Search Results

DeRon S. Williams Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 2 Visit Journal Homepage Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches. Edited by Sharrell D. Luckett with Tia M. Shaffer. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017; Pp. 233. DeRon S. Williams By Published on January 28, 2019 Download Article as PDF Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches . Edited by Sharrell D. Luckett with Tia M. Shaffer. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017; Pp. 233. Sharrell D. Luckett and Tia M. Shaffer’s Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches is an exceptional addition to the field as it turns the spotlight on “Black/African ritual, processes, and methodologies to acting” (1). Rather than focusing on situating black performers in traditional acting methodologies, Luckett and Shaffer engage performance pedagogy that goes beyond the Euro-American canon through a series of ten essays, which provide a wide array of viewpoints on actor training grounded in Afrocentrism. They conclude with thoughtful commentary from notable practitioners who present insights on working with performers of color and/or performance texts/modes rooted in black culture. In the introduction, Luckett and Shaffer grapple with the origins of theatre and performance practices. They acknowledge that most U.S. acting programs operate from the perspective that theatre started with the Greeks; however, they point to evidence suggesting that many humans on the continent of Africa participated in theatrically driven rituals earlier. They then emphasize the book’s overall purpose, which is to: “1) honor and rightfully identify Blacks as central co-creators of acting and directing theory by filling the perceived void of Black acting theorists, 2) uplift, honor, and provide culturally relevant frameworks for Black people who are pursuing careers in acting, 3) provide diverse methodologies for actors and teachers of all races and cultures to utilize, and 4) provide diverse methodologies for actors and practitioners’ labor in social justice issues and activism” (2). Luckett and Shaffer subsequently chart the book’s overall structure of “Offerings” instead of chapters, as they feel “this term is more appropriate to our alignment with Black/African customs and culture, as the notion of giving is innately in the ‘fiber of our being’” (5). The first section of the book, “Methods of Social Activism,” concentrates on approaches that motivate societal change with and in largely black/African American communities with primary emphasis on women and at-risk/underserved youth. Luckett and Shaffer begin by sharing their experiences working with the Freddie Hendricks Youth Ensemble of Atlanta and the “Hendricks Method.” This approach manifests social activism and engages spirituality, devising, and hyper-ego, a concept that encourages fearlessness and “getting someone to believe they are ‘the shit’” (31). Offering two, authored by Cristal Chanelle Truscott, outlines “SoulWork,” which uses neo-spiritual or a cappella musicals as “an aesthetic tool for creating space and experience” (39). Individuals looking to establish ensembles or create communal performances would find Truscott’s approach highly useful, as it “shifts actors’ focus away from ‘me’ to ‘ours’ and rescues the audience relationship from ‘them’ to ‘all of us’” (39). Rhodessa Jones’s essay traces her work with the Medea Project, a teaching methodology that focuses on empowering incarcerated women of color. Through an arts-based approach to reducing recidivism, the Project “utilizes self-exploration techniques on an ensemble comprised of inmates, as well as community and professional actresses who stage material derived from the prisoners’ own stories” (51). Similarly, Lisa Biggs introduces readers to “Art Saves Lives,” an improvisational practice cemented in black feminism. Although she does not discuss processes or techniques, Biggs does highlight how the actress-playwright-teacher Rebecca Rice “practiced improvisation as sacred play to affirm Black women’s right to respect and to a future” (73). While the work of social activism is necessary, the offerings included in the second section, “Methods of Intervention,” target the core issue of most acting programs by emphasizing the necessity to locate plays in a cultural context in the rehearsal room. Justin Emeka’s essay is a real standout in the volume because it considers casting actors of color in classic white plays, concentrating heavily on the works of William Shakespeare. He lays out examples of how many people ignore race and its relation to the classics, and he contends that acknowledging race can augment audiences’ understandings of productions. Of all the essays in the volume, Tawnya Pettiford-Wates’s is the most enlightening, suggesting that traditional acting classrooms have alienated actors of color in their development and training. In recapping her personal training experience in Stanislavski, Chekhov, and Grotowski, Pettiford-Wates explains how this Eurocentric pedagogy has prepared her physical body but disenfranchised her spirit and soul as a black actor. For example, traditional analysis failed to connect her to the culturally steeped characters in for colored girls…. Considering this, she presents a series of useful exercises she calls Ritual Performance Drama “as an alternative methodology that directly addresses the specific needs of the black performing artist in studying the dramatic form and developing into self-actualized and empowered creative artists” (108). The work of Chinesha D. Sibley concentrates on Afrocentric approaches to directing new theatrical works where the playwright’s voice remains dominant while also honoring the interconnections between the playwright, actor, and director. She explains interconnectivity through the process of recalling culturally specific experiences and “embracing the physical and psychological traits of a people” (132) within the text and performance. “Methods of Cultural Plurality,” the final section of full essays, explores how individuals can be co-constructors of theatrical performances using techniques rooted in an Afrocentric perspective. Unlike most of the other offerings, Daniel Banks provides concrete exercises that readers can follow to develop stories and performances. Additionally, he examines Hip Hop as a globalized art form of social justice and provides a pedagogical framework through his work with the Hip Hop Theatre Initiative. Kadogo Mojo’s work is both an Afro-centric and trans-global directing methodology, linking the performance stylings of black Americans and the aboriginal people of Australia. The process formerly known as Kadogo Mojo combines “anthropology, dance, poetry, music, theatre, travel and cultural encounters” (169). Although Mojo’s essay is interesting, it simply chronicles her inspirational working modes. The section’s final offering authored by Kashi Johnson and Daphnie Sicre discusses the difficulties black students face on predominately white campuses and the ways in which they have cultivated the students’ “interest in creating an inclusive, productive pedagogical space” to develop performance techniques that “engage and empower Black students” (184). Like Banks, Johnson and Sicre bring together the traditions of Theatre of the Oppressed with the cultural aspects of Hip Hop theatre. Luckett and Shaffer conclude the book with short writings from distinguished black directors, including Tommie “Tonea” Stewart, Paul Carter Harrison, Tim Bond, Walter Dallas, Judyie Al-Bilali, Sheldon Epps, and Talvin Wilks. This unique group of practitioners offers insights on working with Afrocentric plays; personal experiences navigating the American theatre; and rituals, processes, and methods rooted in an African sensibility. An introduction to acting methodologies rooted in Afrocentrism, Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches samples multiple approaches and foregrounds a necessary pedagogical and theoretical framework for academics and practitioners. The inclusion of additional acting exercises would have made the book even more user-friendly within acting classrooms. Still, just like the prevalence of Eurocentric acting methods, the offerings in this book can—and should—be explored by individuals from all backgrounds and cultures, especially those marginalized groups such as Latinx people who have experienced similar structural oppressions in American theatre training. The text is ultimately an excellent resource to better enfranchise performers of color, particularly those who work at Predominantly White Institutions. References Footnotes About The Author(s) DERON S. WILLIAMS Eastern Connecticut State University Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Johanna Hartmann and Julia Rössler Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences. Compiled by José Casas with Christina Marín, ed. Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing, 2018; Pp. 581. The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era. Jonathan Shandell. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018; Pp. 213 + xii. Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, & the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization. Judith Hamera. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017; Pp. 286 + xvii. Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches. Edited by Sharrell D. Luckett with Tia M. Shaffer. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017; Pp. 233. A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams. Katherine Weiss, ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2014; Pp. 290. Introduction: Reflections on the Tragic in Contemporary American Drama and Theatre Rewriting Greek Tragedy / Confronting History in Contemporary American Drama: David Rabe’s The Orphan (1973) and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003) Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy "Take Caroline Away”: Catastrophe, Change, and the Tragic Agency of Nonperformance in Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change The Poetics of the Tragic in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home: Activism and the Advertising of a "Lesbian Suicide Musical" Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Javier Hurtado Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 2 Visit Journal Homepage Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences. Compiled by José Casas with Christina Marín, ed. Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing, 2018; Pp. 581. Javier Hurtado By Published on January 28, 2019 Download Article as PDF Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences . Compiled by José Casas with Christina Marín, ed. Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing, 2018; Pp. 581. Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences testifies to the fact that “today’s theatre workers know the value and importance of the next generation,” as Jorge Huerta observes in the forward (9). The book brings together contemporary docudrama, solo performance, and plays with and without music written for young, Latina/o audiences by Latino/a playwrights. The anthology also includes six scholarly articles that conduct in-depth analysis of the plays in the collection; document conversations with leaders in the field; offer pedagogical tools; and ultimately model paradigmatic shifts in the ways Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) is produced, presented, and taught. In the introduction, José Casas writes that as an artist of color, he often feels like an “uninvited guest” in the greater landscape of TYA (9). Diane Rodriguez shares this sentiment. In an interview for the collection, she addresses what she calls “the gap,” a disconnection in the field that has not made TYA a means for “building audiences of color over the past 50 years” (88). This 581-page anthology is an attempt to address that gap, featuring plays by Josefina López, Guillermo Reyes, Lisa Loomer, and more. However, it is not a collection begging for an invitation; it is an affirmation of the work that Latina/o/x communities have already been doing for generations. By pairing these plays with essays that engage the themes of the plays in the collection as well as issues in the field of TYA, Palabras del Cielo provides critical tools for degree programs in TYA to center Latina/o plays in their classrooms and on their stages. University-driven efforts to train scholars and professionals in TYA have expanded; at thirty-one universities across the United States, there are six MFA programs, eight MA programs, seven BFA programs, and eighteen BA programs that offer degrees in educational theatre or TYA. Palabras del Cielo makes an intervention for Latina/o-specific studies in these programs. The texts within offer a unique opportunity to deepen conversations about Latina/o experiences in the United States and to interrogate the history of the craft of storytelling through the theatrical adaptation of Latina/o folktales. In turn, three of the included plays reimagine western canonical texts like Voltaire’s Candide and Dante’s Inferno . These plays allow young actors to perform a variety of acting styles and genres while maintaining a focus on the “young audience” aspect that is central to the form. Beyond the theatre classroom, this anthology could easily be used to explore how Latina/o identity and culture shifts over time, since the plays reflect issues in the community from the mid-1990s to 2014. In addition, the companion essays offer scholarly context that make the book a resource for those in the social sciences and humanities more broadly. For example, in her essay, “The Historical Developments and Emergence of Latina/o TYA: Towards a Mestizaje Theatre,” Cecilia J. Argón traces the specific trajectory of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences (LTYA) through the role of children in performance traditions from Indo-Hispanic rituals and indigenous ceremony to the Chicano Movement. Aragon concludes by affirming that “this anthology of plays recognizes the performance of regional specificity, migration, and transnationalism and global impacts on Chicana/o and Latina/o children and youth” (25). In the essay, “They Don’t Look Like Me: A Look at Representation of Marginalized Populations in TYA in the United States,” Kelly Fey uses a cultural studies framework to write about the impact that cultural representation has on identity formation and interpersonal relations. Fey also puts forth a framework to assess diversity and inclusion work being done at theaters across the United States and provides readers with a TYA Inclusivity Manifesto modeled after the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s work in audience development. Palabras del Cielo amplifies the voices of Latinos and Latinas equally throughout. However, the experiences of trans, non-binary, and gender nonconforming youth and the works of playwrights who identify as Latinx are palpably absent. Despite this absence, some of the stories in this book do engage with young protagonists who challenge gender norms. Cinderella Eats Rice and Beans: A Salsa Fairytale (book and lyrics by Karen Zacharías, music by Deborah Wicks La Puma) is a great example. In this fantastic, fast-paced musical adaptation, the title character is a sixth-grade exchange student from Puerto Rico who comes to a new school to learn English. However, this fairytale is not about a young girl who goes to the ball, loses her shoes, and meets a prince; it is about two young girls who learn empathy and fairness, after tempers flare between them on the basketball court. This version of Cinderella makes a significant effort to counter the sexism of the original story. For instance, the girls compete to earn a spot on a national team with a celebrity coach, played by a fairy godfather, while his wife enjoys a day off at the spa. Like the rest of the titles in this collection, Cinderella Eats Rice and Beans is a strong play that can easily tour schools or hold an audience as part of any university or professional mainstage season. Meaning “words from heaven,” Palabras del Cielo is ultimately a stellar anthology of Latina/o TYA geared toward the classroom. It lends itself to production-based and historical survey classes at the university level, providing a necessary intervention with the potential to reverberate across stages and classrooms for generations. References Footnotes About The Author(s) JAVIER HURTADO Tufts University Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Johanna Hartmann and Julia Rössler Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences. Compiled by José Casas with Christina Marín, ed. Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing, 2018; Pp. 581. The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era. Jonathan Shandell. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018; Pp. 213 + xii. Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, & the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization. Judith Hamera. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017; Pp. 286 + xvii. Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches. Edited by Sharrell D. Luckett with Tia M. Shaffer. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017; Pp. 233. A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams. Katherine Weiss, ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2014; Pp. 290. Introduction: Reflections on the Tragic in Contemporary American Drama and Theatre Rewriting Greek Tragedy / Confronting History in Contemporary American Drama: David Rabe’s The Orphan (1973) and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003) Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy "Take Caroline Away”: Catastrophe, Change, and the Tragic Agency of Nonperformance in Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change The Poetics of the Tragic in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home: Activism and the Advertising of a "Lesbian Suicide Musical" Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Jennie Youssef Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 2 Visit Journal Homepage The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era. Jonathan Shandell. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018; Pp. 213 + xii. Jennie Youssef By Published on January 28, 2019 Download Article as PDF The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era. Jonathan Shandell. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018; Pp. 213 + xii. Jonathan Shandell’s The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era offers in-depth, historical reconstruction of the instrumental role that Harlem’s American Negro Theatre (ANT) company played in the development of African American theatre and performance. Formed in June 1940, ANT provided African Americans with the autonomy for culturally distinct artistic expression. During the nascency of the Civil Rights Movement, ANT’s mission entailed opening a platform for “creative dialogues with whites” and fostering white support for the struggle for equality (2). Shandell meticulously documents ANT’s productions and artists using various archival materials, including play scripts, newspapers, and interviews. Shandell focuses on not only ANT’s more popular productions and artists but also more obscure, forgotten projects, and he rigorously situates his analyses within the historical and political context of the United States. Following a short introduction in which Shandell neatly situates ANT between the New Negro Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement, the first chapter provides an overview of ANT’s formation and first show in the Harlem Library’s basement, its launch of the American Negro Theatre School of Drama in the mid-1940s, and its financial and institutional crisis beginning in 1945 until its collapse in 1950. Chapter two looks at three dramatic works by black playwrights: On Strivers Row (1940) by Abram Hill, Natural Man (1936) by Theodore Browne, and Garden of Time (1945) by Owen Dodson. According to Shandell, the adoption of white artistic traditions for the telling of black stories, from the Moliére style social comedy mocking black upper-class snobbery ( On Strivers Row ) to the expressionist struggle of the individual in the folktale of John Henry ( Natural Man ) and the adaptation of Medea that takes place in the South ( Garden of Time ), reveals ANT’s propensity for artistic experimentation and redefining “Euro-American traditions [without] total submission to them” (68). The next chapter narrates the history of the 1945 domestic tragedy Anna Lucasta and the play’s attempt to change the stereotypical conception of African American characters integral in the “American cultural imagination” (89). Originally a play about the struggles of a Polish immigrant family during the Great Depression, ANT’s adaptation made no allusions to African American culture. Performed by an all-black cast, the show appealed to black and white audiences and transferred to Broadway, where ANT then lost artistic control over the show and had financial disputes that later led to the company’s downfall. In the second half of the book, Shandell shifts the focus from ANT’s productions to its artist members. The fourth chapter recounts the life and work of actor-labor activist Frederick O’Neal, ANT’s cofounder. O’Neal worked to reform the white dominated stage for African American artists, but radical anti-racists criticized his moderate views and approaches in dealing with the struggle for racial justice and believing in “incremental change” (94). In 1960, he became president of Actors’ Equity’s Committee on Integration. Chapter five looks at the work of actress and dramatist Alice Childress, who costarred with O’Neal in Anna Lucasta . The child of a formerly enslaved person and German sailor, Childress was frustrated with racist and sexist discrimination in the mainstream theatre. Tired of being considered either too light or too dark for available roles, she began to write her own plays, “which she could populate with more complex, nuanced, and sympathetically drawn roles . . . particularly for African American women” (112). Focusing on her interracial plays of the 1950s and 1960s, Shandell reinterprets her works as forms of protest against racism that demonstrated the conviction that interracial alliances were necessary tools in the fight for equality. In chapter six, Shandell moves from theatre to film in a discussion of the most commercially successful actor to come out of ANT, Sidney Poitier. Examining two of the actor’s early films, No Way Out (1950) and Cry the Beloved Country (1951), Shandell argues that although both films foreshadow Poitier’s later character type of the ebony saint—a variation on the noble savage type for which he was harshly condemned by the African American community—Poitier’s character represents an important mediator between “liberal integrationist hopes and undeniable black frustrations” (153). In the fascinating concluding chapter, Shandell examines the legacy of ANT. The Buck and the Preacher (1972), a western genre film, applies the ANT tactic of redefinition, offering a view of the Wild West where the frontier hero is black and the villain is white. Shandell asserts that The Cosby Show of the 1980s “disrupted the . . . pervasive and distasteful history of caricatured representations of black characters and families” (169) by depicting “an African American well-to-do upper-middle-class family unit” (165). However, The Cosby Show never addressed the “blackness of its characters” who are “unaffected by the material consequences of racism in the United States” (165). Turning his attention to the Classical Theatre of Harlem, he acknowledges the problem of the dominance of the Euro American canon within its repertoire. Nonetheless, Shandell notes that the redeeming qualities of the company lie in the expansion of that repertoire to include canonical black playwrights, use of a predominantly black cast and crew in all productions, and more recently, community outreach efforts, such as the free Uptown Shakespeare performances at Marcus Garvey Park. This short yet comprehensive history of ANT, its key members, and their work is the first of its kind and is long overdue. Shandell’s examination of the available archival material is meticulous, and the noteworthy case studies point to how racial inequality still pervades contemporary American society. His book joins other recently published histories of black American theatre companies such as Penumbra: The Premier Stage for African American Drama by Macelle Mahala and Stages of Struggle and Celebration. A Production History of Black Theatre in Texas by Sandra M. Mayo and Elvin Holt. Scholars of African American theatre and performance, especially those whose area of focus lies within the short but significant timespan of ANT’s activities, will find Shandell’s study a crucial resource for an often overlooked but historically important institution in American theatre history. References Footnotes About The Author(s) JENNIE YOUSSEF The CUNY Graduate Center Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Johanna Hartmann and Julia Rössler Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences. Compiled by José Casas with Christina Marín, ed. Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing, 2018; Pp. 581. The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era. Jonathan Shandell. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018; Pp. 213 + xii. Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, & the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization. Judith Hamera. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017; Pp. 286 + xvii. Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches. Edited by Sharrell D. Luckett with Tia M. Shaffer. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017; Pp. 233. A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams. Katherine Weiss, ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2014; Pp. 290. Introduction: Reflections on the Tragic in Contemporary American Drama and Theatre Rewriting Greek Tragedy / Confronting History in Contemporary American Drama: David Rabe’s The Orphan (1973) and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003) Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy "Take Caroline Away”: Catastrophe, Change, and the Tragic Agency of Nonperformance in Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change The Poetics of the Tragic in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home: Activism and the Advertising of a "Lesbian Suicide Musical" Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Shane Strawbridge Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 2 Visit Journal Homepage A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams. Katherine Weiss, ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2014; Pp. 290. Shane Strawbridge By Published on January 28, 2019 Download Article as PDF A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams . Katherine Weiss, ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2014; Pp. 290. The book opens with a quote from Tennessee Williams: “truth is something you need to deserve,” a statement that volume editor Katherine Weiss asserts “fl[ies] in the face of the imaginary worlds so many of his characters create” (1). From this nucleus emerges A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams , analysis of four plays that attempts to reconcile the contradiction between Williams’s “truth” and his characters’ fictions. The second release in Bloomsbury’s A Student Handbook to the Plays of… series, the text aims to provide a study guide to the most studied dramas from this celebrated American playwright. In her introduction, Weiss lays the dramaturgical framework from which the rest of the volume springs. She posits that the plays from the late 1960s and after lack “the tension and the need to express topics that were considered taboos,” leaving students and scholars to focus on Williams’s early works that explore topics such as “ageing, loneliness, and time’s devastation” (7). In the chapters that follow, scholars Stephen J. Bottoms, Patricia Hearn, Michael Hooper, Philip C. Kolin, and Weiss herself offer in-depth investigations of Tennessee Williams’s most produced and critically favored plays, The Glass Menagerie (1944), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), and Sweet Bird of Youth (1959). Following the introduction, the volume divides into four sections dedicated to plot, commentary, production history, and notes for each one of Williams’s major plays. The plot breakdowns vary in length from Streetcar ’s four-page summary to Glass Menagerie ’s eighteen-page dissection, divided scene by scene. The dramaturgical commentaries connect the plays to contextual history, culture, Williams’s biography, and contemporary playwrights and their works. These sections also offer insights into character arcs and specific actions in the plays’ pivotal moments. In addition, the scholars clarify their arguments by examining the dramatic structure and language of each play. Commentaries conclude with a history of significant productions and adaptations on stage and screen. The notes section for each play reads like a glossary of words and phrases that a layperson might find useful in understanding the plays, and that a theatre scholar or practitioner might use for closer study. Finally, a list of questions for further research opens up opportunities for more in-depth thinking. Stephen J. Bottoms, who specializes in contemporary theatre, probes The Glass Menagerie. Bottoms notes the usefulness of looking at Menagerie as “a series of inter-related paintings, each one of which presents a key component in a much bigger narrative, and which together build up to create an impression—but perhaps not a conclusive understanding—of that ‘whole story’” (19). As such, he breaks down each scene into multiple parts dealing with each character’s role in that scene, a specific hour, or a sub-title (such as Scene Five’s “Annunciation”), lending itself to the “impression” of the scene as a whole, a sort of pointillist view of the play. Bottoms suggests that had Menagerie not been the success that it was, Williams would never have achieved the sort of recognition that allowed study of him as one of the great American playwrights. Patricia Hern and Michael Hooper, who frequently collaborate on Williams scholarship, tackle A Streetcar Named Desire. The crux of their chapter lies in the “close connection between [Williams’s] writing and the circumstances of his own life” (89). For example, Hern and Hooper reference Williams’s need to hide from pain and sorrow while searching for contentment and happiness—no matter the cost to those around them—as a piece of Blanche DuBois’s “fall from grace” (92). Closely reading specific textual examples, they also link the works of Williams to playwrights such as Chekhov, Strindberg, Ibsen, and Miller, as well as authors Edgar Allan Poe and D. H. Lawrence. Author of several books about Tennessee Williams, Philip C. Kolin contributes to this volume commentary and notes on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof . His synopsis contains, like the play itself, act breaks, electing not to divide each act into sub-sections for readability. Two levels of history, “the long tradition of ante- and post-bellum (Southern) customs and their literary expression and the more recent history of the 1950s in American political life” (177) form the foundation of Kolin’s analysis. After glossing these two historical periods, he discusses the structure, drafts, and language of the play, though most of his work centers on the nuances of each character and how they “reveal various sides of Williams’s own personality,” from the “melancholy Brick” to the “sexually frustrated Maggie” (190). Kolin makes character comparisons across the Williams canon: he refers to Big Daddy as an “older Stanley Kowalski” (197), parallels Maggie’s demeanor with that of Serafina in The Rose Tattoo instead of with Amanda or Blanche, and aligns Brick’s “deliberate cruelty” (192) of rejecting Skipper with the behavior of Blanche. Sweet Bird of Youth falls to Weiss. Her summation adheres more to the model of Kolin in providing a broad overview of the events of the play as opposed to running commentary. Using examples from Williams’s play and extra-theatrical writings, Weiss addresses several themes including “The Catastrophe of Success,” “Preaching Hate,” and “The Korean War.” She evaluates the play’s structure, language, and style before analyzing the characters that Williams was “never quite satisfied with” (252). In her estimation, however, Weiss contends that they are “much more complicated than Williams realised [sic]” (253). The section ends with not only a glossary and questions for further consideration but also a list of additional resources. This handbook casts a wide net to capture all definitions of students, as per the title. If only the same wide net had been cast for the definition of “plays.” By limiting the evaluation to Williams’s four best-known and commercially successful plays, the volume leaves a desire for more study, particularly into those works that do not usually receive the same level of attention. Yet Weiss can hardly be faulted for not including the entirety of Williams’s extensive canon. Practicality and familiarity trump a comprehensive study, but one can hope that this will generate more investigation into his works. Although there are other studies of these texts available, what Weiss has done here is sculpt a text that, despite its limitations, provides an in-depth primer to one of the United States’ most decorated playwrights. Ultimately, A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams will be useful for students and professors who are searching for an easily navigable and digestible analysis of Williams and his early work. References Footnotes About The Author(s) SHANE STRAWBRIDGE Texas Tech University Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Johanna Hartmann and Julia Rössler Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences. Compiled by José Casas with Christina Marín, ed. Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing, 2018; Pp. 581. The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era. Jonathan Shandell. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018; Pp. 213 + xii. Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, & the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization. Judith Hamera. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017; Pp. 286 + xvii. Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches. Edited by Sharrell D. Luckett with Tia M. Shaffer. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017; Pp. 233. A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams. Katherine Weiss, ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2014; Pp. 290. Introduction: Reflections on the Tragic in Contemporary American Drama and Theatre Rewriting Greek Tragedy / Confronting History in Contemporary American Drama: David Rabe’s The Orphan (1973) and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003) Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy "Take Caroline Away”: Catastrophe, Change, and the Tragic Agency of Nonperformance in Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change The Poetics of the Tragic in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home: Activism and the Advertising of a "Lesbian Suicide Musical" Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Patrick McKelvey Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 2 Visit Journal Homepage Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, & the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization. Judith Hamera. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017; Pp. 286 + xvii. Patrick McKelvey By Published on January 28, 2019 Download Article as PDF Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, & the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization . Judith Hamera. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017; Pp. 286 + xvii. Scholarship on the subject of performance labor has proliferated with renewed intensity over the past decade. This development is, in part, a response to the way that scholars across the humanities and social sciences have diagnosed transformations in the organization and practice of work in the past half century as a problem of “performance.” With Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, & the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization , Judith Hamera offers a contribution to these conversations that is both methodologically innovative and politically ferocious. Hamera argues that a performance studies analysis can register, recognize, and reimagine the racialized structures of feeling that attend deindustrialization in the U.S. She does so by attending to the overabundant and hypervisible representations of two deindustrial icons: Michael Jackson and Detroit. Three interrelated questions drive Hamera’s inquiry: 1) How does structural economic change feel? 2) What is the role of performance in these transformations? 3) And how have racist hierarchies shaped the performances, including the “promises and perils,” of deindustrial life (xiv)? She pursues these questions through both archival and ethnographic methods, engaging a sprawling performance archive that includes music videos, plays, documentary films, and art installations. Hamera wrests authority from economists as the experts best equipped to explain such structural transformations, modeling a performance theorization of political economy through the analysis of what she calls “figural economies.” Figural economies concern “material and historical entities” as well as the formal, representational, affective, and rhetorical currents through which those entities circulate (13). Performance theorists working across a broad range of contexts will find this notion of “figural economies” useful, even as I suspect most will be hard pressed to mine the “rhetorical, exemplary, and metaphorical potential” of “representations with uncanny persistence” that matches that of Jackson and Detroit (xii, 3). Following an introduction that orients readers to interdisciplinary scholarship on political economy, the racialized history of industrial nostalgia, and the notion of figural economies, Hamera has organized the book in two sections: Part 1, “Michael Jackson’s Spectacular Deindustriality” and Part 2: “Detroit’s Deindustrial Homeplaces.” Two chapters comprise each part. As Hamera herself would attest, this organizational logic is premised on something of a false distinction: Jackson and Detroit are part of a shared figural economy “of race and work within an arc that took them both from epic productivity through equally epic debt and contraction to efforts at fiscal and reputational recovery” (3). Chapter one exemplifies Hamera’s commitment to challenging the presumptive whiteness of the deindustrial imagination (think: Bruce Springsteen) by examining the trope of the human motor in Jackson’s dance repertoire. In her analysis, Jackson’s virtuosity – the intersection of the “musicality” and the “sharpness of attack” (37) – characterized his expanding repertoire of steps in the mid 1980s and produced industrial nostalgia by “offer[ing] a fantasy of unalienated labor in an industrial modernity that was and never was” (51). These moves, enacted when Jackson was at the apex of his career, mediated between “a vanishing US industrial moment” and the “cruel optimism” to come (24). For example, Hamera sees in Jackson’s Thriller music video (and its choreographic afterlife), a highly mechanized reproduction of late capitalism’s zombifying effects as well as the possibility that deindustrialization might be “outdance[d]” (48). The next chapter, “Consuming Passions, Wasted Efforts,” concerns the early 2000s when Jackson no longer owed his renown to his virtuosity and work ethic but to his status as a “prodigious spender and spectacular debtor” (54). Hamera moves across representations of Jackson’s “aberrant consumption” in the Life with Michael documentary, the trials for child molestation that linked Jackon’s debt to a broader set of moral economies, and his planned comeback in the 2009 This is It tour. Hamera draws upon the work of film theorist Linda Williams to read Jackson as a star in a racial melodrama in which he comes to embody austerity politics. In so doing, Hamera demonstrates how “both spectacular and banal” performances can render visible the otherwise invisible processes of financialization (59). In chapter three, “Combustible Hopes on the National Stage,” Hamera examines figurations of Detroit in three works of theatre and features Hamera’s delightful excoriation of Lisa D’Amour’s Detroit. Through a heuristic of “re-sitting/re-citing,” which redirects performance studies’ preoccupations with the substitution of bodies to a concern with the substitution of places , Hamera analyzes the entanglement of race, home, and work in order to assess these plays’ understandings of “Detroit-ness” (109). Ultimately, the chapter demonstrates how Detroit’s figural economy, including not only D’Amour’s play but Motown, The Musical and Dominique Morisseau’s Detroit ’67 , has presented the city as “synecdoche not only for deindustrialization but also for the multisystem failures of late capitalism” (106). The fourth and final chapter, “Up from the Ashes,” considers the roles of the arts in a contemporary Detroit, refigured as being on the precipice of a comeback. Hamera shows how the “kunst washing” (“art washing”) practices of Detroit encourage entrepreneurs to invest in the city as an untamed avenue in need of creativity. Such practices, she argues, frame Detroit’s black population as impoverished with regards to creativity and risk management, blaming the city’s residents for the economic damages wrought by economic elites. In effect, these art-centered efforts have exacerbated the city’s racial and economic stratification implemented through other austerity programs that have privileged private capital over state investment. But she also locates ambivalent promise in specific collaborations, like The Heidelberg Project , that counter Detroit’s “phoenix narrative” while also “refusing melancholic resignation” (163). I suspect that chapter one, an exceptional chapter in a consistently outstanding work, might be the most likely to be excerpted for undergraduate syllabi. In addition to its modeling of figural economies, this chapter is further notable because of how Hamera enriches theorizations of virtuosity by putting theorists like Paulo Virno in conversation with the history of concert dance and music. This is also the chapter in which Hamera introduces Jackson as a “defiant compliant,” so-defined because of his simultaneous embrace of global capitalism and the challenge he posed to racist modes of production (15). Hamera joins the ranks of Margaret Werry and Elizabeth Povinelli in offering some of the most compelling accounts of agency under contemporary capitalism, accounts that are irreducible to tired rehearsals of complicity and resistance. Indeed, Unfinished Business is an urgent read for scholars already steeped in literature concerning performance and political economy, as well as for those who might be newly alerted to the work that remains to be done. References Footnotes About The Author(s) PATRICK MCKELVEY University of Pittsburgh Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Johanna Hartmann and Julia Rössler Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences. Compiled by José Casas with Christina Marín, ed. Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing, 2018; Pp. 581. The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era. Jonathan Shandell. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018; Pp. 213 + xii. Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, & the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization. Judith Hamera. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017; Pp. 286 + xvii. Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches. Edited by Sharrell D. Luckett with Tia M. Shaffer. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017; Pp. 233. A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams. Katherine Weiss, ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2014; Pp. 290. Introduction: Reflections on the Tragic in Contemporary American Drama and Theatre Rewriting Greek Tragedy / Confronting History in Contemporary American Drama: David Rabe’s The Orphan (1973) and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003) Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy "Take Caroline Away”: Catastrophe, Change, and the Tragic Agency of Nonperformance in Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change The Poetics of the Tragic in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home: Activism and the Advertising of a "Lesbian Suicide Musical" Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Konstantinos Blatanis Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 2 Visit Journal Homepage Rewriting Greek Tragedy / Confronting History in Contemporary American Drama: David Rabe’s The Orphan (1973) and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003) Konstantinos Blatanis By Published on January 28, 2019 Download Article as PDF Ever since the late 1960s and early 1970s, a host of diverse American playwrights and directors have resorted to ancient Greek tragedy more intensely than their predecessors had ever done before. Varied in scope and aims as well as distinct in form and expression as these works have been, they have mainly served to re-contextualize the source material in their own present moment and their immediate sociocultural and political settings. Similar to what holds true for their forerunners, [1] American rewrites of Greek tragedy of the last five decades highlight in multiple and inventive ways the “‘presentist’ dimension,” which, in Hugh Grady’s terms, underlies all ventures into “works of the past.” [2] Furthermore, these modern plays also verify in practice the scholar’s argument that “the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, [and] Euripides . . . have never been mere exemplars of a later discourse on the tragic.” [3] Specifically, they manage to do so as they reclaim those resources and particular qualities of classical tragedy by means of which artists and audiences alike are able to engage with issues of historical understanding. In essence, contemporary American rewrites of Greek tragedy reaffirm in their own modes the close connections that the cultural form has perennially sustained with history on both a theoretical and a practical level. In her influential work on tragedy and modernity, Olga Taxidou insightfully stresses that history “forms one of the main structuring forces of tragic form” that has nonetheless “always occupied an ambiguous position in studies of tragedy.” [4] The author elaborates on the findings of her research and proceeds to endorse in particular those “new ways of talking about tragic form that create historical accountability, radical critique and introduce the possibility of change.” [5] It is precisely the possibility of such an accountability that fuels the aspirations in the two different plays studied in this article. Seeking to interrogate how this age-old and fertile dialogue between tragedy and history can be reclaimed in present-day terms, the discussion focuses on two works which undertake the exact same challenge while being separated from each other by four decades. In general terms, David Rabe’s The Orphan (1973) and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003) are singled out here as objects of study precisely because they confront questions of historical perception which relate primarily to the US but also prove of great significance for the rest of the Western world during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In particular the argument in this article develops around two distant, yet intricately related and highly critical moments in recent and contemporary American history. Simultaneously, attention is specifically dedicated to the fact that both plays were voiced within a sociocultural and political climate characterized by a wide-spread and detrimental waning of historical understanding. First, The Orphan attracts interest as an experimental rewrite of Aeschylus’s The Oresteia that seeks to dissect the multiple ways in which the Vietnam trauma was engendered by a seriously compromised sense of history that the war itself intensified even further. Second, The Persians is recognized as an innovative re-reading of the homonymous Aeschylean prototype which examines the implications of the Iraq War and inspects the ways in which the dissolution of historical awareness interrelates with specific policies and practices that postindustrial late capitalism dictates on global scale at present. It is indeed no surprise that the two plays examined here grapple with these issues over the same time span during which the crisis of historical sensibility became the primary focus of attention across different disciplines and for a large number of outstanding theorists and critics who vary from Henri Lefebvre and Fredric Jameson to David Harvey and beyond. [6] As a result, the discussion seeks to elucidate the inventive ways in which both Rabe’s The Orphan and McLaughlin’s The Persians recognize the practice of re-writing as an ongoing, constantly evolving process through which they test their own “poetic, rhetorical, and performative dimensions” that, as historian Dominick LaCapra argues when he discusses the contributions of art to historiography, “not only mark but also make differences historically.” [7] It is precisely for this reason that both plays return to Greek tragedy and aspire to reclaim it as a genuinely “conflictual topos ” where, according to Taxidou’s insightful schema, “the King does not simply and unproblematically stand for the state and its people but acts as a ruse through which the whole concept of power is questioned.” [8] In other words, what inspires the explorations of historical accountability in these two modern plays is the fact that classical tragedy acquired its political significance and resonance by being first and foremost an indispensable constituent to the very birth and growth of democracy. [9] It is through this prism that both plays, similar to what scholar Sanja Bahun-Radunović notes about Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine, Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest , and Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play , address “one specific concern of the recent philosophy of history: the challenge to think history outside the traditional notion of (teleological, recorded) history of events, [and] yet not to deprive it of its human potential.” [10] In this plane of inquiry, central questions revolve around the political efficacy of contemporary drama and theater. In particular, this article places emphasis on whether the two plays can serve as historiographical tools of an unconventional type by means of which instances of multisided crisis are adequately interrogated. Thus, what attracts attention is the role that these works prescribe or at least anticipate for the spectator. Indeed, the issue of spectatorship proves worth exploring since the two plays undertake—in terms analogous to those LaCapra outlines for professional historiography—an “investigation already inserted in an ongoing historical process, a positioning toward which one may attempt to acquire some transformative perspective or critical purchase.” [11] In its effort to test the possibilities of such a “transformative perspective” on history, The Orphan recognizes the Aeschylean prototypical trilogy as an invaluable source of instruction. This third play in a series of four [12] —originally produced between 1969 and 1976—that sought to document the aftermath of the Vietnam War and its impact on private landscapes as well as on the collective conscience of the American people, reaffirms in its own exceptional mode the fact that The Oresteia provides, more than anything else, incomparable guidance on how the dynamics of tragedy are simply unimaginable without the active engagement of the polis with everything that takes place in the orchestra . Indeed, this proves an acknowledgment of utmost significance for a play whose primary aim is to alert audiences to the fact that over the period of the late sixties and early seventies, in spite of the unprecedentedly vigorous antiwar movement, the American public in large part chose to ignore the very actuality of war. In reviewing the moment, Rabe has poignantly remarked on several occasions that “people [in the US] were interested in simplifications, in the debate about the war rather than in the experience of the war itself.” [13] Professionally produced for the first time in April of 1973, the play aspires to attract attention to a highly crucial aspect of a chapter of contemporary history that originally remained consequentially unaddressed. In the playwright’s own words, this is nothing less than the effort “to embrace a portion of that inherently unembraceable subject.” [14] Faced, thus, with the urgency of its own historical moment, The Orphan turns inventively towards the classical trilogy noted for its masterful response to the exact same task. As classicist Michael Walton explains, “Aeschylus’ central concerns . . . are contemporary to the Athens of his time, to the Council of the Areopagus, all but suppressed in 461 BC, and to the growth of democracy in fifth-century Athens.” [15] It is important to note that The Orphan paves its own way by attuning carefully to the instruction it receives from the source text while also aptly exploiting a significant aspect of rewriting, what Julie Sanders terms “the pleasure principle, . . . the connected interplay of expectation and surprise.” [16] In particular, the play takes a large number of major liberties with the prototype both on the thematic and the structural level and thus manages to reflect the atmosphere of confusion and indeterminacy prevalent in the US in the early seventies but also to question its own effort to address the specificity of the moment. First and foremost, the work proposes an unconventional chorus made up of multi-layered and transformational characters who inspect critically the dramatis personae drawn from the Aeschylean trilogy and at the same time interact with them directly. These essentially anonymous entities, noted as The Speaker, The Figure, The Girl, undergo a series of metamorphoses, evidently modelled upon the practices and transformation techniques of Joe Chaikin’s Open Theater, and encapsulate idiosyncratic stances as well as general attitudes prevalent in the US during the early seventies, particularly among young people. [17] Furthermore, they specifically display reactions of the type that can be expected from the members of an experimental theater group working on the classical source text. Thus, they emerge as the main agents of a conscious theatricality through which the play interrogates its own position in history. One of the first major questions the audience is invited to consider is concurrently and instructively pertinent on all these different levels of signification. The Speaker, outlined as “a young woman dressed elegantly [and] hold[ing] a flashlight and a microphone,” [18] greets both the classical figures and the spectators in these words: “Think of time as a pool. Do we speak to the past? Or merely look at it? Is it right? Left? Up? Down?” (90). The great challenge of conversing with the past, whether distant or more recent, looms particularly intensely for the play itself but even more so for its enveloping sociocultural and political context. In the US of the early seventies, the multisided crisis of a nation unable to account for its own doings rendered questions regarding historical agency and responsibility both impossible and absolutely vital. It is precisely this pressing need for questions which remain consequentially unattended that the play stresses by rewriting the prototype in a thoroughly self-conscious mode. Interest in the present discussion revolves around the validity of this historiographical attempt at a moment of crisis and thus what attracts particular attention are elements such as the distancing effect that informs Orestes’s effort to see himself within the overall course of tragic action and the employment of two distinct characters for Clytemnestra at two different moments in her life. As the twentieth-century anonymous characters invite both those onstage and those offstage to engage with the Aeschylean trilogy, emphasis is specifically placed on the ways and means through which one acquires an understanding of one’s own position in history, both as a subject and an object of it. Most of all, what the work highlights is the very notion of historical accountability. Thus, as the action in the first act accommodates fragments from the original source text, Clytemnestra Two tellingly asks Agamemnon to recognize the palpable trails of his own actions and at the same time discloses her own plans to intervene in the scheme of things as an active agent: “You smell of time gone, Agamemnon. It’s time that you bathe. . . . You are filth and filth must bathe. Where’s the net? We must have the net” (93). To the same end, Rabe attempts an extensive cross-fertilization between Agamemnon , the first part of the trilogy, and Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis . [19] The confrontation between the prototypical tragic heroine and hero unfolds thus in an unprecedented way and attention is carefully drawn once again to the issue of historical accountability: “but between this departure of Helen and our daughter’s death, nothing real exists—do you see—unless you put it there” (108). Furthermore, the work seeks to interrogate the crisis of historicity that it witnesses for its own moment and thus it intently highlights the plea Clytemnestra One addresses to her husband: “Please find a way to lift us from this fate. I beg you, Agamemnon, think! Think! . . . Pride is your motive—vanity and power. The wind is your alibi and excuse” (116–17). Undoubtedly, these are questions that prove urgent on the level of the collective and the political, and not on any exclusive or private terrain. This modern work courageously strives to reclaim and redefine in contemporary terms the qualities that made Greek tragedy, as Stathis Gourgouris argues, “especially well configured to place before the polity the event of its own hubris .” [20] Half-consciously, half-instinctively, through these loose and experimental rewriting techniques, The Orphan attempts to recast in late twentieth-century terms what Taxidou notes about the “spectacular, physical, collective, physiognomic (as Benjamin would call it) dimension of tragedy.” [21] Indeed, what incites the interrogations of historical accountability and the questions surrounding the well-being and integrity of the collective in this modern work is the recognition of the fact that in “the Athenian tragedies,” as Grady insightfully stresses, “human alienation from the social and the natural is clearly in evidence, in fact, center-stage.” [22] The scholar elaborates on his point by noting characteristically that “Greek tragedy is always materialist-for-us,” since “the difficulty of founding a stable sense of good and evil, of right and wrong, is as problematic for Orestes, Oedipus, Antigone, Creon, Pentheus, and Phaedra . . . as it is for us in the early twenty-first century.” [23] In The Orphan , Orestes’s agon serves to epitomize this precise type of problematics. At the end of act one, The Figure, “a man with a thick black beard [who] wears a T-shirt, Levi’s jacket and jeans, and boots” (89) assumes the role or even the form of Apollo and foreshadows the action of the second act in these words: “It is time that Orestes arrive with his story . . . understanding nothing. . . . And it will not be his story that will matter, nor will it be his hatred, but only the knife” (124). Reflecting his parents, Orestes faces the insurmountable difficulty of making sense of his own position as a subject and an object of history, the very challenge of “founding a stable sense of good and evil.” [24] In other words, the play resorts to classical tragedy as a paradigmatic “conflictual topos ” [25] in an effort to interrogate the specificity of its own historical moment. To this end, particular emphasis is placed on the way Orestes questions the mission with which he has been assigned: “This is written, that is written. Who is doing all this writing?” (134). However, what proves definitely formative in his case is the set of questions his mother’s plight highlights in act one and which are now dynamically reclaimed by him for the purposes of the second one: “What is my motive, which my alibi—what is my excuse?” (156). In this mode, The Orphan aspires to render possible on stage a peripeteia that unfolds concurrently both within the mythological topography of the original source text and the distinctive sociocultural and political geography of the US in the early 1970s. To this end, Pylades—who similarly to his classical counterpart accompanies Orestes—provides both on-stage and off-stage audiences with a sharp account of Aegisthus’s ways and practices: “He wars against the Persians—he diverts our resources into a pointless struggle with the Peloponnesians. He slaughters the Vietnamese. . . . . He burns their villages” (139). For the exact same reason, moments later, Pylades also delivers a short monologue which accommodates fragments of a penetrating, disarming narrative of the My Lai massacre and which materializes on stage in the form of a flash that cuts across the evolving main action (147). The play articulates its own distinctive political statement by emphasizing primarily the adventurous course Orestes follows as he confronts a cosmos imbued with violence on all different counts. The questions with which the character struggles are pertinent to both the mythological Argos and the contemporary US and thus serve to define the qualities of this exceptional historiographical inquiry. The words with which Orestes addresses Iphigenia constitute a case in point: Why our father killed you, and did your spirit move the wind? . . . I say there are certain things that, if I am to remain a human man, I must not ever cease to know them. What are they? Please tell me! Does no one want to help me? Does no one care what happens to poor Orestes fed so fucking long on bread and dreams he thinks that both are real! (158) Interestingly enough, this singular agon develops within the boundaries of a realm noted for the presence of mostly young people who are fascinated with large-scale crime as well as hallucinatory experiences, and whose centerless quest for a way out of stagnation goes hand in hand with political causes that never become fully defined or adequately developed. Despite the fact that Orestes for most of the action in act two personifies the very effort to resist this force-field of pervasive violence and terminal confusion, he eventually surrenders to it. Thus, his own act of avenging his father’s murder becomes indistinguishable from occasions that either epitomize the general public’s obsession with the Charles Manson family murders, or merely reflect the dullness and anesthesia of drug abuse. Aided decisively by The Figure—who abruptly drops the mask of Manson to assume the role of Apollo—Orestes is led to pronounce himself innocent: “I thought I could not kill. I let fear run me all over the world, but I have caressed my demon, picked up my monster, and I know now I can kill and survive” (175–76). In the final scene of the play, tragic action proves an impossibility as Orestes rises to the sky not to be released but to remain suspended in mid-air. The character emerges now as a palpable symbol of cynical acceptance of violence but also of the very failure to oppose its force and question its far-reaching repercussions. In sharp contrast to his counterpart in Aeschylus’s trilogy, Orestes here attains no deliverance either for himself or the city. His agon culminates in a phase of absolute suspension and deterritorialization during which no future perspective is visible for the private, familial context and no opening can be envisioned either for the larger one of the collective conscience. Evidently, The Orphan highlights the significance of this failure and impossibility so that the chronicle of a terribly missed opportunity can be adequately communicated to the audience. As the playwright himself sharply comments: The Vietnam War . . . was the swamp where history paused and could have shown who were and who were becoming. In its flash and violence it was a probe into the depths, an X ray knifing open the darkness with an obscene illumination against whose eloquence we closed our eyes.[26] On a surface level, the play as an unconventional historiographical attempt which turns critically towards classical tragedy and reviews its own moment, bridges the crucial gap that Terry Eagleton, in his uncommon genealogy of both tragedy and tragic theory, identifies in these words: “While the scholars have been speaking of tragedy with caught breath as estimable and ennobling, or issuing elegiac laments for its decline, history has been awash with warfare, butchery, disease, starvation, political murder.” [27] More importantly, The Orphan exploits the dynamics of a self-reflecting stage and resorts to a source text that “is above all the work of a specific period, of a definite social condition, and of a contingent moral argument,” and thus argues that this failure to see tragic action to its end defines its own standing as a work of art but even more so the historical moment in which it is voiced. [28] In an experimental mode, the play registers the specificity of the moment and does serve as a document that, in LaCapra’s schema, does not “simply represent but also supplement[s] the realities to which [it] refer[s].” [29] It is important to highlight that the play’s contribution is valuable, for as the historian explains, historical research “involves not only the processing of information but also affect, empathy, and questions of value.” [30] Thus, in the early 1970s, The Orphan as an unorthodox supplement to the multisided Vietnam crisis invited the audience to reassess the immediate moment by attending closely to all those elements that affect, empathy and questions of value render possible on stage. As a result, spectators were also led to reconsider their own positions as receivers and translators. It is contended here that the emphasis on physicality and the inspiration from the seminal explorations of the performance theater style of the sixties and the seventies [31] that inform this work do not preclude but rather reinforce Jacques Rancière’s argument that “viewing is also an action that confirms or transforms [the] distribution of positions.” [32] Indeed, precisely because viewing is pivotal in disseminating the message, historiographical endeavors of this type can never attain their potential without an “emancipated spectator” who is willing to act upon what she receives. [33] The promise Greek tragedy entails for historiography and historical awareness as well as the formative impact that the latter two have on the former have been extensively explored by Ellen McLaughlin in her numerous and significant rewrites of classical works. [34] It is no surprise that the first extant tragedy is one of them, since Aeschylus’s The Persians epitomizes precisely this promise. The work addresses directly a chapter in what was then recent history for the city of Athens and offers thus a critical insight into matters which were of primary urgency for its own immediate context. [35] For her part, McLaughlin, in the introduction to her play, clearly identifies what she deems valuable in this work and stresses that while being “the only surviving Greek tragedy that treats a contemporary theme [it is also] typical of all the Greek plays that have survived for us in its unsentimental and clear-eyed view of politics and war.” [36] Furthermore, the playwright emphasizes the fact that “the great Greek dramatists were citizens in a unique political experiment—a burgeoning democracy, newly minted, unsettled and constantly under threat, from both within and without.” [37] Evidently, this appraisal of the genre is in tandem with interrogations that define contemporary scholarship on Greek tragedy. Thus, indicatively, Taxidou elucidates the fact “that tragedy has always been about democracy,” and goes on to explain that “this notion of democracy, however, . . . is not simply about progress, visibility and civilization but also about violence, exclusion and barbarism.” [38] Aspiring to create a modern play which, in its own right, invests in these precise qualities and the ensuing possibilities of the classical genre, McLaughlin undertakes to rewrite the Aeschylean prototype as “a direct response to the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003.” [39] The act of rewriting Greek tragedy is consciously approached here as a process that renders possible a courageous engagement with recent and contemporary history. [40] Similar to what McLaughlin has attempted to achieve in most of her work, what underlies her efforts in this play is the conviction that there can never be an “easy relevance” between the source text and the present moment. [41] In particular, she explains that her effort is to steer away from a “glib, formulaic response [that] does justice neither to [the American people] nor to the Greeks and belittles the complexity of what Aeschylus was responding to and [the] distinct [American] national crisis” of the early 2000s. [42] Indeed, the play aims precisely at making audiences aware of the stark differences between the Athenian polis and its own contemporary context. To this end, both the value of the overall historiographical outlook of the original classic and its specific details are highlighted in the prologue McLaughlin co-wrote with Ethan McSweeny. Thus, in a Brechtian mode, the audience is presented, early on, with the information that the source text “contains the only eyewitness account we have of [the] battle [of Salamis], or indeed of any battle in the Persian Wars.” [43] The Persians , as a modern play, sets out to explore the multisided interaction between tragedy and history through a series of tightly organized, economical scenes that succeed each other with no formal breaks as well as by means of an equally simple, direct and unaffected dialogue construction. In this mode, the opening scene highlights the question of historical agency and brings into focus issues that relate to political power and responsibility, as the members of the chorus outline both the setting of the play and the condition that prevails in the city of Susa: RELIGION : It is a city peopled only by anxious, silent womenTheir eyes darting for omens. CHAIRMAN : And by us, the trusted,The ones who pointed west and told them to go,Commanding them to leave us and seek conquest. (267) Almost as if despite themselves, these counselors to the Persian monarchs offer a historical account which serves to disclose, first and foremost, the thrust of the imperialist expansion: “Defeat is impossible. Defeat is unthinkable. . . . When Xerxes first saw the Olympian mountains rising triumphant. . . . He thought: This too shall be Persia’s” (273). Interestingly enough, at the same moment they emerge acutely aware of the absolute stillness and sterility that now informs the Persian kingdom and as a result they are led to reflect on their own “brazen confidence” and the fact of having been “merely deafened for years by the din of [their] own empire-building” (274). Indeed, the play invites no direct parallelism between Susa of the fifth century BC and the US at the turn of the millennium. And yet, this is a highly topical interrogation for the intended audience of a play that received its first professional production in April of 2003; a critical moment in the second decade of the US as the world’s sole power. As Howard Zinn notes, the economic and military hegemony of the US, which entered a new phase in the early 1990s, is one of multiple, far-reaching implications: In the early nineties, the false socialism of the Soviet system had failed. And the American system seemed out of control—a runaway capitalism, a runaway technology, a runaway militarism, a running away of government from the people it claimed to represent.[44] It is thus no surprise that McLaughlin turns critically towards the Aeschylean tragedy and allows her own work to respond inventively to a work which, as Simon Stow insightfully notes, epitomizes the fact that “it is one thing to tell an audience to avoid hubris but quite another to try to cultivate an ethos that will help them to do so.” [45] In particular, the scholar argues that through the agonistic juxtaposition of nationalism and empathy [Aeschylus’s The Persians ] sought to cultivate in its audience an ethos appropriate to an increasingly imperialistic democracy [and thus] to motivate them to action by identifying their interests, such as avoiding the strategic and military consequences of hubris. [46] McLaughlin’s The Persians places primary emphasis on Atossa in an effort to cultivate this precise ethos in its own spectators. In an almost metadramatic tone, the figurative scheme that Justice, as a member of the chorus, employs to describe the position the queen now occupies speaks for the play’s aims; he openly likens Atossa to “a candle borne across a wasteland [that] shows a divine light” (276). As the plot develops, what proves even more illuminating is the character’s own insight into the absolute suspension and pervasive crisis in which the empire finds itself and which is inscribed on her own body: “I am haunted by my own useless importance. Every surface reflects my aging worried face back to me. I rattle around my gilded palace alone, echoing and reflecting myself” (277). Furthermore, the same lines reveal the queen’s realization that this a moment during which she is required to review her own response to history. Precisely because interest here revolves around the validity of this unconventional historiographical venture, what attracts attention is the distinctive way in which the play illuminates the character’s body as an entity that both receives and answers back to history, both intervenes in it and is ultimately claimed by it. The body of a mother and a queen as well as the motherland, a kingdom in terminal crisis, struggle here with the urgency of the moment: “What do these horrors mean? Does Persia, even now, fall from her heights, blinded and bloody? Shall my son return?” (279). Atossa’s nightmare does anticipate and at the same time fails to capture the full extent of the catastrophe Persia encounters in history. What proves valuable for the interrogation of historical accountability more than anything else in this play are the questions Atossa articulates regarding the factors that contributed to the creation of this “blinded and bloody” empire. In an effort to emphasize this interrogation even further, McLaughlin moves beyond the source text and has also recourse to Herodotus, and thus adds a choral section on the flogging of the Hellespont (292). To the same end, the pivotal role that the Herald’s account of the Persian defeat occupies in the original prototype is reclaimed here in a self-reflecting tone: “I can’t tell it well enough to make you see it. That’s only a fraction. It’s all swimming in my head. Worse things happened” (286). Reflecting the modern play in its entirety, the Herald’s narrative is valuable since, for all its fragmentary nature, it aims at a “critical purchase” of the historical moment in question. [47] Similar to what is argued here about Orestes’s agon in The Orphan , this is indeed a “fraction” that nonetheless allows “affect, empathy, and questions of value” to inform the spectators’ engagement with history. [48] Motivating audience members to grow viscerally aware of their own positions as agents who act upon what they view as interpreters and translators, the play highlights effectively the question of historical agency as well as the notion of political accountability. In other words, what unites the stage and the auditorium in this case is the effort to acknowledge the material and practical dimensions which define any given subject’s position and responsibility in time and history. Similar to The Orphan, McLaughlin’s The Persians invests in tragedy not as “an antidote to suffering and pain” but as “a radical form of critique” through which the key constituencies of the democratic polis question, first and foremost, their own actions. [49] It is indeed the agon of an active agent in history that Atossa courageously strives to fulfill when she appeals to her dead husband. Summoning Darius on stage, she manages to show both on-stage and off-stage audiences why it is imperative that the collective body of the people appeals to its past; in other words, why it is absolutely essential that the Persians reconnect with their own history. Through Atossa’s call, the play argues that recognition of the past, historical awareness and political accountability are closely interrelated. In these terms, the Persian queen leads the way for the chorus, who at first merely rush to free themselves of any responsibility for the present catastrophe and can only blame Xerxes for what they themselves had specifically authorized at a critical moment in the past. If there is anything promising in this suffering for the Persians this becomes sensible only when they turn to history. It is only thus that they may begin on their way towards a candid review of their own responsibility for the predicament Persia now faces. It is contended here that scenes of this nature allow the play to prove in practice what is promising about the very process of dynamically rewriting Greek tragedy, nothing less than the very cultivation of ethos through “agonistic” tension that Stow accurately discerns in the Aeschylean prototype. This type of critical assessment of the empire’s true worth emerges particularly pertinent to the context of the US in the early 2000s. The work outlines effectively an “agonistic” tension between blind trust in the empire’s might on the one hand, and the struggle to understand the complicated repercussions of its rule on the other. Indeed, the play receives instruction from classical tragedy which “was a questioning not a didactic genre, one that sought to provoke theoretical reflection on the values and conflicts that the audience faced as democratic citizens.” [50] Atossa’s struggle to understand the moment epitomizes what the two plays discussed here aspire to examine. Both works invite audiences to face the challenge of growing aware of the specificity of the present moment, what Rabe terms its “eloquence,” and thus to engage actively with questions which pertain to historical agency and accountability. [51] Spectators are encouraged to reflect on the responsibility of those in power as well as of those in the names of whom the empire marches on. Within this frame, the two plays revisit the classical genre seeking to cultivate “both an ethic and action ” at two disparate moments of severe crises. [52] This double effort is what Darius’s message highlights: “Mourn the dead of this great country. . . . They shall lie in the restless waves as testament / To what horrors an overweening pridefulness can reap” (299). In the original prototype, Darius delivers his speech from the palace at Susa to address the Athenian polis . In McLaughlin’s play, the words of the deceased Persian monarch are clearly meant to alert audiences in the US, but also across the Western world, of the actuality of present-day horrors. It is argued here that the endeavor that these two modern plays undertake proves particularly strenuous and thus even more vital since they both acquired shape in times during which historical understanding of the immediate moment was seriously undermined. In the early 1970s, The Orphan struggled to claim its own ground against a setting characterized by the generalized unwillingness to recognize the Vietnam War for what it really was and the ensuing hostility towards the veterans. Forty years later, The Persians confronted a historical instance infused by what Zinn terms “the atmosphere of wartime jingoism.” [53] As the historian shrewdly observes, in the early 2000s, the ubiquitous display of the American flag epitomized, among other things, the reluctance and inability of the citizens to criticize the government’s foreign policy and, in particular, the US intervention in the Middle East. [54] In both cases, key questions of the type Zinn articulates in the following lines remained, to a large extent, an impossibility for the collective American mind: “Is there ‘a national interest’ when a few people decide on war? . . . Should citizens not ask in whose interest are we doing what we are doing?” [55] The two plays studied here trace and register on stage primarily the weight of these challenging questions. Rabe’s The Orphan and McLaughlin’s The Persians target areas that are simply unthinkable without the active engagement of the audience. To this purpose, they explore the dynamics of “the adaptive faculty” and prove in practice Linda Hutcheon’s point that this “is the ability to repeat without copying, to embed difference in similarity.” [56] Furthermore, they also reflect Edward Said’s seminal insight on the act of rewriting as one that leads not backwards to a previous work but “rather toward ‘writing in progress’.” [57] As argued above, by means of this “progress” they test their own potential as versatile tools of historiographical inquiry and showcase that “what is finally at stake is the subjectivity of the spectator, which is not necessarily passive, even if the spectator remains seated in his chair.” [58] In these words, Alain Badiou shares Jacques Rancière’s view and inspects “subjective transferences, transformations [which] occur even if the spectator is immobile.” [59] It is significant to note that such transferences and transformations are particularly prominent in these two rewrites of Greek tragedy which, similar to what Toby Zinman argues about a wide array of American plays of the past two decades, manage “what media pundits and statistics cannot do: revealing the emotional truth of war.” [60] Indeed, contemporary theater work of this type incites audiences “to consider the ethical dimension of [historical] understanding [as well as the] emotional response to these insights.” [61] In these terms, the two plays discussed here prove that “viewing is an action” and thus highlight that political efficacy in drama and theater can only rely upon the level of action which is “owned by no one” but subsists between those on stage and those off stage. [62] References [1] The fact that this effort of resituating the parent text in one’s own surroundings has been a driving force for American rewrites of Greek tragedy produced well before the period on which this article focuses is precisely what Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) best exemplifies. [2] Hugh Grady, “Tragedy and Materialist Thought,” in A Companion to Tragedy , edited by Rebecca Bushnell (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 130. [3] Ibid. [4] Olga Taxidou, Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 15. [5] Taxidou, Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning , 16. [6] In his highly influential book The Production of Space , first published in 1974, Henri Lefebvre identified this very “dissolution” of historical sensibility as one of the major pathologies of contemporary Western societies. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space , trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1991), 416. In 1983, Fredric Jameson outlined “historical amnesia” as one of the most distinguishing features of postmodernity. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in Postmodernism and Its Discontents: Theories, Practices , edited by E. Ann Kaplan (London: Verso, 1988), 28. David Harvey, in 1990, commented specifically on postmodernism’s “incredible ability to plunder history.” David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1990), 54. [7] Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 15. [8] Taxidou, Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning , 5. [9] Stathis Gourgouris accurately notes that tragedy is “endemic” to democracy. Specifically, the scholar stresses that “tragic theater is political, not because of its content, but because, by all accounts, it is endemic to this peculiar mode of self-organization that emerged in Athens.” Stathis Gourgouris, “Democracy is a Tragic Regime,” PMLA 129, no. 4 (2014): 811 (emphasis in original). [10] Sanja Bahun-Radunović, “History in Postmodern Theater: Heiner Müller, Caryl Churchill, and Suzan-Lori Parks,” Comparative Literature Studies 45, no. 4 (2008): 466. [11] LaCapra, Writing History , 36. [12] The other three plays David Rabe wrote in response to the Vietnam War are Sticks and Bones (1969), The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1971), and Streamers (1976). [13] David Savran, In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1988), 193 (emphasis in original). [14] David Rabe, “Afterword: 1992,” in The Vietnam Plays. Volume Two: Streamers, The Orphan (New York: Grove Press, 1993), 193. [15] Michael Walton, The Greek Sense of Theatre: Tragedy and Comedy Reviewed (New York: Routledge, 2015), 74. [16] Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London: Routledge, 2006), 24–25. [17] In his detailed stage history of Rabe’s work, Philip Kolin documents insightfully how formative the experience of watching Jean-Claude Van Itallie’s The Serpent at the Open Theater in 1969 proved for the playwright. Philip C. Kolin, David Rabe: A Stage History (New York: Garland, 1988), 52. [18] David Rabe, The Orphan , in The Vietnam Plays. Volume Two , 89. Further references to this play will be noted parenthetically in the text. [19] Kolin provides information on the experience of a 1967 Off-Broadway production of Euripides’s tragedy that inspired the playwright to write a one-act play by the title The Bones of Birds , which was performed for the first time in 1968 at Villanova University while Rabe was still a graduate student there, and which he later re-worked and expanded into what resulted in The Orphan . Kolin, David Rabe , 51. [20] Gourgouris, “Democracy is a Tragic Regime,” 811. [21] Taxidou, Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning , 7. [22] Grady, “Tragedy and Materialist Thought,” 141. [23] Ibid. [24] Ibid. [25] Taxidou, Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning , 5. [26] Rabe, “Afterword: 1992,” 197. [27] Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 205. [28] Roland Barthes, “Putting on the Greeks,” in Critical Essays , trans. Richard Howard (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 65. [29] Dominick LaCapra, History and Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 62. [30] LaCapra, Writing History , 35. [31] See Kolin, David Rabe , 52. [32] Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator , trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009), 13. [33] Ibid. [34] McLaughlin’s first rewrite of Greek tragedy, Iphigenia and Other Daughters (1994) , offers a distinctive and invaluable feminine perspective into history, in general, and the role that history written by men assigns to women across the ages, in particular. The play was by no means an exception and was followed by works that also address issues of historical understanding, such as The Trojan Women (1995) and Oedipus (2005). [35] The Persians was first presented, as part of an otherwise missing trilogy, during the City Dionysia of 472 BC. In his insightful reading of Aeschylus’s work, Simon Stow quotes Harry C. Avery’s following lines on the characteristics of that historical moment, “Themistocles was probably still in Athens. Xerxes was still on the Persian throne. . . . The victories of 480 and 479 had been magnificent, but it had taken the Persians ten years to return to Greece after Marathon. What guarantee was there that the Persians would not come back again?” Simon Stow, American Mourning: Tragedy, Democracy, Resilience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 127. In the process, the scholar articulates his own point that, “in such circumstances, the dangers of overconfidence emanating from the Greek victory at Salamis were all the more pressing.” Stow, American Mourning , 127. [36] Ellen McLaughlin, “Introduction,” The Greek Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2005), 253. [37] Ibid. [38] Taxidou, Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning , 7–8. [39] McLaughlin, “Introduction,” 254. [40] Ellen McLaughlin is in no way isolated regarding her approach to Greek tragedy. It is instructive to note that a large number of significant contemporary theater practitioners have adapted the same view of the classical genre over the past few decades. It is precisely in this vein that Tony Randall, founder and artistic director of New York City’s National Actors Theatre, invited McLaughlin to pen this rewrite of Aeschylus’s work. Randall stressed that the Iraq invasion could not go unnoticed by theater people and that there was a pressing need for artists to examine what he himself termed “a terrible time in [contemporary American] history.” McLaughlin, “Introduction,” 255. Interestingly enough, several other important efforts in contemporary drama and theater had already targeted the exact same area. It suffices to note as an example Peter Sellars’s controversial production of The Persians in 1993, which was conceived as a reaction to the first Gulf War. [41] McLaughlin, “Introduction,” 254. [42] Ibid., 255. [43] Ellen McLaughlin, The Persians , in The Greek Plays , 266. Further references to this play will be noted parenthetically in the text. [44] Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005), 638. [45] Stow, American Mourning , 123 (emphasis in original). [46] Ibid., 126–27. [47] LaCapra, Writing History , 36. [48] LaCapra, Writing History , 35. [49] Taxidou, Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning , 2. [50] Stow, American Mourning , 120 (emphasis added). [51] Rabe, “Afterword: 1992,” 197. [52] Stow, American Mourning , 123 (emphasis added). [53] Zinn, A People’s History , 680. [54] Ibid. [55] Ibid., 685. [56] Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006), 174. [57] Edward Said, “On Originality,” in The World, the Text and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 136. [58] Alain Badiou, with Nicolas Touring, In Praise of Theatre , trans. Andrew Bielski (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2015), 33. [59] Badiou, with Nicolas Touring, In Praise of Theatre , 35. [60] Toby Zinman, “American Theatre since 1990,” in Visions of Tragedy in Modern American Drama , edited by David Palmer (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2018), 227. [61] Freddie Rokem, “Discursive Practices and Narrative Models: History, Poetry, Philosophy,” in History, Memory, Perfomance , edited by David Dean, Yana Meerzon, and Kathryn Prince (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 27. [62] Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator , 13 (emphasis added), 15. Footnotes About The Author(s) KONSTANTINOS BLATANIS is Assistant Professor of American Literature and Culture at the Faculty of English Language and Literature, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. His research interests lie in American literature, modern drama, popular culture, media studies, and critical theory. He is the author of the book Popular Culture Icons in Contemporary American Drama (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003) and co-editor of the volume War on the Human: New Responses to an Ever-Present Debate (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017). Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Johanna Hartmann and Julia Rössler Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences. Compiled by José Casas with Christina Marín, ed. Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing, 2018; Pp. 581. The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era. Jonathan Shandell. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018; Pp. 213 + xii. Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, & the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization. Judith Hamera. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017; Pp. 286 + xvii. Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches. Edited by Sharrell D. Luckett with Tia M. Shaffer. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017; Pp. 233. A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams. Katherine Weiss, ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2014; Pp. 290. Introduction: Reflections on the Tragic in Contemporary American Drama and Theatre Rewriting Greek Tragedy / Confronting History in Contemporary American Drama: David Rabe’s The Orphan (1973) and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003) Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy "Take Caroline Away”: Catastrophe, Change, and the Tragic Agency of Nonperformance in Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change The Poetics of the Tragic in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home: Activism and the Advertising of a "Lesbian Suicide Musical" Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Book Reviews 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 Bodies and Playwrights Book Reviews By Published on November 8, 2018 Download Article as PDF Donatella Galella, Editor Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting By Amy Cook Reviewed by Ariel Nereson Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism By Patricia A. Ybarra Reviewed by Trevor Boffone The Late Work of Sam Shepard By Shannon Blake Skelton Reviewed by Carol Westcamp Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism By Kirsty Johnston Reviewed by Alexis Riley Books Received The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 1 (Fall 2018) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2018 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References Footnotes About The Author(s) 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 Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism. Patricia A. Ybarra. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 247. 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. Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism. Kirsty Johnston. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 240. “Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something”: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the Reconstruction of Melodrama Pageants and Patriots: Jewish Spectacles as Performances of Belonging Are We “Citizens”? Tony Kushner’s Deweyan Democratic Vision in Angels in America Edward Albee’s Sadomasochistic Ludonarratology in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Bodies and Playwrights Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Book Reviews Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 2 Visit Journal Homepage Black Performance and Pedagogy Book Reviews By Published on January 28, 2019 Download Article as PDF Donatella Galella, Editor The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era By Jonathan Shandell Reviewed by Jennie Youssef Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches Edited by Sharrell D. Luckett with Tia M. Shaffer Reviewed by DeRon S. Williams Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences Compiled by José Casas with Christina Marín Reviewed by Javier Hurtado A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams Edited by Katherine Weiss Reviewed by Shane Strawbridge Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization By Judith Hamera Reviewed by Patrick McKelvey Books Received The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 2 (Winter 2019) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References Footnotes About The Author(s) Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Johanna Hartmann and Julia Rössler Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, & the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams Introduction: Reflections on the Tragic in Contemporary American Drama and Theatre Rewriting Greek Tragedy / Confronting History in Contemporary American Drama: David Rabe’s The Orphan (1973) and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003) Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy "Take Caroline Away”: Catastrophe, Change, and the Tragic Agency of Nonperformance in Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change The Poetics of the Tragic in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home: Activism and the Advertising of a "Lesbian Suicide Musical" Black Performance and Pedagogy Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Baron Kelly Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 2 Visit Journal Homepage Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Baron Kelly By Published on April 30, 2021 Download Article as PDF Histories of US theatre have often overlooked the contributions of Black trailblazers as agents of change. Instead of focusing on the knowledge, tradition, sacrifice, and artistry of these pioneers, mainstream histories have emphasized their acts of rebellion in ways that continue to frame their narratives in the context of the dominant white culture. While the “legitimate theatre” [1] in the United States proved impenetrable to African American artists for many years, the histories of those Black performers who created dynamic careers merit a narrative that transcends their successful “invasion” of that long-forbidden territory. This brief essay explores the legacies of Earle Hyman (1926-2017) and Frederick O’Neal (1905-1992) who represent two shining examples of excellence in a long, and largely unknown historical context in which their long track record of achievements were not recognized or could not be fully acknowledged. Hyman’s career began in the early 1940s and continued well into the twenty-first century, encompassing several significant chapters in American theatre history. His career exemplifies progressive efforts to make the American theatre more culturally diverse and inclusive, to eradicate racial and ethnic stereotypes, and integrate non-white traditions, playwrights, performers, and multicultural audiences. Earle Hyman’s brilliant theatrical career spanned the US and Europe, and he became the first Black actor to play the title roles in four of Shakespeare’s masterpieces: Hamlet , Macbeth , Othello , and King Lear , along with leading roles in Chekhov, O’Neill, Pinter, Soyinka, Albee, Fugard, Beckett, Hansberry, and Uhry. Hyman’s numerous successes established him as a leading man in the classical repertoire of the Western canon. During the 1940s and 1960s Frederick O’Neal led the way on and off the stage, working as an actor, theatre organizer, and union spokesman, advocating and working tirelessly for the inclusion of African Americans in American theatre. While Hyman was on the stage carving a career on stage in legitimate theatre, Frederick O’Neal, Hyman’s costar in Anna Lucasta , promoted the racial integration of American theatre. O’Neal insisted that the Black community and other ethnic groups had the right to act, direct, write, produce, and participate in all aspects of the American theatre. He focused on putting more “color” on Broadway. “I don’t mean in the sense of all-black shows,” he once clarified, “That will take care of itself. What I mean is a real commitment to the integration of the Broadway theatre.” [2] Both men proved that their “revolutionary acts” of penetrating fields long closed to Black actors were only the beginning of their stories. I invite contemporary theatre scholars to return to their legacies and reconsider their impact on this history of Black theatre. Earle Hyman: Two Ways of Life In the mid-1950s, the immensely talented and stately African American actor Earle Hyman pushed his way through the closed doors of classical and contemporary theatre, demonstrating artistic versatility in his roles. Almost a century after Ira Aldridge broke barriers in Europe and Russia (Ira Aldridge had crossed the Atlantic in the early 1800s, but had never been permitted to display his talent in America). Hyman became the first African American actor to demonstrate artistic versatility in a range of both Shakespearean and contemporary roles in legitimate theatre. In the late part of the twentieth century, Hyman’s popular appeal came through his work as Russell Huxtable, Bill Cosby’s television father, in The Cosby Show. However, in the professional theatre world, he was known first and foremost for performance in classic plays, especially his Shakespeare roles. Hyman’s period of prosperity in the 1950s should not be taken as evidence that the status of Black actors had generally improved to any great degree by that time. Before Hyman’s successes, two African American theatre artists of exceptional talent, Paul Robeson and Canada Lee, succeeded briefly in forcing the classical theatre doors open with their Broadway performances in Othello (1943) and The Tempest and The Duchess of Malfi (1945, and 1946), respectively. Additionally, some Black actors, including Ruby Dee, Frederick O’Neal, and Frank Silvera, had been cast in roles that were not specifically Black roles, but they were the exceptions, not the rule. Major roles written by white playwrights for Black actors were limited, and Black theatre had been ghettoized in the US. [3] Writing in the 1960s, author Roy Newquist defined the central challenge faced so many Black actors: As restrictive as the issue of whether or not the Negro is allowed to act is the problem of what he can act in. Few plays, whether classical or contemporary, include good roles for Negroes. Since audiences are still prone to judge the Negro actor as a Negro first, then as an actor, it is difficult to integrate the cast of a play by casting a Negro in a basically ‘white’ part. Plays have been written, of course, for all Negro casts, and ‘white’ plays have been played by all-Negro casts, but the former have been produced frequently enough, and the latter become Negro theater, which is another matter entirely.[4] Indeed, Hyman entered a highly segregated world of theatre. Groups like the Actors’ Equity Association (formed on 26 May 1913) engaged in constant battles with theatre managers for equal treatment, standard contracts, and basic standard civil rights for actors. Yet, throughout this struggle, they ignored the rights of Black actors. The April 1923 edition of Equity News , published by Actors’ Equity, defined the union’s position toward the Black actor: Equity’s policy has been that when colored performers act in white companies, they come under our jurisdiction and should belong to the AEA, but when they perform in all-colored companies, we don’t seek their support because this group of people has many problems of which we know nothing and have at present no way of learning. As we don’t wish to take their dues without giving something in return, we have always felt it would be infinitely better if they were to form a colored branch of Equity.[5] Equity’s policies, while appalling, hardly seem surprising in the midst of the Jim Crow era. They explicitly tie professionalism to whiteness and acceptance in a white-dominated cultural system. Additionally, the language of “We” in the statement signals an entirely white leadership team in Equity, and a refusal to acknowledge Black performers as professional equals. By the time Hyman began making his mark in the 1950s, African American activists had taken to the streets. Black protests for civil rights surfaced in American theatre as early as the mid-forties. Actors Fredi Washington, Canada Lee, and Paul Robeson attended civil rights rallies fighting for soldiers of color and their rights. African Americans who had fought for their country during World War II came home with new expectations. In New York, Black theatregoers were allowed to purchase seats anywhere in the theatre in most Broadway houses that earlier had enforced segregated seating policies. Yet attitudes changed slowly among those who controlled the entertainment industry and access to opportunities for Black artists. In 1956, after becoming the first and only African American actor cast at the American Shakespeare Festival Stratford in Stratford, Connecticut, Hyman achieved another artistic milestone when he secured the lead in, Mister Johnson, a stage adaptation of Joyce Cary’s novel about colonial days in West Africa. Hyman had previously appeared on Broadway in small roles in Climate of Eden (1952) and No Time for Sergeants (1955). However, Mister Johnson was his first leading role on Broadway since Anna Lucasta in 1944 and it offered a chance to exhibit his versatility. In the title role of Mister Roberts he portrayed a young Nigerian elevated to clerk’s status for the British Government. Langston Hughes and Milton Meltzer summarize the plot as follows: Having adopted the appellation Mister, Johnson is no longer tribal, but neither is he civilized in the word’s conventional sense. Hilariously funny yet sweet happenings occur between his would-be decent employer [Harry Rudbeck] and this Nigerian boy in a backwoods outpost of empire. The two men are friends, but the gulf between them is too great for genuine understanding. In the end, the black boy is sentenced to hang for an unintentional crime. Rather than suffer the noose’s public indignity, he begs his white friend (who upholds the sentence) to shoot him. The white does. To paraphrase an old cliché of cowboy and Indian films, ‘Another Negro bites the dust.’