had the chance to meet him, “He was so passionate that he brought everyone along with him.” Help us celebrate Errol’s legacy in this issue dedicated to Black Theatre. Honor the innumerable artists and scholars who have created and documented the field of Black Theatre for more than two centuries of passionate work and those who are propelling it forward into the future. Ronald N. Sherr, "Errol G. Hill," oil on panel, Dartmouth College References [1] For more on Errol’s extraordinary career, including his time with the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, Yale University, Dartmouth College, as a professional actor and playwright, and as an accomplished scholar, see the link to his papers now housed at Dartmouth College: https://archives-manuscripts.dartmouth.edu/agents/people/1185 . Footnotes About The Author(s) HEATHER S. NATHANS Professor, Tufts University Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to "Milestones in Black Theatre" Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration. Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Lisa B. Thompson 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 Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Lisa B. Thompson By Published on May 11, 2021 Download Article as PDF If I do not bring all of who I am to whatever I do, then I bring nothing of lasting worth, for I have withheld my essence. Audre Lorde , I am Your Sister: Collected Writings Every year I return to August Wilson’s powerful speech, “The Ground on Which I Stand.” On the 25th anniversary of his groundbreaking keynote at the 1996 Theatre Communications Group National Conference, Wilson’s words still resonate. [1] I want to honor this Black theatre milestone because Wilson not only delivers a scathing critique of systemic racism in US theatre, but he also insists that Black culture is a worthy and necessary source of artistic inspiration. Although he criticizes the structural inequalities that Black artists face, Wilson also speaks about his personal journey as a playwright and a Black man. He confesses: . . . it is difficult to disassociate my concerns with theater from the concerns of my life as a black man, and it is difficult to disassociate one part of my life from another. I have strived to live it all seamless . . . art and life together, inseparable and indistinguishable. (494) Wilson’s address motivated me to craft my own manifesto as a Black feminist artist/scholar. I’m celebrating the anniversary of “The Ground on Which I Stand” speech by crafting a manifesto which echoes Wilson’s desire for a seamlessness between being a Black person and a theatre artist. As Black people throughout the African diaspora combat dual catastrophes, a global pandemic and the brutality associated with the “long emancipation,” I feel an even greater sense of urgency. [2] I also feel a sense of urgency to make all of my conflicting identities seamless. I’m proclaiming to all that will listen that I’m not only a Black artist, but I’m also a Black feminist scholar. I’m a playwright and a professor who has choreographed a professional life that includes both the arts and the academy. I’ve learned to dance on the slash between the title artist/scholar. I must dance to remain both creator and critic because I refuse to live a divided life. I will no longer deny any part of my intellectual or creative gifts. I call on all Black artist/scholars to join me and do the same. When I was a little girl, I didn’t dance quite like my friends and family. It seemed to me that they were all illustrious dancers. I recall watching my older brother Robert dance. He was a member of the San Francisco Lockers and I loved watching those Adidas sweat suit-clad dancers move in lock step. They were commanding, rhythmic, defiant, and elegant. My classmates mesmerized me as they performed stunningly choreographed routines at the school talent shows, decked out in matching psychedelic outfits. I never joined in when they perfected their dances on Saturday afternoons in a neighbor’s rumpus room. Don’t feel sorry for me. This is not one of those “I was smart but lacked natural rhythm therefore I was a mocked and ostracized inauthentic Negro” essays. I had plenty of friends and could throw down with the best of them, it was just that I preferred dancing alone. Standing in front of the sofa or the bedroom mirror, I would jam to songs by the Jackson 5, Sly and the Family Stone, Stevie Wonder, Donna Summer, and Prince. I despised group dances, but adored the Soul Train line because it was my stage: I could be the star dancing to my own groove. Dancing alone and in my own way has led me to a life as a Black feminist artist/scholar. I define a Black feminist artist/scholar as one who works simultaneously within the academy, pursuing scholarly research and teaching, while also producing art in the public realm for wide-ranging audiences to enjoy. Black feminist artist/scholars often center the lives and experiences of Black women, girls and femmes in both their scholarly and artistic work. I use dancing as a metaphor because dance emphasizes free but disciplined movement. It requires both posture and poise. Dance allows improvisation and planning, creativity and expression. Dance can be done in a group or solo. Dance provides a way to socialize, to become and stay strong, to communicate, to develop self-esteem, and to increase your flexibility. It’s also a way to curate a sense of embodied listening and speaking. After all, dancing around the question can be more about exploring a puzzle more deeply instead of avoiding it. You need all of those traits to survive as an artist/scholar, especially a Black feminist one. The artist/scholar defies the old adage that “those who do, do, and those that can’t, teach.” Artist/scholars often prove some of the best teachers because they have immersed themselves in two worlds, the Ivory Tower as well as the theatre, or museum, art gallery or concert hall. The artist/scholar has many work spaces: the classroom, the library, the archives, and the lab or studio where we create. Some work in completely different realms so that their artistic and scholarly fields have little or nothing in common, while the scholarship and artistry of other artist/scholars is more aligned. No matter how one’s artistic practice and scholarly interests are related, this duality helps us to become great teachers because we understand the work from two perspectives simultaneously. [3] Black artist/scholars are certainly not a new phenomenon. I stand on the shoulders of those who came before me such as anthropologist, novelist, and playwright, Zora Neale Hurston; sociologist, novelist, literary journal editor, W.E.B. Du Bois; poet and comparative literature scholar Kamau Braithwaite; and choreographer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham. I rely on their examples for reassurance, for inspiration, and for guidance. Those tiny descriptors I shared about their work reveals only a fraction of the ground those giants cleared for us, only a morsel of their contributions to the world of arts and letters. Their pathbreaking interventions created the circumstances that allow many contemporary Black artist/scholars to enjoy the security of tenured positions in the academy–often in highly regarded and abundantly resourced institutions. I lean on the example of these precursors as I choreograph my own dance. Their brave work helps me to theorize about Black culture through my essays and books; their life stories inspire me to continue crafting plays about Black life. I draw on their wisdom to give me the confidence to claim my creativity and knowledge. This manifesto represents an attempt to leave some crumbs behind so that other Black artist/scholars who dance alone, but also in community with others, know that it’s possible to bop down their own creative and intellectual path. Toni Morrison, one of the greatest artist/scholars of all time, and a Cornell-trained literary critic, editor, teacher, and Nobel prize winning writer, explained her work simply: “I know it sounds like a lot. But I really only do one thing. I teach books. I write books. I think about books. It’s one job.” [4] She was also a librettist who even tried her hand at playwriting. Why did she downplay the multiplicity of her gifts and the vast reach of her intellectual and creative labor? I suspect that Morrison felt as I do, it is simply your work . It is how you feel compelled to show up in the world as a creator and thinker. It is your purpose. All of it. So, what does it mean to dance on the slash? It means identifying the spaces where the art and the scholarship meet. The powers that be insist that there is a line between teaching and doing, a line between artistry and scholarship, between creativity and criticism, that is not meant to be crossed. Dancing on the slash acknowledges that the line between being an artist and a scholar is a porous one. In the rare instances when that line is crossed or blurred, it’s certainly not meant to be transgressed by people like me, Black, woman, first generation college graduate, single mother. How does one dare to disregard borders in spaces where you are not supposed to even exist? There is a freedom in challenging the boundaries of disciplines—artistic and academic. To live an undisciplined life is dangerous, but it’s also thrilling in all the ways that make you whole. In her essay “Sista Docta,” African Diaspora studies and performance artist/scholar Omi Osun Joni L. Jones pushes back against the artist/scholar divide by refusing to privilege one over the other. Jones argues that “performance is a form of embodied knowledge and theorizing that challenges the academy’s print bias. While intellectual rigor has long been measured in terms of linguistic acuity and print productivity that reinforces the dominant culture’s deep meanings, performance is suspect because its ephemeral, emotional, and physical nature.” She adds that “Performance. Then, subverts the binary of artist/scholar when performance exists as scholarship.” [5] Jones makes clear that part of the dance includes rejecting hierarchies of knowledge. In the most skilled hands, a piece of work is both art and scholarship. Dancing on the slash means balancing the competing demands of two worlds that refuse to understand each other. Maintaining perfect equilibrium is impossible so there are times when artist/scholars devote more time and energy to one field or calling to the detriment of the other. It also means pushing back against those who insist that you must pick one and abandon the other. One must be careful while creating a life on a slash. The slash can be an aggressive and violent motion. You use it to cut out, diminish, partition, and destroy that which is not worthy, but also that which doesn’t serve the art or the argument. Living as an artist/scholar can be lonely because you must shuttle between two fields and feel that you are not fulfilling obligations to either field or community. As an artist/scholar, you have to accept that’s what it means to dance to the beat of different tunes. For me, it means writing plays, essays, and books all while trying to interest a producer in my latest piece. It means suffering the unspoken questions of college deans, artistic directors, department chairs, press editors, and theater boards. They wonder whether I’m an artist or a scholar? They ask is this play simply an essay placed on stage? Is this essay too theatrical? Dancing on the slash means trying to answer those questions and accepting that you can do too much and never enough at the very same time. This manifesto calls for academic and theatrical institutions to move beyond such simplistic questions and to allow space for all that artist/scholars bring to the table (or stage). How did I arrive on this slash? Like August Wilson, I began as a poet after falling in love with the words of Black Arts Movement poets such as Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, and Nikki Giovanni. When Ntozake Shange burst upon the theatre scene in the 1970s with her critically acclaimed choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow Is Enuf, I discovered how poetry can fill the stage and unveil the concerns and dreams of Black girls and women like a rainbow. I was fortunate to find myself in Shange’s classroom as a senior English major at UCLA. On the first day of class, Shange invited us to do a free write for 20 minutes and that’s when I penned my first monologue. One day, Shange invited a friend to visit our class. He was working on a production of his play in Westwood. The friend was George Wolfe and the play was The Colored Museum . Little did I know that seeing Wolfe’s work after spending a term in Shange’s presence would change the course of my life and chosen artistic genre. Wolfe’s irreverent humor and deep knowledge of Black culture blew my mind. I couldn’t believe that this outrageousness was possible! My turn from poetry to drama was complete. I remain inspired by both Shange and Wolfe’s theatrical love letters to Black people’s beautiful and powerful brokenness. Wilson looked to his mother’s pantry, his beloved Pittsburgh Hill District, Black history, and the slave quarters for inspiration. I turn to my home and working-class community in San Francisco, a rich and fertile place full of art, joy, beauty and books that made me into a Black feminist artist/scholar, a cultural producer and a cultural critic. It’s where I learned about Black culture, Black history, Black life, Black womanhood, and Black love; I learned in the pews of the Third Baptist Church, the oldest Black church in San Francisco where I was baptized in the 1970s, in the barbershop in Lakeview that I visited with my father on Saturday afternoons eavesdropping on tall tales told by men on barber stools, from the books left behind by the Black Panthers who rented an apartment from my grandmother in Oakland, the quick tongued signifying women at the beauty shop my mother took me to on special occasions too important for her kitchen stove press and curl, and the fine afroed boys that played basketball on Saturday afternoons in March Banks Park in Daly City. Although the public schools I attended did not teach much about Black history and culture, I was blessed with young Black women teachers who encouraged a smart creative skinny dark-skinned girl who became a champion of Black culture, Black history, Black life, Black womanhood, and Black love in her work for the stage and in her scholarship, as well as a staunch defender of public education. Suzan-Lori Parks’s evocative essay “The Equation for Black People on Stage” implores Black theatre makers to craft narratives that “show the world and ourselves in our beautiful and powerfully infinite variety.” [6] Those are the kind of stories I try to write, tales that present Black people, particularly the Black middle class and Black elites as neither the talented tenth or the sellouts. Interviewers often ask me who I write for and I want to say for me, all the ME’s I’ve been, I am, and may be—me as a little girl in San Francisco in the 1970s, me as a Black graduate student finding my voice, me as a Black single mother, me summering on Martha’s Vineyard, me facing the deaths of my parents, me facing the deaths of Black people murdered by police, me laughing with my homeboys and homegirls as we discuss romance after forty, me navigating the healthcare industry that renders me invisible, and me retiring someday in France, Costa Rica, or Ghana. I’m addressing the audience and telling the story that matters to me and I’ve never been overly concerned with the expectations or tastes of those who fail to recognize stories about Black people as worthy of a theatrical production on the main stage. I have spent my life entering and conquering unwelcoming institutions in the academy and in the theatre that were not designed for people like me. Most of those spaces will never include the classmates I watched dance as a young girl, but I know they belong in every space I decolonize so I bring Tracy, Rolenzo, Nedra, Baxter, Jane, Teru, Priscilla, Barris, and Tina with me as I try to dance through doors that continue to remain closed to Black, Asian, and Latinx people like them, like me. I’m known to leave the door unlocked so they or their children can slip in behind me and take back the stolen seats. This has not been an easy dance to perform. I’ve faced repeated opposition from staff and administrators as I’ve choreographed a life as both a theatre artist and scholar. Those episodes of discouragement are the very reason I believe this manifesto is essential. I want the academy to understand that for artist/scholars, artistic pursuits are not a magnificent distraction, but a way towards knowledge. Art is a way for Black studies and other scholarly fields to engage in public- facing humanities that invite multiple communities into Black life and culture and into conversation with scholars, artists, policy makers and politicians. It’s important to acknowledge what this dance offers. I imagine that some consider pursuing a life as an artist/scholar as a way to avoid the crushing financial reality of the artist’s existence in the US, especially for those of us who lack family wealth. I’ve joked in interviews that I picked academia because I wanted health insurance and food, but the life of a professor is not a safety net. While I never wanted to be a starving artist, I turned to the academy for another kind of necessary sustenance. I found a life of the mind and arts a rich place to research, teach, and discuss theories, ideas, novels, autobiographies, films, and plays about Black life. It allows artist/scholars to be paid for what we would do anyway—researching about craft, field, major and minor figures, genre and form. Working in the academy also allows us to have a group of brilliant and engaged folks to talk to on a regular basis—colleagues and students. The beneficiaries are not just the artist/scholars but also audiences, fans, and even critics. The academy provides us with a lab to try out work and to build relationships, to invite other artists to the university to showcase their work or collaborate with them. This offers a way to support those who don’t have a tenured job and may be living grant to grant, or artist residency to artist residency, but whose work deserves investment from academic institutions. I’ve hosted both local and nationally renowned artists so that students, faculty, staff and the community are in a room, workshop, lecture hall with folks changing the art world not only in theatre, but in film, television, dance, and more. [7] It’s powerful alchemy. There’s nothing more gratifying than inviting Black artists to the university to develop new work so that students get a kitchen island view of how the gumbo is made. What does it mean to be in the academy–as a Black person, and also to insist on being outside it? What does it mean to be in the academy as a woman, and to foster a life outside it? What does it mean to be a theatre artist as a Black woman, and to craft another professional life outside of it? How does a Black woman carve a life in the arts while also claiming space for herself as a feminist critic? Theorist? Teacher? As one of the few Black women full professors at my university, it can be lonely and frustrating. How does one hold the act of creation and the act of disassembly all at once? After all, to teach and to engage in scholarship, one must break the subject, the object apart. One must dissect and analyze what has been crafted and made (or at least attempted to be made) whole. The intellectual inquiry asks us to disassemble, unhinge, reveal, name, categorize, and make intelligible what the artist has prayed is magic. The scholar must reveal (or at least attempt to) reveal what is behind the curtain, and report back –in an essay, book chapter, or article, the pain, yearning, beauty, ugliness and mistakes that are the creation. [8] As a Black woman the fight to gain and maintain any status in either world is wickedly audacious, but to do so in two different worlds? Madness! But, for me it is also necessary. My art is theatre and performance and my scholarship is in the field of Black cultural studies. As an artist/scholar I’m drawn to exploring a question or idea in two ways: for instance, as a graduate student I examined representations of contemporary black middle class women’s sexuality. My study eventually became my first book, Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class (2009), and a two-woman show, Single Black Female (2012), my first produced and published play. In another instance, I considered the portrayal of Africans in contemporary US theatre, which resulted in the essay, “ ‘A Single Story:’ African Women as Staged in US Theatre,” and my play Dinner , that explores cultural and class tensions within the African Diaspora. I’m writing a book that analyzes ways contemporary playwrights reimagine Black history, while simultaneously completing the last two installments of my Great Migration trilogy that traces African American migrants from the south to California and their reverse migration. These dual examinations, this dancing around questions or problems, allows me to thoroughly explore answers and present my findings for different audiences and through different means. All of my work as a Black feminist theatre artist/scholar is meant to present the complexity and delicious beauty of Black life and culture in hopes that it will help make Black people freer. Why do I remain committed to theatre? I adore theatre for many reasons, but one of them is the ease of entry. You can stand on any street corner and recite your monologues or perform a one-person show for free. That’s theatre. It may not be Broadway, but not every play or musical should be. Most importantly, it is the magic of theatre that keeps me mesmerized! Watching Viola Davis perform a scene with Denzel Washington in the revival of Fences on Broadway gave me chills. At that moment, it’s clear that Wilson has presented the ground on which he stood growing up in the Hill District of Pittsburgh. When there is that kind of magic on stage, you can hear a pin drop. I’m sure you’ve felt it as an audience member because magic is not just on stage but also in the seats. A study at the University College London found that the heartbeats of audiences synchronize while watching live theatre, regardless of whether they know each other. [9] Imagine a theater full of strangers beating with one single heart. As a Black feminist artist/scholar, I’m intrigued by the thought of the hearts of strangers from every walk of life synchronizing during a story that centers the lives and experiences of Black women. No study has determined whether the heartbeats of students synchronize when they read a play together in class, but I do know that I’ve felt that group heartbeat many times during the two decades I’ve spent teaching in college classrooms. The magic is real. Lorraine Hansberry’s informal autobiography To Be Young, Gifted and Black continues to inspire me. While I am no longer young, I find Hansberry’s address to young artists poignant. She implores them to “write if you will; but write about the world as it is and as you think it ought to be and must be—if there is to be a world . . . Write about our people: tell their story. You have something glorious to draw on begging for attention. Don’t pass it up. Use it. . . The Nation needs your gifts.” [10] I urge Black artists of any age who also consider themselves scholars to avoid the debate that burdened my younger years. I say choose you; be an artist/scholar because you are both. In this challenging moment, our people need all of your gifts. So on the ground on which you stand, go ahead and dance. References [1] August Wilson delivered his remarks on June 26, 1996, at the Theatre Communications Group (TCG) National Conference at Princeton University. It was first published in American Theatre (September 1996) and reprinted in Callaloo , Volume 20, Number 3, Summer 1997, 493-503. [2] See Ira Berlin’s The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States (2015), and Rinaldo Walcott’s Long Emancipation: Moving Toward Black Freedom (2021) in which both scholars articulate the condition of unfreedom and the slow movement towards full citizenship and rights for Black people globally. [3] Other contemporary Black artist/scholars dancing on their own slash include Elizabeth Alexander, poet, literature professor and President of the Mellon Foundation; Harry J. Elam, Jr., director, theatre scholar, and President of Occidental College; Monica White Ndounou, director, theatre scholar, Executive Director of the CRAFT Institute, and Associate Professor of Theater at Dartmouth; Guthrie Ramsey, composer, musician and University of Pennsylvania musicologist; and Deborah Willis, photographer, curator, photography historian, university professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at New York University. [4] Hilton Als, “Toni Morrison and The Ghosts in the House.” The New Yorker . October 20, 2003. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/10/27/ghosts-in-the-house (accessed November 1, 2020). [5] Joni L. Jones, “Sista Docta: Performance as Critique in the Academy.” TDR (Summer 1997) 53-54. [6] Suzan-Lori Parks, “An Equation for Black People Onstage.” The America Play and Other Works, (1995) 22. [7] The arts are an integral component of Black Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. The Art Galleries at Black Studies (AGBS) is comprised of the Christian-Green Gallery and the Idea Lab. Under the direction of Executive Director Cherise Smith, AGBS has had exhibits featuring the work of Dawoud Bey, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Michael Ray Charles, Genevieve Gaignard, Jacob Lawrence, Deborah Roberts, and Charles White among others. The African and African Diaspora Studies department, the John L. Warfield Center’s Performing Blackness Series, as well as the recently re-named Omi Osun Joni L. Jones Performing Artist Residency has hosted artists such as Charles O. Anderson, Pierre Bennu, Radha Blank, Sanford Biggers, Sharon Bridgforth, Laurie Carlos, Florinda Bryant, Eisa Davis, Colman Domingo, Shirley Jo Finney, E. Patrick Johnson, Krudas Cubensi, Daniel Alexander Jones, Lorraine O’Grady, Rhonda Ross, and Stew. [8] I’ve been cautioned against focusing too much critical attention on other playwrights who are more lauded than I, but I’ve rejected that advice. To ignore their work is to betray my responsibility as a scholar which is to analyze the innovative work of Black artists. More importantly, it dishonors my deep love for Black art and Black culture. [9] “Audience Members’ Hearts Beat Together at the Theatre.” University College London Psychology and Language Sciences . 17 November 2017 https:// www.ucl.ac.uk/pals/news/2017/nov/audience-members-hearts-beat-together-theatre (accessed on Oct 28, 2020 [10] Lorraine Hansberry, To Be Young, Gifted and Black (1969) Footnotes About The Author(s) LISA B. THOMPSON UT Austin Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf ISNN 2376-4236 Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to "Milestones in Black Theatre" Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration. Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Olga Sanchez Saltveit 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 Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation Olga Sanchez Saltveit By Published on April 29, 2021 Download Article as PDF The Black Latinx community represents a significant portion of the Latinx [1] population, particularly in regions of the US where many Latinx reside. In New York, 23%, in California, 15%, and in Florida, 12% of the Latinx community identify as “Afro-Latinx.” [2] These regions also encompass the most established centers of Latinx theatre making in the country, so it is surprising that Afro-descendant Latinx experiences have not been well represented in Latinx dramaturgy except in the appreciative nods toward AfroLatinx cultural heritage found in music, dance, and spirituality. The legacy of hierarchical colonial racism which infiltrates and informs Latinx anti-Blackness has also been omitted from dramatic discourse. “Racial discrimination is a skeleton in the closet of the Latin@ community,” [3] writes Carlos Flores. The absence of the Black Latinx experience in Latinx dramaturgy is simultaneously an act of anti-Blackness and a denial that anti-Blackness in Latinidad exists. However, as Daphnie Sicre [4] notes, the early twenty-first century has ushered in an era in which “Afro-Latinx are no longer non-existent or invisible in theatre,” and the rise of work authored by AfroLatinx on numerous themes calls for “a reconfiguration of the canon: Afro-Latinx theatre is crucial for the survival of Black theatre and its intersectionalities between Latinx and African Americans.” [5] Here, I focus on the work of playwright Guadalís Del Carmen who shines a light on the anti-Blackness found within the Latinx community of the US and Latin America, that is, anti-Blackness targeted toward people who might also identify as Latinx, or, AfroLatinx. UnidosUS defines an “Afro-Latino” as “an individual of African descent from Latin America or an individual who has one parent of African descent and another of Latino descent.” According to Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores, “the term Afro-Latin@ has surfaced a way to signal racial, cultural, and socioeconomic contradictions within the overly vague idea of ‘ Latin@. ’ In addition to reinforcing those ever-active transnational ties, the Afro-Latin@ concept calls attention to the anti-Black racism within the Latin@ communities themselves.” [6] The ideology of mestizaje attempted to homogenize the Latinx identity as one of racial mixture that blended myriad cultures and backgrounds, formed by syncretism, juxtaposition, fusion, and resistance. However, many racial and phenotypical identities exist within Latinidad that continue to be subjected to the legacy of European, primarily Spanish, colonization strategies including the formation of racialized hierarchies. Colorism and phenotypical discrimination pervade Latinx culture to this day, evident in the overwhelming presence of lighter-skinned Latinx in positions of power and influence, including popular media. “It is rare to see Latin@s of African descent on Spanish-speaking television or in movies. It is equally rare to see them advertising products in national Latin@ magazines.” [7][8] This privilege surfaces in the private sphere as well, within families and among friends, where one might hope for respite from racism. Thus, the term AfroLatinx, a non-binary update, intentionally complicates Latinx identity to embrace and celebrate African descent and illuminate the racism that persists in public and private. Latinx theatre since the mid-twentieth century has dedicated itself to challenging misrepresentations and harmful stereotypes of the mainstream by creating dramas that humanize Latinx and Latin Americans in the gaze of the mainstream White Unitedstatesian audience and the “American” theatre. In myriad plays revolving around issues of social justice, the marginalized Latinx can be seen struggling against the dominant White culture. [9] In the latter quarter of the twentieth century, Latinx feminist and queer voices disrupted this dynamic, arguing that their discrimination within the Latinx community also needed to be addressed on stage. [10] In the ‘90s and early aughts, the Latinx experience of anti-Black racism from the larger White mainstream was powerfully documented by Latinx playwrights such as Josefina Baéz, Carmen Rivera, and Candido Tirado. However, the experiences of discrimination faced by Black Latinx from within the Latinx community remains less visible on Latinx stages. I have previously argued that Black Latinx are more likely to be seen on stage in Latinx roles than to be written about in Latinx plays. [11] Yet that argument is complicated by the reality that Black Latinx actors such as Del Carmen and Crystal Román, who is also cited in the article, are too often overlooked for casting in projects that should include them. Latinx anti-Blackness is so embedded in the culture and so often inflicted presumably without intended malice (as for example, in families that encourage their children not to stay out in the sun too long so as not to darken their skin tone further) that injustice and harm appear to be accepted as inevitable interpersonal insensitivity, not worth public scrutiny. That invisibility is assuredly changing, as Sicre details in her 2018 chapter on “Afro-Latinx Themes in Theatre Today.” As Sicre notes, playwright Guadalís Del Carmen was highlighted in the 2018 Latinx Theatre Commons Carnaval of New Latinx Work, held at DePaul University in Chicago. She also performed in the 2015 Latina/o Theatre Commons Carnaval as an actor. However, as a Black Latina she more often found herself in the frustrating situation, too often echoed by others, of being “too Black to be cast as a Latina, and too Latina to be cast as Black.” A journalist by training, Del Carmen turned to playwriting to create roles for herself in the Chicago area where she grew up. Soon, she began writing roles for other Latinx actors who, like her, did not see themselves represented within Latinx theatre. Del Carmen’s work could not be more timely. In 2020, with the increased activism in support of #BlackLivesMatter , and the calling out/calling in from #WeSeeYouWAT , Latinx around the nation, including those of us in theatre, have been forced to acknowledge and address our community’s implicit anti-Blackness and how it shows up on our stages. Latinx theatre making has been so focused on Latinx oppression, that it has seemingly ignored its toxicity toward AfroLatinx. Del Carmen’s transformative