Watch The Brink of Dreams by Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. In a remote village in southern Egypt, a group of girls rebel by forming an all-female street theater troupe. They dream of becoming actresses, dancers and singers, challenging their families and villagers with their unexpected performances. Shot over four years, The Brink of Dreams follows them from childhood to womanhood, facing the most crucial choices of their lives.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents The Brink of Dreams At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Friday May 16th at 5:15pm. RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. You may RSVP above to get a reminder about the Segal Film Festival in your inbox. Country Egypt, France, Denmark, Qatar, Saudi Arabia Language Arabic Running Time 101 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film In a remote village in southern Egypt, a group of girls rebel by forming an all-female street theater troupe. They dream of becoming actresses, dancers and singers, challenging their families and villagers with their unexpected performances. Shot over four years, The Brink of Dreams follows them from childhood to womanhood, facing the most crucial choices of their lives. About The Artist(s) See Presskit Get in touch with the artist(s) sales@thepartysales.com and follow them on social media https://www.thepartysales.com/movie/the-brink-of-dreams/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse

Carol Westcamp 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 The Late Work of Sam Shepard. Shannon Blake Skelton. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016; Pp. 256. Carol Westcamp By Published on November 8, 2018 Download Article as PDF The Late Work of Sam Shepard. Shannon Blake Skelton. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016; Pp. 256. The Late Work of Sam Shepard , by Shannon Blake Skelton, brings necessary attention to the later phase of Sam Shepard’s works, including his short prose, plays, acting performances, and screenplays. Previously published scholarship has tended to focus on Shepard’s most prolific period, roughly categorized as 1965 to 1985, as well as his family plays, such as Curse of the Starving Class (1976), Buried Child (1979), True West (1980), Fool for Love (1980), and A Lie of the Mind (1985). Skelton argues that with Shepard’s 1988 directorial debut in Far North and 1991 play States of Shock , Shepard transitioned to a “Late Style” that mixed genres and “resisted the clichéd notions that an aged artist in their autumnal period will offer gentle reflection” (3, 5). In the introduction, Skelton maps out the main points of the project from Shepard’s personality to the gender dynamics of his works. Each chapter corresponds with each key point, creating a thematically organized structure to the book. The first chapter studies the Shepard persona. Since Shepard was an actor, a writer, and even a celebrity, his image circulated widely during the height of his fame in the 1980s. Skelton argues that during his Late Style, Shepard adopted a paternal character due to his acting roles as well as his “status as an elder statesman of American theatre” (72). This new persona began to emerge when he was cast as law professor Thomas Callahan in the movie The Pelican Brief (1993) and was solidified in his role as father and husband Patrick Singer in the movie Safe Passage (1994). These father figure roles continued in subsequent films: Allie’s father Frank Calhoun in The Notebook (2004) and the elder mentor Tom in Mud (2012). This Late Style identity showed an artist who may have passed beyond his most popular period but stayed active in a variety of art forms. Skelton writes, “From acting and directing to writing, Shepard has seemingly made peace with himself, his art, his legacy, and his persona” (72). In the next chapter, Skelton examines Shepard’s self-reflexive exploration of authenticity and the artist in American culture. Much of Shepard’s earlier work probed how artists struggle with authenticity, trying to remain true to the art or the artistic self while facing a world of capitalism, which tries to change art to make it more commercially popular. Some plays such as Cowboy Mouth (1964), Angel City (1976), and True West may have represented this struggle, but they did not offer resolutions. During his Late Style, Shepard positioned the artist as older and wiser. Using close reading, Skelton focuses on two specific works and two solutions. Howard in the film Don’t Come Knocking (2005) achieves authenticity by forming relationships with others. For Hobart in the play Kicking a Dead Horse (2007), authenticity is ultimately unobtainable in life, so he finds it by embracing death. Chapter three explores the relationship between memory and trauma as demonstrated in the plays Simpatico (1993), The Late Henry Moss (2000), and When the World Was Green (1996), the latter of which was co-written with Joseph Chaikin. As with many of his earlier works, Shepard never offered easy answers but revealed characters struggling to comprehend a “past that consistently informs the present” (13). For instance, Buried Child and A Lie of the Mind address the personal dynamics of remembering and forgetting traumatic events in families’ pasts. But it was not until the Late Style works when Shepard revealed ways of “grappling with the past and its memories to transform the individual” (135). Sympatico demonstrates that one can achieve peace through confronting and then letting go of painful histories. Late Henry Moss and When the World Was Green show that one can reconcile with a past trauma by reenacting the event. Focusing on the two plays States of Shock (1991) and The God of Hell (2004), the fourth chapter addresses the politics of Shepard’s work during the Gulf War and the War on Terror. These two plays, unlike earlier ones, “unabashedly engage with political issues and offer commentary on broader concerns of the contemporary world” (137). Skelton argues that both plays show masculine, political conservatives attempting to change the minds of the other (potentially subversive) characters who question the supremacy of patriarchal narratives. Through these plays, Shepard suggests that “conservative ideology can be defeated through (1) direct action ( States of Shock ) (2) resistance by women ( The God of Hell ) and (3) the responsibility of one to be politically aware and engaged” (161). In the final chapters, Skelton analyzes how Shepard engages with the legacy of colonialism as well as gender dynamics. While the body of Shepard’s work has focused on the mystique of the American cowboy, his Late Style showcased the perspective of indigenous people, as in the plays Silent Tongue (1994) and Eyes for Consuela (1998). Shepard tried to move past romanticized notions of the Native American figure, showing instead more in-depth characters. Much of Shepard’s early work has been criticized for its lack of women and glorification of masculinity. However, during the Late Style, Shepard used the homosocial space in plays such as Ages of the Moon (2009) and Heartless (2012) to challenge patriarchal assumptions, tackle the collapse of masculine expectations, and address same-sex desire. Skelton’s book is an important contribution to the critical studies of Sam Shepard, offering discussion of Shepard’s major themes, stylistic changes, and late works. The book builds upon previous publications such as Stephen J. Bottoms’s The Theatre of Sam Shepard: States of Crisis (1998) and Matthew Roudané’s The Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard (2002). Roudané’s collection does offer two essays that address Shepard’s Late Style, but the essays do not provide the comprehensive insight of Skelton’s monograph. Skelton gives a personal touch to the striking impact that Shepard has had on American culture. References Footnotes About The Author(s) CAROL WESTCAMP University of Arkansas at Fort Smith Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Are We “Citizens”? Tony Kushner’s Deweyan Democratic Vision in Angels in America Pageants and Patriots: Jewish Spectacles as Performances of Belonging “Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something”: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the Reconstruction of Melodrama Edward Albee’s Sadomasochistic Ludonarratology in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism. Kirsty Johnston. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 240. Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting. Amy Cook. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Pp. 198. The Late Work of Sam Shepard. Shannon Blake Skelton. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016; Pp. 256. Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism. Patricia A. Ybarra. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 247. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

By Florian Malzacher | A survey of contemporary theatre to demonstrate its political potential in both form and content. < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the TCG Bookstore or Amazon.com. You can also get in touch with us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu The Art of Assembly Florian Malzacher Download PDF The Art of Assembly surveys theatre today to demonstrate its political potential in both form and content. Drawing on numerous examples from around the world in performance, visual art, and activist art, curator and author Florian Malzacher examines works that draw on the particular possibilities of theatre to navigate the space between representation and participation, at once playfully and with sincerity. In a time of wide-ranging crisis, The Art of Assembly is a plea for a strong definition of the political and for a theatre that is not content merely to reflect the world’s ills, but instead acts to change them. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

Watch Palestine Comedy Club by Alaa Aliabdallah / Charlotte Knowles at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2026. Six Palestinian stand-up comedians write and tour a stand-up comedy show exploring the unlikely, often dark humour that surrounds the complexity of Palestinian identity. What starts as a blending of comic traditions to encourage honest and open reflections through the shared enjoyment of laughter becomes an existential imperative to survival and sharing common humanity. In Palestine, there are no comedy clubs or traditions of stand-up comedy. The country is divided by walls, fences, and checkpoints, creating cultural and quality-of-life disparities between towns. Consequently, developing a comedy show that can resonate with vastly different audiences across these divides poses a significant challenge. Nonetheless, comedians Alaa, Hanna, Diana, Khalil, Ebaa, from Occupied Haifa, Ramallah, Jenin, Hebron, and the Golan Heights along with their British director, Sam, manage to navigate checkpoints and borders to perform in theatres across Palestine and Israel. Word of their performances spreads internationally, leading to an invitation to London for a series of gigs, tragically scheduled to commence in October 2023, just as the Genocide on Gaza breaks out. ‘Palestine Comedy Club’ serves as an exploration of comedy and the power of laughter to unite, liberate, challenge and heal. Initially, we witness how the comedians blend comic traditions from the Western world with those rooted in Arab cultures to employ new tools for expression and create a fresh audience experience. This includes highlighting differences between 'Westbankers' and '48ers', encouraging open and honest reflections, and bridging differing generational viewpoints through the shared enjoyment of laughter. However, as Gaza faces relentless attacks, the mission to connect audiences through laughter and humanity becomes an existential imperative. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Palestine Comedy Club Alaa Aliabdallah / Charlotte Knowles At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2026 Screening Information This film will be screened on May 30, at 2:15 PM, at The Segal Theatre Center RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. Country Palestine, United Kingdom Language Arabic, English Running Time 90 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film Six Palestinian stand-up comedians write and tour a stand-up comedy show exploring the unlikely, often dark humour that surrounds the complexity of Palestinian identity. What starts as a blending of comic traditions to encourage honest and open reflections through the shared enjoyment of laughter becomes an existential imperative to survival and sharing common humanity. In Palestine, there are no comedy clubs or traditions of stand-up comedy. The country is divided by walls, fences, and checkpoints, creating cultural and quality-of-life disparities between towns. Consequently, developing a comedy show that can resonate with vastly different audiences across these divides poses a significant challenge. Nonetheless, comedians Alaa, Hanna, Diana, Khalil, Ebaa, from Occupied Haifa, Ramallah, Jenin, Hebron, and the Golan Heights along with their British director, Sam, manage to navigate checkpoints and borders to perform in theatres across Palestine and Israel. Word of their performances spreads internationally, leading to an invitation to London for a series of gigs, tragically scheduled to commence in October 2023, just as the Genocide on Gaza breaks out. ‘Palestine Comedy Club’ serves as an exploration of comedy and the power of laughter to unite, liberate, challenge and heal. Initially, we witness how the comedians blend comic traditions from the Western world with those rooted in Arab cultures to employ new tools for expression and create a fresh audience experience. This includes highlighting differences between 'Westbankers' and '48ers', encouraging open and honest reflections, and bridging differing generational viewpoints through the shared enjoyment of laughter. However, as Gaza faces relentless attacks, the mission to connect audiences through laughter and humanity becomes an existential imperative. Director: Alaa Aliabdallah Producer: Charlotte Knowles Executive Producer: Carri Twigg, Esther Van Messel, Mikail Chowdhury, Farzana Rahman, Maryam Pasha Cinematographer: Alaa Aliabdallah Editor: Libby Knowles Composer: Khalil Al Batran, Faris Amin About The Artist(s) Director’s profile: Regash (Alaa Aliabdallah) has worked as a photographer and filmmaker with many artists and organisations such as the Palestinian Circus School, Freedom Theatre, Stereo48 Dance Company, and Sarreyet Ramallah. Regash is an internationally recognised portrait and street photographer, with an online audience of over 20,000 people. He produces photography for international fashion brands and magazines. Palestine Comedy Club is Regash’s debut feature documentary. He personally shot the comedy tour, all six comedy performances and five interviews. Regash is also including his beautiful street photography in the Palestine Comedy Club film, creating collage stories of each of the cities visited on the tour to provide audiences with a deeper dive into the diverse cultures found across Palestine. Producer’s profile: Charlotte Knowles is an award-winning TV and film producer. Her work has been featured on BBC, ITN, and Arte. Notable achievements include her term as CEO of the Independent Film Trust, where she oversaw the development and production of various critically acclaimed projects, including the award-winning, Scottish BAFTA and BIFA nominated documentary “Rebel Dykes.” In 2022, Charlotte founded Tough Crowd Limited, a production company exploring narratives at the intersection of politics and pop-culture. Palestine Comedy Club is the first feature documentary to appear from Tough Crowd. Under the Tough Crowd banner, Charlotte also created the CreativeHQ App, a mobile app providing professional development and business coaching for creative media producers. Palestine Comedy Club نادي الكوميديا في فلسطين Palestine Comedy Club is a comedy production company established in the UK and Palestine by Palestinian stand-up comedian, Alaa Shehada, with assistance from comedy director, writer and researcher Dr. Sam Beale, and film producer, Charlotte Knowles. Under the leadership of Alaa Shehada, Palestine Comedy Club is working to establish a stand-up comedy circuit across the West Bank providing space and funds for emerging stand-up comedy talent in the region to hone their craft and develop a culture of live comedy performance that is unique to the Palestinian experience. Palestine Comedy Club’s first show, ‘Balad’ (بلد ) toured to venues in Ramallah, Nablus, Haifa, Nazareth, Jerusalem and Jenin in 2021. Performed by Alaa Shehada, Hanna Shammas, Raed Sheukhi, Diana Swity, Ebaa Monther and Khalil Al-Batran, ‘Balad’ explores the complexity of Palestinian identity as it is experienced across the entire region, from Hebron to the Golan Heights. The show received excellent reviews and was described as “ laughter in extreme pain, and a turning point towards a different comedy in Palestine.” (full review shared below). The group is currently in the process of developing a show that will travel to the UK, before returning to Palestine to work with a wider range of stand-up comedians including more established talent such as Adi Khalefa. Palestine Comedy Club will also be delivering workshops throughout the year to encourage more performers to take up stand-up comedy and become part of the growing comedy ecosystem. Get in touch with the artist(s) https://www.instagram.com/palestinecomedy/ and follow them on social media Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2026 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here

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 22, 2026 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Finding Lear’s Shadow: Compagnia de' Colombari's King Lear at the 2026 Craiova International Shakespeare Festival Published: July 15, 2026 Download Article as PDF By David Barlow with Cindy Sibilsky Image Credits: Article Featured Image: Photo by Albert Dobrin of King Lear at the 2026 Craiova International Shakespeare Festival Compagnia de’ Colombari’s King Lear, directed and adapted by renowned experimental theatre director Karin Coonrod, has a habit of scrambling to extend the performances in other places due to popular demand. It premiered at the Yale University Theatre for the International Festival of Arts and Ideas in New Haven, Connecticut, in June 2024. Because of interest from New York City for the raw, radical interpretation of the oft-produced show and the powerful cast (who all happened to be available, a rare thing with actors), the company rallied to transfer the show within a month. Colombari’s King Lear enjoyed a sold-out, limited four-show run in July 2024 at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre. That was more of a preview run, for King Lear returned to take over the ever-flexible Ellen Stewart Theatre January 23 through February 8, 2026 for the official Off-Broadway engagement. Opening weekend was during the first street-closing snowstorm of one of the most frigid winters the city has seen in years. Despite that, the show received critical raves (including a New York Times Critic's Pick by Helen Shaw, who crowned it: “A Stunning ‘King Lear’ That Reveals, Finally, a King in Full"), repeat attendees and sold-out performances. Word of the success spread around the world, and shortly after the La MaMa run ended, Romania came calling. Colombari’s King Lear was invited to perform at the 2026 Craiova International Shakespeare Festival for two performances, on May 27 and 28, 2026, in Craiova, Romania. As a biennial festival, this would be the next chance until 2028. The show was hot and ready; the actors (seven out of ten who were available), the creative team and the Colombari company were committed to making this rare opportunity work. Photo by Albert Dobrin of King Lear at the 2026 Craiova International Shakespeare Festival The production employs Coonrod’s signature multiplicity, in which multiple actors of varying ages, genders and cultural backgrounds share an iconic role, with surprising and impactful results. That was witnessed with her Merchant of Venice in the historic Jewish Ghetto of Venice in 2016 on the 500th anniversary of its founding, where five actors split the part of Shylock, then came together for a “howl that rends the night” (according to Ben Brantley’s review in The New York Times ). In King Lear, ten actors play Lear in the opening scene, stripping off their paper crowns to transform into other characters, then reuniting at times as a regal legion. But absolute power and royalty are as fragile as a paper crown, and finally, only one Lear remains. That “Last Lear” originated with veteran actor Tom Nelis, whose obligation to return to the role of Grandfather in Ragtime on Broadway prevented him from joining his fellow Lears in Romania. So the Last Lear was replaced by another Colombari veteran actor (and friend to Nelis as well), David Barlow. Barlow generously offered to share his insights and observations behind the scenes of his process as the new Last Lear, and his experiences at the 2026 Craiova International Shakespeare Festival, with European Stages. Here are edited excerpts from his Lear Diary: May 24 When director Karin Coonrod reached out to me about joining the Compagnia de’ Colombari production of King Lear in Romania, I was both happily surprised and warily daunted. I would be taking on the acting track of Tom Nelis, a superb actor whose Broadway engagement in Ragtime prevented him from traveling to Europe. Normally, one expects Lear to be played by an elder statesman—Sir Ian McKellen comes immediately to mind, along with countless actors who have earned the role over the course of long careers. I mean, at 54, I’m no spring chicken, but I never dreamed I’d be rubbing elbows with the role this soon—if ever. But Karin’s compelling adaptation of the play initially allows for the king to be represented by a diverse cast of ten actors. She offers multiple windows into Lear’s prismatic psyche as he plummets from self-satisfied bombast to bare-forked animal. With great care, she has charted his wild descent into the dark night of the soul and subsequent inner awakening. That said, Tom’s track does do much of the role’s heavy lifting. One by one, all the other Lears drop away until there is only one Lear left standing—raving mad in the wilderness, commiserating with the blinded Gloucester, and reuniting with his youngest daughter Cordelia. It is not an assignment to take lightly—indeed, to embody that text is one of the great privileges any actor may be granted. A few years ago, a friend asked me: if you could only have one Shakespeare play with you on a desert island, which would it be? My answer: King Lear . The play is existentialism before existentialism, Beckett before Beckett. And now—gulp—here was an opportunity to seriously delve into a text I’d always held in the highest regard. So, back home in New York, I threw myself into preparation, which, of course, included letting my white beard grow unchecked. Luckily, it has come in so bushy it might give ample sanctuary to a nest of hornets—or at least one mid-sized marmot. I now marvel at how Appalachian mountain men or orthodox priests can tolerate chewing on their own mustache at every meal, or continually dousing it in their morning brew. Alas, one must suffer for one’s art. There are two other newcomers to this iteration of the production: KenYatta Rogers (playing Gloucester) and Nomè SiDone (playing Edgar). The three of us had a week of rehearsals in Brooklyn to wedge ourselves into a production that, following its heralded run at La MaMa in New York, was already a well-oiled machine. I had seen the show there, and knew I’d be teaming up with terrific actors. Compagnia de’ Colombari is a big-hearted group of artists, all of whom have embraced us with the same warmth and goodwill that Karin herself engenders. So, how does one approach the task of portraying this character’s titanic journey, and in such a compressed process? Well, aside from studying a video of the show shot in January, my plan was simply to get the words into my brain as quickly as possible. There is nothing worse than fretting about what the hell is your next line! Each actor has their own process, of course, but for me, coming to work with the language memorized is what will best secure any chance of having an organic exploration in the room. And what language it is! What a curious joy it is to map out this man’s confrontation with his own self-deceit—to enter the raging current that sweeps away every illusion of status and significance on which he has built his sense of self. For him to wake up, all of it must come tumbling down. May 25 Over the years, I’ve come to prefer an approach to acting Shakespeare that, above all, honors the poetry and meter of the text. By that, I don’t mean to suggest that playing Shakespeare well merely requires the recitations of a gifted technician (nothing could be more deadly!). Rather, it is to stress the importance of trusting that this playwright always has your back. Shakespeare—especially with such a masterpiece as King Lear —always provides exactly what is needed in every instant to activate the human imagination—no more and no less. The text consistently supports the actor in simply “say what they mean and mean what they say,” and, in doing so, is on the line. I suppose it’s similar to playing Bach or Chopin—the music is already impeccably notated, now all one must do is practice to the point of allowing it to flow through one’s instrument unobstructed. Open the spigot of your heart, follow the rhythm, and Shakespeare’s iambic beats will usher you into the deepest wells of the human collective unconscious. So no, I’ve never felt drawn to method-based approaches to Shakespeare. Emotional recall, backstory, sense memory—that all seems unnecessary, distracting even. But…but but but… This particular role has, in fact, stirred many personal reverberations. Lear’s archetypal journey into the shadows has felt eerily reminiscent of the inner disintegration I underwent in my mid-forties. It was a harrowing time—textbook mid-life crisis stuff. I guess I was somewhat the poster boy of a man staring into the proverbial abyss. And I’d be embarrassed to admit how much I struggled during that period of my life had it not been such a necessary part of my own growth. Sure, I have never divided a patrimony amongst my three daughters (I don’t have children), and my most kingly estate in life so far has been a one-bedroom apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I have never been cast out by my own kin or dispossessed of all earthly rights. But while considering the play’s cathartic themes of loss, I can easily remember how not so long ago I’d been utterly consumed by questions of identity and self-worth. Desperately, I tried to fend off the crippling dread of losing a core sense of purpose and belonging. This uncontrollable sense of failure is perfectly depicted in the theologian Richard Rohr’s book Falling Upward , in which he describes the “two halves” of life: The first half is marked by the establishment of ego strength, which one attains through achievement and external signs of success—both necessary and healthy. The second half begins when that first structure—so assiduously built over time—eventually collapses under its own weight. According to Rohr, many people—regardless of age—never leave the first phase. And while one might consider that a blessing, it can ultimately lead to calamity. As we see with Lear, who even in his twilight years has stayed trapped in the pursuit of control, status, and certainty, he is blind to the catastrophe he will so carelessly set into motion. In one of my favorite quips that the Fool employs to skewer his master, he says: “Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.” Genuine maturity requires surrender, humility, and a much deeper participation in reality. That is most often precipitated by profound feelings of loss, failure, mortality, grief, disillusionment, and unexpected change. Rohr calls these moments “falling upward” because what initially feels like a crisis or disaster can ultimately become a doorway to deeper wisdom. Instead of asking: “How do I succeed, acquire, and control?” One may begin to ask: “What is essential?” “Who am I beneath these roles?” “How do I love?” And it is love—and true love’s compassion—that becomes the very engine of Lear’s transformational journey. At the height of the storm that rages both in and outside his mind, he awakens to the suffering of all those who are less fortunate: “Take physic, pomp, Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them, And show the heavens more just.” Lear suddenly let’s go of his victimhood and petulant cry for retribution to consider the plight of others. He is willing to feel what they feel and thus close the gap of separation between himself and his fellow man. Later, in the light of Cordelia’s unconditional love and incredible sacrifice, he has finally surrendered all pretensions of importance to simply delight in the communion they share, even in the face of impending doom: “Come, let’s away to prison. We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage. When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues Talk of court news, and we’ll talk with them too — Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out — And take upon the mystery of things As if we were God’s spies.” As is the case in so many—if not all—of Shakespeare’s plays, wisdom (or the lack thereof) is best demonstrated in how we love. Photo by Albert Dobrin of King Lear at the 2026 Craiova International Shakespeare Festival May 26 A couple of nights before our departure for Europe, we did a “share out”—three scenes performed for a small audience in the basement rehearsal space of St. Paul’s Church in Brooklyn. It was helpful to have a crack at a portion of the play in front of people before leaving the States, to get it more in the body and feel some synergy with those who had come to cheer us on. For some, it was their first encounter with the play. And now, here I am sitting in a crisply appointed apartment in the Romanian city of Craiova. I have a panoramic view of distant forested hills beyond the foreground’s post-Soviet industrial sprawl, and the Kaufland Mall five stories below. The city’s old center is a half-hour walk away, or a quick trip by tram. That is where we have skirted off to take in the local charm and enjoy the friendly pulse of beer gardens, old churches, and a myriad of theater spaces presenting productions from all over the world. Oh, and a balloon ride a few stories above the Shakespeare Village. This “village” is set on the grounds of the city’s hippodrome in Nicolae Romanescu Park. The balloon was tied down, so we didn’t float that far up, but high enough to have a great view of the stage where the Romanian blues band The Southern Cockroaches were letting it rip with a grand set of Nashville standards. There seem to be few Americans here, and yesterday my Uber driver was eager to practice his English. The conversation quickly turned to politics, at which point I offered my requisite apologies for the US’s latest batch of geopolitical blunders, while he denounced the rampant corruption that has long infected his country’s government. And suddenly it occurred to me I was again discussing the universal themes of King Lear . In Lear’s addled tirade to Gloucester, there is a moment of shrewd clarity when he advises his blinded friend to: “Get thee glass eyes, And like a scurvy politician, seem To see the things thou dost not.” May 27 Wow! We teched and ran through the entire show all on the same day we had our first performance. And in withering heat. Our space, Teatrul Colibri, is a large children’s theater without air conditioning. And Craiova has been unseasonably warm. So, if there were ever a time and place to summon one’s inner actor warrior, it was today. With more bodies in the space, and in full costume under the lights, our first show may as well have taken place in one of the inner rings of Dante’s Inferno, which I suppose is strangely appropriate. But we pushed on and, from all accounts, gave a damn good show. Could the Romanian audience understand us? Was the temperature as tough going for them as it was for us? I’m not sure. But there’s one thing I’m clear about: this country loves theater. The audiences are present, tuned in, and willing. May 28 Today, a number of us saw Declan Donnellan’s Two Gentlemen of Verona performed by an outstanding troupe of Spaniards. My god, they were good! I never thought I’d have such a blast watching a production of that play. Not one of my favorites, to be sure, but now my earlier judgments are under review. It was also fun to listen to the play in rapid-fire Spanish. As I’m fluent, I’d say I caught a solid 50 percent of what was said. Otherwise, I was taken by the fantastic comic timing and physical alacrity of every single performer. Then several of us scarfed down a traditional Romanian meal at Restaurant Casa Ghincea (think cabbage stew, sausage, polenta, etc.) before hopping in an Uber to get back to our hot box of a theater. With last night’s show under our belt, everyone was poised to release into this final performance of King Lear fully. And we did. For me, I was continually coaching myself not to turn this evening’s effort into some great apotheosis of all my hard work. It would be what it would be. Stay present, be in the moment, exactly as it is. Just tell the story. And then, at the play’s dénouement, turning to Cordelia (played by the wonderful Celeste Sena), I saw the tears in her eyes. Lear says to his daughter: “Be your tears wet? Yes, faith.” Yes… faith indeed. References References About the author(s) David Barlow is a native New Yorker. A graduate of the NYU Grad Acting Program, he has performed in works ranging from the classical and kitchen sink to the avant-garde and off-the-wall. His original theatre piece LA Party (directed by Phil Soltanoff) has toured the US and Canada. He has performed in Europe at numerous national theaters in France with director Arthur Nauzyciel (Splendids and Julius Caesar), a rocky potato field in East Germany (Bauerntheater directed by David Levine), and Norway’s National Opera House in Oslo (The Hamlet Complex directed by Alan Øyen). Back home he has performed at New York Theatre Workshop, Theater For A New Audience, Primary Stages, and The Play Company for whom he performed in This Is My Office and was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for Best Solo Performance. He was a member of the off-Broadway theatre company Potomac Theatre Project for over 25 years, and regionally he has performed in many theaters across the country, including Berkeley Rep, Arena Stage, Hartford Stage, Actors Theater of Louisville, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Portland Center Stage, Kansas City Rep, Berkshire Theater Group, and Philadelphia Theater Company. Recently, as part of Sketchbook Theatre’s outreach, David has helped lead community projects with London theatre artist David Glass, creating new works in Buffalo, NY and Macao, China. David is also a director, and leads workshops in the Viewpoints movement training. A lifelong theatermaker and arts worker, Cindy Sibilsky (she/her) is the founder/CEO and producer of inJOY Entertainment LLC (established in 2011), a multimedia, multi-genre and multi-purpose arts & entertainment company focusing on meaningful cultural exchange worldwide. She is a Broadway, Off-Broadway & international independent producer, marketing/PR director, and writer/journalist. In 2019, she was guest editor, curator, and lead writer for American Theatre Magazine’s special edition on Japanese Contemporary Theatre . Through inJOY Entertainment, Cindy represents a diverse and constantly growing roster of New York and global clients, companies and shows, including festivals, theatre, musicals, dance, cirque, plays, cabaret, drag, concerts, curated art shows, public art, and immersive performances. 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 Review of 'In The Heights' at the Teatro Variedades Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 20 Spring in Europe – Beyond the Theatertreffen Power, Shame, Vanity and Opportunism – Productions of the 63rd Berliner Theatertreffen “The more I give to thee, the more I have…” 15th edition of the International Shakespeare Festival in Craiova Finding Lear’s Shadow: Compagnia de' Colombari's King Lear at the 2026 Craiova International Shakespeare Festival Robert Wilson Beneath a Cabbage Leaf: 7 Solitudes at the Nacionalinis Kauno Dramos Teatras NE:BITEF 2025: The Festival that Refused to Disappear Displacing the Orient: Postcolonial Negotiations in Purcărete's Adaptation of One Thousand and One Nights Staging Tradition, Testing Form: The Second Showcase of the National Theatre of Sofia Poetics of the Unfulfilled: The Seagull at the Jordan Hadji Konstantinov-Dzhinot Theatre, Veles, North Macedonia Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Eileen Trauth, Karen Keifer-Boyd and Suzanne Trauth Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 28 2 Visit Journal Homepage iDream: Addressing the Gender Imbalance in STEM through Research-Informed Theatre for Social Change Eileen Trauth, Karen Keifer-Boyd and Suzanne Trauth By Published on May 26, 2016 Download Article as PDF Introduction While an abundance of data clearly shows a gender imbalance in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, it is less clear how to motivate change regarding both overt and subtle barriers that hold women back. [1] This is particularly the case in the STEM field of information technology (IT). Since subtle gender barriers are transmitted through the cultural norms, values and gender roles of a society, creating a gender-balanced IT profession requires a way of addressing these emotional and implicit factors. The problem is that the scientific professions, on their own, are unable to do so. Information about structural barriers to social inclusion reported in scholarly publications is generally inaccessible to the lay person. Further, the scientific model of research dissemination leaves little room for the expression of subtlety, nuance, emotion, and holistic representation. Hence, artistic practice – specifically theatre for social change through relational aesthetics of transformative learning – can be employed to stimulate awareness, understanding, and activism about barriers to women in technological fields. It can also enable dissemination of research findings beyond the STEM academic community. In response to this opportunity, an original play, iDream , was written to communicate, in dramatic fashion, research results from an investigation of factors contributing to the under representation of women in the IT field. It did so by tackling the issues of experiencing, internalizing, and overcoming barriers to inclusion. The characters, plot, and dialogue of the play come from prior research that both developed theory and empirically applied it in over one hundred life history interviews with women working in the IT field. The characters in the resulting play embody the struggles of those who are marginalized in the IT field by virtue of gender but who seek inclusion and equality in the information society. Following staged readings of the play, audience feedback, and audience learning assessment, the play script was revised. The final version is now available to the public on the project website. This essay considers the challenges and opportunities of using theatre to address the important societal issue of exclusion in STEM disciplines. Backstory In 2007 Eileen Trauth sat at her computer having just sent her final report to the National Science Foundation (NSF) about a multiyear investigation into the gender imbalance in the STEM field of IT. She had developed and empirically tested a theory in the course of conducting life history interviews with women IT workers in the USA. During interviews that sometimes went on for three hours, these women willingly poured out their life stories – about their families, their communities, their schools, their hopes, and their dreams. They spoke about their interests and their passions, and about the people who helped or hindered their progression along a path that brought them to be participating in the interviews. She had already started publishing academic papers that added to cumulative scholarly knowledge about the problem of gender in the IT profession. But something was nagging at her. “How can I communicate what I have learned in this research in such a way that I can reach beyond my fellow academics? I want the results of my research to change the hearts and minds of parents, policy makers, educators, students and, ultimately, society,” she mused. Yet she recognized that scientific writing isn’t set up for such advocacy. This reflection and a fortuitous conversation the following year launched her on a journey through uncharted interdisciplinary waters. The conversation was with Suzanne Trauth, a playwright, who had just finished co-creating and presenting a play about Hurricane Katrina. The play was based upon interviews with residents of New Orleans and written in the genre of theatre for social change. Being aware of the interviews Eileen had conducted, Suzanne suggested a collaborative venture. Eileen’s research had revealed that the barriers to women entering and remaining in the IT field were not limited to those that are explicitly imposed on women, such as parents overtly discouraging their daughters from enrolling in computer science degree programs, or guidance counselors explicitly steering women students away from careers in computing. She had also found evidence of barriers that are implicitly internalized by young women themselves, when they receive messages from adults, peers, and the media about where they do and do not belong. As a result, they are sometimes unconsciously holding themselves back, which is being mistakenly diagnosed in the popular discourse as women “losing interest” in technology. Eileen was searching for a way to give voice to the powerful emotions expressed by the women she interviewed. There were times when she listened helplessly to the women express their feelings about isolation, exclusion from workplace socializing, being subjected to negative gender stereotypes, self-doubt, and being passed over for promotion. She wanted to communicate not just the facts she learned about the gender imbalance; she also wanted to communicate what it feels like to be on the margins. However, nuanced writing about subtle and unconsciously internalized barriers, writing that conveys what it feels like to be excluded, is the antithesis of scientific writing. Empirical research results that are published in scientific journals are expected to be presented in a straightforward manner, emphasizing objectivity and, typically, quantitative data. The emotion, nuance and subtlety that were an integral part of Eileen’s story of barriers did not fit with mainstream scientific research reporting. Consequently, she believed that her scholarly papers were telling only part of the story. She was also becoming increasingly dissatisfied with limiting the dissemination of her research results to fellow academics. Over the course of the project she had developed a growing desire to communicate to the broader public what she had learned about the nature of these gender barriers. She wanted to make a difference with this research and contribute to societal transformation. In recognizing that her research had taken her down the path toward advocacy, she was confronted with the limits of her discipline to effectively advocate for change. She acknowledged that art could pick up where science left off. Thus, this collaborative, cross-disciplinary project was born. This essay, about employing theatre to make a difference in STEM fields, recounts the process of enacting an NSF grant to develop and produce a play as an intervention to address the gender imbalance in science and technology. It also investigates some of the challenges associated with an effort to bring three different disciplines to bear on the enactment of societal change. That is, the play needed to satisfy the demands of playwriting in the relational aesthetics of theatre for social change. Performance arts can call people into relationship with each other and to objects, ideas, and places: a relational aesthetic , a term coined by Nicolas Bourriaud in 1988. [2] While doing so it needed to incorporate the results of scientific research and theorizing about gender barriers in the IT field into the characters and story line of the play. Finally, the play needed to evidence audience learning in the forms of awareness, attitude change, and intended behavior. Eileen Trauth is a professor of information science and technology, and gender studies, who conducts research on gender exclusion in the IT field. [3] She was principal investigator on this grant and co-wrote the play. She wanted to transform the findings from research interviews about gender barriers in the IT field into a medium that allowed for greater expression of emotion and subtlety than what is afforded by scientific journal articles. Karen Keifer-Boyd is a feminist arts educator and scholar of art pedagogy who served as the project evaluator; she wanted to assess the transformative learning that resulted as the playwrights, cast, and audience members experienced the performance of the play. Suzanne Trauth, a playwright, was a project consultant and co-creator of the play script. Her goal was to write a play script that would further societal transformation about barriers to achieving one’s dreams. Transformation: From Transcript to Play Script Theatre has frequently provided a venue for reaching audiences in order to achieve social goals beyond the purely aesthetic by healing, promoting action, encouraging community, and supporting transformation. [4] One articulation is called theatre for social change, which is enacted in times and places of crisis. [5] While theatre for social change has various understandings, our use of the term to describe our project is consistent with Thornton’s [6] depiction of theatre for social change as a set of five defining characteristics. The first characteristic is intentionality. Theatre is being used to alter the actual world, not just reflect it. In our project the intention is to create awareness, educate, and inspire action related to gender barriers in the IT field. The second characteristic is community, based on either geographical location or identity. The community shapes and informs the theatrical work. In our project the community consists of women IT workers whose voices are projected through the work to a potential community of IT workers in the audience. The third characteristic is hyphenation, the intersection of performing arts and sociocultural intervention. In our project the sociocultural intervention is awareness and education about gender barriers to IT careers. The fourth characteristic is conscientization: awareness leading to action. In our project awareness of gender barriers is intended to motivate behavior to resist them. The final characteristic is aesthetics. In theatre for social change multiple perspectives are often in evidence with the aim of giving voice to the voiceless. In our project two perspectives were employed (that of the playwright and that of a scientist) to give voice to an underrepresented group in the IT field: women. There are a number of current examples of theatre for social change. Katrina on Stage: Five Plays, [7] is a collection of works that employ theatre to promote awareness and activism about the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Tim Robbins’ Dead Man Walking (2004) was written to promote activism about abolishing the death penalty. William Mastrosimone’s Bang, Bang, You’re Dead (1999) was written to increase public awareness about violence in high schools. Insofar as the intention of our work is to create awareness and understanding, it also shares a goal of applied theatre, which is to focus on the use of theatre to educate and engage with social issues. Applied theatre is also sometimes referred to as Applied Theatre for Social Change. [8] The project discussed here employs relational aesthetics in which actors, readers, and audience members experience qualitative research findings as theatre for social change, which highlights the issues associated with oppressive societal institutions. [9] One approach in theatre for social change is to transform research findings into an original play script. This approach has several labels, including: performed ethnography, research-informed theatre, and performed research. According to Tara Goldstein et al., Performed ethnography and research-informed theater are research methodologies that involve turning ethnographic data and texts into scripts and dramas that are either read aloud by a group of participants or performed before audiences.