(Livestreamed) In conversation about past and upcoming projects PRELUDE Festival 2023 ARTIST TALK Steve Cosson Theater, Discussion English 60 minutes 12:30PM EST Monday, October 9, 2023 PS21: Performance Spaces for the 21st Century, New York 66, Chatham, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All (Livestreamed) In conversation about past and upcoming projects Content / Trigger Description: STEVE COSSON is a director, writer and Artistic Director of The Civilians theater company in New York, where he has originated and developed numerous original works in collaboration with some of the leading theater artists of the country. He’s developed original shows for TBS and ITV Entertainment, is the creator and host of the documentary musical podcast Let Me Ascertain You, and with The Civilians was the first theater company to be Artist-in-Residence at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. PS21: Performance Spaces for the 21st Century is a contemporary arts venue in the Hudson Valley. PS21 presents innovative programming by leading and emerging artists in music, dance, theater, contemporary performance, and the visual and multimedia arts. Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Stanley Love Performance Group performs excerpts from Meow Love Werk, Hinny selected from choreographer Stanley Love’s vast body of work to honor his life at a memorial celebration in August 2023. “If you dance, you’re a dancer.” – Stanley Love PRELUDE Festival 2023 DANCE Excerpt from Meow Love Werk, Hinny from Love to Love You, Stanley Love: A Memorial Celebration Stanley Love Performance Group Dance English 40-45 minute performance 7:30PM EST Saturday, October 14, 2023 Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All Stanley Love Performance Group performs excerpts from Meow Love Werk, Hinny selected from choreographer Stanley Love’s vast body of work to honor his life at a memorial celebration in August 2023. “If you dance, you’re a dancer.” – Stanley Love The PRELUDE '23 presentation of the Stanley Love Performance Group has been made possible by the generous support of Claire Montgomery, James MacGregor and LOCATION ONE, Linda Wells and the Martha Graham Dance Company. Content / Trigger Description: Language warning for brief use of curse word (shit) Stanley Love Performance Group (SLPG) was created in 1992 with the inaugural performance at DTW’s Fresh Tracks with Adam and Steve and the company’s first full evening in 1993 with Hello Cruel World. SLPG now works, since Love’s death in 2019, in partnership with The Stanley Love Legacy which exists to safeguard, care for and share the artistic works of choreographer Stanley Love. Instagram: @lovestanleylove Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

New York City gave birth to the contemporary practice of performance. Theatre artists presented works in lofts, storefronts, living rooms, churches and streets. New gigantic Performing Arts Centers like the Shed and The Perelman opened recently and are highly visible — small spaces are disappearing and often feel invisible. Less and less free or affordable rehearsal and presenting spaces for theatre and performance artists seem to be available. But is it really the doom and gloom we talk and read about? Significant New York institutions are coming up with new ways to support New York’s Performing Arts scene. Participants: Randi Berry (Indie Space INC. ), Aaron L. McKinney (Hi-ARTS), Ana Fiore (LMCC), Anita Durst (ChaShaMa), Baba Israel (Performance Project at University Settlement), and Candace Thompson-Zachery (Dance/NYC). PRELUDE Festival 2023 PANEL Space and the City Randi Berry, Aaron L. McKinney, Ana Fiore, Anita Durst, Baba Israel, and Candace Thompson-Zachery English 90 minutes 7:00PM EST Monday, October 16, 2023 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All New York City gave birth to the contemporary practice of performance. Theatre artists presented works in lofts, storefronts, living rooms, churches and streets. New gigantic Performing Arts Centers like the Shed and The Perelman opened recently and are highly visible — small spaces are disappearing and often feel invisible. Less and less free or affordable rehearsal and presenting spaces for theatre and performance artists seem to be available. But is it really the doom and gloom we talk and read about? Significant New York institutions are coming up with new ways to support New York’s Performing Arts scene. Participants: Randi Berry (Indie Space INC. ), Aaron L. McKinney (Hi-ARTS), Ana Fiore (LMCC), Anita Durst (ChaShaMa), Baba Israel (Performance Project at University Settlement), and Candace Thompson-Zachery (Dance/NYC). Content / Trigger Description: Hi-ARTS (founded as the Hip Hop Theater Festival) is a leading cultural hub within the urban arts movement. Through development residencies, vibrant multi-disciplinary creative programming, and civic engagement opportunities, we empower artists to develop bold new work while creating a positive, lasting impact on our community. Hi-ARTS is the only institution in New York City, and one of the few in the country, exclusively dedicated to supporting and developing Hip-Hop and the urban aesthetic. Hi-ARTS supports emerging and established theater, performance, and visual artists to develop and present new work. Aaron L. McKinney has been steadfast in building a multi-faceted arts administration career for almost two decades beginning with his early work in production and project management for theatre companies in Florida and California, including a graduate-level internship with Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles, one of the largest non-profit theatres in the country. In recent years, Aaron has served as Project Manager for the Sankofa Justice & Equity Fund, founded by world-renowned artist and activist, the late Harry Belafonte, and an integral member of 651 ARTS, a pillar of the contemporary black arts community. He has also served on several grant review panels, both local and national and sat on many Zoom panels on the state of performing arts during a pandemic. Currently he serves as the Executive Director of Hi-ARTS. In addition to his current role, Aaron continues to pursue professional endeavors guided by his personal mantra “Aspire to Inspire before you Expire”, purposefully unifying the arts and social justice activism, as shown through his independent producer and consultative work across the performance arts landscape. In 2020, Aaron founded The A.L.M. Way, LLC, an arts management and producing consultancy. These opportunities of increasing responsibility only serve to exemplify Aaron’s affinity for urban arts and have solidified his place in performing arts leadership. Ana Fiore, as Director of Artist Services at LMCC, oversees re-grant programs in support of community-based arts programming in Manhattan; artist residencies providing work space for creative development; the SU-CASA program, connecting artists with senior centers; and other artist service initiatives within the organization. The core of these programs is methods for increasing the range of resources available to artists and amplifying the role of artists within society. Prior to LMCC, Ana supported fiscally sponsored artists at the New York Foundation for the Arts with a focus on demystifying the fundraising process. She has also served the Center for Performance Research, The Joyce, and Danspace Project. Anita Durst has been a star, a muse, and a patron of the avant-garde performing arts and emerging arts scene in New York City, since she was 18. She founded Chashama in 1995 following the death of her mentor and artistic professor Reza Abdoh. While performing and working in his company, Dar A Luz, she learned the value of unbridled expression and how to value art objectively. In the wake of Reza’s absence she was driven to create a place for artists free of financial and subjective constraints. Anita has worked tirelessly for over 20 years to secure over one million square feet of space in New York City for artists. Baba Israel is a Hip Hop/theater artist, poet, educator and curator raised in New York by parents who were core members of the Living Theatre. He has toured and developed projects in thirty four countries, often working as a cultural ambassador. Baba is part of Bronx Banda with Arturo O’Farrill and has shared the stage with artists such as KRS ONE, Lester Bowie, Outkast, Bahamadia and Medusa. He is a core member of Hip Hop/Soul project Soul Inscribed who recently completed the American Music Abroad program and released their second album Tune Up on Tokyo Dawn Records. He holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College where he studied with Daniel Alexander Jones and is the Artistic Director of the Performance Project based at the University Settlement. Candace Thompson-Zachery, born in Trinidad and Tobago, now local to Brooklyn, NY, operates between the spheres of dance, cultural production and fitness and wellness, with a focus on the Contemporary Caribbean. She has had an established career as a performer, choreographer, fitness professional, cultural producer, teaching artist, community facilitator and Caribbean dance specialist. In addition to her work in these areas, she leads ContempoCaribe, an ongoing choreography and performance project and is the founder of Dance Caribbean COLLECTIVE, an organisational platform for Caribbean dance in the diaspora that spearheads the New Traditions Festival in Brooklyn, NY. She graduated from Adelphi University's BFA program for Dance, and has presented, performed and taught at major venues including: Queen's Hall (T&T), John F. Kennedy Center, New York Live Arts, Brooklyn Museum, and The Ohio State University. She was an inaugural member of the Dancing While Black Fellowship Cohort 2015/2016, was an awardee of Adelphi University's 2017 - 10 Under 10 program, and a Dixon Place Artist-in-Residence for fall 2017. As a cultural producer and strategist, Candace has worked with the Dance and Performance Institute of Trinidad and Tobago, WIADCA (NY), Sydnie L. Mosley Dances, Renegade Performance Group, and curator Claire Tancons, for the 2019 Sharjah Biennial. Ms. Thompson-Zachery holds an M.A. in Performance Curation from the ICCP program at Wesleyan University and a certificate from the Executive Program in Arts & Culture Strategy at UPenn. with National Arts Strategies. Of tantamount importance to her is the vital role dance plays in our communities and she is eager to see dance artists of various styles, practices and traditions thrive in New York City. Randi Berry is an indie theater maker with an arts advocacy and commercial real estate background. She is the co-founder of Wreckio Ensemble Theater Company, The Indie Theater Fund, and IndieSpace. Randi has worked on over $11B in commercial real estate transactions and has created programs resulting in thousands of artists receiving funding, free real estate consulting services, rehearsal space, and opportunities for professional growth. Select awards include: Tow Foundation Visionary Leadership Award, NYIT Indie Theater Champion, The Ellen Stewart Award, Indie Theater Person of the Year, member of the Indie Theater Hall of Fame, and a Citation for Service by the New York City Council. IndieSpace was established in 2016 to disrupt the ongoing displacement of small theaters and to address systemic inequities in NYC real estate. In 2022, it merged with Indie Theater Fund, an organization focused on a new model for equitable funding for the indie theater community. By contributing a nickel per ticket from their shows to a pot of money for funding, the indie theater community could create a method of self-sustainability and could rethink philanthropy and the process of grant making. Through radically transparent and equitable grants, community resources and advocacy, the Fund supported hundreds of indie theater companies and thousands of individual artists. Since its founding, IndieSpace has: consulted with 90+ companies and venues making real estate decisions, including The Tank, FRIGID New York, The Chain, The Wild Project, Wooster Group, and Classical Theater of Harlem; helped 18 organizations sign new leases; saved seven theaters from being closed or repurposed; created four real estate operation partnerships; walked two venues through the purchase of their permanent homes. During Covid, IndieSpace supported over 50 venues navigating their leases by helping them stay open, and also provided over $1.7M in relief grants to the indie theater community. In 2023 IndieSpace opened the West Village Rehearsal Co-Op with HERE Arts Center, New Ohio and Rattlestick Playwrights Theater. This 99-year lease for $1 per year will serve over 1,500 artists per year. For service to the community, IndieSpace received the Ellen Stewart Award and a citation from the City Council of New York www.indiespace.org Photo credits: Aaron L. McKinney. Photo courtesy of the Josh Walker. Ana Fiore. Photo courtesy of the panelist. Candace Thompson-Zachery. Photo courtesy of the artist. Randi Berry. Photo courtesy of the artist. Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Join us for a captivating Sound Journey with antique Himalayan Singing Bowls at the Prelude 2023 festival. For a transcendent hour, allow the resonances of these age-old instruments to transport you beyond the confines of time. As each note reverberates, it melds quantum vibrations with ageless wisdom, steering your mind into a serene observational state, untouched by barriers. The intricate harmonies, underpinned by the principles of psychoacoustics, aid in releasing tension, submerging you into the labyrinth of the subconscious mind and the expansive realm of creativity. This meticulously crafted sound odyssey guarantees profound relaxation and treasured moments of clarity and unity, irrespective of your meditation experience. Dive in, resonate, and find yourself anew in this symphony of rejuvenating vibrations. PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE Sound Ceremony Guy Yair Beider Music, Other English 90 minutes 2:00PM EST Wednesday, October 11, 2023 Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All Join us for a captivating Sound Journey with antique Himalayan Singing Bowls at the Prelude 2023 festival. For a transcendent hour, allow the resonances of these age-old instruments to transport you beyond the confines of time. As each note reverberates, it melds quantum vibrations with ageless wisdom, steering your mind into a serene observational state, untouched by barriers. The intricate harmonies, underpinned by the principles of psychoacoustics, aid in releasing tension, submerging you into the labyrinth of the subconscious mind and the expansive realm of creativity. This meticulously crafted sound odyssey guarantees profound relaxation and treasured moments of clarity and unity, irrespective of your meditation experience. Dive in, resonate, and find yourself anew in this symphony of rejuvenating vibrations. Content / Trigger Description: Guy Yair Beider is an accomplished sound meditation facilitator, sound wellness arts educator, and Himalayan singing bowls expert. With a passion for promoting healthy sonic nourishment and facilitating mindful and safe sonic journeys, Guy has extensive knowledge of working with sound, drawing on research in psychology, musicology, and psychoacoustics. In the pursuit of sonic aesthetics, Guy meticulously hand-picked every single instrument to unveil its beauty to his audience. This quest for perfection has spanned nearly a decade and has taken Guy as far as India, Nepal, and Tibet, where he tested thousands of singing bowls, attentively listening to and learning from the ancient wisdom imbued in these antique masterpieces. Since 2010, Guy has facilitated hundreds of meditations in a range of settings, including yoga studios, martial art schools, rehabilitation centers, nursing homes, churches, synagogues, schools, businesses, private circles, medicinal plant ceremonies, and various organizations for people with special needs, PTSD, and AA groups. In 2015, Guy founded the internationally recognized Bells of Bliss project. In 2020, Guy introduced a unique method for educating sound therapy practitioners and meditation teachers, which was launched through the online Sound Medicine Academy. https://www.guybeider.com/ Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

The piece is about a lesbian romantic love story. It will start with how they met, went through a long-distance relationship, and finally physically together. PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE Love Distance Shan Y. Chuang Theater, Dance Non-Verbal 10 minutes 5:30PM EST Wednesday, October 11, 2023 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All The piece is about a lesbian romantic love story. It will start with how they met, went through a long-distance relationship, and finally physically together. Content / Trigger Description: To be able to follow the story along Shan Y. Chuang is an accomplished actor, singer, dancer, choreographer and pianist who was born and raised in Taiwan. Shan was trained in classical ballet, traditional Chinese dance and various Musical Theatre genres such as tap, jazz and hip-hop. She is a proud graduate of Circle in the Square’s Musical Theater program and is currently a member of Katharine Pettit Creative and LINKED Dance Theatre. She also holds an MFA in Musical Theater from National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU). Shan’s work explores the world of LGBTQIA+, social justice, and self-discovery through dance movements. She focuses on creating physical narratives for the audience to follow the storyline. Shan received A City Artist Corps Grant and created a 30-minute dance, spoken words, and live piano piece “10 Years In The Making, 10 Years Of Me.” She is also a principal resident dancer at Katharine Pettit Creative and a collaborator with LINKED Dance Theater. Her theater credits include Once Upon A Mattress (Gallery Players), Caligula (New Ohio Theater), Liminal Archive (Al Límite), Breakthroughs (Queer Playback Theater), and Anything Goes. Instagram @shanychuang Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Two friends in the after hours entertain ghosts in the kitchen and the bedroom. One friend takes a long walk to the grocery store. One young woman waits for her. This is a short play about locating and accessing one’s will when the will has begun to drift away. PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE ANALOG INTIMACY (Second Showing) Jess Barbagallo / Half Straddle Theater English 30 Minutes 7:30PM EST Tuesday, October 10, 2023 Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Ave, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All Two friends in the after hours entertain ghosts in the kitchen and the bedroom. One friend takes a long walk to the grocery store. One young woman waits for her. This is a short play about locating and accessing one’s will when the will has begun to drift away. Content / Trigger Description: Jess Barbagallo is an American writer, director, and performer based in New York City. He has toured internationally and domestically with Big Dance Theater, the Builders Association, Theater of a Two-Headed Calf (and its Dyke Division) and Half Straddle. Barbagallo has originated roles in plays by Joshua Conkel, Casey Llewellyn, Normandy Sherwood, Trish Harnetiaux and many others. He appeared as Yann Fredericks in the original cast of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child at the Lyric Theatre on Broadway. His playwrighting credits include Grey-Eyed Dogs (Dixon Place), Saturn Nights (Incubator Arts Center), Good Year for Hunters (New Ohio Theatre), Karen Davis Does … (Brooklyn Arts Exchange), Joe Ranono’s Yuletide Log and Other Fruitcakes (Dixon Place), Sentence Fetish (Brick Theater), Melissa, So Far(Andy’s Playhouse) and My Old Man (and Other Stories) (Dixon Place). His writing has been published by Artforum, Howlround, Bomb Blog, New York Live Arts Blog: Context Notes, Brooklyn Rail and 53rd State Press. He is a 2009 Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab alum, a 2012 Queer Arts Mentorship mentee, and a 2013 MacDowell Colony Fellow. Barbagallo has taught theater and writing as a guest artist and adjunct lecturer at Duke University, New York University, University of Pennsylvania, Brooklyn College, the Vermont Young Playwright’s Festival and The O’Neill Center. Kristina "Tina" Satter is an American filmmaker, playwright, and director based in New York City. She is the founder and artistic director of the theater company Half Straddle, which formed in 2008 and received an Obie Award grant in 2013. Satter won a Guggenheim in 2020. Satter was described by Ben Brantley of the New York Times as "a genre-and-gender-bending, visually exacting stage artist who has developed an ardent following among downtown aesthetes with a taste for acidic eye candy and erotic enigmas." Her work often deals with subjects of gender, sexual identity, adolescence, and sports. She won a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award (2016), and a Doris Doris Duke Artist Impact Award in 2014. In 2019, she received a Pew Fellowship. Satter has created 10 shows with Half Straddle, and the company's shows and videos have toured to over 20 countries in the U.S., Europe, Australia, and Asia. She made her Off Broadway debut as a conceiver and director in fall 2019 with Is This a Room at the Vineyard Theatre. A collection of three of her plays, Seagull (Thinking of You), with Away Uniform and Family was published in 2014. The text for her show Ghost Rings was published in 2017 by 53rd State Press along with a vinyl album of the show's songs. Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