works spotlight AfroLatinx experiences of Latinx racism, in ways that reflect its widespread and corrosive presence within the microcosm of family dynamics as well as in the larger political sphere. Below I focus briefly on two of her plays, My Father’s Keeper and Daughters of the Rebellion, and the strategies she employs to presence Blackness and anti-Blackness in Latinx storytelling. My Father’s Keeper centers on a Dominican immigrant family living in Chicago. Del Carmen employs a telling strategy even before the play begins, making it clear through the descriptions of the dramatis personae that most of the characters are Black. The presence of an intentionally identified AfroLatinx family as the focal point of a Latinx drama was unique in 2013, when the play was first written, and remains rare. Many plays that could have been cast with Black Latinx actors, particularly those that centered on people who hail from regions with significant Afrodescendant populations such as Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Colombia, and Peru, are by default of anti-Blackness cast with mestizo or White Latinx. As Luckett and Shaffer note, “White supremacy often controls and dictates what representations are allowed visibility, and because of this phenomenon ‘Black’ actors are often pigeon-holed within a limited barometer of what is perceived to be Blackness.” [12] Del Carmen corrects this error by stipulating the casting of Black actors, demanding the visibility of the Black who is also Latinx and the Latinx who is also Black. It is an Anzaldúan move [13] that dissolves powerful yet fictional borders between identities that in reality overlap. Next, Del Carmen addresses Latinx colorism by calling for actors of different skin tones in specific roles. The titular father, Tirsio Gonzalez and son, Armando are both identified as “Dominican” and “Black Latino.” Juana Gonzalez, Tirsio’s wife and Mondo’s mother, is also identified as Dominican, and “Lighter in complexion than the rest of the family,” which would include Sofia, Mondo’s sister who is described as Dominican. From the outset, these character descriptions alone make it clear that skin tones are important details that will influence not only casting but potentially engage the embodied experience of the actor and influence audiences’ reception. Later on, Tirsio confirms this when he shares that in his home country, “if you don’t have rich name, or have the light skin, or a friend in the right place, you not go far in your career.” [14] Colorism is of course a familiar dynamic in US African American history, provoked by nineteenth century white supremacy, according to bell hooks who recounts that “racist white folks often treated lighter-skinned black folks better than their darker counterparts, and … this pattern was mirrored in black social relations.” [15] Del Carmen demonstrates the shared hierarchy at work in Latinx and Latin American culture. Mondo has married Anne, a White woman, and they have a son. Juana praises her young grandson, saying “Mi chichí will be a great man. Con those eyelaches, and his bello curly rubio head. Se parece a un angel.” [16] To which her daughter Sofía replies, “A blond baby… just what you always wanted.” [17] Del Carmen then investigates some of the shared and different experiences of anti-Black racism in the US by introducing the character of Daniel, who is identified as “African American” and who self-identifies in the script as Black. Daniel is Tirsio’s lover and confidante, and in their clandestine meetings they share their experiences as gay men who grew up in violently homophobic homes. Tirsio will never come out to his family as his experiences in the Dominican Republic have taught him that there is no place in his culture for homosexuality. Despite this, Tirsio and Daniel have a decades-long love affair. While Daniel seeks to align with Tirsio racially as well as sexually, Tirsio distances himself on the technicality that because he is Dominican, he is not Black. “The obviously Black baseball star of the Chicago Cubs, Sammy Sosa, for instance, becomes an indio (Indian) rather than a Black, since according to this national myth and tradition Dominicans ‘cannot be Black.’” [18] Haitians, argues Tirsio, are Black, while he and his son are, like Sosa, Indios. Tirsio’s internalized anti-Blackness is self-justified under the guise of nationalism. Del Carmen identifies this as a Latin American strategy. “In Latin America, nationalism takes over race. Because anti-miscegenation was not a part of Latin America, racism is seen as a US thing. I’m not Black. I’m not White. I’m Cuban, I’m Colombian, I’m Dominican.” [19] However, Daniel is not convinced, “The only difference between me, you and any Haitian,” he says, “is the boat stops of our ancestors.” [20] Del Carmen is also of Dominican heritage, born and raised in Chicago where she met few Dominicans besides her large family. “When I stepped out of my house to go to school, to go to work, there really wasn’t a lot of people around me that looked like me or sounded like me. I did grow up around a lot of macro-aggression. I’ve actually gotten into the habit of no longer saying micro because the micro affects us on a macro level.” [21] Yet, Del Carmen’s work is inspired not just by her own personal experiences but by what she sees happening globally. “One of the things I wanted to do was drop the pen on anti-Blackness in Latin America.” [22] For Del Carmen, Latinx plays about Latin American revolutions omitted important conversations about the ways in which anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, and capitalism were integral parts of their dynamics. This awareness fueled her next play, Daughters of the Rebellion (previously titled, Tolstoy’s Daughters ), which is set in an “unspecified Latin American country.” With this gesture, Del Carmen expands her statement on anti-Blackness in the Latinx community beyond the horizon of the US to include Latin America and to implicate the globe. This is an intentionally political act that illuminates the historic legacy of racialized and gendered hierarchies in Latin America which has yielded pervasive inequity. “Afro-Latinos comprise some 150 million of [Latin America]’s 540 million total population, and, along with women and indigenous populations, are among the poorest, most marginalized groups in the region.” [23] Del Carmen indicts Eurocentric White male supremacist ideology for the continued marginalization of those who are not White males. The titular “daughters” are half-sisters Katya Libertad Córdova (Bates) and Fanya María Córdova, both in their early 20s, raised in the same rich and aristocratic home. However, Katya and Fanya’s experiences are worlds apart, and Del Carmen makes it clear that this is due to their appearance. As with My Father’s Keeper , Del Carmen describes the characters’ physical attributes in the Cast of Characters. Katya, the daughter of a revolutionary, is described as having “strong, dark features, Afro-Latina.” Her mother, Ester, her sister Fanya and her stepfather Daniel all have “light features,” as do Presidente Burgos and his son Ramón. Franco Montés is a revolutionary who “can be indigenous or black” and Angela, Franco’s accomplice, is “Afro-Latina.” [24] When the play begins, Fanya’s father, Katya’s stepfather, Daniel is a recently elected senator who becomes fast friends with the new President of the country. However, the President has initiated policies that are highly detrimental to the Black and Indigenous people of the country. His White supremacy becomes evident in his encounters with the Córdovas, when he makes it clear he neither trusts not expects much from Katya. In a telling early scene in which the newly elected President visits their home, he alludes to the girl, then nine years old, as a “mistake” and later, years into his Presidency, one “not to be trusted” among “Those people [who] can never be trusted.” [25] As with My Father’s Keeper, in which racism intersected homophobia, Del Carmen complicates the oppressions experienced in Daughters of the Rebellion. In addition to overt anti-Blackness, the Indigenous people of this fictional nation are also under attack, forbidden to wear their traditional clothing in the capital (a negation of their public cultural identity), and are being removed from their land and executed. The play is further intersected with feminist concerns as Katya and Fanya realize that as women living in a blatantly patriarchal society, they will never be taken seriously. Even from her privileged position Fanya knows that “People still don’t believe a woman is capable of anything more than having babies.” [26] This coalitional alliance among Afrodescendants, the Indigenous, and women points to Del Carmen’s shared critique of male-dominated White supremacist ideology. In response, Del Carmen’s fictional nation is in the midst of revolution, as Blacks, Indigenous, and feminists create underground movements and divergent plans which echo the strategies of civil rights movements of the twentieth century. The two half-sisters align themselves with different approaches. Fanya is working with the President’s son to bring charges against the President and his administration in an International Court. Katya’s approach is more militant, destroying government and financial buildings. Eventually Katya and Fanya’s two paths to liberation cross and contradict each other with fatal results. The play is violent, but certainly no more than real life. The true revolution in Daughters of Rebellion as in My Father’s Keeper is the de-centering of Latinx oppression in Del Carmen’s dramaturgy. Unlike much of Latinx theatre, in neither play are the characters’ Latinx or Latin American identities the basis of their experiences of oppression. The Gonzalez family is Dominican and living in the US but the issues at the heart of My Father’s Keeper are Tirsio’s hidden sexual orientation and the self-denial of his Blackness. In Daughters of the Rebellion, Del Carmen removes the potential for anti-Latinx discrimination by situating the play within a Latin American country. If everyone is Latin American, then there is no discrimination on that basis. Del Carmen ironically twists the strategy employed by mestizaje ideology which falsely neutralized race into one raza cósmica and negated the existence of diverse racialized experiences. In Del Carmen’s works, Latinidad is neutralized. Further, the absence of distinct identification implies that this could be any Latin American country where Whiteness rules. It could also be the US. Indeed, Daughters of the Rebellion emerged from a powerfully angry moment for Del Carmen as she witnessed yet more instances of anti-Black violence in the US. I was pissed when I wrote this play. I watched a video of a neighbor taking footage of Michael Brown being killed, and that same day on C-span, I watched a documentary where Shola Lynch, a documentarian, was talking about her film, Free Angela Davis and all Political Prisoners . Fanya’s name was actually inspired by it; Angela Davis’ sister’s name is Fanya. I was watching this documentary and I literally sat there thinking to myself, ‘so nothing has changed.’ The first scene that I wrote was where Katya is about to be electrocuted, and the rest came from there… It was a response to the feeling, so Black people are not wanted anywhere , and the reality of being a Black person who’s a child of immigrants, and the realization that this is global, Black people are not wanted anywhere.[27] Del Carmen was motivated by her identification with Black people, and then recognized the same struggles existed for her as a person of Latin American heritage. In the face of anti-Blackness, nationalism would not protect her, as it does not protect Tirsio nor Katya. Del Carmen writes to create change. She writes for a broad audience with “the hope that something resonates with them and the conversation can happen.” [28] And when her voice as a playwright was silenced by the theatre closures of spring 2020, she turned to more direct action. Del Carmen’s 2020 off-Broadway debut was delayed by the COVID outbreak, so she joined the activism for Black liberation as an advocate for transformation in the field of Latinx theatre-making. Working with the Latinx Playwrights Circle (a project she co-founded) and The Sol Project (the producers of her COVID-interrupted show, Bees and Honey), Del Carmen invited fifty influential Latinx theatre makers around the country to a workshop on “Anti-Blackness in the Latinx Community” led by Radio Caña Negra. Facilitators Dash Harris Machado, Evelyn Alvarez, and Janvieve Williams Comrie provided rich content that delved into the history of Africans and Afrodescendants in Latin America, the continued racism there, and the ways in which contemporary Latinx cultures in the US have inherited and reinforced this legacy of anti-Blackness, even while simultaneously articulating a marginalized position. Latinx have certainly been subjected to injustices, including misrepresentation and harmful stereotypes. But in the US as in Latin America, despite the presence of accomplished AfroLatinx in all areas of the arts and other fields, White supremacy has helped generate an image of Latinx identity that excludes Blackness. As Del Carmen says, “I experienced a lot of anti-Blackness from what’s supposed to be my community, really feeling like I never was a full part of the Latinx community because I didn’t look like what a Latina is supposed to look like. I don’t look Italian. That’s what Latinos are supposed to look like.” [29] Recalling the feeling of unwantedness that angered her to write, she notes how it has helped her to home in on “How I use my art as a form of resistance to that feeling and what I pour back into the world which is a love of Black people and a love of being Black.” [30] Del Carmen creates works that challenge the Latinx community to confront its anti-Blackness. In addition to writing dialogue that pulls no punches, her strategies include intentionally identifying her characters as Black, complicating casting by including skin tones in the descriptions, intersecting anti-Blackness with other forms of oppression including anti-indigeneity, homophobia, and sexism, and de-centering or removing Latinx oppression from the power dynamics in her settings. Del Carmen writes for AfroLatinx liberation, knowing this focus supports a larger cause: global Black liberation. Through dramaturgy and embodiment, Del Carmen roots out and reveals the racism embedded in Latinx culture and places it center stage so that it may be destroyed. References [1] “Latinx” is an inclusive, non-gender binary term that began to replace the earlier, more familiar term, “Latina/o” and its variations which privilege binary gender identification. Because the term Latinx came into use more recently, the terms Latina, Latino, Latina/o, Latin@, and their plurals, are used in this article when they are appropriate to their era and authorship. [2] UnidosUSblog, “Afro Latinos Archives,” UnidosUS Blog, 26 February 2019, https://blog.unidosus.org/tag/afro-latinos/ (accessed 27 April 2021). [3] Carlos Flores, “Desde El Mero Medio: Race Discrimination within the Latin@ Community,” in The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States , edited by Juan Flores and Miriam Jimenez Román (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 323. [4] See “Afro-Latinx themes in Theatre Today” by Daphnie Sicre, for an extensive survey of theatre by AfroLatinx playwrights and performers since 1999. [5] Daphnie Sicre, “Afro-Latinx Themes in Theatre Today,” The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance, edited by Kathy A. Perkins, Sandra L. Richards, Alexander Renee Craft, and Thomas DeFrantz (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), 272-277. [6] Juan Flores and Miriam Jimenez Román, “Introduction,” The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States , edited by Juan Flores and Miriam Jimenez Román (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 2. [7] See The Afro-Latino Reader: History and Culture in the United States , a brilliant anthology edited by Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores, for a vastly more profound discussion of the diversity of Afro-Latino history through scholarly essays as well as poetry, drama, and testimonio. [8] Carlos Flores, 323. [9] A few examples of this dramaturgical dynamic include Zoot Suit (1979) by Luis Valdez, Real Women Have Curves (1990) by Josefina Lopez, and Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints (1992). [10] Examples include Blade to the Heat (1994) by Oliver Mayer, Clean (1995) by Edwin Sanchez, and Cherríe Moraga’s The Hungry Woman: Mexican Medea (1997) . [11] Olga Sanchez Saltveit, “(Afro)Latinx Theatre: Embodiment and Articulation,” Label Me Latina/o , special issue: Afro-Latina/o Literature and Performance (2017): 1–20. [12] Sharrell D. Luckett and Tia M. Shaffer, “Introduction: The Affirmation,” Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 5. [13] “Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy” (Anzaldúa 20). “A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary” (Anzaldúa 25). For Gloria Anzaldúa, political boundaries such as the one between the US and Mexico were artificial and inadequate, failing to capture the complexity of the inhabitants who reside in adjacent lands. One was not simply on one side or the other but in a place that included both. [14] Guadalís Del Carmen, My Father’s Keeper (2018), 18. [15] bell hooks, “Back to Black: Ending Internalized Racism,” Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representation (London: Routledge, 2015), 174. [16] His beautiful curly blond head. He looks like an angel. [17] Del Carmen, My Father’s Keeper, 13. [18] Mark Sawyer, “Racial Politics in Multiethnic America: Black and Latin@ Identities and Coalitions,” The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States , edited by Juan Flores and Miriam Jimenez Román (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 532. [19] Olga Sanchez Saltveit and THEA 0220 “Contemporary Latinx Playwrights” Middlebury College, personal conversation with Playwright Guadalís Del Carmen, 9 November 2020. [20] Del Carmen, My Father’s Keeper, 46. [21] Olga Sanchez Saltveit and THEA 0220 “Contemporary Latinx Playwrights” Middlebury College, personal conversation with Playwright Guadalís Del Carmen, 9 November 2020. [22] Sanchez Saltveit and THEA 0220, personal conversation with Guadalís Del Carmen, 9 November 2020. [23] “Afro-Latinos in Latin America and Considerations for U.S. Policy,” EveryCRSReport.com , Congressional Research Service, 22 January 2009. http://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/RL32713.html (accessed on 27 April 2021). [24] Guadalís Del Carmen, Daughters of the Rebellion (2019). [25] Del Carmen, Daughters of the Rebellion , 30. [26] Del Carmen, Daughters of the Rebellion , 74. [27] Olga Sanchez Saltveit and THEA 0220 “Contemporary Latinx Playwrights” Middlebury College, personal conversation with Playwright Guadalís Del Carmen, 9 November 2020. [28] Sanchez Saltveit and THEA 0220, personal conversation with Guadalís Del Carmen, 9 November 2020. [29] Sanchez Saltveit and THEA 0220, personal conversation with Guadalís Del Carmen, 9 November 2020. [30] Sanchez Saltveit and THEA 0220, personal conversation with Guadalís Del Carmen, 9 November 2020. Footnotes About The Author(s) OLGA SANCHEZ SALTVEIT Assistant Professor of Theatre at Middlebury College, is Artistic Director Emerita of Milagro, the Pacific NW’s premier Latina/o/x arts & culture organization. A director/devisor, scholar, and arts activist, her directorial work has been seen in Portland, Seattle, NYC, DC, Martha’s Vineyard, Peru, Venezuela, and Honduras. Olga served as co-artistic director of the People’s Playhouse in New York City and co-founding artistic director of Seattle Teatro Latino. She is a founding member of the Portland-based Latinx writers’ group Los Porteños; served on the Executive Committee and the Diversity Task Force of TCG’s board of directors, and currently serves on the Advisory Committee of the Latinx Theatre Commons. She is a contributing scholar to the anthology of Latinx plays, Encuentro: Latinx Performance for the New American Theatre, published by Northwestern University Press 2019. 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 BernerCo-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.

Eric M. Glover Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 2 Visit Journal Homepage 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented Eric M. Glover By Published on April 29, 2021 Download Article as PDF The 1991 Lincoln Center Theater (LCT) production of Langston Hughes (1902-67) and Zora Neale Hurston’s (1891-60) 1931 antimusical The Mule Bone represents a milestone in Black theater history. The 1991 production resurrected a historical collaboration between two major Black artists and it used their work to offer a pointed critique of the 1990s New Jim Crow and US carceral system. In The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity , Raymond Knapp argues that in an antimusical, Black performers direct and turn the form back on itself by ironically reflecting the conventions of the genre. [1] The Black performer in an antimusical simultaneously deals critically with the form as a system of white supremacy while engaging in song and dance. In the brief exploration below, I focus on two episodes in The Mule Bone —the first, a trial set in a Black church, and the second, a song that depicts Black stowaways on train cars. Each suggests how the original 1931 work and its 1991 adaptation make milestone interventions in performing the policing of Black bodies in the Jim Crow and New Jim Crow eras respectively. Hughes and Hurston, like activist Michelle Alexander, had new ways to address problems, such as violence against and surveillance of black bodies, if only readers had paid close attention to their alternatives to practices that would produce the profit-driven prison industrial complex. Animated by a staged reading held in 1989 at the Rites and Reason Theatre (RRT), [2] Providence, where playwright and director George Houston Bass [3] laid the groundwork for reimagining the The Mule Bone, Lincoln Center picked up where Rites and Reason left off. Lincoln Center gave the antimusical the presentation that had eluded its authors back in the 1930s in part because of The Theatre Guild’s Theresa Helburn’s conceptual bias against it and in part because of the falling out between Hughes and Hurston during their collaboration on the work. Thus the 1991 production of The Mule Bone becomes significant for premiering a book and a score written, directed, choreographed, and designed largely by a Black creative team. Bass wrote a prologue and an epilogue introducing Hurston as a character, composer Taj Mahal set five of Hughes’s previously published poems to music, director Michael Schultz and choreographer Dianne McIntyre helped performers give characters body and voice, and scenic designer Edward Burbridge and lighting designer Allen Lee Hughes transformed the physical setting of Broadway’s Ethel Barrymore Theater into Jim Crow-era Eatonville. [4] Building on the early Black musicals of Eubie Blake, Will Marion Cook, and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Hughes and Hurston levy a critique of Jim Crow in everyday life—a critique thrown into bold relief against what Michelle Alexander calls “the New Jim Crow,” the mass incarceration that builds on the legacy of Jim Crow using custom and law to secure a disproportionate amount of Black people incarcerated through the three-strikes rule for violent-felony convictions and the War on Drugs. [5] Thus, the Lincoln Center production marks a milestone in Black theater because Schultz and McIntyre’s interpretation helped to reclaim Hughes and Hurston’s places as radical political philosophers. Hughes and Hurston’s The Mule Bone , based on Hurston’s short story, “The Bone of Contention” (1929), about a political and religious fight between Baptists and Methodists, tells the story of a bromance between two figures in 1924 in Hurston’s hometown, Eatonville, in Orange County, Florida. In the short story, Dave, an angler, a Baptist, a hunter, and a local Nimrod, and Jim, a hen thief and a Methodist, do not have a bromance. In the musical Dave and Jim are transformed into a Baptist and a cakewalker and a guitarist and a Methodist, respectively. The events of The Mule Bone unfold around Dave and Jim’s characters. “Ain’t they playin’ somewhere for de white folks?” Daisy Taylor, the object of both Dave and Jim’s affections, asks. [6] Dave and Jim arrive from a performance engagement in a nearby all-white town and they treat the citizens of Eatonville to song and dance. They perform their song, “But I Rode Some,” with Dave dancing the cakewalk and Jim playing the guitar. Their desire to win Daisy drives the action forward but Dave stands in the way of Jim’s desire. Daisy chooses Dave but Jim lams him over the head with a mule bone in anger. Jim must stand trial before a judge and jury of his peers. “Now, who’s gonna take me home?” Daisy asks. [7] Act 2 takes place in the Macedonia Baptist Church which also serves as the courtroom. As James R. Grossman notes, “African-Americans in general looked to the church as an institution independent of white domination,” [8] suggesting that in this instance the church may have offered a site to administer Black rather than white justice. Joe Clarke, mayor of Eatonville, presides at the bench and other citizens serve in the capacities of defense counsel (Reverend Simms), prosecution (Elder Long), and town marshal (Lum Boger). The church gallery is full of Dave and Jim’s supporters, the division between Baptists and Methodists becoming more and more pronounced. Joe finds Jim guilty of assault against Dave and makes Jim leave town, rehabilitate himself, repent for his sins, and return in no less than two years. “We colored folks don’t need no jail,” Lounger, a citizen of Eatonville, declares. [9] However, Dave and Jim repair their relationship and run away together. The Mule Bone illuminates how theater invited Dave and Jim, the characters in the antimusical, to survive and thrive under Jim Crow. Dave and Jim earn their living by performing for white audiences. [10] Dave and Jim’s songs, framed as diegetic performances, clue the audience in to the fact that they are in control of who they are and what they want: “Dem foots done put plenty bread in our moufs,” Jim says of Dave’s dancing. Dave replies, “Wid de help of dat box, Jim,” referring to Jim’s guitar playing. [11] Given that they have to contend with “two competing forces: the demands to conform to white notions of black inferiority and the desire to resist these demands by undermining and destabilizing entrenched stereotypes of blacks onstage [sic],” the audience sees “Dave” and “Jim” in the imaginations of white audiences juxtaposed against the “real” Dave and Jim. [12] Dave and Jim’s proxies, Hughes and Hurston, transform the minstrel stereotype that Dave and Jim perform to undertake social justice. Through their songs and dances, Dave and Jim imagine alternative worlds for themselves. For example, they re-create their subjugation by white audiences in “But I Rode Some” but they also ironically find their antidote to the internalization of white supremacy. Dave and Jim’s “But I Rode Some” tells the story of a stowaway on a train captured and beaten by a white conductor, before being thrown in jail and shoved onto a chain gang: First thing I saw in jail Was a pot of peas. But I rode some, But I rode some. First thing I saw in jail Was a pot of peas. But I rode some, But I rode some. The peas was good, The meat was fat, Fell in love with the chain gang jus’ for that, But I rode some. (90) Hughes and Hurston reflect on the fact that Black people in the 1920s-30s often experienced denial of a sense of place and displacement by taking up themes of escape and resistance in the musical number. Even in the face of violence, Dave and Jim resist: “Grabbed me by the neck, /And led me to the door, /Rapped me cross the head with a Forty-Four, / But I rode some!” [13] The song structure itself has roots and routes both in the era of slavery and freedom and influenced other genres of popular music around the world. [14] Illicit travel by passenger train, often called “riding the blinds,” offered a dangerous way for Black passengers to experience a thrill of autonomy. They parked their bodies between the locomotive tender (coal car) and the “blind” end of a baggage car to hitch rides from the South to the North and everywhere in between. If conductors caught a Black person riding the blinds, conductors would (literally) throw the passenger from the train. [15] Through its strategic use of irony and subversion, the antimusical The Mule Bone is as much about the affective and cognitive powers of representational visibility as it is about Black people’s resilience. It was important to Hughes and Hurston that their Black audience saw a community of Black characters enjoying and loving life–Jim Crow be damned–self-governing their city and supporting its citizens. Looking at its 1931 and 1991 histories alongside each other invites scholars of Black theater to imagine how artists working more than half a century apart have deployed their creative powers to combat patterns of systemic racism that echo across the decades. References [1] Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity (Princeton UP, 2006), 91. [2] Rites and Reason Theatre, based in the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University, is dedicated to producing continental African and diasporic stage works. [3] Bass, in his capacity as Langston Hughes’s estate’s executor, wrote two scenes for the production and he edited a critical edition of the script. [4] As directed by Schultz and choreographed by McIntyre, the opening night cast of the original Broadway production assembled the floor and the walls of a general store which also served as a jook joint with barrels and crates. A train track, beginning off stage left in the fly loft, formed a semicircle around the general store. The opening night cast also assembled the Macedonia Baptist Church which also served as the courtroom, including multiple rows of pews that faced downstage center, a stained-glass window upstage center, and the bench located downstage right. A community of Black people developed through song and dance in some of the most arresting musical numbers in the video of The Mule Bone that is on file at the Theater on Film and Tape Archive at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, New York. [5] Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010), 55-56. [6] George Houston Bass and Jr. Henry Louis Gates, Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life (Harper Perennial, 1991), 58. [7] Bass and Gates, 99. [8] Robin D. G. Kelley and Earl Lewis, To Make Our World Anew: A History of African-Americans since 1880 (Oxford UP, 2005), 90. [9] Bass and Gates, 78. [10] Musician Kenny Neal, a 1991 Theater World Award winner for acting, played the role of Jim and Eric Ware played the role of Dave. [11] Bass and Gates, 125. [12] David Krasner, Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African-American Theater, 1895-1910 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 1. [13] Bass and Gates, 89-90. [14] It follows what blues musicians refer to as the A-A-B pattern where the first, second, fourth, and fifth lines repeat and the remaining respond. [15] Kusmer, 144. Footnotes About The Author(s) ERIC M. GLOVER Swarthmore College Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to "Milestones in Black Theatre" Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration. Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Jasmeene Francois 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 The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Jasmeene Francois By Published on April 8, 2021 Download Article as PDF The Theatre of August Wilson . Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224 . In The Theatre of August Wilson , Alan Nadel critically analyzes the dramatic texts of August Wilson’s cycle of ten plays about African American life in the 20th century in relation to the concept of property rights and the law. In this first comprehensive companion to Wilson’s full cycle, Nadel continues his sustained scholarship and editorial contributions demonstrated in May All Your Fences Have Gates: Essays on the Drama of August Wilson (1994) and August Wilson: Completing the Twentieth Century Cycle (2010). The chapters in his latest study ground Nadel’s argument that “America has always suffered from a profound confusion of human rights and property rights” (2). Beyond presenting an accessible, nuanced study of Wilson’s drama, this volume serves to “underscore… the dimensions of privilege that have transparently enveloped America during what has been called the ‘The American Century’” (2). Nadel argues that throughout American history, law has been an instrument of privilege rather than justice and that the injustices suffered led African Americans to create artistic sites of innovation such as the blues—and Wilson’s theatre. The blues, Nadel claims, provided Wilson an “entry to this history” and serves a “psychic tableau of disrupted dreams and displaced passions…” (2). Nadel begins his valuable analysis with a brief biography of August Wilson (1945-2005), illuminating aspects of Wilson’s life as key to his multifaceted drama. Chapter one, “Becoming August Wilson,” highlights Wilson’s childhood as Fredrick Kittel and his transformation to working playwright; here, Nadel weaves in Wilson’s own words from personal interviews. Interestingly, he focuses on the playwright’s relationships with his parents, his Pittsburgh neighborhood, and his education, connecting these relationships with Wilson’s early career as a writer. Especially notable to Wilson’s artistry is his introduction to and love for the blues. The second part of the biography focuses on Wilson’s career in Minneapolis, his work at the O’Neill Theater Center (with Lloyd Richards) and then on Broadway. In chapter two, “History and/as Performance: The Drama of African American History,” Nadel argues that history is performative and that “History” creates rather than “describes events.” The production of narratives gets deemed factual through the method of performing them. Writing without jargon, he uses the example of a witness to an accident to explain his argument: the witness’s viewpoint is told and recorded and thus becomes part of the historical record. He connects this argument with Wilson’s work with characters such as Troy from Fences who “articulates his own version of history” in Nadel’s reading (19). In a sense, Wilson’s work “engages with history” through characters and by dramatizing the blues (19). The chapters are structured thematically using one or two plays as case study. Chapters three through nine each open with a different play’s production history and plot summary before developing analysis. This structure orients readers who may be curious about the development of specific plays in Wilson’s cycle, as well as those seeking to contextualize the plots. Chapter Three, for example, examines how history and elements of the blues are captured through dramatic structure and characters, using Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom . This chapter in particular considers the entirety of the cycle and its relationship to music. In thinking about the blues, Nadel sees the ten plays as “ten cuts on an album surveying the twentieth century African American blues” (38). Shifting back to Ma Rainy , set in the 1920s, Nadel argues that the play provides an introduction to American history and a decade when blues were central to Black life. Nadel emphasizes that Wilson’s work could be read as musical compositions and orchestrations: thus, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom becomes a “paradigmatic play in Wilson’s canon” (42). Chapter 4 provides a critical analysis of law and property in Gem of the Ocean and Jitney . The chapter considers how Gem of the Ocean , set in the 1910s, begins the Wilson cycle and introduces how capitalism creates the world of Wilson’s plays. Connecting it to Jitney , Wilson’s first piece written for the cycle (set in the 1970s in a black-owned unlicensed taxi service), Nadel examines how characters navigate in that very system where black communities are disenfranchised. Chapter Five examines property in Fences , set in the 1950s, and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone , set in 1911. Nadel focuses on the fence as the “idea of property” (68). He argues that the “act of naming” in Fences enacts “fence building”, connecting with the idea of property within the United States (68). Later chapters continue to consider property and the law as they provide critical companions to specific Wilson plays, including: Two Trains Running , Seven Guitars , King Hedley II and Radio Golf . This compelling volume also includes contributions from scholars Donald E. Pease and Harry Elam Jr. who further critical analysis of Seven Guitars and King Hedley II . An Americanist, Pease’s chapter extends focus on the significance of the blues, giving a brief historical context of the genre, as well as interview material on Wilson’s approach to music. While Nadel examines the dramatic texts, Elam Jr’s chapter considers performance of these texts as theatre. Elam’s chapter analyzes director Bartlett Sher’s production of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone in its 2009 revival on Broadway and Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s staging of Jitney for Broadway premiere in 2017. Elam’s chapter aims to situate these signal performances within the cultural and political context of their times of production, decades after Wilson wrote the plays. These valuable and insightful additions deepen our understanding of Wilson’s contributions to theatre and American history. In The Theatre of August Wilson , Nadel masterfully weaves theory and history with a thorough analysis of Wilson’s dramatic texts. Fittingly, he provides ample analysis of the blues as a storytelling device while the book’s unique lens considers the plays in relation to how law and property are portrayed. The monograph is useful for scholars from varying disciplines and theater practitioners seeking critical analysis of August Wilson’s cycle plays. Beyond connecting plays across the cycle, Nadel also gives specific evidence of how the plays speak to law and property rights, slavery and the forces of capitalism in America, and the incorporation of the blues by Wilson to illuminate the African American experience and creativity through the 20th century. References Footnotes About The Author(s) JASMEENE FRANCOIS Graduate Center, CUNY Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to "Milestones in Black Theatre" Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration. Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Isaiah Matthew Wooden 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 Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement Isaiah Matthew Wooden By Published on April 28, 2021 Download Article as PDF The 1978 documentary Black Theater: The Making of a Movement opens with a striking performance by the legendary artist-activist-duo Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee that reveals the stakes of the project and the revolutionary Black artistic movements it archives. [1] Viewers first encounter Dee’s radiant face and honey-toned voice. With her eyes fixed squarely on the camera, the esteemed actress launches into a poem whose opening line offers a powerful rebuke of the notion that Black art is in any way imitative or derivative. “Black poetry is not what Shakespeare begot,” Dee recites percussively. [2] Davis quickly responds to her initiating call, adding “Nor, is it one with Tennyson.” [3] For a minute or so thereafter, the pair trade lines that remind viewers that Black art “sets up its own condition” and, indeed, “defies tradition.” [4] The performance culminates with Davis and Dee inviting viewers to join them in celebrating all that is distinct and compelling about Black art. The scene offers an evocative overture to a film that, by casting a resplendent spotlight on some of the key figures and movements that collectively revolutionized Black art in the twentieth century, distinguishes itself as a major milestone in African American theatre and performance history. Produced and directed by Woodie King, Jr., the founder of the New Federal Theatre, Black Theater: The Making of a Movement has been screened countless times since its late-70s premiere, and the academic database and video publisher Alexander Street has made it available to stream through its website. [5] For those who study and teach African American dramatic literature and theatre history, the film remains an indispensable resource for the sheer number of Black theatrical luminaries it brings together to meditate on the vital importance of Black art in the ongoing struggle for Black liberation. As the promotional description that accompanies it asserts, the film “is a veritable video encyclopedia of the leading figures, institutions, and events of a movement that transformed the American stage.” [6] In addition to Davis and Dee, the documentary features, among other theatrical innovators, Amiri Baraka, Roscoe Lee Browne, Ed Bullins, Vinnette Carroll, Robert Hooks, James Earl Jones, Lloyd Richards, Ntozake Shange, Barbara Ann Teer, Glynn Turman, and Douglas Turner Ward commenting on the rich contributions of enterprises and initiatives such as the Black Theatre Alliance, the Group Theatre Workshop, the New Lafayette Theatre, the Negro Ensemble Company, and the Urban Arts School. The film offers viewers much more than an abundance of star power or a standard accounting of the organizations and institutions that helped shape the new theatre movements that the Civil Rights activism of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s engendered. It overflows with insights about the tremendous significance and influence of the arts—theatre, especially—in Black social, cultural, and political life. Revisiting the film in the wake of the growing calls to fundamentally upend and overhaul the systems and structures reinforcing racism, antiblackness, and white supremacy in the arts reveals just how deeply relevant and resonant many of the conversations it catalogs remain. Its subjects convey with profound clarity their visions for a Black theatre that is at once revolutionary, heterogenous, and deeply attuned to the experiences of Black people. In drawing attention to a few of its more potent threads and themes in what follows, I hope to situate the current demands for change within a longer history of struggle to rework the American theatre. I also aim to explore how heeding some of the vital lessons the documentary provides might further enrich and embolden efforts to imagine, plot, and build artistic practices, strategies, principles, and conditions that are both transformative and sustainable. The documentary launches with well-known figures including Dee, Davis, playwright Owen Dodson, and director Lloyd Richards paying homage to some of the artists who they credit with making their work in the theatre possible. They give particular praise to change agents like Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes, and Paul Robeson for breaking barriers and expanding possibilities for the Black theatrical imagination. Two key points emerge from these backward glances. The first is the idea that Black theatre has always been deeply connected to and rooted in community. Davis explains how Black artists in New York City responded to the bigotry and discrimination of commercial and mainstream theatres by bringing together people from their own mostly segregated neighborhoods to mount performances. In doing so, they extended a tradition that dates back to the early national period, as theatre historian Marvin McAllister outlines in his study on the “entertainments” of impresario William Brown. [7] However, as Richards observes, the little headway that Black artists did begin to make on and off Broadway in the 1940s and ’50s was quickly undermined by the racist and repressive forces of McCarthyism. Richards, reflecting on the widespread efforts to terrorize Black artists during the period, offers the second key point I want to underscore. Black theatre, he insists, is fundamentally a theatre of protest. “The theatre has been for Black people a way of protesting the circumstances within which we attempt to exist in this country,” Richards remarks. [8] An abundance of evidence in the corpus of African American dramatic literature bears out this declaration. As Daphne Brooks points out in her evocative reading of William Wells Brown’s The Escape, or a Leap for Freedom , the first play published by a Black person in the United States, African Americans have long mobilized the power of theatre and performance to forge both discursive and embodied insurgency. [9] Throughout the remainder of the documentary, King grants some of the Black arts leaders who helped heighten the fervor for a radical Black consciousness, aesthetic, and politic that intensified during the catalytic Black Power era an opportunity to elaborate on their motivations for pursuing new theatrical paradigms. The deep commitment so many of these artists had to centering experimentation in their work resounds across these conversations. Vinnette Carroll, who was both the first Black woman to stage a show on Broadway and to garner a Tony Award nomination for her direction, notes that she founded the Urban Arts Corps in 1967, in part, to create a space for Black artists to train and develop new material that might not otherwise receive nurturing or support. “It’s also a place where some writers and musicians can come and try out things and not be afraid to fail,” Carroll explains. [10] Barbara Ann Teer, who, along with actor-activist Robert Hooks co-founded the Group Theatre Workshop in 1962 and, in 1968, established the National Black Theatre in Harlem, expresses a similar sentiment. Teer recalls how she and her early collaborators at the National Black Theatre spent nearly two years collectively devising artistic processes and practices that at once “fitted the sensibilities of Black people” and demonstrated “the richness and greatness and power inherent in the form and feeling of Black life/style.” [11] To that end, they experimented with drums, rhythms, chants, and energy, all in an effort to create a theatre that was unequivocally and unapologetically Black. [12] Not every Black artist of the era committed to renouncing any and all things associated with the theatrical traditions of Europe. For example, the Group Theatre Workshop, which mounted an off-Broadway staging of Douglas Turner Ward’s Happy Ending in 1965, paved the way for the founding of the Negro Ensemble Company in 1967. While the Negro Ensemble Company would quickly fortify its reputation as a launching ground for Black artistry and talent (including a production of Errol Hill’s Man Better Man in the 1968-69 season), it did not shy away from engaging with white interlocutors and collaborators. The first work the company produced was Song of the Lusitanian Bogey by German playwright Peter Weiss, in fact. “When the decision about Song of the Lusitanian Bogey was announced I knew I would get flack,” Turner Ward recalls. [13] “But no matter. The fact, in this instance, was that authorship had no significance. The play was ‘authored’ by the real historical situation itself. Peter was merely a conduit. More significantly, the material was going to be authored by an all-Black creative team, giving it life,” he goes on to say. [14] The production proved an auspicious springboard for the company, establishing it as a formidable presence on the New York arts scene and a model that others might adopt and follow. Certainly, as James Earl Jones recollects in the documentary, many Black artists maintained profound ambivalence about what their social and artistic responsibility should be to the various movements brewing around them. Jones recalls that during the successful off-Broadway run of Jean Genet’s The Blacks , a fierce debate erupted amongst his fellow company members about what actions they should take to advance the struggle for rights, freedom, and justice. “Half of us thought it was our responsibility, our social and artistic responsibility, to go up to picket… [The] other half preferred to, as Roscoe Lee Browne would say, stick to our vocational guidance, stick to our work.” [15] While Jones notes that he sided with Browne, he also confesses that he found great value in the dissension, as it not only served to build a greater sense of ensemble amongst the company, but it also empowered each performer to clarify for themselves what form they wanted their activism to take. As the film shifts focus to the future of Black theatre in its final section, a more subtle line of conversation begins to emerge about the perils and politics of arts funding. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the drastic economic changes that occurred throughout the 1970s, the interviewees voice a palpable unease about money and resources. It surfaces in the appeal that Carroll makes for wealthy Black people to consider financially supporting the arts: “I’d like to see more Black producers doing all sorts of things in the theatre, and that Black people would invest in us because we certainly have a group of Black people now with the money to invest in the theatre,” she asserts. [16] In the wake of Nixon’s election to the U.S. presidency, many of the grant-giving institutions that had been instrumental in launching ventures like the Urban Arts Corps, the Negro Ensemble Company, and the New Lafayette Theatre (the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, among them) decided that it was too risky to continue to support Black cultural institutions and withdrew their financial backing. This left many of these organizations without the resources they needed to stay afloat. Bullins, who after a brief stint as the Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party became the playwright-in-residence at the New Lafayette Theatre, explains: When Nixon came in the late 60s…he so frightened the philanthropic community that they cut back on just about all Black arts activities…So, all that money just about disappeared. And, we were working with a company of fifteen actors and all the support personnel with quite a yearly budget. And so, we couldn’t operate on the level that we had been operating on.[17] The documentary’s various discussions about funding underline just how potentially detrimental an overreliance on the goodwill and philanthropy of foundations and corporations can be to building a truly sustainable theatre. This is an important caution to take note of, especially amid calls to celebrate the commitments that institutions like the Ford and Mellon Foundations have made in recent months to granting millions of dollars to Black arts and cultural organizations. [18] These foundations have proven time and again that they are undependable. And, although they might provide some relief in the short term, the inconsistency of their funding often produces deleterious effects for Black art that are much longer-lasting. While the film’s chronological structure might suggest a progressive, teleological narrative, Black Theater: The Making of a Movement closes by exploring many of the questions and ideas that remain unaddressed or unresolved for Black theatremakers. The conclusion of the film sends an urgent call to Black artists to continue to find ways to bring the artform to Black communities and to harness its power to embolden radical change. Each of the figures featured in the documentary played a significant role in expanding possibilities for what the American theatre could be. Revisiting the film reaffirms just how solid the foundations they laid remain. It also provides an occasion for contemporary scholars and students of Black theatre to contemplate further how to capitalize on some of the “new stirrings” that have emerged in efforts to reimagine and remake the theatre—and the world—anew. [19] References [1] Black Theater: The Making of a Movement , directed by Woodie King, Jr. (1978; San Francisco: California Newsreel), https://video.alexanderstreet.com/watch/black-theater-the-making-of-a-movement?source=suggestion . All subsequent references are to this version of the film. [2] Black Theater . [3] Black Theater . [4] Black Theater . [5] The New Federal Theatre notably celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2020. [6] See Black Theater . [7] See Marvin McAllister, White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Colour: William Brown’s African and American Theater (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). [8] Black Theater . [9] See Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). [10] Black Theater . [11] Black Theater . [12] La Donna L. Forsgren’s In Search of Our Warrior Mothers provides a wealth of evidence of some of the other ways this commitment to experimentation manifested for Teer and her Black Arts Movement contemporaries. See La Donna L. Forsgren, In Search of Our Warrior Mothers (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018). [13] Douglas Turner Ward, “Foreword,” in Classic Plays from the Negro Ensemble Company , ed. Paul Carter Harrison and Gus Edwards (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburg Press, 1995), xiii. [14] Ward, “Foreword.” [15] Black Theater . [16] Black Theater . [17] Black Theater . [18] See, for example, the announcements about the Ford Foundation’s “American Cultural Treasures” initiative and the Mellon Foundation’s sponsorship of “The Black Seed.” [19] See W. E. B. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” in Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present , ed. Angelyn Mitchell (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994). Footnotes About The Author(s) ISAIAH MATTHEW WOODEN is a director-dramaturg, critic, and assistant professor of Theater Arts at Brandeis University. A scholar of African American art, drama, and performance, he has contributed articles and essays to The Black Scholar , Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism , Modern Drama , PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art , Theatre Journal , and Theatre Topics, among other scholarly and popular publications. Wooden is the co-editor of Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration (Northwestern UP 2020) and is currently at work on a monograph that explores the interplay of race and time in post-civil rights Black expressive culture. 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.

Michelle Cowin Gibbs 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 Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Michelle Cowin Gibbs By Published on April 28, 2021 Download Article as PDF Best remembered as a novelist, fiction writer, essayist, and anthropologist, Zora Neale Hurston’s extensive work as a playwright has been largely overlooked in evaluating her contributions to Black theatre. Many of her plays were imagined lost until 1997, when the Library of Congress recovered a previously unknown body of her work that Hurston submitted for copyright between 1925 and 1944 as unpublished plays. [1] Rutgers University Press published the first full volume of Hurston’s plays in 2008. [2] Scholarly explorations of her playwriting legacy remain at a comparatively early stage. Yet, in those small number of plays published before 1997, including Color Struck (1926) , The First Ones (1927) and Mule Bone (1931) (co-authored with Langston Hughes), performance scholars can see a style of playwriting that presents a stark contrast to Hurston’s more popular contemporaries. Hurston was an anthropologist, auto-ethnographer, and playwright, and as such, many of her plays featured characters that reappear across her collection. Her plays also included many of the same rituals and customs that she witnessed and participated in during her fieldwork in Black Southern folk communities. Along with exploring Black Southern folk vernacular in her dramas, Hurston also included songs, games, and other rituals such as popular word play performatives like signifying, woofing, and playing the dozens. Hurston’s exploration of Black Southern folk culture plays did not validate Eurocentricity as a necessary pre-condition for recognizing, understanding, and affirming Black experiences (an approach popular among her contemporaries, including Angelina Weld Grimké, Mary P. Burrill, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson). Hurston’s plays also often failed to fit within the parameters of the propagandistic style theatre aimed at racial uplift. Thus, for many scholars of Black theatre, Hurston’s early plays have eluded easy categorization. However, I argue that by using dramaturgical analysis to explore Hurston’s plays – particularly her focus on the community game popularized in many Black communities called “playing the dozens”—students of Black theatre can access a radically different set of Black folk characters for the stage aimed at reconfiguring prevailing models of blackness and Black womenness in the early twentieth century. This short essay offers some first steps towards developing a Black feminist dramaturgical lens to contextualize Hurston’s contributions to Black theatre. While my approach is still a work in progress, I hope that it will offer a catalyst for considering Hurston’s early plays in a different light, and for developing further discourses around Black feminist dramaturgy. Hurston developed a method of playwriting that drew upon her work as an anthropologist and auto-ethnographer to depict everyday Negro life in Black Southern rural communities. [3] In particular, she affirmed Southern Black folk women identity by depicting her women characters in ways that transcended familiar archetypes and stereotypes. [4] Hurston revealed Black women’s social networks in her plays, and even though few of her works were staged during her lifetime, the networks she depicted offer insight into larger processes of Black cultural formation. For example, in De Turkey and De Law (1930), a play based on a collection of short stories from Hurston’s field work as an anthropologist and auto-ethnographer ( The Bone of Contention and The Eatonville Anthology ), the audience sees Black women who negotiate the intersections of sexism and personal autonomy in their community on a daily basis. Exploring Hurston’s dramaturgy here suggests how her field research could have contributed to the ways audiences, particularly Black women, saw themselves onstage during a time when minstrelsy attempted to strip our humanity from us. Hurston included Black Southern folk rituals and customs that also contributed to how these practices nuanced conflict and character relationships in her plays. In De Turkey and De Law , Hurston presents the town of Eatonville that becomes divided when best friends, Dave (a Baptist) and Jim (a Methodist) fall in love with the same woman, Daisy. Tempers flare, and Jim assaults Dave with a mule bone. Jim is arrested and put on trial for assault, a trial presided over by the town’s major, Joe Clarke. The town’s Baptist and Methodist folks attend the trial. The Methodist women refuse to believe that Jim will get a fair trial since Mayor Clarke is a Baptist and the trial will take place in the Baptist church. The Baptist women want to make sure justice is served. The trial gets off to a rocky start when the Methodist women are bullied by the Baptists. The church men and women engage in what Hurston describes in Mules and Men as playing the dozens, [5] a comical exchange of personal insults and verbal attacks. [6] Like other rituals she observed during her field research in Eatonville, playing the dozens is a dramatic device that helps to authenticate and ground character interactions. These verbal battles reveal both the power structures of the community as well as the complex network of personal relationships, marital relationships, gendered power structures, and perhaps most importantly, the rituals that govern their interactions. The purpose of the game, according to cultural historian Lawrence W. Levine, is to “display linguistic virtuosity for an audience of peers.” [7] In Turkey , the dozens is a way for Hurston to explore character relationships and dynamics that also contribute to the conflict in the play. For example, the game is usually played by only men, but in Turkey , both women and men play the game, which contributes to the animosity and antagonisms. Whereas the Baptist men and women want the trial to continue from their position of power in the church, the Methodist women use the dozens to push for accountability and fairness by attempting to discredit and shut down anyone that would marginalize their voices. They always stop just short of physical violence. While characters playing the dozens may make verbal threats toward each other, the purpose of the dozens is not to cause physical harm to one’s opponent. The dozens provide a nonviolent method for social control and community advocacy. [8] Rather than settling grievances using physical force, players advocate for themselves and the communities using verbal duels. [9] For example, when Mayor Clarke threatens the women with physical harm by sending in the bailiff, Lum Bailey, Hurston uses the dozens to dismantle male authority. She sows the seed of doubt over Bailey’s ability to actually, as Clarke commands, “shut dem women up or put ‘em outta here.’” [10] Methodist women, Sister Taylor and Sister Lewis, use their familial relationship with Bailey to remind him that they are his mother-figures and elders and can easily “knock every nap of yo’ head one by one.” [11] Lum Bailey retreats and the women celebrate a victory until Mayor Clarke steps in. Mayor Clarke operates from a position of power in the community. In the heated exchange between the Methodists and Baptists, Mayor Clarke remains an outsider in the game because of his relationship to the community. He does not see himself as part of the community so much as he is in charge of the community. He will not respect the nuances of the game and sees the women as a distraction rather than advocating for their right to have a voice in the community. In the same scene, Mayor Clarke admonishes Sister Nixon for talking during the trial. She turns on him and says, You can’t shut me up, not the way you live. When you quit beatin’ Mrs. Mattie and dominizing her all de time, then you kin tell other folks what to do. You ain’t none of my boss. Don’t let you’ wooden God and corn-stalk Jesus fool you now. Not de way you sells rancid bacon for fresh.[12] Sister Nixon challenges Mayor Clarke by using his immoral actions toward his wife against him. Perhaps more importantly, she reveals the intimate sharing of knowledge across the community and the way in which that knowledge confers power. Clarke does not dispute Nixon’s claims, but his anger at having been called out ripples throughout the courtroom. Sister Nixon’s husband tries to smooth things over, by pleading with her,” Aw honey, hush a while, please, and less git started.” [13] Sister Nixon obliges her husband and sits down. The trial continues. Although, it may seem that Sister Nixon yields to her husband, I believe Hurston gives the women more agency than initially appears. Sister Nixon does not apologize for her comments, and the other women in the play also feel free to speak out when they perceive an injustice or believe they are being treated unfairly. Hurston uses the trial to present a community of dynamic, smart, witty, Black women, unafraid to challenge traditional gender norms. Hurston’s depictions of Black women playing the dozens allow audience members to see the characters as more fully human onstage. [14] She uses the dozens as a way to inform a more realistic and empowered depiction of Black women that I argue, also, demonstrates her incorporation of her field research into her creation of Black women characters. [15] In Turkey , Hurston centers Black women’s autonomy and helps Black women see a representation of themselves (or their ancestors) onstage. For today’s audiences, Turkey highlights how Hurston dramatized her everyday interactions with Black folks and gave space for characters to explore Black expression onstage. [16] In tracing connections between Hurston’s ethnographic fieldwork and her playwriting, I have proposed a way of analyzing her plays that includes considering how Black Southern folk rituals and customs, such as playing the dozens, contributes to how contemporary scholars understand conflict and character relationships among Black men and women in De Turkey and De Law . In many ways, this form of Black feminist dramaturgy represents a paradoxical subject for this type of analysis of Hurston’s theatre. Black feminist dramaturgy looks at play analysis and intentionality in performance . It centers the audience’s response to the work, and in Hurston’s case, it also highlights her process of exploring Black women’s autonomy by distilling her field research into a theatrical experience. And yet, the majority of Hurston’s plays have never been produced. Outside of a few productions of some of her more well-known works, [17] contemporary scholars have had few opportunities to experience Hurston’s theatre in rehearsal and performance spaces. For me, this is where Black feminist dramaturgy truly lives. The process of playing the dozens demands an audience to witness and affirm the ritual being enacted. These interchanges reveal deep layers of oral folk culture that offer interactive experiences for both performers and audience members–I hope that they will ultimately inspire a Hurston revival in the Black theatre. References [1] William Triplett, “Hurston Plays Discovered; Find at Library of Congress May Shed New Light on Black Writer,” The Washington Post , 24 April 1997, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1997/04/24/hurston-plays-discovered/70a6c41e-983b-4226-8597-8d0c2f620403/ [2] Jean Lee Cole and Charles Mitchell, Zora Neale Hurston: Collected Plays (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008), xv. [3] Jennifer Staple. “Zora Neale Hurston’s Construction of Authenticity Through Ethnographic Innovation,” The Western Journal of Black Studies 30, no. 1 (2006): 62, Gale Academic OneFile , https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A182035988/AONE?u=uiuc_iwu&sid=AONE&xid=a100cad1 (accessed 12 March 2021). [4] Henry Louis Gates Jr. “ Why the ‘Mule Bone’ Debate Goes on.” New York Times , 10 Feb 1998, https://www.nytimes.com/1991/02/10/theater/theater-why-the-mule-bone-debate-goes-on.html [5] Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (1935) (New York: 1 st Harper Perennial Modern Classic, 2008), 13. [6] Christine Levecq. “’You Heard Her, You Ain’t Blind’: Subversive Shifts in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 13, no. 1 (1994): 87-111, accessed 26 March 2021. doi:10.2307/463858. [7] Lawrence W. Levine. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 347. [8] Harry G. Lefever. “’Playing the Dozens’: A Mechanism for Social Control.” Phylon 42, no. 1 (1981): 76, accessed 29 March 2021. doi:10.2307/274886. [9] Lefever, “’Playing the Dozens,’” 80. [10] Zora Neale Hurston, De Turkey and De Law , in Zora Neale Hurston: Collected Plays, ed. Jean Lee Cole and Charles Mitchell (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 169. [11] Hurston, De Turkey and De Law, 169. [12] Hurston, Turkey , 172. [13] Hurston, Turkey , 172. [14] Norman Marín Calderón. “Afrocentrism, Gaze and Visual Experience in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God,” Káñina 42, no. 1 (2018): 261, http://dx.doi.org/10.15517/rk.v42i1.33568 (accessed 23 November 2020), DOI 10.15517/RK.V42I1.33568. [15] Staple, 66. [16] Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzales, “’From Negro Expression to “’Black Performance,’” in Black Performance Theory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 3. [17] In 1932, Hurston’s The Great Day premiered on Broadway and toured major theatres in New York City, Chicago, and Orlando. Additionally, Arena Stages in Washington D.C. produced a Polk County in 2002. Footnotes About The Author(s) MICHELLE COWIN GIBBS , Ph.D. , is an assistant professor of Theatre and Head of the BA Theatre Arts program at Illinois Wesleyan University. Her scholarly research includes Zora Neale Hurston’s theatrical works and a spectrum of interdisciplinary studies in Black dance performance, Black performativity, and critical identity studies in and around The New Negro movement in early 20th century Black modernist theatre. Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf ISNN 2376-4236 Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to "Milestones in Black Theatre" Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration. Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

