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Brian Eugenio Herrera Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 27 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Best Actor for the Role, or the Mythos of Casting in American Popular Performance Brian Eugenio Herrera By Published on April 23, 2015 Download Article as PDF Casting — the process whereby actors are assigned to particular roles — has largely eluded historical and theoretical inquiry. Casting’s iterative impact lends it a peculiar ephemerality. Once a role is cast, the complex array of criteria informing that decision — not only the methods and techniques of talent assessment but also the interpersonal dynamics, rumors, reputations, and “business” considerations — recedes in importance as the work of performance-making ostensibly begins. Indeed, despite its inarguable centrality in the performance-making project, the inevitably idiosyncratic sequence of events that comprise the process of how this or that actor did (or did not) get the part routinely evades the archive. I contend that such archival evasions are enabled by what we might call a “mythos of casting,” a constellation of interconnected beliefs and assumptions that have evolved within American popular performance over the last century or so. This “mythos of casting” cloaks within mystery the historical practices – by turns material, creative and proprietary – that guide how an actor’s labor is (and is not) valued as a commodity. This “mythos of casting” simultaneously provides ideological rationale for the acknowledged inequities in the allocation of the paid and unpaid labor of actors while also sustaining faith that the apparatus of casting can (and sometimes actually does) work to identify the “best” actor for a given role. The “mythos of casting” also guides most academic conversations about casting, which typically operate within one of three discursive modes: the logistical, the (non) traditional, and the mystical.[1] Logistical discourses of casting might be found most frequently on the “practice” side of the theory-practice divide in theatre studies, with conversations about how to audition (or how to run auditions) eliciting conversation and study in the acting studio, the production meeting, or the rehearsal hall. Such discussions, and the written works engaging them, typically rehearse, explicate or strategize the nuances of disparate audition structures, and are often guided by the premise of “entering the profession.”[2] Traditional — or, more aptly, “Non-Traditional” — discussions emphasize how casting operates as a mode of what scholar Angela Pao calls “both social action and artistic exploration” in which the assignment of a particular actor to a role might “dislodge established modes of perceiving,” perhaps especially with regard to the enactment of cultural identity in performance.[3] Both the logistical and non-traditional discourses of casting prioritize how practitioners might intervene in casting’s machinery to achieve particular ends. By contrast, the third discourse of casting, perhaps the most ubiquitous of the three, fixates on casting as an almost mystical process that defies easy explanation. Such “mystical” accounts arrive in a variety of formulations but always with a fascination for a kind of magic at play within casting decisions. Some such accounts emphasize the “special sight” of creative intuition wherein an ineffable mix of circumstance, luck and discernment combine to guide the director (or teacher, or casting director, or whoever) to the inspired insight that a particular actor is “right” for the role. Often responding to what Joseph Roach describes as “the easy to perceive but hard to define quality possessed by abnormally interesting people” sometimes referred to as “it,”[4] this response informs an inspired confidence like that described by producer Arthur Hornblow recalling his casting Marilyn Monroe in her first featured film role, “As soon as we saw her we knew she was the one.”[5] Other mystical accounts proffer casting as a kind of alchemical mastery, usually on the part of the genius director, in which art manifests from a deftly assembled configuration of actors. As film director John Frankenheimer famously quipped “casting is 65% the battle.” Director Martin Scorsese later upped the ante, noting that “More than 90 percent of directing is the right casting,” while a recent textbook Fundamentals of Film Directing offered a more conservative assessment, noting that “Casting is 50% of the director’s work.”[6] Casting’s mystical discourses also take fantasy form in the myriad speculative fictions spun within the “what if” scenarios rehearsed in discussions of “miscasting.” From sensational lists like “12 Actors Who Almost Had the Part” and “What If? ‘Pulp Fiction’ Near-Miss Casting” to entire books dedicated to Hollywood’s All-Time Worst Casting Blunders, the fantastic genre of the “what if” casting tale stands among the most recurring in popular performance lore. [7] Most mystical discourses of casting, however, fixate upon the moment an actor is assigned a role as the signal moment wherein the magic of performance is conjured. Indeed, while logistical and non-traditional discourses of casting propose strategic interventions into the casting process, mystical discourses instead marvel at the ineffability of casting, fetishize the shrouds of secrecy that sustain casting’s unknowable mysteries, and wonder at the transformative power summoned by whoever happens to be the one deciding which actor is to become the