I DIGRESS, written and performed by Sauda Aziza Jackson, is a 4 episode, transmedia, performance memoir exploring the weight of inheritance and the recollection of memories and material things once lost to time. Jackson weaves together fifteen personal tales from her childhood with the media and memorabilia that defined her past. Episodes 2 and 3 will be showcased during the performance. By fusing theatrical performance, song, music, and projection design with archival materials, animation, filmmaking, and video art, TEAM I DIGRESS sifts through the weight and consequences of grief by taking us down a hilarious and heartfelt coming of age journey from a young girl in 1980s Chicago, through her adolescence and the death of her mother, to her own discovery of how absence, family narratives, and the legacy of history shape us—making us who we are and who we are not. ​ PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE I DIGRESS: The Intimate Insights of a Childhood Weirdo Sauda Aziza Jackson & April Sweeney Theater, Film, Multimedia, Performance Art English 60 minutes 3:00PM EST Thursday, October 12, 2023 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All I DIGRESS, written and performed by Sauda Aziza Jackson, is a 4 episode, transmedia, performance memoir exploring the weight of inheritance and the recollection of memories and material things once lost to time. Jackson weaves together fifteen personal tales from her childhood with the media and memorabilia that defined her past. Episodes 2 and 3 will be showcased during the performance. By fusing theatrical performance, song, music, and projection design with archival materials, animation, filmmaking, and video art, TEAM I DIGRESS sifts through the weight and consequences of grief by taking us down a hilarious and heartfelt coming of age journey from a young girl in 1980s Chicago, through her adolescence and the death of her mother, to her own discovery of how absence, family narratives, and the legacy of history shape us—making us who we are and who we are not. New York State Council of the Arts, New York City Women's Fund for Media, Music, and Theatre award by the City of New York Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment in association with the New York Foundation of the Arts, Arts at the Palace, and Colgate University Content / Trigger Description: Strong Language. Sauda Aziza Jackson (Writer & Performer) has performed in many theater productions during her twenty plus years in New York City. The Chicago native has had the opportunity to perform in Now is the Time with Little Lord, Iona Flies Away with Tanisha Christie, Expense of Spirit & Limitless Joy with International Wow (Josh Fox), Sponsored by Nobody’s The Arts & Behind the Bullseye and The Making of King Kong by Lisa Clair at Target Margin. This past May she had the opportunity to work with Lisa Clair again in her premier of Willas Authentic Self. Her autobiographical project I DIGRESS started as two stories and a song. It has screened at Hi-Arts Outdoor Film Festival, New York City Independent Theater and Film Festival, and Theater Revolution’s Glass Ceiling Breakers Film Festival winning laurels for best writer. April Sweeney (Director) is an actor, director of theater and film, and Professor of Theater at Colgate University. Her performance work includes collaborations with directors of distinct and diverse methods of performance making, moving between intimate immersive theater, (re)drawing and complicating “classical” heroines, plays in translation, hybrid performance works exploring the language of film and stage simultaneously, devised theater, and improvised film. She has performed in theaters and festivals in Argentina, Bolivia, Belgium, Colombia, Costa Rica, France, Hungary and in theaters across the U.S. As a director she has created intimate chamber works in NYC, an immersive play in Maine, a 4 episode transmedia performance memoir, staged readings for regional theater, large scale new works with college students, created theater with communities in Patagonia and the Bolivian selva, and curated theater engagement projects with Central New York audiences. She is co-translator and co-editor (with Brenda Werth) of the volume, Fauna and Other Plays by Romina Paula, forthcoming with Seagull Press in 2023. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment of the Arts, National Endowment of the Humanities, New York State Council for the Arts, and the NYC Women's Fund for Media, Music, and Theatre award by the City of New York Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment in association with the New York Foundation of the Arts. https://www.idigress.info ; http://aprilsweeney.com Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

In conversation about past and upcoming projects PRELUDE Festival 2023 ARTIST TALK Annie-B Parson Dance, Discussion English 30 minutes 3:30PM EST Saturday, October 14, 2023 Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All In conversation about past and upcoming projects Big Dance Theater Content / Trigger Description: Annie-B will give an artist talk. Choreographer Annie-B Parson is the artistic director of Obie award-winning Big Dance Theater, which she co-founded in 1991 with Paul Lazar and Molly Hickok. Parson has co-created over twenty large-scale works for such venues as the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Old Vic/London, Saddler’s Wells/London, The Walker, The National Theater/Paris, Japan Society and The Kitchen. Outside of her company, some of the artists she has worked with include David Byrne, David Bowie, Lorde, St. Vincent, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Wendy Whelan, Anne Carson, Esperanza Spalding, Suzan-Lori Parks, Laurie Anderson, Salt n Pepa, Jonathan Demme, and the Martha Graham Dance Company. Parson choreographed and did musical staging for American Utopia, and she choreographed Byrne’s musical Here Lies Love which is currently on Broadway; as well as his tours with Brian Eno, and St. Vincent. Parson recently choreographed two operas: Candide at the Lyon Opera, and The Hours at The Met. Parson’s writing has been published in The Atlantic, and The Paris Review; her book The Choreography of Everyday Life is published by Verso Press. Upcoming, with Thomas F. DeFrantz, she is co-editing a book entitled: Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study. bigdancetheater.org anniebparson.com Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

A reading of the beginning of a new play. Two actors. We are going to flick the lights on and off. PRELUDE Festival 2023 READING New Work In Progress Will Eno Theater English 20-30 minutes 5:00PM EST Wednesday, October 11, 2023 Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All A reading of the beginning of a new play. Two actors. We are going to flick the lights on and off. Content / Trigger Description: Two actors TBD. Will Eno lives in Brooklyn. He is a Pulitzer Finalist in Drama and winner of the Obie, Lortel, and Drama Desk awards. He wrote the book for the Skittles Superbowl Musical. He will teach playwriting at Princeton University in Spring 2024. www.willeno.com Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

David Levine invites Matthew Gasda, author of "Dimes Square" and director of the Brooklyn Center for Theater Research, to discuss what's under the radar of Under the Radar. PRELUDE Festival 2023 ARTIST TALK The Other Downtown: David Levine, Matthew Gasda David Levine, Matthew Gasda Discussion English 1 hour 5:30PM EST Thursday, October 12, 2023 Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All David Levine invites Matthew Gasda, author of "Dimes Square" and director of the Brooklyn Center for Theater Research, to discuss what's under the radar of Under the Radar. David Levine is an OBIE and Guggenheim-award winning theater director and visual artist. His work has been covered by Frieze, Artforum, The New York Times , and his writing has appeared in n+1, Theater , and Parkett . He is Professor of the Practice of Performance, Theater and Media at Harvard University, and the author, with Shonni Enelow, of A Discourse on Method , published by 53rd State Press. His holographic film, Dissolution , will debut at the Museum of the Moving Image in late October. He is also the author of Re-Public , a 2005 manifesto for the artistic, fiscal, and operational overhaul of the Public Theater, commissioned by the journal Theater . Content / Trigger Description: www.davidlevine.art Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Journals The Segal Publication Wing includes three open-access digital journals and over twenty-five individual volumes of international plays and theatre resources. The journals are all available for FREE online to a global readership. After three decades, the final print editions of The Journal of American Drama and Theatre (JADT), Slavic and East European Performance (SEEP) , and Western European Stages (WES) were printed in 2013/2014. All Journals are indexed in the MLA International Bibliography and are members of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. The Ruin at the Volland Store, photo by Maddy Michaelis Journal of American Drama and Theatre (JADT) JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Read Now Past Issues End of The World Theatre, Egypt. Image ©Kaupo Kikkas 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. Read Now Past Issues Le Septième Jour. Directed by Meng Jinghui. Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage Festival d’Avignon European Stages The journal provide English-language readers with the most comprehensive source available on current theatre practices across Europe. Read Now Past Issues Ondinnok’s Xajoj Tun Rabinal Achi,directed by Yves Sioui Durand at Montreal’s Excentris. (Photo by Martine Doyon) Indigenous Stages (Coming Soon) The world’s first and only global interdisciplinary academic journal dedicated solely to indigenous stages. Its mission is to foster, survey, and publish the contemporary and historical theoretical discourse surrounding the field.

View the collection of books, plays and other literature on performing arts published and supported by the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center CUNY. Books At The Martin E. Segal Center CUNY, we are dedicated to supporting the research, dissemination, and discourse of the performing arts through our extensive collection of books, publications, and journals. Our diverse collection covers a wide range of topics in the performing arts, from theater and dance to music and film. We are committed to providing a comprehensive resource for scholars, researchers, and artists alike. New Plays from the Caribbean Stéphanie Bérard, with Frank Hentschker An anthology of six contemporary Francophone Caribbean plays. BAiT: Buenos Aires in Translation Daniel Veronese, Lola Arias, Federico Leon, Rafael Spregelburd, Jean Graham-Jones This book brings US readers cutting-edge work from one of Latin America’s most vibrant theatrical scenes: Czech Plays: Seven New Works Marcy Arlin, Gwynn MacDonald, Daniel Gerould The first English-language anthology of Czech plays written after the 1989 “Velvet Revolution. Four Millennial Plays From Belgium David Willinger This anthology captures the tendencies of contemporary European playwriting at the beginning of the new millennium. Intermeddlers Sarah Stites, Frank Hentschker An examination of the censorship of LiIllian Hellman's The Children's Hour. New Plays from Italy Vol 2: Three Plays Daria Deflorian, Antonio Tagliarini, Maria Galante, Michele Santeramo, Allison Eikerenkoetter, Jane House, Frank Hentschker This collection features an anthology of three contemporary plays from Italy. Pixérécourt: Four Melodramas Daniel Gerould, Marvin Carlson A collection of dramas from French theatre director and playwright René-Charles Guilbert de Pixerécourt. Selected Essays: New Directions Nehad Selaiha, Marvin Carlson Nehad Selaiha chronicles the rise of the Free Theatre Movement in Egypt in the late 1980s. Szertelen Színdarabok New Yorkból (Riff Raff Plays from New York) Attila Szabó, Frank Hentschker Hungarian language anthology of five contemporary American theater plays. The Art of Assembly Florian Malzacher A survey of contemporary theatre to demonstrate its political potential in both form and content. Three Poems Liwaa Yazji A collection of poems from Syrian playwright and filmmaker Liwaa Yazji. Zeami and the Nô Theatre in the World Benito Ortolani, Samuel L. Leiter This volume contains the proceedings of the “Zeami and the Nô Theatre in the World” symposium, held in New York City in October 1997 Theatre Research Resources in New York City Marvin Carlson A comprehensive catalogue of New York City research facilities available to theatre scholars. Barcelona Plays Josep M. Benet i Jornet, Sergi Belbel, Lluisa Cunielle, Pau Miro, Marion Peter Holt, Sharon G. Feldman A Collection of New Works by Catalan Playwrights DANCE New York: Performed Manifestos Frank Hentschker A snapshot of the vibrant New York dance scene, through their manifestos. Four Plays from North Africa Abdelkader Alloula, Jalila Baccar, Fatima Gallaire, Tayeb Saddiki A collection of dramatic texts from the Maghreb region of Northwest Africa. Jan Fabre: I Am A Mistake Jan Fabre Seven works from the Flemish-Dutch theatre artist Jan Fabre. New Plays from Italy Volume 3 Valeria Orani, Frank Hentschker A collection of contemporary Italian plays presented in English. Playwrights Before the Fall Daniel Gerould A unique anthology playwrights from Poland, Slovenia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Romania in the backdrop of rebellion, war and revolution. Selected Essays: Perspectives Nehad Selaiha, Marvin Carlson Nehad Selaiha draws attention to important performers, directors, dramaturges, critics and managers of Egyptian Theatre. Ta’ziyeh - Ten Contemporary Indigenous Plays From Iran M.J. Yousefian Kenari, Marvin Carlson A collection of the Ta'ziyeh passion play of Iran, one of the world's most elaborate, wide-spread and long-lasting traditions of religious drama. The Heirs of Molière Marvin Carlson Four French Comedies of the 17th and 18th Centuries Timbre 4: Two Plays by Claudio Tolcachir Claudio Tolcachir, Jean Graham-Jones Collection of plays from Claudio Tolcachir’s Timbre 4 company based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. roMANIA after 2000 Saviana Stanescu, Daniel Gerould. The first anthology of new Romanian drama published in the United States A Permanent Parliament: Notes on Social Choreography Cory Tamler An experiment in writing about performance from the conviction that our entire beings (thoughtbodies) make theory and politics. Comedy: A Bibliography Meghan Duffy, Daniel Gerould A bibliography of critical studies in english on the theory and practice of comedy in drama, theatre, and performance. Decadent Histories: Four Plays by Amelia Hertz Amelia Hertz, Jadwiga Kosicka An innovative collection of plays based on bizarre and macabre episodes from history and legend. Four Plays from Syria: Sa‘dallah Wannous Marvin Carlson, Safi Mahfouz, Robert Myers, Nada Saab This collection contains four full-length works by Sa‘dallah Wannous, available in English for the first time. Jan Fabre: The Servant of Beauty Jan Fabre This volume of monologues is the second collection of works by Jan Fabre for the theatre in an English translation. New Plays from Italy Volume 4 Valeria Orani, Frank Hentschker A collection of contemporary Italian plays, presented in English. Quick Change Daniel Gerould A volume of previously uncollected writings by Daniel Gerould from Comparative Literature, Modern Drama, PAJ, TDR, SEEP, yale/theater and other journals. Selected Essays: Plays and Playwrights Nehad Selaiha, Marvin Carlson A stimulating eyewitness account of modern Egyptian drama by Nehad Selaiha. Ten Years PRELUDE Frank Hentschker, Yu Chien Liu Capturing 10 years of the contemporary performances and conversations of the Segal Center's PRELUDE festival. The Trilogy of Future Memory Jalila Baccar, Fadhel Jaïbi, Marvin Carlson, Nabil Cherni A collection of recent work by Tunisian playwright and actress Jalila Baccar and director co-author Fadhel Jaibi, capturing the complexity and depth of grand themes prevalent in Arab societies. Two Plays: Fleeting Stages Josep M. Benet i Jornet, Marion Peter Holt A collection of two plays by Catalan playwright Josep M. Benet i Jornet. An Incomprehensible Mother Tongue Valère Novarina, Frank Hentschker This volume contains two new American translations of works by Valère Novarina Contemporary Theatre in Egypt Alfred Farag, Gamal Maqsoud, Lenin El-Ramly, Marvin Carlson Contains the first English translation of short plays by leading Egyptian playwrights. Four Arab Hamlet Plays Nabyl Lahlou, Mamduh Adwan, Nader Omran, Jawad al-Assadi, Mahmoud Aboudoma, Marvin Carlson, Magaret Litvin, Joy Arab Jumping off from Shakespeare’s tragedy, the Arab Hamlet tradition has produced bitter and hilarious political satire, musical comedy, and farce. Four Works for the Theatre Hugo Claus, David Willinger, Luk Truyts, Luc Deneulin. A collection of dramatic texts from the Flemish writer and playwright Hugo Claus. New Plays from Italy Vol 1: The Origin of the World Frank Hentschker, Jane House A story of basic and perverse family dynamics, the play is an all-female human comedy in three acts. New Plays from Spain Ernesto Caballero, Guillem Clua, Cristina Colmena, Mar Gómez Glez, Borja Ortiz de Gondra, Alfredo Sanzol, Emilio Williams This selection of plays offers insight into the evolution of Spanish art and culture in the context of the country’s current situation. Selected Essays: Cultural Encounters 1 and 2 Nehad Selaiha, Marvin Carlson Volume 4 of Nehad Selaiha's analysis of Egyptian Theatre focuses on cultural relationships. Shakespeare Made French: Four Plays by Jean-François Ducis Jean-François Ducis, Marvin Carlson An exciting collection of Jean-François Ducis' radical reworkings of William Shakespeare's most famous tragedies, penned on the eve of the French Revolution. The Arab Oedipus: Four Plays Marvin Carlson, Tawfiq al-Hakim, Ali Ahmad Bakathir, Ali Salim, Walid Ikhlasi A varied collection of Arabic explorations of one of the central dramas of the European canon. Theatre from Medieval Cairo: The Ibn Dāniyāl Trilogy (Egypt) Marvin Carlson, Safi Mahfouz The first-ever English translation of three of Ibn Dāniyāl’s saucy puppet plays. Witkiewicz: Seven Plays Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Daniel Gerould An English-translation anthology of seven of Witkiewicz’s most important plays.