European Stages, created in 2013 by merging Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance, serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. It explores the evolution of both Western and Eastern European theatrical scenes, offering insightful analyses, artist interviews, and comprehensive coverage of major festivals. Back to Top Untitled Keep Reading < Back European Stages Volume 18, Fall, 2024 Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Dan Venning Report from London (December 2022) Philippa Wehle Confessions, storytelling and worlds in which the impossible becomes possible. The 77th Avignon Festival, July 5-25, 2023 Ivan Medenica “Regietheater:” two cases Anton Pujol The Grec Festival 2023 Kalina Stefanova The Festival of the Youth Theatre of Piatra Neamt, Romania: A Festival for “Youth without Age” (notes on the occasion of the 34th edition) Marvin Carlson Report from Germany Ion M. Tomuș Poetry on Stage: Games, Words, Crickets..., Directed by Silviu Purcărete European Stages European Stages, created in 2013 by merging Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance, serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. It explores the evolution of both Western and Eastern European theatrical scenes, offering insightful analyses, artist interviews, and comprehensive coverage of major festivals. ISSN Number: 1050-199 Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Visit Journal Homepage

Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Back to Top Untitled Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages Volume 15 Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Five Arab American Plays Everyone Should Read Roaa Ali Interview with Nasser Rahmaninejad by Babak Rahimi Babak Rahimi MIDNIGHT IN CAIRO: THE DIVAS OF EGYPT'S ROARING '20S. By Raphael Cormack (REVIEW) Suzi Elnaggar Arab American Drama: Five Books that Inspired My Journey Malek Najjar Carving a Path: Desiring-Production in Displaced Syrian Theatre Bart Pitchford Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage

Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Back to Top Untitled Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages Volume 14 Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents On Writing Egypt from the Diaspora: An Interview with Adam Ashraf Elsayigh Sonali Pahwa Book Review: MANSOUR, MONA. THE VAGRANT TRILOGY Zeina Salame Book Review: ACTING EGYPTIAN Marjan Moosavi Performance Review: LITTLE SYRIA Sami Ismat Performance Review: HOOTA. By Amer Hlehel Samer Al-Saber Performance Review: A FAMILY THAT HAS BEEN BLOCKED Areeg Ibrahim Performance Review: BETHLEHEM SITE-SPECIFIC THEATER FESTIVAL Marina Johnson Two Giants of Egyptian Theatre: Conversations with Mohamed Abul-ʿEla El-Salamouny and Lenin El-Ramly Tiran Manucharyan Crossing Borders: A Theatre Practitioner’s Odyssey, An Interview with Hassan El Geretly Iman Ezzeldin Review: Playwright Showcase, New Arab American Theater Works Katherine Hennessey Up There by Wael Kadour, Introduction Edward Ziter Review: Layalina written by Martin Yousif Zebari, directed by Sivan Battat Sami Ismat Review of Syrian Refugees, Applied Theater, Workshop Facilitation, and Stories: While They Were Waiting written by Fadi Skeiker Sonja Arsham Kuftinec Review of MUKHRIJĀT AL-MASRAḤ AL-MIṢRĪ (1990-2010): DIRĀSA SĪMIYŪṬĪQĪYAH [Female Egyptian Directors (1990-2010): A Semiotic Study], written by Hadia Abd El-Fattah Areeg Ibrahim Review: Baba written by Denmo Ibrahim, directed by Hamid Dehghani Suzi Elnaggar “Indigenous Avant-Gardes”: The Shiraz Arts Festival and Ritual Performance Theory in 1970s Iran Matthew Randle-Bent Review: Decolonizing Sarah: A Hurricane Play written and directed by Samer Al-Saber George Potter Review of Theaters of Citizenship: Aesthetics and Politics of Avant-Garde Performance in Egypt written by Sonali Pahwa Suzi Elnaggar Review: Mother Courage adapted and directed by Alison Shan Price Hassan Hajiyah Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage

Stephanie Lim Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 1 Visit Journal Homepage Silence, Gesture, and Deaf Identity in Deaf West Theatre's Spring Awakening Stephanie Lim By Published on December 10, 2020 Download Article as PDF For a woman to bear a child, she must . . . in her own personal way, she must . . . love her husband. Love him, as she can love only him. Only him . . . she must love—with her whole . . . heart. There. Now, you know everything.[1] Frau Bergman, Spring Awakening In the opening scene of Spring Awakening , Wendla begs her mother to explain where babies come from, to which her mother bemoans, “Wendla, child, you cannot imagine—.” In Deaf West Theatre’s version of the show, Frau Bergman speaks this line while bringing her pinky finger up to her head, palm outward, but Wendla quickly corrects the gesture, indicating that her mother has actually inverted the American Sign Language (ASL) for “imagine,” a word signed with palm facing inward. [2] As part of a larger dialogue that closes with the epigraph above, Bergman’s struggle to communicate about sexual intercourse in both ASL and English is one of many exchanges in which adults find themselves unable to communicate effectively with teenagers. The theme of (mis)communication is also evoked through characters’ refusal to communicate with each other at all, as in the musical number “Totally Fucked.” When Melchior’s teachers demand he confess to having authored the obscene 10-page document, “The Art of Sleeping With” (which they claim hastened the suicide of his best friend Moritz), they reject his attempts to explain. Whereas the dialogue between Bergman and her daughter demonstrates failed communication due partly to lack of linguistic proficiency, Melchior finds himself “totally fucked,” because the adults refuse to listen to him entirely. Moments such as these abound in Deaf West’s production of Spring Awakening and profoundly inform the musical’s dramatic arc, continually demonstrating the boundaries between Deaf and hearing worlds. These breakdowns of communication—either the inability to communicate with others or the refusal to—make the dramatic consequences of a show about miscommunication all the more compellingly tragic. The production’s choices move beyond an access-oriented approach for d/Deaf audiences, [3] as the integration of ASL adds a dramaturgical emphasis to the musical’s themes. In re-imagining the world of Spring Awakening in a d/Deaf context, the “real world” spaces off-stage that often privilege oralist and audist practices are radically inverted onstage, rendering verbal communication unreliable and, instead, prioritizing the literal gestures and physicality of sign language. Exploring the relationship between Deaf West’s Spring Awakening and traditional stagings of the show, this paper looks specifically at how the production’s intricate gestures and staging make visible the boundary between Deaf and hearing communities. The production provides not only the literal stage upon which the Deaf and hearing worlds convene, but also a space where Deaf culture and silence are often emphasized, reconsidering traditional renderings of the Deaf/hearing divide within the space and modalities of musical theatre. Troubling “All That’s Known”: Interrogating the Hearing Line English and ASL scholar Christopher Krentz offers a productive way to understand the space between Deaf and hearing worlds through what he calls the “hearing line,” or the “invisible boundary separating deaf and hearing people.” [4] Drawing from W.E.B. DuBois’ “color line,” Krentz’s hearing line calls attention to—and calls into question—the complex, ever-shifting, and uneven binary between deafness and “hearingness,” whereby identities are formed and shaped. If, at the hearing line, one’s ability to hear informs one’s identity (and corresponding privilege), the world generated in Deaf West’s Spring Awakening is an analogous manifestation of this line, made visible across private and public spaces. Additionally, in the same way that reading and writing offer for Krentz a mutual space for Deaf and hearing worlds to convene—“a place where differences may recede and binaries may be transcended” [5] —so too does the stage attempt to enlighten and alter the complicated relationship between Deaf and hearing identities. In Deaf West’s Spring Awakening , the hearing line is continually emphasized and intensified to both convey and bolster the frequent failures of communication between the adults and teenagers, a point made relentlessly in traditional productions of the musical and in the original 1891 play by Frank Wedekind. The hearing line is also troubled, disrupted, and circumvented at times, often through musical numbers, to accentuate Deaf culture, identity, and silence. In the process, the show exposes, challenges, and reconsiders the hierarchical positions of the Deaf/hearing worlds found at the hearing line, both in the show and in the real-world—ultimately attempting to bridge the gap between the two worlds. Although ASL/English productions such as this have attempted to increase access for d/Deaf audiences, Deaf West’s musical productions (which to date include Oliver! , Sleeping Beauty Wakes , Big River , Pippin , Spring Awakening , and an adaptation of Medusa ) are nonetheless criticized for not being fully accessible. d/Deaf audience members have continually noted the difficulty in understanding ASL used on-stage because of SimCom [6] (which weakens and obscures linguistic meaning, made via the hands and face, known as non-manual markers), the ineffective lighting design in some scenes (at times either too dark or too bright), and the inconsistent use of captions and clear sightlines (or clear access to d/Deaf actors’ communicative gestures and expressions). [7] Jehanne C. McCullough denounces Spring Awakening in particular for being for hearing people rather than for Deaf people because the overall design and casting of the show continually works in favor of hearing audiences. [8] As a hearing audience member, I acknowledge my own limited perspective and hearing privilege in my viewings and readings of the show. Because of the space always-already created by musical theatre (i.e. sound-centric), and given Deaf West’s uses of SimCom and captions, I was afforded more opportunities to understand what was going on. Nonetheless, by highlighting the casting, staging, and choreographic choices of Deaf West’s revival, I hope to point out how frequently the production emphasizes Deaf perspectives over hearing ones, generating an overall shift towards Deaf modalities of experiencing musical theatre. More explicitly than in their previous musicals, this production challenges the hearing line by including various moments that attempt to prioritize and even simulate Deaf experience. Several scenes in the show not only emphasize the hearing line but also purposely call into question the hierarchy that holds audism and oralism superior to deafness. During the first classroom scene, for instance, Herr Sonnenstich calls on various students to recite from Virgil’s Aeneid , enforcing what is known as oralism, the nineteenth-century practice of teaching d/Deaf students through lip reading and vocalizing, which rejects the use of ASL altogether. When Ernst uses ASL to facilitate his own vocalization of the poem, Sonnenstich berates him and angrily strikes a pointing stick against the desk. Later, when Moritz vocally recites a word incorrectly (“multim olim” instead of “multim ille”), Sonnenstich chastises him, mocking the way Moritz sounds when vocalizing and even making up random hand gestures to accompany his voice. In traditional productions, Moritz’s failure is often performed and read as a result of his laziness, his lack of scholarly aptitude, and the fact that he is caught sleeping (an action noted in the libretto); however, Moritz’s vocalized error here, wholly unaccompanied by ASL, adds a layer of complexity to the situation: his mistake might also be a mispronunciation if he does not vocalize regularly. As a result of Sonnenstich’s offensive conduct, Melchior stands up for Moritz and tries to minimize the humiliation by attempting to rationalize the mistake. Suggesting that “multim olim” be recognized as a new critical commentary on Aeneas , Melchior uses SimCom so that his classmates can all understand him. This being Melchior’s first scene also critically positions him as an ally and advocate of Deaf culture, Deaf identity, and language—an important position he maintains throughout the show. By setting the production clearly in the historical context of the late 1800s, Deaf West’s version presents oralism as the framework through which to understand the show. Many of the adults’ actions also uphold audist and oralist ideologies, a dramaturgical choice that affixes specific nuance to the constant miscommunication that pervades the show thematically. At the same time, the dramatized suppression of a rich and vibrant language like ASL and Melchior’s presence as a hearing character who undertakes the plight of his Deaf classmates bring to light the ethics of such an oppressive system. The overall story arc between Wendla and Frau Bergman also presents the devastating consequences that miscommunication, or rather the desire not to communicate at all, can have. Demonstrating the hearing line within the privacy of the home, Wendla asks her mother to explain where babies come from, as discussed in this paper’s opening example. Frau Bergman, rather than explaining the truth—birth as a natural, physiological phenomenon that may result from intercourse—evades the question and explains the process of conception as vaguely as possible, in part because she does not know how to expound on the topic through ASL. The full damage of Bergman’s failure to explain how babies are conceived is revealed in Act Two, when the Bergmans find out Wendla is pregnant. Wendla’s response is to cry out, “My God, why didn’t you tell me everything?” [9] —the only line in the show vocalized by Deaf actor Sandra Mae Frank, rather than voiced by the Voice of Wendla, Katie Boeck. Interestingly, the emphasis on communicative failure also falsely suggests the opposite of what happens: if only Wendla could “hear,” her mother could have fully communicated the truth in English. This mother-daughter relationship, as well as the relationship between hearing and deafness, is further exaggerated and complicated when two doctors become involved in Wendla’s pregnancy. The first, Doctor von Brausepulver, communicates with Wendla using SimCom during their run at The Wallis and using English only on Broadway; when Frau Bergman asks about Wendla’s nausea, Brausepulver ends by speaking but not signing, “Not uncommon. Trust me, child. You’ll be fine ” (emphasis added), performing the emphasized phrases in an over-enunciated and exaggerated manner at Wendla, indicated both vocally and physically. [10] Immediately after, Brausepulver speaks with Frau Bergman off to the side, a whispered conversation that is never spoken aloud to the audience. This secret, “silent” conversation is contrasted soon after by the second physician, Schmidt, who is recommended by Bergman’s “doctor friend” to perform Wendla’s abortion, unbeknownst to Wendla. In this second scene, Schmidt (played by a deaf performer) signs to Bergman in ASL only, “Now, listen to my instructions carefully,” and explains where to bring Wendla. These scenes function together ironically: Brausepulver whispers to Bergman to avoid Wendla’s overhearing him, even though she is deaf, while Schmidt communicates with Bergman in ASL, a language Bergman herself struggles with. The tragedy of Wendla’s eventual death is partly caused and greatly augmented by the adults’ inability and unwillingness to communicate with her and with each other. While the scenes above perpetuate the normative hierarchy of the hearing line (wherein the hearing world is often dominant), other scenes intensify the divide and prioritize silence and ASL. Specifically, Moritz’s confession to his father about failing his final exams is one of the production’s two brief scenes that are communicated entirely through ASL, though subtitled in English. Herr Stiefel continually probes Moritz for an explanation of how they can show their faces publicly: “What are your mother and I supposed to do?” “What do I tell them at the bank?” “How do we go to Church?” Stiefel’s interrogation insinuates that the family will be negatively perceived by the community because of Moritz’s failure, and the shame of Moritz’s failure can also be read as a further marginalization of the family as d/Deaf. In any staging of the scene, silence always permeates the interaction between Moritz and his father; that is, all questions go unanswered, as Moritz is unable to respond at all out of fear and/or shame. But in Deaf West’s staging, the placing of two d/Deaf actors onstage alone further heightens the power of “silence,” not as a passive space or absence of sound, but as a space that includes energy, emotion, and movement, particularly that of ASL. For hearing audiences, the minute-and-a-half scene is ostensibly done in complete silence, except for Herr Stiefel’s brief vocalized yells. While hearing audiences might experience the aural “silence” of this scene, it is the magnitude and force of Stiefel’s rage when he interrogates Moritz that is emphasized, redefining the notion of silence itself. Anyone with experience being reprimanded by a parent can immediately sense Herr Stiefel’s nonstop “shouting,” conveyed through his agitated signing and aggressive movements, like grabbing Moritz by the collar, as well as the word “failed” continuously projected/subtitled on the back wall. Silence here shows what “the deaf family experience [is] like, and how signing can be loving, but can also be angry and scream-like, thus proving to the audience how diverse of a language ASL is.” [11] Moreover, although this scene is punctuated by captions projected onto the back wall—still privileging hearing audiences in providing them a means by which to understand the scene—the prioritizing of and focus on ASL rather than on vocalized speech compels hearing audiences to reconsider the ways in which meaning is communicated, changing how audiences hear and listen , particularly in the space of musical theatre. As a further punctuation of the hearing line, the production’s casting of Deaf/“Voice of” pairs (utilized for the characters of Wendla, Moritz, Martha, Otto, Thea, and Ernst) purposely positions the younger characters in the Deaf world, thereby creating a clear alliance among the students rather than among any of the adults, none of whom were cast in Deaf/Voice of pairs, as noted in the Playbill. In addition, Melchior is positioned as the hearing line in human form, performed by a hearing actor who is fluent in ASL. That Melchior uses SimCom is problematic from a linguistic and logistical point of view, since he is the main character and has a great deal of dialogue. Dramaturgically, however, Melchior is the hearing line made manifest—a human bridge between d/Deaf and hearing worlds, such that SimCom becomes a metaphor for Melchior’s existence in and ability to move in-between both worlds. Notably, of the parents portrayed in the production, Melchior’s are the only Deaf/hearing couple—his mother being Deaf and his father being hearing, using SimCom. Melchior’s actions can thus be read as an attempt to mediate the relationships across both worlds, particularly between teachers and students, and adults and teenagers. On the one hand, because the show employs SimCom with specific characters (rather than double-casting all of the characters) in order to demonstrate the failures in communication, an ironic result is to impair another essential line of communication, diluting the messages from stage to audience. On the other hand, the use of SimCom for adult characters like Brausepulver and Frau Bergman heightens the collapse of communication and highlights the Deaf/hearing dichotomy. By using Deaf/Voice Of pairs, delineations between Deaf/hearing in the adults, and SimCom in the case of Melchior, the characters influence and embody the ever-shifting state of the hearing line in the world of the play. Musically, the production also presents, pushes against, and interrogates the hearing line through the use non-spoken and gestural languages. These languages accentuate the teenagers’ emotional, psychological, and physical states. For example, “And Then There Were None” is both an intensification of the Deaf/hearing dichotomy and an attempt to circumvent the hierarchy produced by and at the hearing line. In the epistolary song, Moritz and Frau Gabor, Melchior’s mother, write a series of letters to each other, detailed within the song’s lyrics. Although Gabor is certainly the most sympathetic and idealistic of the adults, the song itself portrays her unwillingness to believe Moritz’s “veiled threat that, should escape not be possible, [he] would take [his] own life,” creating a more nuanced iteration of her own failure in communication: she “hears” him but refuses to actually listen to what he says. Since the actors playing Moritz and Frau Gabor are d/Deaf, the number compels audiences to focus on the signing rather than on the singing. Hanschen and Georg are the only hearing characters that briefly perform lyrics through SimCom; however, the staging of the song concentrates on Gabor and Moritz, who are later joined by Otto and Ernst—all characters who are played by d/Deaf actors. Therefore, rather than marginalizing the physicality of ASL, it is put front and center, while the Voices Of are off to the sides. This is also a visceral reversal of the limited use of ASL in theatrical settings: typically, d/Deaf access to a show is performed solely by platform interpreters, who are placed off to the sides of the stage. By putting deafness and Deaf identity at the forefront, Deaf West inverts the hearing line dramaturgically through its characters and linguistically for its audiences. A second song that places emphasis on physicality, gesture, and ASL is “Totally Fucked,” which highlights the younger characters’ resistance to their adult counterparts. In traditional stagings of the show, “Totally Fucked” is the ultimate anthem of teenage angst and rebellion, underscored by the music itself. Deaf West stages this number as a rock concert, putting even more emphasis than the original Broadway production on the physical, aggressive, and sometimes sexually and linguistically explicit movements of the choreography. What becomes most important in this song—and indeed, throughout the show’s many musical numbers—is not so much the lyrics but, rather, the gestural and non-verbal languages that accompany the lyrics and music, including choreography, lighting design, and the principal focus on ASL, as in “And Then There Were None.” Sarah Wilbur suggests that Deaf West’s version of the show triumphs because of these layered gestural economies, that is, “the demands that the company’s multifaceted use of gesture places on audiences, performers, and producers.” [12] As a “visual-gestural language,” [13] ASL becomes the most powerful tool on Deaf West’s stage. “Totally Fucked” is, in all productions, a mutinous response to the “yes” or “no” that adults demand of Melchior and his peers. But in Deaf West’s version, the song also becomes an outright reversal of the hearing line in which hearing and oralism are traditionally favored. Deaf West’s “Totally Fucked” takes physicality and gestures to new heights and meanings, imbuing a song known for its loud and extreme chaos with ASL, a language just as intense, powerful, and “loud” (or, in this case, boisterous) in its own unique way. In this way, both multiplying and subverting the traditional modalities of musical theatre beyond merely vocalized speech and music, Spring Awakening highlights a Deaf perspective, a rewriting of the hearing line, through its transformative inclusion of Deaf culture, identity, and language. “I’m Gonna Be Your Bruise”: Sharing Signs On and Across Bodies Additional restructurings of the hearing line occur within Deaf West’s practice of “sharing signs,” [14] when two (or more) actors sign words/phrases together. The use of shared signs reveals how important meaning-making can occur via ASL on and across the literal bodies of performers and characters, which English alone cannot achieve. This practice arises frequently throughout Spring Awakening to emphasize the intimate and physical (often sensual and sexualized) connections between characters. In a show explicitly about sex, shared signs also add complexity to the relationships between characters and bolster the already-sexualized content of the libretto and music. Shared signs first appear in the production during “My Junk,” when Hanschen channels Desdemona and masturbates to Correggio’s Jupiter and Io . With Herr Rilow (Hanschen’s father) constantly rapping on the bathroom door, Hanschen’s urgency to “finish” is augmented by two, three, and eventually five girls who help him sign and masturbate simultaneously: Wendla holds up the picture, while Thea’s right arm signs with Hanschen’s left; when Fraulein Grossebustenhalter asks Georg to “bring out the left hand,” Hanschen switches arms, this time signing with Martha’s left arm while masturbating with his own left; finally, when Rilow demands that Hanschen go back to bed, Martha and Thea sign together, while Anna takes on the task of stroking Hanschen, and Heidi rubs Hanschen’s arms, put above his head to signal his letting go of all control. The abundance and entanglement of hands becomes visually striking, and sharing signs is conceived as an overt sexual act, used to create and complete Hanschen’s stimulation, arousal, and climax—a sexual awakening that is already written into the character. Moreover, this early sequence of shared signs, with its explicit sexual content, adds a related charge to subsequent uses of this device, which acquire similar connotations of intimacy, physicality, and sexuality. The use of shared signs in the songs following “My Junk” reinforce the teenagers’ desires to feel , close to each other and/or anything at all, since the adults in their lives refuse to do so. “The Word of Your Body,” performed by Melchior and Wendla and later reprised by Hanschen and Ernst, first occurs when Melchior and Wendla touch hands for the first time and a brief pause transpires between them. Focusing on the chorus (“O, I’m gonna be wounded. / O, I’m gonna be your wound. / O, I’m gonna bruise you. / O, you’re gonna be my bruise” [15] ), the signs and shared signs for “wound” and “bruise” speak directly to the song’s meaning, especially because the performers sign on the other person’s body. Their signs for “wounded” are made individually, but the repeated sign for “wound”—made with index fingers pointing in and slightly twisting in opposite directions—becomes an entangled idea, as they literally crisscross over and under each other’s arms while signing. Additionally, using an ASL variation to indicate “bruise,” performers sign the color “black”—made by swiping a finger across one’s forehead—on the other person’s body: in the first line, they each point to Melchior for “I’m gonna” and then sign “black” on each other’s foreheads, but in the second line, they point to Wendla for “I’m gonna” and then sign “black” across each other’s chests. As in ASL, the position of the signs adds further meaning to the song: the forehead could signify a mental “bruise,” while the chest signifies the heart or the soul/spirit, suggesting the ways in which Melchior and Wendla’s impending relationship will affect the characters. Since ASL is not normally signed on another person’s body (but, instead, on the affected spot of one’s own body), the repeated act of signing on and across another’s body makes the black and blue metaphor all the more violent and serves as a foreshadowing for the ambiguous brutality and possible rape between Wendla and Melchior that occurs later in the show. Deaf West’s staging of “Touch Me” also utilizes shared signs to visually represent the characters’ sharing of knowledge and of themselves with each other, diminishing the original staging’s emphasis on individual experience and suppressed, inner turmoil, while also accentuating relationships that are both erotic and indeterminate in nature. Melchior and Moritz’s shared signs during “Touch Me” produce ambiguous, bisexual dimensions in both characters and also positions Melchior as “top” regarding both Moritz and Wendla. The very act of sharing signs parallels Melchior’s desire to share his (sexual) knowledge with Moritz, and Moritz’s mutual desire to learn about sex from Melchior, prompted by Melchior’s self-assured insight about how it must feel for a woman to give herself to another, “defending yourself until, finally, you surrender and feel Heaven break over you.” In Raymond Knapp’s reading of Huck and Jim’s relationship in Deaf West’s Big River , Knapp notes that the sharing of signs reinforces their already-intimate friendship and “comes across as a rueful acknowledgment of their impossible love.” [16] Just as Big River ’s Huck and Jim establish a hierarchical rapport through their sharing of signs (especially in “Muddy Water”), Melchior’s position of intellectual authority over Moritz is reinforced through their interconnecting signs as well. Melchior and Moritz’s homosocial relationship—like Huck and Jim’s—is expressed gesturally, evoking homosexuality through physical, shared signs. The shared signs of “Touch Me” also move beyond Melchior and Moritz. In the original Broadway staging of the song, Melchior briefly grabs and controls Moritz’s arms during the song’s chorus (“Touch me—just like that. / And that—O, yeah—now, that’s heaven” [17] ), gesturing toward sight or enlightenment (guiding Moritz’s hands toward Moritz’s eyes) and the discovery of sexuality. The rest of the song is performed by the whole ensemble individually, choreographed within the limited spaces around and on their own bodies. In Deaf West’s version of the number, however, Georg’s solo and final chorus of the song results in a burst of choreography and shared signs amongst the younger characters. Melchior and Moritz sign together and constantly link hands and arms, and several other cast members also pair up to sign together for the chorus (Wendla and Ernst, Thea and Heidi, and Martha and Anna). This choreography underscores the sexuality of the song’s lyrics and altogether multiplies the sexual connotations of shared signs. That the performers appear here in same-sex and mixed-sex pairs adds further homosocial and bi/homosexual undercurrents to a song literally about sex and sexuality. Although the multiplicity of shared signs here could perhaps suggest something like a sexual orgy, the pairing up of the girls and of characters like Wendla and Ernst also highlights the consequences of repressing the truth about sex and of isolating girls and boys: children will educate each other about sex if their parents refuse to. By accentuating the act of sharing through the physical act of sharing signs, and by drawing sharp attention to how sign language can function in tandem with and across multiple bodies, Deaf West shifts the hearing line towards a d/Deaf production of knowledge and community- and relationship-building. “And Now Our Bodies Are The Guilty Ones”: Deaf Experience & Expression Deaf West’s production further revises the hearing line by prioritizing moments of d/Deaf experience and expression. This includes an emphasis on the body and on touch in particular, calling attention to the importance of physical expression and contact found at the hearing line from a d/Deaf perspective: effective ASL depends on the physicality of the speaker, and physical touch holds particular importance within the formation of Deaf community and interactions. Moreover, the production highlights Deaf modalities of meaning-making, including through language and music. That the production generates instances of d/Deaf sensory experience and expression also contests versions of deafness that, in the past, have been romanticized or demonized—that is, the writing of deaf characters who are either pitied or detested. Similar to nineteenth-century deaf writers who “subvert power arrangements, not to mention