[6] Langston Hughes observed that “on Broadway Negro characters do not shoot first. They merely get shot.” [7] Despite its critical success, Hyman faced the same problem with Mister Roberts . It offers no Black hero and no character remains to carry on the Black character’s legacy. Many playwrights of the 1950s framed Black characters as martyrs because those types of figures appeared less threatening to white audiences (and thus more commercially viable). The character of Mister Johnson reverted to that old theme stretching back to Uncle Tom’s Cabin : the innate capacity of Blacks to suffer, especially for white folk. Although Mister Johnson received mixed reviews, the top (white) critics proved unanimous in praise of Hyman’s talent. He had accomplished the American actor’s dream, “stardom” on Broadway, and a collection of glowing reviews. All the leading white New York critics heralded Hyman’s performance. Brooks Atkinson, who had followed Hyman’s career from the beginning, wrote: “The leading part is wonderfully well acted by Hyman, a gifted Negro who at last has inherited a Broadway part worthy of his talents. Mr. Hyman is a tall, supple, imaginative actor. … [He] is superb.” [8] Adding to Atkinson’s praise, Robert Coleman wrote: “Hyman is magnificent as the well-meaning, essentially honest and irresponsible native trapped between two ways of life. His dreams, accomplishments and eventual destruction are realized with touches that are irresistibly amusing and enormously disturbing. Take our word for it, Hyman is going to win many a prize this season for a truly great performance.” [9] And indeed, Hyman received a 1956 Theatre World Award for his performance. Theatre Arts declared Hyman the play’s “principal onstage asset” [10] and dubbed him, “one of the brightest entries in Broadway’s own future outlook.” [11] Richard Watts, admitting that the play had challenges, concluded that Hyman’s performance minimized these failings: “Mr. Hyman, in a part that dominates the evening and appears in virtually every scene, gives a beautiful performance, which is at the same time warmly humorous and has the quality of tragic dignity. Mister Johnson certainly has frailties, but Mr. Hyman’s characterization is so moving and real that they seem comparatively unimportant.” [12] John Chapman of the New York Daily News wrote: “It is, mostly, Hyman’s play, for the role is a long and hard one-and Hyman doesn’t falter. This is good acting.” [13] Other critics were equally impressed by Hyman’s presence and ability to capture the audience. John McClain stated, “The evening is almost entirely Hyman’s. Hyman dominates the stage and sustains you until the final curtain falls on his flattened figure.” [14] The New York Herald Tribune’s Walter Kerr wrote: In actor Hyman’s hands, Mister Johnson is sunny, ingratiating, and strangely touching throughout the play. Mr. Hyman has an enormous emotional range.” [15] Hyman was a handsome and extremely tall light-skinned Black man. He played to exclusively white audiences in the theatre bringing an exoticized and visceral truth to the stage that had not been seen before. [16] Hyman would later describe Mister Johnson as one of the high points of his career. But even Hyman’s newly acquired “star status” did not guarantee Mister Johnson an extended run. Unfortunately, the lines did not form in front of the box-office, and the show closed after 44 performances. “Broadway was just not ready for Mister Johnson ,” observed Helen Martin. “It hit too close to home. The average American audience, composed of middle-class whites, was not open to the idea of seeing injustices perpetrated by them presented on the Broadway stage.” [17] Echoing Helen Martin, Loften Mitchell observed, “The author had good intentions, but the mark of the handkerchief was on Mr. Johnson’s head and Negroes did not like it.” [18] An interesting commentary was the fact that director Robert Lewis never understood why they didn’t. He lamented that Negro groups had not booked theatre parties for the show. [19] Mister Johnson ’s Broadway fate offers one example of how Hyman both exceeded expectations for Black actors of his time but still had his success stymied by racism in the commercial mainstream US theatre. Like his character of Mister Roberts, Hyman found himself “trapped between two ways of life” – one in the mainstream white theatre that relegated him to certain types of roles, and one in the emerging Black American theatre. Once Hyman launched his career in Europe, he found himself able to move into the types of roles that shifted him away from the limited opportunities available in US theatre. Frederick O’Neal: A Real Commitment While Hyman carved a career on the “legitimate” stage in the US and Europe, Frederick O’Neal, Hyman’s costar in Anna Lucasta , promoted the racial integration of American theatre. O’Neal insisted that the Black community and other ethnic groups had the right to act, direct, write, produce, and participate in all aspects of the American theatre. He focused on putting more “color” on Broadway. “I don’t mean in the sense of all-black shows,” he once clarified, “That will take care of itself. What I mean is a real commitment to the integration of the Broadway theatre.” [20] O’Neal’s advocacy for Black actors started with his union involvement. The January 1944 edition of Equity magazine published an editorial entitled, “No Color Line.” Twenty-one years after AEA had claimed its leaders had, “no way of learning” about the “many problems” faced by “colored performers,” the organization seemed ready to reconsider some of its earlier policies. The editorial, “No Color Line,” lauded Equity for ignoring the color line when it needed Black actors in white shows: Equity adopted the policy thirty years ago when it was neither particularly expedient nor likely to obtain for it any commendation, but simply a matter of right and justice and good sense for a theatre which needed Negro actors and has benefited by their appearance. It still might be a good idea for a lot of other organizations to approach the problem of Negro members from the same angle and in the same spirit.[21] Frederick O’Neal decided to tackle the “problem” of Negro members when he joined AEA later that same year. In 1944, O’Neal chaired the Hotel Accommodations Committee. This committee addressed the difficulties facing AEA members on the road, especially minority members. No group of members was more deeply and adversely affected by not being able to secure lodging than Black performers who would have to undertake the discouraging and sometimes humiliating task of finding accommodations for themselves, however poor or inconvenient the accommodations might be. The committee and the AEA took steps to address this problem “[urging] the League of New York Theatre, the Association of Theatrical Agents and Managers, local house managers, and even the national Travelers Aid Society to make special efforts to provide adequate accommodations for minority performers on tour.” [22] From O’Neal’s point of view, finding accommodations for minority performers on the road was only part of the problem. There needed to be more “color” in the audiences as well. But how could this become a reality when many theatres remained segregated? For example, in Washington, D.C. blacks were permitted to perform on the stage of the National Theatre, but their relatives and friends could not come to see them. Equity had been aware of this situation but felt little motivation to do anything about it until after World War II. [23] As a member of the Negotiating Committee of 1947, O’Neal helped to formulate the agreement with the League of New York Theatres which stated that beginning on June 1, 1948, “the actor shall not be required to perform at any theatre in Washington, D.C., where discrimination is practiced against any actor or patron of the theatre by reason of his race, color or creed.” [24] In the June 1952 edition of Equity News , O’Neal wrote an article entitled “Integration.” He pointed out that theatre and all other forms of American entertainment were among the most powerful and influential medium of communication and education. Therefore, it was increasingly important that the role of the “Negro” citizen be adequately and accurately portrayed to reflect his/her significant presence in American society. [25] “In confirmation of the realities of the American scene today,” he wrote, “we urge the portrayal of the Negro as a more general part of the scheme of our society, for example, as postmen, doctors and teachers, without the necessity of emphasis on race.” [26] He stressed that in the recent past: A well-intentioned but ill-directed sensitivity to this problem [of racial stereotypes] has worked inadvertent harm to the Negro artist. Apprehensive of doing injustice to the Negro citizens and offending humanity, writers and producers have tended to completely eliminate the Negro in comedy and servant roles. This policy, wellmeant though it may be, is unrealistic and has seriously curtailed the employment of the Negro artist.[27] O’Neal’s faith in his fellow Equity members and his belief that integration could solve the racial problems in the theatre culminated in a practical display of “mixed casting.” With O’Neal as chair, the Equity Committee on Negro Integration, presented a two-hour program of scenes entitled “Integration Showcase 1959.” The impressive cast of “Integration Showcase” included Ralph Bellamy (then AEA’s president); Robert Preston, star of The Music Man; Geraldine Page, star of Sweet Bird of Youth; as well as many prominent Black performers, including Louis Gossett, Ossie Davis, and Diahann Carroll. The producers of “Integration Showcase” did not “seek a forum to demand the indiscriminate casting of African Americans in roles where audience credibility would be strained,” but “wanted merely to prove that more black actors could and should be cast in roles which are at present denied them arbitrarily.” The producer of the “Integration Showcase,” Windsor Lewis, stated, “the aim is to stimulate the imagination of writers, directors, and producers in every field of the entertainment world down to the level of community and amateur theaters.” [28] O’Neal added, “The point of the show is to show how the Negro actor can be used in ‘other than Negro roles’-without disturbing the artistic intent of the play. In the so-called non-designated role we see no reason why we can’t have a Negro.” [29] The star-studded event was presented to an invited audience of 1,500 actors, directors, agents, producers, and other theatre personnel connected with casting. It had taken two years for Actors’ Equity to assemble all the players in New York City at the same time. The theme expressed in the 1959 Integration Showcase, “We see no reason why we can’t have a Negro,” has echoed in the outcries of the ‘80s and ‘90s and among those who have thrust “non-traditional casting” into the limelight. In a 1992 collection of interviews with actors to determine the effect of non-traditional casting on their lives, one young actor, Mary Lee, translated O’Neal’s goals into the jargon of the ‘90s saying: “We can cut through much p.c. rhetoric in casting if we simply ask of any role: Is race (age, gender, physical ability) germane: if yes, simply cast it so. If no, give all actors an equal opportunity.” [30] While O’Neal maintained that caricatures and stereotypes should always be censured, his denied that there was anything denigrating about comic or servant roles if they were included as a part of American life. On the other hand, when Blacks were presented exclusively in such roles, it distorted their representation and impeded any attempts at integration. Again, Mary Lee’s argument echoes O’Neal’s, but brings his argument into more contemporary conversations: Sometimes the roles are stereotyped as written, sometimes not. Sometimes roles that have depth and dimension are directed as stereotypes. This is especially true for culturally specific roles. When there are more ethnically-specific lead roles out there that command our attention and respect, there will be much more respect for non-white actors in all roles, traditional or not.[31] O’Neal was a man of even temperament, who had experienced the pain of the racial divide, but believed, ideally, in an integrated society and fairness. He fought tirelessly for Black actors to be engaged for roles not racially designated. Conclusion The cultural politics of casting, access, and representation continues in the twenty-first century (most recently in the 2019 volume, Casting a Movement ). In her 2010 study, Passing Strange , Ayanna Thompson pondered the slowness of contemporary theatre to become truly multicultural. Thompson argues that even though directors as early as Orson Welles or Joseph Papp employed color-conscious casting, the mission of countering whiteness through intentional casting against color is still seen as a challenge, and as a new idea. [32] She probes the inconsistencies in contemporary casting practices. Although most regional Shakespeare festivals profess to be multicultural, their actual practices can be divided into four categories: (1) colorblind casting, assigning actors of color according to ability without regard to race; (2) societal casting, assigning actors of color to roles that were originally written for white actors; (3) conceptual casting, assigning actors of color to roles that will enhance the play’s social resonance; (4) cross cultural casting, moving the play’s milieu to a different location or culture. [33] Black theatre artists in twenty-first century America have evolved from a sense of pride, struggle, history, and achievement from those like Hyman and O’Neal who found numerous ways to surmount obstacles set before them. Their resistance to racism and their unrelenting demands for equity in access and representation wrought significant changes in US theatre. Hyman and O’Neal stand as examples of those who led the way with their artistry, integrity, talent, and intelligence bringing honor to the profession. They stories defy the familiar, mainstream narratives of Black artists to illustrate that Black performers could offer layered and complex characters in any setting. Interestingly, Hyman never described the characters he played as “white” characters. He described them as aggressive, frustrated, loving, victimized, etc. He brought his experiences to his characters and wove those experiences into the given circumstances. Similarly, O’Neal remained adamant that performers should not be confined to certain roles based on color. For O’Neal, acting meant revealing the inner worlds of the characters rather than commenting on the circumstances of the performers. Reclaiming O’Neal’s and Hyman’s unique perspectives on the role of the Black performer illuminates an era in US theatre history when Black actors struggled to establish both equity and equality in casting practices. Both men serve as vital links connecting African American trailblazing ancestors of past years when only a select few were able to walk in the corridors of legitimate theatres, to the stars of the present day as they usher in a new era in the American theatre. References [1] The term “legitimate theatre” refers to serious drama sand classical theatre work including classical comedy. It simply indicates a divide, supposedly implying that art and mere entertainment are somehow in separate camps. [2] Loften Mitchell, Voices of the Black Theatre (New Jersey: James T. White, 1975), 181. [3] Sluts . . . slaves . . . servants . . . salt-of-the-earth southern were the stultifying stereotypical s’s. These were the roles available to black actors at the time. Most were written in some white writer’s ersatz pidgin-English version of dialect. When the theatre world would be graced by the illuminating hands of August Wilson, the spoken rhythms of the Black rural poor would be perceived as folk music and take their place beside the lilting Irish brogue of Sean O’Casey and the Welsh inflected rhythms of Dylan Thomas. [4] Roy Newquist, A Special Kind of Magic (New York: Rand MacNally & Co., 1967), 113-114. [5] Equity News (April, 1923), 16. [6] Langston Hughes and Milton Meltzer, Black Magic: A Pictorial History of the Negro in American Entertainment (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1967), 125. [7] Langston Hughes, “The Negro and American Entertainment,” in The American Negro Reference Book, ed. John P. Davis (New York: Educational Heritage, Inc., 1966), 820. [8] Brooks Atkinson, “Mister Johnson,” New York Times Theatre Reviews , 31 March 1956. [9] Robert Coleman. “Mister Johnson is Superbly Acted,” New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews , 1 April 1956. [10] Theatre Arts 15 (June 1956): 16. [11] Theatre , 16. [12] Richard Watts Jr, “Portrait of a Man of Good Will,” New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, 31 March 1956. [13] John Chapman, “Mister Johnson is a Touching Play,” New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, 31 March 1956. [14] John McClain, “A Real Hit? May Well Be,” New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews, 30 March 1956. [15] Walter Kerr, “Mister Johnson,” New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews , 30 March 1956. [16] Gifted Black actresses such as Hilda Simms, Jane White, and Janice Kingslow had suffered brutally stunted careers in which, as light-skinned Black females, they had been considered uncastable in white roles because they looked too much like white. [17] Helen Martin, personal interview in her home 12 June 1996. [18] Loften Mitchell, Voices of the Black Theatre (New Jersey: James T. White, 1975), 181. [19] Mitchell, 181. [20] Mitchell, 181. [21] Equity News (January 1944), 58-60. [22] Equity News (January 1944), 58-60. [23] Equity News (April 1960), 14. [24] Equity News (April 1960), 14. [25] Equity News (June, 1952), 19. [26] Equity News (April 1960), 14. [27] Equity News (April 1960), 14. [28] Windsor Lewis, quoted in “Integration Showcase,” Ebony 14, no.10 (August 1959), 73. [29] Frederick O’Neal, quoted in “Integration Showcase,” 73. [30] Mary Lee, New Traditions (New York: New Traditions,1992), 3. [31] Lee, 3. [32] Ayanna Thompson, Passing Strange (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 99. [33] Thompson, 76. Footnotes About The Author(s) BARON KELLY is a four-time Fulbright Scholar and a Professor in Theatre and Drama at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Currently, he serves on the boards of the Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare and Social Justice Series Editorial Advisory Board, the Harold Pinter Review, Comparative Drama Conference, Stanislavsky Institute, and the American Society for Research’s Executive Committee. In addition, he serves on the Fulbright Review Panel and is a member of the National Theatre Conference. Acting assignments Include Broadway; Royal National Theatre of Great Britain; Stratford Shakespeare Festival of Canada; Edinburgh Theatre Festival. Performances for over 30 of America’s resident theatres including the Oregon Utah, and California Shakespeare Festivals; The Guthrie; Yale Rep; Mark Taper Forum; Old Globe San Diego; Shakespeare Theatre Company, Washington, D.C.; Actors Theatre of Louisville; among others. His teaching of acting has led him to more than a dozen counties on five continents and in 20 American states. Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf ISNN 2376-4236 Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to "Milestones in Black Theatre" Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration. Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Vivian Appler Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 1 Visit Journal Homepage Encounters on Contested Lands: Indigenous Performances of Sovereignty and Nationhood in Québec; Provocative Eloquence: Theater, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum United States Vivian Appler By Published on January 12, 2021 Download Article as PDF Encounters on Contested Lands: Indigenous Performances of Sovereignty and Nationhood in Québec. Julie Burelle. Performance Works, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2019; 232 pp. Provocative Eloquence: Theater, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum United States. Laura L. Mielke. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2019; 296 pp. Issues that surrounded Black and Indigenous sovereignty in the mid-nineteenth century are under scrutiny again as we enter the mid-twenty-first. The summer of 2020 makes this vividly apparent: A global health crisis has exposed disparities of income and access to health care across racial and ethnic lines. The #BlackLivesMatter movement is gaining momentum while an increasingly tyrannical government works to suppress the freedom of speech and right to assemble for those who would peacefully protest anti-Black racism and police brutality. The US Supreme Court has ruled that a 3-million-acre territory in Eastern Oklahoma is, after all, the rightful land of the Muskogee (Creek) people and is therefore exempt from Oklahoma state law. In this context, Julie Burelle’s Encounters on Contested Lands and Laura L. Mielke’s Provocative Eloquence , though different in critical approach and aesthetic content, invite reflection upon legacies of conquest and genocide in the United States and Canada that continue to impede the realization of social justice now. Encounters on Contested Lands: Indigenous Performances of Sovereignty and Nationhood in Québec is an important contribution to scholarship about performance in and of the Americas. Burelle’s performance studies method allows multiple embodied storytelling genres to be read as integral to the narrative clash between the French Québécois de souche (“the white descendants of early settlers from France, who still speak French and understand themselves… as settlers no more, colonized by the British first and, later, by the Anglo-Canadians, and rightfully belonging to the territory of Québec”) and the Indigenous peoples who reside in what is now the province of Québec (6). Burelle articulates her own positionality as French Québécois de souche throughout her criticism of Euro-Canada’s claims to nationhood and territory. Relying on Slavoj Žižek’s concept of “objective violence,” she interprets French Québec’s history of settler colonialism as it pertains to performances surrounding Canada’s Indian Act (1876), and as its damaging social contract persists into the present. Burelle claims, “[r]ace, with whiteness as its ultimate arbiter, is the unstable terrain on which settler-colonial anxieties are performed through a pas de deux between abjection and incorporation” (12). The performance examples she cites demonstrate that French Canadians’ minoritization claims rest upon acts of erasure, ignorance, or consumption of Indigenous presence, resistance, and ancestry. Burelle organizes the book’s intersectional histories around the “Oka Crisis” of 1990, in which the Mohawk people of Kanehsatà:ke defended the destruction of tribal lands by a predominantly white, francophone country club community. Burelle reads this conflict as key to understanding the fluidity of the Québécois de souche’s claims to cultural marginalization, conveniently invoked when contesting Anglo-Canada’s dominance over Québec but obscured when an alliance with Anglo-Canada would preserve French-Canadian claims over Indigenous lands. Burelle begins with an analysis of Alexis Martin’s Invention du chauffage central en Nouvelle-France ( The Invention of Central Heating in New France, 2012-2014), a play that poses paradoxical French Québécois de souche claims of abjection and what Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang refer to as “settler moves to innocence” (169). Burelle historiographically frames Martin’s epic as part of the white settler-colonial legacy of Marc Lescarbot’s 1606 Théâtre de Neptune en la Nouvelle- France. She surmises, “ Invention falls short of its reconciliatory endeavor and echoes in disturbing ways the willful offering of the land” once performed by white actors in redface for Lescarbot’s legendary conquest drama about ‘New France’ (27). Burelle further probes protestations of French-Canadian innocence in Chapter 2, “Les Racines Imaginaires/Mythical Métissages .” Through close readings of films by Euro-Canadians that examine indigeneity, Burelle charts the violence embedded French Québécois de souche affect to what she dubs a “felt Nativeness,” “never problematizing how this desire to possess Nativeness, to absorb it, is… inherently settler-colonial” (58). In this chapter, Burelle explores the many iterations of “ métis, métissé, and métissage ,” terms that broadly refer to racial and ethnic mixing, but each possessing a nuanced interpretation when it comes to various Canadian and Indigenous identities, rendering Métis and métis studies distinct foci of Canadian identities and politics (59). With the films discussed in Chapter 3 – Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (1993, Alanis Obomsawin), Mesnak (2012, Yves Sioui Durand), and the Wapikoni Mobile project – Burelle gives voice to Indigenous filmmakers, at once revealing the objective violence implicit to the history of Canada’s Indian Act and affirming authentic representations of Indigenous culture. Chapter 4, “Endurance/Enduring Performance,” engages Indigenous women’s performances that articulate gender-based violence as an irrefutable component of Canada’s genocidal legacy. La Marche Amun (2010), conceived and organized by Michèle Taïna and Viviane Michel, was “led by a group of Innu women to demand an end to the gendered discrimination contained in the Indian Act” (21). This processional performance, situated along a “rural highway” in 2010, eerily reflected the concurrent murders of Indigenous women along Canada’s Highway 16, most of which remain under-investigated and unsolved (125). Burelle’s analysis of the endurance-beading performance, Indian Act (1999-2002), organized by Nadia Myre (Anishinaabe) for which she and 250 participants of European and Indigenous descent covered an annotated copy of the Indian Act with intricate beadwork. The final piece, many pages of which are unfinished , suggests that much work remains to be done in the ongoing processes of reconciliation and repatriation among the peoples who enact Canada’s “ colonial present tense and tense colonial present ” (4). North American genocidal legacies come into equally sharp focus in Laura Mielke’s Provocative Eloquence: Theater, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum United States , a timely book that reframes US oratory traditions as enmeshed with abolitionism and infused with violence. Mielke considers speech acts of all kinds as she interrogates the connection between embodied action and intentional utterance. She draws from a rich array of theatrical, dramatic, oratory, legislative, and print narratives to craft a meticulous case for the power of words to incite change. Theatre, theatricality and drama inform each portion of her argument that “the antislavery speech readily drew upon theatrical forms and provocations of antislavery speech made their way back to the stage” (24). Mielke’s method is “interperformative and intertextual” (21). She considers dramatic texts and performatic contexts for each oratorical figure as she disrupts popular understandings of familiar figures from the political, melodramatic, and Shakespearean stages of the mid-nineteenth century (21). This is perhaps most evident in Chapter 1, “Edwin Forrest and Heroic Oratory.” In her analysis of Forrest’s 1838 Independence Day Oration , Mielke illustrates Forrest’s political speech as having been understood not just for its political content and delivery style, but also for its Roachian “afterglow” caused by Forrest’s embodiment of his own ideas. For audiences, memories of the actor’s famous “heroic” stage roles such as the slave rebellion leader Spartacus (1831) may have blended with the words of the speech, perhaps lending Forrest a more abolitionist tone than words alone would have conveyed (53). Mielke’s notion of “dramatic suasion” is most clearly defined in a chapter dedicated to the dramatic readings of William Wells Brown and Mary Webb. She argues that “[d]ramatic suasion, as developed by Webb and Wells Brown…, transferred the rhetoric at the heart of Garrisonian abolitionism into a genre… associated with rebellious and retributive violence and into a performative mode” (82). As enacted by the free Black bodies of Webb and Wells Brown, abolitionist narratives shifted the national conversation in the mid-nineteenth century from the implicitly anti-abolitionist question of what the US would do with a population of free Black people, to “the real question… ‘what to do with the masters’” (82). While political histories pin Mielke’s argument in chronological sequence, the event that anchors her thesis most evocatively is the caning of Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner on the US Congress floor by South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks in 1856. In Chapter 3, Mielke compares the event with the tableau, “Southern Chivalry – Argument versus Club’s” by John L. Magee (1856) and then considers three theatrical adaptations of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred; A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp in light of increasingly brutal resistance to the abolitionist movement. As she teases out the violent undercurrents of melodramatic forms such as the sensation scene and blackface minstrelsy, attuned to the physical violence threatened and represented onstage in all three productions, Mielke infers, “[i]t was the fear of antislavery speech’s incitement of forcible resistance that led to a very different manifestation of provocative eloquence: the vicious suppression of eloquence by resistant auditors” (84). Mielke artfully unpacks Portia’s famous “Quality of Mercy” monologue for its rhetorical threat of violence, used to alternately suppress or incite violence that in turn either perpetuated the practice of slavery or resisted it. Mielke’s analysis of Portia’s speech, and its numerous deployments in the antebellum era, helps the reader to understand the US as it is currently embroiled in an unfinished history of racial violence that simmers in words and inevitably manifests as physical brutality. Re-reading this book amidst the context of the #BlackLivesMatter movement during the summer of 2020, I was brought to consider the ways that Mielke’s oratorical subjects have themselves become cultural and rhetorical touchpoints in our ongoing struggles towards social justice. By examining antislavery texts, Mielke reveals the violence that haunts even the most pacifist of entreaties. Her choice to conclude with abolitionist John Brown’s execution and the sway it held for actor John Wilkes Booth towards violently anti-abolitionist ends suggests that the question of whether or not violent action is necessary to dismantle systems of racism and oppression in the US is yet to be settled. Read together, these books deepen our grasp of the violence in which hegemonic North American concepts of citizenship, sovereignty, and suffrage are entrenched. Objective violence embedded in settler-colonial legislation compounded with the implied and enacted violence surrounding abolitionist speech echo across the continent while the struggle for social justice endures. References Footnotes About The Author(s) VIVIAN APPLER College of Charleston Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue "Ya Got Trouble, My Friend, Right Here": Romanticizing Grifters in American Musical Theatre Troubled Collaboration: Belasco, the Fiskes, and the Society Playwright, Mrs. Burton Harrison Unhappy is the Land that Needs a Hero: The Mark of the Marketplace in Suzan-Lori Parks's Father Comes Home from the Wars, Parts 1-3 Silence, Gesture, and Deaf Identity in Deaf West Theatre's Spring Awakening Contemporary Women Stage Directors: Conversations on Craft. Paulette Marty. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2019; Pp. 292 + viii. Ensemble-Made Chicago: A Guide To Devised Theater. Chloe Johnson and Coya Paz Brownrigg. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2019. Pp. 202. Twenty-First Century American Playwrights. Christopher Bigsby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018; Pp. 228. Encounters on Contested Lands: Indigenous Performances of Sovereignty and Nationhood in Québec; Provocative Eloquence: Theater, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum United States Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Shane Strawbridge Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 1 Visit Journal Homepage Twenty-First Century American Playwrights. Christopher Bigsby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018; Pp. 228. Shane Strawbridge By Published on January 11, 2021 Download Article as PDF Twenty-First Century American Playwrights. Christopher Bigsby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018; Pp. 228. In 1982, Christopher Bigsby penned A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama. What was originally planned as a single volume expanded to three, with volume 2 being released in 1984 and Volume 3 in 1985. Although Bigsby, a literary analyst and novelist with more than 50 books to his credit, hails from Britain, he is drawn to American playwrights because of their “stylistic inventiveness…sexual directness…[and] characters ranged across the social spectrum in a way that for long, and for the most part, had not been true of the English theatre” (1). This admiration brought Bigsby’s research across the millennium line to give us his latest offering Twenty-First Century American Playwrights . What Bigsby provides is an in-depth survey of nine writers who entered the American theatre landscape during the past twenty years, including chapters on Annie Baker, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, Katori Hall, Amy Herzog, Tracy Letts, David Lindsay-Abaire, Lynn Nottage, Sarah Ruhl, and Naomi Wallace. While these playwrights vary in the manner they work and styles of creative output, what places them together in this volume “is the sense that theatre has a unique ability to engage with audiences in search of some insight into the way we live…to witness how words become manifest, how artifice can, at its best, be the midwife of truth” (5). This explanation, however vague, does little to provide a concrete rubric for why these dramatists were included over others. Yet productively, although most of the playwrights included in this collection have had productions on Broadway, Bigsby eschews the misguided notion that American theatre means only Broadway with his inclusion of several writers more well-known in universities, regional theatres, and Off-Broadway—providing a refreshing change from many playwright surveys. Bigsby’s recent monograph presents a combination of playwright biography, oeuvre studies, philosophies, working methods, and dramaturgical analysis. Detailed and information-rich, his discussions can be experienced like episodes in a documentary series, gently guiding audiences through the life and catalog of these nine playwrights, proving it an accessible read for academics and enthusiasts, alike. The volume is organized so that each playwright gets their own chapter, any of which could be read independently from the rest of the text for artists and scholars wishing to do a deep dive on a single playwright. Readers do not need to be familiar with each playwright’s work to follow Bigsby’s scholarship, as he takes time to give a thorough description of each play while also unearthing the themes, styles, and methods favored by each writer. The tell-tale marks of each dramatist is dissected, including, for example: Annie Baker’s penchant for pauses (“it’s not actually silence I’m after so much as the things that we do when we’re not talking” (19)); Naomi Wallace’s political narratives (“politics and art can never be divided…that’s terribly exciting” (194)); Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s “radically different” oeuvre (“each of my projects are in part a rejection of or violent departure from a previous project” (35)); Katori Hall’s examination of diverse Black experiences (“everybody is influenced by who they are and unfortunately how other people perceive them” (68)); and Lynn Nottage’s unearthing of “memoir-less” narratives that implicate audiences (“I think that provocations is when you enter in the space and everything you believe in is challenged” (165)). In allowing the playwrights to speak for themselves, Bigsby opens the door to revealing the dramatists’ relationships to the canon. This proves useful to both students and scholars searching for context in placing the latest generation of American writers against the dominant voices of the 20th century. He analyzes many of their plays against titans of not only the American theatre, but also the world’s stage. He draws parallels between Baker’s characters in The Aliens to the vaudevillian clowns of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and the “characters on pause” from Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, for instance . Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County gets read against Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for its ability to “get through the skin and muscle, down to the bone and the marrow” of familial secrets (109). David Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole is compared to O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, both plays having to “recycle their sense of lost purpose within the constraints of what should have been a place of safety” (132). Yet the text is more than an exercise in comparing and contrasting work with what came before, and 20th century models; Bigsby also considers how these works navigate contemporary socio-political issues and historical contexts on both macro and micro levels. Thus he evokes Amy Herzog’s uncomfortable family history as inspiration for After the Revolution (77-78), Sarah Ruhl being inspired to write The Clean House after overhearing a conversation at a cocktail party in which a doctor claimed they “didn’t go to medical school to clean house” (178), and Lynn Nottage’s use of the 2008 financial crisis and Occupy Wall Street as the inspiration for Sweat (164). If there are any flaws to the volume, they mostly lie with the publishers themselves. There are proofreading errors throughout — including calling Albee’s work Whose [sic] Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, referencing the Vermont Senator Bernie Saunders [sic], and an indecision about whether or not there is a second hyphen in “twenty-first century.” These detract from an otherwise engaging and solid read. Bigsby himself is not above question, however. Although he doesn’t say so directly, Bigsby gives the impression that his definition of “playwright” rejects those who write for the musical theatre, a disappointing exclusion. His introduction gives credit to the “financially no less than critically rewarding” plays—sorry, musicals—of Lin-Manuel Miranda, for instance, but still Bigsby denies him a chapter’s sustained discussion. (And because Miranda is denied, we are less likely to question the omission of other critically, commercially and culturally successful musical theatre writers). Bigsby addresses this line of critique in a way, stating that “to name some of [the excluded writers] would invite complaints of further omissions” (2). While none of his volumes to date have examined musical theater writers with his impressive, engaging lens, one can hope that he is deliberately keeping a few aces hidden up his sleeve that will serve as the basis for the inevitable—and welcome—volumes yet to come. References Footnotes About The Author(s) SHANE STRAWBRIDGE Texas Tech 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 "Ya Got Trouble, My Friend, Right Here": Romanticizing Grifters in American Musical Theatre Troubled Collaboration: Belasco, the Fiskes, and the Society Playwright, Mrs. Burton Harrison Unhappy is the Land that Needs a Hero: The Mark of the Marketplace in Suzan-Lori Parks's Father Comes Home from the Wars, Parts 1-3 Silence, Gesture, and Deaf Identity in Deaf West Theatre's Spring Awakening Contemporary Women Stage Directors: Conversations on Craft. Paulette Marty. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2019; Pp. 292 + viii. Ensemble-Made Chicago: A Guide To Devised Theater. Chloe Johnson and Coya Paz Brownrigg. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2019. Pp. 202. Twenty-First Century American Playwrights. Christopher Bigsby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018; Pp. 228. Encounters on Contested Lands and Provocative Eloquence Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Jaclyn I. Pryor Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 1 Visit Journal Homepage Ensemble-Made Chicago: A Guide To Devised Theater. Chloe Johnson and Coya Paz Brownrigg. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2019. Pp. 202. Jaclyn I. Pryor By Published on January 11, 2021 Download Article as PDF Ensemble-Made Chicago: A Guide To Devised Theater. Chloe Johnson and Coya Paz Brownrigg. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2019. Pp. 202. Chloe Johnson and Coya Paz Brownrigg’s Ensemble-Made: A Guide to Devised Theater (2019) is a valuable resource for theater educators and practitioners, particularly those who wish to deepen their knowledge of the craft variously known as devised theater, ensemble-based performance, and collective creation. Each short chapter of the book focuses on a distinct Chicago-based theater company (15 in total)—which range from large, nationally-renowned companies such as Lookingglass Theatre and The Second City to smaller, community-based collectives. Each chapter includes a brief history of the company alongside descriptions of games and exercises emblematic of their process and pedagogy. The co-written book also includes an Introduction which places the field of devising in its larger cultural and historical context, as well as a Time Line of the field and List of Exercises By Type, which function as the book’s conclusion. The authors’ methodologies are informed by their own relationship to devised theater in Chicago: Johnson is an ensemble member of the Neo-Futurists and Paz Brownrigg is the Artistic Director of Free Street Theater and cofounder of Teatro Luna—both of which are featured in the book. In this regard, they write as scholars and practitioners of devised theater but also as colleague-critics within the expansive but close-knit network of the Chicago theater community. (Colleague-criticism is a term developed by Paul Bonin-Rodriguez, Jill Dolan and me to describe the queer and feminist practice of writing criticism from a place of love, respect and mutual aid, as articulated in Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies in 2009.) As Ensemble-Made Chicago’s introduction makes clear, Chicago theater has deep roots in ensemble-based creation methods, and, in turn, the field of devising writ large has a great debt to pay in this neighborhood-based, immigrant-rich town that propagated the craft of ensemble-based theater and performance. Johnson and Paz Brownrigg effectively detail how this history can be traced to the late 19th century emergence of the field of modern social work in the city of Chicago—which was made possible, in large part, through the establishment of the Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr Hull House on Chicago’s West Side in 1889. The Hull House was an early settlement house focused on direct services for new Americans; as the authors duly note, “very early on, Jane Addams discovered the profound effect theater had on the children who attended” (xii). The Hull House Players, as they came to be known, were part of the contemporaneously burgeoning Little Theatre Movement in the U.S. (1912-1925) which distinguished itself by its break from commercial theatre and its focus on theatre as civic good. Guided by the pivotal contributions of sociologist Neva Boyd and social worker Viola Spolin—who brought their respective skills and interests in theatre as a catalyst for play, collaboration, and issue-driven exploration to the Hull House—the authors demonstrate how the Hull House paved the way for this contemporary community of devised theatre makers to thrive. Through both its introduction as well as its body chapters, Ensemble-Made also makes a compelling case for considering devised theatre’s relationship not only to social work and arts education, as previously noted, but also to the history and methods of physical theatre. Although not always explicitly cited, many of the games and exercises featured in the book bear obvious ties not only to the pedagogy of Boyd and Spolin (and Spolin’s son, Paul Sills, who founded Second City), but also to the pedagogy of 20th century French theatre maker and educator Jacques Lecoq who developed a codified system of actor training grounded in embodiment. Featured companies, such as 500 Clown, Albany Park Theater Project, Every house has a door, and Walkabout Theater, among others, draw from physical theatre games and exercises in their creation process, resulting in work that resembles experimental performance as much as it does community-based theater. What also becomes clear, as the reader moves their way through the book, is the fact that the Chicago devised theater community is hardly confined by its midwestern geography. Dell’ Arte International (Blue Lake, CA), Third Rail Projects (Brooklyn, NY), Double Edge Theatre (Ashfield, MA), Sojourn Theatre (Portland, OR), and Pilobolus Dance (Hanover, NH and Washington, CT) all receive honorable mentions in descriptions of exercises. In other words, the artists who comprise Johnson and Paz Brownrigg’s case studies cite not only one another but also those companies from around the country (and world) whose creation methods have circulated through a vast and interlocking network of theater educators and practitioners. In this regard, Ensemble-Made tacitly provides a compelling genealogy of contemporary performance traditions, making evident the ways in which “something as simple as a warm-up has a history” (xi), and revealing the complex ways in which embodied practices circulate across changing times, places and social contexts. While Ensemble-Made ’s explicit focus is more practice than theory, the authors productively place their book in conversation with the field of performance studies—specifically, Diana Taylor’s foundational The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003). Taylor’s work is useful to Johnson and Paz Brownrigg’s project because it provides them with a key rationale: citing Taylor, Johnson and Paz Brownrigg situate ensemble-based performance as a “repertoire event.” They elaborate, “it lives in performance and process, not necessarily in text” (xi). Because the creation process for devised theater breaks from traditional theater methods in which “the script” precedes the rehearsal process (and, relatedly, often from clearly delineated roles such as “playwright,” “director,” “performer,” and “audience”), both the devised theater event as well as the process of making the event do not always leave a clear archive for the historian to later interpret. As the authors succinctly put it, “all of [the companies under consideration] have developed a way of creating performance that is predicated on collective, rather than individual, agency. Their work starts in a room, rather than on a page, building a show bit by bit, together” (x). As such, Ensemble-Made Chicago is all the more indispensable: like the field of devising itself, it privileges process over product, while also serving as an accessible guidebook for the history, methods and practices of devised theater—making it a volume to be used in the present and future of the field. References Footnotes About The Author(s) JACLYN I. PRYOR Pennsylvania State University Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue "Ya Got Trouble, My Friend, Right Here": Romanticizing Grifters in American Musical Theatre Troubled Collaboration: Belasco, the Fiskes, and the Society Playwright, Mrs. Burton Harrison Unhappy is the Land that Needs a Hero: The Mark of the Marketplace in Suzan-Lori Parks's Father Comes Home from the Wars, Parts 1-3 Silence, Gesture, and Deaf Identity in Deaf West Theatre's Spring Awakening Contemporary Women Stage Directors: Conversations on Craft. Paulette Marty. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2019; Pp. 292 + viii. Ensemble-Made Chicago: A Guide To Devised Theater. Chloe Johnson and Coya Paz Brownrigg. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2019. Pp. 202. Twenty-First Century American Playwrights. Christopher Bigsby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018; Pp. 228. Encounters on Contested Lands and Provocative Eloquence Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Dohyun Gracia Shin Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 1 Visit Journal Homepage Contemporary Women Stage Directors: Conversations on Craft. Paulette Marty. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2019; Pp. 292 + viii. Dohyun Gracia Shin By Published on January 11, 2021 Download Article as PDF Contemporary Women Stage Directors: Conversations on Craft. Paulette Marty. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2019; Pp. 292 + viii. Contemporary Women Stage Directors: Conversations on Craft presents an ambitious compilation of interviews with twenty-seven contemporary women stage directors, while archiving and reflecting on relatively underrepresented women stage directors in the US and the UK. Tracing the past two decades, Marty notes that few published books focus on female stage directors. She points to two volumes by Anne Fliotsos and Wendy Vierow as rare examples. Marty distinguishes her project by focusing on mid-career women stage directors—who she argues are not featured enough by Fliotsos and Vierow. This volume provides readers the rare chance to hear disparate, highly-active women directors’ reflecting in their own words about their experiences, insights, styles, labors, and vision. Based on her experience working both as a theatre researcher and practitioner (dramaturg/director), Marty also provides a window on the contemporary theatre industry, opening far beyond how gender intersects with artistic lives. What makes this book unique in structure is that Marty directs, in effect, her book. Interview-based books deploying question-and-answer structures often feature a handful of interviewees in a chapter or section. Instead, she divides chapters, as if splitting beats, and places quotes and excerpts from her interviewees in each chapter according to its theme, as if casting speakers in dynamic dialogue. She aligns thematic chapters like scenes that build into a larger narrative: this journey of women directors pursuing their careers begins with incubating projects and concludes with each director’s own vision of today’s theatre. Although the book’s organizational structure does not provide a clear, holistic profile of each individual director, as Marty acknowledges in the introduction (9), this thematic approach instead distinctly guides readers to respect a director’s role and labor. Marty also provides a series of inspiring models, amplifying the influence of women directors working at an array of theatre venues in the US and UK. In the first two chapters, Marty sheds light on the directors’ incubating process. Chapter 1 opens by laying out how individual directors choose a particular piece of work. For example, Lear deBessonet, the founding director of the Public Theater’s Public Works project, explains that she stages classics since “no one is the authority” (24) which thereby opens up collective imagination. Marty also considers how varied directors and artistic directors actually scaffold their work: finding their niche, planning seasons, choosing collaborators, and mounting their plays in a theater. Chapter 2 demonstrates her subjects’ labor of engaging with scripts and ideas prior to rehearsals. She emphasizes each director’s signature style of analyzing the play, for instance. Further, she expands our grasp of the directorial role by examining how her subjects collaborate with playwrights, play multiple roles besides that of a director, prepare for rehearsals, and communicate with audiences. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on how these directors shape performances, starting from conceptualization of the visual and acoustic, and then moving into the rehearsal room, and, ultimately, the stage. Chapter 3 highlights how the chosen directors envision theatrical worlds visually and acoustically, collaborating with designers. Here, Marty approaches relationships between directing and designing theatre horizontally. Inspired by her subjects, she analyzes spectacle and sound beyond servers of directorial messages, conveying a comprehensive picture of the theatrical process to readers. In Rachel Chavkin’s words, it is a director’s process of “discovering the world with designers and actors” (99).True to the volume’s subtitle, Chapter 4 presents a “conversation on craft,” guided by these leading directors’ invaluable experiences and advice on the rehearsal process. Using quotes, Marty covers the practical process of rehearsal: casting actors, setting the tone for rehearsals, empowering actors, shaping the process, and using research in rehearsals. For instance, Maria Aberg, who is known for “her innovative, feminist productions of Shakespeare and other classics at the Royal Shakespeare Company” (2), introduces points she considers in the casting process when she changes the gender of a character. Readers will find many gems and tips. In the final chapters, Contemporary Women Stage Directors focuses on how each of these experienced directors develop their careers and navigate the US and UK theatre scenes. Chapter 5 considers how the directors sustain their projects, dealing with concerns such as “financial security, community, quality of life, and relationships” (159). Pursuing the theme of work-life balance, Marty places quotes from Leah Gardiner, Kimberly Senior, and Lucy Kerbel together to cover issues such as motherhood, labor and pressure. In particular, Kerbel explains that “the loop of visibility” (190) exposes directors to critics’ attention which sustains their projects. She elaborates on gendered inequality in the field by mentioning how maternity leave easily drops women directors from that loop. If Chapter 5 extensively covers their individual lives and career arcs, Chapter 6 specifically focuses on their diverse experience with systemic challenges tied to their gender, racial and/or ethnic identities in the theatre industry. The 6th chapter analyzes obstacles and disparities in the field through her array of case studies, integrating an intersectional perspective. For instance. Leah Gardiner, Paulette Randall, and KJ Sanchez tell their stories of experiencing misogyny and racism in the field. Importantly, Marty pays attention to how these women directors navigate systemic obstacles. For example, Roxana Silbert and Nadia Fall emphasize that diversity opens up more diversity and brings an alternative gaze to the field, which is dominated by white male directors. Marty concludes her book with the directors’ insight on theatre today and their expectations as working professionals. In the conclusion, Marty summarizes her interview research in two categories: what she did not find and what she did. What is notable here is her picture of a director as a relationship builder. Marty explains that “the director’s role is to build and facilitate relationships , specifically (1) between a play and an audience and (2) among members of the collaborative team” (288). Likewise, Marty, as the director of this book, builds a relationship between these women directors and her contemporary readers. She creates a bridge for these mid-stream women directors —who struggle for their comparatively underrepresented stories and insights to be heard— bringing their voices and methods as accomplished practitioners to readers, both artists and scholars. By providing many substantial examples of brilliant, motivating women stage directors from the US and UK in the early 21st century, this significant study will benefit theatre researchers and our future generation of women (and other) theater directors, artistic directors and, one hopes, producers. References Footnotes About The Author(s) DOHYUN GRACIA SHIN The Graduate Center, CUNY Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue "Ya Got Trouble, My Friend, Right Here": Romanticizing Grifters in American Musical Theatre Troubled Collaboration: Belasco, the Fiskes, and the Society Playwright, Mrs. Burton Harrison Unhappy is the Land that Needs a Hero: The Mark of the Marketplace in Suzan-Lori Parks's Father Comes Home from the Wars, Parts 1-3 Silence, Gesture, and Deaf Identity in Deaf West Theatre's Spring Awakening Contemporary Women Stage Directors: Conversations on Craft. Paulette Marty. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2019; Pp. 292 + viii. Ensemble-Made Chicago: A Guide To Devised Theater. Chloe Johnson and Coya Paz Brownrigg. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2019. Pp. 202 Twenty-First Century American Playwrights. Christopher Bigsby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018; Pp. 228. Encounters on Contested Lands and Provocative Eloquence Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Russell Stone Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 1 Visit Journal Homepage “The Spirit of the Thing is All”: The Federal Theatre’s Staging of Medieval Drama in the Los Angeles Religious Community Russell Stone By Published on November 24, 2022 Download Article as PDF As the Federal Theatre Project fell under the scrutiny of Congressional investigations in its final months, National Director Hallie Flanagan relied on the significant show of public support from America’s religious communities to demonstrate the value of the Project in locally meaningful terms. When Flanagan was allowed to testify before the House Special Committee on Un-American Activities in December 1938, she cited nearly a hundred religious organizations of various faiths that had pledged their appreciation for the Federal Theatre. When asked if the Project had produced any plays that were “antireligious in nature,” she responded that the Federal Theatre had staged more religious plays than any group in the country, including church performances for Christmas programming in Los Angeles, Chicago, and other cities. [1] She even asserted that although the Federal Theatre’s primary purpose was to entertain its audience, it also offered plays that “must also and can also often teach” and are capable of “inculcat[ing] religious principles.” [2] That last point had proven especially effective in winning over the country’s religious communities, whose assurances of the Federal Theatre’s value for their congregations were sent to Flanagan’s office, her regional bureaus, and the Un-American Activities committee itself. In the weeks and months ahead, as the House Subcommittee on Appropriations, chaired by Representative Clifton Woodrum (D-VA), began its own investigation to decide funding of the federal arts programs, members arguing to maintain or to defund the Federal Theatre agreed that it had won impressive support among the religious community. This support was founded less on the artistic merits of producing, among their other offerings, obscure medieval drama—an argument that both Representatives and WPA Director Colonel F.C. Harrington made during the debate—than on the spiritual impact of the plays that religious leaders so valued for their congregations. [3] The extent of this support attested, too, to Flanagan’s efforts since the previous year to engage the religious community in the Federal Theatre across its several regional offices. In response to Flanagan’s call for the Federal Theatre to stage drama within the community via partnerships with churches, schools, and clubs, one of her most prolific directors was Gareth Hughes, who had been assigned to lead a religious unit when the Los Angeles Project opened in December 1935. [4] A Welsh-born, promising stage actor in New York in the 1910s, a silent film star in the following decade, and an itinerant theatre player after the advent of the talkies, he had largely disappeared from the public eye before the Federal Theatre came to Los Angeles. In the Project headquarters, he spoke to newspaper reporters of the fulfillment that he found in training and collaborating with younger actors. The press wrote of his ability to recite any line of Shakespeare, his attention to his younger colleagues trying their hand at historical drama, and “his kindness that is not sentimental, his love for the theatre, [and] his enthusiasm that has awakened and stimulated his actors.” [5] Over the next three years, these qualities would allow Hughes to become an effective advocate for Flanagan’s vision of bringing the Project into public arenas. Creating a traveling unit that brought medieval and early modern drama to community venues, Hughes adapted religious plays as pieces to be acted in churches as an extension of, and complement to, the liturgy. [6] He founded his two signature plays for the Los Angeles Project, The Nativity and Everyman , on engagement with church congregations as audience-participants, humanizing the play’s characters to foster empathy with this audience, and emphasizing the Christian tenets imbedded in the plays. [7] Through these strategies, Hughes established a production model of staging the plays within Los Angeles churches that fulfilled his personal agenda for the Project, responded to Flanagan’s call for regional offices to offer performances in collaboration with their local religious communities, and provided a line of defense against the Federal Theatre’s detractors, who perpetuated the groundless rumors that the Project had been infiltrated by Communists and was thus a government-funded, subversive enterprise. Rejecting these rumors, Hughes promoted it as a vehicle for realizing Flanagan’s vision among the smallest of audiences, especially within schools and churches. In the latter, his handling of The Nativity and Everyman as liturgical performances convinced the Los Angeles religious community that the Federal Theatre might be welcomed as a partner not merely for providing entertainment but even for augmenting the act of worship. Neighborhood by neighborhood, in its second largest market, his success in sacred venues won local support for the Project and in turn provided Flanagan with a valid, but ultimately futile, argument for the religious value of the Project in the escalating national debate over funding the Federal Theatre. Establishing an Audience for Religious Drama in Los Angeles Flanagan’s success in identifying an audience for the Federal Theatre, and Hughes’s particular success in appealing to the religious community in Los Angeles, relied on an ongoing reconsideration of staging Project plays. It has been well documented that the Federal Theatre’s chief audiences were those who had not previously seen live drama, and perhaps could not have afforded to do so, and those whose primary entertainment was provided by cinemas and radio programming. [8] By mid-1937, the Project had successfully drawn these working class audiences to its performances. In Los Angeles, the second largest Federal Theatre market behind New York, over a quarter of those attending Project performances self-identified as trade or office workers. [9] According to audience surveys, a spring run of The Merchant of Venice at the Hollywood Playhouse (featuring Hughes as Shylock) was also seen by a number of teachers, students, and housewives. [10] Soon thereafter, however, Flanagan announced her intention to reverse the model of attracting audiences to commercial houses rented by the Federal Theatre; rather, she wanted also to bring the Federal Theatre to the community and stage productions within public venues. Having founded the Project on an assurance of quality of plays,talent and the promise of live drama that would be at once entertaining, artistic, didactic, and capable of imparting an appreciation for the theatre among audiences unaccustomed to it, Flanagan wrote to her regional directors that in 1938 the Federal Theatre would have an opportunity for “growing up.” [11] She first called for an expansion of the Project beyond the commercial houses that it rented to host its productions and beyond urban areas into both rural and communal spaces, especially those that served the poor. By September 1937, the Federal Theatre had staged over 37,000 shows in parks, hospitals, schools, Civilian Conservation Corps camps for workers on relief, and public and private clubs across the country. Soon after, Flanagan began to consider how to establish permanent touring groups to stage productions in smaller cities and towns. [12] A key stakeholder in this expansion beyond commercial houses would be the religious community, who acknowledged the reciprocal benefits of staging religious drama and extensive Christmas programming that would bring live drama to a wider audience but would win the Project public support in turn. While her regional directors received suggestions for pieces of broad appeal, Flanagan’s more ambitious vision was to stage in select cities the late medieval mystery cycles, and the civic pageants staged to enact biblical history from the Creation to the Ascension. Frustrated at the scant amount of productions in the holiday season of 1936, she remarked to her regional directors that religious drama would offer the Project some defense against the “irate clergymen [who] storm into the office and accuse me of being anti-Christ.” [13] Then, into fall 1937, she encouraged them again to bring the holidays “into the community” by cooperating with local choirs and singing groups, churches, schools, orphanages, and homes for the elderly, broadcasting Christmas productions over the radio, and staging them at public venues. [14] In adopting this model, Federal Theatre officials had an extensive catalog of religious plays from which to choose. The Bureau of Research and Publication was charged with researching possible plays for production, and as they compiled lists of Greek and Roman, British, European, and American plays before and since 1895, staff members solicited recommendations from both Christian and Jewish organizations. [15] Religious leaders had assisted in local planning for the Project since its inception. As for Christmas programming, the Bureau published annotated lists of their suggested medieval and early modern religious plays. Among these pieces, the texts of miracle and mystery plays had only been made widely available in modern critical editions in the previous fifty years or so, and they had only been performed for modern audiences for just over thirty. It would be another two decades before scholarship into the plays began in earnest, and American theatre professionals were largely ignorant of medieval pieces that had not been rendered into modern English for stage performance. [16] Nor, however, were they subject to the controversies that had hindered productions of the mystery and morality plays among the previous generation, owing especially to the restrictions on the portrayal of God well into the twentieth century. [17] For example, in 1901, the English actor William Poel was able to stage the first modern production of Everyman , because it was largely unknown to censors in the Lord Chamberlains’ Office, which still enforced sixteenth-century laws against portraying the deity and “confining the limitless and potent God to the body of an actor, to his mortal gestures and mimicry.” [18] One of Poel’s actor-managers then brought the production to New York, where its presentation of religious material was legally permitted but still controversial for an audience largely ignorant of medieval drama. [19] Nonetheless, Everyman toured across eastern and midwestern cities for two years, suggesting an interest among American audiences that would support the production of similar plays in subsequent years. [20] The lack of formal censorship of religious material in the American theatre gradually allowed directors to more freely explore mystery and morality plays, which became increasingly popular through the 1910s as academic pieces suitable for both lectures and performances informed by the antiquarian sensibilities of Poel and his successors. [21] In the 1920s and 1930s, the reception of medieval drama diverged on either side of the Atlantic. In England, the Religious Drama Society, guided by a principle of “solemnity, simplicity, and sincerity,” performed biblical-themed pieces in churches and schools, and in the former they were allowed to portray divine characters, opened with prayers for the congregation, and anonymized their casts of players, all techniques that Hughes employed in Los Angeles. [22] In America,however, university campuses became popular venues for outdoor productions devoid of such liturgical elements. [23] This model evoked the origins of medieval drama as a public art to be staged within the community rather than on the professional stage, but it did not allow for the spiritual reflection encouraged by the Religious Drama Society in their church performances. [24] A memo circulating from the Federal Theatre’s Bureau of Research and Publication through Project offices recognized, however, that the primary challenge in staging these plays remained their inaccessibility. It encouraged directors that: Carefully studied scripts could be prepared, with business written in to interpret the characters, the lines and the action, with judicious cuttings and rearrangements of scenes, and even (though most rarely) with some word substitutions for obsolete or slang words. . . . Unlike the garbled actors’ versions of some of the plays, now in existence, the prepared scripts would give the playwright a production nearer to the original text; and the play itself would seem better on the stage than in the reading room of the library. Along with the revised play, suggestions could be made for the simplest kind of production that would allow the director to concentrate entirely upon the nature of the play.[25] To further encourage the performance of these plays, the Bureau issued a separate report on the universal appeal of their characters and themes. The authors noted, for example, that Herod in The Nativity was a particularly attractive character, long played as a boisterous hypocrite who rants and raves about his own kingly authority being usurped by the Christ child before he is dragged off to Hell. The Deluge , a comedic narrative of Noah and his wife, “should be rollicking and perhaps burlesqued a little . . . [and was] exceedingly interesting as a humanization of a Biblical story.” [26] Everyman had a certain thematic appeal (“the troubled spirit of man and the trials and tribulations common to most of us”) and that, given its potential to evoke reflection and pathos among the audience, was likewise ideal for the holiday season. [27] These observations suggest a concern for making the characters relatable and appealing to the audience through the allegorical narrative of human life from a state of sin to one of grace that is especially apparent in the morality plays. [28] Robert S. Sturges has argued that these plays served as “mediators between theater and religion,” in that they exhorted the audience to adhere to a virtuous, faith-based lifestyle, in contrast to the various representations onstage of villainous and transgressive behavior. [29] The didactic aspects of the plays have lent them a certain timelessness, as have the characters who populate them. [30] Although the presentation of Christ as both human and God and the “ultimately imitable” figure is central to the cycles, through the mix of comedic (e.g., Noah and Joseph) and bombastic (e.g., Herod) characters, the plays successfully mingle “sacred and profane” themes and figures, and humanize their narratives by emphasizing the traits and emotions of their large casts of characters. [31] Who the audience for the plays might be, however, took time for Project administrators to figure out. As the second largest Federal Theatre branch office after New York, both in terms of staffing and potential theatre-goers, Los Angeles was an ideal city in which to establish community partnerships and to stage pre-modern drama. Enjoying a uniquely deep pool of talent once employed in the film industry, the Los Angeles Project experimented with a wide range of genres and venues. During its first two years, it was largely distinguished by its success in drawing audiences back to the long-shuttered commercial houses rented by local administrators in Hollywood and downtown. [32] Staging medieval and early modern drama was initially left to academic-minded, veteran actors (including Hughes) through “Project 6,” a cooperative venture with the University of Southern California to stage pieces by Molière, the Jacobean duo Beaumont and Fletcher, and Shakespeare on campus in the spring of 1936. [33] Within a year, the Los Angeles Project was regularly able to sell out its five commercial houses, and whereas the productions at USC were staged for free for students and faculty, admission was charged for the shows in Hollywood and downtown, and revenue was allocated for paying rent for the theatres there. [34] When Los Angeles administrators first assigned Hughes to produce medieval religious drama during Christmas week of 1936, they selected the Mayan, one of these downtown houses that they had revitalized. Leading a hybrid classical and religious drama troupe, Hughes himself adapted from the York, Coventry, Chester, and Wakefield cycles two pieces, The Nativity and The Deluge . He also modernized a mumming play entitled St George and the Dragon and selected the music to accompany each of the plays. In the playbill, Hughes explained that he had followed the model of Tudor scribes who sought to reinvigorate Biblical plays written three centuries before their time and six centuries before his own. [35] Despite his careful attention to staging the plays, the Christmas run of 1936 would be the only time that he directed in one of the Los Angeles or Hollywood theatres that the Project rented. Whether or not the plays appealed to a ticket-buying audience in a commercial venue must have been a question to consider, but having drawn academic audiences to USC with “Project 6” productions, Hughes may have realized the relative inaccessibility of medieval drama (compared to Shakespeare) for the general public. In the director’s report filed to Project headquarters, he included a negative review from the Los Angeles Evening News , in which the critic noted that the plays may attract those few people interested in the history of drama but did not offer much entertainment value, and he admitted the actors’ difficulty in pronouncing the archaic words of the script. Hughes suggested in the same report that the religious plays were better suited for churches, schools, and libraries, where he encouraged Project officials to stage the plays each December. [36] They evidently heeded his advice, and in the following year his unit was given the opportunity to perform medieval and early modern drama in just these sorts of public venues in Los Angeles. The Nativity at St John’s (December 1937) Hughes dedicated himself in 1937 to responding to Flanagan’s call for Federal Theatre directors to stage plays in partnership with the community. Away from the commercial houses, he became an ambassador for the Project and a negotiator with civic, private, and religious clubs and organizations for booking performances of The Nativity for the holiday season. Although he occasionally had to convince the city’s religious leaders that the Federal Theatre was not a Communist organization, Hughes fostered personal relationships in the community that assuaged any political concerns about the national project. [37] As he wrote to Flanagan: As for the clergy, they are elated, and as I have said for two years, we have sorely needed a little unit like this—we have stressed the social drama too much, and too little attention paid to things spiritual. I am so happy in it all dear Ms. Flanagan especially now that I feel your co-operation and enthusiasm. I will do anything for you and it matters not a damn whether I get 94 or 175 dollars a month. The spirit of the thing is all.[38] His strategy for creating a sustainable audience for medieval drama within the religious community was threefold. No longer playing at commercial theatres, he re-created his troupe as a traveling one that would perform on location; he staged the plays not as mere entertainment but as performances that would complement the liturgy for the congregation-audience; and he revised his productions to make church leaders and members hosts, audiences, and participants. In several houses of worship, he convinced priests and ministers to participate in the performance. Having the clergy dress in costume and reading the Banns adapted from the Chester cycle (the prologue announcing the theme of the plays), lead a procession of the actors, and even read a speech on the Federal Theatre in their Sunday services before that week’s performance all helped Hughes to gain support from church leaders. [39] Widening his network through letters, meetings, and word of mouth, Hughes led his troupe in staging twelve performances of The Nativity in churches or church-sponsored organizations of multiple denominations that December. Hughes’s production decisions in staging The Nativity in these venues are evident in the multiple copies of script (his second adaptation, after the version performed at the Mayan) that he meticulously annotated for himself and others and in the detailed, descriptive letters that he sent Flanagan after each performance. Although he routinely categorized the letters as director’s reports, they were colored by his emotions and frustrations in convincing local churches to host his troupe, his attention to movement and music, and his effusive praise for Flanagan’s vision of community engagement. The signature performance of The Nativity that season was at St John’s, an Episcopalian church in the West Adams district, where Hughes’s troupe played on the invitation of the church’s dean and rector. A photograph of the opening procession that he included in a letter to Flanagan captures the scope of involvement from both Federal Theatre personnel and church members. Hughes carried a cross through the front doors and led the St John’s children and adult choirs alongside that of the Federal Music Project, while a second crucifer bore the Jerusalem cross (the medieval design of a large central cross surrounded by four smaller ones) ahead of the cast of the play and various extras recruited from the congregation. In all, one hundred and ten people from the church and the Federal Theatre and Music Projects passed along the nave to the high altar carrying all manner of props and liturgical items. Cast members brought banners representing various guilds to recall the medieval origins of the play, torches, and tapers, choir members held lanterns on poles, someone in the long line held up an ornamental star of Bethlehem to be used for the manger scene, and the pipe organist behind the altar and trumpeters following Hughes signaled the processional’s arrival. In a copy of the script that he annotated for the church’s dean, he made clear his intent for the congregation to participate. Hughes relied on “O Come All Ye Faithful” as the opening hymn, but the dean was to ask the congregation to stand and sing as well, and once the procession concluded, he was to provide the opening remarks describing the play’s subject and themes. [40] Hughes’s opening of the play at the Mayan the previous December sheds light on how considerably his production evolved in relocating from the commercial theatre to local churches. In the script for his first adaptation of The Nativity , Hughes notes that the play was to begin with a Federal Music Project choir marching from the lobby and up the aisles on either side of the audience. [41] Singing “O come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant,” they strode towards the lower of the theater’s two stages before exiting left and right while singing from offstage. Two actors dressed as friars and bearing lit tapers soon followed up the aisles. As the curtains of the lower stage opened, the friars stepped up to light the two candelabra there and placed oversized folios on two lecterns placed next to them. While the choir concluded the opening hymn, the friars stepped back to allow the audience to read the large, black and red scripts on the folios: “Nativity of the Child” on the left, and “Hail, Mary” on the right. A trumpet call signaled another actor to step through the curtains of the upper stage, and proclaiming himself as the prophet Isaiah, he announced the subject of the drama to come. The roles of cast members and spectators were firmly established: the one moves towards the stage while performing, and the other remains fixed in their seats as passive observers. In St John’s, however, the distinction between the two was not so rigid. Members of the church choir joined the procession, congregants sang and listened to their own church leader act in character, and continuous movement created an intimate performance space. While in the Mayan, he had relied on these lower and upper stages as the focal points of the main action for his audience, in St John’s he made use of the larger, intricately partitioned space to continuously shift his audience’s attention. In his final director’s report for the Los Angeles office, Hughes noted that because of the constant challenge of restaging the play in cramped settings during the December run, he relied on portable screens to provide a backdrop for his cast. [42] In St John’s, however, he seems to have made strategic use of the interior of the church. As he described to Flanagan in a letter the next morning, his actors recited their abbreviated lines or pantomimed the narrative from multiple spots in imitation of the figures portrayed in the stained glass images of the stations of the cross. Hughes based his usual role of Gabriel on Edward Burne-Jones’s rendition of the Annunciation, and with long blonde hair capped by a halo and a flowing white robe layered with gold trim and embroidered with a pattern of crosses at the hem, he stood still with his hands raised as if in prayer. Mary, inspired by Botticelli’s Venus, stood on the altar with one hand towards her chest and another drawing her garments close and looked askance from the crowd. [43] He reserved the high altar as a stage for the most important, solemn scenes of the play, including the “Magnificat,” the hymn to Mary that concludes the Annunciation. Remaining still until the choir sang the first words of the hymn, “my soul doth magnify the Lord,” Hughes slowly turned away from the actress who portrayed Mary, stepped down from the altar, and along the nave. When he exited through the atrium at the front of the cathedral, behind the view of the spectators, twelve girls and boys entered and retraced his steps towards the altar and knelt at the rail where parishioners normally took communion. They then arose in unison and returned to either side of the transept, their exit timed to the closing words of the Magnificat, “glory to the Father and to the Son, / and to the Holy Spirit: / As it was in the beginning, / is now, and will be for ever. Amen.” [44] This careful, methodical choreography of scenes with Mary, Joseph, and Gabriel was disrupted by Herod, the antagonist and comic foil of the play. As Hughes wrote in the explanatory notes that he distributed to the audience for performances of The Nativity , the role of Herod had a long and colorful history of buffoonery, involving yelling, rolling around, lashing out against his sentries, and the generally brutish and exaggerated behavior that inspired Hamlet’s line on actors who could “out-Herod Herod.” As a modern adaptor of the play, Hughes explained that he had inherited through the medieval cycles an especially prideful version of Herod that had developed in early English drama, and he allowed the character more depth and stage presence than any other in the play: he speaks in lengthy monologues, barks orders at his soldiers, and vacillates from bombast and outrage when he hears of the Christ child to grief over learning that his own son was killed in the Massacre of the Innocents. [45] The script annotations for The Nativity reveal the excitement that Herod immediately brings to the performance. Contrasting with the harps that announce Gabriel’s arrival in the Annunciation scene, for example, Herod enters the play cued by blaring trumpets and heralds, and his frequent tirades involved stomping in a fit of rage and shouting promises of vengeance against the Christ child. In his closing scene, as Herod learns of the death of his son, he delivers a final show of violent madness before acknowledging his life misspent and damnation. In a scene reminiscent of Faustus, Hughes noted that demons were to approach from the left and right to drag him away from the audience’s view. [46] Immediately thereafter, Hughes restored order and calm. He noted in his copy of the script that upon Herod’s departure he himself delivered a benediction for the audience and began the Nicene Creed: “We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty.” At the closing words, “We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen,” the organ rang out the opening chords to “Christians Awake,” and the actors and extras sang the words of the eighteenth-century Yorkshire hymn, “salute the happy morn, whereon the Saviour of the world was born.” [47] He explained in his report to Flanagan that as they sang, he stepped down from the altar and led the recessional back towards the doors from which he had led the processional. Rather than the clergy and crucifers who had accompanied the director to begin the performance, he led the cast of characters, beginning with the actors portraying Mary and Joseph and concluding with those in supporting roles, along the nave to exit the cathedral. The actors left, while the congregation remained. In the early hours of the following morning, Hughes wrote Flanagan that “it was the happiest moment of my life, carrying the great jeweled cross and leading my boys and girls up to the Throne of God.” [48] The dean of St John’s responded in precisely the manner that Hughes must have hoped for: “given with reverence and will all the atmosphere of religion, [the performance] cannot help but do good in strengthening the faith of all who see the play.” [49] This reaction was valuable for Flanagan as well. Having received such frequent and detailed correspondence from Hughes regarding his performances of The Nativity , she had been well aware of the significance of the church bookings for the play, which had already been scheduled when she arrived in California in the fall of 1937. During this second visit to the west coast, she was preoccupied with accusations of nepotism and bribery among the more disgruntled staff and talent in Los Angeles, but Hughes’s relationship with the religious community evidently brought her some peace of mind. As she recorded in her travel notes, “I am awaited upon by a delegation asking me to look into the moral life of our actors, but in spite of this one cloud in the horizon we are doing the nativity plays in the Episcopalian church.” [50] After her arrival, she attended a production of Hansel and Gretel and Pinocchio staged by the children’s troupe at the Hollywood Playhouse, where she found a small but vociferous group of protestors awaiting her in the lobby. They echoed the increasingly widespread accusation of the Federal Theatre’s support of Communism but confessed, when she attempted to have a conversation over their concerns, that none of them had attended a play produced by the Los Angeles Project. It was a moment of honesty that she quickly used to her advantage, and so with the holidays approaching, she advised them on her way out of the lobby to go see Hughes’s production of The Nativity and reassess their opinion of the Project. [51] Flanagan publicly and privately stated her appreciation for Hughes and his religious unit beginning in those final weeks of 1937. Beyond maintaining their regular correspondence, she intervened with local WPA and Project administrators to secure musical instruments for the pieces that he selected for the church performances and began to endorse the value of the unit’s work to Los Angeles religious leaders and school administrators. [52] Everyman at St Joseph’s (September 1938) Encouraged by the reception of The Nativity among the local religious community, Hughes turned his attention the following year to developing for the Federal Theatre what he described to Flanagan as “a real 14 th [-]century production” of Everyman . [53] Unlike The Nativity , whose script he had adapted himself, the Bureau of Research and Publication provided him with a version of Everyman suitable for his desired production. In early 1936, just a few months after the Federal Theatre had been established, the Bureau had purchased the rights to a straightforward translation of Everyman newly completed by a Father Clarus Graves, a Benedictine priest and university professor from Minnesota. Hughes’s plans to stage the play came to fruition that summer, when his contact at St Joseph’s Cathedral, where he had staged The Nativity the previous December, wrote that while he looked forward to the biblical play for Christmas, he hoped, too, to host the premiere of the morality play. [54] The invitation provided Hughes with an opportunity for another signature church performance to follow the performance of The Nativity at St John’s the year before. St Joseph’s Cathedral was to celebrate that fall its Golden Jubilee, the fiftieth anniversary of the parish, and Hughes’s troupe was invited to stage their latest featured play on the opening night of the festivities in early September. As Hughes wrote to Flanagan, he considered his Federal Theatre production of Everyman as opportunity for his own redemption. Over the previous twenty years, professional productions of Everyman in Los Angeles had relied on a translation by the American poet George Sterling of the adaptation by the Austrian poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Sterling’s translation was commissioned by the Polish director Richard Ordynski, who recruited Hughes himself to play the titular role in a 1917 production at Trinity Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles. When Hughes accepted the invitation to stage Everyman at St Joseph’s, he wrote Flanagan that the version of the play used by the Project offered him a chance to return to “the glorious old original” of the text and atone for the “mess that I created in the English speaking world under Ordynske [sic]” two decades earlier. [55] Hughes’s preference for the Federal Theatre version stemmed from its faithful treatment of the source, whereas the earlier adaptation had effectively departed from its source for an early-twentieth-century audience. The Project’s version preserved the comedic elements of the play (when a number of would-be companions find excuses to abandon Everyman) and its physical display of penance (Everyman’s self-flagellation and wearing of a sackcloth), while keeping the narrative’s focus on the main character’s emotional and spiritual progression. In the preface to his translation, on the other hand, Sterling argued that von Hofmannsthal had “vivified and humanized” a play whose performance had bored Sterling himself with its “bleak and not always intelligible passages” that necessitated the translator’s task of modernizing the text and narrative: The appeal of ‘Everyman’ to the medieval mind must have been vast, for it was a child’s mind, and therefore one to be moved far more greatly by things seen than by things preached. But though the moral pill was deftly enough sugar-coated for the audience of those distant days, ‘Everyman’ can but seem a somewhat crude and unconvincing affair to the pampered and sophisticated public of today.[56] Besides revising the language of the play, the von Hofmannsthal-Sterling adaptation supplemented the narrative with a fuller backstory for the protagonist, portrayed as a hedonistic young man who enjoys banquets and camaraderie, a forlorn lover who quarrels with his partner, and a headstrong son who refuses to listen to his mother’s warnings about his lifestyle. With this translation, Ordynski offered a version of Everyman that challenges the audience to empathize with the eponymous protagonist. This is largely due to the recreation of that protagonist from a universal human figure to a symbol of materialism and greed born from wealth (the von Hofmannsthal-Sterling adaptation was subtitled “The Play of the Rich Man’s Death”). The result is an Everyman that may be recognizable to the audience not as a mirror of themselves but as a portrayal of a higher social class, and so his character is removed from the allegorical intent of the medieval original. [57] Much attention is given in Sterling’s translation to Everyman’s material world, constructed around an interpolated backstory in which we see him ordering his cooks to prepare feasts, scorning his poor neighbors seeking alms, constructing a pleasure garden, courting his lover, and lording over his estate. Contemporary reviews of the production comment on the staging of elaborate scenes to display this opulence in the first half of the play. [58] Appropriately amongst this setting, Everyman is a hedonistic landowner who admires his opulence and sermonizes on the power of material wealth to elevate a man’s status above others: “Money lifts the world above/All mean exchange and barter,” he explains to a friend, “and each man/In his own sphere is as a lesser God.” [59] In the second half of the play, when Everyman should repent this previously sinful behavior, the von Hofmannsthal-Sterling adaptation is oddly ambiguous. It is the protagonist’s newfound sense of morality that strengthens Good Deeds and sets up the resolution of the play, but empathy of the poor and the field workers, the men whom Everyman had previously scorned but who now take pity on him. Such a reaction is not so easy for the audience. Given Everyman’s arrogance and petulance as the titular “rich man,” he can equally be cast as the object of their empathy as well, the intent of the morality play as a genre, or desire to see him punished and stripped of the material possessions that he flaunts, a reaction made possible by the modern revision of the play. Both receptions rely on the moral caveat that even one who is socially and financially superior to the audience will suffer the same fate. Nearly twenty years later, in September, 1936, the von Hofmannsthal-Sterling adaptation of the play served as the script for another, far more ambitious Los Angeles production. [60] Daily features in the Los Angeles Times hinted at the extravagant staging of the play by the Danish director and actor Johannes Poulsen at the Hollywood Bowl, where Everyman was billed as “the greatest spectacle ever offered in Hollywood” and “an epic of humanity, with comedy, drama, thrills, and throbs,” Poulsen’s Everyman presented three spaces to the audience. [61] Golden-painted gates opened to reveal heaven erected on a platform high above the stage, where a queen presided over an angelic court, a medieval village housed the initial scenes, in which Everyman surrounds himself with friends and entertainment, and a glimmering Byzantine cathedral towered above the audience’s gaze. The cathedral served as Everyman’s initial destination, the place to which he follows Good Deeds before continuing to heaven above, and it rested upon a series of steps representing the progression of history before the late medieval composition of Everyman – presumably a suggestion of the passage of time and universal nature of mortality that the protagonist must accept, as well as the triumph of Christianity. Poulsen had conceived of his adaptation of Everyman as a festival play that would be produced as if it were a motion picture, especially in its elaborate costume, lighting, ballet numbers, and the musical accompaniment provided by the Los Angeles Philharmonic. On the opening night, red flares lined the streets surrounding the venue, and multiple spotlights drew attention to the seating area, where Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and a host of celebrities from the entertainment industry and civic leaders arrived along a red, velvet carpet leading to their choice seats near the stage, beneath Poulsen’s monumental settings. [62] As the Federal Theatre Bureau of Research and Publication noted, Everyman relies not on spectacle but emotional investment from the audience. The structure of the text, beginning with God’s lament and subsequent summoning of Death to fetch Everyman, ensures that this audience is privy to a divine plan of which the protagonist is ignorant and so allows them to scoff at his futile attempts to evade his own mortality. [63] As the narrative progresses, they must be encouraged to empathize with Everyman, respond to his sorrowful displays of emotion when he is abandoned by his friends, and take heed of his willingness to adhere to Knowledge and Good Deeds, who advise him towards redemption. Through this empathy, Everyman as a morality play relies on the assumption that an audience would be motivated to receive the protagonist as an exemplar of the human condition and reject the behavior represented by those who would lead them astray. [64] Poulsen’s handling of this adaptation suggests an exaggerated notion of what John McKinnell underscores as a central aspect of staging Everyman : ensuring that the audience becomes distracted by the revelry of the protagonist’s hedonism earlier in the narrative to the point that they forget his transgressions and thus the pending return of Death at the play’s end. [65] It is reasonable to assume that the more the audience is entertained by sights and sounds on stage, the more they forget about this overarching structure of the play that begins with God’s anger and disappointment in humanity and concludes with Everyman foreswearing all of the worldly entertainments presented to the audience. However, compelling the audience to do so also threatens to undermine the crucial dramatic irony of Everyman , reliant upon the audience’s knowledge of, and the protagonist’s ignorance of, the roles of God and Death. In the original narrative, any distraction offered by mundane entertainments is abruptly removed for the second half. Everyman finds himself abandoned not only by his friends but eventually, too, by the allegorical representations of his physical and intellectual qualities (Beauty, Strength, Discretion, and Five Wits), a moment that also has the potential to surprise the audience. [66] In Poulsen’s staging of the play, those mundane entertainments never leave the stage, for they are intended to captivate the audience for the duration of the production, rather than for Everyman alone as evidence of his distraction from spiritual matters in the first half of the narrative. This intent to unceasingly stimulate the audience with the trappings of set design, costume, dance numbers, and lighting was Poulsen’s own, directorial interpolation, an edifice of spectacle built onto the textual additions already offered by von Hoffmansthal and Sterling. In that, he was effective. As a Times critic commented on the experience of viewing the play, “that such magic of stage craft were possible no one would ever dream.” [67] Although Hughes had particular ideas about how his production might appear before the audience in a church setting, his focus remained on the spiritual message of the play’s narrative. In his director’s report for the Los Angeles office, he wrote of the same challenges and resolutions of staging Everyman as he had faced in staging The Nativity the year before. The venues were too small, he could never get quite the number of Federal Music Project performers that he needed, and he relied again on large screens to serve as a portable backdrop, since many venues lacked a proper stage. [68] As he had done the previous December, Hughes described many of his staging details to Flanagan in frequent letters written after each performance. To complement the simplicity of the script in the Graves translation and make the best use of the churches where his troupe performed, Hughes relied on careful positioning of his actors and props to focus the audience’s attention. [69] He again insisted on carefully choreographed movement in performing the play. When the other characters approached and departed from Everyman and thus away from the audience’s attention, the staging resembled a processional, and it has been argued that keeping the protagonist fixed amidst this deliberate, minimal movement emphasizes his isolation. [70] As he had done in St John’s, Hughes had his actors otherwise stand in “stained glass attitudes” in St. Joseph’s, a stage direction indicating that they were to deliver their lines in tableau-vivant poses reminiscent of the figures in the cathedral’s windows and stations of the cross, and rely on physical gestures and exaggerated emotions. [71] Perhaps anticipating his audience’s lack of familiarity with the play, he also relied on embroidered titles (e.g., “Good Deeds,” “Strengthe”) across his actors’ costumes to identify the allegorical figures, as captured in photographs that he included with his director’s report for the Los Angeles office. [72] The primary characters were distinguished by these labels and their costumes: Good Deeds wore a halo, Knowledge wore a crown, and Death appeared in dark flowing robes and a veil that covered his face. As he had done just over twenty years ago on his first visit to Los Angeles, Hughes played the titular role, wearing a variegated, ornate Elizabethan costume for the majority of the play and plain white robes for the last moments, as the character prepares himself for death. Standing in place and relying on gesticulations and exaggerated manners to convey emotion, the actors remained before screens painted to resemble wood paneling, which the art director had borrowed from Federal Theatre productions of Shakespearean plays. Whereas Everyman and the allegorical figures thus relied on movement and posturing within various areas of the church interior, Hughes kept another visual cue in the play fixed in a central location. Death is the only other constant presence in the play besides Everyman, and the Federal Theatre script calls for him to remain in place immediately after he enters the play. As Everyman opens, a messenger explains to the audience its primary themes (the transitory nature of life and the futility of sinful behavior), and the figure of God laments that humanity has devoted itself to sin and pleasure, a perverted state of the world that elicits disappointment and anger. “I hoped well that Everyman/In my glory should make his mansion,” he begins, but observes that in their hedonism and negligence of divine mercy, those collectively termed “Everyman” must be met with justice, and so he summons Death to begin the action of the play. [73] From the first lines of the play, the audience is thus made aware that death is the only outcome of the play, emphasized by the fact that the character does not leave the audience’s view. [74] Death is summoned to serve as both messenger and audience, and while he interacts with the protagonist in their dialogue early in the play, in Hughes’s staging, Death remained fixed before the front of the congregation, a passive viewer of Everyman’s vain attempts to evade the mortality of which he is a harbinger. [75] Along with the audience, Death waits to see not merely when the protagonist will die but how he will do so: that is, whether or not Everyman will earn his redemption in time, a suspense that he exaggerates by placing an hour glass and lit candle on a table in the center of the audience’s view. The script also noted that the characters and the audience might track Everyman’s progress through the Book of Life, an inventory of his good and bad deeds that an angel places on the same table and a prop to which Death and Good Deeds are occasionally prompted to point as a reminder of man’s selfish, overly indulgent past. Everyman, too, is aware of the presence of Death and the book. In begging his family to accompany him on his dreaded journey, his cue is to look over his shoulder at the ominous figure and explain that “I must give a reckoning straight/For I have a great enemy, that hath me in wait.” [76] In examining the book with Good Deeds, he further calls the audience’s attention to the book by crying out that “for one letter here I cannot see” on the side of the ledger meant to record his acts of kindness and charity. [77] When Knowledge and Confession instruct him how to scourge his body of its sinfulness by whipping himself and dressing in sackcloth and how to pray to God for mercy, he finds his “accounts” are balanced in the book and is ready for the act of sacrament and unction offered by a priest. By the last moments of the play, Everyman, having atoned for his past transgressions and seeking the purification offered by Knowledge and Confession, looks towards the audience and delivers a reflective monologue that addresses those watching him: Methinketh, alas, that I must be gone; To make my reckoning and my debts pay, For I see my time is nigh spent away. Take example, all ye that this do hear or see, How they that I loved best do forsake me, Except my GOOD-DEEDS that bideth truly.