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. 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. Current Issue About & Submission Guidelines People Past Issues Contact Curren Issue Current Issue: Volume 22, 2026 Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 20 Steve Earnest Displacing the Orient: Postcolonial Negotiations in Purcărete's Adaptation of One Thousand and One Nights Ion M. Tomuș Finding Lear’s Shadow: Compagnia de' Colombari's King Lear at the 2026 Craiova International Shakespeare Festival David Barlow, Cindy Sibilsky Power, Shame, Vanity and Opportunism – Productions of the 63rd Berliner Theatertreffen Steve Earnest Poetics of the Unfulfilled: The Seagull at the Jordan Hadji Konstantinov-Dzhinot Theatre, Veles, North Macedonia Gergana Traykova NE:BITEF 2025: The Festival that Refused to Disappear Ognjen Obradović, Jelena Knežević Spring in Europe – Beyond the Theatertreffen Steve Earnest Review of 'In The Heights' at the Teatro Variedades Timothy Koch Staging Tradition, Testing Form: The Second Showcase of the National Theatre of Sofia Savas Patsalidis Robert Wilson Beneath a Cabbage Leaf: 7 Solitudes at the Nacionalinis Kauno Dramos Teatras Tomasz Domagała “The more I give to thee, the more I have…” 15th edition of the International Shakespeare Festival in Craiova Aglika Stefanova About & Submission Guideline About The Journal For almost a quarter of a century, from 1969 until 2013 the journal Western European Stages provided one of the most detailed and comprehensive overviews of the season-by-season activities in this major part of the theatre world available anywhere in any language. From 1981 onward, parallel coverage of Eastern Europe was provided by its sister journal, Slavic and East European Performance, edited by the late Professor Daniel Gerould. This was an extremely exciting and innovative period, marked by the work of many of the greatest directors of the twentieth century, by actors and designers of equal achievement, and by remarkable changes in theatre design and technology. At the turn of the century WES offered two special issues that gave a complete survey of the current theatrical scene in every country, down to the smallest, in that part of the world, a kind of overview unavailable anywhere else. Many of the larger countries, such as Germany and Sweden, received special issues, as did certain aspects of the contemporary stage, such as the growth of women directors in Europe. Both journals have offered interviews with leading artists and detailed reports on most of the leading European theatre festivals. The European continent has undergone radical changes during this quarter century. When WES was founded, Eastern and Western Europe were two quite distinct political and theatrical spheres. With the disappearance of the Russian control in the East, the rise of the European Union, and the rapid increase of productions combining the artists from a variety of countries, east and west, this cold war division today is largely an historical memory politically and theatrically. Thus, in 2013, these two journals combined their activities to reflect this more integrated continent, and metamorphosed into European Stages. We hope that the new, merged resource will continue to provide English-language readers with the most comprehensive source available on current theatre in this most important area of such activity. ISSN number of European Stages: 1050-199 Submission Guidelines Manuscripts should normally fall between 1500 and 5000 words, the shorter contributions normally reporting on a single production and the longer several related productions or festival reports. All submissions must concern themselves with recent or contemporary work in the Eastern and Western European theatre and performances created and presented in Europe first. In some cases also European productions at US venues without extensive reviews will be considered. Strong preferences will be given to contributions reporting from Europe. Historical studies and literary analyses are not acceptable, although some such material may of course be incorporated into reviews when relevant. The reviews should be primarily descriptive, not judgmental, although reviewers may of course include their opinions of the work. In addition to reports on current productions or groups of productions, we welcome interviews with prominent European theatre figures – actors, directors, designers, and dramatists. Photos should be 300dpi, JPEG, preferably in color, ideally 6×9 inches (six inches wide, 9 inches high; 300dpi for the full size image.) It is the responsibility of the contributor to secure the copyright and permission for the use of the images for ES (European Stages). The photo credit has to be included in the JPEG file name and needs to be listed at the end of the manuscript. The photo credit and JPEG image file should be listed in the following format: The production name as it appears in the essay, in Italics, followed by a period. Then 'Photo' (not in Italics) followed by a colon, and the photographer's credit (not in Italics) ending with a period. For eg: " HAMLET. Photo: Arno Declair." For submissions, please send proposals or articles to our editors at EuropeanStages@gmail.com View Past Issues Curren Issue Past Issues Volume 22 Volume 18 Volume 21 Volume 17 - 1 Volume 20 Volume 19 Archive Search Article Name Article Author Publishing Date Article Name Article Author and Date Publishing Date Article Name Article Author and Date Publishing Date Article Name Article Author and Date Publishing Date Article Name Article Author and Date Publishing Date Article Name Article Author and Date Publishing Date Article Name Article Author and Date Publishing Date Article Name Article Author and Date Publishing Date Article Name Article Author and Date Publishing Date Article Name Article Author and Date Publishing Date Article Name Article Author and Date Publishing Date Article Name Article Author and Date Publishing Date People Editors Steve Earnest, Editor Kalina Stefanova, Co-Editor Dominica Laster, Co-Editor Krystyna Illakowicz, Co-Editor Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Marvin Carlson Director of Publications Frank Hentschker Executive Director Gaurav Singh Nijjer Digital and Web Coordinator Advisory Board Joshua Abrams Christopher Balme Maria Delgado Allen Kuharsky Bryce Lease Jennifer Parker-Starbuck Magda Romańska Laurence Senelick Daniele Vianello Phyllis Zatlin Contact Email EuropeanStages@gmail.com

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. ISSN Number: 2376-1148 Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Current Issue About & Submission Guidelines Resources People Contact Past Issues & Archive Curren Issue Current Issue Vol. 19, Spring 2026 Issue Edited by Katherine Hennessey Download Issue Reframing the Past: Situating Mesopotamian Theatrical Traditions Within a Cross‑Cultural Performance Continuum Amir al-Azraki Performance Review: DODI AND DIANA, by Kareem Fahmy. Directed by Reginald L. Douglas. Mosaic Theater, DC. September 23, 2025. Jovita Jacob Selwyn Gen Z Theatre from Turkey Taps into Repertoires of Millennial Resistance: A Comparison of the Short Festival Plays 'Helezoni' and 'Orange' Deniz Başar Performance Review: ALMONDS BLOSSOM IN DEIR YASSIN, by Hanna Eady. Directed by Hanna Eady. Cherry Street Village, Seattle. October 25, 2025. Marina Johnson Performance Review: THE CLOWN, by Mariam Basha. Directed by Kamal El Basha. El Hakawati Theatre, Jerusalem. August 28, 2025 in person, September 11, 2025 via WhatsApp video. Marina Johnson Book Review: Samer Al-Saber. A Movement’s Promise: The Making of Contemporary Palestinian Theatre (Stanford University Press, 2025). Pp. 328. Hardcover, Paperback, E-book. Hadia Mousa Past Issue Curren Issue Past Issue Volume 19 Volume 16 Volume 18 Volume 15 Volume 17 Volume 14 Volume 1 to 13 Archive We are in the process of moving all past journal entries to the current websiite. Please bear with us as we make this transition. You can view all the past issues at https://arabstages.commons.gc.cuny.edu . For any queries or clarifications, write to us at t ed.ziter@nyu.edu Spring 2023 Volume 14 Up There by Wael Kadour, Introduction Edward Ziter Spring 2023 Volume 14 Review: Baba written by Denmo Ibrahim, directed by Hamid Dehghani Suzi Elnaggar Spring 2023 Volume 14 Review: Decolonizing Sarah: A Hurricane Play written and directed by Samer Al-Saber George Potter Spring 2023 Volume 14 Review: Layalina written by Martin Yousif Zebari, directed by Sivan Battat Sami Ismat Load More About & Submission Guideline About The Journal 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 does not seek to be exclusive nor to promote any nationalist or religion-based agenda. In strictly geographical and political terms, the journal will be devoted to theatre and performance material from the member states of the League of Arab States, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, but also diasporic literature from around the globe created by former residents of those states or their descendants. Moreover, both the operative adjectives Arab and Islamic should be understood here to demarcate, primarily, a general cultural area of scholarly exploration and negotiation. Investigations of material from the many non-Arab and non-Muslim communities located within the Arab/Muslim world are welcomed by the journal. Subjects can be drawn from all areas of theatre activity as well as from performance work that lies outside the traditional European concept of theatre. The journal will welcome essays of a scholarly nature, which will be submitted to peer review, also reports on current productions, interviews, and translations of plays and theoretical statements, and reports, notices and announcements of current and future productions and festivals or other matters of potential general interest to the readership. 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. Submission Guidelines Articles, interviews, and play translations should normally fall between 4,000 and 8,000 words. Performance and book reviews should fall between 800 and 2,000 words. We are especially interested in the studies and reviews of recent or contemporary work. Proposals or articles may be submitted to our editors at t ed.ziter@nyu.edu . Please include the author’s full name, institutional affiliation (if relevant), telephone number, and Email address. Contributors are also asked to include a) a short biographical note (no longer than 250 words); b) relevant images for publication c) a document detailing each image’s caption and credit. View Formatting Guidelines Arab Stages is seeking a new Associate Editor to begin Spring 2027. For more information or to self-nominate, email ted.ziter@nyu.edu . View Past Issues Resources This section is under construction. For suggestions and contributions, kindly email t ed.ziter@nyu.edu Open Calls More information coming here soon. Events / Festivals Bankstown, Australia - Arab Theatre Studio (http://urbantheatre.com.au/current-projects/arabic-theatre-studio/) Al Ain, UAE - Arabian Shakespeare Festival (http://www.arabianshakespearefestival.org/About_ASF.html) Liverpool, UK - Liverpool Arab Arts Festival (http://www.arabartsfestival.com/) Cairo, Egypt - The Egyptian National Theatre Festival (http://www.cairoopera.org/) Baghdad, Iraq - Hawler International Theater Festival (https://hawlerinternationaltheaterfestival.wordpress.com/) Grants More information coming here soon. Research The International Federation for Theatre Research (http://www.firt-iftr.org/) International Centre for Theatre Research (https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2011/08/peter-brooks-international-centre-of.html) Communities Brussels, Belgium - Young Arab Theatre Fund (http://www.annalindhfoundation.org/members/young-arab-theatre-fund) Chicago, Illinois USA - Silk Road Rising (http://www.silkroadrising.org/) New York, New York USA - Noor Theatre (http://noortheatre.org/) USA - Middle East American Initiative (http://www.larktheatre.org/who-we-are/programs/fellowships-and-residencies/middle-east-american-initiative/) San Francisco, California USA - Golden Thread Productions (http://www.goldenthread.org/) Beirut, Lebanon- Ashkal Alwan (http://ashkalalwan.org/) Beirut, Lebanon - Maqamat Dance Theatre (http://www.maqamat.org/) Algeria - Companie El Ajouad (http://www.elajouad.com/fr/accueil) United Kingdom - MENA Arts UK (https://www.menaarts.uk/) Films Arab Film Festival Australia (http://arabfilmfestival.com.au/) Aan Korb: BBC Arabic Film and Documentary Festival (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-26518011) Publishing Journal: Performing Islam (https://www.intellectbooks.com/performing-islam) Issued by Intellect Press UK in both print & digital Magazine: Brown Book (http://brownbook.me/) Published in Dubai Teaching Opportunities More information coming here soon. People Founding Editor Marvin Carlson Founders Marvin Carlson Frank Hentschker Editor Edward Ziter Associate Editor Katherine Hennessey Performance Reviews Co-Editors Aycan Akçamete Hala Baki Marjan Moosavi Malek Najjar Book Reviews Editor James Al-Shamma Managing Editors Jennifer Nan Dong Dominic Finocchiaro Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Marvin Carlson Director of Publications Frank Hentschker Executive Director Gaurav Singh Nijjer Web & Digital Producer Advisory Board Hadia Mousa Khalid Amin Dalia Basiouny Areeg Ibrahim Malek Najjar Sonali Pahwa Babak Rahimi Nada Saab Samer al-Saber Mohammed Jafar Yousefian Contact Email For any queries or clarifications, write to us at t ed.ziter@nyu.edu with the subject line Arab Stages . (Please note arabstages@gc.cuny.edu is no longer a functional email address. If you recently used this email address please resend your email to ted.ziter@nyu.edu .)

Madeline Pages Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 1 Visit Journal Homepage Theatre of Isolation Madeline Pages By Published on December 9, 2021 Download Article as PDF Conceiving of a theatre of isolation presents the performance scholar with a conundrum akin to a tree falling in a secluded forest. As it is so often distinguished by the presence of the group, of collective and communal exchange, the theatre as an art form seems diametrically opposed to isolation—physical, social, mental, emotional, spiritual. How can theatre relate to the world while maintaining a state of isolation from it? And where does isolation lead if and when it ends? I offer theatre of isolation as a category of performance that engages with these questions and one that implies a tension between the social engagement of theatre, which is often thought of as having a social function, and social isolation. In 2020, theatre artists were living in that tension. I believe their work proved theatre and isolation can coexist. I also believe theatre of isolation is not a temporally bounded category but one we can use to see this coexistence of socially engaged art with isolation in the work of theatre makers from other times. The 1970s in the US was an era of aftermath. American society faced as one (though by disparate means and with differing attitudes) the shock of the Vietnam War as it was witnessed on television, national financial decline, and the continued, violent subjugation of marginalized people. The political struggles of the 1960s, in a sense, continued through the 1970s, prolonged and deepened without relief as one decade spilled into the next. Given this climate, a desire for isolation or at least the expression of that desire in art, strikes me as unsurprising. For this essay, I have chosen to look at three artists, Adrienne Kennedy, Peter Schumann, and Jack Smith, whose theatre from the 1970s is isolated from the dominant culture—white, male, heterosexual, conservative, capitalist—of the time. Isolation of this type may be reflected in physical space, and I pay close attention to both real and imaginary architectures of isolation. However, my analysis is more broadly concerned with social isolation—how it happens, what it looks and feels like, and its effect on artistic expression. The result of this isolation is not necessarily an increased understanding of the self, of one’s identity, but a kind of solace that primes the individual for the monumental task of breaking new ground and resisting oppression. Such a claim is not new. Theatre of isolation can be classified alongside the antisocial and the anti-relational in performance studies, particularly as such terms are debated among scholars of queer studies. [1] However, I wish to distinguish isolation from the antisocial and align my analysis with the asocial as theorized by Summer Kim Lee in “Staying In: Mitski, Ocean Vuong, and Asian American Asociality.” The asocial, according to Lee, complicates and expands the state of antisociality of the subject, as a momentary choice to resist the social in order to “shift and reconstellate one’s relations to . . . the socialities with which one is entangled,” rather than deny or resist relationality completely. [2] “Staying in” is what Lee calls the performance of asociality in which the subject chooses to be alone rather than be out with others. In Lee’s formulation, to have the need and desire for time away from others, from an outside . . . does not hold up a depoliticized fantasy of autonomy. . . . Rather, it points toward the desire to want to relate, to show up for another, but when one is ready, and in ways that alter the horizon of what constitutes the social, and the political projects, collectivities, affiliations, and models of care borne out of it. [3] “Staying in,” then, is a self-reflexive performance of asociality, an enactment of “the ambivalent and rich aspects of solitude” for the purposes of protection and preservation, but also preparation for political and social engagement. Particularly for individuals who identify with a minority group—Lee speaks specifically to the effects for Asian American people—staying in offers “sustained and sustaining ways . . . of moving through a world that is messy, damaging, hurtful, and exhausting.” [4] Staying in appears to be the antidote to the psychic exhaustion caused by the normalization of oppression, but does not preclude political engagement or outward expression, as in forms of public art. Lee further argues that staying in is in fact “enfolded within . . . acts and desires of going out” to participate in “radical, collective, organized action [that has heretofore characterized minoritarian political critique] within the social worlds in which we live.” [5] Such collective actions have been inherited by contemporary culture through glorified histories of the protests and insurgency of the 1960s. From that decade’s legacy emerged a “compulsory sociability,” the belief that “one’s political investments and acts of solidarity must be located in the realm of the social.” [6] As Lee conceives it, staying in as a mode of performance rejects the assumption of compulsory sociability but not the collective pursuit of social justice. [7] Staying in inverts the common conception of the antisocial or isolated individual as outside —outside of the world, disengaged, or perhaps a mere spectator. Instead, the individual staying in is staying inside , and by choice. What defines an “insider” is not, as the prevailing use of term implies, the power of being part of the majority but isolation from the outside world while one remains within it. Furthermore, this kind of social isolation is personal, and consciously undertaken; from it one can derive some agency, defining one’s own terms of engagement. This unconventional inside/outside dichotomy becomes important for what follows. I am, as the three artists I will discuss in depth here are, always keeping an eye on the outside context as I delve into solitary spaces of imagination and creative practice. This outside, on the macro level, is the US in the 1970s. The dominant scholarly narratives of American culture in the 1970s, and particularly those narratives that focus on the theatre of the era, provide contradictory summaries of the artistic landscape: it is sometimes monopolized by the echoes of Tom Wolfe’s 1976 essay on “The Me Decade” and the nihilistic glamour of Andy Warhol, or, conversely, by artists characterized as community-oriented survivors scraping by in the middle of a national financial crisis. Hillary Miller argues that these analyses submerge “very necessary labors of institutionalization . . . in histories of downtown theatre that focus on the 1970s political separatism on the one hand, and myopic investigations of the self and identity on the other.” [8] Marc Robinson prefers to look at the American art world in the 1970s as in transition, in flux and unfixed, a decade of indeterminacy, which is a description that this essay may heighten and, hopefully, expand by offering up a possible explanation for that instability (at least for the artists I hone in on). [9] I argue that the lack of fixity stems from, as this brief summary of seventies historiography suggests, a conflict between the solitary and the collective. Therefore, my own research on the decade is caught somewhere in the middle of the academic fray, seeking to spotlight what Will Kaufman claims are the concerns of the decade’s drama with “social exclusion, isolation, and exhaustion,” while denying any notion that isolation as aesthetic counteracts activism and community solidarity. [10] Adrienne Kennedy, Peter Schumann, and Jack Smith are three markedly different artists, and their individual experiences of social isolation cannot be conflated. Whereas Schumann, as I will discuss in detail later on, isolates himself by choice, Kennedy’s (and Smith’s, to a certain extent) isolation begins as the result of exclusion. What I believe these artists have in common (other than being contemporaries) is that the theatre of isolation mirrors the social isolation of the artist, which I will argue further in what follows. All three have received, and continue to receive, no shortage of attention, making them familiar to many readers. This allows me to focus on my point of contact: the theme and aesthetics of isolation within their theatre. I adopt Lee’s approach to how individual artistic works both reflect, and are aesthetically influenced by, the artist’s state of isolation, physical or otherwise, from the social world. In the sense that all three were working in the American Northeast in the 1970s, the scope of this essay is narrow and reveals my own blind spots as a scholar. This essay is not intended to be an encompassing study. It wants conversation: conversation with Lee and other queer theorists and historians, with other artists, and with present and future performance and criticism. I address this essay to future works in particular, in the hopes that the category of theatre of isolation will be a useful tool for the theatre of the present. “I always just could very easily become a character in the movies or in a book.”