concepts of reality and order,” [18] Deaf West thereby rewrites the power dynamics of the hearing line and produces a d/Deaf sensibility and awareness of the world and of music in particular. Further building upon the play’s themes of communication and connection, the production stresses physical touch and sense over sight and language to simulate characters’ need to be close to others and their (blind) desire to feel anything at all. Two “games” take place in which characters are blindfolded, accentuating physicality, sensory deprivation, intensification, and feeling . In the first instance, the students play a version of blind man’s buff with Moritz: depriving him of sight, the students continually circle around him, slapping and smacking various parts of his body, then quickly pulling away before he can catch them. The second game occurs at the top of Act Two, when Melchior and Wendla are blindfolded and play a game of trust, walking on chairs that are continually being set down by the cast, literally trusting the other cast members with their “safety” and feeling their way across the stage to the piano. These blindfold games, in which characters willingly deprive themselves of sight—seemingly the most important element to ASL—address the unspeakable-ness of their lives and underscore the fact that not everything can be verbally or even gesturally communicated between them. Metaphorically, these scenes also depict the teenagers “feeling their way” through life, an irony since they actually do not know what they are doing, despite the adults always being portrayed and thought of as the most ignorant and naïve. [19] These acts of blindfolding, though ironic in a d/Deaf context, maintains focus on the sense of touch found at the heart of Deaf culture. Moreover, the actions limit the usual emphasis on English-centered or hearing-centered modalities and communication. Much like the ASL-centric “silent” scene in which Moritz admits his failure at school to his father, several scenes also show central characters briefly privileging Deaf modalities of meaning-making over English- and hearing-centered ones, or the consequences of the opposite. The scenes also primarily revolve around characters’ desires to “feel something” beyond merely the physical or emotional—that is, to feel something inexpressible through language alone. For instance, during Wendla and Melchior’s beating scene, Wendla continually presses Melchior to beat her with a wooden switch, expressing a longing to feel something (“My entire life. I’ve never . . . felt . . . Anything ”). The actor playing Melchior momentarily foregoes SimCom to sign, “I’ll teach you to say: ‘Please.’” The words are projected for hearing audiences, making this one of Melchior’s two ASL-only lines and adding a disquieting moment to what is already the most harrowing line in the scene. Melchior’s second and only other ASL-only line occurs a few scenes later, right before they have sex, when he signs “forgive me” onto Wendla’s hand; that this too is done in aural silence, with words projected, functions conversely to his line during the beating scene and demonstrates his deep regret for what transpired. Throughout these scenes, Melchior’s use of ASL-only is in the first instance chillingly harsh, but in the second an attempt at compassion, such that his brief but powerful uses of ASL over English perpetuate a complicated sexual politics at the hearing line: Melchior, who exists simultaneously in the hearing and Deaf worlds, exercises his knowledge of sex and ASL both to influence the situation but also to communicate intimately with Wendla, who is primarily read as Deaf although she has a Voice Of partner on stage. Although the act may falsely suggest that language alone can successfully express his raw, complicated emotions, Melchior’s abandoning of English functions as an attempt to communicate fully and intimately with Wendla in ways that no other relationship on stage does. In contrast to Melchior and Wendla’s relationship, a later scene between Ilse and Moritz demonstrates the damaging consequences of unequal communication between d/Deaf and hearing individuals, wherein English and hearing are privileged. While Wendla believes being beaten will allow her to feel something , Moritz believes ending his own life will allow him to feel something different than the despair caused by school and his parents, again a desire inaccessible via language. Ilse unknowingly runs into Moritz as he is searching for his gun and becomes an embodiment of the failures that can be found at the Deaf/hearing divide, specifically in her audist actions. Moritz, too distracted and overwhelmed by his own personal crisis, rejects Ilse’s continued requests (in SimCom) to walk her home, causing Ilse to purposely abandon her use of ASL. She indignantly proclaims in English-only, “You know, by the time you finally wake up, I’ll be lying on some trash heap.” She then removes her wig to reveal her baldness, having recently undergone chemotherapy, before walking offstage. [20] The performative function of removing her wig could, in part, be read as Ilse’s way of trying to stay in control of the situation even beyond her linguistic prerogative, and unlike Melchior’s purposeful abandonment of English with Wendla, Ilse’s actions reimpose the communication gap. The fact that Ilse gives up her position as an ally by discarding the use of ASL not only perpetuates the normative hierarchies of the Deaf/hearing divide and hearing line, but also demonstrates the disheartening consequences of what happens when people cease their attempts to truly communicate and empathize with each other. Momentarily generating a Deaf experience of musical meaning-making, [21] a single ASL-only musical line occurs at the very end of the show, during “The Song of Purple Summer.” These moments highlight for (predominantly hearing) audiences an even wider spectrum of Deaf (multi-)sensory experiences and meaning-making modalities that move beyond sight and speech alone. When Melchior is confronted by the ghosts of Moritz and Wendla, he decides not to kill himself and realizes that they will always be with him; this is musically signified in the repetition of the phrase “Not gone.” However, coupled with ASL, and repeated several times by the ensemble, one phrase omits the singing in favor of the signing; that is, the phrase is signed in ASL but not sung in English. As in Deaf West’s productions of Big River and Pippin , this crucial musical moment is placed towards the show’s finale, displacing hearing audiences from the audist realm but also repositioning them within the Deaf side of musical experience. No longer is music (or meaning) simply about tones and sounds, but it is now instilled with physicality and feeling for both Deaf and hearing audiences. As one final gesture toward the Deaf/hearing divide, the production splits the pairs of characters—deaf and “Voices Of”—from one another, adding dramaturgical intricacy to the deaths of characters. Before Moritz commits suicide, he pushes the Voice of Moritz’s mic down, indicating that he no longer needs an aural voice anymore; the actor playing the Voice of Moritz subsequently walks offstage, and Moritz proceeds to sign his lines without vocal accompaniment, with words projected on the wall. This matches the aural silence of the only other ASL-only scene in the show, the earlier scene between him and his father. The second death occurs when Wendla is taken to get an abortion: in a burst of chaos onstage, one doctor grabs Wendla while another grabs the Voice of Wendla, ushering them offstage in different directions; the shrieking that follows (indicating her pain and subsequent death) comes from Wendla’s side of the wings rather than the Voice of’s. As with Ilse’s earlier abandonment of ASL, Moritz’s voiceless suicide demonstrates an end to his interaction and communication with the (hearing) world, embodied through his voluntary separation from his Voice Of. This is contrasted with the unwanted death of Wendla—brought about by the actions of her mother—which includes the involuntary separation from her Voice Of and subsequent vocalized cries. The varying degrees of d/Deaf expression and experiences performed in the show—of emotions, music, life, and death—symbolize the limitations of spoken language and hearing in partiality of d/Deaf perceptions of the world on stage. In ways that traditional stagings cannot, the production’s d/Deaf lens enhances the meanings and complexities of these themes, characters, and relationships. “And All Shall Know the Wonder”: Reconsidering the Hearing Line Certainly, the integration of ASL in Deaf West’s production opens up the predominantly hearing space of musical theatre, generating a communal space geared towards accessibility and inclusion. Critics and scholars have continually praised Deaf West’s production of Spring Awakening for its groundbreaking ways of addressing issues of inclusion, accessibility, and diversity in theatrical productions, particularly with regard to the intersection of disability activism and the national theatre scene. It brought the first actor in a wheelchair, Ali Stroker, onto the Broadway musical stage, and it was also the first to provide access and innovative interpretation services to deaf-blind theatregoers. Disability Studies scholar Rachel Kolb asserts that the production’s power lies in its ability to reconsider “a question that is increasingly relevant in culture: how to tell stories in more inclusive ways.” [22] But more significantly, the dramaturgical effects of Deaf West’s staging, their artistic use of sign language via shared signs, and the retelling of Spring Awakening through a d/Deaf perspective deliberately rewrites the hearing line. While Krentz’s notion of the hearing line specifically attends to Deaf stories within literature, his ideas certainly extend to the stage, where distinctive worlds can be represented, tested, and played out. The theatrical choices in Spring Awakening thus present, interrogate, and invert the Deaf/hearing dichotomy on-stage, dramatically and dramaturgically, and give audiences a view at the damaging effects of oralism and audism found in the real-world. Rather than suggest that the hearing line itself is a negative factor, Krentz merely notes its existence, arguing that it illuminates the differences that exist between the two worlds. Yet the hearing line does create a hierarchy of difference in reality: the two sides are not equal. Such a difference plays out as a real-world divide in American culture that exists between the Deaf and hearing communities, ideologically affirmed through oralist, audist, and ableist practices and institutions—especially in the case of musical theatre. This emphasized difference and separation has also stigmatized the Deaf community as less than normate bodies, historically “viewed as a physical impairment associated with such disabilities as blindness, cognitive, and motor impairments,” and something to be diagnosed and corrected. [23] Deaf West has made it their mission to trouble the imbalances of the hearing line, not only calling attention to the hearing line itself but also calling it into question and, hopefully, subverting it in the process. In reconsidering the hearing line, ASL/Deaf musical theatre thereby becomes a 21 st century platform on which to bridge the gap between the Deaf and hearing worlds. References [1] Steven Sater, Spring Awakening (New York: Theatre Comminications Group, 2007), act 1 scene 1, Adobe Digital Editions PDF. [2] . This interaction also suggests that ASL is not Bergman’s native language, further signaling the divide between mother and daughter, and adult and teenage characters. [3] . Following Deaf Studies and cultural practice, the use of the lower-case represents the audiological state. The upper-case represents the Deaf community and culture. [4] . Christopher Krentz, Writing Deafness: The Hearing Line in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 2. [5] . Krentz, Writing Deafness, 16. Krentz attributes this space to what Disability/Deaf Studies scholar Lennard J. Davis’s calls literature’s “deafened moment,” wherein “reading and writing are basically silent and visual acts” that produce “a meeting ground of sorts between deaf and hearing people” (Krentz, 16). In the context of Spring Awakening , the stage is “deafened” in a completely different manner: an extremely loud, un-silent space, sanctioning the sharp physicality of rock music and, in so doing, tilting the passive nature of literature toward the active, dynamic nature of musical theatre. [6] . “SimCom,” or Simultaneous Communication, refers to the simultaneous use of sign language and verbal speech by a speaker. Although it seems practical and useful for speakers in a Deaf/hearing space to use SimCom for the benefit of all present, research has shown that the messages produced and received by SimCom are not equivalent—and thus obstructive to communication—because the grammatical structures of both languages are vastly different. Such actions are akin to speaking in one language while writing in another. As such, ASL most often suffers when this practice is used. For more on SimCom, see Stephanie Tevenal and Miako Villanueva, “Are You Getting the Message?: The Effects of SimCom on the Message Received by Deaf, Hard of Hearing, and Hearing Students,” Sign Language Studies 9, no. 39 (2009): 266–286. Also see Ronnie B. Wilbur and Lesa Petersen, “Modality Interactions of Speech and Signing in Simultaneous Communication,” Journal of Speech, Language & Hearing Research 41, no. 1 (1998): 200–12. [7] . Kayla Epstein and Alex Needham, “Spring Awakening on Broadway: Deaf Viewers Give Their Verdict,” The Guardian , 29 October 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/oct/29/spring-awakening-broadway-deaf-viewers-give-verdict . For more on creating an equitable space for d/Deaf audiences, see Brandice Rafus-Brenning, “The Aesthetics of Deaf West Theatre: Balancing the Theatre-Going Experience for Deaf and Hearing Audiences” (Master’s thesis, California State University, Northridge, 2018), 1–29. [8] . Jehanne C. McCullough, “10 Things the Raving Reviews Don’t Tell You About Spring Awakening,” 6 December 2015, https://jehanne.wordpress.com/2015/12/06/10-things-the-raving-reviews-dont-tell-you-about-spring-awakening-2/ . Soon after McCullough’s post was published, The Daily Moth posted a dialogue with McCullough, Deaf West’s Artistic Director DJ Kurs and ASL Master Linda Bove, in which Kurs and Bove explained the intent of the show, including their artistic reasoning behind using SimCom. See The Daily Moth (@TheDailyMoth), “Spring Awakening: Accessibility for Deaf,” Facebook video, 9 December 2015, https://www.facebook.com/TheDailyMoth/posts/464086633793242?__tn__=-R . [9] Sater, Spring Awakening , act 2 scene 6, Adobe Digital Editions PDF. [10] . This action performs the myth that deaf individuals can read lips or can hear better at higher volumes. This misconception is also often generated by the person speaking (or shouting) in a slow, almost childlike way, again calling attention to the hearing line. On Broadway, Brausepulver also verbally emphasized the lines and used the ASL for “fine,” although he did not use ASL for the rest of the scene. [11] . Christian Lewis, “Spring Awakening Is Currently Broadway’s Most Important Show,” Huffington Post , 4 December 2015, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/christian-lewis/spring-awakening-is-curre_b_8721352.html . [12] . Sarah Wilbur, “Gestural Economies and Production Pedagogies in Deaf West’s Spring Awakening .” TDR: The Drama Review 60, no. 2 (2016): 146. [13] . Wilbur, “Gestural Economies and Production Pedagogies,” 148. [14] . Raymond Knapp. “Disabling Privilege, Further Reflections on Deaf West’s Big River,” Studies in Musical Theatre 9, no. 1 (2015): 105–9. [15] Sater, Spring Awakening , act 1 scene 5, Adobe Digital Editions PDF. [16] . Raymond Knapp, “‘Waitin’ for the Light to Shine’: Musicals and Disability,” The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies , ed. Blake Howe et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 828. [17] Sater, Spring Awakening , act 1 scene 4, Adobe Digital Editions PDF. [18] . Krentz, 17. [19] . This is most pronounced by Frank Wedekind’s own description of the original play as “a tragedy of childhood” and his dedication of the work “to parents and teachers.” See Emma Goldman, “Frank Wedekind—The Awakening of Spring,” in The Social Significance of the Modern Drama (The Anarchist Library, 1914), 27 February 2009, https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-the-social-significance-of-the-modern-drama#toc21 . [20] . Notably, this action occurred only during performances at The Wallis. During the production’s Inner City Arts and Broadway runs, Rodriguez completed her lines in SimCom and exited the stage without removing her wig. In an article for Cosmopolitan , Rodriguez shares her experiences during chemotherapy of both wearing wigs and being bald in public, eventually learning to be comfortable with her appearance and regaining her self-confidence. For more on her experience, see Krysta Rodriguez, “What I Learned About Myself From Going Out Bald in Public,” Cosmopolitan , 30 March 2015, available at http://www.cosmopolitan.com/health-fitness/a38428/krysta-rodriguez-cancer-bald-wigs/ . [21] . Numerous scholars working across the fields of music, performance, and Deaf studies have pointed out the multimodal, multi-sensory ways in which d/Deaf people “listen” to music—that is, through a combination of visual, physical, and kinetic sensory encounters and experiences. See Joseph Straus, Extraordinary Measures: Disability in Music (Oxford University Press, 2011); Jessica A. Holmes, “Expert Listening beyond the Limits of Hearing: Music and Deafness,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 70, no. 1 (2017): 171–220; Carol A. Padden and Tom L. Humphries, Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture (Harvard University Press, 1990); and Anabel Maler, “Songs for Hands: Analyzing Interactions of Sign Language and Music,” Music Theory Online 19 (2013). [22] . Rachel Kolb, “‘Spring Awakening’ and the Power of Inclusive Art,” The Atlantic , 18 October 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/10/spring-awakening-and-the-power-of-inclusive-art/411061/ . [23] . Megan A. Jones, “Deafness as Culture: A Psychosocial Perspective,” Disability Studies Quarterly 22, no. 2 (2000), available at http://www.dsq-sds.org/article/view/344/435 . Footnotes About The Author(s) STEPHANIE LIM studies the inclusion of American Sign Language in music and musical theatre performance and the resulting cultural translations/adaptations that occur. She is the Disability Studies Assistant Area Chair for Southwest Popular/American Culture Association (SWPACA), where she is also a Michael K. Schoenecke Leadership Institute Fellow. Publications appear in Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Everything Sondheim, Studies in Musical Theatre, and Popular Culture Studies Journal. Stephanie is a CSU Chancellor’s Doctoral Incentive Program (CDIP) Fellow and teaches undergraduate courses in English and Theatre at California State University, Northridge, where she received her BA and MA in English. She is currently a PhD student in Drama & Theatre at University of California, Irvine. 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 "Ya Got Trouble, My Friend, Right Here": Romanticizing Grifters in American Musical Theatre Troubled Collaboration: Belasco, the Fiskes, and the Society Playwright, Mrs. Burton Harrison Unhappy is the Land that Needs a Hero: The Mark of the Marketplace in Suzan-Lori Parks's Father Comes Home from the Wars, Parts 1-3 Silence, Gesture, and Deaf Identity in Deaf West Theatre's Spring Awakening Contemporary Women Stage Directors: Conversations on Craft. Paulette Marty. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2019; Pp. 292 + viii. Ensemble-Made Chicago: A Guide To Devised Theater. Chloe Johnson and Coya Paz Brownrigg. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2019. Pp. 202. Twenty-First Century American Playwrights. Christopher Bigsby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018; Pp. 228. Encounters on Contested Lands: Indigenous Performances of Sovereignty and Nationhood in Québec; Provocative Eloquence: Theater, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum United States Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Michael P. Jaros Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 1 Visit Journal Homepage Unhappy is the Land that Needs a Hero: The Mark of the Marketplace in Suzan-Lori Parks's Father Comes Home from the Wars, Parts 1-3 Michael P. Jaros By Published on December 10, 2020 Download Article as PDF Appearing within the first iteration of the Black Lives Matter movement and the fraught national conversations over the legacies of the American Civil War, Suzan Lori Parks’s Father Comes Home From the Wars Parts 1-3 is her first full-length play set during that war, focusing specifically on the final period of American chattel slavery and the moment of Emancipation. [1] The work remains timely within a contemporary political environment where both racism and resistance to it are resurgent. It also departs in a number of structural and thematic ways from her previous works for the stage. Scholars have examined Parks’s plays that indirectly explore the period’s contemporary resonances, specifically her two works about black Abraham Lincoln impersonators, The America Play (1994) and Topdog/Underdog (2001), in some detail. [2] Her main characters in those works—The Found ling Father of the America Play and Link and Booth of Topdog/Underdog —both always already exist in the shadow of the Civil War President and signer of the Emancipation Proclamation. The figures they cut are perpetually perceived through Lincoln’s own cut out (which even features as a prop in The America Play ). However, the range of focus of Father Comes Home is considerably broader, indeed epic, in scope, as Parks radically revises Homer’s Odyssey to place it in the Civil-War-Era South. [3] In moving her emphasis off Lincoln or his imitators, a chorus of varied voices takes center-stage. Asked about her play’s topicality at the American Repertory Theatre in 2015, Parks was quick to point out that all her characters’ lives mattered: You know, [the characters in the play] were human. That’s the thing…I would say…that is one of my charges as an artist. And that is the only way that I am interested in, really, addressing what people call the race question…is just that reminding people that my people are people. And under that comes everything.[4] The expansion of focus of one or two persons to people helps contextualize Parks’s comments about the race question and her characters’ humanity: as we witness the existential traumas of enslavement, Parks reminds us that all her staged people are people, not just her hero. In doing so, she addresses a critical need in contemporary representations of slavery to eschew the classic heroic narrative, allowing for a broader structural critique of the systems of valuation and ranking by which slaves were perceived. Parks has her character Smith memorably allude to this idea of marketplace measurement in Part Two of her play: Maybe even with Freedom, that mark, huh, that mark of the marketplace, it will always be on us. And so maybe we will always be twisting and turning ourselves into something that is going to bring the best price. [5] With the staging of Father Comes Home, Parks engages in an ongoing cultural argument about this “mark of the marketplace” in contemporary notions of African American identity. In so doing, she confronts larger structural systems of racism and the current economic system (capitalism) that sustains it. Smith’s quote highlights an issue Parks touched on before in her two Lincoln plays and further refines in Father Comes Home , specifically black participation in this game of self-appraisal, of buying into this idea of the ranking of life. Private Smith’s words about “always twisting and turning our selves into something that is going to bring the best price [my emphasis],” highlights the communal economic trauma of slavery and its resonances in the present for black communities as a whole. Such a collective emphasis helps to resurrect this communal history, ending what Erica Edwards calls an historical “silencing” of the many agents involved in the struggle for freedom in favor of the “implicit valorization of singular, charismatic leadership” [6] which itself “values” certain persons more than others. Existing scholarship on Father Comes Home from the Wars contains little critical examination of the radical implications of her choral characters. Nadine Knight’s examination of notions of home, nostos, and Parks’ reconfiguration of the Homeric epic primarily discusses the protagonist of all three parts, Hero. Similarly, Paula Guerrero provides a deep, sustained reading of Hero’s contradictory nature, fitting him within a larger group of anti-heroic characters appearing in Parks’s oeuvre. However, the Choruses receive less critical attention: they are described as somewhat “homogenized,” and notable in their absence from Part Two of the work. [7] Paul Carter Harrison goes so far as to suggest that the Choruses in fact revert to the worst elements of blackface minstrelsy in an anodyne offering which ultimately amounts to a toned down, less-then-traumatic view of slavery for predominantly white audiences. [8] What I propose to argue here is that Parks’s two Choruses are considerably more radical than previous scholarship has suggested. Two different choral groups appear in her play—a “Chorus of Less than Desirable Slaves” in Part 1 and “The Runaway Slaves” in Part 3—yet the two Choruses are comprised of the same actors. [9] In so naming them, Parks stages the transition from property (in the form of exterior valuation, they are “less than desirable”) to freedom: (they are agents stealing themselves and thus gaining some measure of self-determination as runaways). Their embodiment shifts from being reactionary to radical. Furthermore, Part Two, which includes no Chorus, is a necessary step in this shift in thinking about heroism, capitalism, and valuation that Parts One, Two, and Three collectively undertake. My line of departure involves thinking specifically about Brechtian Epic form, especially as formulated by Liz Diamond’s readings of the gestus and alienation effect. Through a series of performative interventions primarily involving the Choruses, Parks directly equates heroism with marketplace value. Responding to Harrison’s critique that the mythic form and the Choruses make the deprivation of slavery more “palatable,” I argue that Parks’s use of epic form allows the spectator to instead, in Diamond’s words “see and hear [about] it afresh,” [10] and in a way that is not palatable but confrontational. Specifically, we are confronted with the larger, structural implications of slavery on a mass of people when we deemphasize the singular, heroic protagonist, thus giving way to a more substantial criticism of bondage, self-valuation, and the economics of capitalism that sustained the peculiar institution and in turn survive well beyond it. A wealth of scholarship details how the development of the modern system of international capital and slavery were inextricably intertwined, and—along with it—ideas of individual competition and self-valuation. These “proprietorial notions of the self,” as Saidiya Hartman terms them, suffused black life and continued to do so after Emancipation. [11] Edward Baptist argues that the “expansion of slavery and financial capitalism [became] the driving force in an emerging national economic system” in the Antebellum US. Slaves’ financial worth was meticulously calculated via a complex network of valuation established by professional slave traders. [12] This price, as Caitlyn Rosenthal demonstrates, varied directly with “usefulness” on the market. Babies had low value, as did older slaves. Price topped out in the mid-twenties for both men and women. “The prices for enslaved people changed for many reasons,” she remarks, “age, sickness, or health. The acquisition of skill, or changes in the market” but also for disobedience or attempts at escape. [13] Most insidious was the way in which slaves internalized this fiscal language, this “mark of the marketplace,” even using the term “depreciation” do describe their own changes in value when they themselves faced potential sale. [14] Consequently, self-measurement and assessment are part and parcel of her characters’ dialogue in the play. “Mark it” is a constant refrain, which, as Laura Dougherty remarks, is all to close in pronunciation to “market” to be lost on the audience. [15] Opposing this system of competition and individual valuation were forms of collective resistance by a variety of means, especially via performance. After the war, and well into the twentieth century, these arose to combat structural racism and the economic inequalities that accompanied them. As Cedric Robinson describes it in his seminal work Black Marxism, the black radical tradition was borne out of a need to “imaginatively re-create a precedent metaphysic while being subjected to enslavement, racial domination and repression,” and this was most consistently, effectively done via collective action. [16] Fred Moten elaborates that such performances had a radical ability, especially via the improvisation of an ensemble, to cause a momentary “break” in the ideology of bodily commodification which “passes on the material heritage across the divide that separates slavery and ‘freedom.’” [17] The first example he gives of such radical action is in fact a chorus of singers that Frederick Douglas hears shortly after the infamous beating of his Aunt Hester in the Autobiography, a group that challenges, through its vocalized revisions, the violent performance of power that is the master lashing Hester and her screams in response. [18] Parks’s Choruses likewise point towards radical action, towards a break away from the heroic ideals which are all too tied to capitalist notions of individualism, self-valuation, and competition. This is a timely move, as heroic slave narratives remain resilient in contemporary culture. Soyica Diggs Colbert and Robert Patterson reflect on the lack of contemporary critical insight afforded by such traditional narratives. Quentin Tarantino’s 2012 film Django Unchained, which features Jamie Foxx as a black, avenging superhero let loose on southern slaveholders, offers what Colbert terms “unfettered individualism for its male protagonist as a remedy for the burdensome legacy of slavery,” which is at once “a comforting and deceptive remedy.” [19] Similarly, Patterson asserts in his analysis of 12 Years a Slave that protagonist Solomon Northrup’s own narrative, with its heroic idealization of “self-help and individual success” reinforces the dominant order, namely white, Protestant, capitalist notions of rugged self-reliance. Each narrative’s emphasis on the exceptional individual fails to address the “larger pattern of black suffering” of the vast majority of those under the yoke of slavery, as well as slavery’s link to contemporary structural racism and continued black self-appraisal in financial terms. [20] Parks de-centers the original Homeric hero, a character she simply dubs Hero in Parts One and Two, and Ulysses (invoking two white men, both Homer’s protagonist’s Latin name and the name of the leader of the Union armies, Ulysses S. Grant) in Part Three. Despite the hopes of the Chorus and other characters that he is and should remain exceptional, that he should both be measured and valued as such, Hero instead proves to simply be human and unable to personally overcome the ontological negation resulting from his enslavement and its dependent valuation. [21] In the transition from Part One to Three, it is to the Chorus and the secondary characters Homer (his foil) and Penny (his partner) that we must increasingly look to for some collective, future possibility of freedom. A MEASURE OF A MAN From the moment the curtain rises, measurement dominates the dramatic action. Part One, aptly titled A Measure of a Man, opens with the Chorus Leader “measuring the night by holding a hand up to the sky.” [22] This gest by which time is marked recurs throughout the act, and is often accompanied by Parks’s signature “Spells,” in which a character’s name is repeated in the text without being accompanied by any dialogue: Chorus Leader Chorus Leader Chorus Leader Second How much time we got?