[78] As he moves towards a mock grave, he appeals to God for mercy, motivated not by fear for what the afterlife may hold for him but by the faith that he now articulates in his maker: “In manus tuas” (“in your hands”), he states, “commendo spiritum meum” (“I entrust my spirit”). [79] At this moment, Hughes had his musicians ring a bell that, as he wrote Flanagan, he bought out of pocket, because its toll suited the solemnity of playing the morality play in a cathedral and reminded him of the church bells he heard knell while walking one evening in the medieval Bavarian town of Rothenberg. [80] In the director’s report, he noted, too, that Handel’s “Dead March” from Saul would accompany Everyman’s descent into his grave. [81] Finally, at Everyman’s final words, the script prompts Death to extinguish the candle to signal the end of his mortal life, while Knowledge explains to the audience that the protagonist was successful in his journey to heaven and greeted by angels, given voice by the choir’s chanting. In Hughes’s handling of the play, Everyman is thus portrayed as the embodiment of sinful but ultimately pensive humanity, rather than an individual wealthy man whose atonement is sudden and unconvincing. He is not quite an innocent or passive victim, for the play suggests that he has lived life according to his own terms before Death’s arrival, but neither is he an arrogant figure whose redemption can be called into question, as he had been presented in the von Hoffmanstahl-Sterling adaptation. [82] The Federal Theatre script underscores the qualities of Everyman that compel the audience to associate themselves with him: when confronted by Death, he seems ignorant of his own mortality, and after realizing that he cannot bribe his adversary, he quickly realizes that his fate is not merely the act of dying but of dying without having recorded many good deeds in his book of recompense (“my writing is full unready,” he explains to Death, as a bell tolls and the book remains in full view). [83] From the moment the two meet, Everyman acknowledges his isolation, and although his subsequent abandonment by the allegorical representations of both his material wealth and his physical senses (Beauty, Strength, and Five Wits) is hardly a surprise for the audience or the character himself, the emotional impact of these scenes is still poignant. [84] When Everyman cannot compel the latter group of figures to enter the grave with him at the play’s end, he addresses the audience, per the script’s direction, to explain, “how they that I loved best do forsake me,” except for Good Deeds, who carries his book of reckoning into the grave. [85] Hughes’s Everyman also shows a justified range of emotions. He is understandably afraid at the unexpected arrival of Death, he is hurt by the rejection of his companions, and he earnestly seeks to understand how to get to heaven, once Good Deeds, Knowledge, and Confession explain how to do so. Under Hughes’s direction, Everyman presented its title character as an archetype of the human condition that was especially suited to a church performance: beginning the play in sin, he concludes it in a state of grace, a maturation of the character that provides an exemplum for the audience. [86] New Audiences for Religious Drama Following the performance, Hughes added Everyman to his troupe’s repertoire for local high schools and colleges. Applying the same model to Los Angeles school administrators as that which he had established within the religious community, he wrote letters, held meetings with educators, and attended charity events where he was asked to speak on Flanagan and the Federal Theatre. His troupe frequently performed scenes from Shakespearean plays (often The Merchant of Venice , Richard II , and Hamlet ) for high schools and charitable organizations, and Everyman served as a feature play for the drama department at Los Angeles City College a few weeks after the performance at St Joseph’s. Without a proper office for audience research (the Los Angeles branch had been closed in mid-1937), Hughes both created his own audience in the community and inspired them to provide feedback. [87] Among the thank-you notes from local clergy, principals, and faculty, none appeared in an official Federal Theatre report. Rather, these individuals wrote personal letters to Flanagan in Washington, WPA’s California offices, and Los Angeles Project headquarters. Their letters attested to Hughes’s fulfillment of a foundational tenet of the Project to those who could not otherwise see live drama: it impacted them emotionally and intellectually. The Diocese of Los Angeles and San Diego wrote the Los Angeles Project, for example, that a performance of The Nativity for one of its impoverished neighborhoods had “brought a glimpse of beauty rare in their lives,” while a faculty member at Los Angeles City College noted that students were keenly interested in Hughes’s performance as Shylock, in that he “swung the sympathy of the audience back to a racial sympathy at the end.” [88] Flanagan replied to the college’s Department of English that she considered Hughes’s work in the community more impactful for the Project than those performances drawing large audiences downtown and in Hollywood. His traveling troupe, built within a network of churches and schools, required a resolve for which she expressed her “greatest admiration and affection.” [89] These anecdotal testimonies may have been written in support of Hughes and his troupe, but they had applications well beyond Los Angeles. By spring of 1939, when the Los Angeles Project had been largely dismantled, Hughes resigned as director of its Shakespeare and religious unit ahead of the official closure of the Federal Theatre. However, he soon found other avenues for pursuing his belief that the mystery and morality plays could still be staged as narratives embedded within the religious service and performances intended to supplement the liturgy and inspire spiritual reflection. On 30 November 1944, just over five years after the termination of funding for the Federal Theatre, Hughes wrote Flanagan from the isolated village of Nixon, Nevada. He explained to her that he had taken up missionary work on the Paiute reservation that spanned the northern part of the state. He confided in his longtime correspondent that he found the work to be fulfilling yet lonely, and he admitted how he often reflected on the Federal Theatre, Flanagan’s leadership, and “the untimely end of our beloved project.” [90] Responding two weeks later from Smith College, Flanagan suggested that Hughes’s new career was hardly a surprise to those who knew his personality and work ethic, and when she recalled in turn their accomplishments in the Project, she was particularly thankful for his “beautiful religious plays.” [91] He became a working, if not ordained, minister, applying the role that he had begun in the Federal Theatre—an actor and director who considered himself a spiritual leader when staging medieval drama within the religious community—to the tribal community in Nevada. A reporter in Los Angeles wrote that Hughes approached his missionary work in Nevada “as though he had stepped back into the 14 th century, using the patterns of teaching that inspired the early [biblical drama] of the Church,” [92] and Hughes explained to a friend that he still performed (presumably playing multiple parts) The Nativity at Christmas and Everyman during Lent. [93] As Hughes wrote of these performances, “when produced in church or theatre in a spirit of reverence and with a minimum of stage ‘business,’ these glorious little plays have unbelievable beauty, power, and exquisite poetry.” [94] This steadfast belief that elaborate costume and staging might distract the audience from the text and the reflective, solemn experience that it offered was fundamental to Hughes’s success in the Federal Theatre. Situating performances of the medieval plays as an extension of the liturgy, he found in the religious community the opportunity to use live drama as a spiritual teaching tool for the audience. So successful were these performances during Hughes’s tenure as a Project director in Los Angeles that they ultimately provided evidence for Flanagan in her argument before the House Special Committee on Un-American Activities in December 1939. As she explained to the Committee, the Federal Theatre had proven that plays could not only entertain but even, within its religious offerings, instill spiritual values in their audiences. In the two years leading up to that testimony, Hughes had directly responded to her call for Project leaders across the country to introduce live drama beyond commercial houses and engage with religious communities, in particular. Flanagan’s original directive was not without its political aims, given that she needed religious leaders to show public support for the Project. However, Hughes relied on the mystery and morality plays to sermonize to his audience-congregation, an objective that she had not articulated in addressing her directors in 1937. In so doing, his productions of medieval religious plays helped Flanagan both realize and expand on her vision for what the Federal Theatre could accomplish at the local level. References [1] 76 Cong. Rec. vol. 84, pt 7, 2,866–867 (1939). [2] Ibid, 2,869. [3] Ibid., 8,089. For the references to Everyman and The Nativity , see ibid., 7,291 and 7,372; Hearings before the Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, House of Representatives, 114 (1939). [4] Hallie Flanagan, Arena (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1940), 276. [5] Sanora Babb, “The Los Angeles WPA Theatre Project,” New Theatre 11, no. 6 (1936): 23. [6] In referring to his sources for The Nativity , Hughes used the term “mystery” plays for the cycles of biblical drama, whereas the Federal Theatre Project used the term “miracle” in newspaper advertisements. As Meg Twycross, “Medieval English Theatre: Codes and Genres,” in A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture c.1350 – c.1500 , ed. Peter Brown (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 456, notes, the designation “miracle” for the genre did not remain in widespread use beyond the late Middle Ages. [7] John R. Elliott, Jr., Playing God: Medieval Mysteries on the Modern Stage (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1989), 56, writes that the Religious Drama Society in Hughes’s native Great Britain produced religious plays in England in a similar fashion. [8] John O’Connor, “The Federal Theatre Project’s Search for an Audience,” in Theatre for Working-Class Audiences in the United States, 1830 – 1980 , ed. Bruce A. McConachie and Daniel Friedman (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 171, and Cecelia Moore, The Federal Theatre Project in the American South: The Carolina Playmakers and the Quest for American Drama (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017), 9. [9] O’Connor, “The Federal Theatre Project’s Search for an Audience,” 174. [10] “Merchant of Venice: Audience Survey Report (Los Angeles, CA)” 14 May 1937, RG 69, Box 254, 2287303, National Archives (NA). [11] Hallie Flanagan, “Design for the Federal Theatre’s Season: In which the director of the FTP states some plans for the year in 1938,” FTP, Series 1, Box 4, Folder 2, George Mason University Libraries (GMUL). See Bonnie Nelson Schwartz, Voices from the Federal Theatre (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 2003), xii. Hallie Flanagan, “Brief delivered by Hallie Flanagan before the Committee on Patents, House of Representatives,” 8 February 1938. Federal Theatre Project Collection (1932–1943), ML31.F44, Container 5, Library of Congress (LC), pledged that no plays “of a cheap, trivial, outworn, or vulgar nature” would be produced. [12] Frederic H. Bair, “Educational Aspects of the Federal Theatre Project,” 12–15 September 1937, FTP, Series 1, Box 16, Folder 16, GMUL; Hallie Flanagan, “FTP Policy Board Meeting,” 12 April 1938, Hallie Flanagan (1890–1969) Papers, T-Mss 1964-002, Series 1: Federal Theatre Project, Sub-series 2: Administrative Files (1935–1939), Box 8: Administrative Files, New York Public Library Archives and Manuscripts (NYPL). [13] Hallie Flanagan, “Talk at the Meeting of Regional Staff,” 19 August 1937. FTP, Container 962, LC. [14] Hallie Flanagan: “The Christmas Program for the Federal Theatre – To the Regional Directors,” 14 October 1937, FTP, Container 2, LC. [15] Katherine Clugston, “Reorganization of the Play Bureau,” September, 1936, FTP, Series 1, Box 4, Folder 15, GMUL; “Religious Letters of Commendation,” FTP, Container 1, LC. [16] Stanley J. Kahrl, “The staging of medieval English plays,” in The Theatre of Medieval Europe: New Research in Early Drama , ed. Eckehard Simon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 130–48 [17] Katie Normington, Medieval English Drama: Performance and Spectatorship (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 84. [18] Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 3. Poel still took care to have an actor read the role of God (renamed Adonai) from offstage. Susanne Rupp, “Performing Heaven: The State of Grace in Seventeenth-Century Protestant Theology,” in Performances of the Sacred in Late Medieval and Early Modern England , ed. Susanne Rupp and Tobias Doring (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), 131, argues that the prevailing theological concept behind these concerns over presenting God on stage was a sacrosanct “tension between [human] knowledge and [divine] secret [ensuring] that the fundamental difference between God and his creature is maintained.” See also Alexandra F. Johnston, “English community drama in crisis: 1535–80,” in Drama and Community: People and Plays in Medieval Europe , ed. Alan Hindley (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), 265, for Protestant receptions of the plays’ Catholic heritage and Murray Roston, Biblical Drama in England: From the Middle Ages to the Present Day (London: Faber, 1968), 109–15, for the Puritans’ objections to the humanization of God onstage. The laws were rescinded in 1951. [19] Elliott, Jr., Playing God , 42–62. See also Katie Normington, Modern Mysteries: Contemporary Productions of Medieval English Cycle Dramas (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2007), 24–25. [20] Robert Potter, The English Morality Play: Origins, History and Influence of a Dramatic Tradition (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), 224. [21] Claire Sponsler, Ritual Imports: Performing Medieval Drama in America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), 156–65. See also John Marshall, “Modern productions of medieval English plays,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre , ed. Richard Beadle (Cambridge, 1994), 290. [22] Elliott, Jr., Playing God , 57; Sponsler, Ritual Imports , 167, and Gerald Weales, Religion in Modern English Drama (Philadelphia, 1961), 111-12. There is no surviving evidence suggesting that Hughes was directly influenced by member of the Religious Drama Society, but he was likely aware of their church performances by the late-1930s. Hughes was an ardent theatre scholar, and he had kept abreast of live drama in England since his professional days in London, notably through his friendship and correspondence with Iden Payne, director of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre and admirer of the Federal Theatre. [23] Sponsler, Ritual Imports, 169. [24] Although Johnston, “English community drama in crisis: 1535–80,” 248–49, notes that the plays could be staged for any number of practical reasons (e.g., festivals, fundraising), Simon Shepherd and Peter Womack, English Drama: A Cultural History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 11, argue that the procession of the plays through the streets of a given city was intended “to consecrate the everyday environment.” [25] Federal Theatre Project, Play Bureau, “Suggested Repertory of Classic English Plays,” Records, RG 69, Box 348, 2385588, NA. [26] Federal Theatre Project, Bureau of Research and Publication, “Publication Report,” Records, RG 69, Box 161, 2526405, NA. [27] Ibid. [28] Lawrence M. Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 210, argues that the plays emphasize for the audience a moral interpretation of biblical history, founded on the “virtues of obedience and faith.” See, too, Christine Richardson and Jackie Johnston, Medieval Drama (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1991), 98, for the central theme of the progression from sinfulness to grace. Claire Sponsler, Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 79–80, argues of the morality plays that, although this moral teaching of sin and salvation lay at the heart of the narrative, their “flamboyantly bad behavior . . . is by no means entirely subordinated to the plays’ themes of repentance.” [29] Robert S. Sturges, The Circulation of Power in Medieval Biblical Drama: Theaters of Authority (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 136–40. [30] Margaret Rogerson, “Medieval Mystery Plays in the Modern World: A Question of Relevance?”, The Yearbook of English Studies 43 (2013): 362, notes that the 2012 revival of the York cycle used the allegorical nature of the plays to recast the narrative of Adam and Eve through child actors, who are replaced by adults after the Fall. [31] Christina M. Fitzgerald, The Drama of Masculinity and Medieval English Guild Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 145; David Bevington, Medieval Drama (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 240; See Lynette R. Muir, The Biblical Drama of Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 4, and Ruth Harriett Blackburn, Biblical Drama under the Tudors (Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2015), 17. [32] John Musgrove (Federal Theatre Project Research Bureau), “Theatre Buildings in Los Angeles,” Records of the Work Projects Administration (1922–1944), Records, RG 69, Box 242, 2319732, NA. [33] Katherine T. von Blon, “Government Subsidy for Drama Seen,” Los Angeles Times , March 1, 1936, California State Library (CSL). [34] Susan Quinn, Furious Improvisation: How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art out of Desperate Times (New York: Walker & Co., 2008), 214; Stacy Claire Brightman, “The Federal Theatre Project in Los Angeles” (PhD diss., University of California, Davis, 1999), 79–80. [35] “Program Notes Regarding the Miracle Plays,” FTP, Container 1046, LC. [36] Production Records (“Miracle Plays”), FTP, Container 962, LC. [37] In December, 1937, he reported to Flanagan that leaders in the local Baptist community had asked him whether the Federal Theatre supported Communism, and then in October, 1938 he notified her that certain educators among Los Angeles’s Catholic community would not host his troupe, owing to the same suspicions of the Project. See Letters, Gareth Hughes to Hallie Flanagan, December, 1937 and October, 1938, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1: Correspondence, Box 6: Miscellaneous A:Z (1935–1958), NYPL; Elizabeth A. Osborne, Staging the People: Community and Identity in the Federal Theatre Project (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 9. [38] Letter, Gareth Hughes to Hallie Flanagan, 8 December 1937, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [39] Letter, Gareth Hughes to Hallie Flanagan, December 1937, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [40] Hughes, The Nativity , Records, RG 69, Box 306, 2315596, NA. [41] Hughes, The Nativity , Federal Theatre Project Scripts (1935–1939), Box 8, University of Southern California Libraries Special Collections (USCL). [42] Production Records (“The Nativity”), FTP, Container 1046, LC. [43] Letter, Gareth Hughes to Hallie Flanagan, December, 1937, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [44] All stage directions refer to the Hughes’s own annotated copy for the December, 1937 performances: Hughes, The Nativity , Records, RG 69, Box 306, NA. [45] “Program Notes Regarding the Miracle Plays,” FTP, Container 1046, LC; See Sturges, The Circulation of Power , 55–57, and Muir, The Biblical Drama of Medieval Europe , 107. [46] Hughes, The Nativity , Records, RG 69, Box 306, 2315596, NA. [47] Ibid. [48] Letter, Gareth Hughes to Hallie Flanagan, 21 December1937, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [49] Letter, Gareth Hughes to Hallie Flanagan, 21 December 1937, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [50] Hallie Flanagan, Travel Notes, 19 November 1937, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 2, Box 9, NYPL. [51] Flanagan, Arena , 284. [52] Ibid., 257. [53] Letter, Gareth Hughes to Hallie Flanagan, December, 1937, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [54] Letter, Father William to Gareth Hughes, 28 July 1938, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [55] Letter, Gareth Hughes to Hallie Flanagan, 8 August 1938, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [56] George Sterling, The Play of Everyman (San Francisco: A.M. Robertson, 1917), “Preface.” [57] Potter, The English Morality Play , 230. [58] “Theatre Notes,” Los Angeles Herald , 8 January 1917, and 17 January 1917, CSL. [59] Sterling, The Play of Everyman , 21. [60] The 1917 version was republished as The California Festival Edition of the Play of Everyman (Los Angeles: The Primavera Press, 1936). [61] Advertisement, Los Angeles Times , 8 September 1936, CSL. [62] “‘Everyman’ Lures Society,” Los Angeles Times , 9 September 1936, CSL. [63] Ron Tanner, “Humor in Everyman and the Middle English Morality Play,” Philological Quarterly 70 (1991): 150. [64] Sponsler, Drama and Resistance , 80. [65] John McKinnell, “How Might Everyman Have Been Performed?”, in Bells Chiming from the Past: Cultural and Linguistic Studies on Early English , ed. Isabel Moskowich-Spiegel and Begoña Crespo-García (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 129. [66] Phoebe S. Spinrad, “The Last Temptation of Everyman,” Philological Quarterly 64, no. 2 (1985): 192. [67] “Fire Postpones ‘Everyman,’ Show Will Go on Tonight,” Los Angeles Times , 14 September 1936, CSL. [68] Production Report (“Everyman”), FTP, Container 1006, LC. [69] Letter, Gareth Hughes to Hallie Flanagan, 8 August 1938, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [70] Stanton B. Garner, Jr., “Theatricality in Mankind and Everyman,” Studies in Philology , 84 no. 3 (1987): 281, observes that the allegorical figures move through the play “with an almost processional simplicity”; Yeeyon Im, “The ‘Scourge of Penance’ and a ‘Garment of Sorrow’: Catholic Reforms and the Spectacle of the Passion in Everyman ,” Medieval and Early Modern English Studies 24 (2016): 137–38. [71] Letter, Gareth Hughes to Hallie Flanagan, 8 August 1938, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. Dunbar H. Ogden, The Staging of Drama in the Medieval Church (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003), 114, argues that the physical gestures employed in church performances were rooted in the mass; in Ibid., 165, he identifies the primary emotions of awe, joy, sorrow, fear, and anger as those to be portrayed in an exaggerated fashion within the large space of a medieval cathedral. [72] Lesley Wade Soule, “Performing the mysteries: demystification, story-telling and over-acting like the devil,” European Medieval Drama 1 (1997): 221. Leslie Thomson, “Dumb Shows in Performance on the Early Modern Stage,” Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England 29 (2016), 28, notes that the convention was maintained into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. [73] Unknown, “Everyman,” 2, FTP Scripts, Box 16, USCL. [74] Thomas F. van Laan, “ Everyman : A Structural Analysis,” PMLA 78, no. 5 (1963): 466. [75] Thomas Willard, “Images of Mortality,” in Death in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: The Material and Spiritual Conditions of the Culture of Death , ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 418 [76] Unknown, “Everyman,” 9, FTP Scripts, Box 16, USCL. [77] Ibid., 14. [78] Ibid., 24. [79] Ibid., 25. [80] Letter, Gareth Hughes to Hallie Flanagan, 29 August 1938, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [81] Production Report (“Everyman”), FTP, Container 1006, LC. [82] Jérome Hankins, “Staging Everyman . A ‘Dance of Life,’ or of the use of medieval drama to re-energize our contemporary stage,” Etudes Anglaises: Revue du Monde Anglophone 66 (2013): 397. [83] Allen D. Goldhamer, “ Everyman : A Dramatization of Death,” Classica et Mediaevalia 30 (1969): 589–99, posits that a key detail suggesting the protagonist’s unawareness of mortality is the fact that he does not recognize Death when the two first encounter each other. [84] Julie Paulson, “Death’s Arrival and Everyman’s Separation,” Theatre Survey: The Journal of the American Society for Theatre Research 48 (2007): 126, argues that this awareness of isolation is thematically unique among the morality plays, which feature an allegorical battle between virtuous and sinful behavior, rather than a character’s psychological reaction to pending death; Bob Godfrey, “ Everyman (Re)Considered,” European Medieval Drama 4 (2000): 165: “the personal characteristics have been adopted to make the internal conflict of Everyman more immediately poignant to the audience. Foregrounding the physical attributes in this way makes unavoidable an empathetic response to the acting of these final moments in the play.” [85] Unknown, “Everyman,” 24, FTP Scripts, Box 16, USCL. [86] Potter, The English Morality Play , 53–54. [87] O’Connor, “The Federal Theatre Project’s Search for an Audience,” 173. [88] Letter, Gertrude Peifer to Jerome Coray, 23 December 1937, Records, RG 69, 1068204, NA; Letter, Mabel L. Loop to Gareth Hughes, 22 November 1938, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [89] Letters, Hallie Flanagan to O.D. Richardson, 2 December 1938 and Hallie Flanagan to Gareth Hughes, 29 November 1938, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [90] Letter, Gareth Hughes to Hallie Flanagan, Undated, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [91] Letter, Hallie Flanagan to Gareth Hughes, 12 December 1944, Flanagan Papers, Sub-series 1, Box 6, NYPL. [92] “Actor Turned Minister Comes Back for Visit,” Los Angeles Times , 15 September 1952. CSL. [93] Letter, Gareth Hughes to Charlton Laird, Undated, Gareth Hughes Papers (1925–1965), NC803, Box 1: Correspondence, University of Nevada, Reno Special Collections. [94] Gareth Hughes, “Mediaeval Religious Drama,” The Desert Churchman , 3, no. 5 (1945), 3. Footnotes About The Author(s) RUSSELL STONE is Assistant Provost for Academic Assessment at Boston University. As a scholar of the classical tradition, he has published widely on the reception of Alexander the Great in medieval Europe. His current research focuses on a more recent legacy of that tradition, the staging of classical and medieval drama within the Federal Theatre Project. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue “An Art for Which There Is as Yet No Name.” Mobile Color, Artistic Composites, Temporal Objects The Anti-Victorianism of Victorian Revivals Tricks, Capers, and Highway Robbery: Philadelphia Self-Enactment upon the Early Jacksonian Stage “The Spirit of the Thing is All”: The Federal Theatre’s Staging of Medieval Drama in the Los Angeles Religious Community The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical; Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity Previous Next Attribution:

Raymond Saraceni Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 1 Visit Journal Homepage Tricks, Capers, and Highway Robbery: Philadelphia Self-Enactment upon the Early Jacksonian Stage Raymond Saraceni By Published on November 25, 2022 Download Article as PDF Introduction During the early decades of the nineteenth century, Philadelphia became besotted by its own reflection—a growing desire to perceive and to reflect upon itself is clearly manifested in the work of contemporaneous painters, novelists, and organizers of street pageants, as well as in the work of dramatists and theatre impresarios. Perhaps the bustling and industrializing metropolis that was in the process of supplanting the supposedly genteel Federalist city of the preceding century sought something reassuring in beholding itself. The federal government had decamped for the banks of the Potomac in 1800, while with each year the significance of Philadelphia as the birthplace of the nation was slipping further from the space of living memory; meanwhile, immigrants from Ireland, Germany, and even the French Caribbean further altered the deportment and civic culture of the city, as did blacks fleeing slavery in the American south. [1] Given such changes, the need to reflect upon and represent precisely what the city was and how it is signified in the present became increasingly important. Broadly speaking, representations of Philadelphia on canvas or in engravings took one of two forms: one emphasizing the city’s grand architecture and orderly thoroughfares, the other its often boisterous and irrepressible citizens. William Russell Birch, an English-born painter who published four editions of Philadelphia street scenes between 1800 and 1820, created elegant depictions of the city that called viewers’ attention to Philadelphia’s graceful Georgian buildings and its broad boulevards. His images of an orderly Philadelphia peopled by well-mannered and deferential citizens are notable too for a kind of antiseptic quality: the garbage and manure that would no doubt have been found throughout the city’s streets and byways are nowhere to be found. [2] John Lewis Krimmel, born in 1786 and a recent immigrant from Württemberg, was also a painter of Philadelphia street scenes, but his work is of a very different kind than Birch’s. While human figures are of marginal importance to the latter, they are Krimmel’s primary focus. Paintings such as Fourth of July in Center Square (1812) and Election Day at the State House (1815) call our attention not to those buildings that frame the action, but to the crowds themselves: swaggering, celebratory, combustible, and heterogeneous. The energy of his work is equal parts dynamism and hazard—despite the affability of certain of his human subjects, one could easily imagine being pushed aside, pick-pocketed or worse in the midst of such a swirling tumult of urban types. What we find in such aquatints and etchings we also find just a few years later upon the Philadelphia stage; the social energies unleashed as the city’s identity shifted from the eighteenth-century “Birthplace of the Nation” to the nineteenth-century “Workshop of the World,” were echoed, reified, challenged, and reconfigured in Philadelphia’s playhouses. By the end of the 1820s, Philadelphia was struggling to understand and represent the tumult and dislocation of its present in terms of what had already become for many an idealized past. As Gary B. Nash has argued, the “formative decade” of the 1820s was characterized by the construction of a “web of memory” in the Quaker City, a process that involved the founding of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in the wake of the Marquis de Lafayette’s visit in 1824, an institution whose very purpose was to collect those artifacts that might help “to preserve [a] memory of the past or use it to refurbish the present.” Such a process was, however, “made all the more complicated by the fact that Philadelphians, in their growing diversity, came to understand that memory-making was [not] a value-free and politically sanitized matter, [for] . . . as soon as people began to see that the shaping of Philadelphia’s past was a partisan activity, . . . the process of remembering Philadelphia became . . . contested . . . and has remained so ever since.” [3] Representing contemporary Philadelphia to Philadelphia audiences thus became aesthetically compelling at precisely the same moment that Nash considers as decisive in the city’s first serious encounter with shaping historical memory. Both processes were equally fraught. In the following pages, I wish to consider in particular Robert Montgomery Bird’s City Looking Glass , and the Walnut Street Theatre’s staging of both The Mail Robbers and Doctor Foster in Philadelphia . What did these entertainments signify for contemporary Philadelphians? How did audiences reflect upon these performances of self-reflection? When Bird and his contemporaries held a looking glass before the face of America’s First City, what did its audiences behold? These plays, I will argue, allow us to apprehend the formation of Philadelphian civic identity at an inflection point, with the stage itself at the heart of the city’s self-enactment. Indeed, it is not possible to understand this moment of civic identity formation and/or dissolution without working to grasp how it was experienced by those Philadelphians who attended and called upon the theatre to reflect, upend, or further reify the realities they felt themselves to inhabit at the beginning of the Jacksonian era, when the tensions touched upon in the works of Birch and Krimmel reached a kind of climax. Whereas scholars have long worked to situate Philadelphia performances of the antebellum period within the context of the development of American cultural identity, comparatively little attention has been given to the work of the Philadelphia stage relative to the development of Philadelphia civic culture itself. Bird’s Looking Glass , read alongside Mail Robbers and Doctor Foster , confirms a sense that when Philadelphians beheld their city at the end of the 1820s, they saw a place that was no longer the gentlemanly Quaker metropolis of William Penn and his heirs anymore than it was exclusively the eighteenth-century cradle of liberty and shrine of American independence. Instead, audiences beheld a heterogeneous and volatile, dangerous yet exuberant modern metropolis—one characterized by instability and menace as well as by a kind of phenomenologically liberating and disruptive knavery. In these plays, we will find that the exterior street scene becomes the primary space for contesting civic identity, just as it was in the work of painters and engravers like Birch and Krimmel. Bird’s Looking Glass In July of 1828 the ambivalent physician and aspiring dramatist, Robert Montgomery Bird, did something extraordinary: he held up a mirror to the city of Philadelphia. With the publication of his City Looking Glass , Bird invites audiences to look into his dramaturgical “mirror of the times . . . to see such knaves and asses / [a]s, we hope, can’t be seen in your own looking glasses.” [4] The comedy he presents offers us a comprehensive picture of Philadelphia types: wealthy merchants and their headstrong daughters, seedy procuresses and blackmailers, street-savvy rakes and pugnacious (if good-natured) sailors, as well as a promenading African American woman and a visiting Southern gentleman, not to mention servants, constables, and various “young bucks” reflecting various degrees of moral turpitude. On the one hand, the play appears as a somewhat conventional variation on a theme by Terence: sentimentality and mistaken identities abound, even as we encounter the familiar device of a long-lost child reunited with her aged, pining father. At the same time, however, the play’s rambunctious and youthful energy – its gleeful determination to consider the seedy underbelly of life in the Quaker City – mark Bird’s entertainment as being worlds away from what the European larmoyant tradition had formerly wrought of the same comic paradigm. Though apparently never brought to the stage, City Looking Glass may be read as heralding an emergent impulse on the part of Philadelphia to perceive and perform itself, as well as an impulse on the part of dramatists and theatre managers to contest the city’s established reputation as a place of congruity, regularity, and gentlemanly deportment. Bird extends and develops the metaphor of the looking glass throughout his prologue, hoping (or lamenting) that “when some pleasing liniment is shown, / . . . each might softly whisper, ‘That’s my own!’ / And where an uglier product of our labour [sic], / [w]ith the same readiness, say ‘That’s my neighbor!’” Seeking to present a timely, up-to-date urban comedy, Bird next promises his audience “certain tricks and capers / [s]uch as you look for daily in the papers.” [5] What is extraordinary here is not Bird’s deployment of the mirror as a metaphor so much as the way in which he does so, as well as the situation of his Looking Glass within the context of Philadelphia’s emergent obsession with seeing itself in the theatre. As Tim P. Vos has pointed out, the mirror was a popular signifier in the literature of the early American republic, but not necessarily a sign of “objectivity’s normative ascendance.” Instead, the looking glass was most often deployed as “a metaphor for the self-examination of one’s soul or character by holding up individuals either to be emulated or abhorred . . . the mirror was not simply a material article for returning light it received, it was a cultural artifact for returning enlightenment and judgment.” [6] In Bird’s comedy, the play itself is the looking glass—a looking glass absent in the material form but imagined instead as forcefully present in and as the act of performance. Indeed, Bird maintained a persistent fascination with images and reflections—with ways of constructing, refracting, and performing (or re-performing) phenomena of various kinds—throughout his life. In the 1840s and 50s, he famously experimented with an early photographic process called the Calotype, developing not only some of the first photographic images of Philadelphia but also developing an image of his own portrait, painted on canvas by his wife, Mary Mayer Bird. Thus, just as he would eventually reflect upon and replicate an image of his own image in light and shadow, with Looking Glass the dramatist may be understood as presenting us with the city itself as engaged perpetually in its own protean self-enactment—though here the subject is not an individual but a civic, corporate phenomenon. In his study of Philadelphia’s literary history, Samuel Otter argues that eighteenth and nineteenth-century writers in the Quaker City “shared a sense that Philadelphia was a place where, in concentrated form, a peculiarly American experiment was being conducted,” that the public sphere in Philadelphia developed in a unique way “through a series of violent episodes that were interpreted as tests of individual, racial, and civic character.” He goes on to say that “the border status of the city, its symbolic value and political history, its resilient African American population, and its circumstances of extremity provoked inquiries that unfolded in a range of texts over decades.” [7] Otter’s interest here is literary, so while he considers the work of Philadelphia authors like Charles Brockden Brown and George Lippard (both of whom sought to challenge the normative representation of Philadelphia as the refined and gentlemanly capital of Penn’s enlightened Commonwealth), his attention to drama and theatrical performance is slight. It thus should not surprise us that in considering the work of Robert Montgomery Bird, Otter almost entirely overlooks his plays in favor of his prose fiction. Nevertheless, there is much that is useful in Otter’s work relative to an understanding of Philadelphia drama and performance. During the early years of the nineteenth century, Otter writes, urban life in the Quaker City “seemed newly legible . . . as a limit outside the self that shaped identity, [as] . . . a felt excess that resisted such limits, and as a possibility for transformation.” [8] But if this was the moment that Philadelphia became legible, I argue that it is also the moment that Philadelphia become performable ; Otter claims that during the early years of the nineteenth century “Philadelphia came into fiction, and fiction became Philadelphian.” [9] So is this the case for drama and performance, particularly toward the end of the 1820s and most notably at first in Robert Montgomery Bird’s The City Looking Glass ? The play involves the machinations of two brothers who come to Philadelphia in order to make a fortune passing counterfeit bills; one of the brothers, Ravin, is also blackmailing a procuress named Mrs. Gall as he seeks to take possession of her ward: the beautiful and virtuous Emma. This same young woman has also won the heart of our hero, Mr. Roslin, a scion of a respectable family whose hopes for marriage are dashed when he learns that Emma is essentially being raised in a house of ill repute. Meanwhile, Roslin’s old school chum—a southern gentleman named Raleigh—has come to town to court Diana Headstrong, Roslin’s cousin. At first, Raleigh’s hopes for marriage are frustrated because of his being misidentified by Headstrong as a notorious swindler, a charge that brings the young man’s father, the elder Raleigh, to Philadelphia in defense of his son’s reputation (this despite the old man’s enduring heart-brokenness as a result of his young daughter’s disappearance many years before). At long last, however, all obstacles to marriage are removed when Emma is discovered to be Raleigh’s long-lost sister, and the villainous Ravin the very swindler that Headstrong (falling victim to Ravin’s manipulation) had earlier misidentified as Raleigh himself. By the end of the play Ravin’s brother, Ringfinger, has been compelled to give evidence against his brother and the two villains are hauled off to receive their just desserts. The play compels attention not so much for its intrigue, however, as for its disruptive depiction of the Quaker City as a disorderly and unruly space. It is as if Philadelphia were here reflected via a distorted funhouse mirror—a kind of giddy exercise in grotesquerie. Such an enterprise was not without precedent or progenitors, to be sure. Tom and Jerry, or Life in London (that episodic celebration of urban slumming, low-life milieux, and rakish misbehavior) had crossed the pond and debuted at Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street Theatre in April of 1823. Francis Wemyss, a leading actor who had himself recently arrived from Britain and who would serve as manager of several Philadelphia theatres over the decades, records that Tom and Jerry was so popular upon its first appearance in the city that it was picked up and performed by Cowell’s “circus corps” as soon as the Chestnut Street company disembarked for its sojourn to Baltimore and Washington, and was presented at the Walnut Street for the remainder of the season. [10] In his study of populist and underclass performance on the nineteenth-century American stage, Peter P. Reed explores the influence of Tom and Jerry ; he argues that theatres in the United States sought to ensure the continued popularity of the play “by tapping the urban lore of American cities” so that “[g]limpses of the distant metropole’s underworld gave way to representations of a newly localized urban culture, [as] Tom and Jerry helped constitute a specifically American urban public sphere built upon complex rituals of underclass performance and elite patronage.” [11] While The City Looking Glass is not a direct iteration of Tom and Jerry , the energies unleashed by the latter seem to play a role in Bird’s treatment of Philadelphia as a series of street scenes, dives, and the low performances associated with both—a local and particular manifestation of Americans’ increasing consciousness of and investment in “the entertainment value of their own urban low scenes [and their] fascination with stagey underclass characters” who continue to appear throughout the first half of the nineteenth century on the stage and in print. [12] Stagey, underclass characters abound in Bird’s play; they are far more memorable than the ladies and gentlemen, just as the action of the play’s street scenes and exteriors is more memorable than the goings-on in the parlors or drawing rooms of its respectable homes. For it is on the city’s byways and back lanes, as well as in the showboating of its volatile young “bucks” (characters like the sometime lawyer, Bolt, and his streetwise henchmen, Mossrose and Crossbar), that Philadelphia is meant to perceive most clearly its disfigured reflection, to experience most dramatically its contested character. Indeed, Philadelphia’s civic character was already long-understood as being manifest in its streets, specifically in its gridiron arrangement of thoroughfares intersecting at right angles and organized around a series of five open squares framing deep individual lots for houses and gardens — an arrangement proposed by William Penn and his surveyor, Thomas Holme, at the very founding of the colony. Philadelphia’s character as a planned settlement with broad, straight avenues as an alternative to the overcrowded, walled, medieval cities of Europe was an important aspect of what gave the place its initial cachet and self-image as a modern city founded on Enlightenment principles. Philadelphia, as Samuel Otter observes, sought to understand itself as defined by the “symmetry and discipline” of its orderly thoroughfares, as the “perpendicular array of streets and squares . . . were linked with the rectitude of its founder and its Quaker inhabitants.” [13] However, the sameness and regularity characteristic of its general appearance engendered, too, a quality of stultifying rigidity ripe for contestation and aesthetic sabotage. When visiting Philadelphia in the summer of 1830, Mrs. Trollope wrote that the city was “built with extreme and . . . wearisome regularity,” and that “all is even, straight, uniform, and uninteresting.” [14] Just three years later, the Scottish traveler Thomas Hamilton wrote similarly that Philadelphia represented “an infringement on the rights of individual eccentricity—a rigid and prosaic despotism of right angles and parallelograms.” [15] Local dramatists had gotten there even earlier. In his 1806 comedy, Tears and Smiles , James Nelson Barker gives us the character of Nathan Yank, domestic and runner-of-errands for the play’s romantic hero, who repeatedly loses his way amidst the wearisome sameness of Philadelphia’s streets, much to the consternation of his employer and the complication of the plot. While Barker’s sentimental comedy walks the streets of prosaic sameness rather than those of symmetry and rectitude, he is not so much interested in contesting the self-image of Philadelphia as he is in enjoying a good-natured jest with his knowing audience. Nor is the city as such at the center of Barker’s dramaturgy: the final acts of the play take us out of Philadelphia altogether, to a quiet country estate in Fairmount. Bird, by contrast, cannot imagine leaving the city behind, for what would his Looking Glass have to show us then? Otter has written about Benjamin Franklin’s autobiographical writings as, among other things, a guide “to crafting appearances that unsettled the relationship between character and performance,” deploying tales of his youthful progress in the city to “help create a public arena in which individuals were taught to be acutely conscious of their own social performances.” [16] Bird continues this work, albeit in a different key, with an early scene between his malefactor brothers where Ravin upbraids the less-assured Ringfinger over the latter’s persistent weakness for picking pockets. Picking pockets is, Ravin tells him, “a damned low vice” when set against the more refined criminal endeavor of counterfeiting. Refusing to aim higher has had a deleterious effect on Ringfinger, whose “gentility sits as clumsily upon [him] as new clothes.” Gentility and breeding, the sine qua non of the Philadelphia gentleman, are simply matters of wearing the costume well and of playing the role with confidence, for “character . . . is oftener established by conceit than by natural privilege.” [17] This troubling of the relationship between substance and “mere” appearance prefigures the promiscuous relationship in Bird’s Philadelphia between the gentleman and the scoundrel; nowhere is this more clear than in the character of Bolt, a good-for-nothing rogue whose ill-treatment at the hands of the brother villains leads to their demise. Roslin describes Bolt as indeed a “gentleman,” but one with a “black eye.” He expands upon this observation, noting that Bolt is the very “representative of a Philadelphia buck” one who has had opportunities of becoming a gentleman, [but] amends his gentility by the addition of certain accomplishments peculiar to the vulgar; that is, he has been half-educated at college and half bred at home; is seen sometimes at a lawyer’s office [but] … more frequently in the tavern with a terrapin under his nose and a wine bottle at his elbow: he fiddles a little and boxes to admiration; wears a costly coat; keeps a mistress, and sometimes a dog; above all can brag of having shot one grouse on the Jersey colings and one man on the Delaware lines. [18] Bolt is thus an apparently successful Philadelphia lawyer who hails from a supposedly well-bred Philadelphia family. Yet he is a man of halves: part genteel cavalier, part vulgar roughneck. Otter notes that in Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia, “a strategic display of enterprise might lead to worldly success [as] . . . habits of industry, discipline, and virtue” serve to “secure character.” [19] Bolt, however, particularly in Roslin’s representation of him, destabilizes character in his troubling of any distinction between high and low. Not simply a slumming gentleman, he appears to be downright dangerous: while Bolt engages in genteel pastimes like grouse hunting (albeit with limited success), his shooting a man “on the Delaware lines” might betoken either a refined duelist or an unstable sociopath. Indeed, Roslin’s servant, Nathan Nobody, observes that all aristocratic families of the city are most likely mere whited sepulchers, asserting to his master in the spirit of hearty “republicanism” that whenever he sees one of their coats of arms he can only conclude that “they have formerly . . . had in the family more arms than ears; that their titles are registered in a jail book; that their family house was a dunghill and their tree of genealogy a gallows.” The colorful and dexterous Nobody appears to have learned this sort of leveler’s vision at the theatre, where he also came to appreciate “how a wise man can climb on the shoulders of fools.” [20] In Bird’s variation on Abbott and Costello’s verbal monkeyshines, Nathan Nobody is a Somebody, while the aspirational aristocrats of Philadelphia are the real Nobodies. As mentioned above, it is largely upon the byways and back alleys of the city that Bird’s drama of contestation and shifting selves is played out. The “wearisome regularity,” of Philadelphia’s streets, the “symmetry and discipline” of its gridiron pattern of thoroughfares, are here reworked so as to prepare a common space for emergent and variable identity, the sort of undertaking which Elizabeth Maddock Dillon regards as “the shared terrain … of embodiment and representational force.” [21] Indeed, most of the decisive action of Looking Glass takes place out of doors on the city’s thoroughfares. In the course of the play’s five “street scenes” Roslin and Nathan agree on an undertaking that drives the early action, Bolt flirts indecorously with a series of ladies (bringing on the decisive intervention of the sailor, Tom Taffrail), Diana is rescued by Raleigh after she has taken flight from Bolt, Emma is rescued from Mrs. Gall and Ravin by Roslin, and finally, Nathan is delivered from Ravin’s clutches by Tom Taffrail (thus setting up the play’s concluding action). In the course of such intrigue, Philadelphia is transformed into an utterly unrecognizable landscape – or seascape – of protean, Bosh-like strangeness, perhaps best represented by Tom Taffrail’s indignant retort to Bolt that he is not the only man that has been run foul of by unlawful cruisers in this here cursedty [sic] deceitful town. There’s sharks and swordfish enough, though they keep their heads underwater, to nibble one’s eyes out of his head and run their snouts into one’s keel. I have seen a painted pirate run up into a gentle-man’s headquarters as naturally as into a Spanish West-India harbour [sic]. [22] The good citizens of Philadelphia are here reduced to sinister sea creatures or the keels of renegade corsairs (the