[10] They developed a framework of research-informed theatre to analyze the melding of research, theatre, and education to produce transformative learning. Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon employed performed research techniques in her performance piece SHOT! (2009) in order to reframe the discourse about an impoverished North Philadelphia community. [11] Intended as theatre for social change, the play script—when read, performed, or experienced as audience—brings awareness about gender barriers in the IT field and teaches how to challenge, change, and overcome inequities in IT fields. It shares with other forms of arts activism the goal of using “theatre in the service of social change.” [12] Other forms of activist theatre are: community theatre, popular theatre, grassroots theatre, agit-prop (from agitation and propaganda) or protest political theatre, participatory theatre, Freirean “Theatre for Development,” [13] or Boalian “Theatre of the Oppressed”—also referred to as forum or playback theatre. [14] While the staged readings of iDream were performed with professional actors in professional theatre venues, we expect that it might also be performed by schools or community groups and be followed by audience talkback sessions. Our study of attitudinal change for the actors and the audience members at staged readings suggests that the pedagogy of this play project works through embodied learning when performing the play script as a staged reading, or experiencing the staged reading as an audience member. While our learning assessment occurred for staged readings of the play script we believe it is reasonable to expect that a full production would also result in embodied learning. As theatre for social change it aims to remove social and institutional barriers that women experience in the IT field. Theatre, dance, films, and animations in STEM fields is typically used only for explanatory purposes; the arts help non-scientists visualize abstract science concepts as well as bio-physical processes invisible without specialized apparatus. For example, Vince LiCata wrote the play DNA Story (2009) [15] to teach non-scientists about DNA structure and X-ray crystallography. In contrast, our goal was not to explain scientific concepts but rather to raise awareness and critique hegemonic social narratives regarding who could participate in the STEM field of IT. As theatre for social change, iDream performs research about women’s experiences in the IT fields in order to heighten awareness and to advocate for change. The NSF grant scheme that funded this project to transform research findings into an original play script, and to assess it as transformative pedagogy, was directed at innovative ways to communicate research results to a public audience. [16] The original research upon which the play project was built was a qualitative field study of women working in the IT profession. [17] Eileen Trauth interviewed 123 women working in the IT field in the USA. The themes explored in the interviews were: the extent to which the IT field in is socially constructed as a man’s world; pressures on women in the IT field, and how these pressures affect their professional development and working lives; the relationship between working in the IT profession and a woman’s gender self-image; and, finally, how women in the IT profession cope with the challenges presented to them. During open-ended interviews that ranged from one to three hours in duration, women discussed their life stories that led them to their current position in the IT field. They discussed their demographics, the type of work they did, personal characteristics, significant others in their lives, and influences from the larger society regarding gender roles and working in a technical field. At the outset of each interview Eileen explained her interest in understanding variation among women in the ways that they were exposed to, experienced, and responded to gender barriers throughout their careers. [18] While this research was being conducted, Eileen had not envisioned developing a play script as a way to enact societal transformation regarding gender barriers. But she was conscious at the time of the evocative and emotionally compelling nature of the narratives. Hence, in 2008, when Suzanne Trauth proposed writing a play based on the research findings, Eileen was quite receptive to the idea. Two intended audiences were envisioned as the play was being developed. Teenagers constitute the primary audience for the play—those who are experiencing and internalizing barriers to participation in the IT field. While the research that informed iDream is primarily about factors influencing the underrepresentation of women in the IT field, it is also recognized that underrepresentation is an issue for men in certain racial, ethnic, socio-economic, and sexual groups, and that gender stereotypes are enacted by members of all genders. However, while the learning objectives of awareness and understanding, attitude change, and intended behavior about gender, race, ethnicity, and class stereotypes that are embedded in a culture could apply to men as well as women students, the focus of this particular project was on the factors affecting the underrepresentation of women in the IT field. The secondary audience for the play consists of significant adults in teenagers’ lives—parents, teachers, coaches, guidance counselors, and others who are in a position to influence them. Hence, while performances of this play are intended for younger audiences, in order to make the play appealing to adults as well some themes that were intended primarily for this secondary audience were also embedded in the play script. An example is an adult’s effort to hold a young person back from pursuing a dream out of a desire to protect her or him from the same trauma s/he experienced. A concern raised during review of the grant proposal was the need to demonstrate how the play would be compelling to the target audience. In response, at the initiation of the project Eileen Trauth conducted a focus group with undergraduate women currently enrolled in an IT degree program. As relatively recent high school students they were in a position to provide feedback on the story line and advice on techniques to engage the audience. For example, participants said that when they were in high school they lacked exposure to the range of IT educational options that were available in college; they believed that creating greater awareness and understanding about this would be valuable to high school students. As a result, the three main characters in the play and their respective stories relate to a range of IT careers. With respect to awareness and understanding about imposed and internalized barriers to women, participants recommended that the message be conveyed with subtlety. Consequently, promotional materials about the staged readings of iDream emphasized its focus on current issues facing today’s high school students: how to follow one’s dreams while coping with real world issues such as obtaining tuition money for college, and dealing with the expectations and advice of significant people in their lives (parents, boy/girlfriends, guidance counselors, and teachers). Making a decision about careers in the IT field was positioned as the setting for the exploration of these larger themes of concern to high school students. The focus group participants also recommended the use of humor and audience engagement to make the play appealing to high school students. To that end, the script incorporates the vernacular of 18-year-olds, their music and language, their relationships, concerns, and sense of humor. It also includes references to popular video games, and references to contemporary social media and texting. Further, some characters only appear in a technology-mediated way, such as through text messages: MOTHER: Have you done your homework? AMANDA: Duh. It’s Friday night. I have a date with Jimmy. ( She texts and laughs. Mother grabs the cell phone. ) MOTHER ( reads, confused ): What is this? OMG. MOS. 5. CTN. BBL8R. ILU. WYWH. It sounds like a foreign language. Like a…a code or something. Are you hiding something from me? ( Amanda takes the phone back. ) AMANDA: OMG you are so boring. MOTHER: I want to know what you’re talking about. AMANDA: I’m making plans with Jimmy. Though Amanda’s mother reads the text messages, she doesn’t understand their meaning. The scene operates on two levels: it is a humorous exchange that underscores the generational differences between mother and child while, simultaneously, emphasizing Amanda’s obsession with the coded language of texts. Later, Amanda’s teacher Ms. D uses her student’s preoccupation with texting as a means of engaging her interest in a technology career in cryptography. The goal of this project, as theatre for social change, was to create transformation on the part of audience members who experience the play—about intentional and unintentional barriers that can be imposed upon and internalized by young people in the pursuit of their dreams about careers in the IT field. Eileen Trauth was focused on ensuring that the characters and the story arc in the play communicated research findings about gender barriers in the IT field and embodied the theoretical constructs of a gender theory that she developed and that was used in the research that inspired the play. According to this theory, The Individual Differences Theory of Gender and IT, the underrepresentation of women and gender minorities in the IT field can be explained by the interaction of three sets of factors (theoretical constructs). The first is individual identity: demographic characteristics (such as age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, socio-economic class) and type of IT work (such as computer hardware development, software design, or user support). The second factor is individual influences: personal characteristics (such as personality traits and abilities) and personal influences (such as role models and mentors). The third factor is environmental influences (such as cultural norms about gender roles). [19] Even though this project was undertaken to communicate the results of scientific research about gender barriers, the play had to satisfy aesthetic requirements as well. Suzanne Trauth had primary responsibility for writing the play script. She focused on ensuring that its aesthetic design created forward momentum with believable characters who live through a discernible story arc shaped by strong conflicts that force the characters to act to achieve objectives. The higher the dramatic stakes, the greater would be the audience engagement during a performance. Hence, a script was needed that would generate a high level of engagement during its performance in order to achieve the goal of societal transformation through awareness, attitude change, and intended behavior regarding gender barriers in the IT field. In the play, three girls—Khadi, Theresa, and Amanda—are high school students confronting an uncertain future: whether or not to go to college and, if they decide to, what they would study and how to make that happen. They are encouraged by Ms. D., the dynamic teacher of their Digital Design course, to explore the male-dominated fields of information and computer technology—computer science, computer engineering, and information science. In doing so, they begin to discover their places in the world while they struggle with the obstacles—personal, family, and academic—that might prevent them from following their dreams. The play focuses on the conflicts faced by all three protagonists: Theresa’s desire to attend college versus her father’s demand that she work in a hair salon with her cousin; Amanda’s blossoming interest in higher education versus her mother’s low expectations—and her boyfriend’s priorities—for Amanda’s future; and Khadi’s confusion about her choice of college versus the instability of her home life and lack of appropriate mentorship. iDream has a single plot with three threads that are woven together as the three friends face life decisions. By graduation day, Theresa has asserted her independence, Amanda has traded an early marriage for college, and Khadi has found her mentor in an empathetic boyfriend. In view of our goal, the interacting arcs of the three primary characters drove the narrative and textual foundations that held the production together. The integration of their three stories and the personal, academic, and familial barriers they confront as they face the challenges of planning for life after high school become the scaffolding upon which the moment-to-moment actions of the play unfold. Their objectives drive the narrative. The conflicts raised in the play reflect the range of obstacles discovered as a result of the research on barriers to careers in STEM for women and underrepresented groups. Theresa struggles with cultural and parental expectations. Her father is focused on the short term economic benefits of Theresa’s employment immediately after graduating high school. He does not see the long term economic benefits from Theresa remaining out of the labor force for four years while in college. Khadi confronts a lack of consistent mentoring about her future. And Amanda must tackle low parental expectations that affect her self-esteem. THERESA: Papi tells me to get my nose out of the books and learn to do something practical so I can earn money for the family. KHADI: Dad would say “yeah” but Mom is worried about money. I would need a scholarship or something. AMANDA ( mimics her mother ): Mom says, “I’m not wasting good money on college when I’m not sure you’ll even graduate high school.” All performance elements play a crucial role in the dissemination of the research findings. The story arcs of the characters express the results of the research: as the three girls confront personal and social barriers to achieving their goals, they embody the questions and concerns raised in the course of the interviews undertaken by Eileen Trauth. This storytelling, in turn, triggers audience engagement, via personal empathy during the performance and the public discussion afterward. Art and science converge in an exploration of career opportunities in the twenty-first century, and barriers that might hold people back. The focus is not so much on overt barriers that are imposed on individuals; rather the play dramatizes the process by which a young woman might unconsciously internalize limits on her dreams. Research-Informed Theatre Two forms of research were involved in this project. One form of research was the field study of women working with IT that produced the theoretical constructs and findings about the gender imbalance. These findings were, in turn, embodied in the characters and story line of iDream . The characters are a composite of the stories told by the adults about barriers they experienced and observed over the course of their lives, and the constructs of the theory used in the research. The other form of research was the process of obtaining and incorporating feedback into the writing and revising of the play script. Hence, the relationship of the audience to the performance was an integral part of this project. It was through audience engagement that this second kind of research was accomplished. The transformation of a scientific product into a theatrical process was intended to enact transformative learning through relational aesthetics in the experience of reading, performing, or viewing the play: to build awareness, change attitudes, and motivate behaviors and actions. The goal was to shift perspectives about individual, environmental, and social forces at work in creating barriers for women in technology fields. According to Juanita Johnson-Bailey, Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor, Director of the Institute for Women’s Studies, and a professor in the Department of Lifelong Education, Administration and Policy at The University of Georgia, societal transformation is a movement to change oppressive forces and begins with investigating the ways the forces form and operate. [20] Jack Mezirow notes: Transformative learning refers to the process by which we transform our taken-for-granted frames of reference . . . to make them more inclusive, discriminating, open, emotionally capable of change, and reflective so that they may generate beliefs and opinions that will prove more true or justified to guide action.[21] The need for societal transformation is evident in the data about both the significant underrepresentation of women and gender minorities (e.g., black men and LGBTQ individuals) in STEM fields such as IT and in the hegemonic masculine culture that pervades the high tech world. [22] Two groups of individuals are the focus of the societal transformation: those who are experiencing and internalizing the barriers and those who are in a position to tear them down. The development of the play script involved the creation of an initial draft based on the results of Eileen Trauth’s fieldwork and her interactions Suzanne Trauth. This was followed by two workshopping sessions and a series of public staged readings of iDream . Following each of these, the play script was subsequently revised. The script was first workshopped with actors at a table reading with Suzanne Trauth, Eileen Trauth, the director, and the dramaturg in attendance. The goal of this session was for Suzanne, the director, and Eileen to hear the play being read for the first time. The second script workshop occurred a month later on a stage in front of a small audience comprised of teachers, college students, and high school students. The project team observed the script being presented in a staged reading format and gained initial audience feedback on the script. Six staged readings of the play with professional (i.e., Equity) actors in front of public audiences were then held in 2012. The first staged reading was in June 2012 for an audience of several hundred NSF-funded STEM researchers. In October 2012 the remaining five staged readings in front of public audiences were held, three in New Jersey and two in Pennsylvania. Each performance was followed by audience talkback sessions held immediately afterward. Following each event, the script was revised. The final version of the play was completed in 2013. The New Jersey performances were held at Premiere Stages in Union, New Jersey. The audiences for the two daytime performances were recruited from high schools in Jersey City, Elizabeth, and in and near Union. The students came from urban schools that have significant ethnic and socio-economic diversity in the student bodies. Suzanne Trauth and John Wooten, Producing Artistic Director of Premiere Stages (who was also a consultant on this project) invited theatre teachers in these high schools to bring their students. The third performance took place on a Saturday evening as part of a new playwrights series with an audience consisting of adults who came to see the staged reading of a new play; the subject matter of iDream was not the main motivator for attendance. The two Pennsylvania performances were held on a Saturday night and a Sunday afternoon at the State Theatre in State College, Pennsylvania. The audiences for these performances were recruited from newspaper announcements, posts to email listservs, and an interview by a local television station with Eileen Trauth, Suzanne Trauth, and the director. The performances were also listed among the upcoming events on the theatre’s website. Audience members at all five performances were presented with a pretest and an informed consent form to sign, both of which provided background information about the project. In addition, immediately preceding each performance, the director came onto the stage and gave a brief introduction to the project and the play. We achieved engagement with the target audience by writing the script in such a way as to build empathy with the characters, by relating the storyline to the audience members’ own experiences, and enabling them to “see themselves” in the unfolding drama. In this way, audience members were drawn into the circumstances in iDream . Audience members’ connection, in a visceral way, to the play provided the emotional energy moving the story along to the climactic moment. THERESA ( proudly ): My trigonometry exam. I got 99 out of 100. ( Father reluctantly takes the paper and studies it. ) FERNANDO: 99 out of 100. ( teases ) Why not 100 out of 100? But what will you do with 99 out of 100 in your cousin Maria’s beauty shop? This trigonometry will help you cut hair? ( He hands the paper back to Theresa. ) THERESA: I was thinking about college— FERNANDO: No, Theresita. You will go to beauty school. You will have a trade that you can be proud of. You will be able to help your family. In America we have a better life. It has been hard and I work many long hours. But I do it for you and Mami and Imelda and Juan. Theresita, I know you are smart. But you must do this for the family. THERESA: But things change and it is different here now. FERNANDO: Your family never changes. THERESA: I could get a scholarship. FERNANDO: No Theresa! You cannot give any information to the school about our family. You must NEVER talk about us to [outsiders.] Do not betray your family. THERESA: But Papi, this is our country now. They are not outsiders— FERNANDO: No. Come and set the table. No more talk of [outsiders]. And no more talk of numbers. ( He leaves. Theresa presses the exam to her heart. ) During the talkback sessions, audience members, who had experienced being devalued as a woman or person of color, were emotional in their responses; they related the characters to their own lives. Two sub goals were embedded in the overall goal of stimulating awareness, understanding, attitude change, and activism. One sub goal was to generate awareness about types of careers in a field that has been stereotyped as being the exclusive domain of men. The second sub goal was to create awareness about both overt and subtle barriers to participation in the IT field, which are experienced by members of underrepresented gender groups. Karen Keifer-Boyd was responsible for designing and implementing the learning assessment. Research-informed theater can be transformative learning if the relational aesthetic experience of a performance “exposes a discrepancy between what a person has always assumed to be true and what has just been experienced, heard, or read.” [23] Consequently, Karen designed an assessment to gauge changed assumptions and attitudes about women in the IT field by audience members who attended the staged readings of iDream . Three forms of data constituted the audience learning gains assessment. First, audience members were asked to complete a pre-survey form consisting of open-ended questions. Second, at the end of each staged reading, Eileen Trauth, Suzanne Trauth, the director, and actors responded to questions and comments from the audience members during a talkback session. Karen Keifer-Boyd and a graduate student attended the staged readings and took handwritten notes regarding audience responses during these sessions. A third form of data came from a follow-up online survey that was sent to audience members who had completed the pre-survey. Responses during the talkback sessions and follow-up survey consistently showed that iDream “speaks” to the audience. One mother revealed, “I didn’t know the computer field was so broad.” A Latino actor commented that one of the characters “behaved just as my mother did.” An adult Latina audience member said: “The play was telling my life.” Some women audience members related the play to their own experiences of gender stereotyping and being dissuaded from IT careers, or not being given the same opportunities as their male counterparts. One woman audience member “strongly identified with Theresa because it brought back memories of being the oldest in an Italian family and being expected to help the family [rather than undertake a career].” Audience members revealed that after experiencing the staged reading iDream they were now aware that the IT field is available to women and underrepresented minorities and showed some evidence of change in their perceptions of who can pursue IT careers. For example, an audience member stated, “The careers were presented as really accessible in the play.” One student stated, “Students play games but they don’t think about how they’re made. The play did a good job of presenting careers.” A 41 year-old woman responded on the post-survey, “After the play I know they [IT professionals] do more than just ‘develop software,’ which was my original answer.” The audience members also revealed awareness of implicit and explicit barriers that can be both imposed and internalized. They identified with the characters, or knew people and experiences reflected in the play. A mother in the audience stated, “My daughter is nine and when she was five she told me that other kids told her math is not for girls. This play showed the options in the computer field.” Another area of awareness was about resources, particularly the role of teachers in helping underrepresented groups overcome restrictive stereotypes. Nearly all of the respondents in the post-survey mentioned the significance of the teacher in the play as encouraging the three female characters to pursue college and careers in IT. A male audience member stated, “I am pleasantly amazed with the presentation of representing a message in art. … This play spoke to … a dream deferred because the barriers are there, but the story also presented opportunities.” We are aware that identifying the arts as a venue to articulate women’s experience of barriers in STEM might perpetuate a stereotype of the arts as a feminized discipline in contrast to the masculine STEM fields. Throughout the life of this project, which included talkback sessions following the six staged readings and seven presentations at a diverse set of conference venues, there were numerous opportunities for this issue to be raised. Yet it never was. But this doesn’t invalidate the concern. Indeed, Eileen Trauth, in her capacity as a scholarly journal reviewer, has encountered this arts-feminine/science-masculine stereotyping in manuscripts she reviews. For this reason, we believe that it is best to anticipate the potential for this issue being raised and to be prepared to address it in discussions and workshops that accompany future performances of the play. Enacting transformative learning through relational aesthetics in theatre for social change is not to prescribe or expect specific behavior changes. Rather, it is a pedagogical design of this play project that awareness and attitude change set in motion behavior changes specific to each individual’s life and circumstances. For example, one female high school student related the character of Theresa in the play to her brother, who has an interest in gaming and graphic design. She intends to tell her brother he could make a career out of developing video games. A high school teacher “appreciated seeing the struggles of students at home and the different cultures represented, so I can understand and help get students through graduation.” Several audience members recommended that all high school students should see the play. For example, a college professor recommended to all in attendance at one of the staged readings that all first-year college students should see the play because “there’s confusion about STEM—everyone thinks it’s too hard.” A student asked that the script be made available to schools “so they could perform it. Another asked about courses for her daughter to take that would help her “attack gender bias in the IT community.” Transformative learning, a goal of this project as theatre for social change, is “behaving, talking, and thinking in a way that is congruent with transformed assumptions or perspectives.” [24] Assessment of the impact of experiencing staged readings of iDream indicates pedagogical potential for transformative learning. The accessibility of the play script, not only literally by downloading from the play website, but also in the familiar dramatic aesthetics of its construction, lends it the potential for societal transformation through widespread education of high school students, parents, teachers, and counselors about the overt as well as the subtle barriers to participation in the IT field that confront women and other underrepresented groups. Postscript At the conclusion of the project a website was created to make the iDream play script available to those interested in reading and/or performing the play ( www.iDreamThePlay.com ). The final version of the play script became available to the public in 2014. The website also provides resource materials related to overcoming gender barriers in the IT field, such as a short video about the project and interviews with cast and production personnel. These materials offer an opportunity for both documenting and disseminating the performance, and for analyzing the performance process. Three questions accompanying the video convey the learning objectives of the play. How do we help people become aware of the subtle barriers that exist in our society, ones that are often unconsciously internalized, that hold young people back? How do we engage students in thinking about college and careers in science and technology? How do we awaken them to the possibility of creating their own individual dreams—and acting on them? As high schools, community groups, and universities perform the play or do in-class readings, these three questions can guide group discussion, providing a pedagogical design to be adapted to particular groups and places. The goal for the artist working toward relational aesthetics is to create an event or set in motion a social experience, which is the actors’ and audience’s experience of the art. In this project, the play script is the vehicle for creating art as experience. Groups can read and perform the script together and then work with the prompts and resources on the play’s website to reflect on their attitudes, perceptions, and positionality in relation to the IT field. The “Resources” section on the play website was created in response to audience members’ requests for a place to learn more about IT careers. Resources include information about information technology careers, organizations of underrepresented groups in information technology, and articles about theatre and STEM. The website is an important way for high school teachers to learn about the play and to produce a staged reading or full production in their schools. It provides a way to advance knowledge and practice, and enable others to build upon the results of the project. Through dialogue and research motivated by the play, further awareness, attitude change, and transformative learning with intended and actualized behaviors toward addressing gender barriers in STEM fields are the ultimate goals of the generative pedagogical design. From Karen Keifer-Boyd’s perspective as an arts educator who teaches students how to teach new media art, the benefit of working cross disciplinarily lies in the potential of the play script as education and art, to be used to challenge gender inequities in the IT field. Within her discipline she sees the potential for girls to be motivated to creatively play with technology as a mechanism for opening their minds to possible careers with technology. She believes society and institutions need to encourage such play. For Suzanne Trauth, a playwright, framing the issues of gender equality in the context of theatre reminds all involved in the process that these issues are not unique to the STEM fields. The American theatre has long struggled to establish gender parity with regard to the production of plays by female playwrights. That struggle is in the process of being addressed in recent years with the Dramatists Guild’s initiation of The Count, an ongoing study that explores the question of who is being produced in American theatres. In the November/December 2015 issue of The Dramatist , the organization presented for the first time three years of data from regional theatres across the country: only 22% of the plays produced from the regional sample were written by women. Meaningfully, playwright Marsha Norman, the author of the article, suggested that “if life worked like the theatre, four out of five things you had ever heard would have been said by men.” [25] Clearly, the American theatre has a distance to travel in achieving gender equality on its stages. In confronting the STEM issues, the artistic side of the collaboration is reminded that the goal of gender parity crosses disciplines. By the end of the project we came to see that it was really just the beginning. We had embarked upon this project with the goal of producing a play script as a way to disseminate Eileen Trauth’s research findings. The National Science Foundation funding supported development of a play script, and the production of a series of staged readings in order to obtain developmental audience feedback that would inform a subsequent revision of the script. That project is completed and the play script is currently available at the iDream website for those interested in reading or presenting a full production of the play. But we now view our original project as the inaugural steps of a longer-term mission. Eileen Trauth and Suzanne Trauth are currently exploring an expansion of this venture to broaden access to the story begun in iDream by using video story-telling and interactivity as options for greater engagement with the subject matter for a wider variety of audiences. References [1] This work was supported by three grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF #1039546 , NSF #0204246 , NSF # 0733747). We would like to thank, in particular, Dr. Jolene Jesse at the National Science Foundation for her encouragement to pursue this project. [2] N. Bourriaud, Esthétique Relationnelle/Relational Aesthetics , trans. by S. Pleasance and F. Woods (Dijon, France: Les Presses du Réel, 2002). [3] See, for example: Eileen M. Trauth, “The Role of Theory in Gender and Information Systems Research,” Information & Organization 23, no. 4 (2013): 277-93. Eileen M. Trauth, “Are There Enough Seats for Women at the IT Table?” ACM Inroads 3, no. 4 (2012): 49-54. Eileen M. Trauth, and Debra Howcroft, “Critical Empirical Research in IS: An Example of Gender and IT,” Information Technology and People 19, no. 3 (2006): 272-92. [4] See: Diane Conrad, “Exploring Risky Youth Experiences: Popular Theatre as a Participatory, Performative Research Method,” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 3, no. 1 (2004): Article 2. Retrieved from http://www.ualberta.ca/~iiqm/backissues/3_1/pdf/conrad.pdf . Susan Denman, James Pearson, Deborah Moody, Pauline Davis, and Richard Madeley, “Theatre in Education on HIV and AIDS: A Controlled Study of Schoolchildren’s Knowledge and Attitudes,” Health Education Journal 54, no. 3 (1995): 3-17. Jeff Nisker, Douglas. K. Martin, Robyn Bluhm, and Abdallah S. Daar, “Theatre as a Public Engagement Tool for Health-Policy Development,” Health Policy 78, no. 2 (2006): 258-71 . [5] James Thompson, and Richard Schechner, “Why Social Theatre?” The Drama Review 48, no. 3 (2004): 11-16. [6] Sarah Thornton, “What is Theatre for Social Change?” in From the Personal to the Political: Theatre for Social Change in the 21 st Century with Particular Reference to the Work of Collective Encounters: A Review of Relevant Literature (Liverpool: Collective Encounters’ Research Lab). [7] S. M. Trauth, and L.S. Brenner, eds. Katrina on Stage: Five plays ( Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011). [8] Applied Theatre Action Institute. 