role. Mystical discourses of casting hint that mere mortals can never truly know why this or that actor got the part and imply that occasional peeks behind the casting curtain will only ever reveal a partial story. These mystical discourses suggest that some greater power is at work in both the methods and madnesses of casting, and that ours is not to wonder why. The many mysteries of casting might explain why the topic of casting remains so captivating to so many. Indeed, casting’s purported unknowability — that no one can never truly know how casting happens — incites the most passionate conversations about the process, whether in speculative games about who would be better in the role, or in moments of aesthetic outrage (or schadenfreude) over miscasting, or in impassioned outbursts of sometimes politicized fervor within critiques of incidents of exploitation, exclusion or unfairness in casting. Yet, even in such incisive and searching conversations, most assessments of casting controversies resolve with shrugging demurrals or simple judgments of the sort proffered by the author of one best-selling theatre appreciation textbook, who writes “There is good casting and bad casting and, of course, there is also inspired casting.”[8] The persistence of some version of this reductive good/bad/inspired matrix in even the most sophisticated conversations about casting might well reflect some awareness of the many interpersonal, proprietary, and contractual complexities that all factor into the invisible calculus guiding any casting decision. (Can anyone inside or outside the process ever really, truly or fully know why someone got a part?) Even so, this recurring fixation places too much emphasis on casting’s unknowability (its “mystery”) with too little attention to the power at play in any casting decision. As the default resolution for any and every conversation about casting, the good/bad/inspired matrix both sustains the mysterious power of casting even as it also contributes to the ongoing mystification of the material practices of casting — the mechanisms, techniques and assumptions routing the process to that final casting decision — rendering such practices beyond the archive and thus exempt from historical analysis. To discern casting’s archive and thus evince its history, performance historians and theorists might explicate the three principles most routinely invoked to explain, excuse or justify the capricious operations of the casting apparatus: equitable access to opportunity, artistic autonomy, and meritocratic achievement. Over the last century or so, these contradictory premises have come to operate in dynamic tension as a “mythos of casting,” which simultaneously sustains creative faith in the capacity of the casting apparatus to identify the best actor for a given role even as it cloaks the material practices of casting in mystery. As I take up each of these principles — equity, artistry, meritocracy — in turn below, I briefly detail how each principle guided the formation of the contemporary repertoire of casting practices as I also chart the enduring conceptual contours of the “mythos of casting.” Equity The peculiar notion that casting should be fair appears to have emerged from two distinctively twentieth century points of origin. On the one hand, the growing power of actor unions within the industries capitalizing on American popular performance amplified particular questions of equity. On the other, the extraordinary and rapid expansion of educational theatre programs at the secondary, post-secondary and pre-professional level intensified concerns about access. Over time, the belief that the casting process should be equitably accessible to all eligible or deserving performers became one of the guiding ideals of the American casting process and a foundational tenet of the mythos of casting. Concerns about fair and equitable access instigated the formation of actor unions in the United States in the nineteenth century, as producers started to hire actors to “play as cast” for only a particular production (and often without guarantee of compensation for rehearsals, truncated runs, or special wardrobes and skills). Worried that they might be shut out of their seasonal “lines of business” employment, professional actors agitated to protect their access to secure employment opportunities. As these nascent actor unions continued to fight for recognition in the early twentieth century (in both the theatre and in the emerging film industry), their organizing efforts shifted from equitable employment access and toward working conditions, wage scales and enforceability of contracts, concerns which animated the historic Actors’ Equity Association [AEA] strike in 1919.[9] In the decades that immediately followed AEA’s 1919 victory, concerns about equitable access to employment did occasionally reassert themselves within the union, perhaps most fractiously in the Depression years with the 1934 formation of the Actors’ Forum (an ad hoc pressure group of member actors who sought cooperative benefits and a minimum wage for all members) and the 1935-39 operation of the Federal Theatre Project (which rankled union leadership by employing non-union actors).