latter identification pungent with sexual innuendo)—a comic but nevertheless disquieting depiction that conflates machine with man and beast. Nor is it an arbitrary choice to give these sentiments to Tom. “Seafarers and their families dominated certain parts of the Philadelphia cityscape,” Simon P. Newman reminds us, enjoying “a vibrant and highly visible culture.” While Philadelphia’s sailors “participated in the street politics of the early republic alongside laborers, mechanics, and other working men and women, more than any other group they had witnessed and experienced revolutionary transformations, and they participated in American politics within that context.” [23] A peculiar and pugnacious combination of rube and sea-dog, Tom is also the consummate street performer, belting out a spooky moritat about a murderous sailor and his mistress’ ghost as part of Nobody’s deliverance from Ravin’s clutches. Not only has Bird tapped into and deployed what Newman regards as the self-conscious display that characterized the behavior of Philadelphia’s seafarers, whose “scarred” and “tattooed” bodies vividly “proclaimed their profession,” [24] but he also allows the character who would have most closely been identified with the revolutionary energies of the Atlantic World the power to most memorably re-inscribe the streets of Philadelphia as unsettling sea-lanes of depravity, full of predatory creatures best policed by guileless sailors with powerful fists and strong singing voices. Indeed, fisticuffs are never far off in Bird’s Philadelphia. It is Tom who earlier thrashes Bolt and his cronies when the part-time lawyer assails Diana on a street corner; frightened and angry, she demands vengeance, insisting that her suitor, Mr. Raleigh, “come along and make ready to beat somebody.” “Isn’t this the City of Brotherly Love?” protests the Southern gentleman. [25] It would appear not. In her New World Drama , Elizabeth Maddock Dillon writes of how dramatic texts as well as theatrical performance engender “operations of representation” that oscillate between “riotous disorder and collective consent,” for drama and performance make visible “the possibility of consensus in the making as well as the possibility of . . . dissolving [a] collective sense of meaning . . . into one of noise and riot.” [26] I suggest that The City Looking Glass accomplishes precisely this work: dissolving a consensus image of “the City of Brotherly Love” as an ordered, gentlemanly, Federalist city while proposing another. Bird’s play offers us a Philadelphia at once less-familiar and more frightening—more volatile yet more exuberant—than the metropolis imagined by James Nelson Barker, a rendering that also seems to lure us away from the possibility of consensus. Indeed, the City of Brotherly Love has here become the space of rough-and-tumble and free-for-all, of disorderly “noise and riot.” If Bird’s looking glass may be apprehended in and as the act of performance, those reflections we do not see—or those performances we glimpse only fleetingly—are at least as significant as those that command our fuller attention. Though largely absent from the play, Bird would seem to deploy Philadelphia’s African American population as a further signification of disruption and dissensus at the performative heart of the city’s contested character. Samuel Otter has commented upon Bolt’s humiliation when one of the female passersby he seeks to accost turns out to be a finely-attired African American woman, arguing that staging such a “misalignment between costume and visage, and playing this exposure for shock and laughs” underlines a point of juncture between Bird’s treatment of African Americans in Looking Glass , and Edward W. Clay’s notorious print series, “Life in Philadelphia.” [27] Certainly this moment in the play performs work similar to Clay’s etchings, widely popular and first issued between 1828 and 1830: to mock social posturing amongst the city’s African American population. At the same time, Bird’s text is more multivalent here than we might think, very much as Clay’s print series also seems to have been. Otter reminds us that Clay’s African American caricatures represent “a mixture of class desire and African American satire, in ratios impossible to recover.” [28] This point is further clarified by Christian DuComb, who speaks of Clay’s aquatints as “lampooning the pretentious manners of both whites and blacks . . . [albeit] Clay’s mockery of affluent whites seem[s] comparatively mild.” [29] What is especially interesting about Bolt’s brief encounter with the black woman is that, though finely dressed, she is hardly displaying or performing herself in the way that Bolt and his cronies seem to be: indeed, what first attracts Bolt’s attention is that she “bends her head and walks fast” as she passes by, anxious (most likely) to avoid the attention of these white men. Douglas A. Jones, Jr. has explored the significance of self-display and parade for African Americans during the early years of the nineteenth century, arguing that such phenomena signified that “their (black nation within a) nation existed,” [30] such moments of self-enactment functioned in a sense “as rituals do, in that they aestheticized, formalized, and sustained structures of (national) feeling among their [African American] participants.” [31] Looking Glass may thus be said to undermine and/or deny such moments of efficacious self-display for/to Philadelphia’s African Americans. There is no such “national feeling” in evidence at such a hurried and apparently apprehensive moment. It is Bolt, in fact, whose swaggering self-performance is called to our attention—though such behavior hardly makes a favorable impression here, merely reinforcing (as one of his henchmen would have it) that Bolt “prides himself on being an ignoramus.” [32] Every bit as compelling is the utter absence of African American characters otherwise. The invisibility of the city’s African Americans in Bird’s Looking Glass may very well have been a function of their irreducible visibility in the cultural and political life of contemporary Philadelphia. By the decade of the 1820s, Philadelphia was “the most important center of free blacks in the country, [its] black churches, schools, and mutual aid associations . . . more numerous than any other American city’s.” [33] Such a reality unsettled white historians like John Fanning Watson, who in 1830 lamented that “the aspirings [sic] and little vanities” of contemporary black Philadelphians “have been rapidly growing,” and “while twenty to thirty years ago they were much humbler, [now] they show an overweening fondness for display and vainglory.” [34] The villainous Ravin seems especially perturbed by the city’s blacks, exhibiting a penchant for perceiving Philadelphia itself through the lens of its African American population (perhaps as a reminder of his hailing from less racially heterogenous New Hampshire). Outraged by the behavior of Raleigh, Ravin accuses him of possessing “more impudence than a Philadelphia negro.” [35] Later, in drunken exasperation, he laments to Mrs. Gall that “they allow no nuisances here, except negro class meetings, dogs, and church bells.” [36] Such class meetings did indeed signify to many of Philadelphia’s uniquely visible and influential African American population; ever since clergyman Richard Allen established the first such black communion in Philadelphia in 1786, such class meetings symbolized “equal privileges for blacks,” even as they engendered “recalcitrant white opposition” from the very beginning. [37] Interestingly, in his descriptions of Philadelphia’s blacks, Ravin uses the term “negro”—an appellation that John Fanning Watson reports was no longer favored by the city’s more-assured and self-conscious African Americans, who increasingly preferred to call themselves “coloured” [sic]. [38] It is hard to know whether Ravin’s turn of phrase signifies his own or Bird’s indifference to this preference (or indeed, whether or not Watson is even entirely correct). What is more certain, however, is that Bird’s Looking Glass reflects its author’s (and most likely white Philadelphia’s) ambivalence about its African American population, a population that is at once largely absent from the play as well as inseparable from all the “noise and chaos” inherent in the representation and signification of Philadelphia’s combustible, boisterous, and often-antagonistic urban character. Highway Robbery In City Looking Glass , Ravin arranges for an ersatz kidnapping of Diana so that he himself might “rescue” her from the clutches of his co-conspirator. The plot (which quickly unravels) is set to take place as Diana travels by coach along the Ridge Road. [39] The primary thoroughfare connecting Philadelphia and Reading, the Ridge Road had been in use since the early years of the eighteenth century; it was heavy with traffic in Bird’s day, offering weary travelers a number of inns and fashionable hotels where they might rest after a long day’s journey. It was a dangerous route as well, and in the year following the publication of City Looking Glass , a real incident took place on the Ridge Road that riveted the attention of all of Philadelphia. In the early morning hours of 6 December 1829, the Reading Mail Stage was set upon by three highwaymen named Porter, Poteet, and Wilson. According to contemporary accounts, these men were weavers residing in Northern Liberties, a district at the time that was just outside of the City of Philadelphia. Porter seems to have been the ringleader: he apparently organized the undertaking and it was he who robbed the passengers and rifled through the mailboxes while Wilson and Poteet guarded him with their pistols. [40] Eventually, the three were apprehended; Porter would be tried and executed upon Poteet’s testimony, while Wilson’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by President Jackson. These men belonged to Philadelphia’s growing population of Irish immigrants, many of whom resided in Kensington and the Northern Liberties, where they were often employed as semi-skilled handloom weavers. Indeed, tensions in the former neighborhood had already ignited into rioting in 1828, with immigrant Roman Catholic Irish weavers pitted against Protestant American Nativists. [41] Charles Durang speaks of the “unprecedented excitement” in Philadelphia “resulting from the trial and conviction of the three mail robbers” in the spring of 1830, going on to mention that “business at the Walnut Street Theatre had not been very brisk, and it struck [manager] Sam Chapman that to dramatize the subject of this excitement would prove a clever card to attract the audience who then patronized the house.” [42] Called The Mail Robbers , the play would premiere on 10 May of that year. Clearly, the crime struck a chord and Chapman aimed to capitalize. Mrs. Trollope herself notes the “great interest” shown by a number of Philadelphians in the case of “two criminals who had been convicted of robbing the Baltimore [sic] Mail, and who were lying under sentence of death.” She was told that “one of the prisoners [Wilson] was an American, and the other [Porter] an Irishman,” the former convinced that his sentence of death would be commuted. She goes on to report that several of her companions, “in canvassing the subject, declared that if one were hanged and the other spared, [Porter’s] hanging would be a murder and not a legal execution, [as] very nearly all the white men who had suffered death since the Declaration of Independence had been Irishmen.” [43] This sympathy for Porter is perhaps surprising, particularly given the fact that the Philadelphia Saturday Bulletin had described him as a terrifying criminal, “the blackest and most fiendish we ever looked upon,” whose “very childhood exhibited symptoms of a bold, audacious and vindictively wicked disposition, which defied all advice and correction.” [44] The discussion described by Mrs. Trollope reminds us that the production at the Walnut Street was extremely attuned to the obsessions of Philadelphia. Indeed, the fates of Porter and Wilson had yet to be resolved at the time The Mail Robbers was presented; Porter would not be executed until 3 July 1830—about two months after the play’s premiere. While The Mail Robbers , along with Looking Glass , seeks to challenge, redefine, and reconfigure notions of what Philadelphia means and how the city signifies to/for its inhabitants, there is one especially important difference to consider here. The response to the former play is shaped in certain especially significant ways by its performance (the latter play, as mentioned above, seems never to have been staged). In both plays, Philadelphia (and particularly its hinterlands in the case of Mail Robbers ) is a place characterized by real danger, but that danger seems to have been more urgently and unambiguously presented in Mail Robbers— perhaps not surprisingly, given the episodes dramatized here were inspired by true events. As we will see, what is especially interesting is the way in which the real-life and enacted dramas seem to have been to some degree conflated by individuals like Charles Durang, whose History of the Philadelphia Stage provides us with a sense of the peculiar semiotic disruptions that Chapman and his play may have accomplished for audiences of the Quaker City. Once more, the locus for contesting the character of the city and its environs are the streets and byways of the region, as the venerable old Ridge Turnpike becomes a place of mayhem and crime. Federal Philadelphia may have built its primacy upon the port and docks that connected it to the wider Atlantic world; by the beginning of the 1830s, however, Philadelphia’s commercial supremacy as a shipping port was slipping badly, with New York and Baltimore on the rise. Even so, rich deposits of iron and anthracite extracted upstate began to transform Philadelphia into the nation’s primary center of manufacturing. [45] In Mail Robbers , the city’s focus is turned from the Delaware wharves toward the transshipment centers, factories, and coalfields of Schuylkill County and the Lehigh Valley. According to the Columbia Star , Porter was especially interested in setting upon the Reading Mail because it carried valuable goods and well-to-do travelers between Philadelphia and the increasingly-prosperous industrial hubs of Reading and Pottsville. [46] In turning the city toward its own backcountry, Chapman was also offering his audience a kind of anthropological night journey into the wastes of Philadelphia’s contemporary “urban wilderness.” In doing so, his drama would seem to have undermined the ways in which Philadelphia had long sought to deploy its urban and semi-urban green spaces not as signifiers of wastes and danger but as “carefully constructed rural ‘stages’ upon which to perform” itself. [47] Naomi J. Stubbs has argued that it was within and upon “stages” such as the gardens at Gray’s Ferry just across the Schuylkill River, and those located at Vauxhall at Broad and Chestnut streets, that a salubrious “oneness with nature” might be enacted; indeed, by “highlighting those features . . . most clearly conforming to the rural idyll, proprietors [of these sites] capitalized on ideas of rural innocence and its relationship to patriotism through” the enactments of those various entertainments offered at such locations. [48] The rural and semi-rural space that served as the locus for Mail Robbers was apparently reconfigured as savage and terrifying by Chapman and his creative team, however, presenting its audience with a picture of human beings, not as well-pruned cultivars, but as untamed and intractable prodigies of nature and liberty run amok. Yet here it is not simply urban or semi-rural spaces that function as sites of contestation: the actor-manager at the helm of the Walnut Street, the playmaker who had crafted The Mail Robbers, became himself the locus of contested viewings and interpretations. A playbill promoting the drama suggests that Chapman sought to sell the play as a bit of moral edification, for we read that the theatre managers “ever desirous to display vice in its true colors and to show the rising generation the inevitable consequences of crime, have embraced the leading features of the late atrocious mail robbery in forming the present drama.” [49] Durang reports that the play was repeated on the evening after its premiere to “a full pit and gallery,” despite the fact that “the boxes were thin.” [50] This would seem to suggest that responses to the play were divided along class lines, with more respectable and genteel theatregoers turning away from what more robust, populist viewers applauded. Such a conflicted response comes as no surprise when we consider the variety of ways in which Porter and his behavior were understood in Philadelphia, as well as the various ways of reading or viewing Chapman himself. Despite the depiction of Porter in the Philadelphia Saturday Bulletin as little more than a savage, Mrs. Trollope’s companions clearly sympathized with him, as the city’s growing Irish population doubtless did as well. The American Sentinel and Mercantile Advertiser reported that “special constables,” as well as a corps of “Marines from the Navy Yard” were placed on alert the day that Porter met the hangman, as “many persons were apprehensive that [his execution] would be attended with riot,” most likely by Irish immigrants from Kensington and Northern Liberties. [51] Most compelling here, however, is Charles Durang’s response, for he seems to conflate Chapman and Porter while at the same time evaluating both men’s “performances” quite differently. He describes the latter as an Irishman (a stout, thickset man, with a very sinister countenance pitted with the smallpox) [who] seemed to give all the orders to his associates in villainy. He exhibited not only that quality which in an honorable cause would have been called chivalrous bravery, but also, in rifling the passengers, displayed much courtesy and politeness. [52] Durang goes on to report that Porter’s chivalry manifested itself most memorably in his refusal to take a silver watch given to one of the passengers by his mother and that he even went so far as to return a piece of tobacco. Clearly, we are encountering here what Peter P. Reed regards as a fundamental characteristic of the rogue protagonist upon the early American stage: the demonstration of “singular and spectacular outlaw charisma.” [53] What is especially interesting about Durang’s recollection of the crime is that no such behavior is attributed to Porter in the account of the robbery printed in the Columbia Star , where it is Poteet who is said to have returned a watch (supposedly a family heirloom) to one of the passengers, as well as half-dollar to another. Given that his description of the real Porter and the actual crime is offered in the context of a description of The Mail Robbers , one begins to feel that Durang’s recollection of the former may have been shaped by the latter. If so, does this supposed depiction of Porter and his behavior provide us with a rough sense of what Chapman’s Mail Robbers —and the performance of Porter—may have offered audiences? We can do little more than speculate here, but certainly, Durang is much less sanguine about Chapman’s portrayal than Porter’s self-enactment. He is especially critical of Chapman’s “false and trashy, melodramatic coloring,” for while conceding Chapman an “artist in that species of clap-trap drama, . . . the chaste and high behests of Melpomene” being absent from his craft, his acting was merely “pretentious and illusory,” his gifts sufficient only for dramatizing “local subjects of a startling and horrid nature.” [54] The conflation of Porter’s charismatic lowness with Chapman’s less-admirable low style would seem to present Chapman / Porter as what Reed might call “a contested site of cultural valuation,” part of that larger process whereby the stage “transforms the outcasts and conscripts of circum-Atlantic modernity into entertainment.” [55] Indeed, the conflation of Porter and Chapman seems itself to be a function of that “stagey low [which] emerges from and destabilizes the identity formations, collective affiliations, and disciplinary practices of Atlantic modernity.” [56] Further destabilizing rogue representations, however, is the contrast between Durang’s ungenerous assessment of Chapman’s capabilities and what we find elsewhere, particularly when we turn to the reminiscences of Francis C. Wemyss, the British theatre impresario who brought him from Covent Garden to the United States in 1827. [57] Wemyss writes that to his mind Chapman was “a man of varied talent, of much knowledge and a universal favorite,” going on to note that “had he lived, he would have produced an entire revolution in minor American drama.” [58] Unfortunately, Chapman met his demise soon after the premiere of The Mail Robbers —indeed, as a direct result of his staging the play, at least in Durang’s telling. “For the purpose of dramatizing this abhorrent event,” he writes, “Chapman, with his scene painter Wilkins or Harry Isherwood (we forget which) went on horseback to view the spot [where the robbery took place], so as to give an accurate description of its localities.” [59] While at the scene, Chapman was wounded in a fall from his horse; the wound was further infected when later that evening he donned his costume at the Walnut Street—including a brass armor breastplate which he wore against his skin. “Verdigris poisoned the wound,” Durang goes on to report, and Chapman died a few days later, on 16 May. [60] Reinforcing Reed’s sense that presenting the underclass on American stages represents a constant tension between “discipline and unruliness,” [61] it is not especially difficult to read Durang as celebrating Porter’s unruliness while also offering us a tale of stage sensationalism and hack melodrama justifiably disciplined: Chapman the “claptrap” performer is hoist with his own phenomenological petard, the enactment of his unseemly drama leading directly to his demise. However, the question remains, why is Chapman so obviously Durang’s bête noir ? Here we must turn again to the particulars of the Philadelphia stage. Reed writes of how, beginning in the 1820s, “the clubby, personal world of managers and actors who had produced the post-revolutionary generation of theatre had begun to disappear.” [62] In Philadelphia, a development which is sometimes understood as a gradual phenomenon happened with a bang, at a very particular moment. Though Philadelphia was “the emporium of all the regular dramatic talent of the United States” during the 1828–9 theatre season, according to Francis C. Wemyss, “this season was also the most disastrous one ever known; the actors being literally in a state of desperation.” [63] By the end of the season, the three principal theatres of the city (the Chestnut Street, the Arch Street, and the Walnut Street) had closed their doors. William Warren, manager of the venerable Chestnut Street and direct heir of its Federal Era founders, was obliged to surrender his responsibilities to a new management team, consisting of Wemyss himself and Mr. Pratt. William Wood, formerly Warren’s co-manager and himself struggling to helm the tottering Arch Street, wrote subsequently of this crisis as one brought about by over-competition between the three principal theatres, going on to say that the drama “was at sixes and sevens” during the tumultuous 1828-9 season. According to Wood, it is at this moment that the history of the Philadelphia theatre, “that is to say, any history of a continuous and regular management” now “comes to an end,” for there had been “a complete debacle, or breaking up of everything that had been.” [64] The new men who were left standing in the wake of this catastrophe were managers like Wemyss and performers like his protegee, Sam Chapman. Thus, we see how Chapman may have signified the inauguration of a cheaper, tawdrier, less-decorous chapter in the history of the Philadelphia theatre—at least for men like Durang—with Mail Robbers serving as the instrument of Chapman’s subsequent (and not wholly unwelcome) removal from the stage. The Devil and Dr. Foster However, to fully grasp Chapman’s signification upon the Philadelphia stage, we must also understand his role relative to the Walnut Street’s production of an 1830 pantomime entitled Doctor Foster in Philadelphia . As with Mail Robbers , actual events lie very much at the center of the play’s energy and signification: a tale of misrepresentation and theft and naked chutzpah. Here, however, the culprits are not banditti but the impresarios of the Walnut and Arch Street theatres themselves. Similar to what we saw in the Looking Glass , the most memorable episodes of Doctor Foster take place on the street, within the public sphere and the space of public action—though the resolution offered by Foster appears to have been pitched to a different key. If Looking Glass expresses a kind of troubled, admonitory pleasure in the shifting sense of what Philadelphia means, Foster seems all giddy delight as the action winds up – it is a coming out party of sorts in celebration of a civic identity just coming into its own. Likewise, if Mail Robbers allows us to appreciate how the conflation of performance with real event works for Durang and most likely for others to represent both the nobly wicked (Porter) and the opportunistic (Chapman) as receiving their just desserts, Doctor Foster’s resolution is zanier and more explosive. With one stroke, the restoration of order appears to have been presented here as both accomplished and unlikely—perhaps even unhoped for. Doctor Foster grew directly out of what William Wood regards as a self-destructive battle between the city’s primary theatres, in particular the Arch Street and the Walnut Street. Indeed, Doctor Foster was intended in part as an ironic response to rival productions of a pantomime entitled Doctor Faustus ; the Walnut Street’s staging opened on 12 December 1829, the Arch Street’s four days later. There was a bit of skullduggery involved, however, for Durang reports that “the Chapman dynasty” at the helm of the former playhouse infiltrated the Arch Street under the pretense of confraternal solicitude, only to highjack the particulars of that theatre’s much-anticipated production of Faustus and rush the Walnut Street’s staging onto the boards just prior to its rival’s. [65] Durang reports that “public opinion was much divided on the relative merits of the piece as brought out by the two theatres,” though it is clear that he disapproves of Chapman’s decision to “reciprocate those marks of civility” extended to him on the part of the Arch Street management by “literally uprooting” its staging of the pantomime and transposing it to the Walnut Street. [66] Clearly, this was not the sort of “regular” and gentlemanly management that was said to have long-characterized the Philadelphia theatre, and whose loss is so bemoaned by William Wood above. Unsurprisingly, Francis Wemyss represents Chapman’s actions quite differently, arguing that his protegee’s gambit “was a fair business rivalry for which S. Chapman deserves great credit,” for “he reaped, by promptitude, the reward that belonged to [Arch Street manager] Philips.” [67] Once more, we see the Philadelphia stage and its rival theatres at the heart of Philadelphia’s self-enactment, for it seems to have been impossible for audiences to view either staging of Faustus without also seeing the performance of the city’s leading cultural institutions as themselves being indissolubly part of the drama. This point becomes even more clear when we consider that the Walnut Street also presented, on the same evening as the eleventh performance of Faustus (25 th December), an historical melodrama entitled William Penn; or the Elm Tree . Durang seems to regard this staging of Philadelphia and its past as a kind of antidote to the unsavoriness of the Faustus affair (though Chapman appeared in the play as the Quaker, Hickory Old Bay), conflating its romantic evocation of a bygone age with nostalgia for his own youth. All the local scenes in and adjacent to our city wherein … Penn’s first interview with the Indians occurred were accurately taken and beautifully painted. The Great Elm Tree (under whose wide-spreading branches we have passed in our boyhood), the ship Welcome floating under the bank of the Delaware, reposing … under the shadows of the majestic elm, were all very beautifully depicted. [68] Durang subsequently goes on to argue that “the representation of such historical subjects … impresses the mind with a love of country and brings pleasant memories back to the mind of age,” even as the Philadelphia stage here becomes “a normal institution to impart moral lessons in relaxation.” [69] We thus see in those dramatic offerings presented at the Walnut Street on Christmas night of 1829 contested representations of what Philadelphia is, contested representations of the work accomplished by its cultural institutions. Once more, Otter’s characteristic “set of rhetorical instabilities” is reconfigured here as a set of performative instabilities, as Philadelphia’s “spatial complexities and local urgencies” compel its dramatists to present the city “as an event, [as] the place where . . . civic identity [was] forged while the country and a transatlantic audience watched.” [70] William Penn also seems to have something in common with one of Stubbs’s several pleasure gardens: spaces on the cusps of things where cultural identity, “being intrinsically tied to the rural idyll, [to] simplicity, and innocence” feels itself to be challenged and even “supplanted by increasingly urban and modern ideas.” [71] It is this tension between rural simplicity and urban modernity—not to mention a related tension between the idealizing mission of art and its more subversive, populist vitality—that is on full display when we consider the double bill of William Penn and Doctor Faustus relative to the staging a few months later, of Doctor Foster in Philadelphia . The latter, which opened on 23 rd March 1830, is described as a “local burlesque parody” [72] of the Faustus tale, and represents a celebratory fortissimo relative to the symphony of unfolding, disruptive, and insurgent energies that we have been exploring. Certainly, there was nothing new in a burlesque treatment of Faustus , nor in the resituating of the good doctor’s medieval career within a bustling, contemporary metropolis; such treatments were already familiar to London theatre-goers, who had seen their first Faustus harlequinade as early as 1723. [73] What is unique about the Walnut Street’s treatment, however, is its determination to deploy the form as a way of seeing and enacting Philadelphia itself, utilizing as it does the sudden transformations and visual sleights-of-hand so characteristic of pantomime to destabilize any representation of the city as the gentlemanly, “distressingly regular” metropolis so famously bemoaned by Charles Dickens about a decade later. [74] The action begins in an “old times suburban schoolhouse in the vicinity of Philadelphia,” where Dr. Foster (played by Sam Chapman’s brother, William) first raises Mephistopheles, quickly shifting to “a view of the old Hall of Independence” peopled with “political loafers and office seekers.” Here a parade of rowdies apparently spoofed a popular song, “March, March, March Along Chestnut Street,” the scene reducing to ridicule one of the city’s most solemn sites, especially once a huckster appears to hawk Swain’s Panacea to “ladies, negroes, cripples and . . . Siamese boys.” [75] It is fairly easy to understand such a “graphic and miraculous representation” of lowlifes and the urban hoi polloi as an instance of what Dillon describes as “the local and embodied nature of the performative commons,” an embodiment imparting to an otherwise-invisible populace the enduring force of “possibilities . . . that can be mobilized at the site of ontic and mimetic intersection . . . in scenes of dissensus and epistemic disruption.” [76] In fact, what Durang calls “the old Hall of Independence”—a kind of national “performative commons”—had only quite recently been awarded this illustrious sobriquet, for it was the Marquis de Lafayette’s visit to the site upon his grand tour of the United States in 1824 that helped to shape the Philadelphia public’s growing awareness of the city’s history. As Nicholas Wainwright has noted, Lafayette’s official reception in the East Room of the State House brought the building itself “which had hitherto been accorded little reverence,” to the attention of the guarantors of Philadelphia’s cultural patrimony. [77] On that day a parade very different from the one described in Durang’s account of Doctor Foster passed before the State House. Beneath a triumphal arch some 24 feet high marched Lafayette’s military escort: 4000 cavalrymen, infantrymen, artillerists, and riflemen, along with 150 veterans of the Revolutionary War and a number of floats carrying several hundred cord-winders, rope-makers, weavers, shipbuilders, butchers, and coopers. [78] While few in the audience would have experienced the events of 1776, Lafayette’s parade had taken place less than six years before Doctor Foster was presented and would have thus been very much alive in civic memory. The parade of loafers and office-seekers, of hucksters and mountebanks and cripples, thus conflates, undermines, and destabilizes several of the most celebrated moments in Philadelphia civic memory by reclaiming the “performative commons,” while at the same time deflating the aesthetic aspirations of the Doctors Faustus presented just a few months earlier. High culture and momentous history are here reduced to dispute and ridicule, even as such ridicule opens up a space for an irreverent, and impertinent present—a present (and a city) that increasingly prided itself on a refusal to stand on ceremony. A subsequent transformation then hurls Foster into the midst of what we have already discovered to function as a signifier of robust, “chaotic,” and decidedly contemporary Philadelphia: an African American scene—specifically a religious meeting quickly expanding into a euphoric, disorderly “general melee.” [79] While we have only Durang’s performance reconstruction to work from, it would seem rather easy here to apply the lens offered to us by Eric Lott when attempting to grasp the multivalent semiotics of such a moment. This church celebration presided over by a “sable gemman” [sic] invites the Walnut Street’s predominately white audience both to participation and derision, to “disavowal or ridicule of the Other” as well as to “an interracial identification with it” [80] —the “Other” in this case almost certainly white actors in blackface, further destabilizing any one definitive reading of this performative moment. Despite the difficulty of determining Durang’s particular attitude here (patronizing affection or ridicule are only two options), the deployment of what Douglas A. Jones, Jr. has called “linguistic incompetence” in his description of the religious meeting (“sable gemman”) would seem to reinforce the “belief that African Americans were inherently lacking as speaking subjects and therefore unqualified for full freedom in the increasingly modern world.” [81] As Jones, Jr. points out, in the absence of slavery, culture was deployed by white Northerners as a strategy for keeping African Americans captive in a realm of “existential indeterminacy.” [82] Given the relatively large size of Philadelphia’s African American population, not to mention the city’s proximity to the slave-owning Southern states (the city’s upper classes were dominated by Copperheads), [83] such a strategy was particularly and characteristically fraught in the Quaker City. In the midst of such a discussion, it is difficult not to think of Pavel Petrovich Svinin’s famous rendering of Philadelphia’s Black Methodists Holding a Prayer Meeting , executed in watercolor and pen and ink sometime around 1813. This outdoor scene is equal parts ebullience and chaos; its depiction of the celebrants in what would appear to be a contagious moment of communal spiritual ecstasy is equal parts ridicule and fascination – the artist both identifying with and determinedly distancing himself from his subjects. Svinin thus may be said to refract and to reiterate Jones, Jr.’s “existential indeterminacy” in this work. With much less to go on, Durang’s tone (as well as Doctor Foster’s ) may very well reflect a similar fluidity, accomplishing the work of the “captive stage” in the slippery space between ridicule and subversive high-spirits, between racist mimicry and patronizing fascination. In the following scene, after Foster has escaped from the Arch Street Prison (where he had been incarcerated for attacking a local politician), we find ourselves on Prune Street, “next to the old jail wall,” where Foster “appears as Colonel Pluck of the Bloody Eighty-Fourth Regiment.” [84] This is a particularly dense moment of the pantomime, one which we can only understand by situating it within the city’s particular past and present. The “old jail wall” on Prune Street where Foster finds himself doubtless belongs to what was known as the Walnut Street Penitentiary, a structure that extended from Walnut to Prune Street and from Fifth Street to Sixth. Established in 1773, the prison had been subsequently transformed “from a simple holding place for those awaiting trial . . . into a place and instrument of punishment and reformation in and of itself, wherein the minds and bodies of criminals might be attuned to responsible work.” [85] In new construction undertaken in the 1790s, it was specified that there be added cells “for separate and solitary confinement,” thus inaugurating what would become perhaps the most distinctive feature of the so-called Pennsylvania System of prison reform. [86] The Arch Street Prison from which Foster has escaped represented a subsequent (and failed) attempt at reform; inaugurated in 1823, it proved a notoriously disagreeable place whose inmates suffered from an outbreak of cholera just weeks after the prison was opened. Peter P. Reed has commented upon the ways in which theatrical forms, and pantomime in particular, were put to use in the early Republic, pointing out how such entertainments allowed the “stagey low” to emerge from and destabilize “identity formations” and “disciplinary practices of Atlantic modernity.” [87] Here Doctor Foster deploys the quick transitions and transformations characteristic of pantomime to destabilize the often-misplaced idealism and moral pretentiousness that compromised Pennsylvania penal reform in the fraught transition from theory to praxis. Neither the Arch Street nor the Walnut Street prisons can contain nor forestall the hijinks of the protean Dr. Foster (at once a Philadelphia schoolteacher, Doctor Faustus himself, and now Colonel Pluck) as the sheer performative gusto of the character makes him impervious to imprisonment and utterly resistant to the sort of “responsible work” that the penal system was supposed to engender in all those who were locked away. Instead of turning to thrift and industry, Foster turns to mock aria, belting out “It’s my Delight to Learn Them to Write in our City,” before the scene shifts “slap dash” to yet another exterior, where Foster raises visions of specters from steamy washtubs. [88] Disciplinary practices (and institutions) are not for him. Foster’s appearance as Colonel Pluck also situates the pantomime as an act of phenomenological vandalism carried out against Philadelphia’s decorous, gentlemanly self-image as propagated and circulated by the city’s elite. Since the passage of the Militia Act in 1792, Philadelphia workingmen had bristled at the requirement that all able-bodied white males between the ages of eighteen and forty-five serve with local, self-governing militia detachments. While elite volunteer units (disparagingly called “Silk Stocking Companies”) formed the upper tier of Pennsylvania’s militia during the first half of the nineteenth century, the public militia companies ranked far below these in civic esteem. All eligible men unable to afford private company membership were required to enroll in such public companies, where they could expect only the poorest sort of training, often at the hands of indifferent or incompetent officers. Taken from work without compensation and often fined for non-compliance, these men also had to equip themselves at their own expense. [89] The Northern Liberties 84 th Regiment was one such company, and in 1825 its members elected John Pluck, a hostler or perhaps a tavern keeper described in contemporary accounts as bow-legged and hunchbacked, as their colonel. On Muster Day, in an attempt to “irritate middlebrow spectators with a drawn-out parody of the militia system,” [90] Pluck led the men of the 84 th in what the Saturday Evening Post described as a “Grand Military Farce.” [91] He was “mounted on a spavined white nag, behatted with a huge chapeau-de-bras , [and] a . . . woman’s bonnet . . . burlap pants clinched up with a belt and enormous buckle [as well as] a giant sword parodying ceremonial military dress.” [92] Pluck quickly became a national celebrity, appearing on stages in New York, Boston, Providence, Albany, and Richmond before returning to Philadelphia and finding himself court-martialed. Sean DuComb tells us that the erstwhile Colonel’s “name and likeness circulated widely for more than a decade after his national tour,” though by 1832 Pluck would undergo a transformation from an “agent of parody” into “an object of contempt, [a] symbol of racialized disorder” conflated with African American organizers of annual parades anticipating (and later celebrating) the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies. [93] Intriguingly, Doctor Foster seems to represent Colonel Pluck in mid-career, a parody of Philadelphia elite pretension and “Silk Stocking” affectedness rather than a burlesque of African American aspiration (indeed, the only musical number that is not explicitly identified as a parody in Durang’s description of Doctor Foster is a serenade performed on the Kent Bugle by Philadelphia’s celebrated African-American maestro, Frank Johnson). Here an 1825 Muster Day lampoon of proud militiamen on display is replicated onstage (rather in the manner of Richard Schechner’s “twice-behaved behavior”) to produce both a simulacrum of an earlier event as well as a further destabilization of aristocratic Philadelphia at the hands of the “stagey low.” In eighteenth-century afterpieces like The Necromancer , as John O’Brien points out, when Harlequin Faustus is at last taken to Hell, a convocation of pagan deities typically arrives for a concluding masque, the presence of the gods “a sign that order has been restored to a cosmos disrupted by [Faustus’] illicit magic.” [94] When Dr. Foster is carried off to the infernal regions, however, the effect and intention seem very different, the audience enjoying a grand and most sudden ingenious change of [Carter’s Livery Stables] into frying pandemonium. Chorus of fryers, bakers, brewers, bailers, roasters, stewards and broilers [crying] “Put him in the pot & make him hot. Hot pot, make him hot.” [95] The Walnut Street’s burlesque refuses us a sense of order restored from on high. For it is not the gods, but a combustible and uproarious gang of kitchen laborers who take the stage—managing to punish Foster while at the same time declining to resolve the silliness and visual anarchy of the evening into anything like regularity and order. We are left here in a space halfway between charivari and street party, a space where “anything can happen and it probably will”— Hellzapoppin’ on the streets of the Quaker City. Indeed, Durang’s closing remarks concerning the play point to the final transformation that Doctor Foster was able to accomplish. “This truly ridiculous burlesque upon the drama of ‘Faustus,’ the production of which had caused so much bitter rivalry between the Arch and the Walnut houses, to both of their detriment, now created much fun and laughter.” [96] The play reimagines Philadelphia itself as a kind of urban Cockaigne, a chaotic city of grotesque yet thoroughly delightful anarchic misrule and semiotic plenitude—exorcizing the specter of morally edifying (and financially ruinous) high drama from both the Arch Street and the Walnut Street houses, clearing a space on the Philadelphia stage for the delight of the masses rather than their moral edification. We are here a long way indeed from Penn’s Greene Country Town, from his Great Elm Tree, and from the good ship Welcome , just as we are a long way from the street scenes created by William Russell Birch—from a city characterized by nostalgia, genteel regularity, and a “prosaic despotism of right angles.” In the Philadelphia of Sam Chapman and Robert Montgomery Bird, a city that had only just begun to see and to perform itself as such, the angles are forever crooked and the conduct provocatively irregular. Conclusion When Philadelphia audiences of the early Jacksonian era beheld for the first time their (very contemporary) city reflected back to them from the stages of Philadelphia’s several playhouses, they encountered something deliberately other than the rural idyll of Penn’s Holy Experiment as well as something deliberately alternative to the eighteenth-century Shrine of Liberty. The civic culture of the Quaker City was at an inflection point, and Philadelphians went to the theatre in part to experience the reworking, the re-presentation, of that civic identity in performative time. What they found was a heterogenous and volatile, dangerous yet exuberantly modern metropolis—a place of “noise and riot” characterized by depravity and violence as well as by a raw and free-wheeling absurdity, by the grotesque as well as the gleeful. Indeed, plays like Mail Robbers and Doctor Foster in Philadelphia invited audiences to apprehend not just the “stagy low” but the theatres themselves as sites where contemporaneity was being constructed—with the playhouses and their managers often engaged in self-referential sleights-of-hand. Here the relationship between signified and signifier becomes a shifty and promiscuous one, whether deliberately (dueling Doctor Faustus productions become the singular travesty of Doctor Foster , with Philadelphia and her theatres themselves as protagonists), or by semiotic happenstance (an actor-manager suffers a mortal blow for the crime of bad taste, while the somehow nobler though more dangerous Porter who inspired his performance faces execution on the gallows). For its part, Robert Montgomery Bird’s City Looking Glass seems to have inaugurated the sort of semiotic rough-and-tumble characteristic of a thoroughly reimagined urban-cultural landscape. Here we find ourselves for the first time in a space where Quaker earnestness and solemnity dissolve into the outrageous and the preposterous, where street scenes reveal neither “wearisome regularity” nor patriot parades but instead crooked alleyways peopled by morally-misshapen lowlifes whose machinations drive the action of the play and who seem intent upon finishing off once and for all any lingering sense of Philadelphia propriety or the idealism that supposedly characterized the city’s founding. Consensus becomes dissensus, with Philadelphia placed on display as a site for the contestation of identities. The City of Brotherly Love had stepped through the looking glass, and the streets now firmly belonged neither to sober Square Toes nor to stalwart patriots, but to the rascals, the reprobates and the scoundrels. References [1] Gary B. Nash, First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 124. [2] Ibid., 109. [3] Ibid., 8-9. [4] Bird, City Looking Glass (Philadelphia: 1828), 4. [5] Ibid. [6] “A Mirror of the Times: A History of the Mirror Metaphor in Journalism” Journalism Studies , vol. 12, no. 5 (2011): 578. [7] Samuel Otter, Philadelphia Stories: America’s Literature of Race and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 8. [8] Ibid. [9] Ibid. [10] Francis Courtney. Wemyss, Twenty-Six Years of the Life of an Actor and Manager (New York: Burgess, Stringer and Co., 1847), 84–5. [11] Peter P. Reed, Rogue Performances: Staging the Underclasses in Early American Theatre Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 133. [12] Ibid., 137. [13] Otter, Philadelphia Stories , 11. [14] Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (New York: Alfred K. Knopf, 1949), 260–61. [15] Hamilton, Men and Manners in America (New York: Augustus M. Keeley, 1968), 337–38. [16] Otter, Philadelphia Stories , 73. [17] Bird, City Looking Glass , 6. [18] Ibid., 66. [19] Otter, Philadelphia Stories , 88. [20] Bird, City Looking Glass , 18. [21] Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649 – 1849 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 3. [22] Bird. City Looking Glass , 114. [23] Simon Newman, Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 122–3. [24] Ibid. [25] Bird, City Looking Glass , 48. [26] Ibid., 49. [27] Otter, Philadelphia Stories , 105–6. [28] Ibid., 87. [29] Christian DuComb, Haunted City: Three Centuries of Racial Impersonation in Philadelphia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 60. [30] Douglas A. Jones, Jr., The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 34. [31] Ibid. [32] Bird, City Looking Glass , 45. [33] Nash, First City , 147. [34] John Fanning Watson, Annals of Philadelphia: Being a Collection of Memoirs, Anecdotes, and Incidents of the City and Its Inhabitants (Philadelphia: 1830), 479. [35] Bird, City Looking Glass , 30. [36] Ibid., 52. [37] Gayard Wilmore, ed., African American Religious Studies: An Interdisciplinary Anthology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), 7. [38] Watson, Annals of Philadelphia , 479. [39] Bird, City Looking Glass , 21. [40] Columbia Star and Christian Index (Philadelphia: 15 May 1830), 318. [41] Michael Feldberg, The Philadelphia Riots of 1844: A Study of Ethnic Conflict (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1975), 4, 13. [42] Charles Durang, The Philadelphia Stage from 1749 – 1850 (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Sunday Dispatch, 1854-55), vol. III, 243. [43] Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans , 286. [44] Philadelphia Saturday Bulletin . INCOMPLETE CITATION, (Philadelphia: 15 May h , 1830). [45] Nash, First City , 157. [46] Columbia Star and Christian Index. INCOMPLETE CITATION, 318. [47] Naomi J. Stubbs, Cultivating National Identity through Performance: American Pleasure Gardens and Entertainment (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 54. [48] Ibid. [49] Quoted in Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 275. [50] Ibid. [51] American Sentinel and Mercantile Advertiser (Philadelphia: 3 July 1830). [52] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 243. [53] Reed, Rogue Performances , 10. [54] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 243. [55] Reed, Rogue Performances , 5. [56] Ibid. [57] Oscar Weglin, Early American Plays, 1774 – 1830: A Compilation of the Titles of Plays and Dramatic Poems Written by Authors Born or Residing in North America Previous to 1830 (New York: The Literary Collector Press, 1905), 21. [58] Francis Courtney Wemyss, Theatrical Biography, or The Life of an Actor Manager (Glasgow: Griffin & Co., 1848), 160. [59] The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 243. [60] Ibid. [61] Reed. Rogue Performances , 186. [62] Ibid., 15. [63] Wemyss, Theatrical Biography , 153. [64] William Wood, Personal Recollections of the Stage (Philadelphia: Henry Carey Baird, 1855), 353. [65] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 266. [66] Ibid. [67] Wemyss, Theatrical Biography , 154. [68] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [69] Ibid. [70] Otter, Philadelphia Stories , 14. [71] Stubbs, Cultivating National Identity through Performance , 59. [72] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [73] John O’Brien, Harlequin Britain: Pantomime and Entertainment, 1600 – 1760 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 110. [74] Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation , ed. Patricia Ingham (New York: Penguin, 2000), 104. [75] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [76] Dillon, New World Drama , 29–30. [77] Nicholas B. Wainwright, “The Age of Nicholas Biddle: 1825–1841” in Philadelphia: a 300-Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1982), 301. [78] Rosemarie K. Bank, Theatre Culture in America , 1825–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 14. [79] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [80] Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 124. [81] Jones, Jr., The Captive Stage , 49. [82] Ibid. [83] Nash., First City , 231. [84] The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [85] Newman, Embodied History , 10. [86] LeRoy B. DePuy, “The Walnut Street Prison: Pennsylvania’s First Penitentiary.” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies . vol. 18, no. 2 (1951): 131. [87] Reed, Rogue Performances , 5. [88] Durang, Philadelphia Stage , vol III, 271. [89] Nash, First City , 201. [90] DuComb, Haunted City: Three Centuries of Racial Impersonation in Philadelphia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 90. [91] Saturday Evening Post . (Philadelphia: INCOMPLETE CITATION AND DATE FORMAT 21 May, 1825). [92] Susan G. Davis, “The Career of Colonel Pluck: Folk Drama and Public Protest in 19 th Century Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography , vol. 109 no. 2 (April 1985): 188. [93] Ducomb, Haunted City , 89–91. [94] O’Brien, Harlequin Britain , 110. [95] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [96] Ibid. Footnotes About The Author(s) RAYMOND SARACENI teaches in the Center for Liberal Education at Villanova University. He is a company member of Iron Age Theatre and holds a Ph.D. in drama from Tufts 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 “An Art for Which There Is as Yet No Name.” Mobile Color, Artistic Composites, Temporal Objects The Anti-Victorianism of Victorian Revivals Tricks, Capers, and Highway Robbery: Philadelphia Self-Enactment upon the Early Jacksonian Stage “The Spirit of the Thing is All”: The Federal Theatre’s Staging of Medieval Drama in the Los Angeles Religious Community The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical; Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity Previous Next Attribution:

Dan Venning Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 1 Visit Journal Homepage "Ya Got Trouble, My Friend, Right Here": Romanticizing Grifters in American Musical Theatre Dan Venning By Published on December 10, 2020 Download Article as PDF Grifters. Flim-flammers. Matchstick men. Confidence men. [1] These are only a few of the many exotic and perhaps amusing-sounding names for those who spin the truth and perpetrate frauds on unsuspecting victims. There’s a certain charm to the concept of the con artist, as hinted at in the term “artist,” suggesting that there is an art of the con—at least in fiction, or in the abstract. As evidenced by classic films like The Sting (1973), Ocean’s Eleven (1960, 2001), and Catch Me If You Can (2002), the character of the grifter is often depicted as charming, sympathetic, fun, or glamorous. Perhaps that is part of the reason we wound up with a con man in the White House. Many Americans consistently root for the con man even in the real world. President Donald J. Trump’s very admission of being a confidence man is what leads his supporters towards this trope, since this is precisely what he has done, repeatedly. In the Access Hollywood tape where he admitted to sexual assault, he said “when you’re a star, they’ll let you get away with anything.” It’s the “get away with it” that I’m focusing on here—by deploying the trope of the con man, Trump doesn’t even have to pretend he’s honest. And he knows it: “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters,” he said on the campaign trail. And this is nothing new for him: he’s been a shark for decades. He ends his (ghostwritten) book, Trump: The Art of the Deal (his name is indeed part of the title) by proudly describing how he obtained his private plane for a price that was less than a third of what it was actually worth. Then he goes on to promise that soon he will stop negotiating and scamming: “I’ve spent the first twenty years of my working life building, accumulating…the biggest challenge I see over the next twenty years is to figure out some creative ways to give back some of what I’ve gotten.” [2] For a true grifter like Trump, the promised reformation is always in the future, or imaginary; all that’s real is the egotism of the scam. Chuck Klosterman, the American pop culture essayist, writes about the viciousness of con artists in the chapter “Villains Who are Not Villains” in his book I Wear the Black Hat . Klosterman describes the American pop mythologizing of con artists as “people who—in theory—are bad citizens and social pariahs,” but also “charismatic.” He notes that the American con story usually involves a character who “has complex feelings about taking money from strangers,” who is “never as immoral as the person he works with,” and whose “marks” (those the con artist dupes) bear a great deal of the blame because “you can’t con an honest man.” But Klosterman also acknowledges that this is a false picture: those who have encountered real con artists know that they can destroy lives—the romanticized vision “is not something that’s true; it’s only something we believe.” [3] The con artist is especially prominent in American cultural studies. This makes sense, since the grifter is simply the fraudulent extreme of the salesman, and, as evidenced from both literary and historical figures, the salesman and the “American Dream” he hawks live at the heart of the imagination of the American capitalist marketplace. In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin articulates a rhetoric of bootstrapping virtue, in which hard work, honesty, and righteousness can promise any American a comfortable life. In his showy The Art of Money Getting , P. T. Barnum positions integrity and commercial success as almost interchangeable, arguing for the monetary worth of everything from circumspect communication to charitable giving. In works such as these, we see the American Dream sold—as the art of selling. As Scott A. Sandage argues in Born Losers: A History of Failure in America , in the nineteenth century, this ideology came to be cemented as an American cultural principle: a human being’s worth (and especially a man’s masculine virtue) could be tied to their financial success: those who fail to make money suffer from some moral deficiency, and those who don’t strive for riches in the first place are even worse. [4] Under this perverse logic, Charlie Brown and Willy Loman are not the victims of their own faith in an American Dream that simply isn’t attainable to everyone, but are sad sacks who deserve to be ridiculed. And in such a rubric, Mark Twain’s The Duke and The King, the con men from Huckleberry Finn who pose as heirs to claim inheritances from deceased persons they don’t know and who eventually sell Jim back into slavery, are not villainous entertainers, but somehow come to deserve the money that they swindle from the gullible. Recently, The New Yorker ’s Jia Tolentino posited con artistry as the core aesthetic of American identity; “scamming seems to have become the dominant logic of American life,” she wrote in 2018, later expanding her argument in her book Trick Mirror to claim that grifting is “the story of a generation” and that millennials have “been raised from adolescence to . . . adulthood on a relentless demonstration that scamming pays.” [5] Indeed, such romanticizing of the figure of the grifter is as prevalent in the American musical theatre as it is in American cinema, politics, literature, and the sort of pop culture about which Klosterman and Tolentino write. At the same time, the figure of the con artist has not been adequately studied within the field of musical theatre studies, despite the fact that numerous studies of this genre argue that musicals are key to the development of American national identity—and to the personal identities of both mainstream and marginalized Americans. [6] As David Savran has argued, the Broadway musical is itself a particularly American form precisely because of its “cultural instability” born from its melding of a variety of genres and both “popular and elite cultures,” its innovations and revisions that constitute reflection “upon the history of popular entertainments in the United States, from minstrelsy to hip-hop,” and its deployment of both conservative cultural nostalgia and progressive utopianism. [7] This article thus contributes to parallel discussions of what it means to “be an American” by drawing a connection between American cultural studies and studies in American musical theatre. There are numerous examples of con artists in American musicals. Even The Duke and The King have appeared on Broadway, in Big River (1985), Roger Miller and William Hauptmann’s musical adaptation of Huckleberry Finn . Mark Bramble, Michael Stewart, and Cy Coleman brought Barnum (1980) to Broadway, allowing the great impresario himself to take advantage of the suckers born every minute. Cons are central plot points in some of the most significant works of musical theatre history: Gaylord Ravenal in Show Boat (1927) and Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls (1950) are both gamblers who win the affection of a trusting woman through trickery, as does the titular character in Rodgers and Hart’s Pal Joey (1940). Rodgers and Hammerstein deploy the less-than-honest salesman as comic relief through figures such as Ali Hakim in Oklahoma! (1943) and Luther Billis in South Pacific (1949). A monograph-length study tracking the full development of the trope of grifters in musical theatre would certainly be possible, looking at these figures and others. To name only a few: Bialystock and Bloom in The Producers (2001), Oscar Diggs (the Wizard) in Wicked (2003), Elders Price and Cunningham in The Book of Mormon (2011), the murderous Monty in A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (2012), and the main characters in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (2004). Considering all of these examples from the so-called “golden age” of mid-twentieth century American musical theatre to the present, it is reasonable to interrogate what it is about American culture, and what it is about musical theatre, that makes these characters so prevalent. Examining the ways these characters are celebrated in song on stage allows us more effectively to understand the ways American culture venerates con artists, despite the actual harm they cause. In this article, I argue that musical con artists embody an extreme lionization of American individualism, becoming emblematic of the ways in which our culture wants to understand, forgive, or even idolize those who take advantage of others, precisely because grifters maintain their status as empathetic subjects, even—or perhaps especially—as they turn people and communities into objectified marks. The charm of the con artist is the charm of the individual. Part of the project of being a confidence man is the ability to maintain control of the narrative about oneself, constantly redefining and transforming the self as an individual in opposition to broader, undifferentiated groups of people who will be conned. As Lin-Manuel Miranda articulates in the final song of Hamilton (2015), “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story?,” which is in a sense a celebration of historiography: who constructs the record matters. [8] The con man maintains that control of the narrative about himself—transforming from a villain into a savior, from a victimizer into a sympathetic hero. As examples of this celebration of the grifter in the American imaginary, I focus on three examples in the canon of American musical theatre—from the 1950s golden age of the form to today: Harold Hill in The Music Man (1957), Starbuck in 110 in the Shade (1963), and the title character in Dear Evan Hansen (2015). The con artist Harold Hill is the hero of Meredith Willson’s golden age musical The Music Man —which beat West Side Story for the Tony Award for Best Musical in 1958. Bill Starbuck, who sells pipe dreams of water in N. Richard Nash, Harvey Schmidt, and Tom Jones’s musical 110 in the Shade (based on Nash’s play The Rainmaker , from 1954), is ultimately depicted not as a predator but as a primal spirit of romantic—albeit not practical—passion. I utilize these first two shows because they place con artistry front-and-center in their plots: the grift isn’t secondary, at the service of a romantic narrative, or as a comic subplot. Furthermore, both The Music Man and 110 in the Shade are paragons of the mid-twentieth century book musical form, what some critics including Mark N. Grant, Raymond Knapp, John Kenrick, Larry Stempel, and others have labeled the golden age of musical theatre, before conceptual innovations in the form that began in the late twentieth century. [9] And in Dear Evan Hansen , the title character, a high school student who reaps immense social profit by spreading a lie, is never portrayed as a victimizer but instead as a sympathetic figure whose misdeeds must ultimately be forgiven and forgotten. Dear Evan Hansen is a crucial example because as an extremely recent Broadway hit, with numerous Tonys and an immense popular following, the show demonstrates that the trope remains currently in full force. Focusing on these three specific examples also allows me to examine three different types of grifters. Harold Hill is essentially a rip-off artist. Like Max Bialystock from The Producers , this type of con artist plans to provide a product that is no good or unusable. Hill is actually selling instruments and uniforms and a real musical is indeed created within The Producers , but the rip-off artist knows—and even hopes—that the community to which he sells this dud will get nothing out of it. Starbuck represents the second type. He is the classic snake-oil salesman: part evangelist but wholly a huckster, this type draws upon the conventions of a preacher to promise a salvation (in which he does not believe) but that the community he swindles desperately needs. The title character in Gantry (1970), faith healer Jonas Nightingale in Leap of Faith (2012) and Elder Price in The Book of Mormon use actual religion; but others like Masterson in Guys and Dolls or Freddy Benson, Lawrence Jameson, and “The Jackal” in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels use the promise of romance. Even Ali Hakim, who pretends laudanum is a “magic potion,” is an example of this type. In some respects, the blatant hypocrisy of this type, of which Starbuck proves a particularly nefarious example, makes him even more vicious than rip-off artists like Hill. The third type is in some ways the most morally complex. He is a precocious or developing con artist, and we watch him transition from an earnest young man into someone able and willing to con his whole world. Evan Hansen falls into this type, as do J. Pierrepont Finch from How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1961), Leo Bloom in The Producers , and Elder Cunningham in The Book of Mormon . In this article, I examine one of each of these types, demonstrating the ways in which musical theatre aesthetics position all of them as romantic heroes and who are ultimately redeemable. Most commonly, scholars have approached these sorts of figures in musicals as “tricksters,” specifically outsiders working to make their way into the American mainstream. In Transposing Broadway: Jews, Assimilation, and the Broadway Musical , Stuart Hecht examines figures such as Finch from Frank Loesser’s How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying , “an empty cipher, a fraud,” who uses charm, luck, and a gambler’s gamesmanship to win love and financial success. In his chapter “How to Succeed,” Hecht’s point is that strategies such as Finch’s are emblematic of the way that “at some level the standard book musical became a sort of tacit blueprint of how to make it in America.” [10] And one of those ways to achieve the American dream, as Finch demonstrates, is trickery. Hecht’s investigation of the impact of American Jewish immigrants on the development of the musical form in as a symbol for the promise of the American dream builds upon Andrea Most’s study, Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical , which examines musical theatre from the first half of the twentieth century as a form of self-fashioning for American Jews. Most similarly argues for this self-fashioning as a form of clever trickery: “overt Jewish characters and themes actually disappear as the decades progress,” as the Jewish creators of these musicals sell Jewish-American identity as anti-Communist, white, and fully assimilated into mainstream Americana. [11] This approach to the con artist as essentially a trickster in musical theatre studies makes sense, since scholars of con men note that the character is usually portrayed as a sort of American descendant of the commedia dell’arte clown Arlecchino, the crafty servant who is always out to play a prank, but is ultimately harmless. This can be seen in analyses like those of Gary Lindberg, who in The Confidence Man in American Literature , describes the grifter as a “trickster,” “jack-of-all-trades” and “rogue survivor [with] the ability to shift shapes and yet to keep free of the world.” The characters Lindberg describes, from Huck Finn to Jay Gatsby and Saul Bellow’s Augie March, as well as real figures like Benjamin Franklin and P. T. Barnum, are always viewed with a degree of admiration as they perpetrate hoaxes that are part “masquerade.” [12] David Maurer opens his linguistic study The Confidence Man with this: “The grift has a gentle touch. It takes its toll from the ripe sucker by means of the skilled hand or the sharp wit. In this, it differs from all other forms of crime…it never employs violence to separate the mark from his money.” [13] Indeed, Maurer sounds like he is describing a trickster, not exactly a criminal. However, as I argue throughout this article, there is a crucial difference between the con artist and the commedia trickster figure. Arlecchino, his ancestors, descendants, and parallels in other theatrical traditions do indeed perpetrate frauds. They love money, are gluttonous, and lustfully pursue sex. But in the end, they usually side with the lovers or heroes in their fight against oppressive authority figures. The authentic trickster figure is more of what Robert Ray calls an “outlaw hero,” ultimately serving the broader community while enjoying life as much as possible, as opposed to the grifter who ultimately cares only about his own interests. [14] The archetypal American con artist of the sort defined by Lindberg and Maurer was, in a sense, predicted in one of the earliest studies of our country, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America . In perhaps the most famous chapter in this text, “The Main Causes Tending to Maintain a Democratic Republic in the United States,” Tocqueville articulates three main factors that allowed democracy to flourish in the United States as opposed to late-eighteenth century democratic experiments in Europe which had floundered. For Tocqueville, these three factors are the mores of the American people, the laws and constitutional structure created at the establishment of the country, and the geography itself. In describing American geography, Tocqueville presents a picture of “an almost limitless continent” made up of “empty” and “wild” spaces, which tempt Americans into embodying the spirit of individualism, ambition, and adventure that would become typical of the grifter: [Americans] find prosperity almost everywhere . . . for them desire for well-being has become a restless, burning passion which increases with satisfaction. They broke the ties of attachment to their native soil long ago and have not formed new ones since. To start with, emigration was a necessity for them; now it is a sort of gamble, and they enjoy the sensations as much as the profit.[15] In her book on con artists in nineteenth-century American fiction, Susan Kuhlmann uses strikingly similar language: It helps to consider the con man as a one-man enterprise, inspired just as much by the beauty of his scheme as by the need for aggrandizement. Viewed in this light, he represents an individualization of manifest destiny. He takes to heart the belief that a free man may be whatever he claims he is, may have whatever his skill can win, may feel at home in any man’s house. Superior wit, skill in the use of resources, a nomadic and bachelor existence, adaptability, enthusiasm, and a continual desire to better one’s condition—these are the qualities associated with the type of character whom we think of as having ‘opened’ our country. They are also qualities of the confidence man.[16] Of course, these are false stereotypes—and seductive ones indeed. Just as Tocqueville’s “openness” of an American wilderness was a myth that ignored the fact that frontier-settlers had pushed out the original inhabitants of the so-called frontier, the reality of con men is a lot less glamorous: had Harold Hill completed his original plans, River City would have lost a ton of money, celebrating its American identity with a silent parade of a band of duped people. Meredith Willson’s The Music Man opens on the most American holiday of them all, the 4 th of July (1912), with “Rock Island,” in which a chorus of salesmen alert the audience to the plans of con artist Professor Harold Hill, a swindler who comes into small towns, convinces the residents that their local culture can be improved by the presence of a boys’ band, sells them on instruments and uniforms by promising to serve as music teacher (even though in fact he actually can’t read music, and “don’t know one note from another” [17] ), and then skips town with payment. Essentially, Hill’s gimmick is selling small-town hicks on high culture and the idea of self-improvement: using their own American idealism as the very bait that turns them into his marks. [18] As with any good confidence man, Hill “never worries ’bout his line,” but makes up his scheme on the fly. In River City, Iowa (Hill’s mark during the course of the show), the grifter protagonist uses the arrival of a new pool table to rail against vice and sin, arguing that the pool table spells “Trouble / Right here in River / City! With a capital / T and that rhymes with / P and that stands for / Pool.… Fifteen numbered / Balls is the Devil’s / Tool!” [19] Hill sells the idea of the band (and music itself) as a cultural antidote to the vice about to flood River City—and the people are convinced. Although the residents of River City are uncultured, Willson goes to great pains to ensure that producers of the show and his audience, however, see the townspeople as essentially good Americans. Laurie A. Finke and Susan Aronstein place The Music Man alongside Anything Goes (1934) and Oklahoma! as a “community building … Golden Age musical […that presents] Broadway’s traditional vision of America as a land where dreams, with a little luck and a lot of hard work, can come true.” [20] In a note to directors in his libretto, Willson writes, “THE MUSIC MAN was intended to be a Valentine and not a caricature. Please do not let the actors…mug or reach for comedy effect… [they] should be natural and sincere…. The humor of this piece depends upon its technical faithfulness to the real small-town Iowans of 1912.” [21] This is reinforced by the fact that in their first song, “Iowa Stubborn,” the townspeople note that while they may be hard-nosed and thrifty, “we’ll give you our shirt / And a back to go with it / If your crops should happen to die.” [22] These are the sort of people Hill plans to swindle. Hill is redeemed, both for the citizens of River City and the audience, like so many con men in musical theatre, through the love and forgiveness of a woman he intended to dupe. Over the course of The Music Man , a romance blossoms between Hill and the town’s bookish librarian, Marian Paroo, who discovers Hill’s schemes. However, upon seeing how Hill’s feigned passion for music actually inspires her shy younger brother Winthrop and town troublemaker Tommy Djilas, Marian falls in love with Harold, who reciprocates, and at the end of the musical she comes to his defense when his scam is exposed. The band is actually created, and, although it plays badly, Harold is welcomed into the community—and Marian’s arms. Stacey Wolf describes the show’s finale, “Seventy-Six Trombones” as essentially designed to “celebrate the community.” [23] This is, of course, despite the fact that Hill has betrayed and bankrupted countless similar communities, and seduced women like Marian before, as we hear from traveling salesman Charlie Cowell: Who do you think you’re protecting? That guy’s got a girl in every county in Illinois, and he’s taken it away from every one of ’em! And that’s 102 counties! Not counting the piana teachers like you he cozies up to, to keep their mouths shut![24] Hill is redeemed within the world of The Music Man , but only because we never see those 102 earlier Marians, whose love somehow didn’t transform the con man. If Harold Hill’s villainy (stealing money from clueless but basically good communities across the Midwest) seems heartless, compare this to Bill Starbuck’s nefarious plans in 110 in the Shade and the play on which it was based, The Rainmaker , in which the con artist seeks to prey upon a community that is gullible specifically because it is desperate. The story of these works takes place in an unnamed “western state from dawn to midnight of a summer day in a time of drought” [25] during the Great Depression. In the musical, the small town is called “Three Point,” but it might as well be called nowhere. The townspeople are looking for some kind of salvation. In the opening number of the musical, “Another Hot Day,” they complain that “The earth is burnin’. / Crops is bad, / And land is dry.” [26] In his foreword to the original play, Nash describes: When drought hits the lush grasslands of the richly fertile West, they are green no more and the dying is a palpable thing. What happens to verdure and vegetation, to cattle and livestock can be read in the coldly statistical little bulletins freely issued by the Department of Agriculture. What happens to the people of the West—beyond the calculable and terrible phenomena of sudden poverty and loss of substance—is an incalculable and febrile kind of desperation. Rain will never come again; the earth will be sere forever; and in all of heaven there is no promise of remedy.[27] Into such a landscape comes Bill Starbuck, promising that from his very confidence—for he is indeed a confidence man—he can make it rain. He admits that he is a wholly self-made and invented man: “My method’s like my name / It’s all my very own. / You wanna hear my deal? / You only need a hundred dollars in advance, / In twenty-four hours, / You’ll have rain.” [28] In the character descriptions in both the play and musical versions, Starbuck is described as “ a big man, lithe, agile—a loud braggart, a gentle dreamer. He carries a short hickory stick—it is his weapon, his magic wand, his pride of manhood .” [29] Starbuck’s promise is ridiculous, but the people of Three Points are vulnerable enough that they take him up on his offer. [30] As in The Music Man , Starbuck—really just Bill Smith—somehow earns the love of a good woman who sees through his ruse, Lizzie Curry. And Starbuck, in return, saves Lizzie, allowing her to open up, find passion, and discover herself: “Suddenly I’m beautiful / All because of you,” she sings. In turn, Lizzie gets Starbuck to admit, “Lizzie — I got somethin’ to tell you — ! You were right — I am a liar … and a con man and a fake! I never made rain in my life! Not a single raindrop! — nowhere! — not anywhere at all.” [31] Yet—unlike Harold Hill—although Starbuck admits his villainy, he doesn’t change. He offers to stay with Lizzie for a few days, but not forever. He asks her to come with him, to serve as his partner, to invent her own name, “Melisande.” But ultimately, Starbuck saves Lizzie not by turning her into a grifting wanderer like himself, but by allowing her to declare her love for the local Sheriff File. [32] And then it rains. The townspeople, and the sheriff, let Starbuck go—with the hundred dollars—even despite his admission of having duped them, despite his having seduced Lizzie and physically attacked File, and despite everyone’s knowledge that he plans to replicate his scam on the next desperate town he finds. Somehow, the grotesque abuses Harold Hill and Starbuck try to perpetrate upon unsuspecting communities are sold to audiences as alluring. At least part of the answer as to how this is accomplished comes from the form of musical theatre itself. The romantic melodies of love ballads, the comic rhymes and bouncing rhythms of patter songs, the soaring and heartfelt curtain numbers that are designed to bring audiences to tears, and to standing ovations. As Raymond Knapp points out, in The Music Man con artists can indeed “find their redemption through music,” [33] even if, when one reflects upon their actions, it quickly becomes apparent that these characters do not deserve our sympathy. By comparison, the scam perpetrated by the titular character in Dear Evan Hansen might seem less nefarious. An anxiety-ridden high-school student who has been instructed to write letters to himself as a form of therapy, Evan writes a depressed letter to himself, acknowledging that “Dear Evan Hansen: It turns out, this wasn’t an amazing day after all.” He signs the letter “Sincerely, your best and most dearest friend, Me” and confesses that “All my hope is pinned on Zoe,” his crush. [34] Evan’s letter is stolen by Connor Murphy, Zoe’s brother, an angry and depressed bully, who then kills himself, and the letter is discovered. The Murphy family and students at the school think that this letter was written by Connor to Evan, and that the two were friends. Evan allows this misapprehension to be taken as the truth, and even begins to tell stories about his and Connor’s “friendship,” creating “The Connor Project” about suicide awareness—all in order to get closer to the Murphy family. Evan gains popularity in school and becomes an online celebrity for his moving tributes to his “friend” Connor. Zoe becomes his girlfriend, and her father, Larry, becomes the father that Evan, who was raised by a single mother, has never had. The Murphys offer to pay for Evan to go to college. Finally, crushed by guilt, Evan admits what he’s done to the Murphy family. But they never reveal his fraud to the wider community. He loses his girlfriend and surrogate family—all of whom he attained on false premises—and, when we last see him, quasi-forgiven by Zoe in a sun-lit orchard, he tells himself “Today is going to be a good day.” [35] Indeed, at first glance there are numerous significant differences between Evan Hansen and the pair of examples I’ve drawn from mid-twentieth century American musicals. Both The Music Man and 110 in the Shade are period pieces set decades before they were written and in provincial communities far from Broadway where they were first staged. Dear Evan Hansen is unmistakably present—the social media utilized throughout projections in this musical makes frequent references to the 2016 election. While Hill and Starbuck are life-long fraudsters who set out to destroy the communities with which they engage, what we see is Evan’s first, and hopefully only, con—which he falls into accidentally. The archetypal grifter is out for one thing: money. Yet Evan seeks different things: a relationship with Zoe, a father-figure he has never had, as well as popularity and acknowledgment within the cliquish community of high school. And of course, most notably, Hill and Starbuck are adults, while Evan Hansen is a teenager who suffers from depression. Nonetheless, the pattern articulated through works like The Music Man and 110 in the Shade still fits: while Evan isn’t out to get money, what is more valuable to a high school student than the social capital of popularity and sex with his crush? Evan is an opportunistic grifter putting his own interests above those of the community, who is somehow granted salvation in the eyes of the audience through the caring forgiveness proffered by the female lead and the affective power of soaring melodies. The audience, like the Murphy family, is asked to forgive Evan for his psychological abuse because he feels really bad about what he has done. In his critique of the play for Slate , Jason Zinoman writes that the show’s greatest success is that it “is testament to the power of skillfully crafted art to reframe, manipulate, and even obscure moral concerns.” [36] Dear Evan Hansen is a hit with teenagers; the catchphrase Evan invents to sell his lie, “You will be found,” is sold on actual marketing material for the show. The fact that con artists like Harold Hill, Bill Starbuck, and Evan Hansen are sold as heroes within these musicals, and not villains, should be of particularly little surprise to us in the era of Trump. And so, as a coda, I return to our grifter-in-chief. Perhaps to some degree because of fictional narratives like those from these musicals, some audiences of our American political spectacle assume that this con man in the White House can and will reveal himself as only a mischievous trickster or heartfelt idealist, redeeming himself and saving all of us in the process. Maybe he’ll even sing a song when he finally does so. As Klosterman writes: “Is there anything more attractive than a polite person with limitless self-belief? There is not. First, you must love yourself. And if you do that convincingly enough, others will love you too much.” [37] And as Tolentino posits, the most authentically American character type is one who lacks all authenticity, who puts the truth up for grabs and claims to be a “straight talker” while denigrating the “fake news” of verifiable facts. Some of us may know that we’re being had, but the truth is, right now, we’ve got trouble. We’re all living in River City. And in such a political landscape, it should be no surprise that once theatres reopen at the end of the coronavirus pandemic, a revival of The Music Man is returning to Broadway. The figure of the con artist in musical theatre isn’t skipping town anytime soon. The author would like to thank numerous scholars for helpful feedback on various drafts of this article. These include audience members at the 2018 Theatre History Symposium of the Mid-America Theatre Conference; Pattie Wareh and the Union College Department of English; and the editors and anonymous reviewers for JADT . References [1] The gendered term persists in discourse on this topic, despite the obvious fact that scams can be (and are) perpetrated by those of any gender. In fact, my central examples of con artists are all male, and for that reason, as well as the general term of the “confidence man,” I periodically use the male pronoun throughout this paper when discussing grifters. A broader study might examine the few female examples in musical theatre, such as the perpetrator of the long con in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels , but I suggest that this is an exception that proves the rule. [2] Donald J. Trump with Tony Schwartz, Trump: The Art of the Deal (New York: Ballantine Books, 1987), 366-67. [3] Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined) (New York: Scribner, 2014), 41-43. [4] Scott A. Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). Especially noteworthy is Sandage’s quotation of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote in 1842 that “nobody fails who ought not to fail. There is always a reason, in the man , for his good or bad fortune,” 46. [5] Jia Tolentino, “The Fiends and the Folk Heroes of Grifter Season,” The New Yorker , 5 June 2018 (last accessed 10 January 2020), and Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion (New York: Random House, 2019), 195. [6] See especially Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005) and The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). Additionally, however, monographs and articles by Andrea Most, David Savran, Alisa Solomon, and Stacey Wolf articulate the ways in which musicals have been crucial in helping communities of Americans define themselves: from Jewish theatregoers, to middlebrow and middle-class audiences, queer viewers, and women. [7] David Savran, “The Do-Re-Mi of Musical Theatre Historiography.” In Joseph Roach, ed., Changing the Subject: Marvin Carlson and Theatre Studies, 1959 – 2009 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 225. [8] Lin-Manuel Miranda, “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story,” Hamilton: An American Musical , ed. Jeremy McCarter (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2016), 280-81. [9] Historians disagree about when this period existed and whether the term has any real validity. Some, such as John Kenrick, Raymond Knapp, and Larry Stempel, argue that the so-called “golden age” existed only for around two-and-a-half decades, from Oklahoma (1943) until the advent of rock musicals and director-driven concept musicals in the late 1960s. Mark N. Grant, the most forceful defender of the concept of a golden age, posits that this glorious period existed from the opening of Show Boat in 1927 through 1966. Many critics, however, sensibly question this perception. Kenrick argues that any musical with lasting commercial or artistic impact on the form should justifiably be considered as great as any work from the mid-twentieth century, and Stempel goes further, pointing out that philosophies such as Grant’s are grounded in artistically conservative and historically inaccurate nostalgia: “while belief in a Golden Age has been the ideological underpinning for resuscitating part of the Broadway repertoire and awakening new audiences to old excellences, it has also tended to diminish the value of newer work.” Mark N. Grant, The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004); John Kenrick, Musical Theatre: A History [Second Edition] (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 4; and Larry Stempel, Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theater (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010), 657–8. [10] Stuart Hecht, Transposing Broadway: Jews, Assimilation, and the American Musical (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 89, 4. [11] Andrea Most, Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 6. [12] Gary Lindberg, The Confidence Man in American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 253-58. [13] David W. Maurer, The American Confidence Man (Springfield, IL: Charles C Thomas, Publisher, 1974), 3. [14] See Robert B. Ray, “The Thematic Paradigm,” in Sonia Maasik and Jack Solomon, eds., Signs of Life in the U.S.A.: Readings on Popular Culture for Writers (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2012), 377-86. [15] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America , trans. George Lawrence, ed. J. P. Mayer (New York: Perennial Classics, 2000), 283. [16] Susan Kuhlmann, Knave, Fool, and Genius: The Confidence Man as He Appears in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973), 6. [17] Quotations from The Music Man come from: Meredith Willson, The Music Man , unpublished typescript libretto, ©1958 Frank Music Corp. and Reinmer Corporation. 1-1-5. [18] Kimberly Faithbroker Canton argues that, in idolizing high culture, Hill’s particular scam in facts cements The Music Man as a kind of middlebrow work, itself perpetrating the same sort of scam. She writes that “ The Music Man , with its optimistic, faith-based ideology, sells a version of culture that is…lucrative in its averageness and uniquely American in its easy reconciliation of diametrically opposed notions of art and commerce, patriotism and individualism, truth and scam. The Music Man is an anti-intellectual ode to the middlebrow that cleverly sells the very premise that makes it a commercial triumph.” Kimberly Faithbroker Caton, “‘Who’s Selling Here?’: Sounds Like The Music Man Is Selling and We’re Buying,” Modern Drama 51, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 56. [19] Willson, 1-2-15. [20] Laurie A. Finke and Susan Aronstein, “Got Grail? Monty Python and the Broadway Stage,” Theatre Survey 48, no. 2 (November 2007): 290. Finke and Aronstein put Spamalot within this tradition, as opposed to more “deconstructive musicals of the 1970s such as Chicago and A Chorus Line ” and the works of Stephen Sondheim. [21] Willson, v. [22] Willson., 1-2-9. [23] Stacey Ellen Wolf, “‘Defying Gravity’: Queer Conventions in the Musical Wicked ,” Theatre Journal 60, no. 1 (March 2008): 17. [24] Willson, 2-3-18. [25] Nash, N. Richard, Harvey Schmidt, and Tom Jones, 110 in the Shade , unpublished typescript libretto © 1977 and Nash, N. Richard, The Rainmaker: A Romantic Comedy (New York: Random House, 1955), vi. The text of the stage direction is nearly identical in both versions. All quotations from the musical come from this typescript. [26] Nash Schmidt, and Jones, 110 in the Shade , 1-1-2. [27] Nash, The Rainmaker , vii. [28] Nash, Schmidt, and Jones, 110 in the Shade , 1-3-31. [29] Nash, Schmidt, and Jones 110 in the Shade ., iii and Nash, The Rainmaker , 57. Note how Nash highlights that Starbuck is “gentle,” and that, like Arlecchino, he carries a wooden stick. [30] In a longer study of con artistry and American theatre more broadly, it would be worth examining the impact of race on whether or not the scammer achieves forgiveness from the community he bamboozles. It’s worth mentioning the 2007 revival of 110 in the Shade , a color-conscious staging in which Lizzie Curry (played by Audra McDonald) was black. Steve Kazee, a white actor, played Starbuck. Thus, his character wasn’t just duping a drought-ridden town in hard times, he was a white man telling a black woman who had never seen herself as pretty that she was beautiful. Of course, the truth of this statement was obvious to the audience, but in this staging, Starbuck’s “charming” con was thus explicitly racialized. Furthermore, the role of race in The Music Man has been explored by Warren Hoffman in The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical . In his third chapter, “The Racial Politics of West Side Story and The Music Man ,” Hoffman argues that racial politics have at least something to do with The Music Man ’s winning of the Tony for Best Musical over the revolutionary and genre-transforming West Side Story . Hoffman positions The Music Man as a work brimming with a nostalgia for (all-white) small-town Americana. He demonstrates how in “Ya Got Trouble,” Harold Hill uses ragtime, “code for African Americans?” as a “scare tactic.” Warren Hoffman, The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014), 82-110. [31] Nash, The Rainmaker , 162. The line is identical in the musical; Nash, 110 in the Shade , 2-4-27. [32] In the original play, File is the deputy. [33] Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity , 145. Knapp goes on to point out that both authority figures who could punish Hill and Charlie Cowell, who exposes him as a con man, never sing during the show, thus failing to earn the audience’s sympathy. [34] Steven Levenson, Benj Pasek, and Justin Paul, Dear Evan Hansen (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2017), 23-24. [35] Levenson, Pasek, and Paul., 163. [36] Jason Zinoman, “Dear Evan Hansen, You Are a Creep,” Slate , 6 June 2017 (last accessed 10 January 2020). [37] Klosterman, 57. Footnotes About The Author(s) DAN VENNING is an Assistant Professor of Theatre and English at Union College in Schenectady, NY, where he is also a core faculty member in the Interdisciplinary Programs in American Studies and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. He earned his Ph.D. in Theatre at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His articles and reviews have appeared in Asian Theatre Journal , Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism , Ecumenica , European Stages, PAJ , Performing Arts Resources , Shakespeare: A Journal , Shakespeare Bulletin , Shakespeare Quarterly , Theatre History Studies , TDR , Theatre Journal , Theatre Survey , as well as in several edited collections of essays. He was previously associate dramaturg for the California Shakespeare Theater and has previously taught at NYU, Wagner College, and Baruch and Hunter Colleges, CUNY. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue "Ya Got Trouble, My Friend, Right Here": Romanticizing Grifters in American Musical Theatre Troubled Collaboration: Belasco, the Fiskes, and the Society Playwright, Mrs. Burton Harrison Unhappy is the Land that Needs a Hero: The Mark of the Marketplace in Suzan-Lori Parks's Father Comes Home from the Wars, Parts 1-3 Silence, Gesture, and Deaf Identity in Deaf West Theatre's Spring Awakening Contemporary Women Stage Directors: Conversations on Craft. Paulette Marty. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2019; Pp. 292 + viii Ensemble-Made Chicago: A Guide To Devised Theater. Chloe Johnson and Coya Paz Brownrigg. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2019. Pp. 202 Twenty-First Century American Playwrights. Christopher Bigsby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018; Pp. 228. Encounters on Contested Lands and Provocative Eloquence Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. 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 21, 2025 Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 21 Steve Earnest Review of Samuel Barber’s Vanessa by Ópera do Castelo Timothy Koch Summer 2025 in London, England Amy Hamel Robert Wilson’s Moby Dick at Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf, Summer 2025 Steve Earnest Report from Berlin Marvin Carlson International Theatre Festival of Sibiu 32nd Edition Kalina Stefanova Polyphonies of the Present: The Pulse of the Almada Festival Savas Patsalidis Theatre in Poland, Fall 2025 Steve Earnest Radu Afrim and his House Between the Blocks Călin Ciobotari The Tragic Ideal of Eternal Youth: Folk Myth on the Modern Stage Ion Tomus Dramas of Separation at Festival d’Avignon 19th Edition Philippa Wehle 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 21 Volume 17 - 1 Volume 20 Volume 19 Volume 18 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 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