[11] Adrienne Kennedy seems to stand alone in scholarship. On the surface she may be an odd choice for this essay, given that she appears to be very much a part of the scene in the seventies. She was involved with the playwrights’ coalitions New York Theatre Strategy (NYTS) and the Women’s Theatre Council (WTC) and her plays were performed at major downtown theatre hubs like The Public and La Mama. However, she continues to be treated at least from a historical perspective as constantly new and emerging, or else already dead and being revived, in spite of the actual trajectory of her career as a playwright. Though already the winner of an Obie, in the late 1970s she was, as alluded to by Miller, still a new artist to the likes of Joe Papp, who produced the premiere of A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White in his New York Shakespeare Festival in 1976. Stephen J. Bottoms, on the other hand, chooses to mention only the revivals of her work, which seems to devalue the new plays she wrote in the seventies. In overviews of women playwrights and feminist theatre, such as Brenda Murphy’s essay for The Cambridge History of American Women’s Literature , Kennedy is little more than a footnote: her name introduces the “explosion of playwriting in the 1970s that accompanied the second-wave feminist movement,” but none of her plays are mentioned. [12] Then there are the places Kennedy is not named at all: in James Smethurst’s 2005 book on the Black Arts Movement (BAM) in the 1960s and 1970s, for example, Jack Kerouac’s name pops up five times and Kennedy’s does not appear once. She is rarely counted among members of the BAM, though she was in conversation with the movement’s leading artists. At the same time, her race and gender have contributed to her elision from other histories of New York theatre in the 1960s and 1970s. [13] Kennedy’s resistance to grouping, her lack of “group-ness,” at a time when groups, collectives, and movements appear to be the central critical-historical focus, may in part explain the scholarly tendency to read her plays as self-contained or autobiographical. Kimberly W. Benston, for example, writes that “autobiography . . . is the very signature of Adrienne Kennedy’s impossible though endless quest for a clarifying and stabilizing source.” [14] Kennedy is thus placed in a room of her own, unsurprising for a writer whose introspective style of drama abounds with isolated rooms, frames, and other physical spaces as recurring metaphors. [15] Thus, Kennedy’s particular theatre of isolation is characterized by the isolation chamber of the imagination, i.e. the funnyhouse. Beginning with Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964), Kennedy devises the “funnyhouse” as a psychological isolation chamber where characters that look and sound very much like their author grappling with the mystery of the self. In Funnyhouse , the self is subsequently broken up into multiple, “ideal selves,” from Patrice Lumumba to Jesus. In her later works, the “funnyhouse” is given different names (the sleep deprivation chamber, for example), yet its structure persists as indicative of the same interior: that of the writer’s mind. Luckily, we have snippets of the writer’s mind for comparison: that is, Kennedy’s prose texts, such as People Who Led to My Plays , which give context to the sense of isolation in plays like Funnyhouse . There is a potential danger, however, in reading Kennedy as self-contained if it means downplaying the influence of outside sources. As suggested by the epigraph to this section, as well as the subject matter of People Who Led to My Plays , the books, movies, and other media Kennedy consumed are inseparable from her imagination and the spaces in her plays. Particularly in her plays from the 1970s, Kennedy is mining the American media, and showing onstage the complex relationship between the media and Black people. An Evening with Dead Essex (1973), for example, was the result of an obsession in the early 1970s with the way news reports depicted Mark Essex, the Black nationalist who killed nine people in two attacks in New Orleans in December 1972 and January 1973. “I feel like Mark Essex,” she told Paul K. Bryant-Jackson and Lois More Overbeck in a 1990 interview, carrying her own “tremendous rage against American society.” On the one hand, as an African American she was forced to be bicultural, to read white culture as fluently as Black, despite being violently written out of that culture. Benston remarks, “Much like her heroines, Kennedy’s work seems driven by a search for an incandescent touchstone of self-reference, some primal image, story, or scene, that would heal the self’s constitution as wound or lack, its entrapment in dramas scripted from elsewhere.” [16] On the other hand, Kennedy says, “I think that as a black person in America, you almost have to force yourself on society.” [17] Kennedy’s books and movies, and even the true story of Essex, are the “dramas scripted from elsewhere,” and Benston interprets them as a trap of false identity. But it is perhaps this sense of falseness, when Kennedy wrestles with it in her plays, which is most illuminating of how the outside world operates against her and other Black people, particularly women. In A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White , the Kennedy funnyhouse transforms into the silver screen of Golden Age Hollywood cinema, more enthralling to Kennedy and exclusive of her conception of self than any other “drama scripted from elsewhere.” In the play’s opening speech the audience is told that Clara plays “a bit role,” standing outside the frame and the action between characters representing cinema stars Marlon Brando, Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, Jean Peters, Montgomery Clift, and Shelley Winters. [18] Even when Clara steps into the scene, her “lines” are read by one of these white Hollywood icons and she is separated from both the movie world and her own life as her diary entries, recounting her family’s history and present relationships, are read aloud and subsumed within their reenactment of famous films. The black and white movie scenes are juxtaposed with scenes of Clara’s parents and husband, who “all look like [black and white] photographs” she keeps of them. The play is always attempting to fit these two spaces, the screen and picture frame, together, but regularly fails. For example, the hospital bedroom of Clara’s brother, in which she and her mother discuss her happiness or lack thereof, is at odds with the bedroom in which the characters of Marlon Brando and Jean Peters perform the teach-me-to-read scene from the film Viva Zapata , the one in “constant twilight” while Brando and Peters “star in dazzling wedding night light.” [19] The simultaneity of these contrasting scenes heightens the disconnection between Clara’s life and that of the movies, as well as between mother and daughter in their conversation, as mother insists that her pregnant daughter is unhappy without a settled domestic life while daughter cites her professional successes as a playwright as cause for great happiness. It is significant that when Clara speaks, she is almost always talking about herself as a playwright. This choice leads easily to a feminist interpretation of the play as dramatization of the difficulties of being a woman—read mother and sexual object—and an artist at once. It is twice as difficult for a Black woman, with the models of womanhood forced upon her by white culture. As Deborah R. Geis argues, “Tension between immersion and angry confrontation of the Hollywood world experienced by Clara in this play embodies the ambivalent spectatorial status of the African American woman whose subjectivity risks being undermined by her identification with an exclusionary cultural apparatus.” [20] The struggle for self-definition with these slippery models, which promise “fulfillment and female power” [21] but fail to address its limitations, then becomes a central concern of the play. I’m not entirely convinced, however, that it is Clara who is experiencing the tension Geis describes. As Clara says, her image as spectator comes not from her but from her husband Eddie: “Eddie says . . . that my diaries make me a spectator watching my life like watching a black and white movie.” [22] For Clara, writing is both her dream and her way of understanding her reality. Through writing she copes with family traumas such as her brother’s hospitalization, her parents’ divorce, her own divorce, and a miscarriage, on top of daily experiences of a racist and segregated society. Her life as such does not fit into the movie scenes—she cannot watch herself there. Instead, she must write her life in, and direct the stars from the wings in how to insert the language of her life into their filmography. The cohesion Clara and Winters achieve in the final moments of the play suggests that such a writing is possible to an extent. It is successful, however, only in the sense that each woman’s end is equally evocative of a desperate situation. In these last moments, Clara and Winters speak simultaneously of the possibility of Clara’s brother’s death. Then, when it is revealed that her brother will not die, Clara describes almost falling down the front steps of the hospital, her crying mother in her arms, in a scene of family sorrow-tinged relief (her brother will live but paralyzed and with brain damage). Simultaneously, Winters drowns as at the end of the film A Place in the Sun . Both Clara and Winters, in their separate worlds, are drowning. Clara’s writing and orchestration of the film stars and Kennedy’s writing of Clara are also united, in their exemplification of what Margo Natalie Crawford calls “black public interiority.” Black public interiority, a similar contradiction to my theatre of isolation that Crawford explains, caught the BAM between viewing introversion as elitism and “constantly performing ways in which the personal could be collective and inner mental space could be shared as people deconditioned their minds together.” [23] As a playwright in the 1970s, Kennedy was accused of such elitist introversion and yet her plays so powerfully publicize, in the act of performance, inner mental space. She engaged with the BAM principles and with white culture though neither of them would have her. In both cases she appears superficially as a spectator, as Eddie calls Clara, when in truth she was inside it all, constructing a funnyhouse to contain and showcase the complexities of that insider state. “[Art] needs to be EVERYWHERE because it is the INSIDE of the WORLD.”[24] It is difficult to argue that any period in the history of Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theatre is asocial in Lee’s sense, a respite from direct engagement, when their reputation is so closely linked to political protest and other forms of activism. The 1970s, however, saw a break in the company and, perhaps, a moment of redefining what it means for the Theatre’s art to be “ inside of the world.” In 1970, Schumann moved from New York City to the small town of Plainfield, Vermont and, as company founder and linchpin, essentially reconstituted Bread and Puppet as a solo project. Schumann had become increasingly critical of the audiences and politics of the city where his company’s homemade bread and giant carnivalesque puppets had commanded street actions of the Resistance Movement of the 1960s. [25] “We the Schumanns,” he wrote at the time, “are ready for a bigger slower style of motion, air breathing and vegetable growing included.” [26] Many of his collaborators, all but two of whom he left behind in New York, perceived the move as “copping out.” In their eyes, Schumann was abandoning the collective spirit that had defined Bread and Puppet since 1961 in order to join the well-to-do intellectuals and resort entrepreneurs migrating to Vermont for a taste of the majority white wilderness. [27] But as an artist Schumann had “outgrown the addressive-moralistic mode” that defined his street theatre of the 1960s. [28] At Cate Farm, the location of the Goddard College artist’s residency Schumann had secured in Vermont, he could develop a new, personal style. The Bread and Puppet Theatre of the Vermont days, as I will argue, exhibits an isolation through disillusionment—the disillusionment Schumann had with the forms of political activism that consumed him in the 1960s. Schumann’s move to rural Vermont would have a profound influence on his work up to the present day. As an out-of-towner and an immigrant to the US, Schumann was unlikely to find communion in Plainfield. The Cate Farm period can be defined by distance from the audience, from coherent narrative and authorial power, and from the crowd . Lee notes that isolation “dynamically affords one the time and space needed to evade forms of sociability that late liberalism and subsequent formations of political resistance demand.” [29] The isolation Schumann experienced afforded him the time and space to reevaluate his performance practices, which in the early Vermont days he tailored to his new circumstances. When there was an audience, it was made up of small-town Vermonters and students, and some of the Goddard performance experiments he conducted with student volunteers had no audience at all. This was a far cry from the socially, racially, and generationally diverse crowds in the streets of New York, an audience who Schumann saw as ideal for political theatre. [30] For the Plainfield audience, Schumann eschewed direct address and adopted the more traditional staging of the elevated proscenium, restoring a physical distance between audience and performance. He no longer saw the need for the conscious, aggressive alienation of the audience that characterized his New York street agitations. He wasn’t making theatre for his audience anymore but for himself and alienation could be achieved simply by embracing the isolated place he already inhabited as an immigrant to rural America. The first of the proscenium performances at Cate Farm were the five Grey Lady Cantatas ( Grey Lady Cantatas II-VI, 1970–1975). In these Cantatas , Schumann had a new preoccupation, which is encapsulated in the image of the Grey Lady puppet crying a crystal tear in Grey Lady Cantata II (1971): an individual—or The Individual—as the central subject in a story of suffering. Grey Lady Cantata II consists of a series of tableaus featuring an increasingly isolated Grey Lady figure, whose life is made barren by the removal of all other people and objects until finally she dies. The Grey Lady, as well as most of the other performers, are large-scale puppets that completely obscure their human puppeteers. The few human performers, in turn, imitate the cold puppets, with grey-painted faces and the stiffness of automatons. The grotesque and opulent style of the puppets, the puppet-like acting style of the humans, and the use of marionette-type mechanization for removing props and changing scenery de-emphasize the presence and power of human authors or performers and prevent the audience from fully identifying with the suffering being. Furthermore, Schumann wrote no dialogue which might have humanized the Grey Lady puppet or provided some authorial insight. “The story is definitely the audiences’ job, not ours,” wrote Schumann: “We have no free delivery of interpretations, librettos, symbols, special philosophies. We have a physical fitness apparatus of colors and other wonders of perception. Audience does the sport, the skis and knapsacks of theatre.” [31] Grey Ladies (the name given to American Red Cross volunteers who provided non-medical care, particularly during World War II) and other references to war might easily be connected with the many works of Schumann’s that were explicitly anti-Vietnam War. However, as Schumann explains, that’s a story for the audience to write. Stefan Brecht, a prolific chronicler of Bread and Puppet’s history, speculates that the obscurity of Grey Lady Cantata II was a device ensuring the “privacy” Schumann had desired when he left New York. [32] Although Schumann’s work had always attempted to preclude audience identification and pacification, the plight of the Grey Lady strikes a more introspective, unprecedented note than other of his works—and seems to reflect the artist’s own state of mind. [33] In the evolution of Schumann’s theatre, Cate Farm was a period of transition between the agitprop street theatre and the contemplative, moralistic tone and style that would distinguish his work from the late 1970s on. After moving again in 1974, this time to Dopp Farm in the even more rural Vermont town of Glover, Schumann would actually return to much of what characterized his earliest works: the movement of parades, marches, and circuses; “gigantic language” and spectacle; and, most importantly, subject matter that responded in the form of direct address to global politics. While at Goddard College, however, Schumann seemed to abandon his social activism for a time in favor of introspection. Schumann’s preference for The Individual as subject connects to what Brecht describes as presentation of a representation, without exhortation, a quiet succession of images without a transparent director’s note. However, Grey Lady Cantata II presents the extreme of individuality as source for great suffering and suggests the individual’s need for the collective. The crowd was still Schumann’s purported enemy and the perceived enemy of all individual thought and artistic freedom, but such a production suggests that he harbored a desire to embrace relation and collectivity if for no other reason than that it was a necessary tool in the fight for the good of society. Schumann was clearly troubled by the tension between denouncing the crowd and identifying individuality as sickening and deadly. He hungered for some other way, some middle ground. When he moved to Glover, he disbanded the Vermont Bread and Puppet that had formed around him in Plainfield and also turned away from the obscuring style of the Grey Lady Cantatas. It seems that what Schumann took away from his early years in Vermont and the intense isolation in the work of that period was the energy to reenter the fight for good in earnest. The early Dopp Farm period began with a series of morality plays, but shortly thereafter the enormous Domestic Resurrection Circuses—arguably the most iconic performances in the company’s history—blossomed. The influence of Scott Nearing, the philosopher of capitalist secessionism and “living the good life” who inspired the American back-to-the-land movement of the late 1960s (and who happened to be Schumann’s relative by marriage), in the Circuses and other post- Grey Lady works is evident. Schumann’s work in the late 1970s cried out for the “decent life” to abide by what he understood as the values of good and addressed a “universal” neighborhood as audience-recipients. The fact that Schumann’s morally didactic theatre emerges after the reserved Grey Lady Cantatas recalls Lee’s definition of asociality as a means of taking stock of political projects and perhaps altering one’s plan of engagement. In a 1994 interview with John Bell for Theater magazine, Schumann acknowledged the dangers of the ecological romanticism that attracts many people to isolated green places like his farm in Vermont: the evils of capitalism had to take thematic precedence, he said, though he lamented that this world is not a place in which his work could be focused on the idyllic setting. [34] At the time of the interview it had been almost twenty five years since Schumann moved to Vermont, and in the intervening decades, he had eschewed the aesthetics of solitude and suffering in productions like Grey Lady Cantata II for community-oriented spectacles imbued with his utopian ideals. There is irony in fighting mass systems of oppression from such a place of solitude atop a misty green mountain, but from Schumann’s perspective, he was back in the mud. “I want to be uncommercial film personified.”[35] Wading through secondary source material on Smith, I feel acutely the struggle to understand the introverted Jack Smith and to interpret his enigmatic theatre. With little surviving film documentation of Smith’s performances to go on, the archive of Smith’s theatre feels like a load of conflicting gossip and indecisive speculation. John Matturri and Rachel Joseph both describe the material elements of Smith’s performances—the “homeless objects” or “glittering junk”—as emblematic of the inherent impossibility of fixity. Smith’s orientalist aesthetic (“Egyptiana”), remarked on by Michael Moon, Marc Siegal, and Juan Suárez and compared by Dominic Johnson with Sun Ra’s “intergalactic esoterica,” is either camp or an authentic belief based in Maria Montez monotheism. [36] Matturri recalls Smith’s “generous acceptance . . . of collaborative input” and the audience’s “relaxed receptive attention” at performances in spite of their length, frequent interruptions, and arbitrary conclusion, which are at odds with the stories (which I will discuss further on) about Smith’s verbal abuse of spectators. [37] These and other writings on Smith seem to depict a different version of the artist. However, it is José Esteban Muñoz’s formulation of the artist as “the exemplary figure of the queer utopian artist and thinker who seeks solitariness yet calls for a queer collectivity” that seems the truest, and his conception of Smith’s theatre as utopian stands as a direct challenge to the inclusion of Smith in an anti-relationist archive of gay male artists. [38] Muñoz acknowledges two sides of Smith, the solitary and the collective, that are so often kept apart, yet are very clearly both present in his oeuvre. Smith’s infamous filmography of the 1960s captures the crazed, queer collective and Susan Sontag called Flaming Creatures “a lovely specimen of . . . ‘pop art,’” lumping Smith in with a whole art movement addressing the American culture of the day. [39] The theatrical performances he began in the 1970s, many of which were one man shows, represent the other, solitary side of Smith. These intensely lonely performances of the 1970s are Smith’s theatre of isolation, but even as they capture Smith’s increasing personal and creative isolation, at their heart is the anti-capitalist utopia Smith dreamed of for all people like him. [40] Smith spoke distastefully and fearfully in interviews of the archive (specifically, the Anthology Film Archives) as the “vault.” The vault was unyielding, petrifying, and antithetical to Smith’s preferred venue in the 1970s: his own apartment. In 1970, Smith announced that he would open his living space in downtown Manhattan to audiences for free shows. J. Hoberman described the “Plaster Foundation” (as Smith’s home performance venue was called) as squalid, with a gaping hole in its ceiling and an accumulation of junk and debris on the floor, to which Smith lovingly tended in the performance series “Plaster Foundation of Atlantis.” Over the rubble Smith hung fairy lights, placed cardboard palm trees, and constructed an artificial lagoon complete with a waterfall. In other words, he built Atlantis, which mythic paradise featured prominently in his imaginative writings and performances, out of a dilapidated East Village apartment. The Plaster Foundation was both the precursor to and the absolute antithesis of Andy Warhol’s Factory, which promised consumerist glamor where the Foundation spat on it. Warhol may have been an “insider” in the eyes of the broader public, but Smith was tuned in to the ugly truths of the system that produced it and he dug into them on his stage. Smith’s style of performance crumbles like the ceiling of his apartment and is as inhospitable to the audience as a junkyard. Performances were held late at night and often began hours after their expected start time. Much of what audiences watched, which may or may not have been part of the intended performance, was the arrangement of the set and other anti-theatrical antics such as Smith pretending to vacuum up the mountains of cement and plaster for hours on end. The action was frequently interrupted by further fussing with sets and costumes and the script was liable to be spontaneously rewritten by Smith mid-speech. Some Plaster Foundation visitors like Richard Foreman read this as evidence that Smith’s imagination and editorial eye were always one step ahead of the