2015. Retrieved from http://appliedtheater.org/ . [9] Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed (New York, NY: TCG Books, 1993). [10] Tara Goldstein, Julia Gray, Jennifer Salisbury, and Pamela Snell, “When Qualitative Research Meets Theater: The Complexities of Performed Ethnography and Research-Informed Theater Project Design,” Qualitative Inquiry 20, no. 5 (2014): 674-685, 674. [11] Kimmika L.H. Williams-Witherspoon, “On SHOT!: A Rationale for Resesarch and Dramas Depicting Violence in the ‘Hood’,” Theatre Topics 23, no. 2 (2013): 169-83. [12] Tim Prentki, and Sheila Preston, eds. The Applied Theatre Reader (New York: Routledge, 2009), 12. [13] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 2007). [14] Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed. [15] Personal copy from the author. [16] National Science Foundation, Informal Science Education (#1039546). [17] National Science Foundation, “A Field Study of Individual Differences in the Social Shaping of Gender and IT” (#0204246). [18] For further explanation see: Eileen M. Trauth, “Odd Girl Out: An Individual Differences Perspective on Women in the IT Profession,” Information Technology and People 1, no. 2 (2002): 98-118. [19] See: Eileen M. Trauth, Jeria L. Quesenberry, and Haiyan Huang, “Retaining Women in the U.S. IT Workforce: Theorizing the Influence of Organizational Factors,” European Journal of Information Systems 18 (2009): 476-97. [20] Juanita Johnson-Bailey, “Positionality and Transformative Learning: A Tale of Inclusion and Exclusion,” in The Handbook of Transformative Learning: Theory, Research and Practice , edited by Edward W. Taylor, and Patricia Cranton (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2012), 260-73. [21] Jack Mezirow, “Learning to Think Like an Adult,” in Learning as Transformation: Critical Perspectives on a Theory in Progress , edited by Jack Mezirow & Associates (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2000), 7-8. [22] Claire Cain Miller, “Technology’s Man Problem” The New York Times , April 2014. [23] Patricia Cranton, “Teaching for Transformation,” New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education 93 (2002): 63-71, 66. [24] Ibid, 66. [25] Marsha Norman, “Why the Count Matters,” The Dramatist , Nov/Dec, 2015. Footnotes About The Author(s) Eileen Trauth is professor of information sciences & technology, and women’s gender & sexuality studies at Pennsylvania State University. She conducts research on societal, cultural and organizational influences on the information technology profession with a special focus on gender and social inclusion. She held the 2008 Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Gender Studies at Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria, and served on the scientific advisory board for Female Empowerment in Science & Technology Academia (FESTA) , a European Union project to increase female academic participation in science and technology. Her research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the Australian Research Council and Science Foundation Ireland. She is editor of the Encyclopedia of Gender and Information Technology and editor-in-chief of Information Systems Journal. ( www.eileentrauth.com ) Karen Keifer-Boyd is professor of art education and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Pennsylvania State University. She was the 2012 Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Gender Studies at Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria, and received a Fulbright in 2006 for research in Finland on intersections of art and technology. Her writings on feminist pedagogy, visual culture, inclusion, cyberart activism, transcultural dialogues, action research, social justice arts-based research, and identity are in more than 50 peer-reviewed research publications, and translated into several languages. She co-authored Including Difference: A Communitarian Approach to Art Education in the Least Restrictive Environment (NAEA, 2013); InCITE, InSIGHT, InSITE [ amazon.com ] (NAEA, 2008); Engaging Visual Culture [ davisart.com ] (Davis, 2007); and co-edited Real-World Readings in Art Education: Things Your Professors Never Told You [ amazon.com ] (Falmer, 2000). ( www.personal.psu.edu/ktk2/ ) Suzanne Trauth is a playwright, novelist and screenwriter. Her plays include Françoise , which received staged readings at Luna Stage and Nora’s Playhouse and was nominated for the Kilroy List; Midwives developed at Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey; Rehearsing Desire ; iDream , supported by the National Science Foundation’s STEM initiative; and Katrina: the K Word . She is a member of Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey Emerging Women Playwrights program and the Dramatists Guild. She wrote and directed the short film Jigsaw , nominated for best film in the shorts category at the PF3 Film Festival and screened at New Filmmakers, NY. Ms. Trauth has co-authored Sonia Moore and American Acting Training and co-edited Katrina on Stage: Five Plays. Her novels include Show Time and Time Out . ( www.suzannetrauth.com .) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction: Performance as Alternate Form of Inquiry in the Age of STEM Playing Sick: Training Actors for High Fidelity Simulated Patient Encounters Setting the Stage for Science Communication: Improvisation in an Undergraduate Life Science Curriculum iDream: Addressing the Gender Imbalance in STEM through Research-Informed Theatre for Social Change Moonwalking with Laurie Anderson: The Implicit Feminism of 'The End of the Moon' This In-Between Life: Disability, Trans-Corporeality, and Radioactive Half-Life in D.W. Gregory’s Radium Girls Blue-Collar Broadway The New Humor in the Progressive Era Stages of Engagement Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Clay Sanderson Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Clay Sanderson By Published on April 15, 2023 Download Article as PDF The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto’s collection of historical essays from a wide array of scholars may at first seem to retread familiar territory, but the editors are determined to make this volume original and relevant. In their Introduction’s first paragraph, the co-editors emphasize “an urgency to disrupt traditional historiography that perpetuates hierarchies of power and privileges overwhelmingly white male voices” (1), and for the most part, their disruption is successful. While American theatre in the second half of the twentieth century has been extensively recorded, the editors provide some new resources, deliberately highlighting the contributions of BIPOC and female artists; they also avoid the usual trap of forgetting that professional American theatre goes far beyond the island of Manhattan. Critical essays discuss relevant cultural history of each period, which frames what was happening on stage in the context of what was then happening in the United States at the time. This absorbing volume is broken into three parts: Commercial and Mainstream Theatre, The Regional Theatre Movement, and Experimental Theatre and Other Forms of Entertainment. Each section includes three to four essays, written predominantly by leading scholars of theatre studies. For instance, the first section includes Susan C.W. Abbotson’s chapter, “Broadway Post-1945 to 1960: Shifting Perspectives.” This exemplary essay outlines how after War World II, America adopted a new identity as a leading world superpower and boasted “a growing middle class determined to grasp a bright new American future” that was “modeled around the perfect nuclear family, while holding at bay the demons of communism, the atom bomb, and juvenile delinquency” (21). Simultaneously, Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and subsequent Sexual Behavior in the Human Female book-length studies shocked people across the country with his revelation of a stark contrast between what conservative Americans believed their society to be and the reality of what their neighbors were actually doing behind closed doors. These contrasting ideologies, Abbotson argues, are partly responsible for the popularity of the work of such playwrights as Tennessee Williams, who titillated Broadway audiences with his frank portrayal of the sexuality of both those on the outskirts of society and those making up its family-based middle class. Abbotson references influential plays by Eugene O’Neill, Thorton Wilder, Arthur Miller, and William Inge, as well as musicals by the likes of Rodgers and Hammerstein and Lerner and Loewe, which featured the work of innovative producers, directors, and choreographers such as Hal Prince, George Abbott, and Jerome Robbins. Yet the editors’ mandate for a more inclusive theater history is modeled by this same chapter’s focus on female contributors to the Golden Age of Broadway. Abbotson includes artists such as Federal Theatre head Hallie Flanagan, acclaimed Shakespearean director Margaret Webster, musical theatre director Mary Hunter, and Broadway producer Cheryl Crawford, among others. She also considers some of the African-American theatre that was happening Off-Broadway–including works by such playwrights as William Branch, Loften Mitchell, and Alice Childress who are frequently left out of New York theatre history. Thus, the Cambridge Companion reflects on how disparate theater-makers, communities in America and perspectives intersect. In Part II, the section on regional theatre, Elizabeth A. Osborne uses her chapter “Money Matters: Dismantling the Narrative of the Rise of Regional Theatre” to correct the accounts ofearly historians of the regional theatre movement such as Martin Gottfried and Joseph Zeigler, arguing that “(h)istoriographically…the existing narrative has gone largely uninterrogated for too long” (136). Traditional narratives chronicle regional theatre as an attempt in the 1940’s and 50’s to decentralize New York City within the professional theatre world, striving to give audiences amore avant-garde alternative to Broadway and its tours, only for many organizations to eventually succumb to the economic need to model commercial theatre’s values despite their non-profit status. Osborne argues that this narrative “oversimplifies a complex web of artistic goals, economic and administrative structures, and relationships with local communities” (138). Osborne centers women as the true forgers of the regional theatre movement, detailing the founding of Theatre ’47 in Dallas by Margo Jones, the Alley Theatre in Houston by Nina Vance, and the Arena Stage in Washington D.C. by Zelda Fichandler. Part II also includes an important essay by Faedra Chatard Carpenter, “When and Where They Enter: Black and Brown Voices in American Theatre.” This wide-ranging chapter chronicles the Black Arts movement as propelled by Larry Neal, the Chicano Theatre movement as led by Luis Valdez, and the seminal work of BIPOC playwrights such as Amiri Baraka, Adrienne Kennedy, and María Irene Fornés. Carpenter nicely balances the importance of these artists’ contributions to the transformation of American theatre, noting that some of these writers (particularly Valdez and Baraka) were “products of their time” who “were not always inclusive in terms of intracultural representation”(161) such that their own biases upheld a male, heteronormative worldview. Part III’s focus on “experimental” theatre and beyond also finds meaningful ways to refocus history away from male-centered institutions. Although in Timothy Youker’s essay “Experimental Collectives of the 1960’s and The Legacies” we are treated to the requisite exploration of how the likes of Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud deeply influenced non-commercial and regional theatre collectives from the San Francisco Mime Troupe to the Living Theatre in New York City, eventually leading to such modern groups as Moisés Kaufman’s Tectonic Theatre Project, Youker also chronicles the contributions of female-centric troupes suchas Anne Bogart’s SITI company and The Five Lesbian Brothers. This well-researched, more inclusive vision of the experimental theatre movement demonstrates the wide-range of non-traditional performances practices that have drawn in diverse audiences outside commercial theatre. The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945 will benefit established scholars and theatre history students. It incisively summarizes the contributions of the most well-known theatre artists of the past seven decades, as well as many who history has overlooked. Framing diversity of representation as critical to scholarship, this volume considers previously underrepresented perspectives and players in theatre history scholarship. Equally, this volume practices theater historiography: questioning what we think we know, and reinvestigating it with an eye towards the future. References Footnotes About The Author(s) CLAY SANDERSON Arizona 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 Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Previous Next Attribution:

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 14 Spring 2023 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Review of MUKHRIJĀT AL-MASRAḤ AL-MIṢRĪ (1990-2010): DIRĀSA SĪMIYŪṬĪQĪYAH [Female Egyptian Directors (1990-2010): A Semiotic Study], written by Hadia Abd El-Fattah By Areeg Ibrahim Published: May 1, 2023 Download Article as PDF Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes References About The Author(s) Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Review: Mother Courage adapted and directed by Alison Shan Price Review of Theaters of Citizenship: Aesthetics and Politics of Avant-Garde Performance in Egypt written by Sonali Pahwa Review: Decolonizing Sarah: A Hurricane Play written and directed by Samer Al-Saber “Indigenous Avant-Gardes”: The Shiraz Arts Festival and Ritual Performance Theory in 1970s Iran Review: Baba written by Denmo Ibrahim, directed by Hamid Dehghani Review of MUKHRIJĀT AL-MASRAḤ AL-MIṢRĪ (1990-2010): DIRĀSA SĪMIYŪṬĪQĪYAH [Female Egyptian Directors (1990-2010): A Semiotic Study], written by Hadia Abd El-Fattah Review of Syrian Refugees, Applied Theater, Workshop Facilitation, and Stories: While They Were Waiting written by Fadi Skeiker Review: Layalina written by Martin Yousif Zebari, directed by Sivan Battat Up There by Wael Kadour, Introduction Review: Playwright Showcase, New Arab American Theater Works Two Giants of Egyptian Theatre: Conversations with Mohamed Abul-ʿEla El-Salamouny and Lenin El-Ramly Crossing Borders: A Theatre Practitioner’s Odyssey, An Interview with Hassan El Geretly On Writing Egypt from the Diaspora: An Interview with Adam Ashraf Elsayigh Performance Review: A FAMILY THAT HAS BEEN BLOCKED Performance Review: BETHLEHEM SITE-SPECIFIC THEATER FESTIVAL Performance Review: HOOTA. By Amer Hlehel Performance Review: LITTLE SYRIA Book Review: ACTING EGYPTIAN Book Review: MANSOUR, MONA. THE VAGRANT TRILOGY Previous Next Attribution:

Watch Transindigenous Assembly by Joulia Strauss at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. This documentary concerns queer aboriginal and indigenous artists and their inventions of the “good life”. Many indigenous peoples have in common that they embrace trees, drink the sun, talk to the plants, worship their ancestors, and, in order to daydream, forge their own bridges to the sky – just as we will be during the film. Transindigenous Assembly takes us on a journey from knowledge-rich island to knowledge-rich island, guided by Joulia Strauss who plays an Ancient Greek lyre along the way while narrating this “Odyssey” from the perspective of an ecofeminist Siren. In this film you will meet artists who have remained in their indigenous communities or have variously returned to them and the forms of knowledge they offer. You will meet master teachers whose outstanding teachings on light are as precise as any mathematics. You will meet Aboriginal cultural workers who have emancipated themselves solely through the power of their art, and Amazonian curanderas who work miracles despite the shaman business. Living on the receiving end of the Empire, they have invented lives worth living. The idea of bringing all these protagonists together in one film is intended to inspire an alternative planetary politics. The film also proposes an epistemic and pedagogical shift to help education adapt to these times of failed systems of governances and life on a privatized planet. The people featured in the film include: filmmaker and activist Sonal Jain, co-founder of the Desire Machine Collective, Assam; Dharmendra Prasad, founder of the Harvest School; Surendar Kshatriya, founder of the Barefoot Nature movement; Syriademmah, who with his shamanic drum from Iran synchronizes the rhythm of our hearts with Gaia; the queer Aboriginal Sista Girls Buffy Warlapinni and Nicole Miller, who have emancipated themselves from the conservative structure of their tribe and made their life in the settlement more bearable by printing ancestral patterns with natural colours on fabric and opening the Tiwi Design Centre, Tiwi Islands, Australia; Khien Phuc, founder of the Cambodian Lotus Center, who has rescued land from the clutches of real estate speculators and built a free school for the Takmao village; Albenis Tique Poleska, an indigenous leader from the Pijao tribe in Columbia who is part of a long tradition of midwifery and, being raised in Cauca, helps navigates peace processes; Maestra Justina Serrano Alvares, who has been at home doing jungle diets all her life, deliberately not giving in to the educational system; and Maestro Wiler, who shares with us important warnings and bits of advice about the globalization of jungle knowledge. The author of the film, Joulia Strauss, was herself born and raised as Mari, one of Europe’s last remaining indigenous cultures with a shamanic tradition, located at the very edge of Eastern Europe. The Mari people have successfully resisted the Czar, Stalin, and now Putin. The intention of the film was to use the privilege of being able to travel and to meet other indigenous peoples around the planet to tell them about the existence of “Indigenous Russia” (no other member of the Mari tribe has ever travelled to any other indigenous community), to exchange songs, cosmovisions, techniques of survival, notions of good life, and to ask whether they also feel that the time has come to unite; and last but not least, to invite them to be professors at the Avtonomi Akadimia, a university for transformation in Athens. During the editing process, which took place during the Covid19 lockdown, the second phase of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began, inducing many indigenous cultures living inside of the Russian “Federation” to unite for the first time in history. . The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Transindigenous Assembly At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Joulia Strauss Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Thursday May 15th, at 5:15pm. RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. You may RSVP above to get a reminder about the Segal Film Festival in your inbox. Country Germany Language English Running Time 85 minutes Year of Release 2025 About The Film This documentary concerns queer aboriginal and indigenous artists and their inventions of the “good life”. Many indigenous peoples have in common that they embrace trees, drink the sun, talk to the plants, worship their ancestors, and, in order to daydream, forge their own bridges to the sky – just as we will be during the film. Transindigenous Assembly takes us on a journey from knowledge-rich island to knowledge-rich island, guided by Joulia Strauss who plays an Ancient Greek lyre along the way while narrating this “Odyssey” from the perspective of an ecofeminist Siren. In this film you will meet artists who have remained in their indigenous communities or have variously returned to them and the forms of knowledge they offer. You will meet master teachers whose outstanding teachings on light are as precise as any mathematics. You will meet Aboriginal cultural workers who have emancipated themselves solely through the power of their art, and Amazonian curanderas who work miracles despite the shaman business. Living on the receiving end of the Empire, they have invented lives worth living. The idea of bringing all these protagonists together in one film is intended to inspire an alternative planetary politics. The film also proposes an epistemic and pedagogical shift to help education adapt to these times of failed systems of governances and life on a privatized planet. The people featured in the film include: filmmaker and activist Sonal Jain, co-founder of the Desire Machine Collective, Assam; Dharmendra Prasad, founder of the Harvest School; Surendar Kshatriya, founder of the Barefoot Nature movement; Syriademmah, who with his shamanic drum from Iran synchronizes the rhythm of our hearts with Gaia; the queer Aboriginal Sista Girls Buffy Warlapinni and Nicole Miller, who have emancipated themselves from the conservative structure of their tribe and made their life in the settlement more bearable by printing ancestral patterns with natural colours on fabric and opening the Tiwi Design Centre, Tiwi Islands, Australia; Khien Phuc, founder of the Cambodian Lotus Center, who has rescued land from the clutches of real estate speculators and built a free school for the Takmao village; Albenis Tique Poleska, an indigenous leader from the Pijao tribe in Columbia who is part of a long tradition of midwifery and, being raised in Cauca, helps navigates peace processes; Maestra Justina Serrano Alvares, who has been at home doing jungle diets all her life, deliberately not giving in to the educational system; and Maestro Wiler, who shares with us important warnings and bits of advice about the globalization of jungle knowledge. The author of the film, Joulia Strauss, was herself born and raised as Mari, one of Europe’s last remaining indigenous cultures with a shamanic tradition, located at the very edge of Eastern Europe. The Mari people have successfully resisted the Czar, Stalin, and now Putin. The intention of the film was to use the privilege of being able to travel and to meet other indigenous peoples around the planet to tell them about the existence of “Indigenous Russia” (no other member of the Mari tribe has ever travelled to any other indigenous community), to exchange songs, cosmovisions, techniques of survival, notions of good life, and to ask whether they also feel that the time has come to unite; and last but not least, to invite them to be professors at the Avtonomi Akadimia, a university for transformation in Athens. During the editing process, which took place during the Covid19 lockdown, the second phase of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began, inducing many indigenous cultures living inside of the Russian “Federation” to unite for the first time in history. About The Artist(s) Joulia Strauss, artist and activist, lives and works in Athens and Berlin. Her sculptures, paintings, performances, drawings, and video works have been displayed in solo and group exhibitions at the Pergamon Museum and the Martin-Gropius-Bau, in Berlin, and at the Tate Modern, in London, as well as at the Tirana Biennale, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Athens Biennale, the Kyiv Biennial, the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, and documenta14, among others. She plays a reconstruction of an Ancient Greek lyre and sings healing songs in Ancient Greek, Mari, and many other languages. Strauss practices Việt Võ Đạo Kung Fu and is training for her fourth stripe. In 2024 she founded Avtonomi Akadimia, a durational artwork and grassroots university that she organizes in the Akadimia Platonos, Athens Get in touch with the artist(s) jouliastrauss@gmx.de and follow them on social media www-joulia-strauss.net http://joulia-strauss.net/2024-transindigenous-assembly/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse

Nic Barilar Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 2 Visit Journal Homepage Remembering Censorship in the World Premiere of Seán O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned: Lafayette, Indiana, 1959 Nic Barilar By Published on July 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF In September of 1960, St. Vincent Troubridge, the Assistant Examiner of Plays in the Lord Chamberlain’s Office—the United Kingdom’s theatre censor—submitted his report recommending a license for a production of Irish writer Seán O’Casey’s comedy The Drums of Father Ned . Troubridge details how he arrived at his recommendation, explaining he “approached this play with circumspection,” because “I remembered that its banning by the Archbishop of Dublin caused the collapse of last year’s [ sic ] Dublin Festival of Drama.”(1) Indeed, not the prior year but two years earlier, Archbishop John Charles McQuaid refused permission for a mass to open the 1958 spring cultural festival, An Tóstal , after learning that the Dublin International Theatre Festival (part of An Tóstal ) would include a new O’Casey play and an adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses . Media soon reported McQuaid’s decision. O’Casey took the news with only mild irritation since, as far as he knew, the festival still planned to produce his work. When O’Casey received a letter from producers at the theatre where his comedy was to perform requesting he give the director authority to alter the play, O’Casey revoked his permission and claimed he was the victim of a church ban. This, together with the festival’s own ejection of Ulysses , led Samuel Beckett to pull his contributions to the festival in solidarity. Without headliners, the organizers cancelled the 1958 theatre festival.(2) Troubridge’s report reveals a key insight on censorship that has gone under-theorized: reading a text with the memory that it was banned can change or even shape its reception. Troubridge explains that the play’s censorship made him “read the play with extreme care” in order to “steer a course between accepting too readily the opinion of a possibly reactionary Irish cleric and giving offence to” UK Catholics. What he found was criticism of Irish clergymen as bigoted and out of touch with their flocks. Troubridge argues, “though it is understandable that the Archbishop of Dublin may not like it, it should cause no more offence to the Catholic Church than if one remarked that Alexander Borgia was not a perfect Pope.”(3) Troubridge specifically read with imagined differences between Ireland and the UK in mind, interpreted the play through Irish censorship, and judged its suitability within British legality and sensibilities. This comparison of national values raises pressing questions about the role that the memory of censorship performs when it adheres to cultural objects: How do such memories contribute to the interpretation of the object’s representations? How do acts of censorship continue to impact cultural objects and their reception long after and far away from the initiating act of censorship? What is the political effect of engaging with censorship history as an interpretive tool? These questions become thornier when considered through not just a textual reading of O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned , but also its world premiere performance by the amateur Lafayette Little Theatre in Indiana in 1959. Unlike Troubridge, the Hoosiers in attendance had no “natural” memory of the play’s censorship. Rather, the artists constructed their own. Through advertising, publicity, and program notes, the Lafayette Little Theatre (LLT) built what Alison Landsberg calls “prosthetic memory”: cultural memory acquired through media engagement rather than lived experiences or familial/national descent.(4) This prosthetic memory of censorship took the form of a narrative about O’Casey’s play, Ireland, and America, too. Ireland became an imagined space of oppression against which the Americans were invited to interpret and contrast themselves. After all, it was in America where O’Casey’s play was performed. In this way, the LLT’s narrative around the production participated in Cold War-era discourses of American exceptionalism. Although the artificial memory of censorship gave the audience a way to interpret O’Casey’s play, the Ireland performed onstage sometimes clashed with the narratives that the memory projected, challenging the LLT’s underlying assumptions about Ireland and America. While reviews are limited, memory and performance studies methodologies can help theorize the cultural work the production undertook. Not only is The Drums of Father Ned deeply Irish, it’s also deeply leftist. Ironically, by inviting the Cold War Hoosiers to interpret the play through the lens provided by the memory of censorship, the LLT’s performance of Father Ned ’s communist sympathies held the potential to reflexively highlight Lafayette’s memories of anticommunism. These competing memories convoluted O’Casey’s play, yielding ambivalence. While Landsberg studies the way prosthetic memory can bridge identity differences to progressive ends, the case of the LLT’s Father Ned demonstrates the political limits of prosthetic memories of censorship. In addition to shedding new light on a neglected performance in Irish and O’Casey studies as well as a neglected geography in U.S. theatre history, the LLT’s Father Ned offers scholars, artists, political commentators, and activists ways of thinking about, contending with, or even appropriating or adopting censorship history.(5) In particular, the LLT’s use of censorship memories suggests that censorship’s effects are not bound to the time/place of their enactment: censorship moves, and as it moves it continues to exert censorial effects. According to Judith Butler, censorship is “a productive form of power” that creates as it attempts to negate. For Butler, censorship never completely erases its target. If a state seeks to ban a word, it must state the word to ban it, recirculating language it sought to destroy. Censorship paradoxically makes its subjects “[take] on new life as a part of the very discourse produced by the mechanism of censorship.”(6) This “performative contradiction” disrupts the limitations censors try to impose, transforming them into sites of contestation—into something “banned.”(7) As sites of contestation, censored objects and subjects invite people to performatively renegotiate or “produce” interpretations of the ideas under contestation. This slippage, the recirculation inherent in censorship’s performative contradiction, entails mobility—across geographies, discourses, media, and time—and as censorship moves it continues to “produce” via people’s engagement with it. Today, when censorship can take place through online policing, cancel culture, and self-censorship, when the mantle of “silenced” and “censored” can be adopted and projected via social media’s megaphone (among other means), it is imperative that scholars and artists reckon with both its movement and its effect as an interpretive framework. Father Ned 's Journey to Indiana How did an amateur theatre in Indiana come to be the first to produce a play by a world-renowned playwright? The answer lies with Dr. Robert Hogan, remembered today as one of Irish theatre’s most “indefatigable annalists.”(8) Having previously contacted O’Casey for his doctoral thesis, he wrote to the playwright after learning about the festival scandal, asking if O’Casey would send him a copy of the play so that he could write on it.(9) It was not until January 1959 that Hogan broached the subject of producing Father Ned in Lafayette, where he was working in the English department at Purdue University. Following the collapse of the Dublin festival, O’Casey entertained several offers to produce The Drums of Father Ned on professional stages, but none had come to fruition.(10) Without other options, the group’s amateurism probably didn’t deter O’Casey. Indeed, Hogan suggested the production upon recalling O’Casey’s youthful participation in amateur dramatics.(11) What’s more, several O’Casey plays premiered with amateur groups.(12) While James Moran suggests O’Casey turned to amateurs out of economic necessity, Susan Canon Harris argues Britain’s Unity Theatre, which premiered The Star Turns Red in 1940, better suited O’Casey’s politics as a workers’ theatre.(13) The LLT hardly shared O’Casey’s revolutionary aspirations, though. It’s likely that the LLT’s biggest incentive to stage O’Casey’s play was the financial opportunity that would come with producing a famous playwright’s world premiere. The Drums of Father Ned did not fit their practical or aesthetic profile. They mostly produced conventional New York hits like Enid Bagnold’s The Chalk Garden and stage versions of popular films like Frederick Knott’s Dial “M” for Murder . Of the 117 plays the LLT produced from their 1931 founding to Father Ned in 1959, eighty-nine were by American or English playwrights. Only seven had been by Irish writers, and it had been a decade since their last Irish play.(14) Father Ned also has a cast of twenty-nine, significantly larger than most LLT shows (compare with Chalk Garden ’s six and Dial “M” ’s nine). The large cast posed an opportunity to recruit LLT members, however. Their budget depended on company membership and program advertising. Only those who purchased a membership could see or participate in LLT shows, and the company was losing members to television by the late 1950s.(15) They also made tickets available to the public for the first time.(16) The play’s controversial past was itself a selling point: the show was a box office hit. Over two thousand attended its 4-night run at Sunnyside Junior High.(17) This success was despite the play’s Irish focus, which also made it an outlier for LLT shows. The Drums of Father Ned is an ensemble piece with a thin narrative, allowing O’Casey to focus on ideas in vignette-like episodes that critique Irish life. The play begins with a satire of the Irish War for Independence (1919–21), a foundational moment in Ireland’s and the characters’ national consciousness. Titled the “Prerumble,” the scene shows the Black and Tans—British royal police—capturing two young men, Binnington and McGilligan. The pair hate each other so much that the Black and Tans eventually release them saying, “these two rats will do more harm to Ireland living than they’ll ever do to Ireland dead.”(18) O’Casey depicts Irishmen of the period as in conflict with each other as much as with the British. Time then jumps to 1950s Ireland, and the rest of the play revolves around the imaginary town of Doonavale as its inhabitants prepare for An Tóstal (the same festival in which the play, itself, was to perform). Now the Mayor and Deputy Mayor, Binnington and McGilligan still hate each other (and even fought on opposite sides of the Irish Civil War [1922–23]), but overlook their grudge when it comes to money. Their adult children and local laborers rehearse a pageant about the 1798 Irish Rebellion. The Mayor and his Deputy await a shipment of lumber that turns out to be “red” lumber from Russia. Meanwhile, a North Irish businessman, Alec Skerighan, attempts to woo Binnington’s servant, Bernadette, but ultimately assaults her. Murray, a local organist, rehearses choral numbers under the controlling eye of the parish priest, Father Fillifogue. The eponymous Father Ned is Fillifogue’s foil. Although he never appears onstage, Father Ned is the spirit of the Tóstal : his passion, openness, and investment in the community’s future inspire the younger characters. By the end of the play, the older characters lose their power and the town joins Father Ned in a march to change. While not realist, the style helps O’Casey manifest cultural and political changes he believed were necessary. O’Casey uses the play to critique the cultural and economic atrophy of 1950s Ireland and posits An Tóstal as something of a cure for Ireland’s ills. There were too few jobs and an over-emphasis on agriculture, protectionism, and self-sufficiency that failed to reckon with postwar realities.(19) Lack of economic opportunity contributed to emigration. From 1951 to 1961, nearly a sixth of the population left the Republic.(20) Women, especially, fled in pursuit of change, bodily autonomy, marital opportunities, and escape from ostracism and the national marriage bar.(21) An Tóstal attempted to stimulate the economy by extending the tourist season with historical and religious pageantry, sports, concerts, and theatre.(22) O’Casey felt An Tóstal ’s activities, influx of foreigners, and opportunities for young people could stir Ireland’s renewal.(23) Unlike Ireland, Lafayette was a prosperous place in 1959, buoyed by post-war prosperity, Purdue University, and major manufacturers like Alcoa and a Coca-Cola bottling plant (which purchased space in the production program).(24) There were few ways for The Drums of Father Ned to resonate with the Hoosiers. According to Irish theatre historian Patrick Lonergan, when Irish plays that center Irish histories/issues perform abroad, they “must be framed or mediated in a way that will provide an interpretive framework for a[n]…audience lacking specialized knowledge of Ireland.”(25) Lafayette’s audience needed a way to engage with the play. So Hogan and the LLT built a memory of Irish censorship for them. “Dublin’s loss is Lafayette’s gain”: Learning to Remember Ireland in Indiana Hogan and the LLT constructed this memory through production publicity—what Hogan called his “propaganda” in a letter to O’Casey.(26) In addition to advertising the event, these materials constituted a discursive field through which audiences could recall the memory of Irish censorship during the performance to help interpret the play. Hogan constructed this memory through a narrative of American exceptionalism that explained the staging of O’Casey’s play in Lafayette, positioning the locals in relationship to the play and its history. For Landsberg, prosthetic memory forms through an embodied interaction with media that allows audiences to take on histories other than their own.(27) This interactive dynamic appears in these performance-adjacent texts and positions the play’s history, O’Casey’s biography, and the LLT production in relation to Lafayette. From the start, the LLT framed Father Ned through its scandalous past. Their first press announcement stated, “the play has already become something of an international ‘cause-celebre’ because of its dramatic withdrawal from the Dublin International Theatre Festival last summer and from the subsequent cancelling of the festival.” This announcement gives no description of the play’s content, emphasizing its history and O’Casey as “the greatest living dramatist of the English-speaking world” instead—a telling choice for an article that also served as an audition notice.(28) After casting, an editorial pitched the show as a vote of confidence from O’Casey and an honor for the city: “it will be interesting and stimulating to be among the first in the world to hear what so famous an Irish literary figure who ranks with Shaw, Joyce and Yeats has to say.”(29) Hogan’s marketing went farther, calling on Lafayette to participate in an unfolding history that would repudiate Irish censorship. Hogan embedded that invitation in essays defining O’Casey’s life by injustice. The first of these articles glossed the theatre festival scandal. Hogan ends this article with the Manchester Guardian ’s report: “One may contemplate [the festival’s] ruins as a monument to the subservient orthodoxy which so often passes for piety in Ireland.” Eliciting a comparison between oppressed Ireland and a tolerant U.S., Hogan concludes, “But in this case, Dublin’s loss is Greater Lafayette’s gain.”(30) Hogan penned publicity in the form of a history-in-progress that interpolates its readers, encouraging them to participate in the story’s triumphant conclusion. The logic and rhetoric of Hogan’s writing absorbed the LLT’s performance into America’s culture of containment. In the first decades of the Cold War, the global spread of communism and the U.S.’s foreign containment policy pushed anticommunist sentiment to paranoiac heights.(31) If communism couldn’t be contained abroad, it could penetrate and threaten the U.S. from within. In this way, the foreign policy of containment came home. Containment culture simultaneously constructed and policed American norms through discursive and cultural production, negotiating American ideals according to specific needs rather than a stable set of principles.(32) For example, although domestic commentators labeled abstract art un-American, the State Department deployed American abstract art abroad to promote American expressive freedom.(33) Simultaneously, containment culture sanctioned the expulsion of perceived subversiveness in its aim to cultivate idealized Americans, such as in 1951 when Lafayette schools ejected a government textbook that teachers and officials argued supported communism. Indiana followed suit one year later. Lafayette commentators argued that it wasn’t that America’s youth shouldn’t know about communism but that they shouldn’t be taught there’s anything redeemable in it.(34) The LLT’s narrative that framed their production of Father Ned projected local pride in righting an international wrong, of being an exceptionally tolerant and progressive space for artistic expression. In his publicity work, Hogan depicts Ireland as an oppressed and oppressive other in contrast to America, clarifying the national character of the memory of censorship he staged the play against. Hogan continues his history of Ireland via O’Casey, casting the playwright as an outcast genius and decrying Ireland. Hogan’s next article summarized O’Casey’s adolescence in colonial Ireland, emphasizing his poverty.(35) Next, he described O’Casey’s early adulthood, painting a picture of an artist who became keenly aware of social injustice as he entered the workforce and struggled to survive against the backdrop of the bloody revolutionary era.(36) In his subsequent article, Hogan reshapes Ireland from oppressed to oppressor through a description of the 1926 riots over O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars and O’Casey’s later self-exile to Britain.(37) Hogan’s final article conjured an embattled O’Casey whose artistic home at the Abbey Theatre pushed him out of Ireland by rejecting his misunderstood WWI drama The Silver Tassie .(38) Hogan connects this to Father Ned ’s history: O’Casey continually searches for an outlet, and Lafayette, Hogan implies, can give him vent. This publicity rhetorically established Lafayette’s place in the play’s history. The advertisements always touted that it was a world premiere, simultaneously promoting the event, framing it for the community, and providing a proxy-rehearsal for attending the play, priming the audience for how to think about it.(39) These advertisements expect its audience to have some familiarity with how the play arrived in Lafayette and ask Hoosiers to imagine themselves in that history. As the opening approached, the Lafayette and West Lafayette mayors proclaimed a “World Premiere Week” in honor of the LLT’s historic achievement, and the Greater Lafayette Chamber of Commerce urged the community support this “event of world-wide theatrical importance.”(40) Both implicitly understand the production via its censorship: Ireland refused it, allowing Lafayette to make history. Although it’s unlikely everyone in the LLT audience read all of Hogan’s articles, the production program reproduced much of their content and rhetoric, grounding spectators in their curated history. It introduces O’Casey as “a stormy figure in the British Theatre,” tracing O’Casey’s earlier controversies through the theatre festival scandal. “Well,” the note proclaims, “Dublin’s loss is Lafayette’s gain,” echoing the earlier article.(41) Again, the production positioned the Hoosier community as the solution to Irish censorship. Hogan and the LLT brought the memory of Irish censorship to Indiana through the production’s paratexts, establishing a framework for audiences to interpret the show. Othering Ireland on the Hoosier Stage Onstage, the LLT worked to differentiate Ireland from Lafayette. The prosthetic memory of Irish censorship further distanced the audience from identifying with the Ireland onstage by allowing the spectators to position themselves and their world as different. According to the narrative Hogan and the LLT created, it was by virtue of their unique place in the world that the play could appear in Lafayette at all. Indeed, O’Casey draws a particularly harsh sketch of historical and contemporary Ireland—but he does so to imagine Ireland’s movement from oppression to utopia via O’Casey’s communism. This complicates the memory’s neat Indiana/Ireland division and, by extension, the performance’s politics. For O’Casey, Ireland’s stagnancy was due to its political and cultural conservatism. According to The Drums of Father Ned , a new politics grounded in a communal sociality of care rather than competition is necessary to move Ireland forward. The prosthetic memory of Irish censorship made it difficult for the LLT’s production to resonate in this way because it situated Lafayette in a position of progressive superiority compared to Ireland. Lafayette was more progressive than Ireland by dint of the banned play’s mere presence and communism was a wholly negative force to be expelled, not adopted. Because amateur theatre is an especially “situated practice… rooted in its local environment,” the LLT artists needed to perform Irishness to contrast with Lafayette.