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 21, 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage The Tragic Ideal of Eternal Youth: Folk Myth on the Modern Stage by Ion Tomus Published: December 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF In the contemporary cultural landscape, there is an increasingly urgent need to identify artistic forms capable of resonating with new modes of aesthetic and cultural sensibility. The accelerated transformations of the social and technological environment have altered not only the ways in which audiences engage with artistic expression but also their expectations regarding the dynamics and aesthetics of representation. In this context, the recovery and reinterpretation of traditional narrative material can no longer operate as a mere exercise in reconstruction; rather, it must be understood as a process of critical re-signification. Adapting canonical narratives to contemporary performative structures entails more than a scenic transposition—it involves repositioning theatrical discourse in relation to present-day experience. Such a practice aligns with broader tendencies in postdramatic theatre, privileging hybridity, intermediality, and the performative act over narrative linearity. This creative strategy enables the exploration of new reception models, opening a dialogic space between collective cultural memory and the aesthetic sensibilities of contemporary audiences, whose references are increasingly shaped by pop culture’s fluid reinterpretation of folklore, myth, and fairy tales. A relevant example of this approach is the performance Youth Without Age and Life Without Death , produced by Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu & Radu Stanca National Theatre in Sibiu, and later included in the repertoire of Radu Stanca National Theatre in Sibiu (RSNT). Choreographed by Ștefan Lupu, the production deliberately transcends the boundaries of classical choreographic conventions, embracing a complex artistic discourse situated at the intersection of tradition and contemporaneity. The project foregrounds embodiment, rhythm, and visual dramaturgy as primary means of signification, privileging a sensorial rather than purely narrative experience. The artistic endeavor of the students and faculty involved exceeds the framework of a pedagogical exercise, becoming an act of performative research with substantial theoretical and aesthetic implications for current performance practices. The stage reinterpretation of Youth Without Old Age infuses it with tragic dimensions, reshaping the themes and emotional impact to resonate with the fears, conflicts, and sensitivities of contemporary audiences. It is via the choreographic and theatrical language that the narrative message of the fairy tale is brought into the present. The main tension is between the ideal of eternity and its unattainability. Through all these artistic means, the tragic depth of the story is revealed, resonating with contemporary reflections on the human condition. Beyond the formal partnership between the two institutions mentioned above, their relationship has allowed the best student productions to enter the theater’s regular repertoire. This has been an extraordinary opportunity for the young artists, who thus benefit from increased visibility early in their careers. Perhaps the most eloquent example is the performance Antisocial , which I previously analyzed in volume 6 of European Stages. Now, history repeats itself. Youth Without Old Age , directed and choreographed by Ștefan Lupu, premiered in the early months of 2025 and has consistently played to sold-out audiences. It was also included in the student festival affiliated with Sibiu International Theatre Festival. The students—now professional actors—were guided by Lupu in an ambitious project that reimagines a famous Romanian fairy tale through dance, emphasizing its tragic dimensions. The performance is staged in the new LBUS performance hall, which has proven to be not only a generous educational space for the performing arts in Sibiu but also an open venue for experimentation and for a young audience willing to challenge (or at least postpone) the comforts of the petite bourgeoisie . It is also necessary to highlight the research dimension of this performance. The assistant director of Ștefan Lupu, Andrada Oltean, is a PhD candidate at LBUS and is writing a dissertation on the training of the modern actor and dancer. In this regard, the Youth Without Old Age project proved to be a perfect ground for research, as the rehearsals lasted several months and provided the framework for the practical investigation carried out by the doctoral student, which will resonate in her future PhD thesis. Moreover, this mix of practice and theory is the preferred strategy of the doctoral studies in theatre and performing arts at the university in Sibiu (Romania). As we all know, the fairy tale is a traditional narrative transmitted orally within a community, reflecting its collective imagination, cultural values, and moral codes. Unlike literary works, these tales have no identifiable author; they emerge through collective creation and evolve over time through multiple reinterpretations and retransmissions. The authorial context is therefore collective and cultural rather than individual, encompassing the historical, social, and cultural background of the community that created and preserved the story. The themes of the folk tale are universal: the struggle between good and evil, justice, or transformation. Fairy tales may also transmit specific traditions, beliefs, and norms of their place of origin. In this sense, they function both as artistic forms and as cultural documents, offering a valuable perspective on the worldview and identity of the communities that produced them. The Romanian fairy tale Youth Without Old Age and Life Without Death has a powerful tragic dimension that amplifies its resonance in the Romanian cultural imaginary. The quest for the absolute ideal proves to be impossible, and the protagonist (Făt-Frumos / Prince Charming) ultimately loses everything he wished to preserve forever. The impossibility of overcoming time becomes a meditation on the human condition and the fragility of existence. This tragic vision transforms the tale into a symbol of human aspiration and confrontation with inevitable destiny. The story begins with the wish of an unborn child who refuses to enter the world unless he receives the gift of eternal life. The emperor promises this gift, and when the child reaches maturity, he sets out in search of the pledged reward. After a long journey and battles with supernatural forces, he reaches the realm of eternal youth, where he lives happily for a while. Yet his longing for home and the past drives him to break the interdiction of leaving that place. Upon returning to the world, he discovers that centuries have passed and everything has changed. Death awaits him and embraces him, thus fulfilling the tragic destiny of the hero. Folk and fairy tales contain a strong element of theatricality: initially transmitted orally, the tales were not merely told but performed : the storyteller employed gestures, vocal inflections, pauses, and repetitions to build dramatic tension and capture the audience’s attention. The typological characters—the hero, the antagonist, the magical helper—are constructed schematically precisely to be easily recognizable and representable on stage. Its fixed narrative structure, with clearly defined moments (initial situation, trial, confrontation, triumph, and return), follows an almost dramaturgical logic, allowing for a natural transposition into theatrical forms. Moreover, European folk tales consistently possess a ritualistic and symbolic dimension, which adds depth to the scenic action. Through conventions, repetitions, and fixed formulas (“Once upon a time…”), they establish a recognizable performative framework, akin to the opening of a stage performance. Thus, the folk tale is not merely a source of inspiration for theater but carries within itself the seeds of theatricality, anticipating modern dramatic forms. Ștefan Lupu is a young theater manager from Bucharest (Teatrul Mic). He graduated acting and has focused his career on choreography and stage movement. In addition to his artistic work, he is also one of the most enthusiastic and dynamic movement and stage dance instructors in Romania. In the performances he choreographs, Ștefan Lupu is particularly interested in identifying a playful vein that he later explores on stage—developing, transforming, and refining it—to reveal to the audience that beneath this surface lies something profoundly serious and weighty. He pays extraordinary attention to detail and nuance and is a particularly active figure in the Romanian performing arts scene. As part of the “new wave” of dancers and choreographers, he undoubtedly brings fresh, dynamic energy and a revitalizing perspective to the field. Ștefan Lupu surrounds himself with very young and exceptionally talented artists, a fact that is evident in all his productions: they are filled with energy, courage, and an openness that resonates with an equally dynamic audience. The role of Lupu’s choreography in constructing the scenic language was both complex and precise. Having previously transformed Romanian folk tales into dance performances, the choreographer engaged in a process of decoding the tale’s key narrative nuclei and reassembling them on stage in a language that blends elements of Romanian folk culture with pop culture. This strategy is by no means superficial or simplistic. The fairy tale is a popular story, passed down through generations and addressed to the many. So in this particular performance it is therefore entirely appropriate that, for example, the traditional Storyteller is replaced by a hip-hop artist who communicates with the audience and frames the story, functioning as a kind of prologue. This opening moment sets the theatrical convention, energizing and captivating the audience. As in the original fairy tale, the Emperor and Empress are childless, which is a source of domestic tension. This is translated on stage through a stable physical proximity between the two performers, tinged with a slight distancing as they move in sync, attempting to prove something. Both dancers embody youth and royal status, but choreographically, the weight of responsibility and the shadow of a tragic destiny hover over the stage and the characters. The ensemble of dancers functions organically, but at key moments, individual performers step forward to shape the action. Right from the beginning, things are problematic at the emperor’s court. The baby cries inconsolably; the Emperor offers many difficult-to-attain gifts, including—humorously—a star on Sibiu’s Walk of Fame. Ultimately, the supreme promise that convinces the child is youth without aging and life without death. Choreographically, this harmony is reflected in fluid movements and balanced compositions. But everything changes when the young Prince Charming demands the promised gift and sets off to find the supreme ideal. As in any fairy tale, the hero must choose his loyal horse, face trials, and meet certain conditions—each moment choreographed with sensuality, wit, and meticulous attention to detail. The horses, for example, are embodied by two female dancers, their movements combining elegance, sensuality, and impeccable technique. Arguably the highlight of the performance is the encounter with Gheonoaia (The Forest Hag)—a supernatural creature, traditionally a witch-like or forest spirit figure, an adversary who captures, tests, or torments the hero. One of her strongest symbolic functions is to herald misfortune. In the performance, however, Gheonoaia is reimagined as a drag character who challenges Prince Charming to a dance battle to Sex Bomb by Tom Jones. The decision to include a drag performance in an adaptation of a Romanian folk tale is both bold and natural: bold because drag culture remains a niche in Romania, and natural because it heightens the contrast between past and present, central to Lupu’s staging. Moreover, this hypersexualized drag battle scene can also be read as a performative manifesto directed at a more conventional segment of the audience, challenging comfort zones and expectations. Indeed, the entire performance is built upon strong contrasts that need to be analysed. Old / new: the timeless world of the Romanian fairy tale forms the foundation for a performance using the expressive tools of contemporary dance. Tradition / modernity: traditional elements of the old Romanian world intersect with pop culture—for example, embroidery motifs on costumes are juxtaposed with pop aesthetics in Gheonoaia’s costume. The musical arrangement combines traditional Romanian music with modern beats, energizing group scenes and lending fluidity to more intimate moments. Another choreographic strategy worth noting is character doubling. While the fairy tale features a single horse, the performance employs two dancers to achieve a heightened choreographic effect. The final sequence of the performance naturally presents the most spectacular group choreography: the dance of death is a moment in which all the performers are on stage, moving in a synchronization that only appears to have a low level of energy. The central figure is once again Prince Charming, positioned at the center of the stage — the point where all the group’s energies intersect. The dance movements draw, at least in part, from traditional Romanian folk dances, yet they are reinterpreted — in keeping with the music — and paired with contemporary beats that open the piece toward the universal language of pop culture within the contemporary performing arts context. The musical phrases repeat themselves, not obsessively, but with the steady rhythm of a well-established refrain that lingers in the audience’s collective memory. Gradually, Death enters the stage, moving among the dancers, touching them one by one, contaminating them, and bringing them down (with a morbid tenderness) to the ground. Death is portrayed by an actress with very long hair, which she uses to touch and bring down those around her. What can be seen as a symbol of femininity becomes the touch of death. Prince Charming is, of course, the last to fall — the final remnant of a world once full of life, but which from this moment on will be nothing but ashes. Death’s touch does not bring death in the literal sense, but a void, an absence: after Death, there is nothing left; after Death, the performance is over, the rest is silence. The performance employs tragic elements through the way it stages the confrontation between destiny and individual freedom. The figure of Prince Charming becomes emblematic for the doomed hero, unable to escape the ending dictated by the very nature of the myth. Death does not appear as a violent force but as an inevitable, slow, and implacable presence, turning the finale into a moment of collective lucidity rather than a dramatic explosion. Thus, the tragic dimension arises not from external conflict but from the awareness of the inescapable. In conclusion, the contemporary staging of Youth Without Old Age and Life Without Death reveals the profound tragic resonance embedded in the original fairy tale. By reimagining this canonical narrative through a modern choreographic and theatrical language, the performance exposes the inevitable confrontation between human aspiration and immutable destiny. Prince Charming’s quest for eternity becomes a timeless reflection of humanity’s futile struggle against the passage of time—a struggle marked not by violent opposition but by the quiet, inexorable arrival of death. The choreography heightens this tragic inevitability, allowing death to emerge not as a destructive force, but as an implacable presence that slowly absorbs all vitality, culminating in silence. This dramaturgical choice shifts the focus from external conflict to inner awareness, turning the finale into a moment of collective recognition of human fragility. The tragic dimension is amplified through contrasts—youth and decay, desire and loss, movement and stillness—each reinforcing the inescapable tension between the ideal of eternal life and the reality of mortality. In doing so, the performance does more than reinterpret a folk myth; it transforms it into a powerful meditation on the human condition, where beauty, vitality, and longing ultimately yield to the unalterable certainty of death. Through this tragic lens, the story transcends its folkloric origins and becomes a universal, deeply affecting theatrical experience. Ultimately, this also represents a deliberate wager undertaken by the production team: the young actors and dancers, under the coordination of Ștefan Lupu, have demonstrated their ability to meet the complex challenges of transitioning from the protected environment of the university’s creative laboratory in theatre and choreography to the competitive landscape of the professional performing arts sector. The university provided them with an opportunity, which they successfully materialized, and the inclusion of the performance in the repertoire of a professional theatre stands as evidence that the wider public has likewise acknowledged and validated the artistic accomplishment of the ensemble. This work was funded by the EU’s NextGenerationEU instrument through the National Recovery and Resilience Plan of Romania - Pillar III-C9-I8, managed by the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitalization, within the project entitled Measuring Tragedy: Geographical Diffusion, Comparative Morphology, and Computational Analysis of European Tragic Form (METRA), contract no. 760249/28.12.2023, code CF 163/31.07.2023. Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu Concept: Ștefan Lupu Assistant director: Andrada Oltean Choreography: Devised Costumes: Maria Constantin Musical illustration: Ștefan Lupu, Andrada Oltean Musical arrangement: Vlad Robaș Light designer: Dorin Părău Sound designer: Bobariu Cătălin Cast: The Emperor: Adrian Bumbeș The Empress: Maria Maftei / Andrada Oltean The Wizard: Eva Frățilă The Horse: Ada Bicflavi & Isabela Haiduc Prince Charming: David Cristian Gheonoaia: Mihai Mocanu Scorpio: Alberta Dima, Ana Ștefan, Andra Stoian Fairies: Ana Ștefan, Andra Stoian Little Fairy: Isabela Haiduc / Ada Bicfalvi Rabbit: Eva Frățilă / Fabian Toderică Death: Eva Frățilă Jokester: Ștefan Chelimândră Narrator: Fabian Toderică Image Credits: Article References References About the author(s) Dr. Ion M. Tomuș is a Professor at “Lucian Blaga” University, Sibiu, the Department of Drama and Theatre Studies, where he teaches courses in History of Romanian Theatre, History of Worldwide Theatre, Text and Stage Image and Drama Theory. He is member of the Centre for Advanced Studies in the Field of Performing Arts (Cavas). In 2013 he finished a postdoctoral study together with the Romanian Academy, focused on the topic of the modern international theatre festival, with case studies on Edinburgh International Festival, Festival d'Avignon and Sibiu International Theatre Festival. He has published studies, book reviews, theatre reviews, and essays in prestigious cultural magazines and academic journals in Romania and Europe. Since 2005, he has been co-editor of the annual Text Anthology published by Nemira Publishing House for each edition of the Sibiu International Theatre Festival. Since 2005, Mr. Tomuș is part of the staff at Sibiu International Theatre Festival (SITF is the third performing arts festival in the world, preceded by the ones in Edinburgh and Avignon). As part of SITF, Ion M. Tomuș coordinates Aplauze, the festival’s official daily journal, and oversees two editorial projects: Cultural Conversations and the annual volume of Aplauze. Ion M. Tomuș was Head of the Department of Drama and Theatre Studies, in “Lucian Blaga” University of Sibiu (2011-2019) and now he is the Chair of the PhD School in Theatre and Performing Arts at the same university. Since October 2016, Ion M. Tomuș is advising PhD students in the field of Performing Arts at “Lucian Blaga” University of Sibiu. Institutional Affiliation and Contact: “Lucian Blaga” University, Sibiu, Faculty of Letters and Arts, Department of Drama and Theatre Studies. 12 Banatului St, 550011, Sibiu. ion.tomus@ulbsibiu.ro European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Theatre in Poland, Fall 2025 Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 21 Robert Wilson’s Moby Dick at Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf, Summer 2025 Dramas of Separation at Festival d’Avignon 19th Edition Polyphonies of the Present: The Pulse of the Almada Festival Summer 2025 in London, England The Tragic Ideal of Eternal Youth: Folk Myth on the Modern Stage International Theatre Festival of Sibiu 32nd Edition Review of Samuel Barber’s Vanessa by Ópera do Castelo Radu Afrim and his House Between the Blocks Report from Berlin Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Home to theatre artists, scholars, students, performing arts managers, and the local and international performance communities, the Martin E. Segal Center at CUNY Graduate Center provides a supportive environment for conversation, open exchange, and the development of new ideas and new work. Upcoming Events Yousef Sweid & Isabella Sedlak's River and Sea Thu, Dec 18 Join us for an evening of live theatre with the Berlin Gorki Theater’s 60-minute performance Rivers and Seas, featuring Palestinian-Israeli actor Yousef Sweid, exploring life between different cultures and narratives. More Info + RSVP The Segal Center: Bridging the gap between the academic, local and global performing arts communities through dynamic public programs and digital initiatives that are free and open to all. Upcoming events at the Martin E. Segal Centre CUNY See Events Welcome to The Segal Center The Segal Center bridges the gap between the academic and performing arts communities through dynamic public programs and digital initiatives that are free and open to all. Home to theatre artists, scholars, students, performing arts managers, and the local and international performance communities, the Segal Center provides a supportive environment for conversation, open exchange, and the development of new ideas and new work. Year round, the Center presents a wide variety of FREE public programs which feature leading national and international artists, scholars, and arts professionals in conversation about theatre and performance. Programs include staged readings to further the development of new and classic plays, festivals celebrating New York performance (PRELUDE) and international plays (PEN World Voices), screenings of performance works on film, artists in conversation, academic lecture series, televised seminars, symposia, and arts in education programs. In addition, the Center maintains its long-standing visiting-scholars-from-abroad program, publishes a series of highly regarded academic journals, as well as single volumes of importance (including plays in translation), all written and edited by renowned scholars. We livestream many of our events with Howlround . You can find the video archive here . IN MEMORIAM Martin E. Segal (1916-2012) Daniel Gerould (1928-2012) Explore our Work Events Sharings, discussions, readings and more, join our events in-person in New York or online via Howlround. Free entry! Festivals Our festivals provide a platform for artists, educators, cultural managers and others at the forefront of contemporary theatre practice. Research We support CUNY Graduate Center's top-ranked Ph.D. Program in Theatre and Performance in a myriad of ways. Archive Explore archival material, videos, interviews, essays, events and more from across 20 years of the Segal Center's history. Publications We support books, journals and other publications focused on contemporary theatre and performing arts. Get Involved We would love to hear from you and how you'd like to contribute to our work. Digital Initiatives Segal Talks Tune in to Segal Talks, featuring conversations with artists all around the world. Watch on YouTube or listen on Spotify Read More Howlround for India Watch a 24-hour onlin e marathon of COVID talks with artists honoring the Indian theatre community. Read More Segal Film Festival Watch films on theatre and performance from over 30 countries, at the Segal Film Festival. Read More NY Theatre Artists for Ukraine Watch a 12-hour online marathon of readings and conversations with 24 New York theatre institutions and Ukrainian artists. Read More

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 20, 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Duende and Showbiz: A Theatrical Odyssey Through Spain’s Soul By Adam Pelty Published: July 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF Spain doesn’t just welcome you; it grabs you by the collar, spins you into its whirlwind of color and sound, and dares you to keep up. Madrid sprawls with boulevards and architectural flourishes so magnificent they seem to wink at you, as if to say, “Yes, we are this fabulous, and no, you can’t afford any of it.” Then there is Seville, in the South, the sultry heart of Andalusia, where history lingers like the scent of orange blossoms, and the air is thick with the strum of distant guitars and the echo of heels striking cobblestone. I made off to Spain to fling myself into Flamenco, the raw, guttural, earth-shaking duende that dominates the south—Cádiz, Granada, Jerez de la Frontera, and most potently, Seville. It isn’t just performed, it’s exorcised from the very depths of the soul, a deeply rooted cultural institution that demands a level of commitment bordering on religious devotion. You don’t just dabble in Flamenco. You either give yourself over to its unrelenting demands—its passion, its virtuosity—or you get the hell off the tablao . Madrid, though? Madrid is the glam showbiz cousin. Yes, there’s incredible Flamenco, but there’s also a staggering volume of musical theatre, opera, and contemporary dance. Now, I realize this is the kind of thing one should know—like knowing that water is wet or that Andrew Lloyd Webber is inescapable. Yet, up until six months ago, I had absolutely no idea that Madrid was the second-most prolific hub of Broadway-style musical theatre in Europe, just behind London’s West End. As my car sped from the airport to the hotel, I was blindsided by the sheer number of marquee lights blinking seductively from the streets— Book of Mormon, Phantom, Titanic, Come From Away, Aladdin —alongside original Spanish productions that are boldly redefining what theatre can be. Madrid, it turns out, is a city that breathes performance. Every street corner hums with its rhythm, every theatre pulses with an audience hungry for spectacle. It’s dazzling. The Spanish approach to musical theatre is something truly special, much like a beautifully executed Flamenco performance. It’s all about vulnerability, strength, emotional availability, and a vivid freedom to express very specific intentions with no apologies. This spirit is deeply etched into Flamenco, but it was equally palpable in the Spanish productions of The Book of Mormon and Gypsy that I caught—both of which left me giddy and a little emotional about my industry, which was frankly surprising. These Spanish performers have more than competence—they’ve got soul. The technical aspects of their craft seem effortless, leaving the crucial part—the emotion—free to roam. There is fearlessness. No slick Broadway airs here; I felt invited to experience something raw and genuine. Compared to some recent Broadway shows, Some Like It Hot and & Juliet come to mind (both excellent productions when I saw them), which can sometimes feel like they “insist upon themselves” (to steal Seth MacFarlane’s Family Guy line), these Spanish performances feel like a true invitation to connect. In shows like these, the pressure to impress takes a backseat to the vital act of sharing a story. Watching Broadway performances, I can’t help but feel there’s certain theatrical gymnastics happening back home—impressive, sure, but does it invite me in? Or am I just a spectator, watching the finalists flex their muscles for the judges? Musical theatre performers, like athletes, generate explosive and brilliant energy. Yet, inevitably, it’s about connection. When it works, the audience becomes part of the experience. So let’s talk Flamenco. Over six weeks in Andalusia, I saw lots of it, from the caves of Granada to the more slick and professional stages of Seville—it’s all utterly mesmerizing. And yet, beneath the swirling skirts and searing wails, there’s a rhythm, a structure, a sacred ritual. Flamenco is part storytelling, part catharsis, part sanctioned public outburst. It is what you would get if tap dancing and an existential crisis had a baby and raised it on Spanish wine and heartache. The commitment required is absolute. And let’s be real: only a select few are graced by the diodes del baile with the innate ability to fully embody this art. The tablao —that hallowed ground of Flamenco—follows a time-honored pattern, a method of learned and studied laws that have been passed down by the greats for the last two hundred years. The artists drift in and out of work like wandering minstrels, the finest among them tearing across Spain in a week, paid per gig, living for the moment, for the music, for the duende. One performance in Seville, an electrifying display of artistry and mastery, was notable. At its heart was a Seville-based dancer, Juan Fernandez, possessing the magnetism of a movie star and the skill of a seasoned maestro. Of all the Flamenco performances I witnessed over my time in Spain, this one stood apart—raw, precise, and transcendent. Seville based flamenco dancer, Juan Fernandez The lights came up on three singers and a guitarist, seated in a circle of chairs facing outward—one even turned upstage. Shadows and rich hues painted the stage, smoke billowing through the air. Then, the dancers emerged—two tall, striking figures in silhouette, male and female, like the Flamenco gods you see on tourist posters and souvenir magnets. As the lights rose, their feet took focus—cracking the floor with impossible speed, like rhythmic lightning. Technically masterful, magnetic, dangerous. They moved with the kind of chemistry you only see in a Fellini film—seductive, electric, larger than life. For one hour, six geniuses set the stage on fire. The lead singer—formidable, fifty-something, owned the stage with nothing but her voice and the guitarist at her side. They sparred, teased, played—like two actors improvising the scene of their lives. Passion, argument, seduction. I found myself thinking, ‘And the Tony Award goes to…’. Each performer took their turn like some divine emissary of chaos, conjuring entire universes in ten-minute bursts—erotic, combative, mournful, and laced with sharp wit, it could slice through the air itself. The tocaor (the guitarist) weaved a spell that bound them all together—first as a collective, then in electrifying solos. Watching them, you got the distinct impression that if the room were to spontaneously combust, they would simply weave the flames into the rhythm, stomping out embers in a frenzy of duende-fueled ecstasy. Now to Madrid. The Spanish Book of Mormon —an absolute joy. While the Madrid production might feel more intimate than the Broadway original, it’s more than welcome. All the desired spectacle is in place; the comedy is in crisp-top shape and the performers look to be having the time of their lives. My first thought as I took my seat: Do the Spanish even have Mormons? Will they grasp what South Park maestros Matt Stone and Trey Parker are skewering? Spain does have a notable Jehovah’s Witness presence—door-to-door evangelists, strict doctrines, globe-trotting missionaries—so, in theory, the joke should land. But will it land with the full, glorious thud of satire intended? The answer is yes, absolutely. Alexandre Ars, towering at six-foot-six, owned the role of Elder Price. His presence is magnetic, commanding the stage with grace, intent, and emotional availability. He made space for me, for the audience, and his performance had a warmth I can’t quite describe. Alejandro Mesa, playing Elder Cunningham, was a masterclass in physical comedy—nuanced, sweet, and hilariously real. Their chemistry was undeniable, even if my lousy Spanish didn’t catch every line. The African cast was spectacular—versatile and hilariously funny. Aisha Fay as Nabulungi was perfectly matched with Mesa’s antics, delivering a clear and powerful performance. Yet, there were moments where things didn’t quite land. Nil Carbonell’s Elder McKinley felt… overdone. A bit too broad, too lecherous, lacking that necessary subtlety. The male ensemble of missionaries, too, seemed to fall into the trap of generalization. They were all “gay” in the same way, and it felt like a one-size-fits-all performance rather than the more layered, repressed pseudo-theologians the characters are meant to represent. Still, these flaws didn’t dampen the fun. The production, fresh since 2023, is irreverent, joyous in it’s naughtiness, and a spectacular showcase of talent. I attended opening night of Gypsy , directed by Antonio Banderas, and sat right behind the magnetic movie star now director at Teatro Nuevo Apolo. He developed this production at the Soho Caixabank Theatre in Málaga, a venue quickly becoming a hub for creative innovation with considerable help from him. Banderas is a force, thrusting Spain further into the global musical theatre spotlight—and it’s incredibly exciting. The most important thing I can say about this Gypsy is that it pushes boundaries. Banderas takes this traditional title and introduces contemporary impulses that breathe new life into it. The show’s concept is intimate yet theatrical, blending emotional depth with spectacle. Banderas’s vision emphasizes a deep exploration of the themes of ambition, reflecting on what he describes as “the pathology of success.” His intensity permeates the production, which feels distinctly Spanish in moments—and why not? He’s speaking to a Spanish audience. His success shines brightest when his leading lady, a fiercely talented and committed Marta Ribera, shares dramatic moments with her co-stars, especially with the patiently seductive Carlos Seguí as Herbie. Their scenes, especially their final confrontation, are beautifully staged, full of subtlety and fire, given an extra kick by Banderas’ conceptual flair. Lydia Fairén and Laia Prats bring fierce energy to the roles of Louise and June, electrifying the stage. These triple threats are allowed to transcend the original era and become 2025 versions of their historic characters. It is a departure from the 1930s vaudeville style, but it worked. Banderas, however, undeniably provides the heartbeat of this production. He pushes the boundaries with quirky, contemporary touches—like the expanded “Let Me Entertain You” sequence in Act Two, which is re-imagined with Louise headlining a Liza Minnelli-like extravaganza. In this extended section, ensemble members morph into inflated Emcee-like roles. It’s funny, albeit a bit indulgent, and I assume culturally significant. However, with the costume design, I was reminded of another iconic musical with a titular emcee that shall remain nameless. Some choices left me scratching my head. The set, a massive silver veil wrapping the entire proscenium, including the orchestra on a second level, is a big choice. The projections onto this luminescent shower curtain were often dazzling, but the reason for this bold choice escaped me. The costumes, mostly veering off-period, seemed intentionally conceptual, were often dazzling, but didn’t always land. Here’s my take: Mama Rose stays rooted in the vaudeville era, costumed impeccably for that period. The world around her is a cacophony of her present and future, something she refuses to step into. The orchestra, under the direction of Maestro Arturo Díez Boscovich, played this magnificent score on opening night with sublime splendor. Lush, vibrant, and perfectly executed, the music nearly carried the whole production on its own. The overture was stunning, adding beautifully to Banderas’ vision. Yet, in an ironic twist, the overture was overshadowed by choreography that felt more suited to a modern-day show choir than this iconic musical. As much as I wanted to love the choreography, it just didn’t quite hit the mark. At times, it felt too contemporary and abstract for a piece so deeply rooted in its historical context. Aside from the strangely jejune overture, poor Tulsa, played by the talented Aarón Cobos, could’ve used more help in telling the broader story in his iconic number, “All I Need is the Girl.” This is a vital emotional crescendo for Louise as well as Tulsa, but it falls flat. There’s a lack of that delicate push and pull where one character’s brilliance enhances the narrative journey of another. It’s a missed opportunity. Despite all this, the evening reminded me of the true purpose of musical theatre. It’s not just about spectacle or skill (of which there is an abundance) or making ‘correct’ choices; it’s about emotion, vulnerability, and connection. And when it’s done right, that’s the magic we all feel in the theatre—whether we understand every word. That’s what is happening here and thriving. In short, Banderas’ Gypsy is a bold experiment that captures the essence of why we love theatre—its energy, its emotion, and its unpredictability. I had my quibbles, but there is no doubt that this is a thrilling time to be a part of Madrid’s artistic landscape, and the Spanish, recently with lots of help from Banderas, are most definitely leading the charge. Spain, in all its theatrical, passionate, unapologetically expressive glory, has left its mark on me. From the raw, soul-shaking power of Flamenco in Seville to the dazzling musical theatre of Madrid, this country doesn’t just perform—it lives, breathes, and bleeds artistry. Whether it’s a single guitarist commanding a room with aching melodies or an entire ensemble pouring their hearts into a Broadway-caliber production, Spanish performers remind me why we tell stories in the first place—to connect, to reveal, to transcend. Here, theatre isn’t just entertainment; it’s an extension of life itself. And if there’s one thing Spain has taught me, it’s that art should never just be observed—it should be felt, fought for, and flung into with reckless, wholehearted abandon. Some notes on Spain’s Acting Scene Madrid. The pulsing heart of Spanish theater, where the scent of churros and chocolate mingles with the glitz and glamour of world-class theatr e . The industry here is a passionate, unpredictable beast—brimming with opportunity, yes, but riddled with instability. Performers leap from stage to screen, juggling Shakespeare, Almodóvar-style melodrama, and the occasional detergent commercial just to keep the lights on. From what I’ve gathered through old-school research and conversations with actors, Madrid’s acting schools aren’t just institutions; they’re artistic battlegrounds where actors are sculpted, shattered, and reborn. Whether you want to master classical theatre, embody raw emotional realism, conquer the screen, or defy gravity, there’s a training ground tailored to your brand of artistry. Incidentally, if you’re interested in studying performance in Spain and you are not fluent in the language—or the many dialects—of the Iberian Peninsula, I suggest diving into those language apps posthaste. And then take a formal course. While the British may revel in the elegance of their native tongue, the Spanish-trained actor is also a virtuoso of vocal expression, wielding their language with astonishing precision and power. Formal Acting Schools & Conservatories in Madrid: A Theatrical Wonderland From hallowed conservatories to avant-garde training grounds, Madrid boasts institutions that turn hopeful performers into genuine stars—sometimes with a bit of existential suffering thrown in for good measure. The competition is fierce, but it feels less overwrought and populated, more specific and focused, filled with those who truly belong, who are ‘Initiate’— in an environment where only the committed, the obsessive, and perhaps the unhinged survive. RESAD: The Shakespearean Boot Camp of Spain https://www.resad.es/ Let’s start with the Real Escuela Superior de Arte Dramático (RESAD), Spain’s version of Juilliard or RADA, where the walls ooze history, and you can practically hear the echoes of centuries of Spanish theatre legends yelling about fate and honor. This is where actors go to be properly forged in the fires of theatrical rigor, emerging with a predilection for declaiming Lorca monologues while sipping overpriced café con leche. RESAD specializes in classical and contemporary theatre, ensuring students can handle everything from Shakespearean soliloquies to brooding avant-garde absurdism. The facilities match the intensity: multiple theaters, both indoor and outdoor, providing full-fledged performance spaces rather than just a dusty black box with a broken spotlight. The library is legendary, filled with plays, historical texts, and possibly a few haunted scripts. It is a place of discipline, tradition, and, if you make it through, prestige. While it’s best known for its rigorous classical theatre training, it also offers a specialization in Musical Theatre. This is where the academically inclined Ariana DeBose wannabe goes, where you’ll analyze the historical evolution of musical theatre in the morning and belt out a Sondheim ballad in the afternoon. Cristina Rota: The Rebel’s Playground https://escuelacristinarota.com/ If RESAD is the polished grand dame of Spanish theatre training, then the Escuela de Interpretación de Cristina Rota is the rebellious rock star in ripped jeans and a leather jacket. Known for its intensive Meisner-based training, this school pushes actors toward emotional authenticity, raw vulnerability, and the occasional existential meltdown. Forget the grandiosity of RESAD—Escuela de Interpretación de Cristina Rota is raw, intimate, and probably smells a bit like sweat and ambition. This place isn’t about fancy buildings; it’s about emotion, technique, and stripping your soul bare in front of your classmates. Minimalist black box theaters, because who needs elaborate sets when you ARE the drama? Cristina Rota’s alumni list reads like the Spanish version of an indie film festival lineup—including Paco León, who became a household name for his comedic genius, and Juan Diego Botto, who juggles theatre, film, and social activism. And then there’s Penélope Cruz who graced the halls of this institution before charming the world with her undeniable talent and Pedro Almodóvar-approved magnetism. Instituto del Cine Madrid: The Hollywood Gateway https://www.institutodelcine.es/ For those who prefer the buzz of film sets over the scent of dusty velvet curtains, the Instituto del Cine Madrid is your best bet. Specializing in screen acting, camera techniques, and making sure you don’t awkwardly blink at the wrong moment, this school prepares actors for the wild world of film and television. Who trained here? Many of the actors working in Spain’s booming Netflix and HBO España productions have passed through its doors, and while they may not yet be household names internationally, they are steadily climbing the ladder of cinematic fame. The school’s real strength is industry connections, making it a top choice for anyone on the film and television trajectory. Juan Carlos Corazza: The Mind-Bending Masterclass https://estudiodeactuacion.com/en/home/ If you’re looking for something a little more esoteric, a little more soul-searching, and potentially life-altering, welcome to the Juan Carlos Corazza Studio . This isn’t just actor training; this is an odyssey into your own psyche. It’s a Stanislavski-Meisner-movement-infused pilgrimage, and those who survive it emerge as acting titans with an almost eerie emotional depth. Javier Bardem, Spain’s finest growling, brooding, scene-stealing Oscar winner trained here. If it worked for him, maybe there’s hope for the rest of us mere mortals. Musical Theatre Training Musical Theatre is an industry that’s exploded in recent years, with Madrid establishing itself as the Broadway of the Spanish-speaking world, producing everything from Sondheim to original Spanish-language mega-musicals. But where do these triple-threats-in-the-making hone their craft? Let’s dive into the musical theatre training grounds of Madrid—places where singers become storytellers, dancers learn to act, and actors learn, well, to count to eight. Escuela de Teatro Musical Memory: The Broadway Bootcamp https://www.escolamemory.cat/ca/ If RESAD is the hallowed temple of theatre, Escuela de Teatro Musical Memory is the sweaty, fosse-walking rehearsal studio where the magic actually happens. This school is entirely devoted to musical theatre, meaning you won’t have to sit through a lecture on 17th-century Spanish drama before launching into a full-throated rendition of "Defying Gravity." Here, it’s all about technique: voice, movement, acting, and most importantly, stamina—because if you can’t belt through an eight-minute dance number, are you even a musical theatre performer? The school’s facilities are state-of-the-art, with professional dance studios, recording spaces, and performance venues that make it feel more like a working theatre than an educational institution. The training is full-throttle, preparing students for the grueling reality of eight-shows-a-week contracts. Scaena: The Contemporary Powerhouse https://scaenaartesescenicas.com/ Scaena , founded by the illustrious Carmen Roche, is another serious contender in Madrid’s musical theatre scene. With a faculty stacked with industry professionals and a curriculum that blends classical technique with contemporary performance skills, this is where you go if you want to be employable in both West Side Story and whatever avant-garde, genre-bending musical is about to take over the industry next. Scaena is known for its holistic approach—training students not just in singing, dancing, and acting, but also in the business side of theatre. Graduates have gone on to perform on Madrid’s biggest stages and, in some cases, taken their talents international. If you’re looking for a well-rounded, forward-thinking approach to musical theatre training, Scaena is a solid bet. SOM Academy: The Industry Pipeline https://somescuelademusicales.com/ The new kid on the block but already making waves, SOM Academy is the brainchild of Stage Entertainment, the production company behind Spain’s biggest commercial musical theatre hits. If you want direct access to industry professionals and a training program designed with actual casting needs in mind, this is the place to be. SOM Academy is less about academia and more about real-world training. Students work with active directors, choreographers, and vocal coaches currently employed in Madrid’s theatre scene, meaning your final showcase could literally be an audition for your first professional gig. The school’s facilities include recording studios, full-scale rehearsal spaces, and performance venues that mimic the conditions of actual commercial productions. Since it’s directly connected to Madrid’s most successful theatre productions, the alumni list is growing fast, with many graduates booking ensemble and lead roles straight out of training. It’s the ultimate fast-track for those looking to go from student to working professional with as little downtime as possible. La vida del actor para mí Let’s consider the life and times of the Spanish actor—that bohemian struggle between artistry and financial ruin, between thunderous ovations (mercifully, the Spanish don’t stand up after every performance) and standing in line for unemployment benefits. And what better way to explore it than by comparing two of the world’s great theatrical cities: Madrid and New York. The city’s musical theater scene has been the subject of some dramatic exposés—tales of grueling schedules, low pay, no vacations or sick leave, and the kind of exhaustion that turns jazz hands into trembling claws. These conditions have fueled a surge in union activism, as actors demand to be treated as professionals rather than disposable props. Sound familiar? It should—to anyone who knows the history of Actors’ Equity Association in America. Speaking of America, New York actors navigate a world just as cutthroat but armed with a powerful shield: the union. And unlike Spain, where performers are still fighting for basic protections, New York has its fortresses—Actors’ Equity Association (AEA), the Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA), and a network of contracts designed to ensure actors aren’t working themselves to death for the price of a subway swipe. Broadway performers are still flogging themselves nightly—belting, leaping, and sweating their way through eight-show weeks—but at least there are structured breaks, minimum salaries, and a health plan that doesn’t require one to barter a kidney. And since the COVID era, the old adage “the show must go on”—once a rallying cry for actors to struggle through sickness and like it—has given way to a new mantra: “Stay home and keep your coughs to yourself.” Swings and understudies now step in all the time, proving that the industry can, in fact, survive without forcing its performers to push through pneumonia for the sake of a matinee crowd. Progress? Perhaps. But whether in Madrid or New York, the hustle remains eternal, the struggle is real, and the show, as ever, must go on. Now the money—because as much as we like to pretend it’s all about the art, passion doesn’t pay the bills—Madrid actors face a salary roulette that makes the stock market look stable. One source pegs the average annual salary at a respectable €56,779 (roughly $59,500.00), while another (Glassdoor) suggests it’s closer to €15,000 ($15,730). That’s a discrepancy so vast; it’s like comparing a West End leading role to playing “weeping willow on the left” in the school play. Meanwhile, in New York, a Broadway actor under union contract starts at around $2,034 per week—if they can land a full-year contract, that’s over $100,000 annually. Just breaking poverty in New York, but still… Off-Broadway? Less predictable. Indie films, immersive theater, TV guest spots, experimental performance art in a Brooklyn warehouse? Welcome to the hustle. Let’s break it down even more. According to a report from El País in October 2024, ensemble members, replacements, and understudies in Madrid’s musical theater scene earn a base salary of €2,556 gross per month . After social security and a moderate income tax rate (~15%), the net monthly salary could be around €1,900–€2,050, or €475 - €513 per week. That’s what I made in 1992 in Chicago. I’m sure working through the economics of it, considering a lower ticket price, FREE health insurance and $3 copa de Rioja ($18 in New York), etc, might soften these horrifying stats, but still. Quaint hobby is, indeed, how one might categorize a career as a performer nowadays. For context, ensemble members in the Broadway production of “The Book of Mormon” have been reported to earn approximately $2,095 per week, the current minimum weekly salary for a member of the actors’ union (AEA). And then there’s the challenge of work itself. Madrid’s performers talk of brutal rehearsal hours, minimal breaks, and an industry that expects them to power through illness like some kind of method-acting exercise in suffering. New York, at least in the unionized world, has mandated breaks, sick leave, and some attempt at humane working conditions. But make no mistake—whether it’s Broadway, Off-Broadway, or grinding out guest spots on Law & Order, New York actors are still running a constant marathon of auditions, callbacks, side jobs, the ever-present spectre of the two-week notice, and competition that feels like Squid Games . Home life is farther away from work as well… who can afford to live in Manhattan? The 475 square foot, two-bedroom apartment I rented on 51st and 9th, a few blocks from Broadway’s theatre district from 1995 - 2010 for an average $1600.00 during that time goes for $7000 per month in 2025. I have no discernible words for that preposterous fact. And yet, despite the odds, they persist. Because for the true actor, the show really must go on—even if it means doing it for exposure, a travel stipend, or the occasional free drink at an industry mixer. Image Credits: Article References References About the author(s) Adam Pelty is a nationally recognized performer, director, and choreographer. He created the original choreography for The Scarlet Pimpernel on Broadway and received the IRNE Award for choreography for his work on Billy Elliot - the Musical at the Ogunquit Playhouse. His Broadway acting credits include Cyrano: The Musical, Steel Pier, A Christmas Carol, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, The Scarlet Pimpernel, and Titanic . As a director and choreographer, he has worked regionally at theaters such as North Shore Music Theatre, The Fulton Theatre, Argyle Theatre, Merrimack Repertory Theatre, Capital Repertory Theatre, and Porchlight Music Theatre. Pelty has served on the faculties of Interlochen Center for the Arts, Ithaca College, AMDA, and NYU. Currently, he is Professor of Musical Theatre and Dance at Coastal Carolina University in South Carolina, where he lives with his wife, Hillary Patingre Pelty. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents The 2025 Festival International New Drama (FIND) at Berlin Schaubühne Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 20 Willem Dafoe in conversation with Theater der Zeit The Puzzle: A new musical in the Spoleto Festival, Italy presented by La MaMa Umbria Varna Summer International Theatre Festival Mary Said What She Said The 62nd Berliner Theatertreffen: Stories and Theatrical Spaces That Realize the Past, Present and Future. Interview with Walter Bart (Artistic Leader, Wunderbaum Collective & Director, Die Hundekot-Attacke) from the 2024 Berliner Theatertreffen Duende and Showbiz: A Theatrical Odyssey Through Spain’s Soul Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 21, 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 21 By Steve Earnest Published: December 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF The Winter 2025 edition of European Stages features articles from England, Portugal, Germany, Poland, France and Romania. There is a fascinating mix of productions covered and an equally varied group of writers ranging from Marvin Carlson, one of America’s most respected theatre scholars to Amy Hamel, a university lecturer and former student of mine from Florida who appeared on Broadway and major regional theatres across the USA. It was amazing to publish this brilliant young woman’s first work, but Dr. Carlson had done me that favor many years ago in the 1990’s with one of my first articles, a (probably bad) review of Der Eismann Kommt at Deutsches Theater Berlin while I was completing my dissertation research on the Ernst Busch Schule. I know I tried very hard to be a good writer as Yvonne Shafer, one of my mentors and longtime contributors to Western European Stages , was instrumental in my submitting that review as well as helping me making the connections with the Ernst Busch Schule before that. Also included in the mix are long time contributors to European Stages like Kalina Stefanova and Philippa Wehle, both of whom covered important European festivals in Romania and France from Summer 2025. The Winter issue has generally included many works each year from the previous Summer, which allows readers to both reflect on past work but also to consider what possibilities the upcoming season may hold. The issue also features an article from first time European Stages contributor, Dr. Timothy Koch, a former colleague of mine at Coastal Carolina University now living in Portugal. Tim has a strong sense for European production, having taken numerous musical groups to Europe over his distinguished career. Savas Patsalidis also contributes a work on a the prestigious Almada festival in Portugal while Ion Tomus provides a glimpse into the Radu Stanca National Theatre in Romania and its collaboration with a Romanian University. The issue also looks at a few Polish productions in both Warsaw as well as Lublin, the city recently designated as the European Capital of Culture in 2029. Finally, I have included a review of Robert Wilson’s last realized work, Moby Dick at Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus in May 2025. Bob’s death in June created a void in our world that is not likely to be soon filled, and I was happy to attend the production with his co-director Ann-Christin Rommen. I think we will all be mourning Bob’s death for many years to come, but we will hope to see new works emerge that reveal his tremendous influence on world theatre. Wilson’s Moby Dick plays at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in late April/early May 2026 and opportunities to see Wilson’s work in the USA have traditionally been scarce. Personally, I am very happy that Marvin Carlson is continuing to make strong contributions to the journal that he founded in 1969. Marvin’s current article is particularly relevant as it covers Peer Gynt , the most recent work of the controversial yet brilliant Norwegian Director Vegard Vinge and his longstanding colleague Ida Müller. As we approach the vibrant European Summer festival season, it’s likely that some of the works mentioned in this article (particularly The Summit and Peer Gynt ) could end up in the lineup of the Theatertreffen this coming May. My trip is already booked! Steve Earnest and Ann-Christin Rommen at Moby Dick , Schauspiel Düsseldorf in May 2025 Image Credits: Article References References About the author(s) Steve Earnest is a Professor of Theatre at Coastal Carolina University . He was a Fulbright Scholar in Nanjing, China during the 2019 – 2020 academic year where he taught and directed works in Shakespeare and Musical Theatre. A member of SAG-AFTRA and AEA, he has worked professionally as an actor with Performance Riverside, The Burt Reynolds Theatre, The Jupiter Theatre, Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theatre, The Colorado Shakespeare Festival, Birmingham Summerfest and the Riverside Theatre of Vero Beach, among others. Film credits include Bloody Homecoming , Suicide Note and Miami Vice . His professional directing credits include Big River , Singin’ in the Rain and Meet Me in St. Louis at the Palm Canyon Theatre in Palm Springs, Musicale at Whitehall 06 at the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach and Much Ado About Nothing with the Mountain Brook Shakespeare Festival. Numer ous publications include a book, The State Acting Academy of East Berlin , published in 1999 by Mellen Press, a book chapter in Performer Training, published by Harwood Press, and a number of articles and reviews in academic journals and periodicals including Theatre Journal, New Theatre Quarterly, Western European Stages, The Journal of Beckett Studies and Backstage West . He has taught Acting, Movement, Dance, and Theatre History/Literature at California State University, San Bernardino, the University of West Georgia , the University of Montevallo and Palm Beach Atlantic University. He holds a Ph.D. in Theatre from the University of Colorado, Boulder and an M.F.A. in Musical Theatre from the University of Miami, FL. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Theatre in Poland, Fall 2025 Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 21 Robert Wilson’s Moby Dick at Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf, Summer 2025 Dramas of Separation at Festival d’Avignon 19th Edition Polyphonies of the Present: The Pulse of the Almada Festival Summer 2025 in London, England The Tragic Ideal of Eternal Youth: Folk Myth on the Modern Stage International Theatre Festival of Sibiu 32nd Edition Review of Samuel Barber’s Vanessa by Ópera do Castelo Radu Afrim and his House Between the Blocks Report from Berlin Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.