audience. The fussing and adjusting was performance, striving for and failing at perfection in front of the audience. In such performances as The Secret of Rented Island (1976) (of which only a slideshow and audio recording remains), an adaptation/queering of Ibsen’s Ghosts , Smith carries the script in his hand as he interacts with a supporting cast of costume pieces and stuffed animals each representing an alternating set of characters. Script and inanimate actors, which “moved in and out of and were often simultaneously both within and outside of various roles,” [41] disrupt the interchange of character and performance, thereby exposing Smith as himself, alone and potentially vulnerable. The irony of Smith inviting audiences into his home was that he seemed to want nothing more than to be left alone. If no one showed up to his place for a performance, those who knew him have said Smith would go on without an audience. These may have been the greatest performances he ever gave, as he was purportedly paranoid and plagued by anxiety in the presence of others—and by their mere existence in his psychic universe. He was known to abuse audiences, calling them “sofa-roosting cabbages,” and sometimes he failed to show up for a performance in the hopes that the audience would leave him alone. [42] He was both pathologically afraid of others’ criticism and persecution and assured of their duplicity: his living space featured a “hate wall,” upon which he “scrawled animosities towards friends and supporters.” Performances like What’s Underground About Marshmallows? featured nefarious figures inspired by Smith’s personal enemies, such as film critic Jonas Mekas. Smith viewed Mekas, among others, as a capitalist vampire whose motivations were antithetical to Smith’s own mission to construct an uncommercial utopia, and he believed that it was because of his foes that he was forced to “live in squalor all day long, playing hide-and-seek with others.” [43] Dominic Johnson sees in the first-hand accounts of Smith’s performance space echoes of Anthony Vidler’s critical writings on the “architectural uncanny” that “conspicuously renders architectures to be no longer homely.” Furthermore, “in Smith’s domestic performances . . . the nostalgic associations that lived spaces may garner are pitted against the threatening or subversive oppositional structures that often encroach upon them. The set of processes by which architectures become strange are deployed as a neat proxy . . . for the ways in which they approximate other social and cultural tendencies towards estrangement.” [44] Johnson identifies sexual difference as one of these so-called “social and cultural tendencies towards estrangement,” thereby comparing Smith’s space to the estrangement he experienced as a queer person in a heteronormative society. I agree with Johnson’s comparison and see the uncanny space also as definitive for Smith’s particular theatre of isolation. In contrast to the worlds in his films, which were built by way of the accumulation of writhing bodies, the transition to these home performances in the 1970s shifts settings to a one-man island. Even surrounded by audience members, it is difficult to imagine how anyone else could have authentically reached Smith’s Atlantis. The only extant and complete reconstruction of a Smith performance that I know of is a recording of Ron Vawter’s ROY COHN/JACK SMITH , as performed at The Kitchen in New York in 1993. In the production, Vawter parrots the voice of the real Jack Smith, coming through a neon yellow earbud connecting tape-deck to Vawter’s ear, as he recites the lines from Marshmallows, which premiered in the last year of the queer 1970s: 1981, the year the first positive cases of AIDS were reported in the US. Smith ominously foreshadowed the next decade of queer history and both his and Vawter’s deaths due to complications of AIDS, with the line “they love dead queers here.” [45] Wearing him in performance like an ill-fitting shirt, Vawter pulls Smith out of the closet and refashions him as a tragic hero of the queer underground. In fact, Vawter described his portrayal of Smith as “homosexual ‘closet’-performance,” and when one considers Smith’s relationship in regard to performance space, the invocation of the closet seems apt. [46] In a sense, Smith’s theatrical performances of the 1970s were staged within his own personal closet-space, but rather than being a hiding place, it becomes legible to other queer people like Vawter. In Marshmallows , Smith says the “worst of all” is that nobody thinks he is acting. The solution is to “go back into the vault.” [47] However, Smith could not hide from Vawter and his reading of Marshmallows as an overtly political, liberatory performance. Smith’s films were far more successful, at least in terms of making him a known entity, than his solo theatrical performances. His move to a more solitary artistic medium and to the role of “lone lunatic” is perhaps what led to Smith’s failure in the society of the straight and normal . The theatrical performances are, in my opinion, his most radical attempts at what Muñoz identifies as escape through “refusal of a dominant order and its systematic violence,” precisely because they were so much a product of Smith’s personal cosmology. [48] Not only did he play himself, but he enacted his personal brand of queer utopia. His performance of self was so convincing to him that living in the real world became untenable. The failure to transform the real world into one’s fantasy, argues Muñoz, is the typical plight of the queer utopian. However, something of that desire lives on in Vawter’s performance and casts Smith as an icon of collective queer world-makers. Conclusion Jack Smith, the anxiety-riddled queer filmmaker-turned-performer, tried to build utopia in the trash heap of capitalist society. Peter Schumann, an immigrant who got his start in agitprop avant-garde performance, took his puppets out into rural America when the social and political pressures of the New York art scene became too great. Adrienne Kennedy, a Black woman playwright in the overwhelmingly white commercial theatre, gave audiences rare glimpses into a fractured mind simultaneously inside and excluded from society. I have described the theatre of these three artists, in terms of its aesthetic as well as the process of its creation, as a product and a reflection of social isolation of the mind and/or body—and particularly the mind and/or body of the artist. I have tried to demonstrate, however, by tracing the trajectory of each theatre maker beyond their theatre of the 1970s, that this isolation was not an escape route but a troubled state of being at the heart of the social and political issues of the decade and a means of reinscribing one’s relationship to the collective. The plays and performances that I have examined operate on the artistic insights of the individuated while speaking to the issues of the collective. Theatre of isolation is not theatre that speaks only to itself. Categorizing such diverse works as A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White , Grey Lady Cantata II , or What’s Underground About Marshmallows? as theatre of isolation allows scholars to question how these works go beyond isolation and how they might draw individuals together and, as Lee says, “alter the horizon of what constitutes the social.” [49] For the theatre of Kennedy, Schumann, and Smith, the 1970s was an era of isolation, but what happens at the end of, or after, an era? One could turn to these three artists again, and examine Kennedy’s Sleep Deprivation Chamber , Schumann’s Domestic Resurrection Circuses, or Smith’s tragic death and status as queer icon for a few examples of going out, again. “After” is the topic for a different essay and for another time. [50] However, thinking about theatre of isolation in the past is unavoidably connected to thinking about isolation in the present. When theatre artists who have been working in isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic no longer need to do so, how we will think about what has been created during this time and how “after” art will be changed by it are questions that are sure to consume the historian. Beyond theorizing the screen or Zoom as a medium—or perhaps as a way to fold those elements in with other considerations—we might look at today’s theatre of isolation as not merely constitutive of social distance. How have perspectives on society and community been changed? By making aesthetic connections to antecedents like Kennedy, Schumann, and Smith, we might find examples of where theatre might go from here. References [1] I’m thinking especially of Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam, Robert L. Caserio, José Esteban Muñoz, and Tim Dean, all of whom participated in a panel on the “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory” at the 2005 MLA Annual Convention, as well as scholars, like Tavia Nyong’o, who have written about punk aesthetics through the lens of queer studies. [2] Summer Kim Lee. “Staying In: Mitski, Ocean Vuong, and Asian American Asociality,” Social Text 37, no. 1 (1 March 2019): 27. [3] Ibid., 31. [4] Ibid., 28. [5] Ibid., 31-32. [6] Ibid., 30. [7] Ibid., 33. [8] Hillary Miller, Drop Dead: Performance in Crisis, 1970s New York (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2016), 15. [9] From a lecture in Robinson’s course “American Performance in the 1970s,” at Yale University. [10] Will Kaufman, American Culture in the 1970s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 72. [11] Paul K. Bryant-Jackson and Lois More Overbeck, “Adrienne Kennedy: An Interview.” Edited by the authors in Intersecting Boundaries: The Theatre of Adrienne Kennedy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 9. [12] Brenda Murphy, “American Women Playwrights.” In Dale M. Bauer, ed., The Cambridge History of American Women’s Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press , 2012). Perhaps unsurprisingly, Barbara Ann Teer and the other “warrior mothers” of the Black Arts Movement are not even named, though their work has been reclaimed in other recent scholarship. See La Donna L. Forsgren, In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press: 2018). [13] I have not been able to track down concrete sources, but Kennedy’s exclusion from BAM scholarship could be connected to her lack of interest in the movement’s organizing structures, or to her work not being considered (by BAM members) to reflect the movement’s values. In the Forward to The Alexander Plays , Alisa Solomon writes, “During the 1960s and 1970s, many within the activist African American community insisted that [didactic, militant plays about race were] what their playwrights should have been writing. In those years Kennedy was criticized by activists for not working hard enough in the movement. . . . They objected to her characters, who were confused about their identity and place in the world, and who did not proclaim an uncomplicated pride in being black” (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1992, xii). Claudia Barnett cites Solomon, as well as scholars who argue against the use of a feminist label for Kennedy’s works, in support of her argument that Kennedy defies expectations and stereotypes connected to Blackness and/or womanhood. See Claudia Barnett, “‘This Fundamental Challenge to Identity’: Reproduction and Representation in the Drama of Adrienne Kennedy” Theatre Journal 48, no.2 (1996): 141–155. [14] Kimberly W. Benston, “Locating Adrienne Kennedy Prefacing the Subject.” In Paul K. Bryant-Jackson and Lois More Overbeck, eds., Intersecting Boundaries: The Theatre of Adrienne Kennedy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 115. [15] bell hooks makes an explicit connection between Kennedy and Virginia Woolf, reading Kennedy’s prose as a celebration of women’s confessional writing akin to A Room of One’s Own . See bell hooks, “Critical Reflections: Adrienne Kennedy, the Writer, the Work.” In Paul K. Bryant-Jackson and Lois More Overbeck, eds., Intersecting Boundaries: The Theatre of Adrienne Kennedy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 180. [16] Benston, “Locating Adrienne Kennedy,” 115. [17] Bryant-Jackson and Overbeck, “Adrienne Kennedy: An Interview,” 7. [18] Quotations from A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White come from: Adrienne Kennedy, Adrienne Kennedy in One Act (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). 81. [19] Ibid., 92. [20] Deborah R. Geis, “‘A Spectator Watching My Life’: Adrienne Kennedy’s A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White .” In In Paul K. Bryant-Jackson and Lois More Overbeck, eds., Intersecting Boundaries: The Theatre of Adrienne Kennedy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 171. [21] Ibid., 173. [22] Kennedy, Adrienne Kennedy in One Act , 99. [23] Margo Natalie Crawford, Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First Century Aesthetics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 169. [24] From “The WHY CHEAP ART? Manifesto,” Bread & Puppet, Glover, VT, 1984. [25] Silvia D. Spitta,“Revisiting the Sixties and Refusing Trash: Preamble to and Interview with Peter Schumann of Bread and Puppet Theater,” boundary 2 36, no. 1 (1 February 2009): 110. [26] Here, Schumann presumably uses the royal first-person plural, as he did not initially relocate his family. But the plural “Schumanns” could also be read as his referring to his whole “company” with his own name. Quote from Bread and Rosebuds by Peter Schumann, 25 April 1970. In Stefan Brecht, Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theatre, vol. 2 (London: Methuen, 1988), 18. [27] Brecht, Bread and Puppet Theatre , 12. As of 2020, Vermont is 94.3% white—one of the top three whitest states in the country. [28] Brecht, Bread and Puppet Theatre , 15. [29] Lee, “Staying In,” 33. [30] Brecht, Bread and Puppet Theatre , 48. [31] Schumann quotes from an unpublished mss., “possibly an intra-company summation, dated Cate Farm, March 9, ’72.” In Brecht, 175. [32] Brecht, Bread and Puppet Theatre , 180. [33] Spitta, “Revisiting the Sixties,” 116. [34] John Bell, “Uprising of the Beast: An Interview with Peter Schumann,” Theater 25, no. 1 (1 February 1994): 42. [35] From dialogue of Jack Smith’s performance What’s Underground about Marshmallows? . Quotes taken from performance recreation by Ron Vawter, as part of his piece ROY COHN/JACK SMITH, as recorded in: Jill Godmilow, dir., Ron Vawter Performs Jack Smith: What’s Underground About Marshmallows? (1993). [36] Dominic Johnson, “Jack Smith’s Rehearsals for the Destruction of Atlantis: ‘Exotic’ Ritual and Apocalyptic Tone.” Contemporary Theatre Review 19, no. 2 (1 May 2009): 177. [37] John Matturri, “Jack Smith: Notes on Homeless Objects,” Criticism 56, no. 2 (Spring 2014): 281. [38] Judith Halberstam identifies this archive, in her short forum response “The Politics of Negativity in Recent Queer Theory” as including the likes of, “in no particular order, Tennessee Williams, Virginia Woolf, Bette Midler, Andy Warhol, Henry James, Jean Genet, Broadway musicals, Marcel Proust, Alfred Hitchcock, Oscar Wilde, Jack Smith, Judy Garland, and Kiki and Herb.” In PMLA 121, no. 3 (May 2006): 823–4. [39] Quotes from Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation pulled from: Douglas Crimp, “Our Kind of Movie”: The Films of Andy Warhol (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), 132. [40] José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009) , 170. [41] Matturri, “Jack Smith,” 284 [42] From the documentary Jack Smith and The Destruction of Atlantis (2006), directed by Mary Jordan. [43] Godmilow, Ron Vawter Performs , 1993. [44] Johnson, “Jack Smith’s Rehearsals,” 169. [45] Here, I suggest the “queer seventies,” in the U.S., as beginning in 1969, with the Stonewall Riots in New York’s Greenwich Village, and the ending with the first reports of AIDS cases in 1981. [46] Godmilow, Ron Vawter Performs , 1993. [47] Ibid., 1993. [48] Muñoz, Cruising Utopia , 172. [49] Lee, “Staying In,” 31. [50] In addition to Lee’s discussion of what happens “after,” Joshua Chambers-Letson’s recent book After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life (New York University Press, 2018) is dedicated to the question this essay does not answer. Footnotes About The Author(s) Madeline Pages is a dramaturg and MFA Candidate at the former the Yale School of Drama. She is currently partnering with the Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM) to conduct research and performance experiments around the history of astronomy, astrophysics, and human space travel. She is also collaborating on a new opera I AM ALAN TURING , composed by Matthew Suttor and inspired by the life and writings of mathematician Alan Turing. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience: The Tourist as Actor. Jennifer A. Kokai and Tom Robson, eds. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019; Pp. 292. The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy: Gambling, Drama, and the Unexpected. Edwin Wong. Victoria, Canada: Friesen Press, 2019; Pp. 363. Susan Glaspell’s Poetics and Politics of Rebellion. Emeline Jouve. Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2017; Pp. 258. Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry. Soyica Diggs Colbert. New Haven: Yale, 2021; Pp. 273. The Mysterious Murder of Mrs. Shakespeare: Transgressive Performance in Nineteenth-Century New York “What Will Be Changed?”: Maxwell Anderson and the Literary Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti Theatre of Isolation “A Certain Man Had Two [Kids]”: Tragic Parables, “The Prodigal Son,” and Edward Albee's The Goat “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells [Her] Story”: An Intersectional Analysis of the Women of Hamilton Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Steve Earnest Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 28 2 Visit Journal Homepage Stages of Engagement Steve Earnest By Published on May 25, 2016 Download Article as PDF Stages of Engagement . Edited by Joshua E. Polster. Routledge Press: New York, NY, 2016. Pp. 241. Joshua Polster’s Stages of Engagement features eight essays that examine the relationship between United States society, culture and politics in order to demonstrate how the first half of the twentieth century was marked by numerous perceptions and representations of various cultural groups, ethnicities, and peoples associated with the U.S. during a time of exploding imperialism. The work exposes political and social agendas that were presented on stage that formulated or reaffirmed racial and cultural stereotypes, perceptions and ideas prominent in the U.S. during the time period of 1898 – 1949. Though the work leans toward a negative portrayal of the “American spirit” of the period, it does unearth numerous coincidences, prejudices, and ‘gazes’ of a time when the U.S. was forming post-Reconstruction ideas as well as embracing its role as an emerging global superpower. Polster succeeds by balancing his discussion of American Imperialism with little-known facts regarding incidents surrounding theatrical and dramaturgical events of the half-century. The text is divided into four parts, each of which explores the theatre of the period through a different social construct. Part one, “Colonialism,” includes Polster’s “Setting the Stage: Performing War and Empire for the New U.S. Century,” that deals with U.S. world relations post-Spanish-American war (particularly U.S./Cuban relations) and analyzes the dramatic works spawned by the numerous events between the U.S. and Cuba as well as Cuba’s struggle for independence from Spain. The essay addresses works in both America and Cuba that explored their co-relations, including plays, vaudeville sketches, poetry, film, reenactments and other forms such as teatro bufo , a Cuban form similar to commedia dell’arte . Finally, the essay covers dramatic representations influenced by the Phillipine-American War of 1899-1902, including the Broadway production Floradora . Featuring a young Phillipino woman in the central role, Floradora celebrated the fact that the islands had been taken as a U.S. territory after the Phillipine Revolution. Part two, “Religion, Race, and Ethnicity,” includes two essays. The first, again from Polster, is entitled “The Pan American Exposition and Tragedy Onstage” and deals with the 1901 Buffalo Exposition. Exhibits featured “colonial conquests” of the U.S., alongside those of America’s indigenous and African populations. But according to Polster, many cultures – particularly those of African or Asian descent – were somewhat relegated to “lesser” parts of the exhibition as the focus of the event was to display the “spirit of the new world.” Polster asserts that the Exhibition clearly showed that the new world was in “white hands” (48). The chapter also details the unfortunate assassination of America’s twenty-fifth President William McKinley on the grounds of the Exhibition at the Temple of Music and the ramifications it had regarding U.S. trade and expansion overseas. The second essay of part two, written by Stuart J. Hecht, is entitled “Controlling and Defining Jewish Identity on the Early Twentieth-Century American Stage.” The essay examines the growth and rise of the New York Jewish community and the corresponding growth of theatre written and performed by Jews. The early Yiddish theatres of New York are discussed as are a number of important performers like Al Jolson, Sophie Tucker, David Warfield and Fannie Brice. The contributions of Jewish writers such as Elmer Rice, Lillian Hellman and Moss Hart are considered as well as the Gershwins, whose Lady, Be Good introduced a “modern, urbane, fast-moving Jewish sensibility to Broadway” (96). Finally the productions of the Marx Brothers are analyzed by Hecht as the classic embodiment of contemporary Jewish humor. Their constant clashes with the stiff WASP matron, always played to perfection by Margaret Dumont, displayed the battle for non-conformity, individuality and the rights of the “ethnic outsider” to preserve their sense of self. Part Three, “Gender and Sexuality,” features two essays: “Gendered Spaces: Law and Justice in Susan Glaspell’s Trifles ” by Polster, as well as a companion essay written by Susan C.W. Abbotson entitled “Mae West and Wales Padlock Law.” Both essays provide commentary on the challenging status of women during this era but approach the topic in very different ways. Polster’s essay details (somewhat laboriously) the trial on which Glaspell’s play Trifles was based – the Margaret Hossack case in which many emerging women’s issues, such as suffrage, jury inclusion, and marriage relations were explored. Perhaps the most important point made by the essay is that, with Trifles , Glaspell had attempted to create an ideal female spectator – one who would be a “better informed and active public citizen” (123). Polster notes that Glaspell sought to define and break down the male gaze and to create a more inclusive environment for the female citizenry of the U.S.A. Abbotson’s essay analyzes the emergence of greater sexuality, particularly associated with female performers, on the American stage. She also details the emergence of homosexual culture, the fad for drag balls and the eventual Wales Padlock Law (1927) that would forbid homosexual depictions on stage. Spurred by works such as Scholom Asch’s The God of Vengeance (1923) and Edouard Bourdet’s The Captive (1926), both of which suggested lesbian relationships, the Wales Padlock Law made it possible for officials to close down productions that involved sexual relationships deemed deviant or inappropriate. Certainly there was no greater offender in the collective minds of city officials than Mae West, whose Sex (1926), The Drag (1927) and Pleasure Man (1928) dealt with themes of homosexuality, prostitution, crime, drugs and other “offbeat sexual practices” (quoted by Abbotson, 154). Abbotson’s essay illuminates an era of groundbreaking sexuality on the American Stage. Finally, part four, “Economic Systems and Systems of Government” consists of a trio of essays. The editor’s “A New Approach to Revolution: Artef and Hirsch Leckert in the Third Period,” considers the rise of numerous Communist theatre companies in the U.S.A but primarily Artef or the Arbeter Teater Farfband, a New York-based Yiddish Theatre company with open ties to the Communist Party. Given the shortage of Communist playwrights in the U.S.A. the company chose to import the Soviet play Hirsch Leckert (1929), and Polster’s essay provides keen insight into the social and political implications of the work that described United States capitalism as being in its “third period” – the period which, according to Josef Stalin, would witness its demise. The second essay, provided by James Fischer, “The Rise of Fascism and Diversionary, Anti-War and Interventionist Theatre,” explores theatre and film from the mid 1930’s. Focusing on five key dramatists – Robert E. Sherwood, Irwin Shaw, Thornton Wilder, Lillian Hellman and Tennessee Williams, Fisher’s essay looks into dramas that commented on post-World War I society and the impending rise of fascism. The essay includes sub-sections that effectively analyze thematic elements from each of the playwrights. The final essay of part four, again by Polster, is entitled “SALESMAN and the 1930’s Theatres of Social Protest,” which deals primarily with Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) and Clifford Odet’s Waiting for Lefty (1935) and other plays of the two decades that provided critical inquiry into the capitalist system in America. Considering major “leftist” theatre companies of the time, such as the Theatre Union, The Group Theatre and parts of the Federal Theatre Project, the essay details how many of these major works refused to bow down to the commercial Broadway theatre and instead managed to find resonance with American audiences on the Great White Way. The work chronicles an important half century of American theatre history and also reveals a number of cultural, social and political perspectives drawn from various sources that clearly define the first half of the Twentieth Century as one of the most formative in the nation’s history. Stages of Engagement and its companion text, The Routledge Anthology of Drama 1898 – 1949 would serve as excellent text resources for courses in American Drama or for continued exploration of this topic by researchers. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Steve Earnest Coastal Carolina University Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction: Performance as Alternate Form of Inquiry in the Age of STEM Playing Sick: Training Actors for High Fidelity Simulated Patient Encounters Setting the Stage for Science Communication: Improvisation in an Undergraduate Life Science Curriculum iDream: Addressing the Gender Imbalance in STEM through Research-Informed Theatre for Social Change Moonwalking with Laurie Anderson: The Implicit Feminism of 'The End of the Moon' This In-Between Life: Disability, Trans-Corporeality, and Radioactive Half-Life in D.W. Gregory’s Radium Girls Blue-Collar Broadway The New Humor in the Progressive Era Stages of Engagement Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Published by the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center CUNY, supported by American Theater Drama Society. Back to Top Untitled Copy of Copy of Untitled Copy of Untitled Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume 38 Visit Journal Homepage Issue 2 SPECIAL ISSUE INTRODUCTION 100 Years of Du Bois: “Principles of a Real Negro Theatre” and “Criteria of Negro Art” Khalid Y. Long and Le’Mil Eiland ARTICLE “One Great and Fine Mode of Expression”: On W. E. B. Du Bois and the Exigencies of Black Drama and Theatre Isaiah Matthew Wooden ARTICLE Reflections on Fundamental Principles Jonathan Shandell ARTICLE An Expansive “Us”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Pan-Negro” Theatrical Vision Kellen Hoxworth ARTICLE W. E. B. Du Bois’s Krigwa Little Negro Theatre Movement in Harlem and Beyond Kirsten Lee ARTICLE It Was All a Dream: Shifting Du Boisian Notions in Richard Wesley’s The Talented Tenth Kristyl D. Tift ARTICLE Teaching August Wilson in an Age of Democratic Decline: Du Boisian Imperatives and Black Pedagogy Across Campus and Community Omiyẹmi (Artisia) Green QUEER VOICES Debbie with a D Talks Theatre with a T Bess Rowen PERFORMANCE REVIEW The Wild Duck Alexander Miller PERFORMANCE REVIEW Picnic at Hanging Rock Bess Rowen PERFORMANCE REVIEW Last Call: A Play with Cocktails Daria Kerschenbaum PERFORMANCE REVIEW The Dinosaurs Dominic Finocchiaro BOOK REVIEW The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism. Catherine Burroughs and J. Ellen Gainor, editors. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 652. Emma Futhey BOOK REVIEW Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation. Julius B. Fleming Jr. New York: New York University Press, 2022; Pp. 301. L. Bailey McDaniel BOOK REVIEW The Theatre of Paula Vogel: Practice, Pedagogy, and Influences. Lee Brewer Jones. New York: Methuen Drama, 2023; Pp. 194. Lynn Deboeck Issue 1 Introduction EDITORIAL Benjamin Gillespie and Bess Rowen Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale ARTICLE Teya Juarez “The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya ARTICLE Jewel Pereyra What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre ARTICLE Heather S. Nathans, Javier Hurtado, Benny Sato Ambush, Henry Bial, Kristoffer Diaz, Kim Marra, Harvey Young "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana QUEER VOICES Alex Ferrone Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill QUEER VOICES Benjamin Gillespie Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman QUEER VOICES Jen-Scott Mobley and Maya E. Roth Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. BOOK REVIEW Lauren Friesen Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. BOOK REVIEW Henry Bial Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. BOOK REVIEW Eileen Curley Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. BOOK REVIEW Sierra Rosetta The Brothers Size PERFORMANCE REVIEW Isaiah Matthew Wooden Dead Outlaw PERFORMANCE REVIEW Elliot Lee 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival PERFORMANCE REVIEW Lindsey Mantoan ZAZ PERFORMANCE REVIEW William DeVito, Juanita Mejia Restrepo, M. Nance, Robert Pike, and Rufus ZaeJoDaeus Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 NEW ENGLAND THEATRE IN REVIEW Martha S. LoMonaco, Editor, New England Theatre in Review Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 NEW ENGLAND THEATRE IN REVIEW Paul E. Fallon Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 NEW ENGLAND THEATRE IN REVIEW Steven Otfinoski Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 NEW ENGLAND THEATRE IN REVIEW Karl G. Ruling Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative articles and reviews on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Please refer to our Style Guide for submission information and general formatting guidelines. Send all general queries to the editors at jadtjournal@gmail.com . Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage

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

Courtney Ferriter Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 1 Visit Journal Homepage Are We “Citizens”? Tony Kushner’s Deweyan Democratic Vision in Angels in America Courtney Ferriter By Published on November 8, 2018 Download Article as PDF In his recent book Democracy in Black (2016), Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. argues that for Americans, “collective forgetting is crucial in determining the kind of story we tell ourselves. Ours is the chosen nation, the ‘shining city upon a hill,’ as Ronald Reagan called it. America is democracy. . . . To believe this, we have to forget and willfully ignore what is going on around us.” [1] While Glaude is particularly concerned with the distortions and fairy tales Americans continue to tell ourselves about race, Tony Kushner’s epic two-part play Angels in America tackles this same theme of conveniently forgetting and willfully ignoring so as not to disrupt the American self-image with respect to sexual orientation and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play received much acclaim from critics and scholars alike for many years following its initial publication—resulting in initial runs on Broadway and the National Theatre in London in 1992-1993 and an award-winning 2003 HBO mini-series starring Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, and Emma Thompson—but more recently, it seems to have fallen out of favor among scholars, despite a successful 2010 revival at the Signature Theatre and a 2017 production at the National Theatre that transferred to Broadway in February 2018. Indeed, many (although not all) scholarly articles that discuss Kushner and Angels in recent years focus on how AIDS functions in the play, [2] with scant consideration of Kushner’s portrayal of democracy. I argue that Kushner is especially relevant in the socio-historical moment in which Americans currently find ourselves—one marked by political polarization and distrust of those who think differently than we do. The 2016 election was symptomatic of these problems and brought them into full view for any who still harbored doubts about how deep this divide runs, but Kushner’s play proves instructive for how to build an engaged democratic citizenry. In the epilogue to Part Two of Angels in America , Prior leaves the audience with an optimistic vision for the future, stating, “The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come.” [3] He then offers a blessing of “more life,” and the play concludes with the same phrase that appears at the end of Part One: “The Great Work Begins” ( Perestroika , 146). As David Kornhaber has observed, many scholars and critics are dissatisfied with the play’s conclusion due to “the reconciliationist politics it seems to espouse,” [4] which for them provides “a too-easy gloss on more intractable problems” [5] that continue to plague society. Thus, Kornhaber reasons, “a lot must depend on how one figures what seem to be the two key concepts of Kushner’s conclusion: citizen and blessing.” [6] Like Kornhaber, I believe that individual understanding of the term “citizens” as well as broader notions of what constitutes citizenship figure heavily in interpretation of both the epilogue and Angels as a whole. Furthermore, I contend that Kushner’s idea of citizenship is necessarily linked to the beginning of the “Great Work” invoked at the end of both parts of the play. In Angels , “citizens” are those who are part of a Deweyan community, made up of diverse people with sometimes conflicting opinions who listen to each other and who are nonetheless connected by their desire to enact positive change in the world, to progress toward a more ideal and inclusive democracy. This is what Prior (and by extension, Kushner) means by “Great Work.” Individualism and undemocratic communication—represented by Roy Cohn and Joe Pitt—fall away by the end of Angels in America , making room for what Atsushi Fujita calls a “a new model of community,” [7] consisting of Belize, Hannah, Louis, and Prior, who value inclusivity and democratic communication. John Dewey argues in Freedom and Culture (1939) for a distinction between “society” and “community.” Society arises from the politics of individual nations, how a particular country governs, and what policies are enforced, whereas community is unrestricted and made up of individuals or groups who share a common solidarity. He explains, “[F]or a number of persons to form anything that can be called a community in its pregnant sense there must be values prized in common. Without them, any so-called social group, class, people, nation, tends to fall apart into molecules having but mechanically enforced connections with one another.” [8] Thus, for Dewey, one characteristic of community lies in shared values. Furthermore, Dewey adds democratic communication to his idea of community, arguing that “there is a difference between a society, in the sense of an association, and a community. . . . Natural associations are conditions for the existence of a community, but a community adds the function of communication in which emotions and ideas are shared as well as joint undertaking engaged in.” [9] In the case of Americans, our joint undertaking is the democratic experiment, and for this reason, we should likewise strive to embody democratic ideals of communication. In the vein of Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy, Kushner emphasizes the importance of inclusive, democratic community in Angels in America . The play models Deweyan communities while also highlighting models that are anti-Deweyan: there is no great community—no solidarity between different groups of Americans—and thus, there is no realized democracy. Kushner writes in the Afterword to Perestroika that Americans “pay high prices for maintaining the myth of the Individual,” [10] which he contrasts with the idea that “the smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction.” [11] This juxtaposition of individualism with community, illustrated in the play by Roy and Joe as opposed to the community envisioned in the epilogue, is central to Kushner’s understanding of democratic progress and what it means to be a citizen. Some leftist critics may bemoan the ending of Angels as “turn[ing] away from the kind of collective action demanded by Marx and staged by Brecht,” [12] but as Hussein Al-Badri has observed, the play’s main flaw in this regard is merely presenting “a different politic[s] than its detractors would like it to be.” [13] Kushner is ultimately more concerned with how to enact Deweyan democracy and community—which he believes will lead to real and lasting social change—than he is with envisioning an America based around socialism or Marxism. In recent years, John Dewey’s notions of community and his pedagogy have come under scrutiny from critics who rightly cite the ethnocentrism that undergirds much of his early philosophy in these matters. [14] Thomas Fallace notes that because pragmatism is “a self-correcting theory of knowledge,” [15] by 1916, Dewey understood that “a plurality of cultures was necessary for democratic living and intellectual growth.” [16] Nevertheless, Fallace argues, “ethnocentrism was built right into Dewey’s early pedagogy and philosophy.” [17] This ethnocentrism troubles Dewey’s notion of community; he conceived of community as “not merely a variety of associative ties which hold persons together in diverse ways, but an organization of all elements by an integrated principle.” [18] If Dewey believed that white people represented a more advanced form of civilization that people of color had not yet achieved, then how would it be possible to form a community in which “all elements” are organized by the same principle? As Glaude has noted, democracy for Dewey “is a form of life that requires constant attention if we are to secure the ideals that purportedly animate it.” [19] Likewise, Scott Stroud emphasizes that a “real amount of openness is implicated in the [pragmatist] habits of democracy.” [20] In other words, democracy is a process, one which must continually be reexamined to ensure that we are increasing democracy and participation among citizens, creating a more inclusive community rather than excluding or marginalizing certain voices, as Dewey was guilty of doing in his early career. As Dewey himself put it, “only when we start from a community as a fact, grasp the fact in thought so as to clarify and enhance its constituent elements, can we reach an idea of democracy which is not [merely] utopian.” [21] One particular benefit to considering the vision of Deweyan community and democracy in Kushner’s Angels is that, several generations removed from Dewey, he is interested in how to incorporate citizens from different backgrounds with vastly different life experiences into the great community Dewey envisioned, particularly African Americans and people who identify as queer. Thus, Kushner’s reexamination of community and inclusive democracy as demonstrated in Angels is itself pragmatic in its consideration of the conditions and context of American life and democracy in the 1980s and ‘90s, revising Dewey’s idea of community by incorporating more and varied groups and voices into it. Fallace argues that an important part of Dewey’s pragmatism was context: “all knowledge was context-bound; it served a purpose in a particular situation and its usefulness was dependent upon that context.” [22] Kushner speaks to a particular historical moment in his work on community, examining the anxieties and shortcomings of American democracy in light of black/white and gay/straight relations. Thus, reading Kushner as a pragmatist increases our understanding of what an ideal community might look like, taking into account the experiences of those who are often pushed to the margins of society by the not-so-silent majority. A consideration of how Kushner treated the power disparities he observed at work in society may also prove instructive for how the U.S. might address current forms of oppression and marginalization in society. I argue in the remainder of this essay that the “Great Work” to which Kushner refers at the end of both Millennium Approaches and Perestroika is, in part, a call to the greater democratic community reflected in the play’s epilogue, which is championed over the closed views of community embodied in Roy Cohn and Joe Pitt. Kushner’s vision of Deweyan community emphasizes inclusion and listening to marginal voices, for characters in Angels in America who ignore the voices of the other do so at their peril. Roy Cohn and Joe Pitt are representative of undemocratic communication in the play—Roy because he dominates those around him, and Joe because he cannot be truthful with others or see beyond himself. Dewey writes that in a democracy, “both parties learn by giving the other a chance to express itself, instead of having one party conquer by forceful suppression of the other.” [23] For Roy, suppression of the other in communication is par for the course. One early example of this occurs in Act One, Scene 9 of Millennium Approaches when Roy’s doctor Henry diagnoses him with AIDS. Roy then tries to force Henry to call him a homosexual, finally threatening, “No, say it. I mean it. Say: ‘Roy Cohn, you are a homosexual.’ And I will proceed, systematically, to destroy your reputation and your practice and your career in New York State, Henry. Which you know I can do” ( Millennium , 44). When Henry gives him the diagnosis of AIDS, Roy counters, “No, Henry, no. AIDS is what homosexuals have. I have liver cancer” ( Millennium , 46). Roy forcefully suppresses Henry from telling anyone that Roy is gay by threatening his career, and he even manages to suppress the diagnosis of AIDS. The next time Henry appears is in Perestroika to facilitate Roy’s admission to the hospital, where even his medical charts, as Belize reads them, say “liver cancer” ( Perestroika , 21). Roy’s relationship with his nurse Belize in Perestroika is similarly domineering, as Roy makes racist and homophobic remarks, goads Belize into using an anti-Semitic slur in one scene, knocks over pills he is supposed to take, and generally proves to be an insufferable patient. Roy also makes it clear that even though he is somewhat dependent on Belize, he does not consider him an equal in any way. Bemoaning his imminent disbarment in Act Four, Scene 1 of Perestroika , Roy says, “Every goddam thing I ever wanted they have taken from me. Mocked and reviled, all my life” ( Perestroika , 87). When Belize identifies and responds, “Join the club” ( Perestroika , 87). Roy says, “I don’t belong to any club you could get through the front door of. You watch yourself you take too many liberties” ( Perestroika , 87). Shortly after Roy has a series of violent spasms, Belize says that he almost feels sorry for him. Roy is quick to remind him, “You. Me. No. Connection” ( Perestroika , 88). Thus, Roy suppresses Belize any time Belize attempts to identify with him in the slightest. If democracy is characterized in part by open communication, then Roy’s constant desire to “win” or conquer in conversations with others exposes him as a totalitarian at heart. Roy’s totalitarian communication is a natural result of his individualism. He relishes his status as “the dragon atop the golden horde” ( Perestroika , 55), maintaining that “Life is full of horror; nobody escapes; nobody; save yourself. Whatever pulls on you, whatever needs from you, threatens you” ( Millennium , 58). This philosophy clearly runs counter to Kushner’s belief in the smallest indivisible unit as two people. Nevertheless, Kushner includes Roy in the play, explaining in an interview that he is “a part of the gay and lesbian community even if we don’t really want him to be a part of our community.” [24] This indicates a capacity for inclusivity in his democratic vision that Roy himself disdains in the play. This inclusive community is similarly emphasized when Louis, aided by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, recites the Mourner’s Kaddish for Roy, thus accepting him into the greater Jewish community of which they are part (albeit in death). While Joe is not like Roy in his communication in the sense that he has to win or dominate others in conversation, his general dishonesty and unwillingness to take responsibility for his actions make him undemocratic in his dealings with other characters in the play. Kushner has sometimes been criticized in scholarship on Angels in America for being too hard on Joe. Hussein Al-Badri, for example, asserts that Kushner’s omission of Joe from the community included in the epilogue runs counter to Kushner’s “own political ideology of inclusion and inclusiveness.” [25] However, this dramatic punishment seems more fitting when Joe’s undemocratic communication and individualism are taken into consideration, for then it is clear that like his mentor Roy, Joe too spurns community and democratic communication. Dewey argues for truthful communication in “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us” writing, “knowledge of conditions as they are is the only solid ground for communication and sharing.” [26] Joe lies about his identity as a gay man to his wife Harper, he keeps from Louis the fact that he is a Mormon, and he repeatedly tells Harper that he is not going to leave her, only to abandon her anyway. Because Joe lacks a foundation of truthfulness with people who are important to him, open, democratic communication is not possible. Like Roy, Joe also acts with the individual—himself—in mind, rather than considering community or the circumstances and experiences of others. Following an irreparable fight with Louis in Perestroika , Joe tries to return to Harper, not because she needs him but because he is thinking of himself. He tells her, “I don’t know what will happen to me without you. Only you. Only you love me. Out of everyone in the world. . . . Please, please, don’t leave me now” ( Perestroika , 139). Joe is unable to sustain a community or communicate democratically with others because he never