[23] Spells transpire outside language, and in this case function as a Brechtian gestus of appraisal. The gestus, Diamond remarks, is “a gesture, a word, an action, a tableau by which, separately or in series, the social attitudes encoded in the playtext become visible to the spectator.” The gestus thus “opens [the audience] up to the social ideologies that inform its production.” [24] Here, the social ideology involves measurement, marking, and assessment. Collectively, such gests engender spectatorial alienation from the event at hand. We gain enough aesthetic distance to see a familiar exchange in a new, critical light. In these exchanges, night and the coming day are assessed in slave-time: with the day shall come the end of their pseudo-freedom, the end of their limited, stolen time as people and the beginning of their time as chattel. As Part One proceeded in the ART production, more and more orange light flooded the stage as this inevitable moment of daybreak approached. The ever-approaching day will also bring with it Hero’s decision as to whether he shall follow the Boss-Master to war as his aide-de camp in the Confederate army. If he does so, his master has promised him freedom upon his return. If he refuses, he will have to stay behind and face his punishment, a punishment that all the other characters must also endure. These first few moves set the dramatic tempo of Part One. All the dominant actions of A Measure of a Man involve sizing up, and it is the Chorus, not Hero, that determines the dramatic action. In betting on Hero’s choice, they are monetizing the dramatic stakes of the play, and in so doing are drawing our attention to the fact that we as an audience have done the same thing: we have paid to see this spectacle and also to assess Hero’s choice. As Diamond puts it, these betting and marking gests force the spectator to “engage with her own corporeality” in looking and assessing the black bodies onstage for their respective measures, particularly Hero’s. Harvey Young examines an earlier manifestation of Parks’s use of Choruses in Venus , whose protagonist is Saartjie Baartman, a nineteenth century South African woman who was toured across England and France as “The Venus Hottentot,” due in no small part to white audiences’ obsession with the size of her posterior. That play’s Chorus “continually reminds the audience that the play is about looking at [her],” ensuring that our compassion for her “anchors itself in our own complicity in her spectacularization.” [25] We can only feel sympathy for the protagonist after we objectify her as much as the Chorus does. In Father Comes Home, the Chorus’ need to size up Hero also goes hand in hand with the audience’s, yet what Young terms spectacularization is even more overt: not only is the Chorus betting money themselves on Hero’s actions, but Hero is literally a slave, and his measure in that sense has an exact number (his selling price). They and we are participating in a system that reinforces such financial objectification. Moreover, the Chorus of Father Comes Home exists within the same world as Hero. Whereas in Venus the Chorus often stands outside the dramatic action and comments on it, the Chorus of Less than Desirable Slaves are decidedly within the play and suffer along with Hero, if not more than him. Their shared world of appraisal is reified in the exchange that ensues as the other Chorus members (Third and Fourth) join the first two onstage. The productions at ART and the Public Theatre, both directed by Jo Bonney, reinforced the choral synchronicity by placing the first, second, third, and fourth in a strong line cheating upstage; we see each arriving in turn to imitate the next at measuring the night, and all use the same gest. Though they all admit that the Leader is best at night-measurement, their appraisal of Hero himself is different: Fourth You may be the best at measuring the Night But that don’t make you the best at measuring Men. Third Early risers have their say but we gotta make our own choices on this Each of us gotta make a measure of the man We gotta choose for ourselves (Rest) I got a brass button I might be betting that Hero is– Going to the War.[26] Parks’s “Rests,” another consistent feature in her dramaturgy, afford a slightly more restrained moment of reflection or distancing than the Spell. The above Rest occurs immediately before the Chorus of Less than Desirable Slaves arrange their bets with their varied prized possessions (spoons, buttons, etc). These people, themselves property, are betting their own scant properties, reinforcing the system of exchange, property and assessment—of marking—in which they are themselves caught. The forms of resistance open to the Less than Desirable Slaves are, as Moten notes, “always already embedded in the structure they would escape,” [27] namely these proprietorial notions of the self. Neil Patel’s barren stage-space for the ART production reinforces the structural desolation within which these choices transpire: it is a vast, rust-colored expanse with only a short stump downstage right and a withered tree-trunk stage right of the tiny slave cabin placed center stage. The choice to be—indeed the seeming inevitability of doing so (“we gotta”)—is foregrounded by the Rest, the stage-space within which the betting transpires, and the resulting false implication that there is some sort of real, meaningful “choice” to be made. Alienation allows us to parse out these symbols. Ultimately, their bets and their choices, along with Hero’s, are existentially meaningless in this desolate space: they contribute nothing towards changing their current position of enslavement. Nevertheless hero-betting remains, as Colbert maintained of Django Unchained, “a comforting but deceptive remedy”: “There is a kind of sport to be had,” the Chorus Leader remarks, “In the consideration of someone else’s fate.” [28] This sport is the distraction that the Rest highlights; this pregnant pause troubles the preceding words. In betting on Hero’s decision, the Chorus members avoid confronting their own stark situation as being one without any real choice. Just as betting on the length of the night will not stop the arrival of day, betting on Hero’s choice shall not result in any change in their own condition. Moreover, in so doing they acquiesce to being inscribed as undesirable so that Hero might become individually exceptional. “Prime hands” like Hero were historically set up as an ideal against which all other slaves were assessed vis-à-vis labor performance and (as a result) financial worth. [29] All are caught up in these acts of appraisal, and we are continuously made aware of the contradictions lurking within the heart of these “choices,” as well as our own complicity in spectatorial appraisal. The slave Homer brings the futility of such sport home soon after arriving onstage. Homer shall not bet, he says, because he realizes the choice is meaningless: Homer Ain’t no game, Hero. Cause you shouldn’t be doing neither. Cause you shouldn’t stoop To do neither Cause both choices, Hero, To stay here and work the field To go there and fight in the field Both choices are Nothing more than the same coin Flipped over and over Two sides of the same coin And the coin ain’t even in your pocket.[30] Homer, with his vision of an oscillating coin that is not even Hero’s to spin, breaks in upon the small world within which the Chorus and Hero have lived until this moment. The talk of heroism and the resulting bets are suddenly revealed for what they are: someone else’s stories, stories that don’t apply to the people onstage and will do no one there any good. Each side of the coin means collective suffering: staying means mass-punishment for all the slaves on the plantation, and leaving means helping ensure slavery’s national continuation (by aiding the armies of the Confederacy). The Chorus’ belief in Hero begins to falter immediately after Homer’s monologue. They become more assertive, stepping in and prompting Hero to make some choice. When he initially announces that he shall not go to war, the Chorus steps in to remind him that they shall be punished far worse than he shall be for his choice: Leader That’s right. He’ll beat him hard and He’ll beat us twice as hard. Second For his 10 lashes we’ll get 20. Third For his 20 we’ll get 40. Fourth For his 50 we’ll get 100. Hero I won’t go. I can’t. My heart’s been set against it from the start. Chorus Hero Chorus Hero (Rest) Old Man So you’ll have to harm yourself in some way To take the edge off Boss’ anger.[31] The Chorus must remind Hero that his decisions have trickle-down effects on the bodies of the Less-Than-Desirable Slaves, who are quick to calculate the amplification of punishment that shall be inflicted on them due to their subordinate value to Hero. A series of Spells and a Rest alienate us from the action so that we have space to reflect upon this moment. It is Hero’s adoptive father, the Oldest Old Man, who must prompt him towards an action that takes the others’ fates into account. Hero’s exceptionalism is founded upon a competitive individualism that operates at the collective’s expense. Consequently, he does not take into account the collateral damage that his choice shall inflict on everyone else. Far from Carter’s vision of the Chorus of Less than Desirable Slaves as reanimated blackface minstrels or Guerrero’s reading of the “stereotypical roles” which they serve in the drama, what we witness as they begin to challenge Hero is an assertion of their own, collective identity. Although the first Chorus and the second are not the same , they are composed of the same actors and thus remain corporeally connected. The Runaway Slaves are the embodied successors of the Chorus of Less Than Desirable Slaves, who take these first steps towards agency at the end of Part One. As Moten attests, the improvisation of such ensembles is integral to any comprehension of the black, radical tradition. Such choral questioning forces a “revaluation or reconstruction of value.” [32] The ensemble, deprived of their hero, are forced to improvise. Homer proposes an alternative to this choice-less choice, something the Choral Leader agrees represents a viable “third way”: Freedom, for Homer, cannot be given; it must be taken. Freedom means stealing yourself and taking others with you. The aptly named Homer thus gives voice to one of the central ideas of the entire work: just as much as slavery is collectively endured, Freedom [33] must also be collectively, clandestinely acquired. Hero, however, views such an act as property theft: “A Stolen-Freedom?” he remarks, “That ain’t me.” [34] Running off quite literally means stealing himself and stealing Freedom would deprive him of the central choice he must make as a hero in act one, a choice Homer implies does not really matter. Moreover, stealing one’s self represents a radical exit from the status quo. Since criminality is the “only form of slave agency recognized by law,” Hartman attests, “agency of theft…challenged the figuration of the black captive as devoid of will.” [35] Running off is a radical choice that opens up the possibility of further choices. It becomes a choice that in fact matters. The problematics of Hero’s individualism are reinforced by the last significant development of Part One. Homer reveals to the Chorus that he and Hero had both, previously planned to escape together and that Hero betrayed Homer to the Boss-Master in exchange for an earlier promise of Freedom. Homer’s foot was taken as punishment, and Hero was forced to cut it off himself. Homer’s missing foot, and his limp, remain indelible onstage markers of this legacy of dehumanizing violence, and also of Hero’s failure to act heroically in the face of such terrible choices. Confronted with Hero’s un-heroic actions, the Chorus then makes their own choice, removing Hero’s name from him just as his crucial moment of choice arrives, along with the sun, at the end of the act. Leader And we can’t call you Hero. Penny That’s still his name. Third Maybe we won’t call you anything at all. The Sun Rises Chorus Penny Hero Homer Chorus Second The sun us up. Hero And my need to leave is clear. Not run off, Homer, Although I can see there’s value in it, But it’s not my road. I’ll go trot behind the Master The non-Hero that I am.[36] As the sun rises over the stage, Homer, Penny, and the Chorus’ Spells surround Hero’s, suggesting a shift in the dramatic hierarchy of the scene. We, along with the other figures onstage, await Hero’s response. It is finally the Second who must prompt Hero that the moment of choice has arrived. His resulting decision to leave is decidedly anti-climactic; it is only a default reaction to the revelation of his betrayal of Homer and the larger community. It would be unfeasible, now, for him to stay. In both the Public and ART productions, Hero slowly exits up a vast ramp, which slants down, stage right, across the entire backstage area. This afforded an extremely elaborate entrance for Hero earlier in the work, high above the others, yet it is now all of the Less than Desirable Slaves who escort him up it for his antiheroic exit. The collective mourns the loss of faith in Hero’s heroism, yet we are at once confronted with the stark, impossible nature of the choices put before him within the context of slavery. Parks thus gives the play its tragic resonance, but also opens up the possibility of Homer’s “third way” towards salvation: relinquishing the need for heroes and striking out for Freedom as a group. “The significance of becoming or belonging together in terms other than those defined by one’s status as property, will-less object, and the not-quite human.” Hartman maintains, “should not be underestimated.” [37] Such radical acts are certainly worthy of memorialization, as they transpired against immense historical odds put in place by a system set up to directly oppose communal resistance. The actions the Chorus takes here represent the beginnings of what she terms a “latent political consciousness,” [38] one more radically developed by the Runaway Slaves in Part Three. A BATTLE IN THE WILDERNESS As Part Two: A Battle in the Wilderness, opens, we quickly realize that it contains no Chorus; the choral measurement of a man is replaced by the singular, appraising measure of the white slaveholder. Whereas Parts One and Three Occur in the same locale—”a slave cabin in the middle of nowhere. Far West Texas.”— A Battle in the Wilderness , transpires on the frontier of the war itself, in “a wooded area in the South. Pretty much in the middle of nowhere.” [39] We might well assume that it is here that Hero shall distinguish himself before “coming home from the wars.” The “battle” that is depicted is more existential than actual, however, as the fighting is only heard in the far-off distance; we remain “pretty much” off the historical map, in the middle of nowhere. Just as Hero’s ability to be a hero—with actual choices —was challenged by the Chorus in A Measure of a Man, his ownership of his own self is called into question in A Battle in the Wilderness . He is physically objectified as chattel by the only white character in the play, his master the Colonel, in what Hartman has described as form of “coerced theatricality” associated with the spectacle of the auction block, what she terms the “theatre of the marketplace.” [40] The measurement and bidding of the auction block replaces the measuring of the night and the choral betting on Hero’s choice in Part One. The difference between the two plays’ forms of measurement is minimal; one follows naturally from the other, as the Chorus learned its sport of determining Hero’s measure through the language and the performative conventions of the slave auction. The pull-away from the Chorus in Part Two allows for a sustained focus on such valuation via performance, preparing the way for the complete break from it which the Runaway Slaves accomplish in Part Three. Consequently, the central assessing event of A Battle in the Wilderness is a mock-slave auction. In staging such a spectacle, Parks taps into a macabre form of performance with a long, sordid history, whose primary purpose was to mark black bodies with a marketplace value, as Joseph Roach so memorably shows in his examination of such auctions in Antebellum New Orleans. “The staged exhibition of bodies for the purpose of selling them,” he maintains, “marks those bodies publicly as not possessed of themselves as property.” [41] Moreover, the mark of the marketplace was often applied to black bodies as a performance. Slave auctions became, Roach attests, a popular form of entertainment, even for those not actually participating in the bidding. [42] Those on the auction block were frequently dressed in evening wear and made to promenade, and even dance, before later being stripped down by buyers for the final inspection. In staging such coerced theatricality, Parks again challenges our complicity in an even more stark assessment of Hero’s measure. For Diamond, such alienation allows a way to put that historicity on view, specifically “in a sign system [western commercial theatre] governed by a particular apparatus, usually owned and operated by men for the pleasure of a viewing public whose major wage earners are male.” [43] Although Diamond speaks about the gendered body here, it is equally applicable to the white, masculine appraising view of the theatre of the marketplace, and how its historicity is re-staged in a contemporary commercial theatre viewing black bodies, specifically Hero’s body, onstage. The setup for this performance occurs early on in Part Two as the Colonel converses with his captive, Smith, a mixed-race private in a colored regiment of the Union army who has successfully passed as a white Captain by taking the dead man’s uniform, thereby avoiding death at the hands of the Colonel. Hero, Smith, and the Colonel have become separated from their respective armies in the aftermath of a battle. While Hero is collecting firewood, the Colonel assures his captive that Hero shall not attempt to escape: You might have commanded them but I own them. And because I own them I have an understanding of them that you don’t have and never will. Hero knows his worth to the penny, and, well, the poor thing is honest. Meaning he won’t run off not now not ever. He told me one day: “Master,” he said, “running off, well that would be the same as stealing, he said. [44] Choral watching and assessing are replaced in Part Two by the direct assessment of the white slaveholder. We witness this assessment’s ideological internalization in both Hero and Smith: whether or not one can, or should, steal one’s self—something Hero did in fact refuse to do in Part One—becomes the internal battle in the wilderness of Part Two’s title. Smith is subsequently coerced into visually assessing Hero in a mock, two-part slave auction that the Colonel initiates to follow up on his claim about how well he “understands” Hero, which for the Colonel means Hero’s attachment to his own financial value. The Colonel collateralizes Freedom, something he has already done to Hero at least twice thus far: he promises that if Smith can guess Hero’s actual price, he will free both of them, and Hero may return with Smith to the Union lines. Despite initial protestation, Smith ultimately agrees to participate, as the chances of freeing another man are too hard to pass up. In so doing, however, Smith plays the Colonel’s game and according to his rules; he replaces the Chorus in their measuring game of Part One. The Colonel’s line, “We’ll school him, just for sport,” echoes the Choral Leader’s remark about the “sport to be had” in betting on another’s fate in Part One. Like the Chorus before him, Smith now measures and assesses worth as attached to the black body, a collective, projected “them” that includes his own body. In accepting the wager of freedom and the rules of the game, Hero agrees to be the spectacle and Smith agrees to be the appraising audience. Both play into Hero’s spectacularization, as do we, again, by watching and guessing at his financial measure. The spectator is forced, as Diamond puts it, to “engag[e] with her own temporality. She, too, becomes historicized…her material conditions, her politics, her skin, her desires.” [45] It is impossible for us to avoid considering the material conditions of this spectacle as we sit watching it in the theatre. As the mock-auction begins in the ART production, Hero is made to stand on the downstage stump and be inspected by Smith as if on the auction block. [46] He occupies the center of this stage-image, keenly reinforcing a series of groupings Bonney created in the first play in which the Chorus, Penny, and Homer surround the center-stage Hero, yet now in Part Two Hero is so centered as chattel to be sold. Taking his role as auctioneer, the Colonel describes Hero as “hardworking, trustworthy, [and as] smart but still compliant.” [47] Smith-as-bidder is forced to demean Hero by inspecting the inside of his mouth to make sure he is not getting a bum deal. Ultimately, Smith places Hero’s worth at one thousand dollars, which, we learn, is two hundred too high. Although Smith has been coerced into participating in this act of valuation, it is Hero who must conclude the inspection: the Colonel forces him to name his own price. Despite this act of shame, Hero rebels against the Colonel by remarking that he might, in fact, be worth more now and, if the Confederacy loses the war, he might be worth much more. Smith agrees, calling this “good thinking.” Such self-assessment was historically key to the auction process. If a slave refused to help sell himself for the highest price possible, whipping would ensue. [48] Hero, and to a certain extent Smith, remain incapable of conceiving of their own worth outside of a given fiscal value, even when imagining a post-emancipation future. Hero can rebel only by placing his valuation higher; thinking outside the mark of the marketplace remains impossible. Hero’s rebellion pushes the auction to the edge of the point of no return. The Colonel orders Hero to “undo himself” and stand nude before them for his final inspection. One of the largest Spell-interruptions in the script follows: Colonel Undo yourself Hero. Hero Hero Hero is thinking, no fucking way. Smith Stop. Colonel Undo yourself I said. Smith Stop. Colonel Hero Smith Colonel Colonel Alright. For his sake. We wouldn’t want the Yankee to die of fright. The Colonel approaches Hero and, quickly raising his riding crop, strikes him across the face.[49] Hero steps down from the stump and the Colonel’s control over the performance ends, yet its effects on Hero reverberate through Parks’s silent architecture: the Colonel’s own final Spells frame the two other characters’ experience of whatever transpires there. Parks also gives a rare, authorial reading of what Hero’s long solo Spell entails ( Hero is thinking, no fucking way ), deviating from her earlier suggestion in her essay “Elements of Style,” that directors and actors should interpret a Spell “as they best see fit.” [50] No fucking way, it seems, must this moment be left to chance: Hero’s “undoing himself” would be a point of no return; it is and must remain unstageable. Yet the threat of the Colonel being able to take away any semblance of Hero’s humanity, to reveal him as merely meat, saturates the air. It is just before this “no fucking way” moment becomes real that the Colonel ends the performance, so that the “Yankee,” and the audience, shall not “die of fright.” Yet after this seeming release of performative tension, the mock-auction concludes with one of the only significant onstage acts of violence in all three parts of the play. The threat of physical punishment, torture, or death that guarantees slavery is quickly, tersely realized with the Colonel’s brief movement. [51] The auction block act is powerful enough to cause Smith to momentarily drop his own performance of passing: “you don’t know anything about us,” he remarks to the Colonel, before catching himself and suggesting that “us” means “Yankees.” [52] Seeing Hero on display is all too close to Smith’s own remembered trauma of being sold at auction. Parks deftly demonstrates that this spectacle reinforces how Smith and Hero see each other, the real “us.” The performative residue of the auction act hangs over the two men even after the Colonel leaves the stage to check on the armies’ movements. Left alone, Smith reveals to Hero that he’s really a Private in a Union colored regiment, not a Captain, and therefore a mixed-race, former slave himself. We must quickly reassess our understanding of all that has just transpired. It is implied that Smith gave his own price as his guess for Hero’s worth, as he later tells Hero that he cost around the same price as Hero did when he was last sold. Smith’s estimation of Hero is thus tied to the former’s own perceived fiscal value. Smith, however, goes on to oppose their prices and attendant value with the oft-debated and enigmatic term, “Freedom.” Echoing Homer in Part One, Smith holds out Freedom as something that exists outside of valuation: Smith There’s more to Freedom than I can explain, but believe me it’s like living in Glory. Hero Who will I belong to? Smith You’ll belong to yourself. Hero So when a Patroller comes up to me, when I’m walking down the road to work or to do what-have-you and a Patroller comes up to me and says “Whose Nigger are you Nigger? I’m gonna say, “I belong to myself?” Today I can say, “I belong to the Colonel” Imagining being confronted by a Patroller, Hero holds up his hands. Reminiscent of “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” Hero “I belong to the colonel,” I says now. That’s how come they don’t beat me. But when Freedom comes and they stop me and ask and I say, “I’m on my own. I’m on my own and I own my ownself.” You think the’ll leave me be? Smith I don’t know. Hero Seems like the worth of a Colored man, once he’s made Free, is less than his worth when he’s a slave. Smith Is that how come you don’t run off? Hero Maybe. I’m worth something so me running off would be like stealing. Smith Seems to me like you got a right to steal yourself.[53] In imitating the gesture of “Hands up Don’t Shoot,” Hero’s motion links his own ontological uncertainty (will his life have value in a post-slavery world?) to the modern Black Lives Matter protests. Parks maintains that the move developed organically in rehearsals when the actor playing Hero in the premiere, Sterling K. Brown, made this gesture and Parks recognized its resonance immediately, enough for it to subsequently be published as a stage direction. [54] This recognition certainly transferred to the audience, as was demonstrated in the talkback discussion I attended at the American Repertory Theatre production in 2015. Benton Greene, who played Hero in the ART production, maintained the gesture. “The gestic moment in a sense explains the play,” Diamond asserts, “but it also exceeds the play, opening it to the social and discursive ideologies that inform its production.” [55] Members of the audience remarked that they clearly connected Hero’s gesture to the modern protest movement and certainly felt it made the work resonate in the present moment. [56] Hero’s “hands up” gest directly demonstrates the relationship between his potential plight and the larger, institutional systems that encourage and sustain white hegemony both then and now. Smith’s vision of Freedom prepares the way for Hero’s one truly heroic act. When the Colonel leaves the stage to scout ahead once more, Hero lets Smith go, to atone, he attests, for a “horrible wrong” he has done, namely his previous betrayal of Homer. Before he leaves, however, Smith gives Hero his own Union Private’s coat, which the latter then puts on under his own Confederate coat. Paula Guerrero reads this as another moment of Hero’s embrasure of whiteness, as “his inherited soldier’s clothes come to substitute his body, as the power they imply eclipses his black skin, making it invisible.” [57] Alternatively, I contend that it is a communal act of subversion, a rehearsal for more radical acts of resistance that the Chorus shall undertake collectively in Part Three. [58] The coat gest transpires after each man has shown the other his brand, his literal mark of sale. It is instead a restorative moment of what Hartman terms a “belonging together,” a collectively enacted performance that might “redress and nurture the broken body,[offering] a small measure of relief from the debasements constitutive of one’s condition.” [59] Hero has gotten where he is with Smith, not alone, and their moment of cooperation is commemorated via a subversive, hidden costume-piece that Hero shall carry with him. THE UNION OF MY CONFEDERATE PARTS In the final play, The Union of My Confederate Parts, [60] Parks opposes the collective nature of Freedom with Hero’s tragic lack of recognition of the need for others as he relentlessly clings to his heroic identity, even in the face of its implicit connection to marketplace price in Part Two. Nadine M. Knight writes that throughout the three parts of the play, Parks hews to the line of the original Odyssey inasmuch as “freedom is won through the hero’s self-interest, infidelities and delay and does not apply to others.” [61] Conversely, I suggest that throughout Part Three, Freedom is both sought and potentially earned by the more radical Chorus and the influence they excerpt over Penny and Homer, who ultimately leave with them to steal their own Freedom at the play’s conclusion, leaving Hero behind. In The Union of My Confederate Parts, Parks returns us to the slave cabin “in the middle of nowhere,” but there are marked changes to both the characters who populate the stage and to the context within which their performance transpires. Most significantly, the Chorus of Less Than Desirable Slaves have been sold off, we learn, and are replaced onstage by The Runaway Slaves. The word “Chorus” is dropped from their name, and within their own ranks there is no choral leader, merely three equal figures. They are also played by the same actors. These are the first signs of a more radical shift away from the only nascently assertive Chorus in The Measure of a Man . In Part Three their tone becomes more collective and radical, representing what Douglas Jones, Jr. dubs a “shift from black grief to grievance.” Such collective, choral performances were vital, he notes, in the transition from slavery to freedom in order to create a “collectivist (cultural) politics that positioned the group over the individual.” [62] The Runaway Slaves map this transition in Part Three, consistently challenging Hero’s heroic individualism and winning Penny and Homer to their ranks. Their collective story, and the alliance they forge with Penny and Homer (who ultimately leave with them) forms the spine of Act Three, not Old-Hero’s long-awaited “Return From The Wars” with news not only of the death of the Colonel in the war but also of Lincoln’s far-off signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. The Runaway Slaves’ time, and by extension they themselves, are no longer commoditized within the measure of the Boss-Master’s workday. The Chorus of Less Than Desirable Slaves measured how much darkness was left until sunrise and work, but the Runaway Slaves wait for darkness to arrive so that they can run. No time-measuring gestus therefore exists in Part Three. What matters above all else to the Runaway Slaves is Freedom. Freedom from slavery is not the master’s to grant, but can only be attained with others clandestinely, by stealing one’s self. Moten terms this radical stance “fugitivity,” equating blackness itself with a fugitive state, one which represents “a desire for and a spirit of escape and transgression of the proper and the proposed.” [63] Consequently, the Runaway Slaves do not occupy the same physical or ideological space as Hero. In the ART production they constantly lurk in the stage-shadows, and do not focus stage-images around the erstwhile protagonist, as they did in Part One. As the action of Part Three proceeds, they become the new, collective protagonist; their interactions with Hero consistently challenge his gests of heroic return and the mark of marketplace which informs them. Appearing onstage, Hero remains, despite his encounter with Smith, heroically stuck, unable to relinquish this role and steal himself. Moreover, in choosing his new name, Ulysses, he links himself even more securely to white heroism. The long ramp again affords him his elaborate entrance into Part Three and as soon as he arrives, Ulysses performs a series of homecoming gests for Penny, Homer, and the Runaway Slaves, ones which seem fitting (to him) for a hero who has returned from the war. However, The Runaway Slaves consistently interrupt these performances from the outset, highlighting their staleness as inherited performances, as well as Ulysses’s own lack of awareness about the actual hopes and dreams of the community to which he has returned. He performs the first of these shortly after arriving: Ulysses kneels on the ground. He gets up. He kneels again. Ulysses This is what I seen them do. When they get home. It just follows but it feels right.[64] This onstage, repeated miming of the heroic return of the soldier, which “they do,” invokes its inherited, white origins (both in the Odyssey and in the Civil War itself): This gest demonstrates Ulysses’s own alienation from himself as well as from the community for which he was supposed to be a hero. His separation from the newly forming onstage community is reinforced by his immediate reaction to the Chorus when they interrupt Ulysses’s homecoming gestures by announcing their presence, emerging from the shadows around the center-stage cabin: The Runaway Slaves First : We’ll be gone by nightfall Second : In case you’re wondering Third : We’re good honest people First : Just like you Ulysses We can’t help you but much[65] Deprived of the Less than Desirable Slaves, for whom he has brought gifts, Ulysses has lost a great portion of the intended audience for his heroic return. “Just like you” implies an equality Ulysses is reluctant to acknowledge. The Chorus splits the lines into their constituent parts, each in turn interrupting Ulysses’s performance. Moreover, “good” and “honest” replace heroic deeds here as merits. Such “ordinary virtues” were part and parcel of the sort of caretaking that went on as bloodlines were continuously broken and remade on antebellum plantations. “Kindness,” remarks Baptist, led slaves to “create families of all sorts, and to care for them, feed them, and teach them.” [66] Far from merely bringing superficial gifts, the Runaway slaves bring fugitivity, this desire for freedom outside the given rules of the stage-world. They are teaching Homer to write, one of great illegalities under slavery, and they will go on to convince Penny to “break the chain” binding her to Ulysses and leave with them. Ulysses’s oppositional gests continue as he gives Homer his gift, a white alabaster shoe-last [67] to somehow replace his missing foot. Ulysses found the shoe-last in a burnt-out store and he assures Homer that it is expensive: Ulysses Homer, this here’s for you From his satchel, he pulls out a foot, more like a shoe last, made of white alabaster. Homer A foot. The Runaway Slaves First : not dark enough Third : not yet Second : Not dark enough to jet.