(42) The minimal set, historically and culturally inaccurate costumes, auditorium, and performers were constant reminders of the local circumstances of production. Performing with Irish dialects was one of the major ways the company used to create difference, even though O’Casey twice told Hogan not to bother, saying that he preferred the actors’ natural voices over contrivance.(43) To perform without an Irish brogue in a production that so reflexively pointed out its localness would risk limiting its capacity to depict Ireland as other. Take, for instance, Robert Corbin, who played Father Fillifogue. According to Richard “Dick” Jaeger, who played the church organist Mr. Murray (see Figure 1), the LLT frequently cast Corbin in older roles because he was a person with albinism, and directors felt his light skin and hair aged his appearance while his relative youth allowed for physical dexterity and endurance unavailable to many seniors.(44) Corbin’s past performances as older men would have haunted his Father Fillifogue for LLT regulars, highlighting the show’s localness.(45) Performing with Irish dialects helped to distinguish the Irish characters from the Hoosier actors who played them, even as many in the audience surely delighted in seeing friends, family, and colleagues onstage. Figure 1: The LLT’s staging of “The Prerumble.” IE/NLI/MS/44,728/6/1. Nevertheless, Jaeger distinctly recalled Hogan and co-director Jeanne Orr telling everyone to speak with “a broad theatre accent.” According to Jaeger, Hogan taught the cast the dialect to varying degrees of success.(46) Corroborating the importance of dialects, news coverage sold the authentic Irish speech of one cast member, Geraldine Gray, an Irish immigrant who “hasn’t lost her Irish brogue,” as a selling point that lent authenticity to the production.(47) Gray was joined by fellow immigrant Nicholas Bielenberg, a graduate student at Purdue, who played the Man of the Pike in the play’s 1798 pageant. Both noted their Irish origins in their program bios. Bielenberg confirmed in a 2020 interview that the cast used Irish dialects, adding that he and Gray helped the others, and that it wasn’t exaggerated but “soft.”(48) The sound of the play, together with Gray and Bielenberg’s presence, confirmed the legitimacy of the production’s representations of Ireland while constantly marking it as different from Lafayette. In its movement from oppression to utopic progress, The Drums of Father Ned begins with a bleak picture of colonial Ireland, creating sharp contrasts with Lafayette in the LLT’s production. The production began with the silhouette of a town in flames behind a scrim, with a cross-topped spire especially visible and a white Celtic cross standing before the scrim. A group of Hoosiers clad in black sweaters, khaki pants, and berets played the Black and Tans, firearms in hand (see Figure 2). The officers force the hateful Binnington and McGilligan to talk to each other and run side-by-side while the officers shoot just to the left and right of each—coercing the hateful pair together, mixing social and martial torture to humorous effect. This staging of the Irish War for Independence, with its hellish backdrop and violence, is a darker depiction of Ireland than that contained in the memory of censorship. After the Black and Tans march away, gunshots sound and Binnington exclaims, “Aha, our boys are givin’ it to them! God direct their aim.” Here, O’Casey marshals the name of God in service of dehumanizing violence induced by the colonial relationship. At the scene’s conclusion, the audience heard a war chant accompanied by a drumroll.(49) As the program’s glossary notes, the drums signify a Protestant ritual, pointing to the sectarianism that informs Ireland’s history and foreshadows the continued sectarian divide in independent Ireland. Figure 2: Mr. Murray (Richard “Dick” Jaeger) rehearses for An Tóstal under the watchful eye of Father Fillifogue (Robert Corbin, right). IE/NLI/MS/44,728/6/4. The sardonic violence, Irish dialects, war-torn setting, and dark humor solidified Ireland as an other and likely inspired in spectators an endearing thankfulness to not be in Ireland. The scene was intense enough to frighten Hogan’s child.(50) The “Prerumble” evoked for the Hoosiers a far-off place not their own. The prosthetic memory of Irish censorship reinforced this critical distance by providing a narrative framework about the play that positioned Lafayette both as Ireland’s tolerant counterpart and the banned play’s home. Rather than offer pathways to empathy and progressive politics, prosthetic memory denied them by further cementing and implicitly vilifying cultural difference through the comparison of Hoosiers and Irish, Indiana and Ireland. The Specter of Anticommunism and Hoosier Intolerance From the prologue through the play’s end, O’Casey works to supplant one Irish nationalism with another. O’Casey draws connections between the revolutionary era and the contemporary one, arguing that Ireland’s stagnancy is due to the conservatism, capitalism, and parochialism that calcified after independence. O’Casey proposes Ireland can overcome its economic failures and socio-cultural malaise through an alternative nationalism that embraced a broadly socialist worldview of communal care over competition and profit. As the play progresses, these two nationalisms come into increasing conflict until O’Casey’s politics win out, paving the way for a utopian future. The memory of Irish censorship, though, likely muddled this critique, continuously reinscribing its viewers in a binary where America out-progresses Ireland. American containment culture resisted O’Casey’s dramaturgy even as the play unfolded, contributing to an ambivalent reception. The first major source of revolutionary energy in The Drums of Father Ned emerges from the 1798 Rebellion An Tóstal pageant rehearsed by the younger characters. This failed uprising against British imperialism provided O’Casey with a historical model for his alternative Irish nationalism precisely because it was led by an interfaith group that hoped its call for equality would transcend Ireland’s divisions. O’Casey specifically saw in its leader, Wolfe Tone, a proto-Marxist willingness to fight structural inequalities and advocate for universal equality.(51) He thus renders the 1798 pageant in Father Ned as a nostalgic, patriotic melodrama.(52) Further, he plants this idealism in the younger generation of characters who are inspired to work toward their vision of a renewed Ireland where anything short of an equal and united Ireland “is but quiet decay.”(53) For the younger characters (and O’Casey), there’s hope in the rehearsal of a nationalism that forgoes the historical divisions of the revolutionary period. O’Casey minimizes the youths’ “radicalism” through the ridiculously conservative Father Fillifogue: “So your play babbles about the rights of man. [ He chuckles mockingly .] What with your rights of women, rights of children, rights of trades unions, rights of th’ laity, an’ civil rights—[ shouting angrily ] youse are paralysin’ life!”(54) The peaceful “quiet decay” is Fillifogue’s ideal, which a more caring and equal democracy can undo. The players are earnest in their efforts, too. The players express genuine connection with the pageant, saying ahead of their rehearsal that “We have to get on with th’ work of resuscitatin’ Ireland.” Binnington and McGilligan admonish their efforts as a waste of time and money. But the younger characters see in their labor not a chance to “widen the walls of a bank” but to care for the good of their community, drawing on the communist imagery of hammer and sickle to make their case.(55) Such imagery would likely have set off alarms in the minds of the Cold War Hoosiers in attendance. Indiana and Lafayette, in particular, were centers of anticommunist fervor. Indiana was one of only four states to pass legislation banning the Communist Party from the ballot, and the state also required people in certain professions take loyalty oaths to qualify for employment.(56) In 1957, worried about communism in Indiana University’s faculty and the relocation of the Communist Party USA headquarters to Chicago, Indiana legislators established a state-level House Un-American Activities Committee, which, at the federal level, famously investigated suspected communist activity in public and private sectors.(57) Lafayette also participated in this project at the local level. In 1949, Purdue University employees took loyalty oaths. Ten years later—the same year as the LLT production—Purdue complied with a federal mandate requiring loyalty oaths from students seeking federal student loans, and commentators approved.(58) In fact, Lafayette beat the drums for anticommunism, outlawing outright communism’s promotion, support, advertisement, dissemination, or advancement, punishable by fine and imprisonment.(59) While it is unclear if the city charged or convicted anyone for violating the ban, the law projected a unified front in the “total cold war,” as President Eisenhower put it, against communism. Hogan, at least, participated in that war. Hogan’s scholarship makes clear his anticommunism, even when it came to O’Casey. He scathingly describes The Star Turns Red as the O’Casey play that is “closest to straight propaganda…and it is his poorest play.…There is no real dramatic clash here because there are no characters. There is only disembodied opinion.” Hogan goes on to quote critic George Jean Nathan: “the two worst influences on present-day playwrights are, very often, Strindberg and Communism.” To Hogan, O’Casey’s primary contribution was his formal experimentation, and he reads Father Ned as a parable of a universal cycle of death and renewal, represented in its generational transition.(60) It is harder to suggest what Jeanne Orr, who co-directed with Hogan, thought or knew of O’Casey’s politics or its presence in Father Ned . In a newspaper article, Orr said that O’Casey “is attacking intolerance, narrow-mindedness, and confining attitudes” in the play.(61) Her granddaughter, Jessica Jeanne Orr Urley, stated in a 2020 interview that her grandmother was progressive.(62) Holding a degree in speech from Ohio State University as well as a master’s from Purdue, Orr was highly educated. In an article in the local daily, the Journal and Courier , about her work, Orr listed amateur theatre actor and director, puppeteer, radio and theatre dramatist, and seamstress among her work in addition to her labor as a mother and wife.(63) She later won an award for a children’s book she authored and illustrated that celebrates individualism and difference.(64) She also greatly admired the play, expressing in a post-show letter to O’Casey her “deep gratitude…for what became my most interesting, challenging, and thoroughly rewarding experience in the theatre.”(65) None of this means she was procommunist, of course. It is unlikely that the LLT embraced O’Casey’s communistic utopianism. Like Orr, Hogan also recognized that the play’s Ireland moves from puritanism to tolerance.(66) At the time, though, he also consistently ignored or disparaged the playwright’s leftism. It is probable that the directors’ varying perspectives and especially Hogan’s anticommunism informed staging choices and obfuscated the play’s politics, at least. The 1798 pageant is one instance where dramaturgical confusion is evident. In a post-show report Hogan wrote to O’Casey, he explained that they kept to the letter of the script to the best of their abilities, but that they may have tonally missed the mark with the 1798 pageant. Hogan explained that they played the dueling scene “in a purposely awkward grand manner with broad stage gestures and amateurish bumbling. I think it was one of the best scenes, though one woman stalked out during it, saying, ‘My God, I’m leaving if the acting is this bad.’”(67) Following O’Casey’s stage directions, the scene should show a lack of preparation, not inability. To stage the pageant in such a broad manner that it turns spectators out of the theatre is to potentially ridicule the ideas and characters in which O’Casey lodged hope. Showing their inspiration as an absurd or naïve game of poorly acted make-believe instead of an enactment of earnestly held beliefs that rehearse utopia undermines O’Casey’s politics. For an audience already inclined toward anticommunism, deprecating the play’s communism could have reinforced preconceived prejudices. If Ireland was an other against which to compare the U.S., rather than help to propel Ireland toward progressivism, the LLT’s staging of the pageant kept Ireland in a place of naivety at best and repression at worst. Even if the production staged the scene in congruence with O’Casey’s politics, the performance still would have othered Ireland—but it would have been an other that exceeded the imagined tolerance that the prosthetic memory of Irish censorship established. Again, the memory of censorship positioned the audience in a comparative relationship with the banned art that allows the audience to work through their own subjectivity and understanding of history. Audiences make meaning from perceived contrasts between the histories laden with the memory of censorship, the banned art itself, and their own time and place. Instead of imagining Ireland as more progressive than the U.S. or entirely repressed, it’s quite probable that the production’s staging of 1798 left spectators with multiple Irelands of varying character. At this point in the show, read through the cultural memory of Irish censorship, the performance maintained U.S. exceptionalism by limiting the challenge O’Casey’s dramaturgy posed to that constructed memory and the American identities the memory safeguarded. Rather than encourage audiences to embrace difference and understand themselves anew, the prosthetic memory of censorship permitted audiences to reinscribe their exceptionalism vis-à-vis the politically muddled staging. Each instance the play addresses communism is a moment of negotiation, where The Drums of Father Ned summons the Hoosier history of anticommunism and asks the audience to contend with their assumptions. Hogan and the LLT did not create their prosthetic memory of Irish censorship to reckon with any interpolative dynamic other than the “tolerant here”/“oppressive there” dichotomy, yet the performance asked its audience to consider O’Casey’s communism as a way to better the world. The cultural memory of Irish censorship conflicted with the positive, progressive Ireland in Father Ned because the memory allowed the Hoosier audience to place themselves in a dominant hierarchical position to the Irish on the basis of their supposed tolerance. Read through an interpretive framework that privileged American identities and histories, O’Casey’s fantastical “progressive Ireland” pointed out Lafayette’s own history of political intolerance. The performance conjured the specter of Hoosier anticommunist intolerance and censorship, scrambling the memory of censorship’s predetermined relationship to Ireland and the politics of Cold War containment culture. Irish censorship moved to highlight and critique histories of censorship that Lafayette took for granted, challenging what it meant to be Hoosier. The play’s references to communism are never only about communism, but are in conversation with ideas like religion, sexuality, and gender. The production interrogated these categories’ function as regulators of the domestic communist containment project, questioning the supposedly binary nature of communist/U.S. culture. For instance, late in the play the northern Protestant Skerighan debates religion with the southern Catholics. He asks Michael Binnington whether God is a Catholic or a Protestant and Michael shares, He’s neither; but He is all…He may be but a shout of th’ people in th’ street.…It might be a shout for freedom, like th’ shout of men on Bunker Hill; shout of th’ people for bread in th’ streets, as in th’ French Revolution; or for th’ world’s ownership by th’ people, as in the Soviet Union.(68) Michael frames God in revolutionary terms, in justice and communal, humanitarian care. As Moran argues, “O’Casey co-opts such theological language in order to justify the communist cause.”(69) O’Casey’s advocacy of communism comes out of a very Christian place, but it nevertheless is still an advocacy of communism and would have resonated against Lafayette’s history and jarred with the memory of censorship. Lafayette saw its share of religiously-motivated anticommunism, enacting their ban on communism in part because communism “denies God and the God given rights which our government is designed to respect.”(70) The conservative columnist Fulton Lewis Jr. argued in an article that appeared in the Journal and Courier in 1958 that the U.S.’s “superior heritage of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man” would be key to defeating communism.(71) For O’Casey, the brotherhood of man is precisely where God is located and communism is its logical political expression. When Father Fillifogue discovers Binnington and McGilligan’s plot to import lumber from Soviet Russia to save money, he furiously exclaims, “You rascals, how can I let my people live under roofs of atheistical timber?” and demands they burn it. The youths, including several dressed in their eighteenth-century pageant costumes and wielding pike and musket props, refuse, condemning Fillifogue’s command as the burning of homes.(72) O’Casey thus makes the priest’s anticommunism immoral and impractical. This is a small revolution, but one that O’Casey emphasizes, too, with the 1798 pageanters: the alternative, communal nationalism that they earlier rehearsed, they now enact. O’Casey turns Christianity’s “inherent anticommunism” on its head. In Lafayette’s estimation, Christianity expelled communism and worked to guarantee Americanism. In O’Casey’s logic, Christianity that manages to get over its own piety easily promulgates communism—a total reversal of containment principles. O’Casey’s Ireland is the more tolerant imaginary and, arguably, the more Christian state, a representation that upsets the memory of Irish censorship. On this point, the play may have upset some religious Hoosiers, too. According to Bielenberg, some Catholics in the audience “frowned upon” the play because they thought it antireligious. Bielenberg insisted that these objections were not based on O’Casey’s communism, arguing that they weren’t aware of it.(73) This contradicts what Hogan told O’Casey about the Catholic response: “Indeed, there were a couple priests chortling in the audience one night. About 20percent [ sic ] of the people in the town or [ sic ] Catholics, but there have been no rumbles.”(74) It is entirely possible that Hogan simply did not hear the rumbles that Bielenberg heard or that the response was inconsistent. It is entirely possible that some in the audience thought the play was antireligious because of the connections O’Casey makes between communism and Christianity. To challenge the cultural politics of conservative religiosity was to stand against the faith. Rejecting O’Casey’s religious message also meant rejecting his communism and thus maintaining containment culture. This logic clashes with the cultural memory of Irish censorship by suggesting that perhaps Dublin’s archbishop was right to protest the play. Ireland and the U.S. are more closely aligned than the memory’s narrative suggests because both refuse communism and antireligion, which, according to this logic, is in the best interests of both nations. Containment culture also policed sexuality and gender as signs of healthy American values, but these categories were more fraught. In some respects, norms were ideals: heterosexuality, monogamous marriage, the wife-as-homemaker and husband-as-breadwinner. Early Cold War America agonized over perceived threats to hegemonic expressions of masculinity. More women were in the workforce, blurring gender roles and yielding a more egalitarian domesticity. Many believed that women’s evolving social roles impacted sexual mores, decentering male sexual pleasure. WWII gave men greater purchase to carry out supposedly natural aggressions, yet men were also expected to be gentle providers and role models. Further, husbands were expected to be sexually experienced enough to pleasure their wives but not so much as to detract from their marriage. Monogamy and premarital abstinence could thus hinder masculinity even as it was also an ideal. This “crisis of masculinity” exposed political anxieties: sexual and gender “deviance” equaled political subversion.(75) The publication of Indiana University professor Alfred C. Kinsey’s studies on sexuality created a firestorm, revealing the great extent to which Americans “deviated.” As Indianapolis minister Dr. Jean S. Milner sermonized, “there is a fundamental kinship between this thing [Kinsey’s report on female sexuality] and Communism and…though it may seem to be a thousand miles from Communism, [it] will contribute invariably towards Communism, for both are based on the same naturalistic philosophy."(76) Given communists’ supposed proclivity for “abnormal” sexuality and gender expression, recentering masculinity could guard America. But this generally meant accepting men would need to practice aggression and sexual prowess to gain the experience necessary to manage their homes.(77) Two scenes in The Drums of Father Ned bring American assumptions about communism and sex and gender into dialogue. With the revelation of the “red” timber, chaos descends. Fillifogue blames Michael and Nora: “We have had peace here till youse came back from Dublin [where they attend university] with your design to use the Tosthal for your own ends; but I won’t allow your idle impudence to molest our pure peace.”(78) His language is terribly ironic, for their “peace” is one of patriarchal abuse, as evidenced by the Ulsterman Skerighan’s assault on Bernadette the maid on the pretense that she enticed him by “twutterin’ [her] luddle bum” at him. Skerighan forces himself onto her and kisses her against her will. Though at first, she “coyly” tries to dissuade his advances, she finally screams and pushes him off. Panicking, Skerighan tries to bribe Bernadette into silence and although she first refuses she ultimately takes his money—gesturing to her powerlessness. Fillifogue then tells Skerighan that he saw Bernadette running from the house. Fillifogue interprets Bernadette’s retreat as a sign of her sinfulness, but it’s more likely that she is fleeing after the assault.(79) Bernadette represents the condition in which many Irish women found themselves and that led many to emigrate. Fillifogue’s culture of peace thus comes at the expense of women’s mistreatment. Like the pageant sequence, the LLT production apparently played Bernadette’s assault primarily for laughs. While Moran is right that the scene points out one of the reasons so many Irish women emigrated, Hogan called the scene “delightful” in his scholarship and failed to contend with its violence.(80) Rather, the sequence is one of several representations of misogyny in Ireland that O’Casey depicted in his later plays, as Moran demonstrates. Between the archival photograph of the scene (see Figure 3) and his comment that they pushed the play’s comedy, it’s likely Hogan and Orr staged it in a slapstick style. Figure 3: The North Irish Protestant businessman Alec Skerighan (Stuart Main) approaches a shocked maid, Bernadette (Patricia Hensley), after whirling her to the sofa. IE/NLI/MS/44,728/6/2. The LLT’s staging reflects the Cold War’s masculinity crisis. Skerighan’s sexual aggression is acceptable and even desirable under this logic. In this interpretation, Bernadette still resists his aggression but then feigns distress in an overly dramatic fashion in order to extort Skerighan, making light of the assault to comedic effect, complete with dramatic irony that cues the audience to Bernadette’s ruse instead of grappling with her trauma. This benefits Skerighan’s masculinity at the risk of Bernadette’s safety. Read through the memory of Irish censorship, instead of cultural difference, here the LLT production perversely performed the gendered oppression O’Casey meant to critique as normal, closely aligning the conservative Irish patriarchy with American masculinity. The movement of censorship as memory likely had the effect of confirming already entrenched attitudes rather than critique either Ireland or the U.S. The Drums of Father Ned concludes with a positive link between communism and sexuality. As Binnington and McGilligan try to support Fillifogue at the end of the play in his suppression of the young people’s enthusiasm, Nora attacks their support of capitalism and patriarchy. Fillifogue’s ridiculous response blames her thinking on “th’ College lettin’ th’ students wear jeans. I warned th’ Chancellor that allowing the students to dress like manual labourers would have a communistic tendency and influence.”(81) Michael then reveals that he and Nora have been living together and sharing a bed while at College. Their parents collapse into chairs in shocked paralysis, as the despairing priest proclaims, “Youse see, youse hear! The jeans, jeans, jeans!”(82) In this satire of Red-Scare hysteria, Fillifogue connects their sexual behavior with communism via jeans. Nora’s openness about their relationship is what finally topples the older generation. The Romeo and Juliet –esque couple from opposing “houses” live and sleep together without any mention of marriage, violating normative expectations. Once revealed, this “revolutionary” sexuality that ignores old enmities shatters Irish conservatism and ushers in the dawn of O’Casey’s Irish utopia. A culture that accepts a kind of communism, Christian principles, sexual liberty, and social equality without contradiction, the Ireland that concludes the play far exceeds the limits of what counted as Hoosier tolerance and exceptionalism. The end of the play sees Ireland shift politically, with Nora and Michael contesting their parents’ elected positions. The young leave the old, deciding to follow Father Ned’s march into the future. As Binnington and McGilligan struggle to rise from their stupefaction, they beckon their wives to bring them their mayoral regalia, but the robes, hats, and chains are too big for them.(83) This bit of fantasy illustrates they are inadequate for the needs of governance. Fillifogue similarly collapses as his parish abandons him for Father Ned, who has encouraged progressivism, and the three slump over and admit defeat: “Ireland has gone to the fair!” – meaning both the young as well as the Tóstal fair. Skerighan, whose business also depends upon his dealings with Binnington and McGilligan, tries to rouse the three Catholics to stop Father Ned by singing a mocking Protestant song. Father Ned’s march interrupts and drowns out Skerighan’s divisive tune, and Murray urges them to join the united front. Father Ned’s drums roll, and the play ends (see Figure 4).(84) Faith in competition loses to faith in community. Figure 4: The Drums of Father Ned ’s final tableaux at the LLT. IE/NLI/MS/44,728/6/3 The play asks its audience where it stands. Will they march to Father Ned’s beat or stay behind? The LLT performance asked Lafayette to take on what it means to live under censorship, to affectively feel and think through the contradictions in their thinking and history, and to maybe even entertain a politics that may never have had a place in the community had it not been for their willingness to indulge in the fantasy of American exceptionalism. But the show also skirted the drama’s progressive potential. The play’s procommunist outlook, at turns muted or ridiculed but ultimately fulfilled, was not wholly subsumed. Audiences voiced their confusion. As Hogan told O’Casey, “but even tho [ sic ] they were entertained and chortled and guffawed through more than two hours, I’ve got to ruefully admit that a lot went away wondering what the play was about;” and in his book, “there were a lot of people who left shrugging.”(85) Henry Hewes, drama critic for the Saturday Review , traveled from New York to see the production. In his review, he, too, commented on a sense of bewilderment.(86) In its movement from Ireland to the U.S., the world premiere of The Drums of Father Ned repudiated Lafayette, Indiana, and the U.S.’s contradictory intolerance and exceptionalism. By making the case that communistic politics and culture can achieve a more equal, tolerant world and presenting an Ireland that accepts ideas and practices which U.S. containment culture rejected, the LLT production rebutted its own narrative about Lafayette’s exceptionalism. Yet because the company built its framework around the notion that the Hoosiers already occupied the ultimate possible political position, even a utopian play that reminded them not only of what they had refused to tolerate, but that those very ideas and practices could make the world better failed to offer much beyond the challenge itself. Ireland might have played a small role in shaping how Lafayette’s theatregoers understood themselves, but taking on the prosthetic memory of Irish censorship very likely produced more ambivalence than serious reflection, let alone a renegotiation of their own biases. And despite the pretensions to progress that making banned cultural objects accessible can entail, the Lafayette production of O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned demonstrates how the cultural memory of censorship can limit progress and inspire political complacency. All photographs were scanned by the National Library of Ireland and are shared with the permission of Shivaun O’Casey. References St. Vincent Troubridge, Report on The Drums of Father Ned , September 26, 1960, The Lord Chamberlain’s Correspondence, LCP CORR 1960/1074/1, The British Library, London. Christopher Murray, Seán O’Casey: Writer at Work: A Biography (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), 386–404. Troubridge. Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (Columbia University Press, 2004), 2. Previous studies considering O’Casey’s play have focused on the archbishop’s intervention and/or the text itself. See Joan FitzPatrick Dean, Riot and Great Anger: Stage Censorship in Twentieth-Century Ireland (University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 160–65; Joseph Greenwood, ‘Hear My Song’: Irish Theatre and Popular Song in the 1950s and 1960s (Peter Lang, 2017), 133– 57; James Moran, The Theatre of Seán O’Casey (Bloomsbury, 2013), 30–31, 117–46; Christopher Murray, “O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned in Context,” in A Century of Irish Drama: Widening the Stage , ed. Stephen Watt, Eileen Morgan, and Shakir Mustafa, 117–29 (Indiana University Press, 2000); Paul O’Brien, Seán O’Casey: Political Activist and Writer (Cork University Press, 2023), 256–64. Judith Butler, “Ruled Out: Vocabularies of the Censor,” in Censorship and Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation , ed. Robert C. Post (Getty Research Institute, 1998), 249, 248. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (Routledge, 1997), 130. Christopher Morash, A History of Irish Theatre, 1601–2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 309. Sean O’Casey, The Letters of Sean O’Casey , ed. David Krause, vol. 3, 1955–1958 (Catholic University of America Press, 1989), 254, 306 n. 1, 551–2; Hogan to O’Casey, received March 4, 1958, Seán O’Casey Papers (hereafter cited as O’Casey Papers), IE/NLI/MS/37,846/2, National Library of Ireland, Dublin. John Moody to O’Casey, February 18, 1958, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/38,074; J.E.C. Lewis-Crosby to O’Casey, March 10, 1958, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/38,051; Paul Shyre to O’Casey, March 14, 1958, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/38,051; Paul Shyre to O’Casey, March 29, 1958, April 18, 1958, May 19, 1958, June 5, 1958, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/38,079/3; Harold Goldblatt to O’Casey, October 7, 1958, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/38,051; O’Casey to Harold Goldblatt, October 12, 1958, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/38,051; O’Casey, Letters , 3: 536, 568, 575, 580–82, 954–55, 612, 627–28. Robert Hogan, The Experiments of Sean O’Casey (St. Martin’s Press, 1960), 140–41. These included The Star Turns Red in 1940 at Liverpool’s Unity Theatre and both Purple Dust and Cock-a-Doodle-Dandy at Newcastle’s People’s Theatre in 1942 and 1949, respectively. Moran, 27, 29–31, 248 n. 100. Moran, 27; Susan Canon Harris, Irish Drama and the Other Revolutions: Playwrights, Sexual Politics and the International Left, 1892–1964 (Edinburgh University Press, 2017),192–94. Jim Hanks, Stage Memories and Curtains (On Stage/Back Stage) (Copymat Services, 1998), 62–66. The other plays by Irish playwrights were George Bernard Shaw’s The Great Catherine and Candida , Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest , Lennox Robinson’s The Far-Off Hills , and St. John Ervine’s Friends and Relations , The Ship , and The First Mrs. Frasier. Ibid., 12, 16. “World Premiere of Play by Irish Author,” Journal and Courier , April 25, 1959. “A Few Tickets Are Left for O’Casey Play,” Journal and Courier , April 25, 1959. Sean O’Casey, The Drums of Father Ned (St. Martin’s, 1960), 10. John Bradley, “Changing the Rules: Why the Failures of the 1950s Forced a Transition in Economic Policy-making,” in The Lost Decade: Ireland in the 1950s , ed. Dermot Keogh, Finbarr O’Shea, and Carmel Quinlan (Mercier, 2004), 105–17; Mary E. Daly, Sixties Ireland: Reshaping the Economy, State and Society, 1957–1973 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 6–7, 19–24; Eleanor O’Leary, Youth and Popular Culture in 1950s Ireland (Bloomsbury, 2018), 11–12, 38–43. Edna Delaney, “The Vanishing Irish? The Exodus from Ireland in the 1950s,” in Keogh et al., 81. Caitríona Clear, “‘Too Fond of Going’: Female Emigration and Change for Women in Ireland, 1946–1961.,” in Keogh et al., 135–46; Sandra McAvoy, “Before Cadden: Abortion in Mid-Twentieth-Century Ireland,” in Keogh et al., 147–63. The marriage bar was a national policy in Ireland that women resign from their posts in certain jobs upon marriage and prohibited married women from joining the civil service. The policy lasted until 1973. See Daly, 128, 151–55. Eric G. E. Zuelow, Making Ireland Irish: Tourism and National Identity since the Irish Civil War (Syracuse University Press, 2009), 67–69, 124–35. O’Casey, Letters , 3: 414, 416, 423–24, 433. O’Casey was also critical, however, of the materialism he saw at the heart of An Tóstal . See ibid., 266. Alcoa, “Lafayette Families Live Better Because of Alcoa,” Journal and Courier , July 23, 1959; Program for the Lafayette Little Theatre Association production of The Drums of Father Ned , 4–5, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/38,161/4. Patrick Lonergan, Theatre and Globalization: Irish Drama in the Celtic Tiger Era (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 92. Hogan to O’Casey, April 30, 1959, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/37,846/3. Landsberg, 108. “Little Theatre May Do World Premiere,” Journal and Courier , February 26, 1959. “World Premiere,” Journal and Courier , March 4, 1959. Robert Hogan, “O’Casey Play Already Has Stormy History,” Journal and Courier , March 7, 1959. Larry Ceplair, Anti-Communism in Twentieth-Century America: A Critical History (Praeger, 2011), 91–190; M. J. Heale, American Anticommunism: Combating the Enemy Within, 1830–1970 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 122–90. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (Basic Books, 2008); Alan Nadel, Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (Duke University Press, 1995). Michael L. Krenn, Fall-Out Shelters for the Human Spirit: American Art and the Cold War (University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 1–6. “Text Rejected As Socialistic,” Journal and Courier , December 14, 1951; “Textbook Action Vindicated,” Journal and Courier , December 13, 1952. Robert Hogan, “O’Casey Started with Little, Learned Much,” Journal and Courier , March 21, 1959. Robert Hogan, “O’Casey Saved Money for Reading Material,” Journal and Courier , April 4, 1959. Robert Hogan, “Like Most, O’Casey Left Native Land,” Journal and Courier , April 9, 1959. On the Plough and the Star riots, see Morash, 163–71. Robert Hogan, “Play Rejection Called Crucial O’Casey Event,” Journal and Courier , April 16, 1959. On the Abbey’s rejection of The Silver Tassie , see Moran, 20–23, 66–80. Hogan also appeared on local television and radio to promote the play. Bill Brooks, “Around Here,” Journal and Courier , April 18, 1959. Lafayette Little Theatre Association, Advertisements for The Drums of Father Ned , Journal and Courier , April 8 and 9, 1959 . “Proclaim Week for Premiere,” Journal and Courier , April 16, 1959; Resolution of the Greater Lafayette Chamber of Commerce, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/37,846/3. “About the Play,” Program for the Lafayette Little Theatre Association Production of The Drums of Father Ned , O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/38,161/4. Helene Nicholson, Nadine Holdsworth, and Jane Milling, The Ecologies of Amateur Theatre (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 12. Sean O’Casey, The Letters of Sean O’Casey , ed. David Krause, vol. 4, 1959–1964 (Catholic University of America Press, 1992), 14, 20. Richard Jaeger, phone interview with the author, recorded with permission, April 16, 2016. My deepest thanks to Richard “Dick” Jaeger and Nicholas Bielenberg for sharing their thoughts and memories of the production. On the ways past roles “haunt” actors’ present performances, see Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (University of Michigan Press, 2001), 1–15, 52–95. Jaeger interview. UPI, “Premiere Of Irish Playwright’s Drama Slated For Lafayette,” Anderson Daily Bulletin , April 22, 1959. Nicholas Bielenberg, phone interview with the author, recorded with permission, July 3, 2020. O’Casey, Father Ned , 7–12. Hogan to O’Casey, April 30, 1959, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/37,846/3. O’Casey, Letters , 3: 464. O’Casey quotes a play from Shaw to explain his views of Tone and communism. See George Bernard Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island (Penguin, 1984), 163. See also, Moran, 36. O’Casey saw melodramas of 1798 as a young man. See Stephen Watt, Joyce, O’Casey, and the Irish Popular Theatre (Syracuse University Press, 1991), 31, 51, 59, 143–87. O’Casey, Father Ned , 36. Ibid., 40. Ibid., 32. Ceplair, 238 n. 24; Heale, 29. Dale R. Sorenson, “The Anticommunist Consensus in Indiana” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1980), 94, 127, 194–7. “Loyalty at Purdue Covered by Oath,” Journal and Courier , June 4, 1949; “Loyalty Oaths and Defense,” Journal and Courier , December 2, 1959; Mary Schlott, “Loan Loyalty Oath OK with Purdue,” Journal and Courier , November 19, 1959; George E. Sokolsky, “Loyalty Oaths and Such,” Journal and Courier , February 22, 1960. “Council Will Act On City Communism Ban,” Journal and Courier , September 29, 1950; “City Acts to Prohibit Communist Activities,” Journal and Courier , August 5, 1950. Hogan, Experiments , 85–86, 98, 139. “World Premiere.” Jessica Jeanne Orr Urley, phone interview with the author, recorded with permission, March 22, 2020. My thanks to Jessica for helping me gain a better sense of her grandmother as a human and artist. Mary Kemmer, “Seven Plays, Two Sons A Degree in Six Years,” Journal and Courier , August 29, 1959. Urley interview. Jeanne Orr to O’Casey, June 8, 1959, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/37,846/3. Hogan, Experiments , 135–42. Hogan to O’Casey, April 30, 1959, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/37,846/3. O’Casey, Father Ned , 92. Moran, 127. Qtd. in “Council Will Act.” Fulton Lewis Jr., “The Answer to Communism,” Journal and Courier , August 28, 1958. O’Casey, Father Ned , 95–96. Bielenberg interview. Hogan to O’Casey, April 30, 1959, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/37,846/3. Hogan does say, though, that Geraldine Gray, the Irish immigrant who played Nora, “gave us a bit of trouble about the crucifix in Act I, and a couple of actors took the play to a priest who sai[d] nothing wrong in it.” Clearly, there was some trepidation in the cast as well. K. A. Cuordileone, Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War (Routledge, 2005), xxi–ii, 9–17, 124–25; Miriam G. Ruemann, American Sexual Character: Sex, Gender, and National Identity in the Kinsey Reports (University of California Press, 2005), 9, 55, 59, 68, 76–85. Qtd. in Wardell B. Pomeroy, Dr. Kinsey and the Institute for Sex Research (Harper and Row, 1972), 366. Cuordileone, Manhood , 78, 84. O’Casey, Father Ned , 97. Ibid., 58–61. Moran, 142; Hogan, Experiments , 137. O’Casey, Father Ned , 98–99. Ibid., 99. Ibid., 101. Ibid., 104–05. Hogan to O’Casey, April 30, 1959, O’Casey Papers, IE/NLI/MS/37,846/3; Hogan, Experiments , 143. Henry Hewes, “Broadway Postscript: The Green Crow Flies Again,” Saturday Review , May 9, 1959. Bibliography Alcoa. “Lafayette Families Live Better Because of Alcoa.” Advertisement. Journal and Courier , July 23, 1959. Bielenberg, Nicholas. Phone interview with the author, recorded with permission, July 3, 2020. Bradley, John. “Changing the Rules: Why the Failures of the 1950s Forced a Transition in Economic Policy-making.” In The Lost Decade: Ireland in the 1950s , edited by Dermot Keogh, Finbarr O’Shea, and Carmel Quinlan. Mercier, 2004. Brooks, Bill. “Around Here.” Journal and Courier , April 18, 1959. Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. Routledge, 1997. ---. “Ruled Out: Vocabularies of the Censor.” In Censorship and Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation , edited by Robert C. Post. Getty Research Institute, 1998. Carlson, Marvin. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine . University of Michigan Press, 2001. Ceplair, Larry. Anti-Communism in Twentieth-Century America: A Critical History . Praeger, 2011. Clear, Caitríona. “‘Too Fond of Going’: Female Emigration and Change for Women in Ireland, 1946–1961..” In The Lost Decade: Ireland in the 1950s , edited by Dermot Keogh, Finbarr O’Shea, and Carmel Quinlan. Mercier, 2004. Cuordileone, K. A. Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War. Routledge, 2005. Daly, Mary E. Sixties Ireland: Reshaping the Economy, State and Society, 1957–1973 . Cambridge University Press, 2016. Dean, Joan FitzPatrick. Riot and Great Anger: Stage Censorship in Twentieth-Century Ireland. University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. Delaney, Edna. “The Vanishing Irish? The Exodus from Ireland in the 1950s.” In The Lost Decade: Ireland in the 1950s , edited by Dermot Keogh, Finbarr O’Shea, and Carmel Quinlan. Mercier, 2004. Greenwood, Joseph. ‘Hear My Song’: Irish Theatre and Popular Song in the 1950s and 1960s. Peter Lang, 2017. Hanks, Jim. Stage Memories and Curtains (On Stage/Back Stage) . Copymat Services, 1998. Harris, Susan Canon. Irish Drama and the Other Revolutions: Playwrights, Sexual Politics and the International Left, 1892–1964. Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Heale, M. J. American Anticommunism: Combating the Enemy Within, 1830–1970 . Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Hewes, Henry. “Broadway Postscript: The Green Crow Flies Again.” Saturday Review , May 9, 1959. Hogan, Robert. The Experiments of Sean O’Casey . St. Martin’s Press, 1960. ---. “Like Most, O’Casey Left Native Land,” Journal and Courier , April 9, 1959. ---. “O’Casey Play Already Has Stormy History.” Journal and Courier , March 7, 1959. ---. “O’Casey Saved Money for Reading Material.” Journal and Courier , April 4, 1959. ---. “O’Casey Started with Little, Learned Much.” Journal and Courier , March 21, 1959. ---. “Play Rejection Called Crucial O’Casey Event.” Journal and Courier , April 16, 1959 Jaeger, Richard. Phone interview with the author, recorded with permission, April 16, 2016. Journal and Courier . “City Acts to Prohibit Communist Activities.” August 5, 1950. ---. “Council Will Act On City Communism Ban.” September 29, 1950. ---. “A Few Tickets Are Left for O’Casey Play.” April 25, 1959. ---. “Little Theatre May Do World Premiere.” February 26, 1959. ---. “Loyalty at Purdue Covered by Oath.” June 4, 1949. ---. “Loyalty Oaths and Defense.” December 2, 1959. ---. “Proclaim Week for Premiere.” April 16, 1959. ---. “Text Rejected As Socialistic.” December 14, 1951. ---. “Textbook Action Vindicated.” December 13, 1952. ---. “World Premiere.” March 4, 1959. ---. “World Premiere of Play by Irish Author.” April 25, 1959. Kemmer, Mary. “Seven Plays, Two Sons A Degree in Six Years.” Journal and Courier , August 29, 1959. Krenn, Michael L. Fall-Out Shelters for the Human Spirit: American Art and the Cold War. University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Lafayette Little Theatre Association, Advertisements for The Drums of Father Ned . Journal and Courier , April 8 and 9, 1959. Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture . Columbia University Press, 2004. Lewis Jr., Fulton. “The Answer to Communism.” Journal and Courier , August 28, 1958. Lonergan, Patrick. Theatre and Globalization: Irish Drama in the Celtic Tiger Era . Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era . Basic Books, 2008. McAvoy, Sandra. “Before Cadden: Abortion in Mid-Twentieth-Century Ireland.” In The Lost Decade: Ireland in the 1950s , edited by Dermot Keogh, Finbarr O’Shea, and Carmel Quinlan. Mercier, 2004. Moran, James. The Theatre of Seán O’Casey . Bloomsbury: 2013. Morash, Christopher. A History of Irish Theatre, 1601–2000 . Cambridge University Press, 2002. Murray, Christopher. “O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned in Context.” In A Century of Irish Drama: Widening the Stage , edited by Stephen Watt, Eileen Morgan, and Shakir Mustafa. Indiana University Press, 2000. ---. Seán O’Casey: Writer at Work: A Biography . McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004. Nadel, Alan. Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age . Duke University Press, 1995. Nicholson, Helene, Nadine Holdsworth, and Jane Milling. The Ecologies of Amateur Theatre . Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. O’Brien, Paul. Seán O’Casey: Political Activist and Writer . Cork University Press, 2023. O’Casey, Eileen. Eileen O’Casey Papers. National Library of Ireland, Dublin. O’Casey, Seán/Sean. The Drums of Father Ned . St. Martin’s, 1960. ---. The Letters of Sean O’Casey . Edited by David Krause. Vol. 3: 1955–1958. Catholic University Press, 1989. ---. The Letters of Sean O’Casey . Edited by David Krause. Vol. 4: 1959–1964. Catholic University of America Press, 1992. ---. Seán O’Casey Papers. National Library of Ireland, Dublin. O’Leary, Eleanor. Youth and Popular Culture in 1950s Ireland. Bloomsbury, 2018. Pomeroy, Wardell B. Dr. Kinsey and the Institute for Sex Research . Harper and Row, 1972. Ruemann, Miriam G. American Sexual Character: Sex, Gender, and National Identity in the Kinsey Reports . University of California Press, 2005. Schlott, Mary. “Loan Loyalty Oath OK with Purdue.” Journal and Courier , November 19, 1959. Shaw, George Bernard. John Bull’s Other Island . Penguin, 1984. Sokolsky, George E. “Loyalty Oaths and Such.” Journal and Courier , February 22, 1960. Sorenson, Dale R. “The Anticommunist Consensus in Indiana.” PhD diss., Indiana University, 1980. Troubridge, St. Vincent. Report on The Drums of Father Ned , September 26, 1960. British Library, London, Lord Chamberlain’s Plays Correspondence, 1960/1074/1. UPI. “Premiere Of Irish Playwright’s Drama Slated For Lafayette.” Anderson Daily Bulletin , April 22, 1959. Urley, Jessica Jeanne Orr. Phone interview with the author, recorded with permission, March 22, 2020. Watt, Stephen. Joyce, O’Casey, and the Irish Popular Theatre. Syracuse University Press, 1991. Zuelow, Eric G. E. Making Ireland Irish: Tourism and National Identity since the Irish Civil War. Syracuse University Press, 2009. Footnotes About The Author(s) NIC BARILAR is Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. Nic earned his PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Pittsburgh in 2021. Nic’s research has appeared in the edited collections Beckett Beyond the Normal (Edinburgh University Press, 2020; pb 2022), The Routledge Companion to Absurdist Literature (Routledge, 2024), and The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre Censorship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025). Nic is also an actor, proud member of Actors’ Equity Association, and director. Among his creative credits, he produced and directed the North American premiere of Irish playwright Máiréad Ní Ghráda’s classic 1965 drama On Trial ( An Triail , 1964). Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Censorship/Public Censure and Performance Today: Special Issue Introduction Remembering Censorship in the World Premiere of Seán O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned: Lafayette, Indiana, 1959 The Stage as Networked Battleground: Dissent and Censorship in Contemporary Canadian Theatre and Performance Censor/Censure: A Roundtable Which of These Are Censorship? The Divide Between Prior Restraint and Soft Censorship How Can an Artist Respond to Censorship? The Dilemma That Faces Contemporary Creatives in the UK The LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project: A Roundtable Conversation Life is Drag: Documenting Spectacle as Resistance An Interview with Rachel Rampleman Middle Eastern American Theatre: Communities, Cultures, and Artists. Michael Malek Najjar. Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2021; Pp. xvi + 237. Lessons from Our Students: Meditations on Performance Pedagogy. Stacey Cabaj and Andrea Odinov. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 126 Choreographing Dirt: Movement, Performance, and Ecology in the Anthropocene. Angenette Spalink. Studies in Theatre, Ecology, and Performance Series, no. 3. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 116. Fauci and Kramer Our Town Frankenstein Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch Somber Tides by Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. Somber Tides is a cry from the species, startled into survival against the elements. One last breath before being trampled by the Earth or maybe conversely a battle to wage against winds and tides clutching on before extinction.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Somber Tides At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Saturday May 17th at 11am (as part of the Short Film Program) and also be available to watch online on the festival website till June 8th 2025. RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. You may RSVP above to get a reminder about the Segal Film Festival in your inbox. Country Canada Language No Dialogue Running Time 12 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film Somber Tides is a cry from the species, startled into survival against the elements. One last breath before being trampled by the Earth or maybe conversely a battle to wage against winds and tides clutching on before extinction. About The Artist(s) Choreographer and filmmaker Chantal Caron's visual signature has always been inspired by the St. Lawrence River and the natural elements that make up its ecosystem. Her works are inspired by the living and embodied in contemporary dance. A member of the Order of Canada and recipient of CALQ's "Artist of the Year" award in 2023, her short films have been selected and awarded around the world since 2015 for their unique aesthetics. Get in touch with the artist(s) distribution@bandesonimage.org and follow them on social media Official Site : https://bandesonimage.org/distribution/catalogue-de-films?view=article&id=10 FILM FACEBOOK : https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61564890205177 PROD FB : https://www.facebook.com/fleuveespacedanse PROD INSTA : https://www.instagram.com/fleuve_espacedanse/ DISTRIB FB : https://www.facebook.com/BandeSonimage DISTRIB INSTA : https://www.instagram.com/bandesonimage/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse

Watch This is Ballroom by Juru and Vitã at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. In Rio de Janeiro City and its outskirts, LGBTQ+ youth of color recreates Ballroom culture on their own terms. A portrait of the dramas, the voguing performances, and the art of shade, 50 years after its inception in New York. Rio is burning!. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents This is Ballroom At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Juru and Vitã Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Thursday May 15th, at 4pm. RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. You may RSVP above to get a reminder about the Segal Film Festival in your inbox. Country Brazil Language Portuguese, English Running Time 92 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film In Rio de Janeiro City and its outskirts, LGBTQ+ youth of color recreates Ballroom culture on their own terms. A portrait of the dramas, the voguing performances, and the art of shade, 50 years after its inception in New York. Rio is burning! About The Artist(s) Vitã is a filmmaker and screenwriter. Director of the short film "The day I remembered the trip to Bicuda" (2015), producer of the feature documentary "It's Not the First Time We Fight For Our Love" (2022). Curator of Brazilian Comedy FF and of showcases on Hong Sangsoo films in four cities in Brazil. Master's degree in Audiovisual at UFF (Brazil). In the ballroom scene, they participate as an independent photographer and are a member of the Legendary House of Lauren Intl. Juru is a researcher, dramaturgist and performing arts critic. Casting coach for the feature film "Com O Terceiro Olho na Terra da Profanação", by Catu Rizo (2017) and the short film "Sunset", by Bruno Roger (2014). Dramaturgist in the performance "Repertory n. 1", by Davi Pontes and Wallace Ferreira. Master in Contemporary Arts Studies at UFF and PhD student in Arts at UERJ. Get in touch with the artist(s) festival@utopiadocs.net and follow them on social media https://www.utopiadocs.net/ renato@utopiadocs.net Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 17 Spring 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage SHAHADAT (THE TESTIMONIES) Adapted by Fouad Teymour By Suzi Elnaggar Published: May 12, 2025 Download Article as PDF SHAHADAT (THE TESTIMONIES) . Adapted by Fouad Teymour from Women Resisting Sexual Violence and the Egyptian Revolution: Arab Feminist Testimonies (2020) by Manal Hamzeh . Directed by Tina El Gamal . Silk Road Cultural Center in partnership with the International Voices Project and New Mexico State University, Chicago . 4 November 2024 . A (Re)view From The Inside: Silk Road’s Shahadat Shahadat (The Testimonies) was adapted by Egyptian playwright Fouad Teymour from Resisting Sexual Violence and the Egyptian Revolution: Arab Feminist Testimonies (2020) by Manal Hamzeh. Hamzeh’s scholarship aims to “provides unique insight into women’s experiences during the Egyptian Revolution, and into the methods of resistance these women developed in response to sexual violence.” [1] Her book centers the verbatim accounts of three Egyptian women—the shaaheda [2] (“women who give testimonios”) Ola S., Samira I., and Yasmine E., who experienced sexual violence during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution ( suwret yanayer ) and shared their stories publicly, from social media posts to television interviews, seeking justice on their own terms. Through her ongoing work, Hamzeh aims to preserve and represent the shahadat (testimonies) while documenting her conversations and relationship with the three women over the past decade. Egyptian playwright Teymour’s adaptation marks the first time Hamzeh’s work on the shahadat has been adapted for the stage. Previously, she collaborated on a graphic art representation of the testimonies, which, like the play, was developed with the women’s knowledge and consent. [3] Teymour’s script highlights the women’s voices, amplifying their strength, resilience, and unwavering demand for justice. Co-produced by Silk Road Cultural Center and New Mexico State University, Shahadat was presented as a work-in-progress reading at the International Voices Project (IVP) in Chicago at the Instituto Cervantes. [4] Shahadat found its home with Silk Road as part of a long-time friendship and collaboration between Hamzeh and its founders, Jamil Khoury and Malik Gillani. In addition to Teymour’s involvement, this first developmental reading was shaped by Egyptian and Egyptian-American perspectives, with direction by Egyptian-American theatre artist Tina El Gamal and script dramaturgy by myself, Egyptian-American dramaturg Suzi Elnaggar. To bring Hamzeh’s work to the stage, Silk Road prioritized assembling a team of primarily SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) and Egyptian artists, ensuring the adaptation honored the power of these testimonies while exploring how the reading could evolve into a fully realized production. Shahadat . Adapted by Fouad Teymour . Directed by Tina El Gamal . Left to Right: Samira played by Tina El Gamal, Yasmine played by Anelga Hajjar, Ola played by Marielle Issa, Manal/Hewar played by Annalise Raziq . Photo: IVP and Scott Dray , provided by Silk Road Cultural Center . From Book to Stage: The Text of Shahadat Teymour and Hamzeh worked through multiple drafts of the script, refining the adaptation to balance textual authenticity with theatrical cohesion. From the outset, Teymour aimed to maintain the fidelity of the women’s words while shaping a structured narrative that could sustain dramatic momentum onstage, a goal that director El Gamal supported in rehearsal through her actor-led process. Another notable aspect that reinforced the authenticity of the shahadat and honored the specificity of the women’s experiences in their own words was the extensive use of colloquially transliterated Arabic throughout the script. No elements were added to the testimonies, though some small translation adjustments were made for flow (Hamzeh originally translated the testimonies for her book from colloquial Egyptian Arabic into English). Additionally, Teymour’s script introduces two framing characters, where in the book Hamzeh’s scholarship frames the testimonies. These framing characters help add narrative cohesion and dramatic subtext: Hewar (Arabic for dialogue or conversation), a narrator and context-giver, and Rajul (Arabic for man), a composite character representing all the male voices. In this first reading, both were voiced by actors seated at the periphery—Rajul and the oud player stage right, and Hewar and the stage directions reader (separately) stage left—though they initially were written as off-stage voices. Hewar is doubled with the character of Manal (the dramatic representation of Hamzeh, played by an actor), creating an element of metanarrative when the ‘narrator’ comes on stage as Manal. Teymour has expressed interest in further developing these characters and their narrative and structural function in a future workshop, particularly by bringing Rajul onstage as a physical presence and exploring Hamzeh’s role as the character Manal. Apart from translation and framing the verbatim text, a key challenge for Teymour was weaving the three testimonies together—each woman’s experience was independent of the others, yet the script had to find a way to bring them into a shared space. With that challenge in mind, the first act unfolds as individual yet interwoven testimonies, capturing the fragmentation of their experiences, before transitioning to the second act that focuses on their collective relationship with Hamzeh, as an on-stage character Manal. This shift in structure mirrors the real-life process that led to the creation of Hamzeh’s book, the disparate testimonies of women drawn into conversation through Hamzeh’s work and scholarship, creating lasting relationships. Using Hewar as a narrator, Teymour provides necessary context for audience members who may not be familiar with the 2011 Egyptian Revolution while also moving back and forth through time to have the characters meet at the pivotal moment of the protests, the “day of rage” Friday, January 28th, 2011 (Teymour 1). Teymour continues to use this technique of hewar (conversation), so the narrative slips between the characters conversing with each other, the audience, and Hewar, who weaves throughout. The method of storytelling that Teymour uses builds on the methodological ideas in Hamzeh’s book, shahadat (public testimonies) , and haki , (the building of strong relationships and having conversations over time) (Hamzeh 13-18). Haki is rooted in the Arabic verb haka, meaning to weave or to tell, calling to a tradition of oral storytelling [5] . Teymour begins the narrative on Qasr al-Nil bridge, during January 28th, 2011, “the Friday of Indignation”(1). The ‘narrator,’ Hewar, sets the scene, situating the audience in a revolution in progress: The revolution was afoot. Three young women converged independently onto this historical event, seeking, alongside others, “freedom, bread, and Social Justice!” Unaware that their lives would be permanently upended in the process, and that they would end up teaching the world a lesson in courage, resistance, dignity, and [sic]self-respect. These are their stories told through their own Testimonies... Shahaddat! ( Shahadat , Teymour 1) Shahadat. Adapted by Fouad Teymour. Directed by Tina El Gamal. Yasmine played by Anelga Hajjar (foreground,) Ola played by Marielle Issa. Photo: IVP and Scott Dray, provided by Silk Road Cultural Center. Ola steps forward, recalling the protest in midan etahrir (Tahrir Square): “I was on the frontlines” (1). Hewar notes, at that same moment, Samira had been released from detention the day before and was amid the protesting crowds. Time shifts, and Samira recounts her decision to join the protests on January 24th: “I took the train from Sohag to Cairo knowing something was building up” (2). Hewar remarks that she is unsure of the location of the third protestor, Yasmine; Yasmine clarifies that she made the decision to join the protests, having only begun to be politically active: “I was living in the heart of Cairo when the revolution started. I began my political activism during the 18 days of essuwra ” (3). The three women continue their introductions, explaining what drew them to Tahrir Square, moving together to become the crowd of protestors chanting “3eish, Horreya, 3adalah egtema3eyeh!” [6] which Teymour translates as “Freedom, Bread, and Social Justice!” ending the first scene (4). This narrative interweaving of the testimonies, which exemplifies the idea of haki is a key part of the dramatization of the verbatim text. Hamzeh played a vital role in the development and reading, commenting on the process as it related to her methodology and sharing her first-hand knowledge of the three women. Because director El Gamal’s rehearsal process was collaborative, Hamzeh often shared her thoughts while also enjoying learning more about a developmental process as a non-theatre maker and academic. While Hamzeh provided insights, the creative team consciously decided not to attempt direct reconstruction of the women but to approach the script through an interpretive lens. The actors engaged with the text as it appeared on the page, informed by the contextual details in Hamzeh’s book, which were mediated through dramaturgical presentations, handouts, and exercises. El Gamal led the actors in crafting the characters through discussion and some devised work in the room. This process allowed the actors to discover the characters organically, balancing fidelity to the testimonies with the needs of the stage and the material’s emotional weight. Shahadat. Adapted by Fouad Teymour. Directed by Tina El Gamal. Left to Right: Rajul played by Faiz Siddique, Yasmine played by Anelga Hajjar, Samira played by Tina El Gamal, Ola played by Marielle Issa, Manal/Hewar played by Annalise Raziq. Photo: Gordon Chow, provided by Silk Road Cultural Center. Staging and Theatricality A staged reading has inherent limitations—minimal set, little movement, and a focus on the text—but El Gamal’s direction found ways to use these constraints to the production’s advantage. The actors began offstage before moving into a staggered formation at their music stands. Throughout the reading, the actors alternated positions, with different actors stepping forward to emphasize key moments, echoing the dynamic movement of a protest as it becomes a revolution. The fluidity reflected the activity of Tahrir Square on those January days, immersing the audience in the tumult and hope of a revolution as it unfolded. A particularly striking use of movement came during the testimony of Ola, an active political organizer during Mubarak’s presidency; she opens the play clashing with police over tear gas canisters. Recalling the clash, Ola moved forward downstage as if tossing a canister back, then fell in line again, embodying the rhythm of protest. On the other hand, Yasmine, recounting being surrounded and assaulted by a mob, retreated upstage, mirroring her sense of entrapment. Of the three women, her staged testimony was the most physically dynamic, emphasizing the fear and disorientation of her experience. Stillness, too, played a crucial role. At the end of act one, all three women raised their voices as they declared, “STOP!” (24). The shift from motion to stillness punctuated the act’s conclusion, reinforcing the strength of their testimonies. In act two, when Manal transitions from Hewar, the staging shifted from a triangular formation to a living room-like arrangement, which created an intimate and conversational setting that complemented the act’s reflective tone. For the play’s epilogue, the actors repositioned themselves into a straight line behind music stands, visually echoing the format of a Zoom call, reinforcing the theme of remote yet connected testimony. These staging shifts marked the passage of time, guiding the audience through the play’s evolving emotional landscape. Another element that added to the theatricality of the reading was live oud music. On the oud, Lucia Thomas underscored the reading by performing compositions by Yasmine. This addition, requested by Teymour, added emotional depth and texture to the piece. Throughout the staging, the music did not simply accompany the performance; it actively shaped the atmosphere. Swelling at moments of intensity and retreating to allow spoken words to resonate, the oud wove through the testimonies like an extension of their voices. In all, El Gamal’s use of clever yet minimal staging used the constraints of a staged reading to their best effect; at the end of the performance, multiple audience members commented on the effectiveness of those choices. Following the reading, Khoury led a talkback featuring Teymour, Hamzeh, El Gamal, myself, and most of the cast and creative team. The audience reported that the strength of the women’s testimonies deeply resonated with them and that they found connections to their own experiences. A significant Egyptian audience was present, and many expressed how the play captured the trauma and resilience of those who lived through the Revolution. However, the events of the shahadat themselves were difficult to hear, as some audience members expressed, though they relayed strong support for a full production to come to fruition. The script, which Teymour, Hamzeh, and Silk Road seek to develop further, hopefully with a local partner, was extremely well-received. Shahadat. Adapted by Fouad Teymour. Directed by Tina El Gamal. Stage Directions/ Samira stand-in played by Jamila Tyler, Yasmine played by Anelga Hajjar, Ola played by Marielle Issa. Photo: Gordon Chow, provided by Silk Road Cultural Cente Next Steps The developmental reading of Shahadat at IVP marked a critical step in developing this powerful piece, highlighting the resilience of women in the region through their testimonies and the importance in the contemporary American theatre of their being able to represent themselves and their experiences. Moving forward, the creative team is committed to refining the production, deepening its theatrical elements, and expanding its reach to broader audiences. As a work-in-progress reading, Shahadat demonstrated the power of these testimonies and the potential for a full production. With a more extensive workshop, there would be an opportunity to explore richer staging, sound design, and immersive projections to realize the play’s impact more fully. The ultimate goal is to transition Shahadat from a staged reading into a fully realized production that continues to amplify these voices and spark critical conversations, furthering the representation of SWANA, Arab, and Egyptian stories in the American theatre while honoring the voices of the shaaheda and their goal of promoting justice for women in Egypt and the region. Shahadat is not just a recounting of past events—it is an active engagement with memory, justice, and resistance. [1] Hamzeh, a scholar of gender and ethnicity and co-founder of the Department of Borderlands and Ethnic Studies, describes her research as “rooted in Arab feminist research methodologies.” Manal Hamzeh, “Manal Hamzeh Bio,” n.d., https://best.nmsu.edu/manal-hamzeh.html . Her book can be found here: “Women Resisting Sexual Violence and the Egyptian Revolution,” Bloomsbury, n.d., https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/women-resisting-sexual-violence-and-the-egyptian-revolution-9781350333321/ . [2] The translations and transliteration styles used in this review are pulled from Hamzeh’s text, except where drawn from the workshop playscript. She describes her approach as “Arabic terms and names transcribed into Latin alphabets with lay and popular spelling”; here, her use of shaaheda , a noun which does not usually have a feminine plural form in Arabic dictionaries, is an intervention through translation (145). [3] Hamzeh organized an initial reading of act one of Teymour’s script at NMSU, which myself and other creative team members attended virtually, called “Shahadat Theatrical Readings”; the page for the reading contains more of Hamzeh’s perspective on the work, as well as links to the graphic representations created with Ola and Yasmine: “Shahadat Theatrical Readings,” n.d., https://best.nmsu.edu/shahadat-theatrical-readings.html . [4] The International Voices Project serves as an incubator for international work, featuring commissions, translations, and new productions from playwrights representing countries from across the globe. This year, five playwrights were produced in partnership with local Chicago theatres and organizations, with each project championed by a group of artists who deemed the plays to be relevant to their communities; this method has led the International Voices Project to have an exceptional track record of their selected readings which go on to have full productions afterward. Over its 14 years, the International Voices Project has produced readings of multiple Arabic and Egyptian plays. To learn more about the project and past seasons visit the website: https://www.ivpchicago.org/ [5] For Hamzeh, haki , which has not been previously used as a research methodology, has been used by Palestinians “for decades” and is grounded in an “Arab methodology of oral storytelling.” Drawing on Palestinian scholar, Faiha Abdulhadi, who wrote, as quoted in Hamzeh’s book, “When we have our own narratives, with all details, then we can face the world with it. ” Manal Hamzeh, Women Resisting Sexual Violence and the Egyptian Revolution: Arab Feminist Testimonies (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2020), 13,14, https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350224087 . [6] This transliteration reflects a colloquial Egyptian style and is pulled from a workshop version of Teymour’s text. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes References About The Author(s) Suzi Elnaggar Northwestern University; Freelance Dramaturg Suzi Elnaggar is an Egyptian American performance scholar, freelance dramaturg, and theatremaker. Her work has been published in Asian Theatre Journal, Arab Stages, and Theatre Times. Her interests include recontextualizing tragedy, myths, and folklore, postcolonial theatre contexts, decoloniality in performance, theatre of social change, the intersection of trauma and performance, transnational and migrant stories, and work that centers SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) experiences. Suzi’s scholarship and practice center community, collaboration, and context. As a dramaturg, she is experienced in both production and developmental work. She is the artistic director of Backstitch Story Project, and the founder and creative director of the Digital Development Project. She has read scripts for PlayPenn, Playwright’s Center, Rattlestick’s Van Lier New Voices Fellowship, SHELA, and Sparkfest, among many others. Selected dramaturgy credits (Production & Developmental Workshops): Silk Road’s Shahadat ; Backstitch Story Arts Off-White: The Arab House Party Play ; Clamour Theatre’s Lived Experience ; TACTICS Ottawa’s ANANSI V. GOD(S) ; Jubilee Theatre Waco’s Fairview (Texas Premiere); Wild Imaginings’ Jesus and Valium (World Premiere), The Way He Looks at You , Cardboard Castles Hung on Walls (World Premiere); Northwestern University Theatre’s The Great Sea Serpent . Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents O Lord! By Ali Abdel-Nabi Al-Zaidi Mothers Challenging the Divine: Ali Al-Zaidi’s Ya Rab! The 31st Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre. September 1-11, 2024. ARTIFICIAL HEART. By Mohammad Basha and Firas Farrah. LEILI & MAJNUN. Written and directed by Torange Yeghiazarian SHAHADAT (THE TESTIMONIES) Adapted by Fouad Teymour Review: TO THE GOOD PEOPLE OF GAZA: THEATRE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE Staging Revolutions and the Many Faces of Modernism: Performing Politics in Irish and Egyptian Theatre Previous Next Attribution: Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch Grand Theft Hamlet by Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. With theaters shut during the COVID-19 pandemic, two jobless actors, Sam and Mark, are uncertain about their futures—finding solace in the virtual chaos of Grand Theft Auto Online. Desperate for purpose, they decide to stage Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the unpredictable world of their favorite game.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Grand Theft Hamlet At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Saturday May 17th at 1:25pm. RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. You may RSVP above to get a reminder about the Segal Film Festival in your inbox. Country USA Language English Running Time 89 minutes Year of Release 2024 About The Film With theaters shut during the COVID-19 pandemic, two jobless actors, Sam and Mark, are uncertain about their futures—finding solace in the virtual chaos of Grand Theft Auto Online. Desperate for purpose, they decide to stage Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the unpredictable world of their favorite game. About The Artist(s) PINNY GRYLLS CO-DIRECTOR After founding Birds Eye View Film Festival, Grylls became an award-winning documentary and commercials director. Her first short documentary, Peter And Ben, won awards at Aspen, London Short Film Festival, and SXSW. Since then she has specialized in making documentaries about theatre, opera and dance. Films include The Hour (National Theatre/BBC), Becoming Zerlina (The Royal Opera House), Who Do You Think You Were (Channel 4), Voytek The Soldier Bear (BBC), Thankyou Women (The Guardian), and Skin Hunger (Arts Council/ Dante or Die). She was a contributing filmmaker to Grierson-nominated The Street bought by Amazon and is currently developing her first fiction feature Hear My Voice with BFI funding. Commercials include Dove, Aldi ‘Like series’ and British Gas. Grand Theft Hamlet will be her debut documentary feature. Pinny studied Archaeology and Anthropology at Oxford University and has worked for over a decade as a senior ethnographic researcher for Ipsos Mori and the UK government through Policy Lab. She was also an Associate Lecturer in ethnographic filmmaking in the Anthropology department at University College London. Other teaching work includes the Poplar Film School, Central Film School, University of the Creative Arts London, Creative Futures, and Here On Earth – an International collaborative environmental documentary project made online in lock down by teenagers in Taiwan, London and New York. She is a proud member of the hard of hearing/deaf community and is learning British Sign Language. SAM CRANE CO-DIRECTOR Crane is an award-winning machinima video artist and actor. He is currently playing Harry Potter in the West End production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and can soon be seen as Jacques-Louis David in Ridley Scott’s forthcoming film Napoleon for Sony Pictures and Apple TV. In a theatre career spanning 20 years, he has been critically acclaimed for his performances at the National Theatre, Shakespeare’s Globe, in the West End and on Broadway. He starred as Farinelli in Farinelli And The King alongside Mark Rylance, and Winston Smith in Robert Icke’s multi-award-winning 1984. His machinima film We Are Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On won the Critics’ Choice award at Milan Machinima Festival, First Prize for Video Art at The Athens Digital Arts Festival, was shortlisted for the Lumen Prize and long-listed for the Aesthetica Art Prize. He is a PhD candidate at York University's School of Arts and Creative Technologies and a member of the PEERS programme of artistic researchers at Zurich University of the Arts. He read Classics as an Undergraduate at Oxford University and trained as an actor at LAMDA where he won the Nicholas Hytner scholarship. Get in touch with the artist(s) cwells@mubi.com and follow them on social media N/A Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 16 Fall 2024 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Review: OF KINGS AND CLOWNS: LEADERSHIP IN CONTEMPORARY EGYPTIAN THEATRE SINCE 1967 By Tiran Manucharyan. By Areeg Ibrahim Published: November 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF OF KINGS AND CLOWNS: LEADERSHIP IN CONTEMPORARY EGYPTIAN THEATRE SINCE 1967. By Tiran Manucharyan. Routledge Advances in Theatre and Performance Studies. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2024; pp. 270. Tiran Manucharyan’s Of Kings and Clowns: Leadership in Contemporary Egyptian Theatre Since 1967 is an important addition to the literature on theatre and leadership. Manucharyan who is a Lecturer of Arabic as well as Comparative Literature at the University of St. Andrews, Scottland is a budding scholar of Egyptian theatre. Composed of 270 pages, this monograph is a rewriting of the author’s PhD dissertation and is comprised of a preface, an introduction, seven chapters and a conclusion. The book deals with the transformations of Egyptian theatre since 1967 until the 2011 revolution through theoretical discourses, essays and plays of Yusuf Idris, as well as the analysis of the plays of Abul-‘Ela El-Salamouny, Lenin El-Ramly, and Fathia El-‘Assal, along with some theatre makers of the younger generation such as Sondos Shabayek, Mahmoud Gamal Hedeny, and Magdy El-Hamzawy. In the preface, Manucharyan explains that the book explores the development of Egyptian theatre since the period following the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, shedding light on political and cultural leadership. The author maintains, “The book observes the ways Egyptian theatre has negotiated its place within the socio-political environment in which it operates, not only transforming itself but also inciting transformation” (xi). The author also proposes that this book is innovative as a monograph in English that provides an examination of the progress of theatre as well as a detailed analysis of plays, focusing on leadership and taking gender into consideration, especially in the dramatic and theatrical works of women playwrights and theatre makers. In the introduction, the author begins by exploring the way in which events on stage can integrate with real-life events, and recalls the essays of iconic Egyptian playwright Yusuf Idris who proposed removing the boundaries between stage and audience, in order to emphasize theatre’s role in society. After going through the relationship between leadership and theatre, Manucharyan refers to the works of some of the major Egyptian playwrights of the period, referring to Idris, El-Salamouny, El-Ramly and El-‘Assal. In chapter one, “ Tamasruh : Between Theatricalisation and Carnivalesque,” the author link’s Yusuf Idris’ tamasruh , a coined term which refers to dissolving the boundary between audience and spectator, with Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque. The chapter links these concepts to the overarching theme: the relation of clowns and jesters to the carnivalesque. By extension, intellectuals/playwrights represent such archetypes, especially when they assume their role as leaders in the society. Idris’ vision of theatre, which is informed by indigenous popular forms of Egyptian theatre, such as the shadow theatre ( khayal al-zill ) and open-air rural performances ( samir ), calls for the stage as a space for public and collective participation (21). The chapter explores such concepts in relation to the plays of El-Salamouny, El-Ramly, and El-‘Assal. Each of the next four chapters takes up individual playwrights. Chapter two continues to explore Yusuf Idris’ ideas about establishing a uniquely Egyptian theatre, and then brings the discussion back to the clown and the role of women, with some references to plays of the aforementioned playwrights. (Since both this chapter and the previous engage in Idris’ thought, one wonders why they were not integrated into one chapter.) Chapter three focuses on the role of theatre and explores representations of leadership in the plays of Abul-‘Ela El-Salamouny. Similar to Idris’ ideas, El-Salamouny integrates indigenous forms of performance and theatricalization in his plays in order to have an open dialogue with the audience (63). The plays are discussed in relation to what they present about leaders, kings, clowns and women. Chapter four explores Lenin El-Ramly’s use of comedy as “the art of cunning” to satirize the socio-political milieu. Despite El-Ramly’s slightly different stance on the use of indigenous popular forms in theatre, his use of meta-dramatic techniques also offers a space for theatricalization. As in many of his plays, El-Ramly makes use of foolishness and madness to explore authoritarianism and institutionalization versus leadership and social change. Chapter five links silence and carnivalization while discussing the plays of Fathia El-‘Assal, as representative of Egyptian women playwrights. Manucharyan opines, “She makes female characters central to the action, yet still silent and muted to start with, making them seen and heard within the silence” (158). El-‘Assal’s plays thus portray leadership, women rights and societal inequalities. The final two chapters take up the 2011 revolution and the theatre it inspired. In chapter six, “Of Times and Spaces,” the author begins by referring to the 2011 revolution and then sheds light on the realities of the revolutionary change. The chapter discusses the time and space of the discussed plays (a part that could have been integrated into the previous chapters) before moving to explore how public spaces played a role during revolutionary times. The chapter then relates the revolution to the carnivalesque and the emergence of verbatim theatre, or public spectacles that are based on lived testimonies of the revolution. Some women theatre makers also had a paramount role in producing such kind of theatre. Chapter seven, “Theatre and the Revolution,” focuses on the post-2011 plays. It explores the relationship between theatre and the 2011 revolution in relation to the plays of the younger generation of theatre makers as well as some post-revolution plays by the previously-discussed dramatists. The chapter suggests that the 2011 revolution had its impact on theatre in allowing for the emergence of new forms and new voices (213). For instance, Sondos Shabayek and team’s Tahrir Monologues presented verbatim documentary theatre that narrated testimonies of the revolution’s participants. Mahmoud Gamal Hedeny and Mohamed Gabr’s 1980 Onwards dramatized the uncertainty of Egyptian youth after the revolution. As for Magdy El-Hamzawy’s Report on Revolutionary Circumstances , it was a staged play about the role of an underprivileged Kid in supporting the revolution. To sum up, Tiran Manucharyan’s Of Kings and Clowns: Leadership in Contemporary Egyptian Theatre Since 1967 provided an encyclopedic study of Egyptian theatre from the last third of the twentieth century onto the 2011 revolution. The book is a good read both for an average reader as well as scholars and students of theatre and Arabic studies. The strength of the book lies in its survey and analysis of leadership, carnivalization, and the search for a theatrical national identity in the plays of three established playwrights, as well as three theatre makers of the younger generation. The book uses these phenomena as lenses to look at the plays El-Salamouny, El-Ramly, and El-‘Assal both individually and in relationship to one another. The book also clearly uses the ideas of Egyptian playwright Yusuf Idris as part of the theoretical literature about the discussion. It is unclear as to whether the analysis of Idris’ plays is central to the book’s arguments about these phenomena or simply helps clarify the playwright’s theoretical concepts. The book also could have benefited from using some of the topical literature in leadership studies. Overall, t he book engages both the specialized and average reader in a journey with bits and pieces of enjoyable information and analyses about Egyptian theatre and representative plays. The book closes with a profound analysis of the 2011 revolution and highlights the role Egyptian theatre performances narrated, documented, and came to terms with that event. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes References About The Author(s) Areeg Ibrahim is Professor and Chair of the Department of English Language and Literature at the Faculty of Arts in Helwan University, Cairo and was the Dean of Graduate Studies and Research at Effat University, KSA. She has published widely in both Arabic and English on Arabic and international Drama. She is the co-editor of a Routledge volume, Rewriting Narratives in Egyptian Theatre . She has also translated a number of Theatre books for the National Center for Translation. Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents An Interview with the Iraqi-born British playwright Hassan Abdulrazzak by Hadeel Abelhameed Review: GUERNICA, GAZA: VISIONS FROM THE CENTER OF THE EARTH. By Naomi Wallace and Ismail Khalidi Performance Review: The Tutor Review: OF KINGS AND CLOWNS: LEADERSHIP IN CONTEMPORARY EGYPTIAN THEATRE SINCE 1967 By Tiran Manucharyan. Review: PLAYS OF ARABIC HERITAGE. By Hannah Khalil Previous Next Attribution: Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 19 Spring 2026 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Gen Z Theatre from Turkey Taps into Repertoires of Millennial Resistance: A Comparison of the Short Festival Plays 'Helezoni' and 'Orange' By Deniz Başar Published: May 11, 2026 Download Article as PDF Arab Stages ISSN: 2376-1148 Vol. 19 (Spring 2026), pp. 27-51 Gen Z Theatre from Turkey Taps into Repertoires of Millennial Resistance: A Comparison of the Short Festival Plays Helezoni and Orange Deniz Başar Abstract : This article traces the changes to the alternative theatre field in Turkey since the 2013 Gezi Park Resistance until today, documenting the reasons for and outcomes of the erosion of that field due to growing authoritarian neoliberalism. Through auto-ethnography, among other methods, the writer tries to meditate rhizomatically on the relationship between alternative theatre in Turkey and repertoires of resistance embodied in 2013, and re-embodied in protests triggered by the illegal imprisonment of elected İstanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu on 19th of March 2025. Tracing the lineage of the 19th of March protests, a Gen Z-led movement, back to the millennial-led movement of Gezi, the article investigates the living heritages of the alternative theatre field in Gen Z theatre, which persist despite the strategic damage to the field which took place through the past decade. Arguing that these re-embodied, ever-growing repertoires of resistance are best archived in their sensibility by young people’s theatre works, the writer shares her insights into two short plays from 2025: Helezoni and Orange . Both plays were made by ensembles of emerging theatre practitioners, who were pushed into working in 2020s neoliberal spaces, due to the strategic and authoritarian erosion of the 2010s’ alternative theatre field, and both plays challenge the neoliberal authoritarianism policing their lives and censoring their work, in ways legible to people who have embodied knowledge of the local repertoires of resistance . Keywords : repertoires of resistance, Gezi Park Resistance, 19th of March 2025 protests in Turkey, alternative theatre, Gen Z theatre, queer theatre A Personal Introspection, in the Form of a Literature Review I have been teaching in various theatre conservatories in İstanbul, such as Bahçeşehir University and Maltepe University, as contract faculty, and as part of independent theatre workshops, such as Performance Ecologies , since 2022. Since 19 March 2025, I have encountered most of my students, and some of my own university professors from my BA degree in Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University’s (MSFAU) Urban and Regional Planning Department, through the on-going protests. I feel unnamable things in my chest when I think about the fact that I was my students’ age when the Gezi Park Protests [1] happened in 2013, as I was writing my MA thesis on the alternative theatre field of İstanbul (Başar, 2014), and how that whole experience changed who I am today. A fellow theatre scholar working on the performance field of contemporary Turkey, Zeynep Uğur, notes the ways in which the alternative theatre field that emerged in the late 2000s and early 2010s provided sociological foreshadowings of the Gezi Park Protests. Uğur then traces the aftereffects of Gezi on the alternative theatre field: [T]he Gezi movement can be traced back to the alternative theatre practice in Istanbul which was already in existence prior to the protests claiming autonomous spaces in the city for artistic creation and sociability. In other words, it provides an alternative history to analyse the sociopolitical transformation of citizens claiming their ownership in the city. Furthermore, alternative theatres become spaces of political resistance in the aftermath of Gezi (Uğur, 2022, 122). The logic of cause and effect is unapologetically ouroboros in contemporary Turkey. Gezi transformed my personal relationship to the city and independent theatres too, as a sense of urgency sneaked into all of my daily practices. The “here and now” of a revolutionary moment redefined the “here and now” of performance for me within my body as a “performing remains” (Schneider, 2011). It was the end of my first year in my master’s degree when Gezi happened, and I remember many things about June 2013 along with how I—miraculously—managed to write my graduate papers in between regularly being tear gassed in Taksim. Starting from late 2011 I was captivated by the alternative theatre scene which was introduced to me by a crush who was working as a volunteer dramaturg in this habitat. As life goes, this crush led to the other—the much, much bigger one—which redefined my life. I took it onto myself to make sure the world knew about it. I agree with Uğur’s reading above: alternative theatre—as a field—was a foreshadowing of Gezi (it was indeed one of the many [2] ). I underestimated the impacts of taking part in this kind of resistance, as many young people in their 20s do, but it caught up to me gradually: with immense waves of migraine and body pain (see Başar, 2022 for an academic reflection; [3] see Başar, 2025 for an artistic reflection), and in forms of chronic workaholism as I attempted to document, academically and artistically, what was happening (see Meerzon, 2024; and Ülgen, 2024 for semi-academic meditations on my artistic outputs). I wrote my MA thesis in Boğaziçi University (BU) between 2012 and 2014, a personal turning point in my career that made me the social scientist that I am today, if not the artist (for that, the real nod goes to MSFAU). BU, a historical, prestigious, landmark university, has been under heavy attack by the AKP government since 2021 (see Tekay, 2022; and, Altuğ et al., 2025), the year that I returned to Turkey to do my postdoc in BU through an FRQSC scholarship. My postdoctoral supervisor Emine Fişek was forced into quitting her tenure job after a long fight with AKP-enforced rectorate around the time my funding ended in 2023.[4] I produce most of my academic work in English, about the political performances and performativities of Turkey in the AKP era. I give into the colonial hegemony of Anglophone academia as strategic choice: I need other ESL scholars like me to learn about what has been happening here. [5] Yet I struggle about where to begin. How can I make the connections that are obvious for us—insiders—visible to outsiders? Here is my attempt. What Came Before and After 19 March 2025 On 19 March 2025, the elected mayor of İstanbul, Ekrem İmamoğlu, was taken from his home for multiple alleged crimes, including “threatening and targeting persons involved in anti-terrorism activities” (Tecimer, 2025). A wave of nationwide protests started in the subsequent months, as more and more elected mayors were taken from their homes across Turkey for belonging to opposition parties against the 23-year rule of the AKP and Prime-Minister-turned-into-President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The preview of this authoritarianism was particularly tested in the 2019 elections, when İmamoğlu became mayor for the first time (see Felix, 2019; and Demiralp & Balta, 2021). Surely this episode of the history of Turkey will be written in detail in the near future, and after less than a year, the first academic articles are already circulating. Here is a quote from one: When he was detained on March 19 (he would be formally arrested a few days later), İmamoğlu was the presidential frontrunner of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), which leads the political opposition to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. While the next presidential election is not for another three years, İmamoğlu had been leading Erdoğan in opinion surveys. Now the 55-year-old mayor sits behind bars, facing the possibility of a long prison term (Esen and Gümüşçü, 2025, 106). As I revised this article at the end of 2025, citizens of Turkey were updated on this infamous case by learning through various media outlets that the “prosecutor seeks 2,352-year jail term for Istanbul's mayor” (Tuncer and Blackburn, 11 November 2025). Just as the timing gap between journalism and academic response has rapidly decreased in contemporary Turkey, the timing between journalism and artistic response has shortened too. Perhaps this is because many intellectuals of the country, artists, journalists, and academics, collectively feel the responsibility (and burden) of documenting what has happened, increasingly and overwhelmingly, over the past two decades. We don’t have the time to digest, and we almost always have to respond urgently. Perhaps this should be kept in mind as one reads this piece too, that Zeitgeist in contemporary Turkey is of urgency and urgency only. Then how does this Zeitgeist inform our lives? It means that hundreds of thousands of people live in a constant state of being ready for mobilization. As generative modes of activism have been directly attacked by the government since the early 2010s, and as they have been eroded through the daily reality of social and economic crisis of the early 2020s, our mode of action today is becoming more reactive. Like a fraudulent chess game, when the government makes a move, the people counter-move, en masse in at least the hundreds of thousands, and face the consequences. As Amnesty International reported on the 19 March protests: Following the CHP rallies, law enforcement officials used unnecessary and excessive force to disperse the crowds and according to the authorities, detained 1879 people, either at the location of the protests or from their homes, between 19-26 March across the country. By the end of March, over 300 people—mainly university students from different provinces including Istanbul, Ankara and İzmir—were remanded in pre-trial detention while hundreds of others were subjected to judicial control measures, including house arrest, foreign travel bans and reporting requirements. In Istanbul, seven journalists covering the protests in Saraçhane Square were detained in raids of their homes on 24 March (Amnesty International, 2025, 1). In the days that followed 19 March, many lecturers and professors in the university where I now work were left helpless as their students were detained without any legal procedure. We reorganized, pushed the authorities to start the legal process, tried to stay in solidarity, of course. Yet the burnout remained. Amnesty International documented several instances of unlawful use of force by law enforcement officials against peaceful demonstrators between 19 and 26 March, including beating, kicking and dragging protesters on the ground and the unlawful use of water cannon, pepper spray, tear gas, kinetic impact projectiles, often at close range directly targeting individuals at the head and upper body that led to numerous injuries and hospitalizations. All the information collected was assessed in accordance with international standards and the pertinent legal obligations the Turkish state has under the treaties it is a party to (Amnesty International, 2025, 2). Perhaps it was the morning of 21 March when a friend, who is an expert Ottoman historian, came to our shared office and cried her heart out as some of her students were detained and the legal support hadn’t caught up yet. What does this do to you, really? To people who are dissidents but also mothers, fathers, friends, teachers, Ottoman historians, and theatre artists. What does it actually do to your nervous system, to your dreams, to your understanding of what it means to be alive? My focus is very rhizomatic these days, and it is not out of choice. I regularly google how long Salazar ruled Portugal (36 years), Franco ruled Spain (36 years), Mussolini ruled Italy (22 years), Pinochet ruled Chile (17 years). I google how many years have passed since the so-called Islamic Revolution in Iran (47 years). I do statistics. I want to find a logical future projection as an academic. We call fortune telling “statistics” in academia. Fast Forward to June 2025 I get two invitations from my former students, current colleagues, to attend two different short play festivals. One is DasDas Theatre’s, which took place between 12-15 June (Image 1); and the other is Zorlu PSM Studio Shorts Festival, 14-15 June (Image 2), which is the final result of a seven-month long residency for young playwrights and directors. DasDas is a multi-functional venue with multiple black box performance spaces created by a group of well-established stage artists (actors and musicians), running since 2017 in the Metropol İstanbul shopping mall, aiming to cultivate new audiences within a particular upper-middle class. Zorlu PSM, designed as the first “performance center” of Turkey, is located in a luxury shopping mall, Zorlu Center, which was designed by starchitect Emre Arolat and opened in 2013. It was built through well-documented labor abuse [6] and the direct support of the government, which allowed the illegal building of the colossal shopping mall in the center of one of the busiest districts of İstanbul. Image 1: Memory ticket, DasDas Shorts Festival. 12-15 June 2025. Image 2: Instagram post , PSM Studio Shorts End-of-Year Performances. 14-15 June 2025. The structures of the two festivals are quite different: DasDas invites theatre students and new graduates living in İstanbul to showcase their new experimental and devised works, whereas Zorlu PSM Studio selects artistic interns in the beginning of an academic year and works separately with directors and writers to make meaningful artistic pairs who create a series of short plays at the end of the year. On 14 June 2025, at 9:15pm, I am at DasDas to watch Helezoni (Image 3) , a short play by new graduates and current students of Bahçeşehir Conservatory, having been invited by my former student Seray Üstündağ; and on 15 June 2025, at 8:30 pm, I am at Zorlu PSM to watch Orange (Image 4) , invited by the playwright, Baroj Nejdet Babat, whom I met through the Performance Ecologies project. I want to talk about these two pieces together because they are both created by theatre artists in their early 20s living and working in Turkey, and struggling to form their artistic voice in an atmosphere that is becoming more and more dreadfully oppressive and monopolized with each passing day. Image 3: Helezoni (poster) Project Design and Performance: Buse İlker, Seray Üstündağ, Yağmur Başak Text: Collective Text Supervision: Doruk Öztürk, Diyar Çiler Assistant Director: Diyar Çiler Sound Design: Buğra Nayir Lights: Alp Özer Video Design: Eray Devrenk Poster Design: Doğa Erdağ Date & Time: 14 June 2025, 9:15 pm Place: DasDas Stage Image 4: Orange (poster) Playwright: Baroj Nejdet Babat Director: Yasemin Kır Producer: Riyana Tufanova & Ekinsu Köse Assistant Director: Teo Chapdelaine Assistant Producer: Orçun Ertaman Performers: İpek Sobutay, Mizgîn Özel, Tuğba Sorgun, Aylin Çelikçi, Begüm Önerler, Merve Bayus, Nezahat Arkun Stage Design (SD): Cem Yılmazer, Yasemin Kır SD Realization: Zekeriya Ece, Riyana Tufanova Costume Supervisor: Hilal Polat Costume Design & Realization: Riyana Tufanova Light Design & Application: Güray Doğru Sound Design: Aylin Çelikçi, Begüm Önerler, Merve Bayus, Nezahat Arkun Poster Design: Can Akşit Date & Time: 15 June, 2025, 8:30 pm Place: Zorlu PSM These shows took place almost back to back, in two completely different parts of İstanbul, yet both inside luxurious shopping malls. I remember how in early 2010s my generation was proud of the bohemian nature of found spaces being turned into little black box stages in Beyoğlu [7] . In a palimpsest, I quote my (earlier) self: A significant episode in the contemporary theatre scene of Turkey began around 2008 (Başar 2014), when a generation of emerging young artists started renting small flats around the Beyoğlu district of İstanbul, which is known to be one of the most cosmopolitan, historical, and, possibly, the liveliest part of the city. These artists were locked out of institutional theatre settings because of the lack of formal theatre education (most of them were trained in universities’ theatre clubs while studying other things) or because of their ideological differences with the theatre institutions (Başar 2014, 152). In Beyoğlu, they began to create ensembles and write in the small black-box stages that they collectively made together. Only on these alternative stages and through their new plays, a variety of characters from contemporary Turkey (such as Kurds, LGBTI characters, and urban women wearing headcloths) started to appear on stage. This was a breath of fresh air in the theatre field of Turkey, circumventing the Leviathan-like bureaucracy of state theatres and municipality theatres, and the cheap populism of commercial comedy theatres and other private establishment theatres (Başar, 2021, 196). I remember both the vibe and the hype: Many of us were in our 20s or early 30s, some of us were emerging theatre professionals, some were either bachelors or graduate students in the diverse academic ecosystem of İstanbul (before the brutal attacks on academia after 2016, which aimed and partially succeeded in creating a monoculture [8] ), and there was a smell in the air that blended theatre and activism, and in return redefined both of these categories as immediate life itself. Yet I don’t mean to romanticize this era; it was a precarious heterotopia, just as Gezi was. But heterotopias, “[a]s a sort of simultaneously mythic and real contestation[s] of the space[s] in which we live” (Foucault, 1986, 24), die hard. In parallel to my above reading of the era, Zeynep Uğur comments on the same phenomenon as follows: In the early 2000s, the alternative theatre scene gained a new momentum with the increasing number of theatres spreading around Taksim. The founders of these theatres are commonly inspired by the avant-garde of the 1990s; however, their own personal trajectories are different. Almost all of them take their roots from university theatre clubs instead of conservatoires or theatre departments. Thus, socialisation emerges as a mobilising motor. To ‘create their own space to be able to make theatre as they want’ is an often-repeated phrase in the interviews that I conducted in Istanbul. A young audience profile, mostly college students, adhered to this emerging theatre (Uğur, 2022, 137). We used to look down upon the idea of moving into shopping malls (also see Aydoğan and Ayhan, 2026, to trace the sentiment). In a little more than ten years so much has changed, with so much trauma. [9] The bohemian and underground theatre infrastructure—built outside of state-governed institutional theatres and profit-oriented commercial theatres [10] —to which many people contributed with sweat, blood and tears has (mostly) collapsed under a regime that has become increasingly authoritarian. This regime has been very strategically targeting Beyoğlu, particularly since 2011, but the scale and insidiousness of the attacks has multiplied exponentially every year, as Asu Aksoy and Kevin Robbins, among others, point out: At first glance, the Beyoğlu Cultural Route (Beyoğlu Kültür Yolu Projesi) [a large-scale re-development project launched in 2020 by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism] may appear to be a good investment of resources, with the potential to enhance the cultural life of the city. […] What it represents is, in fact, an intervention on the part of the central state, intended to impose its own ideological priorities, both economic and political, on the cultural life of the city (Aksoy and Robbins 2023, 40). Meanwhile, hand-in-hand with the current regime, large corporations such as Zorlu Holding have started to invest in the performing arts in İstanbul, and as a miniscule compensation for this exploitative capitalist shift, these new organizations started creating spaces (extremely limited ones) for up-and-coming theatre artists. Yet, quite obviously, these spaces fail to make up for loss of the grassroots independent theatre scene of 2010s. That’s why I am burdened by history at age 36, when I come to see the shows of my former students in their early 20s; yet I also feel a complicated brew of emotions, knowing what they might be feeling since 19 March 2025. My internal compass oscillates between the joy of solidarity and mourning of the loss of innocence. But being in one’s early 20s means having hope, because that age group does not yet have the luxury of the 30s and 40s for being comfortably hopeless. A Brief Cross-Tracing of Repertoires of Dissident Performance and Protest Culture The two works that I watched back-to-back are stylistically and dramaturgically very different from each other. Helezoni , which is a made-up word based on the Turkish appropriation (‘helezon’) of the Latin word helix , is a devised work, fragmented in a 1990s-postmodern fashion, comfortable with being misunderstood. Orange , on the other hand, is much more structured: there is a text, there is a story, and there is even an invented folk tradition and ritual embedded into the performance. I go through my private mind-library of rhizomatic references, to see where I attach these performances in the global network of everything I know about theatre. Helezoni —interestingly, despite having an American gloss to it (à la Wooster Group and Tim Burton)—strictly lands in the German, especially Berlin-based, realm of theatre making: I reach and grab Robert Wilson’s Berliner Ensemble productions, Rimini Protokoll’s fragmented dramaturgies, and of course Bertolt Brecht’s pre-Second World War take on cabaret. In the realm of Turkish theatre, the only distant relative I can think of for Helezoni is Şahika Tekand’s body of works, which are also rooted in 1990s İstanbul (see Dinçel, 2023). A day later, Orange takes me to references from across Europe, and strictly avoids any feel of Americanness. I grab Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2009 movie Dogtooth , the 2023 book She That Lay Silent-Like Upon Our Shore by Brendan Casey, and–of course–García Lorca's last play before his assassination in 1936 during Spanish Civil War, The House of Bernarda Alba . The world that playwright Baroj Nejdet Babat and director Yasemin Kır created also reminds me of the aura of early 2010s in İstanbul; I am reminded of Şamil Yılmaz and Pelin Temur’s plays from Mek’an Sahne (see Onat, 2025) and M î rza Met î n and Berfin Zenderlioğlu’s works, performed in Kurdish with Turkish surtitles, from Şermola Performans. [11] Both pieces want to speak to the world they live in, and to the state of contemporary Turkey, but where Helezoni uses metatheatricality through 1990s-postmodern fragmentation to do that, Orange goes back to ritual to seek metatheatricality as a form of the sublime. These are both strategic dramaturgical choices to tap into the repertoires of resistance of Gezi, which was actually both a palimpsest and a transcendence of all previous left-wing resistance movements in Turkey (see Verstraete, 2019 & Başar, 2022); which is why the main title of this piece is “Gen Z Theatre from Turkey Taps into Repertoires of Millennial Resistance.” Helezoni Helezoni has four parts to it, strictly separated by a male voiceover that introduces the numbered sections, which are loosely connected. All sections are devised by the woman-majority team, which includes many queer collaborators, and the only prior information the audiences have about the show is that it is devised from the premise “fascism everywhere”. The first section is a Grimm-style tale, written mostly by Diyar Çiler, within the parameters the group decided on, a tale about a group of animals living happily in a forest, accompanied by AI-generated images which straightforwardly aim to tickle the cognitive response of the uncanny valley (reminding me of Rimini Protocol). The wording of the tale is tethered to the taboo themes of the repertoires of resistance of Gezi, which was partially reenacted in the 19 March protests. [12] For instance, the tale uses ‘pepper’ to stand in for ‘tear gas’, and the phrase ‘factory of emotions that produce hope,’ which can mean both ‘state propaganda’ or ‘revolution’, almost-alluding to many things, almost gesturing towards a creeping danger, but all in a purposefully ambiguous manner. As the tale goes on, stage creatures in the form of acting bodies start to occupy the stage, filling it with mundane acts of prepping for the performance, such as putting tape down to mark the exact boundaries of where the performance will take place. Their physicalities range from fairies to witches. Defining the boundaries is important, to be able to cross over them later. The second section starts with three Tim Burton-esque (or Robert Wilson’s take on the Faustian theme) stage creatures taking over the stage fully (Image 5), after listening to the same tale with us, while working and commenting on the tale, their sudden and explosive laughter echoing around us. These stage creatures move in a stylized manner and have choreographed movements and fragments of speech that they throw at us. In the darkness we hear a witchy voice yelling “catastrophe! nein!” which marks the beginning of this second part while introducing the linguistic heteroglossia of the piece. Adding German into the mix perhaps alludes to both the Brechtian aesthetic and the horrors of fascist propaganda’s aesthetic (such as Triumph des Willens [1935]). The vocabulary they break apart is embedded in our own political moment, and their gestures showcase a repertoire of the streets, of the military training that we all received as part of our compulsory physical education classes in Turkey, and of the acting education they all received, creating counterpoints. Then they locate us in an urban square through their scattered descriptions. Is it Taksim Square where the 2013 protests happened, located next to Gezi Park? Or is it Saraçhane Square where 29 March 2025 protests took place [13] ? Is it Tiananmen Square in 1989? Is it Tahrir Square in 2011? Is it Vali Asr Square in 2022? Where is this square? Why are they there? And more importantly, why are we here, with them? But we don’t stay in the square: a video is projected alluding to the now aged practice of zapping amongst TV channels, which always censor what happens in squares.[14] The TV glitches, and a quote from early 2010s leftist band Bandista intervenes with the commercials. After this oscillation between the lived reality of urban squares and censored TV, the third section reaches towards the internet as a public sphere, immediately interconnected to urban squares, which speak a different tune than the commercials on TV (because “the revolution will not be televised,” as Gil Scott-Heron once said). Image 5: Helezoni. Photo credit: Volkan Aykaç. The third section opens with video which showcases this realm of the internet, which is completely different from the AI-generated video in the first section. This video was made by Film and TV undergraduate student Eray Devrenk, with clear care and passion. It was interesting for me because this video, less than four minutes long, pulled out so much of my personal history—the burden of history I tried to unpack in the beginning of this article—along with other things that I didn’t know yet, but immediately recognized their meaning through the overlap of images. Banned LGBTQ pride walks in İstanbul, highlighted with police clashes; conservative Islamic ‘family’ protests, backed by the government, against LGBTQ pride walks; the suicide videos from 2014 and 2015 of kind individuals (like Mehmet Pişkin—see Başar, 2022, 181, n.10) and trans activists like Mehtap Zengin, who just said that they could not take it any longer; the 2016 military coup attempt which paved the way for the three-year-long state of emergency and legitimi-zation of human rights abuses; wild-fires; wars; more wars; the 6 February 2023 earthquake that turned into a massacre, due to corrupt planning decisions; world leaders lecturing cameras on their borders, their wars, their hierarchy of people, and all the things that I can’t, and perhaps don’t want to, remember, to be able to stay functional. The video ends with a pop culture twist, a short scene from The Hunger Games , where Jennifer Lawrence yells at us “if we burn, you burn with us.” The actors don and doff a variety of accessories—ropes, hair pins, etc.—at the front of the stage as this video rolls behind them (Image 6). We don’t hear most of the sounds of these videos, à la Thomas Ostermeier; a solo drummer playing from a recording keeps the beat of the performance going. The final section makes yet another metatheatrical move. The actors change their acting style completely: they are actors now in a rehearsal room, they play, and then they wash their makeup in front of the audience (Image 7), and conclude with movement choreography. Image 6: Helezoni. Photo credit: Volkan Aykaç. The stylistic break comes when Seray Üstündağ comments on the fact that her taping work in section 1 of the performance was indeed not a good job, as the tape is laid in a wavey nature. People laugh here; the gesture of this stylistic shift is a powerful one. Seray Üstündağ untapes the stage. Now the entire stage, even perhaps the back stage, even perhaps the foyer, and beyond the shopping mall, the streets and the squares, belongs to the actors. They perform a series of trust falls, an act of catching each other at the exact moment of falling, which is an acting practice, and a very necessary skill in a revolutionary moment. (We have learned very well in Turkey exactly what happens when no one catches you in a trust fall.) When they wash their makeup together, almost in a ritualistic manner, it is a moment of catharsis. Yet it is also an uncanny catharsis in this postmodern show with no conclusion, no predefined faith hovering over the characters, and/or the actors. The final choreography is of exhausted bodies, going through choreographed stage actions as they fall apart, and fall down in a lump on the ground, to—maybe—rest a little. In the talkback session after the performance of Helezoni , the group talks about what made them devise this play. I am humbled by the experiences they have survived in their young age, and especially shaken by learning that assistant director Diyar Çiler is a survivor of the 6 February 2023 earthquake. What they choose to tell, I am here to listen. I also think about how the name of the play gestures towards the psychedelic nature of living in this global Zeitgeist, how violence is so close, but how much we are alienated from the impact of it unless it hits us directly and immediately. Orange The day after Helezoni , Orange tells another story of our times. Playwright Baroj Nejdet Babat is a very young queer and Kurdish artist from Şırnak [15] , who received their BA in Munzur University, and was introduced to the Performance Ecologies team by our colleague Asst. Prof. Duygu Çelik. [16] They have a soft voice and gentle manner always accompanied with a kind smile, which might at first sight hide their deep theoretical knowledge on gender and queer studies, exceeding many of the theatre scholars I encounter regularly. Director Yasemin Kır does justice to this nuanced gem of a text, with all the performative areas she explores with the design team and performers. Image 7: Orange. Photo credit: Cem Gültepe. Orange takes place in an imaginary village that only grows oranges and nothing else (Image 8). No other fruits are allowed to grow in the village, and villagers (especially women and children, who are not allowed to leave) can only eat oranges. Only adult men are allowed to leave the village, and when they are gone, the village is ruled by a deep-cutting matriarchy that leans on a much deeper-cutting patriarchy. Mothers are the gatekeepers of the community; they indoctrinate their children about the importance and singularity of oranges, and tell fearful stories of wild boars that roam around the village [17] to make sure the children won’t go out, seeking a different fruit—or a different life (Image 9). The ecologically problematic idea of monocultures—i.e. growing a single crop in a large piece of land—as represented through the intense singularity of oranges in the play, also serves as a metaphor for fascism. Image 8: Orange . Photo credit: Cem Gültepe. Babat’s text is unapologetic when it comes to using ancient tools of theatre, such as the chorus. In Orange , the chorus is composed of the village women, who give life to land, who protect, who harvest oranges, but who also oppress through their gazes and exert intense control through shaming, gossip, and their collective power to break the will of young people. In this village of oranges lives a young girl whose name is Cennet (a real name in Turkish which means both Paradise and Heaven ). Cennet wants to break free from both the monoculture of oranges and from her oppressive mother, who forbids her from ever being curious about the outside world. This mother figure seems to have walked in from the world of Gabriel Garcia Lorca. She casts heavy curses upon women who dare to disobey the monoculture, and tells gruesome stories about what has happened to them outside the village. Supposedly, the wild boars that roam right outside the limits of the village do not necessarily kill young women; rather, the violence described by the mother sounds much more like kidnapping, rape, and forced marriage. The choice of animal is loaded too: pigs are haram /sinful in Islam. The mother acts like the head of the chorus in Greek tragedies, and the chorus sings with her, collectively cursing the unnamed and mythologized women who disobeyed once upon a time, and were doomed to unspeakable fates. All the while, their songs cherish the monoculture of oranges. Image 9: Merve offers Cennet an apple. Orange . Photo credit: Cem Gültepe. Just when Cennet is toying in her loneliness with the idea of escaping, an outsider comes, another young girl, from a neighboring village which only grows apples. This new friend, Merve, secretly sneaked out to take a long walk in the forest and discovered Cennet’s village of oranges, and she is curious to taste this new fruit. Merve starts visiting Cennet secretly and regularly after that first contact, and their friendship knowingly hints to the audience that a homoerotic romance develops between them. (I wonder how much more openly queer this performance could have been if we had been in an independent space, outside of this shopping mall, deep into Beyoğlu, surrounded by the dirty walls of found spaces turned into black box theatres, surrounded with will power and solidarity, maybe a decade earlier. Sure, the performance might have been less clean, less polished, but it would have not pulled back from naming things, as they should be named in honesty.) Merve also tells Cennet that the boars in the forest are not dangerous—it is the humans that are dangerous, and that she is particularly scared of orange-trading men. (Isn’t it always one of the most difficult confrontations to realize your community can be the big bad wolf in someone else’s story, and that they might be right to see you that way?) When Merve offers Cennet an apple (Image 10), she finally eats it—which is a direct allusion to the apple of Adam and Eve, which according to the three major monotheistic religions leads to the famous couple’s exile from heaven. Image 10: Orange . Photo credit: Cem Gültepe. From here on, there is a dramatic twist, one that is welcomed by the foreshadowing of the allusion of Adam and Eve’s apple—a twist that only early twentysomething artists can do, who are not beaten down by the dramatic structure, the dramatic canon and the conventional beauties of tragedy. After eating the apple Cennet goes back to her mother and village women and confronts them about their oppression, about their chosen and insistent ignorance, about their own evil (Image 11). She sings the prayer of the apple that she learned from Merve as she does this, and the chorus along with the mother try to silence her with the prayer of the orange village. Cennet sings longer and louder than them, and eventually leaves the monoculture of oranges with Merve, hand in hand, to find other fruits, together. Conclusion: An Interdisciplinary Introspection What does it mean to be in your early twenties in Turkey today? How does it differ from my early twenties? What is lost, what is gained in time? Below I quote my younger self, from a point in time when I was doing a first round of calculations for answering this question. I agree with Uruguayan political scientist Paulo Ravecca who claims that ‘situating disciplinary introspection through personal introspection may open fruitful paths to interrogate and unravel knots of experience made of knowledge, power, and politics’ (2019: 166). My own history is entangled in the history of contemporary Turkey: I was one of the protestors in the Gezi Park during June 2013 like many people I know, and the experience influenced—and perhaps shaped—me in multiple ways (Başar, 2022, 192). 19 March 2025 and its aftermath has shaped this generation of theatre makers. Many gestures of dissidence remained little-changed, yet meanings of these gestures shifted considerably over a dozen years: while we covered our faces in Gezi primarily to protect ourselves from the tear gas, this generation went to Saraçhane covering their faces primarily to protect themselves from government profiling. GenZ’s experience is different from ours as they try to fit their artistic and political perspective into a corporate institutional system that we managed to escape to some extent fifteen years ago, but that ecosystem is gone (for now). Today, answers escape me. Yet I stay with the questions as they grow and multiply like rhizomes, and wait for the right time, alongside my young colleagues. Because who knows? Formulating the right question could be the right answer to our times, by triggering the tsunami wave of a paradigm shift. Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes Endnotes [1] For an overview of and commentary on the 2013 Gezi Park protests, see Özkırımlı, 2014; David & Toktamış, 2015; Gürcan & Peker, 2015; Koç & Aksu, 2015; Yücesan-Özdemir, 2016; Hemer & Persson, 2017; Tüfekçi, 2017; Ağartan, 2024 . [2] See Yücesan-Özdemir, 2016, for a survey of other events that foreshadowed the Gezi Park protests. [3] Also see Christina Banalopoulou's discussion of the government's "suffocation policies" and "politics of asphyxiation" (2024). [4] Emine Fişek has been the Research Associate and Project Leader of ERC Project: THEAGENT - Theatre and Gentrification in the European City in Austria since 2023. See Fişek, 2026. [5] The limitedness of translations of Turkish plays into English makes it a challenge to start a larger scale discussion in Anglophone academia about the theatre field in Turkey; this has directly impacted my career trajectory, developing me as a translator and a translation editor. For a survey of Turkish play anthologies available in English, see Ergil and Yanıkkaya, 2026. [6] Curiously, these Zorlu Center cases, well known to the Turkish-speaking public, are not translated into English. Let me offer a translation of a short news clipping from 2012: “At the Zorlu Center construction site, which has turned the Beşiktaş district into a massive construction zone, a tragic worker death occurred. According to eyewitness accounts, the worker fell from the 22nd floor of the building and was killed. The Zorlu Center, which was sealed off when the construction reached the 4th floor, and then obtained a permit in one day without the approval of the Beşiktaş Municipal Council and the Chamber of Architects, continues to be the scene of tragic events. […] It is unknown whether Zorlu Center officials obtained a work permit for working on Sunday [the day that worker’s death happened]. The Beşiktaş Municipality is also maintaining silence on the matter. According to claims by local shopkeepers and eyewitnesses, this tragic death is not the first at Zorlu Center. Local residents claim that there have been fatal work accidents at Zorlu Center before, but all of them were kept from the press.” Translated from the source: "Zorlu Center'da işçi ölümü!" [Worker death in Zorlu Center], Beşiktaş Postası, last modified May 14, 2012. For readers who know Turkish, see İş Cinayetleri Almanağı 2012 [Almanac of Worker Murders], BirUmut Yayıncılık, 2013. This book and its serials from the same activist publication house will allow readers to see what a large-scale issue this is in the construction-dependent economic development model of the AKP, where workers are seen as disposable, work safety measurements are consistently lacking, and the construction companies where work accidents repeatedly happen face no disincentivizing punishments. [7] See Şeyben, 2021 (especially “ Section III: Decentralized Theatres”) for a good discussion of the relationship between authoritarian urban transformation and alternative theatres. Also see Fişek 2018 on the representation of gentrification and capitalist investment on the stages of alternative theatres during the 2010s. Ironically, the venue discussed in this 2018 article, GalataPerform, was closed during the pandemic, though the ensemble continues to work. Additionally, see Fişek et al., 2026. [8] See Akıncı, 2018 to follow the reasoning of this claim. [9] For more on this claim, see Ejder, 2019. [10] See Şeyben, 2021 (especially “ Section II: Subsidized Theatres” ) to understand the impact of AKP on institutional theatres of Turkey. Also see Adak and Altınay, 2018, to have a sense of the historical cultivation of the current day theatre ecosystem of Turkey. [11] See Baş, 2015; Akar, 2018; Metîn, 2019; and Şeyben, 2021 (especially “ Chapter 6: Battle on Many Fronts: The Case of Şermola Performans ”) for an analysis of the Kurdish theatre scene in İstanbul during the 2010s. Beyond these works, to understand the general state of Kurdish theatre in Turkey, see the body of publications of Duygu Çelik, which are listed below. [12] It is telling that many of the banners in 19 March protests referred to Gezi. Here are some examples: “Biz Çapulcular Yeni Gelmedik Geri Geldik” [“Us Chapullers Didn’t Arrive Just Now, We Only Came Back”], “Gezi_2.0”, “Çapulcuların Çocukları Büyüdü” [“The Children of Chapullers Grew Up”] (Peker, 2025). “Chapullers” ( Çapulcular ) means “looters” in Turkish. Initially a pejorative that the government applied to the Gezi protesters, it was later adopted by protesters as a badge of honor. [13] See Akgöz, 2026 for a history of protests at Saraçhane Square. [14] Such as the infamous penguin documentary, broadcast on CNN Turk during the first days of the Gezi Protests, while people were being brutalized by the police almost immediately outside CNN Turk’s own corporate building (David & Toktamış, 2015, 19). [15] Another point of introspection: The main character (Toprak) of my first award winning play in Turkey, The Itch , was also from Şırnak. See Başar, 2024 for more on this play; and see Onat and Başar, 2025 for more insight on the nature the contest. [16] See works cited for a list of Duygu Çelik’s works on Kurdish theatre in English and Turkish. [17] The imagery here is reminiscent of the 2019 Turkish movie, Sibel, and its use of the wolf mythologies of the Black Sea region. ___________________ Works Cited Adak, Hülya, and Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay. "Introduction: Theatre and Politics in Turkey and Its Diasporas." In "Performing Turkishness," special issue, Comparative Drama 52, no. 3/4 (2018): 185-214. Ağartan, Kaan. Gezi: The Making of a New Political Community in Turkey . Edinburgh University Press, 2024. Akar, Bilal. "Transformation of the Kurdish Theater Field in Turkey between 1991 and 2017." Master's thesis, Koç University, 2018. Akgöz, Görkem. "LMT #142 : Saraçhane Square, Istanbul, Turkey." Laboratório de Estudos de História dos Mundos do Trabalho. Last modified March 5, 2026. Accessed March 7, 2026. https://lehmt.org/lmt-142-praca-sarachane-istambul-turquia-gorkem-akgoz/ . For the English version of the article: https://www.academia.edu/164967991/Saraçhane_Square_Istanbul_Turkey Akıncı, Özgül. "Performing Academia in Public Space in Turkey." Performance Research 23, no. 2 (2018): 44-48. Accessed 13 November, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2018.1464753 . Aksoy, Asu, and Kevin Robbins. "Beyoğlu in Istanbul: Whose Story is It?" In Culture in the Cities - Present and Future , edited by Franco Bianchini and Guy Saez, 40-53. İletişim Yayınları, 2023. Altuğ, Seda, Mert Arslanalp, Volkan Çidam, and Saygun Gökarıksel. "Repression and Resistance at Boğaziçi University: The Making of Counterpublic under Authoritarian Offensive." In Fragments of Repression and Resistance: A.K.P. Rule in Turkey , edited by Kumru F. Toktamış and Isabel David, 119-42. Peter Lang, 2025. Aydoğan, Kemal, and Emine Ayhan. "'Büyük PSM'lerin Önünde Garipsiyorduk'" ["We were finding ourselves weird in front of big PACs (Performance Arts Centers)"]. In "Bugün, Sahne Nedir? [What is the stage today?]," special issue, Cogito , no. 119 (2026): 139-57. Banalopoulou, Christina. "'Doesn't Every Dying Person's Last Breath Touch the Living?'" Performance Research 29, nos. 4-5 (2024): 49-55. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2024.2510855 . Baş, Elif. "The Rise of Kurdish Theatre in Istanbul." Theatre Survey 56, no. 3 (2015): 314-35. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0040557415000289 . Başar, Deniz. "Constructing A Fictional Skin Disease Pandemic as Political Allegory Based on First-Hand Experience: An Auto-Ethnography Trial on How I Wrote The Itch ." In The Routledge Companion to Performance and Medicine , edited by Gianna Bouchard and Alex Mermikides. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2024. Başar, Deniz. "Faces of a Long Unspoken Collective Trauma: Theatrical Representations of Friendship, Love, Betrayal, and Pain in the Landscape of War in Contemporary Turkey." In The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre and Race , edited by Osita Okagbue and Tiziana Morosetti, 195-217. Palgrave, 2021. Başar, Deniz. "From Repertoires of Resistance to Monuments of Absence." European Journal of Theatre and Performance 4 (June 2022): 160-97. https://doi.org/10.21827/ejtp.4.41720 . Başar, Deniz. "Kaşıntı [The Itch]." In Mitos-Boyut 6. Oyun Yazma Yarışması, 2014 . Mitos Boyut, 2015. Başar, Deniz. "Performative Publicness: Alternative Theater in Turkey After 2000s." Master's thesis, Boğaziçi University, 2014. Başar, Deniz. Tsunami . Edited by Mina Çakmak. Istanbul: Onagöre, 2025. Poetry. Çelik, Duygu. "Dengbejlik geleneği ve Türkiye'deki Kürt tiyatrosuna etkileri [Dengbêjî tradition and its effects on Kurdish theatre in Turkey]." PhD diss., İstanbul University, 2017. Çelik, Duygu. "The Impact of the Dengbêjî Tradition on Kurdish Theater in Turkey." In Kurdish Art and Identity: Verbal Art, Self-definition and Recent History , edited by Alireza Korangy and Philip G. Kreyenbroek. Walter De Gruyter, 2020. Çelik, Duygu. "Kilam as Theatre Music in Kurdish Theatre in Turkey." In Music and Sound in European Theatre: Practices, Performances, Perspectives , edited by David Roesner and Tamara Yasmin Quick. Routledge, 2025. Çelik, Duygu. "The 'Other' Karagöz: The Kurdish Qeregoz." In Race, Gender and Disability in Puppetry and Material Performance , by Laura Purcell-Gates, edited by Paulette Richards, Hazel Briar, and Alissa Mello. Routledge, 2026. Çelik, Duygu. "Otherness and Censorship in the Theatre of Turkey (1960s–70s)." In The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre Censorship , edited by Anne Etienne and Graham Saunders. Palgrave Macmillan, 2025. David, Isabel, and Kumru F. Toktamış, eds. 'Everywhere Taksim' : Sowing the Seeds for a New Turkey at Gezi . Amsterdam University Press, 2015. Demiralp, Seda, and Evren Balta. "Defeating Populists: The Case of 2019 Istanbul Elections." South European Society and Politics 26, no. 1 (2021): 1-26. https://doi.org/10.1080/13608746.2021.1923639 . Dinçel, Burç İdem. "Biomechanical Resonances in Turkey: The Working Method of Studio Oyuncuları." In The Routledge Companion to Vsevolod Meyerhold , edited by Jonathan Pitches and Stefan Aquilina. Routledge, 2023. Ejder, Eylem. "Reports from the Field: Contemporary Performance Criticism in Turkey— Critical Endeavours: Experimental Searches in Contemporary Performance Criticism in Turkey." Platform 13, no. 1 (2019): 103-15. Accessed 13 November 2025. https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/media/11708/09_eylemejder.pdf.pdf . Ergil, Başak, and Zerrin Yanıkkaya. "Towards New Perspectives on Anthologizing and Representing Turkish Theater in the Anglosphere." Middle Eastern Literatures , March 13, 2026, 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1080/1475262x.2026.2629937 . Esen, Berk, and Şebnem Gümüşçü. "How to Fight Turkey's Authoritarian Turn." Journal of Democracy 36, no. 3 (2025): 106-20. Fişek, Emine, Aurélien Bellucci, Regina Lissowska-Postaremczak, Joseph Prestwich, and Clio Unger. "Stages of Gentrification: An International Roundtable." Theatre Research International, March 4, 2026, 1-13. Accessed March 7, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1080/03078833.2026.2634146 . Fişek, Emine. "Palimpsests of Violence: Urban Dispossession and Political Theatre in Istanbul." In "Performing Turkishness," special issue, Comparative Drama 52, nos. 3-4 (2018): 349-71. https://doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2018.0015 . Fişek, Emine. "THEAGENT ÖAW." Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften [Austrian Academy of Sciences]. Accessed April 14, 2026. https://www.oeaw.ac.at/projects/theagent . Foucault, Michel. "Of Other Spaces." Trans. Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22-27. https://doi.org/10.2307/464648 . Gürcan, Efe Can, and Efe Peker. Challenging Neoliberalism at Turkey's Gezi Park: from Private Discontent to Collective Class Action . Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Hemer, Oscar, and Hans-Åke Persson, eds. In the Aftermath of Gezi: From Social Movement to Social Change? Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. İş Cinayetleri Almanağı. 2012 [Almanac of Worker Murders] . 2013 ed. BirUmut Yayıncılık, 2013. Koç, Güneş, and Harun Aksu, eds. Another Brick in the Barricade: the Gezi Resistance and Its Aftermath . Wiener Verlag für Sozialforschung, 2015. Meerzon, Yana, Art Babayants, and Deniz Başar. "Ethos of New Stockholm: A City Invented to be Staged." Critical Stages . Last modified December 2024. Accessed February 4, 2026. https://www.critical-stages.org/30/ethos-of-new-stockholm-a-city-invented-to-be-staged/ . Metîn, Mîrza. "Kurdish Resistance and the Dramaturgy of Fire." Theatre Research International 44, no. 3 (2019): 314-17. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0307883319000397 . Onat, Fatma. "Traces of a Lost Archive: Four Selected Theatre Criticisms by Fatma Onat from 2010s' İstanbul." Edited by Deniz Başar. Critical Stages . Last modified December 2025. Accessed February 4, 2026. https://www.critical-stages.org/32/traces-of-a-lost-archive-four-selected-theatre-criticisms-by-fatma-onat-from-2010s-istanbul/ . Onat, Fatma, and Deniz Başar. "In A State of Constant Migration: Conversation with Fatma Onat." Critical Stages . Last modified December 2025. Accessed 4 February 2026. https://www.critical-stages.org/32/in-a-state-of-constant-migration-conversation-with-fatma-onat/ . Onat, Fatma, Deniz Başar, and Ayşe Bayramoğlu. New Stockholm'de Sonbahar = Payîza New Stockholmê = Autumn in New Stockholm . Mitos-Boyut, 2023. Özkırımlı, Umut, ed. The Making of a Protest Movement in Turkey: #occupygezi . Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Peker, Dilara Bağcı. "Gözaltına Alınan Ekrem İmamoğlu'na Destek İçin Saraçhane'ye Akın Eden Halkın Açtığı Pankartlar" [Banners Unfurled by People Flocking to Saraçhane in Support of Ekrem İmamoğlu, Who Was Taken into Custody]. Onedio. Last modified March 19, 2025. Accessed 29 January 2026. https://onedio.com/haber/gozaltina-alinan-ekrem-imamoglu-na-destek-icin-sarachane-ye-akin-eden-halkin-actigi-pankartlar-1280979 . Ravecca, Paulo. The Politics of Political Science: Re-writing Latin American Experiences . Routledge, 2019. Schmidt, Felix. "'The aura of invincibility is gone.'" IPS. Last modified 25 June 2019. Accessed 29 January 2026. https://www.ips-journal.eu/interviews/the-aura-of-invincibility-is-gone-3562/ . Schneider, Rebecca. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment . Routledge, 2011. Şeyben, Burcu Yasemin. Struggle and Survival under Authoritarianism in Turkey: Theatre under Threat . Lexington Books, 2021. Tecimer, Cem. "The Arrest of Istanbul's Mayor is Textbook Lawfare." Verfassungsblog - On Matters Constitutional. Last modified March 28, 2025. Accessed 29 January 2026. https://verfassungsblog.de/the-arrest-of-istanbuls-mayor-is-textbook-lawfare/ . Tekay, Cihan. "#AşağıBakmayacağız ('We Will Not Look Down')." South Atlantic Quarterly 121, no. 1 (2022): 210-19. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-9561671 . Tuncer, Anıl Can, and Gavin Blackburn. "Prosecutor seeks 2,352-year jail term for Istanbul's mayor over alleged corruption." Euronews. Last modified 11 November 2025. Accessed 12 November 2025. https://www.euronews.com/2025/11/11/prosecutor-seeks-2352-year-jail-term-for-istanbuls-mayor-over-alleged-corruption . "Turkey: 'I Cannot Breathe' Allegations of torture and other ill-treatment in the context of mass protests between 19—26 March must be investigated" [Index Number: EUR 44/9471/2025]. Amnesty International. Last modified 19 June 2025. Accessed 12 November 2025. https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/eur44/9471/2025/en/ . Tüfekçi, Zeynep. Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest . Yale University Press, 2017. Uğur, Zeynep. "Reappropriation of Public Space Autonomous Space Making from Istanbul's Alternative Theatre Scene to the Gezi Movement." In "Activism and Spectatorship," ed. Pieter Verstraete and Agata Łuksza, special issue, European Journal of Theatre and Performance , no. 4 (May 2022): 114-59. Ülgen, Övgü. "'Wine & Halva:' Post-Migration and The Limits of Western Liberalism." The Theatre Times. Last modified July 26, 2024. Accessed 4 February 2026. https://thetheatretimes.com/wine-halva-post-migration-and-the-limits-of-western-liberalism/ . Verstraete, Pieter. "In Search of a New Performativity after Gezi: On Symbolic Politics and New Dramaturgies in Turkey." Theatre Research International 44, no. 3 (2019): 273-90. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0307883319000312 . Yücesan-Özdemir, Gamze, ed. The Road to Gezi: Resistance and Counter-publics in 21st Century Turkey . Red Quill Books, 2016. "Zorlu Center'da işçi ölümü!" [Worker death in Zorlu Center]. Beşiktaş Postası. Last modified 14 May 2012. Accessed 29 January 2026. https://www.besiktaspostasi.com/zorlu-centerda-isci-olumu-29556/ . References About The Author(s) Deniz Başar (PhD Concordia University ‘21) is a theatre researcher and playwright from Turkey, and a 2021-2023 FRQSC post-doctoral fellow in Boğaziçi University. She has published multiple articles on puppetry and political performativity. Her play Wine and Halva was staged in Montreal (2024) and remounted by Teesri Duniya Theatre (2026-27). Autumn in New Stockholm (2023), a play she co-wrote with Fatma Onat and Ayşe Bayramoğlu, was published in a trilingual edition (Turkish, Kurdish, and English), and a French translation was staged in Montreal in 2026. She currently works at the Foundations Development Directorate of Sabancı University. Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Reframing the Past: Situating Mesopotamian Theatrical Traditions Within a Cross‑Cultural Performance Continuum Gen Z Theatre from Turkey Taps into Repertoires of Millennial Resistance: A Comparison of the Short Festival Plays 'Helezoni' and 'Orange' Performance Review: THE CLOWN, by Mariam Basha. Directed by Kamal El Basha. El Hakawati Theatre, Jerusalem. August 28, 2025 in person, September 11, 2025 via WhatsApp video. Performance Review: DODI AND DIANA, by Kareem Fahmy. Directed by Reginald L. Douglas. Mosaic Theater, DC. September 23, 2025. Performance Review: ALMONDS BLOSSOM IN DEIR YASSIN, by Hanna Eady. Directed by Hanna Eady. Cherry Street Village, Seattle. October 25, 2025. Book Review: Samer Al-Saber. A Movement’s Promise: The Making of Contemporary Palestinian Theatre (Stanford University Press, 2025). Pp. 328. Hardcover, Paperback, E-book. Previous Next Attribution: Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch In-I In Motion by Juliette Binoche at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2026. In 2007, French actress Juliette Binoche and British dancer-choreographer Akram Khan stepped away from their established careers to embark on a bold artistic experiment. Over six months, they co-created In-I, an intense, boundary-pushing performance they would go on to stage 100 times around the world. Today, Juliette Binoche returns to that intimate journey. From the first spark of inspiration to the final applause, she retraces the emotional and creative arc of a singular collaboration. Drawing on dozens of hours of previously unseen footage, she reflects, as a filmmaker, on the nature of artistic creation, the vulnerability and exhilaration of taking risks, and the personal transformation they demand. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents In-I In Motion Juliette Binoche At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2026 Screening Information This film will be screened on May 30, at 5:45 PM, at The Segal Theatre Center RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. Country France Language French, English Running Time 125 minutes Year of Release 2026 About The Film In 2007, French actress Juliette Binoche and British dancer-choreographer Akram Khan stepped away from their established careers to embark on a bold artistic experiment. Over six months, they co-created In-I, an intense, boundary-pushing performance they would go on to stage 100 times around the world. Today, Juliette Binoche returns to that intimate journey. From the first spark of inspiration to the final applause, she retraces the emotional and creative arc of a singular collaboration. Drawing on dozens of hours of previously unseen footage, she reflects, as a filmmaker, on the nature of artistic creation, the vulnerability and exhilaration of taking risks, and the personal transformation they demand. CAST Juliette Binoche Actress Akram Kahn Dancer CREW A film by Juliette Binoche Cinematography Marion Stalens Production Sébastien de Fonseca Music Philip Sheppard Editing Sophie Brunet, Sophie Mandonnet Sound Mix Éric Tisserand Sound Editor Arnaud Rolland, Emmanuel Angrand Colour-grading Yov Moor, Elie Akoka Post Production Eugénie Deplus, Thomas Jaubert Production MIAO PRODUCTIONS In coproduction with YGGDRASIL Ola Strøm LÉGER PRODUCTION Solène Léger In collaboration with BABEL LABEL Co., Ltd. MEGUMI With the support of KERING TEMPIO FONDATION BNP PARIBAS International Sales mk2 Films © 2025 MIAO PRODUCTIONS About The Artist(s) Juliette Binoche was born in Paris. She loves travelling like someone who might have come from the four corners of the earth. In her blood run Polish, Brazilian and Flemish platelets. As a child, she loved making things, crafting, tinkering even. She brought her hands together, believed in the happiness of living, in saving snails, in warming up cold dolls. And then, to play was to escape. Escape from the loneliness of boarding schools, from recurring nightmares, creating moments of joy in playgrounds, in the pitch-black night of dormitories. At the age of four, she preferred whispering games to sleep. Her fragmented family brought her closer to angels. High up in the sky, like Dumbo, she no doubt chose her father and mother, who bathed in the world of the arts. With them, she lived at the heart of creative love. Her father’s theatrical tours awakened in her the desire for itinerant sharing. As a teenager, her cheeks aflame, Juliette had a band of friends with whom she performed theatre in the countryside with her mother: Jean-Philippe, Francine, Florence and Isabelle. But life meant she had to leave behind the valleys of Loir-et-Cher, the fruit trees, and the long evenings under immense sunsets. The nostalgia of that countryside, with its nourishing quality, became a touchstone throughout her life. Moving to Paris, baccalauréat in hand, she began theatre classes with Jean-Pierre Martino at 17 and Véra Gregh at 18. They helped her break down her will, to make room for silence, for another kind of openness. Casting after casting, hoping to fulfil her dream of becoming an actress, she was chosen to play her first major role in Rendez-vous by André Téchiné — a provocative, solitary film. The Cannes Festival became the palace of her public consecration, where the spiral of her life took flight. Her instinctive path through global creation has given Juliette Binoche a singular aura among filmmakers of a borderless constellation: Michael Haneke (Austria), David Cronenberg and Abel Ferrara (United States), Olivier Assayas, Leos Carax and Claire Denis (France), Amos Gitaï (Israel), Naomi Kawase and Hirokazu Kore-eda (Japan), Krzysztof Kieślowski (Poland), Hou Hsiao-hsien (Taiwan), Trân Anh Hùng (Vietnam), Abbas Kiarostami (Iran)… Crowned with the most prestigious awards (Academy Awards, BAFTA, César, Best Actress prizes at Cannes, Berlin and Venice…), Juliette Binoche does not, however, seek virtuosity. She prefers a mysterious link between her inner world and the desire to give of herself, perhaps encouraged, as Louis Malle noted after Damage, by “the love affair between her and the camera, a presence and an intensity that are staggering.” The great range of her performances in Bruno Dumont’s films — from austerity (Camille Claudel, 1915) to burlesque (Slack Bay) — illustrates her taste for freedom and her courage in constantly questioning herself in the fire of her performances. She seemed destined for an uncompromising auteur cinema when Jean-Luc Godard spotted her in 1984 for Hail Mary, but Juliette Binoche was unafraid to venture elsewhere: Godzilla by Gareth Edwards or Ghost in the Shell by Rupert Sanders, which she says she chose as a wink to her children. The success of Anthony Minghella’s nine-Oscar-winning The English Patient, along with Philip Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Lasse Hallström’s Chocolat, established Juliette Binoche as a truly international actress, recognised worldwide. Yet her need for renewal in her creations always drives her further towards freedom. Her shifts and turns make her elusive. She takes her destiny into her own hands in cinema as well as theatre (Andrei Konchalovsky, Ivo Van Hove, Wajdi Mouawad), devotes herself to music (It’s Worth Living with Alexandre Tharaud), to poetry as to painting (Portraits In-Eyes, published by Place des Victoires), to dance (In-I with Akram Khan) and, most recently, to directing her first documentary film In-I In Motion (2025). Get in touch with the artist(s) tiphaine@miaoproductions.fr and follow them on social media Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2026 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here

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JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Published by the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center CUNY, supported by American Theater Drama Society. Back to Top Untitled Copy of Untitled Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume 37 Visit Journal Homepage Issue 2 Censorship/Public Censure and Performance Today: Special Issue Introduction David Bisaha and Pria Ruth Williams EDITORIAL Remembering Censorship in the World Premiere of Seán O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned: Lafayette, Indiana, 1959 Nic Barilar ARTICLE The Stage as Networked Battleground: Dissent and Censorship in Contemporary Canadian Theatre and Performance Donia Mounsef ARTICLE Censor/Censure: A Roundtable Pria Ruth Williams, Claire Syler, Amy Hughes, Karen Jean Martinson, David Bisaha ARTICLE Which of These Are Censorship? The Divide Between Prior Restraint and Soft Censorship Rowan Jalso ARTICLE How Can an Artist Respond to Censorship? The Dilemma That Faces Contemporary Creatives in the UK Patrizia Paolini ARTICLE The LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project: A Roundtable Conversation Benjamin Gillespie QUEER VOICES Life is Drag: Documenting Spectacle as Resistance An Interview with Rachel Rampleman Benjamin Gillespie QUEER VOICES Middle Eastern American Theatre: Communities, Cultures, and Artists. Michael Malek Najjar. Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2021; Pp. xvi + 237. Megan Stahl BOOK REVIEW Lessons from Our Students: Meditations on Performance Pedagogy. Stacey Cabaj and Andrea Odinov. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 126 Samantha Briggs BOOK REVIEW Choreographing Dirt: Movement, Performance, and Ecology in the Anthropocene. Angenette Spalink. Studies in Theatre, Ecology, and Performance Series, no. 3. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 116. Erika Guay BOOK REVIEW Fauci and Kramer Janet Werther PERFORMANCE REVIEW Our Town I. B. Hopkins PERFORMANCE REVIEW Frankenstein Melissa Sturges PERFORMANCE REVIEW Issue 1 Editorial Introduction Bess Rowen and Benjamin Gillespie EDITORIAL A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Catherine Heiner ARTICLE Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov Alisa Zhulina ARTICLE “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Thomas Keith ARTICLE Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” Allan Johnson ARTICLE “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein James F. Wilson QUEER VOICES Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames Bess Rowen QUEER VOICES The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Jane Barnette BOOK REVIEW Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Nicholas Orvis BOOK REVIEW Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Zach Dailey BOOK REVIEW Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Sebastián Eddowes-Vargas BOOK REVIEW Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. Kelly I. Aliano BOOK REVIEW New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 Stuart J. Hecht, (former) Editor in Chief, New England Theatre Journal NEW ENGLAND THEATRE JOURNAL New England Theatre in Review Martha Schmoyer LoMonaco, (former) Editor, New England Theatre in Review NEW ENGLAND THEATRE REVIEW American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Stephen Kuehler Harvard University SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 Steven Otfinoski Fairfield University SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Tom Grady. Bristol Community College SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Paul E. Fallon. Cambridge, Massachusetts SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 Jan Mason Western Connecticut State University SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Paul E. Fallon Cambridge, Massachusetts SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Karl G. Ruling Milford, Connecticut SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Megan Grumbling University of New England, Southern Maine Community College SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Steven Ofinoski Fairfield University SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Tom Grady Bristol Community College SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Angela Sweigart-Gallagher St. Lawrence University SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Martha Schmoyer LoMonaco, emerita Fairfield University SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative articles and reviews on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Please refer to our Style Guide for submission information and general formatting guidelines. Send all general queries to the editors at jadtjournal@gmail.com . Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage

Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Arab Stages 14 Spring 2023 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Review: Layalina written by Martin Yousif Zebari, directed by Sivan Battat By Sami Ismat Published: May 1, 2023 Download Article as PDF Article Bibliography, References & Endnotes References About The Author(s) Arab Stages Arab Stages is devoted to broadening international awareness and understanding of the theatre and performance cultures of the Arab-Islamic world and of its diaspora. The journal appears twice yearly in digital form by the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center of New York and is a joint project of that Center and of the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Review: Mother Courage adapted and directed by Alison Shan Price Review of Theaters of Citizenship: Aesthetics and Politics of Avant-Garde Performance in Egypt written by Sonali Pahwa Review: Decolonizing Sarah: A Hurricane Play written and directed by Samer Al-Saber “Indigenous Avant-Gardes”: The Shiraz Arts Festival and Ritual Performance Theory in 1970s Iran Review: Baba written by Denmo Ibrahim, directed by Hamid Dehghani Review of MUKHRIJĀT AL-MASRAḤ AL-MIṢRĪ (1990-2010): DIRĀSA SĪMIYŪṬĪQĪYAH [Female Egyptian Directors (1990-2010): A Semiotic Study], written by Hadia Abd El-Fattah Review of Syrian Refugees, Applied Theater, Workshop Facilitation, and Stories: While They Were Waiting written by Fadi Skeiker Review: Layalina written by Martin Yousif Zebari, directed by Sivan Battat Up There by Wael Kadour, Introduction Review: Playwright Showcase, New Arab American Theater Works Two Giants of Egyptian Theatre: Conversations with Mohamed Abul-ʿEla El-Salamouny and Lenin El-Ramly Crossing Borders: A Theatre Practitioner’s Odyssey, An Interview with Hassan El Geretly On Writing Egypt from the Diaspora: An Interview with Adam Ashraf Elsayigh Performance Review: A FAMILY THAT HAS BEEN BLOCKED Performance Review: BETHLEHEM SITE-SPECIFIC THEATER FESTIVAL Performance Review: HOOTA. By Amer Hlehel Performance Review: LITTLE SYRIA Book Review: ACTING EGYPTIAN Book Review: MANSOUR, MONA. THE VAGRANT TRILOGY Previous Next Attribution:

Rachel Merrill Moss and Gary Alan Fine 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 Pageants and Patriots: Jewish Spectacles as Performances of Belonging Rachel Merrill Moss and Gary Alan Fine By Published on November 8, 2018 Download Article as PDF The night before Independence Day in 1933, something unprecedented occurred. [1] As part of Chicago’s Century of Progress Exposition, “Jewish Day” was celebrated, culminating in a record-breaking performance that garnered an audience of between 125,000 and 150,000 spectators crammed into Chicago’s Soldier Field, causing massive traffic jams before and after. [2] While some of Chicago’s other immigrant ethnicities were represented as part of the Expo, Jewish Day and its show-stopping finale were the most notable ethnically-oriented events of the entire fair. So impactful was the performance, The Romance of a People , that not only did it receive twelve columns of coverage in the Chicago Tribune the following day, but an encore performance was sponsored by the Tribune three nights after the initial performance. Ultimately a bold Zionist affair, raising money for creating the would-be Jewish refuge of Palestine, The Romance of a People combined spectacle and politics in a remarkably successful performance as Hitler was coming into power. A decade later, in the midst of World War II, another Jewish pageant of massive scale graced the city, but after ten years of atrocities, the motives and emotions were much different. Well into wartime, 1943 brought the New York-originated pageant, We Will Never Die , to Chicago as part of a nationwide tour. While still promoting the increasingly insistent need for a government-sanctioned nationhood (the demand which transformed Palestine into Israel five years after the Chicago performance), the pageant, as evidenced by its title, spoke to the threat to Jewish life and identity by the Nazis. Even more than in The Romance of a People, We Will Never Die carried the fear of genocide. A somber tone and a tocsin of impending death replaced the patriotic and inclusive hunger for recognition evident in The Romance of a People . Another decade later, as series of smaller individual performances were organized as part of a nationwide Jewish-American celebration: the American Jewish Tercentenary. Commemorating three hundred years of Jewish presence in America, the year-long event was held from 1954 through 1955, and boasted “forums, exhibitions, pageants, musical festivals, and public dinners organized by local committees in at least four hundred cities and towns.” [3] While these three decades of pageants bore similarities in theme and in production elements, their execution and tone differ drastically, speaking to the radically different times in American history for Jews and America’s relationship to the Jews. In our examination of these pageants, we understand them to be historically contingent, site-specific, and temporally-bounded events. Each of these Jewish-American pageants relied on its historical specificity and locale, while these elements also contributed to their lack of performance longevity. But it is in their nuanced, culturally-reflective status that we find these pageants compelling—they are historical artifacts that didactically perform their own contextually-contingent ideologies. Furthermore, as we focus on each of the three decades of pageants in the paper that follows, we contend with the ways in which their varying degrees of site-specificity are also intricately bound within a broader American network, reflective of both Jewish American microcosms and the macro-national level. Pageants and Politics We use twentieth-century Jewish pageants to argue that the pageant form of theatre is an ideal forum by which to make claims about citizenship and political engagement. While these pageants differ from traditional theatre in terms of their fluid scripting, grand scale, and limited potential for extended performance runs, they nonetheless resemble normative theatre in that they are specific, performed events with beginnings and endpoints, they feature performers enacting a narrative upon a stage, and they rely heavily on the audience-performance dynamic that is live theatre’s hallmark. That said, however, by virtue of the extent of its stagecraft, audience, and ambition within the public sphere, the pageant form, as distinct from the routinely-performed play, expresses the perspective of a segment of the population. This was particularly important from the end of the Civil War to the 1960s, a period of extensive immigration, during which the issue of accepting and integrating ethnic immigrants was salient and “patriotic pageants became a popular form for promoting the assimilation of the immigrant into American society.” [4] Pageants reached their apogee in the first half of the twentieth century, playing off the desire to solidify an American tradition, but this was necessary precisely because of the migrants who had to demonstrate that, despite diverse customs, religions, and beliefs, they belonged to—and were fervently patriotic towards—the American nation. Explicating this sentiment, albeit baldly, Esther Willard Bates describes this integration in her pageantry how-to guide, The Art of Producing Pageants from 1925: “pageantry is more than an end; it is also a means. . . . It teaches our late-comers the story of the nation in an imaginative manner, and when they act [as] our fore-fathers and speak their very words, they become part-owners in our traditions.” [5] The ethnic pageant, and in this case the Jewish-American pageant, was designed to meet this need but was also situated in light of the political needs of the community, as defined by organizations with the resources and authority to create extensive performances, requiring personnel, locations, and the activation of audiences. Pageants are not merely a means of displaying nationalism and tradition but also an occasion on which community resources are expended to set a political agenda. America’s longstanding tradition of using spectacle and pageantry for the formation and assertion of “Americanness” can be traced back to the earliest years of the American republic. Colorful, boisterous, and clear in message, pageants of early American history fostered community among America’s ethnic, religious, and social groups, simultaneously unifying them under a single banner of American identity and mobilizing as a vehicle for hybrid American-ethnic identity formation. S. E. Wilmer traces this long history of America’s theatricalized nationalism in Theatre, Society and the Nation . “Particularly in times of national crisis,” he states, “the theatre has served as a political and ideological tool to help reconfigure the [American] nation,” defining or challenging “national values and the notion of the nation,” and “reformulating concepts of national identity” that even predate Germany’s nationalistic theatrical Romanticism. [6] While the American-Jewish relationship to pageantry reflects these community—and nation-building—protocols, by the twentieth century pageants changed in their focus. Pageants became strategic attempts at persuasion, both within the community and beyond. American perceptions of Jews, both American and international, have also altered greatly over the course of the twentieth century, and the changing approaches to Jewish-American pageantry are as much a reflection of this shift in perception as of the changing relationship of American Jews to both America and assimilation. In American Historical Pageantry , David Glassberg describes the legacy of early American pageantry, its heyday in the first decades of the twentieth century, and its ultimate decline after the late-1920s. In its prime, historical pageantry played a major role in American celebrations and festivals, showcasing “the belief that history could be made into a dramatic public ritual through which the residents of a town, by acting out the right version of their past, could bring about some kind of future social and political transformation.” [7] Reiterating both American pride and the possibilities of growth of the town, neighborhood, or ethnic association, these productions presented an idealized vision of past and future through “the use of historical imagery to discover or invent an appropriate tradition in support of reform.” [8] In addition to Glassberg’s and Wilmer’s book-length studies on historical American pageantry, from early to mid-century American works, Richard M. Fried’s The Russians Are Coming! The Russians are Coming!: Pageantry and Patriotism in Cold-War America examines national patriotic activity and efforts executed through theatrical pageantry and ritual, implemented through federal-level initiatives, as a means of reasserting national identity during troubling political times, particularly focusing in on Cold War-era “patriotic and civic pageantry.” [9] While the book does not focus closely in on them, Fried also acknowledges the plethora of more localized, group-specific pageant performance traditions from the turn-of-the-century onwards. Additionally, a number of articles focus specifically on minority-driven American political pageants, including those by Stephen J. Whitfield, Robert Skloot, and Lauren Love, that individually explore two of the pageants discussed within this article, examining the pageants’ “civic purpose” and ability to activate Jewish solidarity. [10] Likewise, in “Performing the Polish-American Patriot,” Megan E. Geigner similarly examines theatrical pageant performances that serve to reiterate hyphenated other-American identity as a means of galvanizing patriotic kinship. [11] In this same vein, Martha S. LoMonaco’s work on nineteenth-century Mormon pageants looks at historical pageantry as creating a foothold in American historical narrative through performance. [12] Taken together, recent scholarship displays a clear interest – albeit a diffuse one – in the performance practices of minority groups in America who used pageantry as a means of articulating their hyphenated American identity. While this article seeks to add to this body of literature, our goal is also to further that discussion by including the ways in which mid-century Jewish-American pageants built upon such an American tradition, while, conversely, discussing how we can use these past pageants as a way to explore the turns in performance practices in moments where Jewish and American-Jewish identity are in jeopardy. Our approach offers a macro view of how pageants were utilized as a means of identity production and group unification spanning three decades. Despite the overall decline in popularity of the pageant form across America, the mid-century Jewish pageants we discuss display a continuation of those same ideologies fostered by the American pageant tradition, but with particular, persuasive goals sensitive to the situation of American and global Jewry. While small towns no longer emphasized the performance of patriotism, this became increasingly important for urban Jews. For the Jewish community, the pageant both energized the community and spoke to the wider American public through the media representations of the large gatherings. Though the American pageant form by this point had morphed into the “folk play, the restored museum village, or the annual historical festival . . . depict[ing] the past as a separate world from the present,” Jewish American pageants before, during, and after the Second World War successfully bridged the gap between the ethnic enclave and the Christian public. [13] Employing familiar techniques and tropes that were long central to American civil religion, [14] these pageants continued the American pageantry legacy while utilizing the theatrical form as a successful way to assert an overtly didactic message: Jews are a unique and worthy people, they lack a homeland ( Romance of a People ), they are threatened with destruction from un-American enemies ( We Will Never Die ), and they share core American values while contributing to national history (the Tercentennial pageants). Each moment of pageantry had its own agenda, but the overall message—the insistence that Jews were worthy and patriotic Americans—remained throughout. By performing these Jewish narratives within but not eclipsed by an American narrative, these pageants performed Jewish difference, thereby drawing attention to specifically Jewish issues before Jewish and broader audiences. Furthermore, these pageants also represent a unique moment in the American pageantry legacy, as they also interpolate its historical tradition of ethnic subsumption into a homogenous (Anglo-)American, nationalist narrative. These three mid-twentieth-century pageants allow Jews to represent themselves (i.e. prominent Jews in American history) while still arguing for their Americanness and adopting a stance that hybridizes the American aesthetic and American nationalism. Additionally, we examine the ways in which these Jewish-American pageants are responsive to their contemporary moment in explicit and didactic ways that limit their potential for longevity but that offer themselves up to historians as illuminating points of reference into their cultural and political contexts. We examine each of these pageants, describing their content and how they situated the Jewish community in light of contemporary issues that a large, well-attended performance could address. 1933: The Romance of a People The Romance of a People was a three-hour pageant of epic proportions: a program “which symbolize[d] four thousand years of colorful history—history high in its drama, packed with pathos, terrible in tragedies, glorious in its victories.” [15] The pageant featured 3,500 cast members, including singers and dancers reminiscent of a Greek Chorus on a massive scale, nearly all of whom were local residents of Chicago and members of the Jewish community. [16] To prevent chaos and cacophony from the humongous cast, director Isaac Van Grove opted to amplify mechanically the speeches and songs of the cast from a room hidden beneath the stage. Covered in a Chicago Daily Tribune article that ran the day after the initial performance, columnist Virginia Gardner’s discussion of the methods utilized by Van Grove for the production, and the fact that it merited newspaper coverage at all, provides evidence of its remarkable execution. “The control room and amplifying system made possible what Van Grove described as ‘the effect of an intimate theater two blocks long.’” [17] The marriage of artistry and technology not only assisted in executing the mass theatre in which Van Grove openly believed, but also aligned with the Century of Progress mission to promote technology unimaginable in the previous hundred years. [18] Van Grove is credited for pioneering amplified sound for a theatrical production, as he did in The Romance of a People . [19] Across all press reports and published material about The Romance of a People , it is evident that the public reception was strong. The word “colorful” appears a dozen times throughout the pageant’s press coverage, as do accolades about the audiences’ upturned faces and positive Jewish attitudes and self-opinion, such as in David and Goliath allegories. [20] The positive perception of the extravagance at Soldier Field is clear but seems largely to pertain to the material only aesthetically. While the production aimed to educate for the purposes of the Zionist cause, Van Grove and his producers spared no expense to generate entertainment and to immerse the audience in the spectacle. Six months earlier in December 1932, Chicago audiences had an early taste when a massive Chanukah holiday pageant, also directed by Van Grove (and similarly produced by Meyer Weisgal), was staged at the Chicago Stadium, entitled “Israel Reborn.” [21] Though the cast size and audience numbers were more than doubled for The Romance of a People , the previous Jewish “theatrical spectacle” was heralded as a performance that “one sees once in a generation.” [22] Van Grove knew going into the colossal Soldier Field production what had worked so triumphantly only half a year prior for a similar Chicago audience. Van Grove was a staunch believer in the opportunity to create theatrical impact that “mass spectacle” afforded. [23] To Van Grove, the possibilities for emotional gravitas were substantially higher when utilizing pageantry and grand-scale spectacle, rather than realism that he considered “passé.” [24] It was the power of thousands of bodies in coordinated movement that Van Grove believed could elicit the vital response The Romance of a People needed. While the pageant aimed to garner support and attention for the Zionist cause, it also allowed an emotional appeal to non-Jewish audience members. The pageant strove to engage Jews and Christians alike, so much so that it was commented on in nearly all reviews of the pageant production. Perhaps the Chicago Daily News reporter, S. J. Duncan-Clark, put it most poignantly in his pageant review that ran 5 July 1933, highlighting the community forged through pageantry: There was laughter and weeping among the thronging spectators for the floodtide of emotion had been released. Christians and Jews grasped hands with a new sense of spiritual kinship. There were thousands of Christians present. All Christian creeds had joined in approving and promoting the magnificent project of their Jewish neighbors.