considers the experience of the other person and only considers his own needs and desires. In fact, Joe even tells Louis that “sometimes self-interested is the most generous thing you can be,” ( Perestroika , 73) a notion that serves as Joe’s modus operandi throughout the play. Deweyan communication requires what Hongmei Peng calls sympathetic thinking, the ability to “step outside of [one’s] own experience and see it as the other would see it by putting [oneself] in the place of the other and using imagination in order to assimilate the other’s experience.” [27] Since Joe proves incapable of imagining the other’s experience, he necessarily excludes rather than includes others in his would-be community, particularly Harper and Hannah. His unwillingness or inability to change in this regard is why he is not included among the democratic “citizens” in the epilogue, since undemocratic communication and exclusive community building stand in opposition to Kushner’s Deweyan model of community. Although Roy and Joe form a community of sorts in Angels , it proves to be undemocratic and representative of anti-Deweyan communication. In spite of the father/son-type relationship that Roy and Joe maintain throughout most of the play, there is much that they keep from one another, and their relationship is marked as much by silence as it is by the closeness and warm feelings for one another as mentor and mentee. This silence comes to a head in Act Four, Scene 1 of Perestroika , when Joe visits Roy in the hospital. When Joe reveals that he left his wife Harper and has been living with Louis, Roy forcefully silences Joe: JOE : Roy, please, get back into… ROY : SHUT UP! Now you listen to me. [. . .] ROY : I want you home. With your wife. Whatever else you got going, cut it dead. JOE : I can’t, Roy, I need to be with… ROY : YOU NEED? Listen to me. Do what I say. Or you will regret it. And don’t talk to me about it. Ever again. ( Perestroika , 85) Roy not only silences Joe in this particular moment of the play, but he commands him never to speak of his relationship with Louis or to make any allusion to homosexuality again. Thus, Roy’s silencing of Joe is distinctly undemocratic and unrepresentative of the kind of communication expected in a democratic community. Far from being an outlier, this is not the first time Roy has stifled Joe’s communication with him. Rather than being open to hearing what Joe wants to express (even if he disagrees with it), Roy chastises him in Millennium Approaches for having ethical reservations about interfering with the disbarment committee hearing, calling Joe “Dumb Utah Mormon hick shit” ( Millennium , 106) and “a sissy” ( Millennium , 107). As for Joe, he claims to love Roy, but is unwilling to go to bat for him when the chips are down. Although this is a legal as well as an ethical quandary, it demonstrates that Joe’s love for Roy is more theory than practice. He asserts, “I’ll do whatever I can to help,” ( Millennium , 66) but those are empty words, since he ultimately refuses the job in Washington he is offered and fails Roy. Joe and Roy cannot agree on a shared ideal toward which they can work together, and thus, their efforts at community building are doomed to fail. Given Dewey’s assertions that community involves “communication in which emotions and ideas are shared” [28] and that such community is “a pressing [concern] for democracy,” [29] Roy and Joe fail at both democratic communication and maintaining a community even with one another. In addition to their undemocratic communication, Roy and Joe are devoted to exclusion rather than inclusion and to individualism rather than community, qualities that are distinctly anti-Deweyan, and for which (along with their undemocratic communication) they are dramatically “punished” by Kushner. Roy succumbs to his illness, while Harper leaves Joe for good and Joe is nowhere to be found in the democratic community of the play’s epilogue. Unlike Roy and Joe, Louis is able and willing to change, demonstrating by the end of the play a commitment to open communication and revising harmful beliefs and actions. While Louis initially abandons Prior when the effects of AIDS become more than he can handle, he eventually sees the error of his ways and atones for his past misdeeds. Prior tells Louis when they meet after Louis’s month-long absence in Perestroika that when he cries, he “endanger[s] nothing. . . . It’s like the idea of crying when you do it. Or the idea of love” ( Perestroika , 83). Similarly, Belize remarks to Louis in Millennium Approaches , “All your checks bounce, Louis; you’re ambivalent about everything” ( Millennium , 95). For much of the play, Louis claims to support things in theory, but his practice reveals his own ambivalence on the subject, from his alleged love for Prior to his support of the Rainbow Coalition. However, following a conversation with Belize in Act Four, Scene 3 of Perestroika in which Belize observes that Louis is “up in the air, just like that angel, too far off the earth to pick out the details. Louis and his Big Ideas. Big Ideas are all you love,” ( Perestroika , 94) Louis realizes that theory and practice must be joined, both in love and in democracy. This is confirmed for him when he researches Joe’s legal decisions written on behalf of Justice Wilson and finally understands that Joe, who wants to be “a nice, nice man” ( Millennium , 107)—as Roy aptly puts it—has rendered legal decisions that have real and damaging consequences for children and gay people. Dewey argues for praxis in democracy, asserting that democracy is “a personal way of individual life. . . . Instead of thinking of our own dispositions and habits as accommodated to certain institutions we have to learn to think of the latter as expressions, projections, and extensions of habitually dominant personal attitudes.” [30] Joe thus expresses a clearly undemocratic viewpoint when he tells Louis of his legal decisions, “It’s law not justice, it’s power, not the merits of its exercise, it’s not an expression of the ideal” ( Perestroika , 109). The discrepancy between Joe’s theory and practice in multiple areas of life, including love and democracy, causes him to think that he must accommodate himself to institutions—like “legal fag-bashing” ( Perestroika , 109) or heterosexual marriage, for example—rather than viewing such institutions democratically, as potential sites for expressing his own experiences and habits. Louis recognizes his own behavior in Joe’s habits, and after their fight, Louis finally understands the extent to which he has failed Prior. He later asks to come back to Prior and tells him, “Failing in love isn’t the same as not loving. It doesn’t let you off the hook, it doesn’t mean you’re free to not love,” ( Perestroika , 140) indicating a respect for praxis that he previously lacked. In addition, Louis gains “expiation for [his] sins” ( Perestroika , 121) through his recitation of the Mourner’s Kaddish for Roy Cohn. Although he had previously refused to identify with Roy in any way, calling him “the polestar of human evil … the worst human being who ever lived, he isn’t human even,” ( Perestroika , 93) with some coaxing from Belize and help from Ethel Rosenberg’s ghost, Louis recites the traditional Jewish prayer for the dead, thus affirming Roy as part of the Jewish community. Framji Minwilla argues that the coming together of Belize, Ethel, and Louis to say Kaddish for Roy “invent[s] a more complex yet exact sense of self and a more expansively conceived idea of community.” [31] This community is a democratic one, in which people who have ideas and beliefs differing from the mainstream (like Roy, for whom this is the case not in life nor in the Reagan years of the play, but within the politics espoused by Kushner and the characters in the epilogue of Angels ) are nevertheless included and acknowledged as part of the larger community. Based on his joining together of theory with practice and expanding his idea of community by praying for Roy, Louis is able to participate as a “citizen” in the epilogue: he argues at points with Belize about politics, but he is ultimately able to listen and value the presence of differing opinions in his community. Prior also makes a few missteps, but like Louis, he ultimately “succeeds because he is willing to change,” [32] to become more democratic in his communication with others and his vision of community. For instance, when he first meets Joe’s mother, Hannah, he assumes that because she is Mormon, she must be trying to convert him when she helps him to the hospital. After they arrive at the hospital, Prior tells Hannah about his visit from the Angel, and she says he had a vision, drawing a comparison with Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, and Prior once again rushes to make assumptions about her because of her Mormonism: PRIOR : But that’s preposterous, that’s… HANNAH : It’s not polite to call other people’s beliefs preposterous. He had great need of understanding. Our Prophet. His desire made prayer. His prayer made an angel. The angel was real. I believe that. PRIOR : I don’t. And I’m sorry but it’s repellent to me. So much of what you believe. HANNAH : What do I believe? PRIOR : I’m a homosexual. With AIDS. I can just imagine what you… HANNAH : No you can’t. Imagine. The things in my head. You don’t make assumptions about me, mister; I won’t make them about you. ( Perestroika , 102) This is the first moment of democratic communication between Prior and Hannah. He acknowledges her point, listening and taking to heart her experiences. This openness serves him well when Hannah advises, “An angel is just a belief, with wings and arms that can carry you. It’s naught to be afraid of. If it lets you down, reject it. Seek for something new” ( Perestroika , 103). Prior takes her advice, struggling with the Angel of America and returning the Book of the Anti-Migratory Epistle to Heaven. He previously identified with the Angels—their abandonment by the Almighty and desire to go back—but ultimately he insists upon progress and forward movement. Additionally, Prior’s vision of community becomes more expansive and inclusive by the end of the play. He tells Louis in Millennium Approaches that if Louis walked out on him, he would hate him forever. While he does not take Louis back as a partner in Perestroika , he forgives him, tells him he loves him, and Louis remains an important presence in Prior’s life based on their interaction in the epilogue. In Hannah’s first appearance, she does not seem particularly inclusive or capable of democratic communication given her outrage at Joe’s admission that he is gay, however she experiences a transformation in Perestroika and shows more concern for others, particularly Prior and Harper. Despite Hannah’s somewhat gruff manner—she is described by Sister Ella Chapter in Millennium Approaches as “the only unfriendly Mormon [she] ever met” ( Millennium , 82)—and her claim that she “[doesn’t] have pity,” ( Perestroika , 101) she tends to both Prior and Harper, both of whom have been abandoned by the person closest to them. Hannah explains her actions by claiming, “I know my duty when I see it,” ( Perestroika , 66) which suggests that unlike Joe, she is willing to take the needs and experiences of others into consideration before acting. Much like Dewey, Hannah acknowledges that communication and community require cooperation, “understanding, learning, [and] other-regarding thinking.” [33] Given her sympathy and concern for Prior and Harper as well as her advice to Joe to reflect on his actions and beliefs by asking himself “what it was [he was] running from,” ( Perestroika , 96) Hannah has become a Kushnerian “citizen” in the epilogue, musing about the “interconnectedness” ( Perestroika , 144) of people in the world and providing hope for Prior to keep moving forward. Her advice to Prior that he should “seek for something new” ( Perestroika , 103) if his beliefs fail him demonstrates her own willingness to revise previous assumptions and incorporate new knowledge into her experience, an essential quality in a member of a democratic community. As for Belize, who has been described in scholarship as the moral center of Angels in America , [34] his actions toward Roy and Louis show a commitment to inclusivity in line with Deweyan democratic community. Belize empathizes with Roy and Louis as fellow gay men, despite his outright hatred for some of their actions and ideologies. He advises Roy about the best course of treatment for late-stage AIDS, contra the opinion of Roy’s “very qualified, very expensive WASP doctor,” ( Perestroika , 26) and warns him about the double-blind AZT trials. Despite the fact that Roy is a terrible patient and person who, as mentioned previously, takes every opportunity to remind Belize that Roy considers him beneath him, Belize feels, as he puts it, a sense of “solidarity. One faggot to another,” ( Perestroika , 27) and reminds Louis that Roy “died a hard death” ( Perestroika , 122). With Louis, Belize embodies the democratic value of believing in human nature’s capacity for change. Dewey argues in “Creative Democracy” that democracy is “a way of life controlled by a working faith in the possibilities of human nature.” [35] Although Belize disdains Louis for his abandonment of Prior, he meets with Louis in both Millennium Approaches and Perestroika and offers him some moral guidance, indicating that he has not given up on Louis and retains some hope that he will change for the better. Belize’s inclusivity is unsurprising considering his description of Heaven as encompassing “voting booths … everyone in Balenciaga gowns with red corsages, and big dance palaces full of music and lights and racial impurity and gender confusion” ( Perestroika , 76) with gods who are all “brown as the mouths of rivers” ( Perestroika , 76). This utopic vision eradicates all of the obstacles to justice and democratic participation of marginalized groups in the United States; everyone has gained suffrage, wealth inequality has been destroyed, and racism, sexism, and transphobia have all been tempered by mixed-race divinities and blurred gender boundaries. Belize’s idea of Heaven is aligned with Kushner’s philosophy on freedom; he argues that freedom “expand[s] outward” [36] and the most “basic gesture of freedom is to include, not to exclude.” [37] This sounds remarkably like Dewey, who concludes in “Creative Democracy” that the task of democracy is always to create “a freer and more humane experience in which all share and to which all contribute.” [38] Belize’s vision of Heaven and Kushner’s understanding of freedom express Dewey’s practical ideal for democracy. The four characters included in the epilogue to Angels in America —Belize, Hannah, Louis, and Prior—represent democratic community either because they have demonstrated a willingness to change, listen to others, and revise previous beliefs/actions in the course of the play, or (in Belize’s case) because that kind of inclusivity and democratic communication had already been attained. Michael Cadden argues that the epilogue to Angels “leaves us with the image of four individuals who, despite their very real differences, have chosen, based on their collective experience, to think about themselves as a community working for change.” [39] Similarly, Ron Scapp suggests that Kushner’s ending embraces “the hope of democracy.” [40] For Kushner, the “hope of democracy” is embodied in these characters who have become “citizens” ( Perestroika , 146) with differing thoughts and opinions who are nevertheless capable of working together to accomplish the “Great Work” ( Perestroika , 146) of expanding democracy. Roy and Joe, who were neither inclusive of dissenting voices nor able to form democratic communities, are incapable of acting as citizens and thus omitted from the epilogue, even as Kushner includes them in the greater community of the play itself. The epilogue to Angels in America ultimately advocates for a more ideal democracy, which must begin with individuals who act as citizens. This is the kind of democracy envisioned by Dewey, where all citizens believe “that even when needs and ends or consequences are different for each individual, the habit of amicable cooperation … is itself a priceless addition to life.” [41] Such a community stands in stark contrast to the exclusive, undemocratic, and homophobic legislation and political rhetoric of the Reagan years as portrayed in the play and embodied by Roy and Joe. Kushner’s small democratic community at the end of Angels reminds the audience that democracy is a process, one toward which we must constantly work to ensure we are applying the democratic method of expanding rights and freedoms outward, revising beliefs or actions based on experience and new information, and opening ourselves to democratic communication with others. Kushner begins from the premise that including marginalized voices is not only beneficial but essential to democracy. This revises some of Dewey’s early notions, which had been grounded in ethnocentric thinking, and provides a foundation for what including others in a democratic community looks like. The inclusivity Kushner portrays in Angels in America demonstrates that democracy does not mean that all voices are considered to be equally valid; rather, Kushner highlights voices that are similarly committed to democracy as method. Roy Cohn and Joe Pitt provide examples of voices that are too partisan and too committed to their own individualistic and undemocratic ways of thinking. However, it is important to note that such people are not irredeemable; they have the capacity to change, as we see Louis do over the course of the play. As a result, such individuals deserve to be included in the larger community (as Kushner includes Roy) even if their ideology is itself anti-democratic. Kushner cautions, however, that such individualism and anti-democratic thinking is harmful to democratic inclusivity and communication. Thus, anti-democratic ideology must not be allowed to dominate at a legal level, as we see its harmful consequences in the exclusive, homophobic legislation of the Reagan administration. In addition, democratic communication is encouraged on a personal level, too, otherwise relationships and communities run the risk of being torn apart, as evidenced by Roy and Joe or Joe and Harper. Like Dewey, Kushner believes that it is necessary to revise our methods to become always more democratic and more inclusive—like the “citizens” referred to in the epilogue—progressing slowly but ever closer to true democratic communication and community with one another. In our present political moment in the United States, democratic communication and community seem like essential tools to cultivate as we work together toward a future like the one Kushner envisions in his epilogue rather than resigning ourselves to undemocratic rule by the Roy Cohns of the world. References [1] Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul (New York: Broadway Books, 2016), 48. [2] See, for example, Alexander Peuser, “AIDS and the Artist’s Call to Action,” Lucerna 11 (2017): 10-22; Dennis Altman and Kent Buse, “Thinking Politically about HIV: Political Analysis and Action in Response to AIDS,” Contemporary Politics 18, no. 2 (2012): 127-140; Laura L. Beadling, “The Trauma of AIDS Then and Now: Kushner’s Angels in America on the Stage and Small Screen,” Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance 5, no. 3 (2012): 229-240; and Claudia Barnett, “AIDS = Purgatory: Prior Walter’s Prophecy and Angels in America ,” Modern Drama 53, no. 4 (2010): 471-494. [3] Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, Part Two: Perestroika [1992] (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2004), 146. All subsequent references to the play will be indicated parenthetically, e.g. ( Millennium , 64) or ( Perestroika , 75). [4] David Kornhaber, “Kushner at Colonus: Tragedy, Politics, and Citizenship,” PMLA 129, no. 4 (2014): 728. [5] Ibid. [6] Ibid, 729. [7] Atsushi Fujita, “Queer Politics to Fabulous Politics in Angels in America : Pinklisting and Forgiving Roy Cohn,” in Tony Kushner: New Essays on the Art and Politics of the Plays , ed. James Fisher (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2006), 125. [8] John Dewey, Freedom and Culture [1939] in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953 , vol. 13: 1938-1939, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988): 71. [9] Ibid, 176. [10] Tony Kushner, “With a Little Help from My Friends,” [1993] in Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, Part Two: Perestroika (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2004), 149. [11] Ibid, 155. [12] Kornhaber, “Kushner at Colonus,” 736. [13] Hussein Al-Badri, Tony Kushner’s Postmodern Theatre: A Study of Political Discourse (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 73. [14] See, for example, Shannon Sullivan, “From the Foreign to the Familiar: Confronting Dewey Confronting Racial Prejudice,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 18, no. 3 (2004): 193-202; Frank Margonis, “John Dewey’s Racialized Visions of the Student and Classroom Community,” Educational Theory 59, no. 1 (2009): 17-39; and Thomas D. Fallace, Dewey and the Dilemma of Race: An Intellectual History, 1895-1922 (New York: Teachers College Press, 2011). [15] Thomas D. Fallace, Dewey and the Dilemma of Race: An Intellectual History, 1895-1922 (New York: Teachers College Press, 2011), 4. [16] Ibid. [17] Ibid. [18] John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1927), 38. [19] Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 6. [20] Scott R. Stroud, “The Challenge of Speaking with Others: A Pragmatist Account of Democratic Rhetoric,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 29, no. 1 (2015): 100. [21] Dewey, The Public and Its Problems , 149. [22] Fallace, Dewey and the Dilemma of Race , 9. [23] John Dewey, “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us” [1939] in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953 , vol. 14: 1939-1941, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988): 228. [24] Charlie Rose, “Tony, Tonys, and Television,” in Tony Kushner in Conversation , ed. Robert Vorlicky (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1998): 46. [25] Al-Badri, Tony Kushner’s Postmodern Theatre , 93. [26] Dewey, “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us,” 229. [27] Hongmei Peng, “Toward Inclusion and Human Unity: Rethinking Dewey’s Democratic Community,” Education & Culture 25, no. 2 (2009): 82. [28] Dewey, Freedom and Culture , 176. [29] Ibid, 177. [30] Dewey, “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us,” 226. Emphasis in original. [31] Framji Minwilla, “When Girls Collide: Considering Race in Angels in America ,” in Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America, eds. Deborah R. Geis and Steven F. Kruger (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997): 110. [32] Al-Badri, Tony Kushner’s Postmodern Theatre , 101. [33] Peng, “Toward Inclusion and Human Unity,” 82. [34] See, for example, Minwilla, “When Girls Collide,” 104-105; or Al-Badri, Tony Kushner’s Postmodern Theatre , 96. [35] Dewey, “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us,” 226. [36] Tony Kushner, Thinking about the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995), 6. [37] Ibid, 7. [38] Dewey, “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us,” 230. [39] Michael Cadden, “Strange Angel: The Pinklisting of Roy Cohn,” in Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America, eds. Deborah R. Geis and Steven F. Kruger (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997): 88. [40] Ron Scapp, “The Vehicle of Democracy: Fantasies toward a (Queer) Nation,” in Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America, eds. Deborah R. Geis and Steven F. Kruger (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997): 98. [41] Dewey, “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us,” 228. Footnotes About The Author(s) COURTNEY FERRITER is Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Georgia. Her research interests include American pragmatism and 20th century Jewish and African American literature. She has published articles in James Baldwin Review and Education & Culture . She is currently at work on an article about Harryette Mullen’s poetic wordplay as a form of resistance against white supremacy. Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Are We “Citizens”? Tony Kushner’s Deweyan Democratic Vision in Angels in America Pageants and Patriots: Jewish Spectacles as Performances of Belonging “Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something”: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the Reconstruction of Melodrama Edward Albee’s Sadomasochistic Ludonarratology in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism. Kirsty Johnston. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 240. Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting. Amy Cook. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Pp. 198. The Late Work of Sam Shepard. Shannon Blake Skelton. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016; Pp. 256. Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism. Patricia A. Ybarra. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 247. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Isaiah Matthew Wooden Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 2 Visit Journal Homepage “One Great and Fine Mode of Expression”: On W. E. B. Du Bois and the Exigencies of Black Drama and Theatre Isaiah Matthew Wooden By Published on May 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF In 1927, W. E. B. Du Bois sent a short letter to members of the Krigwa Players Little Theatre he helped launch in the basement of the 135 th Street branch of the New York Public Library in Harlem announcing his resignation. “With deep regret, I am giving up my work for the Little Theatre movement in Harlem. My work is so pressing that I cannot spare time,” Du Bois explained. 1 A fuller report on his decision to depart would be forthcoming in the New York Amsterdam News , he added, before concluding the correspondence by stating, “I shall miss all of you.” 2 Du Bois would make good on his word, outlining for readers of the October 5, 1927 edition of the bi-weekly, Black-owned the New York Amsterdam News his rationale for transitioning away from his leadership position with the company he first began imagining and laying the groundwork for in 1925 and would subsequently detail the “four fundamental principles” guiding its work in the pages of The Crisis Magazine . Included among other “special articles” published in the newspaper that week, Du Bois opened the piece, which ran under the title “In High Harlem: The Krigwa Players’ Little Negro Theatre,” by indicating his departure was mostly a consequence of accomplishing what he and dedicated collaborators like Charles Burroughs had set out to do. 3 “I have finished a little job which I set myself in 1925. It was the job of starting a Little Theatre movement in high Harlem,” he asserted, “The movement has been auspiciously begun. I leave it with fondest benedictions to those better able than I to conduct its growth.” 4 The Krigwa Players had already enjoyed extraordinary success in its short life, including staging new works by the likes of Georgia Douglas Johnson, Willis Richardson, and Eulalie Spence, and enlisting such collaborators as the renowned painter Aaron Douglas, among dozens of other artistically-inclined Harlemites. Du Bois insisted that the challenges confronting the company, including concerns about whether continuing to rely on the generosity of volunteers was sustainable, were not insurmountable. There were, however, several key questions Du Bois felt those supportive of the idea of a Little Negro Theatre in Harlem needed to contend with before a “real” movement could truly flourish: namely, “Is Negro life dramatic and interesting? Do we want profit or art? Will we subordinate ourselves to authority?” 5 While Du Bois was a great believer in the transformative power of drama and theatre for Black people in the United States, he was clear that any aspirations he held for being an impresario had dissipated. “It was a beautiful venture. We loved it even when we despaired of it,” he stated. 6 He notably closed the piece by announcing his intent to retain ownership of the name Krigwa, which served to index the company’s emergence from the Crisis Guild of Writers and Artists he was instrumental in forming, before again declaring that he was leaving the day-to-day work of running the company to others ostensibly more up to the task than he was. While much might be said about the shifting affects suffusing Du Bois’s resignation missive, which range from delight and appreciation to disappointment and regret, I want to linger here briefly on what I view as his very conscious choice to proclaim love for Black drama and theatre amid separating himself from what remains one of the most consequential Black cultural institutions in United States history. I do so, in part, to invite reflection on what this love might help us discern about the ongoing exigencies of these modes of expression in Black life and culture. Du Bois notably invokes the word love one other time in “In High Harlem: The Krigwa Players’ Little Negro Theatre.” Early in the article, he declares, “I am no theatrical man, but I love the theatre.” 7 Du Bois makes clear here that his affection for the art form is unequivocal, even if trying to keep the Krigwa Players in operation ultimately proved too tall of an order for him. Of course, despite his assertions to the contrary, there is no question that Du Bois was , indeed, a theatrical man. The spectacular pageants he mounted in the early decades of the twentieth century and the countless dramas he would go on to write and work to get produced and published well into the Civil Rights era certainly provide rich evidence to support this contention. So too do the multiple manifestos for Black theatre he composed over the course of his extraordinary life. Indeed, as Geoffrey Lokke suggests, the critical essays Du Bois penned to accompany the collection of plays that he endeavored to get printed under the title “Playthings of the Night” beginning in the early 1930s are often as revelatory as pieces like “Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre: The Story of a Little Theatre Movement” and “Criteria for Negro Art.” They shed particular light on what Du Bois viewed as some of the distinguishing features and aesthetic ambitions of his dramaturgy. 8 They are also full of searing commentary on what the renowned activist, writer, and visionary leader often diagnosed as the dismal state of the contemporary theatre. Du Bois routinely conveyed disappointment about the wanting engagements with and representations of Blackness littering stages big and small across the nation. Despite his frequent forays into drama and theatre (Lokke, for example, notes that he “was still circulating” the unpublished dramas selected for “Playthings of the Night” well into the 1960s, thereby “showing a commitment to the plays he sustained over five decades”), Du Bois would remain somewhat reticent about identifying himself as a “theatrical man” deep into old age. 9 This likely accounts for why he began the remarks he crafted for a forum focused on “The Negro and the American Theatre” in October 1946, some twenty years after the Krigwa Players launched in Harlem, with “an apology in appearing upon a program devoted to the drama.” 10 Of course, his subsequent comments would affirm why he was in fact the right person to anchor such a conversation. After reflecting on the extraordinary achievement of staging the “pageant of Negro history called The Star of Ethiopia ” in New York to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1913 and the establishment of the Krigwa Players Little Theatre in 1926, Du Bois went on to express the following about the expressive significance of drama and theatre: A group of people no matter what their biological background may be; no matter what their color and race, if they have lived, worked, and striven together as a group; If they share the same memories and experiences, they have something which they ought to express for the benefit of mankind and the drama is one great and fine mode of expression. This then is the wide and fruitful field for the Negro drama in the United States. 11 Notwithstanding any misgivings he might have maintained about naming himself a “theatrical man,” what is clear from these remarks is that Du Bois continued to marvel at what drama and theatre could make possible and do for Black people. His love for Black drama and theatre remained as “wide and fruitful” as he proclaimed the fields themselves to be. It remains somewhat curious, then, that in the years since Du Bois’s death in 1963 at the age of 95 there has been a recurring tendency to promote the idea that Black drama and theatre are amid some sort of “renaissance.” The underlying implication is that these modes of expression are somehow constantly falling out of favor and are thus in need of resuscitation. What Du Bois’s persisting regard for Black drama and theatre over his expansive life begs us to consider are the ways they have in fact continually remained exigent in the cultural, social, and political lives of Black people in the United States. Certainly, many of the institutions formed specifically to take Black theatrical practice and production in fresh and inventive directions have had noticeably short lifespans (much like the Krigwa Players Little Theatre in Harlem, which only lasted for about three years). This lack of longevity should not be mistaken for a decline in appreciation for Black drama and theatre as “great and fine” modes of expression, however. It is meaningful, for example, that Du Bois continued to field queries about the Krigwa Players long after his departure from the group. There was no shortage of interest from Black folks across the country in learning more about some of the plays the company performed or in seeking advice about the steps they might take to establish Little Theatre movements in their own communities. Du Bois would often generously counsel letter writers to contact some of his esteemed peers like the playwright and educator S. Randolph Edmonds, who in addition to founding the Negro Intercollegiate Drama Association (NIDA) during his time teaching at Morgan College (now Morgan State University) in Baltimore, a city where Du Bois would take up residence for significant parts of the 1940s, was also a prolific maker and teacher of drama. His generosity in answering such queries is perhaps best exemplified in a letter he wrote in response to a correspondence sent to him by a graduate student named J. W. J. Lovell in February 1929. 12 Lovell explained in his note that he was working on a graduate paper about “The Negro in American Drama” and wanted to know if Du Bois “would be at liberty in directing me to cumulative records about the Krigwa Players and other Little Theatre Movements among Negroes over the country in general.” 13 In seeking out Du Bois’s assistance, Lovell continued, he hoped “to be able to contribute something of real value to the scholarship on the subject.” 14 It did not take long for Du Bois to send a reply, which he began by detailing that there were Little Negro Theatre movements in a number of cities, including New Haven, Washington, D.C., Dallas, Cleveland, and Boston. He went on to urge Lovell to solicit additional information about these theatres and the dramas that they were commissioning and producing from some of their champions, whose names and addresses Du Bois supplied. Of course, many of the companies Du Bois directed Lovell to investigate further also would not endure. However, much like Du Bois and his collaborators at the Krigwa Players had done for various residents of and visitors to Harlem, these companies created opportunities for their communities to discover and expand their own love for Black drama and theatre. To be sure, the demand for Black drama and theatre has never waned precisely because the love for it is unwavering. Correspondingly, when one takes a closer look at all that was going on in the periods immediately preceding or following one of the so-called “renaissance” moments in Black theatrical practice and production, what inevitably emerges is an abundance of evidence of the ways artists have continued to conceive and produce dramatic works and performances that elicit deeper reflection on the conditions of Black life and, more broadly, the complexities of the human experience. The tremendous care and thoughtfulness with which these artists set out to respond to the calls Du Bois put forward in The Crisis magazine detailing the urgent need for more nuanced and layered representations of Blackness on the page and stage is immediately apparent. A January 1926 write-up encouraging submissions to the publication’s literary contest, which offered “$600 in prizes for stories, plays, essays, poems and covers,” is illustrative on this front. 15 Du Bois counseled p rospective contestants to write “about things as you know them; be honest and sincere,” adding, “Plumb the depths. If you want to paint Crime and Destitution and Evil paint it. Do not try to be simply respectable, smug, conventional. Use propaganda if you want. Discard it and laugh if you will. But be true, be sincere, be thorough and do a beautiful job.” 16 Du Bois’s insistence that contestants ought to write as imaginatively and expansively as possible, while also remaining grounded in the specificity of Black life and experience, is no doubt a charge that has resonated with Black theatremakers and other artists in the hundred years since he first put it in print. This perhaps accounts for why, when asked to contemplate the question, “What is a b lack play?” the celebrated playwright Suzan-Lori Parks offered , among other possibilities, that “A b lack p lay IZ.” 17 With the pithy phrase, Parks, like Du Bois before her, notably reaffirmed the fact that Black drama and theatre can and must contain multitudes and, in so doing, prompted further consideration of the ways that they remain present in the present and, thus, are always already exigent. As Freda Scott Giles observes, “Du Bois viewed the arts as a powerful weapon in combatting oppression, but his appreciation for the arts went much deeper.” 18 While Giles argues that “through his participation in theatre, Du Bois could partially reconcile his mission as a social scientist and civil rights activist with his avocation as a creative artist,” this does not fully capture the extent to which drama and theatre were foundational to his larger objectives of dismantling the oppressive structures constraining Black life in the wake of emancipation. 19 To be sure, Du Bois’s investments in drama and theatre were not merely intellectual or secondary to his political work. His deep love for these forms emerged from a lasting belief in their transformative potential to upend the racist status quo. Thus, his love not only sustains, but it is, indeed, sustaining. References 1 W. E. B. Du Bois, “Note from W. E. B. Du Bois to the Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre,” 1927. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b039-i281 . 2 Du Bois, “Note from W. E. B. Du Bois to the Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre.” 3 W. E. B. Du Bois, “In High Harlem: The Krigwa Players’ Little Negro Theatre,” The New York Amsterdam News , October 5, 1927. 4 Du Bois, “In High Harlem.” 5 Du Bois, “In High Harlem.” 6 Du Bois, “In High Harlem.” 7 Du Bois, “In High Harlem.” 8 See Geoffrey Lokke, “Du Bois’s Forgotten Plays,” African American Review , Vol. 50, No. 3 (Fall 2017): 309-319. For a rich discussion of one of the plays Du Bois intended to include in the collection, “Seven-Up,” see Paul Michael Thomson, “‘I Thought I Loved Him,…the Pale Coward’: The Politics of Interracial Love in W. E. B. Du Bois’s ‘Seven-Up’,” Theatre History Studies , Volume 43 (2024): 111-128. 9 Lokke, “Du Bois’s Forgotten Plays,” 309. 10 W. E. B. Du Bois, “Stage for Action,” ca. October 1946, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b198-i049 . 11 Du Bois, “Stage for Action.” 12 See W. E. B. Du Bois, “Letter from W. E. B. Du Bois to J. W. J. Lovell,” February 26, 1929, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b049-i388 . 13 J. W. J. Lovell, “Letter from J. W. J. Lovell to W. E. B. Du Bois,” February 24, 1929, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b049-i387 . 14 Lovell, “Letter from J. W. J. Lovell to W. E. B. Du Bois.” 15 Lovell, “Letter from J. W. J. Lovell to W. E. B. Du Bois.” 16 Du Bois, “Krigwa, 1926.” 17 See Suzan-Lori Parks, “New Black Math,” Theatre Journal , Volume 57, Number 4 (December 2005): 576-583. Quoted on pp. 578. 18 Freda Scott Giles, “W. E. B. Du Bois, Dramatist,” in The Routledge Companion to African American Theater and Performance , edited by Kathy A. Perkins, Sandra L. Richards, Renee Alexander Craft, and Thomas F. DeFrantz (New York: Routledge, 2018), 217. 19 Giles, “W. E. B. Du Bois, Dramatist,” 217. Footnotes About The Author(s) Isaiah Matthew Wooden  is a scholar-artist, writer, and Associate Professor and Chair of Theater at Swarthmore College. He is the author of  Reclaiming Time: Race, Temporality, and Black Expressive Culture  and co-editor of  August Wilson in Context ,  Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration , and “Manifestos for Black Theatre, Then and Now,” a special section of  Theatre History Studies . Wooden has contributed more than sixty articles, essays, and reviews on contemporary art, drama, and performance to scholarly and popular publications. As a director and dramaturg, he has collaborated on projects in venues ranging from the Uganda National Theatre to the Kennedy Center. Wooden is currently at work on a critical biography that conjoins performance history, cultural analysis, dramatic criticism, and personal reflection to trace the significance of trailblazing Black playwright-director-producer George C. Wolfe to the evolutions of post-1970s American theatre, drama, and expressive culture. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue 100 Years of Du Bois: “Principles of a Real Negro Theatre” and “Criteria of Negro Art” “One Great and Fine Mode of Expression”: On W. E. B. Du Bois and the Exigencies of Black Drama and Theatre Reflections on Fundamental Principles An Expansive “Us”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Pan-Negro” Theatrical Vision W. E. B. Du Bois’s Krigwa Little Negro Theatre Movement in Harlem and Beyond It Was All a Dream: Shifting Du Boisian Notions in Richard Wesley’s The Talented Tenth Teaching August Wilson in an Age of Democratic Decline: Du Boisian Imperatives and Black Pedagogy Across Campus and Community Debbie with a D Talks Theatre with a T The Wild Duck Picnic at Hanging Rock Last Call: A Play with Cocktails The Dinosaurs The Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism. Catherine Burroughs and J. Ellen Gainor, editors. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 652. Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation. Julius B. Fleming Jr. New York: New York University Press, 2022; Pp. 301. The Theatre of Paula Vogel: Practice, Pedagogy, and Influences. Lee Brewer Jones. New York: Methuen Drama, 2023; Pp. 194. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch Firebird by Irina Patkanian / Marion Schoevaert at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2026. FAIRY-DOC, in stop motion animation Once upon a time, there was a Firebird, who was caught and caged by the Father of the Motherland. To free herself, she laid him the egg of immortality from his seed. She lost her feathers and hid deep in the woods, weaving lace from snowflakes. Once upon today, the Father of the Motherland saw her lace on TikTok and waged a war to find and marry her. Dancing at the wedding, Lacemaker turned back into the firebird and burned the citadel down. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Firebird Irina Patkanian / Marion Schoevaert At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2026 Screening Information This film will be screened on June 1, at 5:00 PM, at The Segal Theatre Center RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. Country USA, Ukraine Language English Running Time 23 minutes Year of Release 2026 About The Film FAIRY-DOC, in stop motion animation Once upon a time, there was a Firebird, who was caught and caged by the Father of the Motherland. To free herself, she laid him the egg of immortality from his seed. She lost her feathers and hid deep in the woods, weaving lace from snowflakes. Once upon today, the Father of the Motherland saw her lace on TikTok and waged a war to find and marry her. Dancing at the wedding, Lacemaker turned back into the firebird and burned the citadel down. Irina Patkanian Director, Marion Schoevaert Director, Irina Patkanian Writer, Ksena Samborska Key Cast "Firebird", Michael Kaplan Key Casy "Colonel", Yevgenia Nayberg Lead Artist, Maxim Dondyuk War Photography, Marion Schoevaert Production Designer, Masha Yukhananov Animator, Jennah Camara Animator, Anna Carolina Bastos Sound Design, Vlada Tomova Composer, Elena Kalkova Visual Editing About The Artist(s) Irina Patkanian is an award-winning filmmaker, a Fulbright scholar, Professor of Film and Media Arts at Brooklyn College/CUNY, and the co-founder of In Parentheses, Inc. Irina Patkanian makes hybrid (fiction/nonfiction) films questioning history with poetry, memory with animation, performance with behavior. Irina’s films have screened at 150+ film festivals worldwide, incl. DOC NYC, Ann Arbor, STARZ Denver, Palm Springs, Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival and many others, winning 20+ awards. Her work has been supported by fellowships and grants from NYSCA, NYFA, Made in New York, Tow, Blaustein, Troy and Jerome Foundations; as well as artist residencies at the Obermann Center, MacDowell, the Millay Arts, Ucross Foundation and the Art Studios of Key West. Marion Schoevaert has been developing her own style of physical theater for 25 years in New York, Seoul and France. She has directed, produced and choreographed more than twenty theater shows, operas and shadow plays, blending dance-theater, rhythmic text and live music. She works with artists from all disciplines and genres: painting, video, jazz, tango, hip hop, sports, martial arts, propaganda, graffiti, etc. to create visceral and raw emotional response from both actors and audiences. Marion Schoevaert has created illustrations for 33 Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic. She has produced the successful Koltès New York Festival (7 plays) in New York and has directed a North Korean mass dance propaganda play with 2 orchestras and 100 actors, blending North and South Korean texts, music and style together. She has created 3 theatre companies in New York, Seoul and France. Get in touch with the artist(s) irinapatkanian@gmail.com and follow them on social media www.inparentheses.org/firebird Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2026 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here