[68] The Runaway Slaves again interrupt, cutting into Ulysses’s gift-giving performance and underlining its absurd shortfall. They in fact repeat to Homer a refrain that was his own earlier in the scene (“it’s not dark enough yet/to jet”), again inciting him to be true to their shared convictions to escape. “It’s not dark enough” becomes a double entendre that cements the collective defiance of Ulysses’s white heroism. Since the alabaster shoe last is “expensive,” Homer is supposed to be happy with the white foot. Ulysses is blind to this disparity, expressing genuine surprise when Homer is not thrilled with this token gesture, clearly meant to assuage Ulysses’s personal guilt. “It’s not dark enough” refers not only to the foot itself, but also to the fading light of the day and its potential for transgression, for fugitivity, one in which Homer himself is becoming keenly invested. The Runaway Slaves, Penny, and Homer are in fact in the midst of forming a collective that is “dark enough” to escape to Freedom; they are giving a value to blackness outside of its marketplace price. They begin to articulate a fugitive culture that is what both Hartman and Jones term oppositional, “a culture [which] resists dominant ideologies, values, and action,” [69] here most specifically an individualism associated with capitalist valuation. “Dark enough/to jet” suggests that blackness may soon become radically black (jet), which will allow the Runaway Slaves (along with Homer and Penny) to steal themselves together. Ulysses’s desire to be a hero ultimately ensures his own tragic downfall. He cannot escape the equation of the hero with value, and, this idea of value insidiously affects how he sees his fellow slaves, including even Penny. Following his “heroic” gests, Ulysses prepares to read a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation which he has brought with him when he suddenly “ decides to discuss another matter instead. ” He announces after a Spell and a Rest that he has “brought something home for [himself]” [my emphasis]. [70] This “something” is in fact his new wife, Alberta. [71] He explains to Penny that he decided to marry someone else since they could not have children (he assumes it is her issue and is unaware that Penny has in fact become pregnant with Homer’s child in his absence). He even suggests that Penny might stay behind to help Alberta tend the house; the gift he has brought for Penny is, quite bluntly, a gardening spade. This misogynistic, dehumanizing vision of Alberta as a gift, as “something” for himself, specifically a thing that might allow him to sire children, and — together with Penny and her new spade — work his little piece of land, is alarmingly close to the Boss-Master’s own views of slaves as interchangeable property, as marketplace flesh to be bred. Moreover, as Paula Guerrero points out, he even withholds telling the slaves about their own proclaimed freedom to discuss a personal matter. [72] Despite his encounter with Smith and his momentary consideration of the radical stance of “belonging together,” he decides, ultimately, to remain a hero. As Penny retreats into the tiny cabin, the Runaway Slaves once more intervene. Moving out of the shadows, they come into the full lights of the scene as night begins to fall over the stage and the stage-light turns increasingly blue: Third : Inside, Penny makes up the marriage bed And in doing so she takes her place in a long line of the Wronged Come out of the house, true wife, true love, Second : Come with us First : Come with us Third : Come break the chain. (Rest) First : I wish it was dark enough Third : I wish it was dark enough Second : Dark enough to jet. First, second and third : Not yet Not yet Not yet Not yet. Homer It will be soon.[73] It is precisely this “collectivist yearning for liberation” remarks Jones, that directly “fueled black resistance to enslavement” [74] The Chorus implores Penny to break the long chain of inherited wrong and Homer, hearing his own refrain once more, provides a resounding affirmative that it is almost time to do so, ending the choral ode. [75] The messianic future tense of the ultimate line brings the ode into our own time, where it is still not “dark enough” but “will be soon.” We, too, are being asked to imagine a world otherwise. It is Penny, upon returning, who makes the final, resounding choice of the act, permanently rejecting the passive role of the original Penelope: she leaves Ulysses behind to head north with Homer and the Runaway Slaves. Ulysses has come home from the wars, but no audience remains, save his talking dog, for his heroism. Moreover, his first act of Freedom is to bury his former master, who never actually freed him. His plight remains resolutely tragic, and his tragic choice amounts to refusing to renounce his perceived exceptionalism. Yet even Ulysses ultimately retains a trace of this collectivity and the moment he shared with Smith in Part Two: he keeps Smith’s coat. This “truth” is the war-story Ulysses may one day tell his children, the truth of how he came to possess the coat, and it shall perhaps be a story about his one actually heroic act, which involved solidarity with another former slave. [76] Parks employs a series of strategic, gestic performances across all three parts of Father Comes Home from The Wars : all her characters are marked by the marketplace, and we witness performances that both reinforce that marking but also those which demonstrate collective, performed resistance to it. “The black radical imagination,” Robin Kelley remarks, “is a collective imagination…it is fundamentally a product of struggle, of victories and losses, crises and openings, and endless conversations circulating in a shared environment.” [77] Father Comes Home from The Wars consistently confronts its audience with these crises, but also points towards openings, towards a potential for transcendence: one may, in fact, steal one’s self and run with others, embracing fugitivity and a radical, collective improvisation in the face of the pervasive mark of the marketplace. One may also simply wear another man’s coat to remind one’s self of Freedom and its possibilities. We are forced to consider both choices. Parks’s use of her own, revised Epic form allows for a broad cultural critique about how the mark of the marketplace and its lasting legacies dehumanize all of her characters. If we need heroes to resolve the action, this says a lot about both the past and present state of things. “The heart of the thing won’t change easy or quick,” [78] as Private Smith opines, but Parks provides a space for fugitivity, allowing the audience space within the shared environment of the theatre to question the mark of the marketplace’s enduring legacies, perhaps engendering a radical blackness that is “dark enough” to destabilize them References [1] Several short plays in 365 Days/365 Plays do address the Civil War and its contemporaneity. Suzan-Lori Parks, 365 Days/365 Plays (New York: TCG, 2006). The genesis of Father Comes Home actually began with 365 Days/ 365 Plays , which features eleven different works with the title “Father Comes Home from the Wars.” Each features a series of fathers returning from various wars. The premiere production of Father Comes Home took place at the Public Theater in New York on 28 October 2014. The design and production personnel then transferred to the American Repertory Theater at Harvard, with a predominantly new cast. This was the production which I saw myself in Feb. 2015. Subsequently, it has been performed at various professional and non-professional venues both in the United States and abroad. [2] Many scholars have discussed both Lincoln works. See especially the chapter “Resurrecting Lincoln: The America Play and Topdog/Underdog in Deborah Geis, Suzan Lori Parks (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008): 97-125; Verna Foster, ““Suzan-Lori Park’s Staging of the Lincoln Myth in The America Play and Topdog/Underdog,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 17, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 24-35. Works that discuss the two plays in tandem tend to focus primarily on the figure of Lincoln as opposed to the broader historical context of which he is a part. [3] Parks has remarked that the play will have a total of nine parts; the other two sections shall transpire during other wars. Suzan-Lori Parks, “The ART of Human Rights with Suzan-Lori Parks,” American Repertory Theatre, 18 February 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmB3fJRAroo . Harvard University streamed this talkback session after the play, which I also attended. [4] Parks, “ART of Human Rights.” [5] Suzan-Lori Parks, Father Comes Home from the Wars, Parts 1,2 and 3 (New York: TCG, 2015), 98. [6] Erica R. Edwards, Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2012), 20-21. [7] Paula Guerrero, “Reformulating Freedom: Slavery, Alienation and Ambivalence in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3 ) , ” Ex-Centric Narratives: Journal of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Media, no. 2, (2018): 46. [8] Paul Carter Harrison, “Suzan-Lori Parks’s Father Comes Home from the Wars: An Arrested Development , ” Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire 15, no 2 (Fall 2015): 33. [9] In Part three there are only three choral members and no leader. At least in the Public Theater and American Repertory Theatre productions, in part 3 the fourth choral member instead plays Hero’s talking, cross-eyed dog, Odd-See. [10] Elin Diamond, “Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory: Towards a Gestic Feminist Criticism,” TDR 17, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 84. [11] Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 6. [12] Edward Baptist, The Half has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 33, 245. [13] Cailtyn Rosenthal, Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 126. [14] Rosenthal, 135. [15] Laura Dougherty, “ Father Comes Home from the Wars, by Suzan-Lori Parks,” Theatre Journal 67, no. 3 (Oct. 2015): 562. [16] Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 309. [17] Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2003), 6. [18] Moten, In the Break, 21. [19] Soyica Diggs Colbert, Black Movements. Performance and Cultural Politics (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017 ), 2. [20] Robert Patterson, ““12 Years a What? Slavery, Representation and Black Cultural Politics in 12 Years a Slave, ” The Psychic Hold of Slavery: Legacies in American Expressive Culture (Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 24-25. [21] Hartman writes: “what are the constituents of agency when one’s social condition is defined by negation and personhood refigured in the fetishized and fungible terms of object or property?” Scenes of Subjection, 52. [22] Parks, Father Comes Home, 5. [23] Parks, Father Comes Home, 5. The character names are in bold in the original script. [24] Diamond, 90. [25] Harvey Young, “Choral Compassion: In the Blood and Venus, ” Suzan-Lori Parks: A Casebook, ed. Kevin J Wetmore and Alycia Smith-Howard (New York, NY: Routledge, 2007): 41,44. [26] Parks, Father Comes Home, 10. [27] Moten, In the Break, 2. [28] Parks, Father Comes Home, 11. [29] Rosenthal 144. [30] Parks, Father Comes Home, 42. [31] Parks, Father Comes Home , 34. [32] Moten, In the Break, 89, 21. [33] To emphasize its importance, Parks consistently capitalizes Freedom in her text, so I am following that style in this essay. [34] Parks, Father Comes Home, 47. [35] Hartman, 69. [36] Parks, Father Comes Home, 51. [37] Hartman, 59, 61. [38] Hartman, 48. [39] Parks may be referencing the historical battle in fact called the Battle of the Wilderness , which was fought between Union and Confederate forces from 5-7 May 1864, and was inconclusive in its outcome. [40] Hartman, 37. [41] Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 211. [42] Roach, 215. [43] Diamond 89. Douglas Jones Jr. also elaborates on this theatre of the marketplace, which he calls the “shared communion in the rites of the slave market – the looking, stripping, touching, bantering and evaluating [in which] white men confirmed their commonality with the other men with whom they inspected the slaves.” Douglas Jones, Jr, “Slavery and the Design of the African-American Theatre,” The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre (Cambridge: UK, Cambridge University Press, 2013), 20. [44] Parks, Father Comes Home , 67. [45] Diamond, 90. [46] This was the same stump upon which Hero’s own foot was almost cut off in Part One of the ART production, to “take the edge off Boss’ Anger” when Hero at least initially decides he shall not go to the war. We can only assume it was also the stump upon which Homer’s own foot was cut off by Hero earlier. [47] Parks, Father Comes Home, 75. [48] Hartman, 38. She quotes L.M. Mills, a former slave: “when a negro was put on the block he and to help sell himself by telling what he could do. If he refused to sell himself and acted sullen, he was sure to be stripped and given thirty lashes.” [49] Parks, Father Comes Home , 79-80. [50] Parks, “Elements of Style,” 16. [51] Parks refusal to stage such violence on a larger scale is tactical. “If the scene of the beating readily lends itself to an identification with the enslaved, notes Hartman about Douglas’ description of the beating of Aunt Hester in the Narrative, “it does so at the risk of fixing and naturalizing this condition of pained embodiment,” 20. Parks distances us from the shallow empathy of seeing Hero stripped and beaten in favor of a more complex engagement with the material conditions of slavery. Additionally, Edward Baptist remarks that the slave auction was designed to “destroy the façade of negotiation with the enslaved and established a community of right-handed power,” 98. The Colonel’s brief, violent action helps to shatter this façade. [52] Parks, Father Comes Home, 80. [53] Parks, Father Comes Home, 96. [54] Michelle Norris, “Suzan-Lori Parks’ New Play, ‘Father Comes Home from the Wars,’” NPR, 5 Dec 2014, www.npr.org . www.npr.org/2014/12/05/368640540/suzan-lori-parks-new-play-father-comes-home-from-the-wars . [55] Diamond, 90. [56] Parks, “ART of Human Rights.” [57] Guerrero, 52. [58] Parks frequently employs such subversions within more monumental versions of white history. Perhaps the most well-known is the blonde beard the Foundling Father introduces into his portrayal of Abraham Lincoln in The America Play , as “his fancy.” Parks, The America Play and Other Works (New York: TCG, 1994), 163 [59] Hartman, 61. [60] The title references Parks union of the varied strands of her play together, specifically the anticipated reunion of Penny and Hero (akin to Penelope and Odysseus/Ulysses in the Odyssey ), as well as the reunion of the country at the war’s conclusion. [61] Nadine M. Knight, “Penelope Gone to the War: The Violence of Home in Neverhome and Father Comes Home from the Wars, New Voices in Classical Reception Studies , no. 11 (2016): 37. [62] Jones, 25. [63] Moten, Stolen Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 131. [64] Parks, Father Comes Home, 141. [65] Parks, Father Comes Home, 143. [66] Baptist, 282. [67] a shoe-last is a foot mold used in making and repairing shoes. [68] Parks, Father Comes Home , 145. [69] Jones, 23. [70] Parks, Father Comes Home, 146-147. [71] Parks reminded the audience during a talkback at the American Repertory Theatre that Troy, the protagonist of August Wilson’s landmark 1985 play Fences , had a mistress named Alberta. Parks picked the name Alberta as Ulysses’ new wife without immediately realizing what she had done, but quickly ascertained that her own protagonist and his plight were “so woven into the groundwater of [her] personal cultural experience,” that the name and the associations it might call to mind in the audience had to stay. Parks, “The ART of Human Rights.”. Also a victim of historical circumstance, Troy never got to play baseball in the major leagues due to the color line. His own fall echoes Ulysses’s, as a series of choices he makes to play within the system as it is, but also to play selfishly, alienates him from his own family. [72] Guerrero, 52. [73] Parks, Father Comes Home, 152. [74] Jones, 20. [75] Edward Baptist speaks to the choral power of work-songs to literally save slaves from death by despair. Lucy Thurston remarked eighty years after her enslavement that when she was considering dropping down and dying, when “she could not bring herself to go on living by herself,“ her fellow slaves begin singing to her in a chorus. “I got happy,” she remarked, “and sang with the rest,” 147. [76] Parks remarked in the talkback that the idea for the play had begun with Hero possessing the two coats. She then wrote backwards to determine how he came by them. “ART of Human Rights.” [77] Robin Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon, 2002), 150. [78] Parks, Father Comes Home, 98. Footnotes About The Author(s) DR. MICHAEL JAROS is Associate Professor of English at Salem State University in Salem, Massachusetts, where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in dramatic literature. His research and publications focus primarily on Irish culture and performance in the 20th and 21st centuries, as well as contemporary American drama. He holds a PhD from The University of California, San Diego. 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 "Ya Got Trouble, My Friend, Right Here": Romanticizing Grifters in American Musical Theatre Troubled Collaboration: Belasco, the Fiskes, and the Society Playwright, Mrs. Burton Harrison Unhappy is the Land that Needs a Hero: The Mark of the Marketplace in Suzan-Lori Parks's Father Comes Home from the Wars, Parts 1-3 Silence, Gesture, and Deaf Identity in Deaf West Theatre's Spring Awakening Contemporary Women Stage Directors: Conversations on Craft. Paulette Marty. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2019; Pp. 292 + viii. Ensemble-Made Chicago: A Guide To Devised Theater. Chloe Johnson and Coya Paz Brownrigg. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2019. Pp. 202. Twenty-First Century American Playwrights. Christopher Bigsby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018; Pp. 228. Encounters on Contested Lands: Indigenous Performances of Sovereignty and Nationhood in Québec; Provocative Eloquence: Theater, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum United States Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Maureen McDonnell Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 2 Visit Journal Homepage Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home: Activism and the Advertising of a "Lesbian Suicide Musical" Maureen McDonnell By Published on January 28, 2019 Download Article as PDF Alison Bechdel offered a complicated and compelling memoir in her graphic novel Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006), adapted by Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori into the Broadway musical Fun Home (2015). Both works presented an adult Bechdel reflecting on her father’s troubled life as a closeted gay man and his possible death by suicide. As Bechdel herself noted, “it’s not like a happy story, it’s not something that you would celebrate or be proud of.” [1] Bechdel’s coining of “tragicomic” as her book’s genre highlights its fraught narrative and its visual format indebted to “comics” rather than to comedy. Bechdel’s bleak overview of her father’s life and death served as a backdrop for a production that posited truthfulness as life-affirming and as a means of survival. Fun Home ’s marketers, however, imagined that being forthright about the production’s contents and its masculine lesbian protagonist would threaten the show’s entertainment and economic potential. It was noted before the show opened that “the promotional text for the show downplays the queer aspects,” a restriction that was by design. [2] According to Tom Greenwald, Fun Home ’s chief marketing strategist and the production’s strategy officer, the main advertising objective was to “make sure that it’s never ever associated specifically with the ‘plot or subject matter.’” Instead, the marketing team decided to frame the musical as a relatable story of a family “like yours.” [3] The marketers assumed that would-be playgoers would be uninterested in this tragic hero/ine if her sexuality were known. Ticket buyers who perceived the lesbian protagonist’s sexuality as a barrier to their “recognition of [her] humanity” risked not experiencing the subsequent ethical empathy that tragedy might elicit. [4] In the marketers’ efforts to circumvent the lesbophobia and taboos against suicide they imagined would-be playgoers might hold, they became complicit in such prejudices. As the production was met with commercial and critical success, a “both/and” marketing approach surfaced: that the production was both timeless and timely, with the production newly presented as a vehicle for affirming emerging legal gains for LGBTQ+ rights generally, and marriage equality in particular. This rising sensibility that lesbian characters and culture were commodifiable might justify future shifts from Broadway’s systematic exclusion of lesbian characters, even if for mercenary, capitalistic reasons. The creative team voiced their support of lesbians and their rights throughout the run, a departure from the endorsed narrative of Greenwald’s company. The producers began to echo the creative artists’ advocacy after two nearly simultaneous events: the production’s anniversary of winning five Tony Awards and the Orlando mass shooting as the deadliest incident of violence against LGBTQ+ people in US history. The producers’ commentary swerved in June 2016 when they began championing both the production and the communities it represented, albeit a year after the show’s critical reception was secure. These evolving campaigns suggest the vulnerability of productions that feature female actors playing sexual minorities and gender non-conforming characters. By featuring a butch lesbian as its lead, Fun Home was culturally revolutionary, providing a cultural—and commercial—landmark for mainstream musical theater. The musical featured three different actors performing the characters of Alison Bechdel: “small” Alison at 8, “medium” Alison at 19, and Alison at 43. The categorizations emphasized the characters’ visual differences (e.g. “small” versus “youngest”), in keeping with what may be a cartoonist’s default parameters. The adult Bechdel character served as a narrator, drawing at an artist’s table as she observed and commented on the memories enacted by her younger counterparts. An early line of Alison’s summarizes the plot: “Caption: Dad and I both grew up in the same small Pennsylvania town. And he was gay, and I was gay, and he killed himself, and I became a lesbian cartoonist” (“Welcome to Our House on Maple Avenue”). [5] This expository line frontloaded the musical’s conclusion within the first eleven minutes of performance. [6] The musical’s disclosure was strikingly more efficient than that of the marketing team. It was only after Fun Home opened that Tom Greenwald revealed that the “marketing team jokingly referred to [the play] as a ‘lesbian suicide musical.’” [7] This inaccurate characterization invited misdirection of a familiar type. [8] Despite a long cultural history that presents lesbians as necessarily isolated, doomed, and suicidal, this production challenged those tropes by presenting a lesbian protagonist who survives the dramatic action. [9] This theatrical and biographical outcome indicates the political dimensions of Fun Home ’s tragedy, as its lack of an abject lesbian underscores that the tragic lesbian figure is conjured and constructed rather than fixed and innate. The team’s “joke” not only reinforced a stereotypical narrative about lesbian death, but also suggested that they saw the narrative arc of Bruce Bechdel (Alison Bechdel’s father) upstaging that of his daughter (it is Bruce who dies by suicide in the musical). Despite the decentering and misrepresentation of Alison Bechdel’s character, playgoers would have been able to easily learn that this dramatic protagonist’s real-life counterpart helped shape this creative narrative rather than becoming a victim of it. The marketing team’s omission of Alison Bechdel from the promotional campaign was perhaps motivated by their desire to make the show more broadly appealing to investors by erasing her sexuality and survival. Such concerns about financial solvency reflected the financial structure of 21 st century Broadway productions, a time in which corporate interests frequently override artistic innovation. [10] Theater scholar Steven Adler writes of this trend, noting that production often depended upon partnerships, sometimes with the powerful real estate moguls who owned the theaters, [which] provided the best means of mounting shows. Corporations, with extensive financial and marketing resources, recognized fertile territory in the hardscrabble of midtown Manhattan and joined the fray. A Broadway presence might bolster the corporate brand, as with Disney. [11] Disney-authorized productions are sometimes called “McMusicals” (a term that emphasizes the production’s consumability) or “technomusicals,” which theater director and scholar John Bush Jones describes as “a phenomenon . . . driven by visual spectacle” and “engender[ing] little or no thinking at all.” [12] Such spectacles are often mined from popular movies and books whose familiarity allows productions to draw upon already established fan bases. American musical scholar Elizabeth Wollman points out that these moments of: synergy allow[] a company to sell itself along with any product it hawks. The Broadway version of Beauty and the Beast , for example, can be mentioned in Disney films and television shows, or advertised on Disney-owned radio stations. Disney musicals can also serve as advertisements for one another.[13] Wollman notes that “shows with corporate backing can now be hyped internationally in myriad ways long before a theatrical property begins its run,” a factor that contributes to Broadway functioning as a “global crossroads, populated by transnational corporations catering to tourists.” [14] Given that only one in five Broadway shows recoup their initial investment, derivative productions and revivals included, the marketing campaign reflects both the financial precariousness of theater generally and reticence about Fun Home ’s cultural content specifically. Investor caution is especially warranted with musicals, particularly if they are new. Commercial houses rarely undertake such efforts. Instead, creative teams who wish to develop those works mostly rely on non-profit theaters whose educational and artistic missions state their willingness to sustain financial loss. Such collaborations can be contentious, as revealed by Ars Nova’s decision to file suit for breach of contract over their billing after their production Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 transferred to Broadway in 2016, or result in a commercial juggernaut like Hamilton. [15] Fun Home ’s move from the Public Theater to Broadway was underwritten by three primary producers, Kristen Caskey, Barbara Whitman, and Mike Isaacson. In an interview published shortly after their investment was recouped, the producers provided a thumbnail sketch of the skepticism people held towards the production: “They said we were insane to do this,” said Mike Isaacson. “Really? You’re bringing that to Broadway?” recalled Barbara Whitman. “I think crazy was the word we heard most,” said Kristin Caskey.[16] Admittedly, the producers’ diction may have been only unintentionally ableist. But such comments problematically echoed the disproven historical notion that people who were sexual minorities were mentally ill, another suggestion of discomfort about Fun Home ’s treatment of sexuality from people outside of the creative team. [17] Such stereotypical conflation of “insanity” and lesbianism re-produced the specter of the tragic lesbian the producers attempted to discard. Frank disclosures aren’t the only way lesbianism surfaces within Broadway musicals. Musical theater scholar Stacy Wolf’s generative work invites playgoers to deploy “a spectatorial/auditorial ‘lesbian’ position that is not essentialist but rather performative: any willing, willful spectator may embody such a position of lesbian spectatorship” which can “lesbianize” the text. [18] Fun Home extends itself beyond presenting a “hypothetical lesbian heroine” because its protagonist’s sexuality is not solely dependent on viewers decoding subtext or deploying Wolf’s rhetorical techniques but is additionally affirmed by depicting the character Alison’s queer childhood and subsequent coming out. [19] Moreover, Fun Home offers an androcentric lead, a break from Broadway’s dominant tradition. Fun Home ’s departure from highlighting feminine lesbians risks what literature scholar Ann M. Ciasullo cautions against: dehumanizing the butch lesbian who is imagined as “too dangerous, too loaded a figure to be represented.” [20] However, one of the chief innovations of Fun Home was its butch lesbian lead. Instead of functioning as a surrogate or scapegoat, the theatrical Alisons’ desires “lead the way to a different future” rather than “fasten[ing]” lesbians “to the image of the past.” [21] This theatrical breakthrough appears nowhere in the advertising campaign. In their attempts to de-lesbianize the production, the marketers buried both the lede and the lead. There have been other musicals that prominently include identifiable lesbian characters, although that misrepresentation is often uneven at best and sometimes presents lesbian characters whose sole function seems to be as “the object of the show’s most unsavory jokes.” [22] Lisa Kron, the lyricist and book writer for Fun Home , revealed her response to what she saw as a trend: “there was a moment where someone would say the word lesbian as a non sequitur because it was funny. I’d be so on board, and then I’d be slapped in the face by it. It was just like, This character’s a joke. This is not a person .” [23] Within the production, actor Beth Malone navigated this pitfall when delivering adult Alison’s line that someone she saw briefly as a child was “an old-school butch.” Malone explained her delivery of this line and her efforts to recuperate that term as follows: When I say the word “butch,” I say it with the color of, like I’m saying the word supermodel. Because from my lens, the word butch is the most beautiful adjective I can come up with. “Oh my God, she was an old-school butch !” Like satisfying words coming out of your mouth. Still, it gets titters because the word “butch” is a punch line. For every other show that has ever existed, “butch” and “dyke” have been a punch line for the end of a gay man’s joke. So now we are taking that word, like the word queer, we’re owning it and saying, butch is a beautiful thing.[24] In Malone’s account, her artistic and activist sensibilities converged in playing this role. Such moments are bolstered because Fun Home featured a number of queer characters who are not solely defined by their orientation or gender identity, and whose presence is important for the plot. [25] Although these features were present in other productions, the non-existent track record for butch-centered musicals indicates an asymmetrical Broadway history characterized by sexism and lesbophobia. If we compare Fun Home with another contemporary musical with an LGBTQ+ lead character, Kinky Boots is an apt choice. Based on a 2005 film inspired by true events, Kinky Boots took thirty weeks to recoup its $13.5 million investment, roughly the same timeline as Fun Home (which had lower ticket prices). [26] Kinky Boots had a fuller theatrical tradition than Fun Home to draw upon: male actors inherit a variety of gendered performance traditions, theatrical practices that are increasingly familiar to and co-opted by straight playgoers. [27] Gay male leads and gender non-conforming characters played by male actors are not new features of musicals. (Consider this partial history: Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Rent, Kiss of the Spider Woman, La Cage Aux Folles, Falsettos, A Chorus Line, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Avenue Q, Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Spring Awakening, and Cabaret .) Stacy Wolf usefully points out a key difference between this theatrical tradition and the one women inherit, noting that “the visibility of white gay men’s alliance with musicals stems in part from capital (cultural and real) and the general visibility of a relatively identifiable affluent, urban, white, gay male culture.” [28] This disparity in capital was indicated in material ways by Fun Home ’s relatively small cast of nine, orchestra of seven, and slim advertising budget, all of which kept production costs low. Kinky Boots ’ cast was more than three times the size of Fun Home ’s, and had an orchestra of thirteen musicians. The diverging cultural capital of gay men and lesbians also surfaced in the showcasing of the titular “kinky boots” in that production’s poster campaign, and the cloaking of Bechdel’s experience within that of Fun Home , whose posters evoked the colors of the 1970s in color values too deep to invoke a rainbow flag. [29] The advertisements for Kinky Boots flaunted sexual and gender transgressiveness whereas Fun Home ’s marketers closeted their characters. Fun Home ’s marketing team was not alone in minimizing its connection with underrepresented groups outside of Broadway’s cultural mainstream. For instance, Hamilton ’s producers deliberately distanced Hamilton from the hip hop music and culture that influenced Lin-Manuel Miranda’s show, a redirection that included a name change of the show itself from Hamilton Mixtape despite his earlier hit In the Heights . [30] (Bechdel’s book title, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic , was also abridged.) Such concerns about a production’s broad appeal surface in Fun Home ’s production history, as seen in one critic’s question: “Is America ready for a musical about a middle-aged, butch lesbian?” [31] This hesitancy was echoed by the creative team and by Bechdel, who drily noted that “Lesbians are inherently uncommodifiable. . . . It’s a gift.” [32] Bechdel, in her suggestion that being imagined as uncommodifiable offers lesbians a way to resist being dehumanized, echoes the precise concern of Fun Home ’s marketers. In other words, Bechdel doesn’t realize how right the marketers imagined her to be: she hits a nerve along with her punchline. Lisa Kron discussed this concern after the musical won the 2015 Tony Award: We were constantly having to rewrite the assumed narrative, which was that this was not commercially viable. Because it’s a serious piece of work. You know, it’s not a pure entertainment, even though it is very entertaining. Because it was written by women, because it not only focuses on women characters but lesbian characters and more than that has a butch lesbian protagonist.