[25] While Duncan-Clark recognizes the pageant’s message of Jewish distinctiveness in order to highlight the specific plight of its people, he rightly points to the pageant’s goal of community orientation—attempting to bring others into the fight for Jewish lives abroad. Regardless of, or perhaps due to, the diversity of the audience, the pageant itself was both a dramatic and edifying affair, chronicling notable events in Jewish history. The pageant depicted “forty centuries of religion” in the form of six episodes with two interludes, starting with a dramatization of the religion’s formation. [26] A 27-foot idol of the god Moloch surrounded by 500 slaves and worshippers set the scene for Judaism’s rejection of the false god, thereby depicting “the birth of true religious concepts.” [27] Furthermore, this attempt at monotheistic universality is mentioned in the pageant’s program “Greeting and Tribute” penned by producer and script-writer Meyer Weisgal. Hailing the presumed diversity of the crowd, Weisgal declaimed, “Among you are representatives of all the races and creeds which are incorporated in the structure of the American Republic. The composition of this assembly bears equal witness, therefore, to the spirit of fellowship and mutual respect among diversities of faith and race.” [28] While his program greeting closes with a reminder of the pageant’s Zionist cause, Weisgal’s preamble anticipates what would later be the American Jewish Tercentenary’s purpose: realigning Jewishness within an American historical context and within a multiethnic community. The pageant consisted of a prologue, six episodes, and two “interludes” (performed transitions) that outlined widely-known moments from “biblical and historical records,” from ancient to present times. [29] Beginning with “The Creation,” a scene depicted the first lines of the Torah (the Jewish Bible) and the creation of humanity, using chaotic lights and sound to represent “the morning of Creation, the freshness of the world as it came from the hand of the divine Artificer.” [30] This scene was followed by the aforementioned birth of Judaism and Abraham’s covenant with God after denouncing the impending sacrifice to a false god, the escape from slavery in Egypt, the building of the first temple and its subsequent destruction, exiles wandering in search of a new homeland, and finally, deliverance to a new Israel. Part of the pageant’s power comes not from the scenes depicted, but rather the sheer scale of the production itself. The thousands of bodies onstage before gigantic scenery, depicting, at turns, false idols, the temple in Jerusalem, and finally the future homeland, constituted a remarkable spectacle. The use of amplified sound enabled giant choreographed movement onstage to take place without worry about carrying noise, while the stereophonic voice-acting of forty or so actors depicting The Voice of God, Abraham, and other significant figures were hidden beneath the stage, merging media and performance technologies to enable unimpeded spectacle. The production set for the pageant was claimed to be “unquestionably the most elaborate stage ever built” at Soldier Field. [31] A “mammoth” four level, 200-foot long, 150-foot wide set filled much of the stadium. “Fashioned to look like stone, the set, on the one hand, suggested the use of ancient materials, substantial enough to endure for thousands of years into the future. On the other hand, solid but blank, this place’s history was waiting to be inscribed.” [32] The tiered stage accommodated a chorus of 1,500 and an orchestra on a single level, with ample room left for the action of the performance, [33] with the temple at stage center, adorned with a Star of David. [34] Advanced coverage in the Chicago Daily Tribune raved of the pageant’s precedent-breaking visual spectacle, including embedded floor lighting, four 35-foot lighting towers, and a giant glass “curtain” (35 feet long by 25 feet high) onto which colorful light effects would be projected. [35] These lights were used with great dramatic effect for the final stage picture: a single light blazed from darkness to illuminate the temple’s star, as the sung prayer “Shema Yisrael/Hear, O Israel” brought the pageant to a close. [36] The production’s playbill also reflected the high level of community interest and involvement. Featuring advertisements and well-wishes from organizations and businesses citywide (both Jewish and secular), the program itself enacted a coherent community voice vouching support of the production, albeit a commercially motivated one. [37] The program serves as a material testament to the city’s vested interest in the Jewish community’s patronage. The range of pageant-specific advertisements include a message in handwritten Yiddish from Sophie Tucker of The 225 Club, a note to the “Jews of Chicago” from D. L. Toffenetti of the Triangle Restaurants franchise, and an ad from Flashtric Sign Works, creators of “One of the Most Outstanding Features of Jewish Day,” the illuminated Star of David used in the production. [38] The playbill, therefore, performed the same integrated community mentality that the pageant itself asserted and reflected a desire for its success from community supporters. In his history of Soldier Field, Liam T. A. Ford notes that “rather than promoting assimilation into America’s melting pot, [ The Romance of a People ] helped make pride in being Jewish more acceptable to non-Jewish Chicagoans and at the same time, helped define what being Jewish would mean for generations of American Jews.” [39] Ford’s assertion as to the pageant’s reverberating impact on public performances of Jewishness in America in the generations to come certainly rings true when considering the next generation’s overlapping uses of spectacles for asserting Jewish-American acceptance. That said, the pageants in the decades that follow The Romance of a People differ in important ways, reflecting their altered political and cultural circumstances. 1943: We Will Never Die World War II created a new context for Jewish-American pageantry. A decade after The Romance of a People , the fate of European Jews was desperate, survival in the balance, while at the same time the might of the American military was arrayed against their tormentors. Though, perhaps, saving Jews was not a prime motivator of American military involvement, the vicious anti-Semitism of the Nazis was used to justify the war effort, leading to sympathy for Jews and a rejection of the more overt forms of prejudice in the United States.' The 1943 pageant, We Will Never Die , was produced at a moment in which wartime patriotism was linked to a hatred of anti-Semitism, and the pageant built on this connection. We Will Never Die premiered at New York’s Madison Square Garden, emphasizing that preserving Jewish culture and community was consistent with American values, and it featured a laundry list of theatre-celebrity involvement, including direction by Moss Hart, script by Ben Hecht, music by Kurt Weil, and was produced by Billy Rose. As their titles suggest, the decade between Romance of a People and We Will Never Die dramatically altered the substance of these theatrical narratives. While both pageants featured distinctly Jewish narratives, The Romance of a People represented hope and galvanization, whereas 1943’s We Will Never Die , facing the grim realities of Nazi crimes, presented a desperate plea for Jewish safety and mobilization to assure it. Both pageants were attended by both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences, [40] and each addressed the future of Jewish inclusion and preservation. While We Will Never Die was more didactic, both pageants played off ethnic distinctiveness—Jews as a special category of “Americans”—in gaining the attention of an audience that accepted the legitimacy of that difference. Perhaps the pageants had limited effects in changing American policy, but in performance, they made the case that Jewish interests were American interests. We Will Never Die , performed on 9 May 1943 at the Chicago Stadium, proffered similar themes as The Romance of a People , but with darker, more somber tones. The pageant was a “memorial to the 2,000,000 Jews” that the producers stated had already been murdered in Europe, and was penned by acclaimed Jewish-American playwright and screenwriter, Ben Hecht. [41] We Will Never Die used vastly disparate tactics from The Romance of a People , and was credited as the first wide-scale dramatic presentation of the destruction of the Jews in Europe. [42] Contrary to the optimism of the 1933 pageant, We Will Never Die threw violent, gory details at audiences, hoping to make viewers incensed at the slaughter, rather than to convince the crowds of the goodliness and godliness of the Jewish people. We Will Never Die featured a cast of 1,000 and garnered a Chicago audience between 15,000 to 20,000. [43] It was treated as a critical step in advancing the cause of the Jewish people. The Chicago Daily Tribune titled their review, “Pageant Stirs 15,000 to Vow: Jew Must Live.” [44] Using high praise, the Tribune reviewer, Edward Barry, wrote, From a majestic stage flanked by representations of the tablets of the law and the star of David, 1,000 American Jews last night delivered a plea to an audience of 15,000, and thru these 15,000 to the world, to heed the plight of the Jews of Europe before the last remnants of the race there are sacrificed to the Nazi fury.[45] In contrast to the 1933 review by James O’Donnell Bennett, who reviewed The Romance of a People , Barry does not differentiate the Jews and gentiles in the audience, perhaps indicating the unifying, humanist appeal of the material. Unlike the historical epic of The Romance of a People , We Will Never Die opted for relative naturalism in the script. Though the production set consisted of “two towering Tablets containing the Ten Commandments loom[ing] at the back of the stage,” much of the dialogue is realistic and personable, albeit didactic, and often gruesomely so. [46] The show begins with the Kol Nidre chant from Yom Kippur, [47] a shofar is blown, and a rabbi emerges from between the two tablets to introduce and honor the plight of “the two million who have been killed in Europe.” [48] The rabbi gives the stage over to two narrators who begin a series of short episodes, each addressing the Jewish plight. The first of four episodes begins with a “roll call” of important Jewish contributors to American and global life—somewhat foreshadowing the Tercentenary narratives—including a disparate collection of individuals, such as Luis Ponce de Leon, Benjamin Disraeli, Marcel Proust, and Samuel Gompers. The second episode chronicles one Jewish-American soldier’s wartime experience and urgent telegraph home on the brink of his death during American defeat in the Philippines. Episode Three chronicles the struggle and uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, [49] and the pageant closes with an episode entitled, “Remember Us,” consisting of the dead announcing their gruesome ends at the hands of the Nazis, while beseeching the audience not to forget them. Closing with two narrators urging American involvement in the Jewish plight, the pageant used the rhetoric of the American ethic: We [Americans] have brave soldiers who are fighting to victory. But the massacre of the unarmed civilians is beyond the reach of their guns. The desert and the Mediterranean are the battle front and they are honorably engaged on it. The massacre in Europe is our battle front—and we are not honorably engaged on it.[50] Then, making a greater, global claim, a second narrator decries, “the crime of Europe calls for the mobilization of every shred of righteousness and spiritual power left in the world.” [51] While We Will Never Die offered a persuasive cry for a cohesive front and fight against the Axis and Nazism in order to rescue the remaining European Jewry, support from American Jewish organizations was spotty. Though Ben Hecht, the pageant’s scriptwriter, presented a work-in-progress to garner financial support from the Jewish community, “with representatives of nearly three-dozen Jewish organizations,” the groups “could not agree to work together in support of the forthcoming pageant. Even when Hecht . . . offered to withdraw the formal endorsement of the controversial Committee for a Jewish Army and to work only behind the scenes, the others declined to sponsor We Will Never Die .” [52] Furthermore, the pageant attempted not only “[t]o heighten concern for doomed coreligionists . . . it was also targeted at public opinion and at the nation’s capital. Hecht and his collaborators . . . wanted to stimulate a change in policy.” [53] This ambitious goal was also ultimately unattainable. As Whitfield argues in “The Politics of Pageantry, 1936-1946”: Perhaps none of these pageants was great enough, soaring enough, memorable enough . . . but there is a more likely explanation. It asks too much of art to expect it to halt the juggernaut of tyranny. Nazism and fascism were too powerful for that. . . . Neither masterpieces nor spectacles could influence geopolitics; and the lesson that many Jews learned is that, while art can enhance and illuminate and expose power, only countervailing force can effectively confront it. . . . That realization meant consolidating a sense of peoplehood, instilling in American Jewish audiences a sense of transatlantic solidarity.[54] While transatlantic solidarity was important during the war years due to the threat to Jewry in Europe, other issues took priority during the 1950s as Jews attempted to demonstrate their bona fides as “Americans.” Whitfield points toward what would become the strategy of the yearlong American Jewish celebration to follow a decade after We Will Never Die . 1954-55: A Return to Different Roots After the war, like so much else, the politics of American-Jewish pageants were indelibly altered. During the 1950s, rather than reaching outward, emphasizing a “transatlantic solidarity,” the 1954-55 Jewish-American Tercentenary pageants focused inwards, emphasizing the particularly Jewish role in the development of American life and culture over the past 300 years. These pageants were intended to incorporate Jews into American collective memory, perhaps given the concern about seeing Jews as Communists. [55] With the existential threat to Jewish life resolved in Europe, the next challenge for American Jewry was to demonstrate to fellow citizens questioning their patriotism that Jews had long been integral to American life. American-Jewish pageantry turned to its local soil to advance a narrative of Jewish “Americanness,” which became further emphasized as the Cold War tensions increased and questions of loyalty became salient. Post-war Jewish-American pageantry presented a narrative of long-standing Jewish commitment to America since its founding, no longer suggesting that the United States must do something for Jews, but instead that Jews have done something for America. The culmination of this assimilationist, hybrid-identity of Jewish-American status was the year-long American Jewish Tercentenary celebration, occurring from September 1954 through May 1955. Celebrated nationwide, the 300 th anniversary of Jewish American presence was memorialized through publications, celebratory events, television and radio formats, and pageant spectacles. The Tercentenary was well-timed for this assertion of the embeddedness of Jews in American life. The specter of Communism conjured a need to perform a non-threatening—solidly American—Jewish identity, and a choice was made to create a celebration that publicly proclaimed this allegiance. Unlike the massive spectacles in the 1930s and ‘40s, these Tercentenary pageants were on a smaller scale, [56] a function surely of a decline in large-scale pageants, and perhaps a reaction to large-scale rallies in Germany and the Soviet Union. These pageants were performed in cities across the country but with more modest casts and in smaller venues. With their local orientation, these pageants had a different position in creating public awareness and perception than the highly successful mass pageants that had taken place previously and were centered mainly in Chicago and New York, with subsequent tour stops at other urban centers, including Detroit and Washington D.C. Although hints of the post-war assimilationist movement could be seen in sporadic pageants and publications from the immediate post-war years through the early nineteen-fifties, the Jewish Tercentenary was distinct: it hoped to include every Jewish community, large or small, in the national celebration of Jewish influence on American life and democracy. Founded in 1953, the American Jewish Tercentenary Committee (AJTC) was formed to promote and establish the commemoratory year of anniversary celebrations, building on the tercentennial theme of “Man’s Opportunities and Responsibilities Under Freedom.” To this end, numerous pamphlets were published under the auspices of the organization, created to aid and encourage Jewish communities and organizations taking part across the country. Explicit in their intended goals, the materials from the AJTC provided a clear set of instructions to follow for all manner of anniversary celebration attempts nationwide. In their clarity, these instructional booklets asked that a certain ideal narrative be followed and performed across all related performance platforms. That narrative not only asserted the early and unchanging importance of Jews in America but also their unceasing dedication to the American way of life, emphasizing democratic governance. In the numerous texts published by or with the support of the AJTC, American democracy is central. The texts didactically indicate Jewish involvement through centuries of American politics and patriotism, including one text referencing Oscar Straus’s contention that the “Hebrew Old Testament” influenced America’s foundational democratic ideals. [57] What is abundantly clear in this heavy-handed commentary is that the Jewish organization saw a need to counter the association of Jews and Communism, a perspective widely accepted in the Depression years but receding in the post-war period. [58] The culmination of the Tercentenary celebration contributed to delinking Jewishness from Communist associations in the minds of the American public, despite the continuing presence of Jews in the shrinking Communist movement. Even prior to the Tercentenary celebration, the American Jewish Committee was laying the groundwork for the later message of Jewish-American involvement in foundational American democracy. A pamphlet published in 1950, written by David De Sola Pool, chairman of the American Jewish Historical Society provisional committee for planning the tercentenary project, addresses these themes. In the pamphlet’s culminating page, De Sola Pool lists the “Fruits of the Tercentenary Celebration,” providing insight into his, and presumably the committee’s, goals for the tercentenary celebration year. Heralding the coming reinvigoration of Jewish presence within American society, De Sola Pool states that the tercentenary celebration “carried out in this broad national way will make vivid for all Americans, Christians and Jews alike, how deep and centuried is the stake of the Jews in the United States,” and furthermore, that the tercentenary “will further devotion to the Hebraic ideals of democracy that have helped to mold American democracy.” [59] In 1954, a reissue of the 1905 events of the 250 th anniversary was published by the American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, seemingly as another means of naturalizing the occurrence of the 300 th . In 1905, the 250 th Anniversary of Jewish settlement in the US was celebrated on Thanksgiving Day, in an effort to “make the celebration a truly national event,” underscoring the centrality of American secular holidays and nationalism within Jewish-American identity. [60] The official celebratory proceedings for the opening event included addresses from the Catholic Bishop Coadjutor of New York, David Greer, as well as secular figures such as former president, Grover Cleveland, governor of New York State, Frank Higgins, and Mayor of New York City, George McClellan. The ceremony closed with an audience rendition of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” [61] This pan-religious, nationalist service was designed to establish Jewish Americans’ place within the cornucopia of American identities. However, the vast historical distance between the 250 th anniversary and the tercentenary couldn’t possibly have been anticipated, and the Tercentenary events had to take into account the changes in America and globally that had occurred during the past half-century. Within her pamphlet outlining Tercentenary pageant guidelines, Adele Gutman Nathan echoes the linking of Jews and early American democracy: “From the time the Jewish pilgrims arrived in 1654 at the little port of New Amsterdam . . . Jews as individuals and as groups have participated dramatically in each step of the creation of our nation, in its never-ending search for true democracy.” [62] With one small exception, [63] she fails to mention the enormous Jewish pageants of the past two decades within her description of previous American pageantry, though she mentions other popular productions from the time. This lack of connection between the Tercentenary and earlier pageants highlights their profound ideological and aspirational differences. While The Romance of a People , We Will Never Die , and the Tercentenary pageants all fall into the pageantry category, utilizing particular features of narration, spectacle, anti-realism, and episodic structures, their similarities end with that. As Nathan’s pamphlet outlined, the Tercentenary pageants strove to integrate Jewish historical presence in the United States in the grander American narrative, therefore establishing loyal Jewish “Americanness” in the post-war period. Just as earlier American historical pageants, such as the 1914 Pageant and Masque of St. Louis, [64] aimed to create an optimistic future by crafting an idealized past, the Tercentenary pageants strove for the same goal. Conversely, The Romance of a People and We Will Never Die performed Jewish difference to assert their message, while the Tercentenary performed proudly assimilationist narratives. With communities permitted either to purchase ready-made scripts (offering titles such as Faith and Freedom , The Lamp of Liberty , and We Came to an Island [65] ) or to pen their own community-oriented pageants, towns and cities across America performed their own local renditions of American Jewish history. These pageants simultaneously asserted contemporary (and historical) Jewish presence alongside Jewish integrity and ingenuity throughout American history. The basic narrative entailed several narrators framing a number of short episodes that featured notable figures through introduction or initial verbal reenactment of the scene by the narrators. For example, the 1955 pageant, The Quilt , written by Mae Clement Perley for the Louisville, Kentucky Tercentenary celebration, includes episodes describing Jewish ties to Abraham Lincoln, community ties to Louis Brandeis, and dramatized peacemaking amongst Jews and the previous Native American dwellers of Kentucky, all being reenacted in order to educate two Louisville youth about their community’s illustrious history. [66] Highly didactic, the narrative of Jewish impact on American life and society is clear. Though specific to Kentucky history, Perley’s script bears strong resemblance to more generic pageant scripts available for purchase, written to be performed across the country, and available in formats either broad enough to suit any local setting, or able to be shaped to include local events and memories. The Golden Door , penned by Norman Corwin for the American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, is an example of the former, that could be tailored to any community and offered an American narrative, depicting a broad Jewish-American history. Featuring numerous short monologues from notable public figures attesting to positive Jewish-American presence, the script is comprised of short, didactic vignettes. Monologues are delivered from figures as diverse as George Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, Levi Strauss, and the voice of God, among many others. Another alternative was a that enabled portions of the play script to be personalized for local performances. This was the case of Faith and Freedom , written by Marc Siegal for the Tercentenary committee. The script is comprised of the same narrated episodic format, and attends to both local and nationwide Jewish-American history, even including a pre-written but optional scene, available for use if the community possessed an esteemed member who had been “an eyewitness to the growth of [the] Jewish community since 1880.” [67] If so, such a person could have been featured in a scene in conversation with the narrator, Dr. Goldman, as an integral part of the plot and pageant’s mission. This potential character, “Mr. Blank,” could deliver a monologue on the hardships of early Jewish settlement in the local area, including needing to move frequently as the Jewish neighborhoods changed. Additionally, the character emphasizes the increased community engagement and local involvement in the present time: “Around (blank year) we elected our first (name of public office), (name of person). There was real excitement when he won.” [68] Much like The Golden Door , This is Our Home , written by I. Goldberg and Yuri Suhl for the Committee for the 300 th Anniversary of Jewish Settlement in the U.S., similarly enabled personalization, though also incorporated Yiddish into the core script, with nearly 50% of dialogue in Yiddish. Unlike other Tercentenary pageant scripts, this suggests a different Jewish community, one in which assimilation had not entirely erased Yiddish-language usage, potentially indicating a more recently immigrated community audience and/or one more interested in maintaining a more visible Jewish presence in a secularizing nation. In spite of its Yiddish components, however, This is Our Home almost verbatim follows the formulaic model of incorporating a Jewish thread into known nationalistic, American narratives. With four episodes and voice-overs by Albert Einstein, Chaim Zhitlowsky, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the play begins with a rendition of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” followed by English and Yiddish preambles that echo each other’s statement of the shared heritage of American and Jewish-American beginnings. This performative tactic, which extends beyond the presentation of Jewish presence in early America, led to grander statements of Jewish exemplification of true American democratic ideals. This juncture was ripe for classic American pageantry techniques, “at the intersection of progressivism and antimodernism [that] placed nostalgic imagery in a dynamic, future-oriented reform context.” [69] As was the case with the two previous pageant moments, the Tercentenary responded to contemporary political conditions. Ultimately, while the American Jewish Tercentenary celebration seems to have aided the strengthening of Jewish public image in America, the festivities, tributes, and commemorations of 1954-55 were less frequently or substantially reported in newspapers and made a less significant mark on public memory. Unlike the earlier massive-scale pageants, the Jewish Tercentenary was about blending in to the standing American narrative, erasing radical associations, naturalizing patriotism and nationalist contributions, and asserting neighborliness. Politics of Pageants Each of the pageants we examine in this essay assert Jewish significance in their individual performances; either pushing toward redefining the group’s investment in broader Jewish issues, or by insisting upon Jewish importance in early and foundational American narratives. These pageants came about during such “times of crisis” in which the necessity of American interest and involvement in Jewishness needed to be emphasized, galvanized, and supported. [70] As previously discussed, each of these mid-century pageants did so in its own manner specific to the cultural and political contexts in which they emerged, but collectively they performed Jewishness in a broader American context and in that way similarly reinvented Jewish-Americanness in their respective decades. Furthermore, each performance discussed pageants as the appropriate mode of performance by building upon America’s long history of pageantry as a means for ethnic communities’ performed articulation and redefinition of their own hybrid identities. Pageants are both theatrically significant and historically situated. That is their purpose and their charm: they uncover the themes of a community and the challenges that are being faced. As performances, they attempt to persuade their audiences about those issues that are currently engaged. These three decades of pageants, produced at distinct historical moments, demonstrate that the idea of a “Jewish pageant”—or for that matter any pageant—must be contextualized. Even more than most forms of theatricality, the pageant attempts to inspire or to rouse a public that sees itself as belonging together and sharing common assumptions and desires. The pageant form is, in some sense, the most communal of all dramatic genres: this is true not only because of its massive production values, the fact that the performers are often members of the same community as the audience, and that the authors have deep local roots, but also because the themes and the morals build a sense of unity. The pageant provides a nexus of the study of theatre, history, and sociology. While these three mid-century Jewish-American pageants each present didactic accounts of ethnic history, they do so with markedly different agendas, each a presentation of and response to Jewish-American needs and interests at the time. Beginning with the start of the worldwide Jewish crisis in 1933 as Hitler took power in Germany and spanning through the post-war period of critical ethnic assimilation, each of these pageants served to both attract broad-scale interest through the mass-appeal of spectacle and sought to channel nationwide Jewish-American interest into a singular political performance (or set of performances), thereby powerfully enacting a desired outcome, from recognition to rescue to the reconstitution of Americaness. While each pageant utilized Jewish history and linked it to the present, each depended on a different set of values and historical events, shaping collective memory for specific purposes. For this reason, too, each pageant may itself offer fruitful insight into the moment in which it emerged. Because of their questionable literary authority and their focus on events of the moment, it is understandable that, unlike canonical drama, pageants will not be reprised over time, and, as a result, few scholars have focused on examples of the form as signals of current civic concerns and ethnic worries. These three Jewish-American pageants, however, demonstrate that such historically contingent productions have value as indicators of the state of society. The community provides a stage that these dramas fill. For all their local interest, pageants reveal the world. References [1] The authors thank Megan Geigner and Grace Overbeke for comments on an earlier version of this paper. [2] Earl Mullin, “Holiday Throng at Fair Nears Monday Record,” Chicago Daily Tribune (5 July 1933): 1. The current capacity is only 61,500. For the 1933 pageant, seating spilled from the stadium seating onto the stadium green, with makeshift seating filling the playing area all the way up to the stage. (Lauren Love, “Performing Jewish Nationhood: The Romance of a People at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair,” TDR: The Drama Review 55, no. 3 (2011): 61.) [3] Arthur A. Goren, The Politics and Public Culture of American Jews (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 196. [4] S. E. Wilmer, Theatre, Society, and the Nation: Staging American Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 108. [5] Esther Willard Bates, The Art of Producing Pageants (Walter H. Baker Company: Boston, 1925), 240. [6] Wilmer, Theatre, Society, and the Nation , 11. [7] David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 4. [8] Ibid., 4. [9] Richard M. Fried, The Russians Are Coming! The Russians are Coming!: Pageantry and Patriotism in Cold-War America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 122. [10] For reference, see Stephen J. Whitfield, “The Politics of Pageantry, 1936-1946,” American Jewish History 84, no. 3 (September, 1996): 221-250.; Robert Skloot, “We Will Never Die”: The Success and Failure of a Holocaust Pageant,” Theatre Journal 37, no. 2 (May, 1995): 167-180.; and Love, “Performing Jewish Nationhood,” 57-67. [11] Megan Geigner, “Performing the Polish-American patriot: civic performance and hyphenated identity in World War I Chicago,” Theatre History Studies 34 (2015): 59-78. [12] Martha S. LoMonaco, “Mormon Pageants as American Historical Performance,” Theatre Symposium 17 (2009): 69-83. [13] Ibid., 288. [14] Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 96, no.1, (1967): 1-21. [15] “The Romance of a People.” Official World’s Fair Weekly: A Century of Progress International Exposition Week Ending July 8 th (Chicago: The Cuneo Press Inc., 1933), 6. [16] Love, “Performing Jewish Nationhood,” 63. [17] Virginia Gardener, “Unseen Actors Supply Sound at Jewish Pageant: Sing, Play and Speak in Hidden Room,” Chicago Daily Tribune (4 July, 1933): 4. [18] Ibid., 6. [19] Garfield discusses the use of amplified sound in The Romance of the People in his article about the pageant, arguing that Van Grove’s use of amplification in this context was totally unique for theatrical performances in the US. “The ‘binaural, electro-acoustical system,’ as it was called, was a highly innovative sound set-up – probably the first public use in the United States of what has since come to be known as stereophonic sound.” David Garfield, “The Romance of a People,” Educational Theatre Journal 24, no. 4 (1972): 440. [20] James O’Donnell Bennett, “125,000 Witness Jewish Spectacle: Mighty Drama Traces History Back 4,000 Years; Climax of Jewry’s Day at Fair,” Chicago Daily Tribune (4 July, 1933): 2. [21] “The Romance of a People,” Official World’s Fair Weekly: A Century of Progress International Exposition , 6. [22] Ibid., 6. [23] Garfield, “The Romance of a People,” 436. [24] Ibid., 436. [25] S. J. Duncan-Clark, “Jewish ‘Romance of a People’ Kindles Thrill of Faith in 150,000 Spectators,” The Chicago Daily News (5 July, 1933). [26] Rev. John Evans, “Jewish pageant to depict 40 centuries of religion,” Chicago Daily Tribune (9 June, 1933): 10. [27] Ibid., 10. [28] Chicago Jewish Historical Society, “The Romance of a People” pageant program reprint from 1933 (Chicago: Chicago Jewish Historical Society, 2000), 1. [29] Ibid., 17. [30] Ibid., 18. [31] Liam T. A. Ford, Soldier Field: A Stadium and its City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 157. [32] Love, “Performing Jewish Nationhood,” 60. [33] Edward Moore, “Stage Effects at Jewish Fete to Make History: Lighting Arrangements to be Feature,” Chicago Daily Tribune (17 June, 1933): 6. [34] Chicago Jewish Historical Society, “The Romance of a People,” 18. [35] Moore, “Stage Effects at Jewish Fete to Make History,” 6. [36] Chicago Jewish Historical Society, “The Romance of a People,” 19. [37] While the Pageant program includes Exposition-wide advertisements, it also contains numerous “Jewish Day” specific advertisements and messages from sponsors. [38] Chicago Jewish Historical Society, “The Romance of a People,” 56. [39] Ford, Soldier Field: A Stadium and its City , 155. [40] While audience statistics are not known to be available, the sheer numbers of spectators that attended both events render ethnic and religious homogeneity highly unlikely. In the first performance, The Romance of a People performed in front of anywhere between 125,000 and 150,000 people, depending on the source. We Will Never Die performed before an estimated 15,000-20,000 (for the opening Chicago performance). Furthermore, We Will Never Die had a significant tour around the US, including a stop in Washington, DC, where President Roosevelt sent First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in his stead, as well as numerous cabinet, Supreme Court, and Congress members (See Medoff 2002). [41] We Will Never Die Official Program from Madison Square Garden 9 March, 1943 (New York: Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews, 1943), cover. [42] certainyl ESexecuted this through loosa, 2002.”ers in attendance that night included First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, all the way Rafael Medoff, Militant Zionism (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2002), 85. [43] Edward Barry, “Pageant Stirs 15,000 to Vow Jew Must Live,” Chicago Daily Tribune (20 May, 1943): 1. [44] Ibid., 1. [45] Ibid., 1. [46] Ben Hecht, We Will Never Die: A Memorial Dedicated to the 2,000,000 Jewish Dead of Europe Pageant Script (New York: Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews, 1943), 11. [47] The Jewish Day of Atonement. [48] Hecht, We Will Never Die, 11. [49] The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is generally considered to have begun on April 19, 1943. The original production of We Will Never Die occurred in New York on March 9 th prior to the start of the Uprising, as did the Washington DC performance on April 12 th , but Hecht later incorporated an additional scene entitled “The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto,” which was performed in Los Angeles on July 21, 1943. The date written in the script for the start of the uprising was March 17, 1943 (Hecht, We Will Never Die , 29). [50] Ibid., 39. [51] Ibid., 39. [52] Whitfield, “The Politics of Pageantry, 1936-1946,” 239. The Committee for a Jewish Army had been proposed by the Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky, and was designed to create a fighting force against Hitler, but which would also support the aspiration for a Jewish-led Palestine. [53] Ibid., 239. [54] Ibid., 251. [55] Aaron Beim and Gary Alan Fine, “The Cultural Frameworks of Prejudice: Reputational Images of the Postwar Disjuncture of Jews and Communism,” The Sociological Quarterly 48, no. 3 (2007): 376. [56] On the larger-end of cast size, Chicago’s main Tercentenary pageant featured 1,000 performers, compared to The Romance of a People ’s 3,500. [57] David De Sola Pool, Planning for the Tercentenary of the Settlement of the Jews in the United States in 1954-55 (New York: American Jewish Historical Society, 1950). [58] Beim and Fine, “The Cultural Frameworks of Prejudice,” 375. [59] De Sola Pool, Planning for the Tercentenary of the Settlement of the Jews in the United States in 1954-55 , 414. [60] Judith Friedman Rosen, “In Search of… Earlier American Jewish Anniversary Celebrations: 1905 and 1954,” American Jewish History 92, no. 4 (2004): 481. [61] American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, Exercises in the celebration of the Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Settlement of the Jews in the United States, 1655-1905 original pamphlet reprint (New York: American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, 1954). [62] Adele Gutman Nathan, Producing Tercentenary Pageants (New York: American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, 1954), 7. [63] Nathan mentions a single Jewish themed pageant/play from wartime, The Eternal Road (1937), though only to use it as an example of what not to do: don’t use “canned music” (Ibid., 9). [64] “St. Louis officials desperately sought to present a different civic image to the nation. They felt that a successful historical pageant would not only cleanse the city’s tarnished reputation nationwide, but also advance a single civic identity around which the various people sand classes could rally to enact reforms at home.” Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry , 159-60. [65] Listed in American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, Program Materials for the American Jewish Tercentenary (New York: American Jewish Tercentenary Committee, 1954). [66] Mae [Maie] Clement Perley, The Quilt (Louisville: Jewish Tercentenary Committee of the Conference of Jewish Organizations, December 1954). Written for presentation in Louisville on March 8, 1955. [67] Marc Siegel, Faith and Freedom: A Dramatic Presentation (New York: American Jewish Tercentenary, 1954), 20. [68] Ibid., 21. [69] Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry , 5. [70] Wilmer, Theatre, Society, and the Nation , 11 Footnotes About The Author(s) Rachel Merrill Moss is a doctoral candidate in the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama at Northwestern University and a 2018-2019 Fulbright grantee to Poland. While earning her MA in Theatre History and Criticism from CUNY Brooklyn College, she worked in New York as a theatre critic and dramaturg. Rachel has presented work at the American Society for Theatre Research, Association for Theatre in Higher Education, and the Polish-Jewish Studies Working Group. Gary Alan Fine is James E. Johnson Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University, a member of the faculty of the Interdisciplinary Program in Theatre and Drama, and a former theatre critic. He is the author of numerous articles and book, including most recently, Talking Art: The Culture of Practice and the Practice of Culture in MFA Education . He writes extensively on reputations and scandals in art worlds and in politics. 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