[33] Kron clearly states her diagnosis of people’s reticence about the show’s viability: misogyny and lesbophobia, particularly towards masculine lesbians. Within that interview, Kron revealed the persistence of that narrative, even after the show was hitting crucial markers of success: Even when we were succeeding, even when it had had a successful run at the Public and we were selling tickets on Broadway, still the question was being asked “do you think this will work on Broadway?” These financial concerns lingered, despite the production’s relatively quick financial solvency. The investors of Fun Home recouped their investment of $5.25 million dollars within eight months. [34] The tour also returned its investment within eight months, benchmarks that belie the supposed need to commercially closet Fun Home. [35] The marketing of Fun Home reveals a two-pronged approach. The first tactic universalized the musical. The subsequent tactic encouraged playgoers to see the production as politically engaged. In one article, readers are told that: The subject matter, obviously, is a complication in a Broadway market dominated by lighter material. The show’s producers, Kristin Caskey, Mike Isaacson and Barbara Whitman, who raised $5.2 million [sic] to finance the Broadway transfer, are emphasizing the father-daughter relationship and journey of self-discovery, rather than the sexuality, the suicide or the fact that Alison’s father ran a funeral home (“Fun Home” was the Bechdel children’s nickname for the business).[36] Occasionally members of the creative reinforced the producers’ tenet that Fun Home is about a generic family whose story resulted in a “father-daughter heartbreaker.” [37] Judy Kuhn, who played Alison’s mother, Helen, appeared in a promo saying that “[e]verybody can relate to [the play] because everybody has a family.” [38] Elsewhere, the investor Kristin Caskey suggested that the musical offers an opportunity for “seeing your parents through grown-up eyes.” [39] Caskey volunteered that: this is how I saw the show: It was about a child and her relationship with a parent, and as she became an adult, how she came to peace with how she saw that parent. . . . I think a broad audience can relate to that, and will give the show a chance to be commercial.[40] Caskey’s comments removed gender and sexuality as factors within the theatrical work, suggesting their irrelevance for audiences. This sidestepping so overgeneralized the musical’s protagonist and her narrative arc that it nearly misrepresents the show. By the production’s end, the producing team detoured from its initial, sanitizing premise of the musical’s universal family to advance a counternarrative: that the show served as a cultural milestone. These antithetical approaches— that the production was both ahistorical and historically prescient—occurred concurrently during the Broadway run. As Fun Home prepared to move to Broadway from the Public Theater the notoriety of Bechdel’s book became a promotional tool, although not an automatically synergistic or positive one. [41] In February 2014, the College of Charleston and the University of South Carolina Upstate announced that Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic would be part of their optional summer reading programs. Politicians responded by voting to defund those public colleges. Rep. Garry Smith, R-Greenville, justified his vote by explaining that the book “goes beyond the pale of academic debate. It graphically shows lesbian acts.” [42] (Readers who pick up Bechdel’s book expecting pornography might be disappointed to find relatively few anatomical moments, aside from her drawing of a male corpse in her father’s embalming studio.) Alison Bechdel and the production team went to South Carolina in April 2014 so that the cast could perform part of the musical as the six-month censorship debate was swirling. [43] This unanticipated pre-Broadway debut “tour” marked a pivot: the creative team began to directly comment on and interact with the censorship debate even as Fun Home ’s marketing products featured no references likely to cause controversy. The production’s responsiveness escalated in the upcoming months: the cast put Fun Home in dialogue with real-time national debates about marriage equality. The play opened a few days before the US Supreme Court began hearing oral arguments about the Obergefell v. Hodges case. Beth Malone commented on this timing in an interview given before the court decision: Right now, the Supreme Court is arguing for our rights as human beings, and I’m going home to my wife tonight who I married in a court of law in New York City. This is a time in our lives. This is quite a time. This is quite a season.[44] Fun Home ’s actors commented on that case in front of larger audiences as well. As he delivered his Tony speech for playing Bruce, Michael Cerveris spoke of his “hope” that the Supreme Court would support LGBTQ+ citizens’ right to marriage. [45] Eighteen days later when the court confirmed marriage equality, the evening’s performance included a new prop: a rainbow flag brought on to stage after the bows. Beth Malone put the flag around her and did a victory lap around the stage, before saying “What an amazing time to be an American. We owe this night to the people who came before us.” [46] In other interviews, Malone specified the activist and artistic pasts to which she felt indebted: The only reason Fun Home itself can be a mainstream Broadway show is because of the fringe work of my sisters that came before me, like the Five Lesbian Brothers, doing this downtown theatre that was so edgy and it was happening in the margins. The margins had to exist for a really long time before it incrementally crept toward the center.[47] After the Supreme Court passed this civil rights case in June 2015, Fun Home began to be included in publications marketed towards LGBTQ+ readers. One such instance was the article within Out magazine that exclusively featured the actors who identified as lesbian or gay in the Broadway production (Beth Malone, Roberta Colindrez, and Joel Perez) alongside Bechdel and Kron. [48] In another produced segment, Malone appears with her wife in a video that features her Fun Home pre-performance commute. [49] These curated moments provided evidence for Malone’s sense that lesbian rights are moving towards “the center” of public sympathy and support. The marketing of Fun Home as proof of American exceptionalism to seventeen ambassadors from the United Nations in March 2016 also hinted at a newfound security for LGBTQ+ people. [50] Three months later, however, Fun Home responded to an intensely harmful event that targeted LGBTQ+ people. The crimes committed at Pulse (a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida) resulted in the deaths of forty-nine victims and the wounding of fifty-eight other people. This event sparked a number of responses from Broadway workers, including at the Tony Awards which were held on the day of the attacks (12 June 2016) as scheduled. Although individual Broadway actors participated in an Orlando tribute, Fun Home was the only production to travel to Florida to be physically present with the victims, survivors, and their families. [51] Beth Malone and Michael Cerveris each wrote publicly about this pilgrimage in tones consonant with the LGBTQ+ advocacy they articulated before the production’s run. [52] The producers’ willingness to highlight the LGBTQ+ themes of the production was newly evident: Mike Isaacson : “For our company, there is no choice but to respond with what we have, what we know, and the belief that it leads to something.” Barbara Whitman : “I think we all had that same reaction: What can we do? This is something we can actually do.” Kristin Caskey : “It was one of those perfect moments where everyone aligned and did so quite quickly, understanding that many of the ideas and themes within ‘Fun Home’ would be a perfect gift and a way for the community to come together in advocation for LGBT rights.”[53] Their unified perspective diverged from Tom Greenwald’s earlier recommendation to “never ever associat[e] [the play] with . . . the subject matter.” At this moment, some fourteen months after the show opened on Broadway, the producers unambiguously voiced their objection to the homophobic and lesbophobic crimes. [54] Particularly striking is Caskey’s transition in framing Fun Home : the show is no longer about “a child and her relationship with a parent,” but a “gift . . . for the community to come together in advocation for LGBT rights,” with her suggestion that the artistic production and political advocacy were linked. The trio continued this pattern of speaking to LGBTQ+ people when in Orlando, writing in a joint statement that “as the first musical with a lesbian protagonist, we so often hear from audience members at ‘Fun Home’ that it was the first time they saw themselves represented on a Broadway stage. We all feel so helpless, but hopefully this will allow us to give back to the LGBT community in this tiny way.” [55] Here, the protagonist’s identity was presented as a pioneering choice, rather than a detail that needed to be hidden. Moreover, the producers acknowledged their debt to the LGBT community rather than distancing the show from that community. Such a development from reticence and repression to an overt championing of LGBTQ+ individuals’ rights was remarkable and challenged the historical pattern of excluding lesbian characters from Broadway stages. These actions that openly acknowledge and affirm the production’s debt to LGBTQ+ artists speak to the gains that the production enabled. Ceveris and Bechdel offer ways to see the historical context of the run. Michael Ceveris says: We’ve played through an extraordinary moment in our country’s history and the most progressive and heartening ways and the most retroactive and terrifying ways. We played through the Supreme Court’s decision, we played through the naming of the first national monument to gay and lesbian rights, and we played through a massacre that was horrific enough in itself and in its aftermath, when some of the hatred and reactionary comments that were made were just as horrifying. If there was ever a play that arrived on Broadway in the moment it was most needed, I think this would be it.[56] Ceveris encapsulated his perspective of the show as a necessary one. Bechdel’s comments featured her characteristic ambivalence: it’s a funny moment. It’s a very funny moment for LGBT culture and civil rights right now. I feel like the play and the success of the play is very much tied into what’s happening in the culture.[57] Like Bechdel in her emphasis of the production’s connection with the contemporary moment, Fun Home ’s composer Jeanine Tesori spoke of production’s role in advancing agendas outside the theater: And so I think that this has met our time, it’s a musical of our time. It makes me think . . . it’s available, what else can it do? What are the next stages? Where are we, what can we express [in] that conversation, the global conversation, the national conversation?[58] The answers to Tesori’s questions are forthcoming: it remains to be seen what artistic and commercial risks might be undertaken to create a more diverse, inclusive theatrical tradition for women actors to inhabit. Despite the censorship that characterized Fun Home ‘s early promotion, the producers ultimately reckoned with a literal tragedy that befell LGBTQ+ people. This transition suggests a recognition that tragedies can be spurred by settings, such as a homophobic society, rather than by LGBTQ+ people’s existence. Fun Home ultimately offered a way forward for a more varied performance history and for productive interplay between onstage representation and offstage politics. Fun Home ’s temporal context offers a useful demarcation of the interplay between civic and theatrical tragedies, and the creative ways that theater can elicit empathy. References [1] StuckinVermont, “Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home on Broadway,” 11:49, YouTube , 22 April 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9vD7Nc0L3k (accessed 1 May 2017). [2] Sarah Mirk, “Alison Bechdel’s ‘Fun Home’ Will Now be a New York Musical,” Bitch Media , 11 October 2013, www.bitchmedia.org/post/alison-bechdels-fun-home-will-now-be-a-new-york-musical (accessed 17 January 2017). [3] Kalle Oskari Matilla, “Selling Queerness: The Curious Case of Fun Home ,” The Atlantic , 25 April 2016, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/04/branding-queerness-the-curious-case-of-fun-home/479532/ (accessed 21 August 2016). [4] Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 334. [5] This line was taken from a “Stuck in Vermont” interview with Bechdel in 2008. Bechdel’s comment appears around 4:50 minutes into the clip. The varied sources for the musical suggest the creative team’s early openness to Bechdel’s contributions beyond the published pages of her visual memoir. StuckinVermont, “Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home on Broadway.” [6] According to Robert Petkoff, the actor playing Alison’s father during the tour, the content of the show remained a surprise to some playgoers: “There are people in the audience who are like, ‘What?! I saw kids dancing on the poster—this doesn’t seem to be that story!’” Lori McCue, “The star and designer of ‘Fun Home’ on how their show still surprises audiences,” The Washington Post , 27 April 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/express/wp/2017/04/27/the-star-and-designer-of-fun-home-on-how-their-show-still-surprises-audiences/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.80af729129a9 (accessed 20 July 2017). [7] Matilla, “Selling Queerness.” [8] Heather K. Love charts this genealogy in “Spectacular Failure: The Figure of the Lesbian in ‘Mulholland Drive,’” New Literary History 35, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 120–22. [9] The phrase “Bury your gays” serves as a shorthand for this narrative in popular media. GLAAD (formerly the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) provides data on the occurrence and type of LGBTQ+ representations on film and TV. See their Studio Responsibility Index for film data (www.glaad.org/sri/2018), and the “Where We Are On TV” reports (www.glaad.org/tags/where-we-are-tv). [10] Steven Adler, “Box Office,” The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical , eds. Raymond Knapp, Mitchell Morris, and Stacy Wolf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 356. [11] Ibid., 352. [12] Quoted in Mark N. Grant, “The Age of McMusicals,” The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical (Lebanon, NH: Northeastern University Press, 2004), 304–15. Jones’s primary examples of the category “technomusical” are Disney productions and those affiliated with Andrew Lloyd Webber. [13] Elizabeth Wollman, The Theater Will Rock: A History of the Rock Musical, from Hair to Hedwig (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 145. [14] Ibid., 145, 144. [15] Michael Sokolove profiles Hamilton ’s producer Jeffrey Seller in “The C.E.O. of ‘Hamilton’ Inc.,” The New York Times , 5 April 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/04/10/magazine/the-ceo-of-hamilton-inc.html (accessed 10 May 2018). For an overview of the Great Comet attribute dispute and resolution see the following: Michael Paulson, “Three Words Lead to a Battle Over ‘Great Comet’ on Broadway,” The New York Times , 19 October 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/10/20/theater/three-words-lead-to-a-battle-over-great-comet-on-broadway.html (accessed 17 May 2018); Michael Gioia, “ Great Comet Billing Dispute Prompts Lawsuit,” Playbill , 28 October 2016, www.playbill.com/article/ars-nova-sues-great-comet-producers-and-explains-why-were-taking-a-stand (accessed 17 May 2018); Michael Paulson, “Dispute at ‘Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812’ Leads to a Lawsuit,” New York Times , 30 October 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/10/29/theater/dispute-at-natasha-pierre-the-great-comet-of-1812-leads-to-lawsuit.html (accessed 17 May 2018); Jeremy Girard, “Peace Now: ‘Natasha, Pierre’ Production and Non-Profit Group Agree to Secret Deal,” Deadline, 2 November 2016, www.deadline.com/2016/11/broadway-lawsuit-natasha-pierre-josh-groban-1201845138/ (accessed 17 May 2018). [16] Michael Paulson, “‘Fun Home’ Recoups on Broadway,” The New York Times , 13 December 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/12/14/theater/fun-home-recoups-on-broadway.html (accessed 3 June 2016). Caskey repeated the characterization of the show as “crazy” in her conversation with Whitman preserved at Story Corps. “Fun Home producers Barbara Whitman and Kristen Caskey,” Story Corps , 1 April 2016, www.archive.storycorps.org/interviews/fun-home-co-producers-barbara-whitman-and-kristin-caskey/ (accessed 14 June 2018). After the Tony Awards, Isaacson repeated this diction: “Everybody had been telling us we were crazy, even stupid” (Paulson, “Winning”). As the production went on tour within the US, Isaacson described the “whole endeavor [as] a crazy leap of faith” (Moffit, “Taking on ‘tough stuff’”). Michael Paulson, “‘Fun Home’ Finds That Winning a Tony is the Best Way to Market a Musical,” The New York Times , 9 June 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/06/09/theater/theaterspecial/fun-home-finds-that-winning-a-tony-is-the-best-way-to-market-a-musical.html (accessed 15 June 2015). Kelly Moffit, “Taking on ‘tough stuff’ with beauty, talent, humor: St. Louis-produced ‘Fun Home’ opens at The Fox,” St. Louis Public Radio , 17 November 2016, www.news.stlpublicradio.org/post/taking-tough-stuff-beauty-talent-humor-st-louis-produced-fun-home-opens-fox (accessed 21 August 2018). [17] The American Psychiatric Association included homosexuality in the second and third editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders . The classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder was omitted in their 1987 volume. Neel Burton, “When Homosexuality Stopped Being a Mental Disorder,” Psychology Today , 18 September 2015, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/201509/when-homosexuality-stopped-being-mental-disorder (accessed 20 August 2018). [18] Stacy Wolf, “‘Never Gonna Be a Man/Catch Me if You Can/I Won’t Grow Up’: A Lesbian Account of Mary Martin as Peter Pan,” Theatre Journal 49, no. 4 (1997): 494. She uses “lesbianize” as a verb in A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 26. This claim about audience reception is also a starting point for Wolf’s book-length projects, including Changed for Good , in which Wolf argues that Wicked musically and visually codes Elphaba and Glinda as the show’s central couple. Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). [19] Chris Straayer’s phrase describes viewers’ willful interpretations of texts that do not secure the character’s sexuality or heroism. “The Hypothetical Lesbian Heroine in Narrative Feature Film,” in Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian and Queer Essays on Popular Culture , eds. Corey K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 44–69. [20] Ann M. Ciasullo, “Making Her (In)Visible: Cultural Representations of Lesbianism and the Lesbian Body in the 1990s,” Feminist Studies 27, no. 3 (2001): 605. [21] Love, “Spectacular Failure,” 129. In the footnote that follows this sentence, Love references Elizabeth Freeman’s “Packing History, Count(er)ing Generations,” New Literary History 31 (2000): 727–44. [22] Ben Brantley, “Candy Worship in the Temple of the Prom Queen,” The New York Times , 20 April 2007, www.nytimes.com/2007/04/30/theater/reviews/30blon.html (accessed 9 June 2016). In Stagestruck , playwright Sarah Schulman offers a productive overview of lesbian theatrical context and the ways that lesbian characters are considered more commodifiable when presented from non-lesbian playwrights, with Rent as a key example. Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). [23] Mirk, “Alison Bechdel’s ‘Fun Home.’” [24] Adam Hetrick, “For Beth Malone, ‘Butch is a Beautiful Thing’—What This Fun Home Star Learned Playing Lesbian,” Playbill , 29 June 2015, www.playbill.com/news/article/for-beth-malone-butch-is-a-beautiful-thing-what-this-fun-home-star-learned-playing-lesbian-351968 (accessed 1 July 2015). [25] These are key features of “The Vito Russo Test.” See “The Vito Russo Test,” GLAAD, www.glaad.org/sri/2018/vitorusso (accessed 14 August 2018). [26] Andrew Gans, “Tony-Winning Musical Kinky Boots Recoups Initial Investment,” Playbill , 3 October 2013, www.playbill.com/article/tony-winning-musical-kinky-boots-recoups-initial-investment-com-210206 (accessed 19 June 2017). According to Brent Lang, the recuperation happened in large part because of the high costs of Kinky Boots tickets. “ Kinky Boots Recoups $13.5 Investment,” The Wrap , 3 October 2013, www.thewrap.com/kinky-boots-recoups-13-5m-investment/ (accessed 19 June 2017). For additional context, Rent recouped in fifteen weeks, Avenue Q took forty weeks, and Matilda took some nineteen months to recoup its $16 million capitalization (Adler, “Box Office,” 352). Fun Home ’s cost of $5.25 million in 2015 was less than that of Spring Awakening in 2007, which cost $6 million. Spring Awakening ’s production team was concerned that their box office might suffer from their production’s content: like Fun Home , that musical includes suicide, adult language, homoeroticism, and teenage sexuality. For Matilda box office details, see David Cox, “Broadway Musical ‘Matilda’ Turns a Profit,” Variety , 5 December 2014, www.variety.com/2014/legit/news/matilda-recoups-broadway-musical-1201372084/. For all other box office details, see Adler, “Box Office,” 352. [27] Michael Ceveris, incidentally, “set the record for playing the most performances as the East German rock ‘n’ roll singer Hedwig in Hedwig and the Angry Inch.” For information on Ceveris’s record, see Carey Purcell, “Michael Ceveris on the Closing of Fun Home: ‘It Arrived on Broadway in the Moment it Was Most Needed,’” Out, 22 August 2016, www.out.com/theater-dance/2016/8/22/michael-cerveris-closing-fun-home-it-arrived-broadway-moment-it-was-most (accessed 12 February 2017). [28] Stacy Wolf, “The Queer Pleasures of Mary Martin and Broadway: The Sound of Music as a Lesbian Musical,” Modern Drama 39, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 52. [29] Other details specific to Bechdel’s experience were stripped from the campaign. Whereas the cover for Bechdel’s book referenced the family’s funeral home, including a Mass card reappropriated as her book title, the musical’s poster omitted that background and that prop. [30] See Sokolove, “The C.E.O. of ‘Hamilton’, Inc.,” where Jeffrey Seller characterized the name change as a result of “gentle but persistent prodding before Miranda finally agreed.” Patricia Herrera writes about the ways in which Hamilton “proclaims an inclusive narrative of American identity that obscures the histories of racism that are at the base of so much of the American experience,” as well as the promotional distance from the show’s “acoustic environment shaped by Afro-Caribbean and Afro-American musical, oral, visual, and dance forms and practices.” Patricia Herrera, “Reckoning with America’s Racial Past, Present, and Future in Hamilton ,” in Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America’s Past , eds. Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018), 262, 260. [31] June Thomas, “ Fun Home Won Five Tonys. How Did a Graphic Memoir Become a Musical?” Slate , 8 June 2015, www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2013/10/08/fun_home_is_america_ready_for_a_musical_about_a_butch_lesbian.html (accessed 21 April 2017). [32] Rae Binstock, “Why Lesbian Spaces Will Always Be in Danger of Closing, and Why Some Will Always Survive,” Slate , 20 December 2016, www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2016/12/20/why_do_lesbian_spaces_have_such_a_hard_time_staying_in_business.html (accessed 21 April 2017). [33] “Alison Bechdel’s ‘Fun Home’: The Coming-Out Memoir That Became a Hit Broadway Musical,” Democracy Now! , 30 July 2015, www.democracynow.org/2015/7/30/alison_bechdels_fun_home_the_coming (accessed 14 May 2017). [34] Paulson, “‘Fun Home’ Recoups.” [35] Andrew Gans, “National Tour of Fun Home Recoups Investment,” Playbill , 17 May 2017, www.playbill.com/article/national-tour-of-fun-home-recoups-investment (accessed 19 June 2017). [36] Paulson, “‘Fun Home’ Recoups.” [37] Patrick Healey, “Moving Your Show to Broadway? Not So Fast,” The New York Times , 8 May 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/05/11/theater/theaterspecial/moving-your-show-to-broadway-not-so-fast.html (accessed 2 May 2017). [38] “Life with Father! Learn the True Tale Behind the New Broadway Musical Fun Home ,” Broadway.com , 23 March 2015, www.broadway.com/buzz/180076/life-with-father-learn-the-true-tale-behind-the-new-broadway-musical-fun-home/ (accessed 13 March 2017). [39] Paulson, “Tonys.” Kristen Caskey was played off by the orchestra in the midst of her acceptance speech. Lisa Kron’s acceptance speech was not televised, but can be found here: Jerry Portwood, “ Fun Home was the big musical winner at the awards,” Out , 8 June 2016, www.out.com/popnography/2015/6/08/watch-lisa-kron-gives-moving-tonys-acceptance-speech (accessed 9 June 2016). [40] Healy, “Moving.” [41] The Public Theater’s Public Lab held a run of Fun Home in 2012 in their Newman theater, and a subsequent off-Broadway run at the Public Theater that began in September 2014. Manuel Betancourt, “From the Public to Broadway: Fun Home ’s Growing Pains,” HowlRound , 22 October 2015, www.howlround.com/from-the-public-to-broadway-fun-home-s-growing-pains (accessed 27 August 2018). [42] Betsy Gomez provides commentary on this provision, which “mandates that students be allowed to avoid encountering educational material they find ‘objectionable based on a sincerely held religious, moral, or cultural belief.’” Betsy Gomez, “This Compromise Is Not Acceptable: CBLDF Joins Coalition Condemning South Carolina Budget Provision,” Comic Book Legal Defense Fund , 13 June 2014, www.cbldf.org/2014/06/this-compromise-is-not-acceptable-cbldf-joins-coalition-questioning-south-carolina-budget-provision/ (accessed 22 May 2017). [43] Democracy Now! , “Alison Bechdel’s ’Fun Home.’” [44] Hetrick, “Butch is a Beautiful Thing.” [45] Michael Ceveris gave the speech on 8 June 2015. Michael Musto, “Lesbian Musical Crushes Gershwin Show, and Other Tony Awards Revelations,” Out , 8 June 2015, www.out.com/michael-musto/2015/6/08/lesbian-musical-fun-home-crushes-gershwin-show-tony-awards-revelations (accessed 10 June 2015). [46] These moments have been preserved by the production team, and can be easily accessed on their webpage. The Playbill Video site shows Kron commenting that the play is “at the cusp of an evolving opening moment.” Playbill Video, “Lisa Kron, Michael Cerveris, Judy Kuhn and Emily Skeggs Have Fun Talking “Fun Home” at BroadwayCon!,” 7:51, YouTube , 3 February 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdltIKzwLUk (accessed 13 March 2016). [47] Hetrick, “Butch is a Beautiful Thing.” [48] “Out100: The Fun Home Family,” Out , 9 November 2015, www.out.com/out100-2015/2015/11/09/out100-fun-home-family (accessed 17 May 2016). The shoot includes a stylist, an approach reminiscent of some of Rent ’s promotion techniques which included clothing lines at Manhattan’s Bloomingdales and fashion spreads featuring the cast. See Michael Riedel, “Available at Bloomies: The ‘Rent’ Rags Can Be Yours—For a Price,” New York Daily News, 30 April 1996, 35. [49] Theatre Mania, “A Day with Fun Home Star Beth Malone,” 6:35, YouTube , 30 September 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hQw_uwzJCc (accessed 3 June 2016). [50] As Matilla notes, US Ambassador Samantha Powers took her colleagues to this event in May 2016, see “Selling Queerness.” [51] Carmen Triola, “‘Fun Home’ Is Going to Orlando to Perform a Benefit Concert for Pulse Shooting Victims,” FlavorWire , 6 July 2016, www.flavorwire.com/583516/fun-home-is-going-to-orlando-to-perform-a-benefit-concert-for-pulse-shooting-victims (accessed 22 July 2016). [52] For additional reports of this trip, see the following: “Broadway’s ‘Fun Home’ Cast Sets Benefit Performance for Orlando Victims,” Hollywood Reporter , 5 July 2016, www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/broadways-fun-home-cast-sets-908612 (accessed 11 April 2018); Michael Ceveris, “Taking ‘Fun Home’ to Orlando for a Catharsis Onstage and Off,” The New York Times , 6 August 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/08/06/theater/taking-fun-home-to-orlando-for-a-catharsis-onstage-and-off.html (accessed 11 April 2018); Hal Boedecker, “Pulse benefit: Broadway’s ‘Fun Home’ plays Orlando,” Orlando Sentinel , 5 July 2016, www.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment/tv/tv-guy/os-pulse-benefit-broadway-s-fun-home-plays-orlando-20160705-story.html (accessed 11 April 2018). [53] Mark Kennedy, “Broadway’s ‘Fun Home’ cast sets benefit for Orlando victims,” AP News , 5 July 2016, wwwapnews.com/c90a05bc88204ae4950c0ada08bf48e8 (accessed 22 July 2016). [54] After their advocacy, Isaacson was awarded an Equality Award from the St. Louis chapter of the Human Rights Campaign, and Caskey was appointed the executive vice president of Ambassador Theater Group’s North American operations. See Judith Newmark, “‘Fun Home’ reaps more honors for its producers,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch , 20 November 2015, www.stltoday.com/entertainment/arts-and-theatre/culture-club/fun-home-reaps-more-honors-for-its-producers/article_492d110f-3d24-574a-8517-a4dcd372b5f5.html (accessed 6 June 2018); Gordon Cox, “Broadway Producer Kristen Caskey Joins Ambassador Theater Group,” Variety , 29 November 2016, www.variety.com/2016/legit/news/kristin-caskey-ambassador-theater-group-north-america-1201928759/ (accessed 6 June 2018). [55] Matthew J. Palm, “‘Fun Home’: Cast is here for you,” Orlando Sentinel , 20 July 2016, www.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment/arts-and-theater/os-fun-home-orlando-benefit-20160713-story.html#nt=inbody-1%20Ceveris%20%E2%80%93%20idea%20in%20middle%20of%20show,%20producers%E2%80%99%20response (accessed 22 July 2016). [56] Purcell, “On the Closing of Fun Home .” [57] Democracy Now! , “Alison Bechdel’s ‘Fun Home.’” [58] Ibid. Footnotes About The Author(s) MAUREEN MCDONNELL is Director of Women’s and Gender Studies and Professor of English at Eastern Connecticut State University. Her research interests include gender studies, early modern drama (including Shakespeare), and American Sign Language in performance. Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Johanna Hartmann and Julia Rössler Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction: Reflections on the Tragic in Contemporary American Drama and Theatre "Take Caroline Away”: Catastrophe, Change, and the Tragic Agency of Nonperformance in Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change The Poetics of the Tragic in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America Rewriting Greek Tragedy / Confronting History in Contemporary American Drama: David Rabe’s The Orphan (1973) and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003) Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home: Activism and the Advertising of a "Lesbian Suicide Musical" Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches. Edited by Sharrell D. Luckett with Tia M. Shaffer. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017; Pp. 233. Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences. Compiled by José Casas with Christina Marín, ed. Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing, 2018; Pp. 581. The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era. Jonathan Shandell. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018; Pp. 213 + xii. Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, & the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization. Judith Hamera. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017; Pp. 286 + xvii. A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams. Katherine Weiss, ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2014; Pp. 290. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.