[10] Yet it was not until the post-World War II years, and amidst growing national concerns about civil rights and desegregation, however, that actor unions – in what one historian has called a “gradual politicization”[11] – reasserted their inceptive investment in equitable access to employment. During the 1940s and 1950s, subcommittees within all the major actor unions began to advocate for fair and equitable access to employment opportunities for minority union members, especially actors of African descent. Through initiatives like the Negro Employment Committee in the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the Committee on Negro Integration in the Theatre in Actors’ Equity Association (AEA), these committees gathered and published data about the number and kind of roles available to minority actors, rehearsing and deploying strategies of advocacy that endure to this day.[12] Activist actors also, through such endeavors as AEA’s Integration Showcase (staged in 1959), argued for and demonstrated casting techniques that modeled ways of hiring actors of African descent for roles not specifically written with a black actor in mind.[13] This work by actor advocates within their unions in the 1940s and 1950s anticipated the work of AEA’s Non-Traditional Casting Project (which reanimated the premise of the Integrated Casting Committee by expanding it to also include Latina/o, Asian American, and Native American actors, as well as disabled actors).[14] This practice of assembling data and insisting that industrial casting norms adapt to rank and file realities also animated the institution of the “open audition.” The practice of the “open audition” was instituted in the 1970s to insure that all union (or union eligible) actors had access to at least one general audition for every production (or producing season) undertaken under union contract. Even though these “open call” auditions have often come over time to be regarded by many as cumbersome and hollow rituals of union compliance, the institutionalization of the open call, as well as the actor union advocacy that compelled it, not only derived from but also fortified a foundational ideal within the mythos of casting – that equitable and transparent access to the casting apparatus benefitted all actors. While midcentury actor unions worked within the entertainment industry for equitable access to opportunity for professional actors, the massive expansion of educational theater programs that boomed in high schools, universities and pre-professional training programs in the post-World War II era exerted an even more substantial influence on the idea that the casting process should be fair. Yet, in the 1940s and 1950s, no consensus existed among theatre educators about how to balance the competing priorities of fairness, efficiency and quality when assigning roles in a school or community setting. Most midcentury theatre educators advocated for some version of “tryouts.” The 1948 Play Production Primer (published in 1951 by the Mutual Improvement Association of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) defined the “tryout” as “a method of selecting talent for a cast. Either parts read from the play, or [a] display of general ability.”[15] In the spring of 1948, a series of short essays in Dramatics Magazine (then a publication addressing both high school and university theatre programs) discussed a striking array of “tryout” strategies. Some, like Blandford Jennings of Missouri’s Clayton High School, instructed students to “come prepared to read anything of their choice for a minute or two” because “reading at sight from an unfamiliar text is no fair indication of the true ability of a young reader.”[16] Others, like Esther McCabe of New York’s Salamanca High School, approached the casting of a play as “a lesson in democracy, reliability and human relationships” and assigned roles by student vote, subsequent to a full reading and discussion of the play.[17] Sam Boyd of West Virginia University affirmed the merits of “competitive reading tryouts” for their “spirit” and the “salubrious, unprejudiced attitude” they encouraged,[18] while Carnegie Mellon’s Talbot Pearson scoffed at even trying to select a single best practice. “There are so many methods of trying out the available players,” Talbot insisted, “that no rules can safely be applied” and “to list the dozen or more differing approaches would serve no practical purpose.”[19] Perhaps notably, none of these educators used the word “audition” to describe their preferred casting method. Where the word “audition” does appear with some frequency at midcentury is in the advocacy work of organizations like the American Theatre Wing and Theatre Communications Group, especially as such emerging, non-commercial but professional organizations explained their affiliation with professional training programs. For Isadora Bennett, the publicity director of the American Theatre Wing from the later 1940s through much of the 1950s, the audition represented the most effective point of connection between the professional theatre and those aspiring actors emerging from university and other training programs (like the American Theatre Wing’s own Professional Training School which enrolled hundreds of students at the time, most under the GI Bill). In a widely referenced 1955 essay published in Educational Theatre Journal, Bennett affirmed the importance of centralized auditions for “trained” actors so that such actors might be introduced to what she termed the “machinery of casting” and “the ‘technique’ of job-hunting.”[20] For Bennett, such auditions — in which aspiring professional actors might offer a concentrated display of their ability using brief, prepared excerpts from well-regarded plays — promised to serve as “aptitude tests given by warm and friendly but severe experts.” By the end of the 1950s, the idea that a concentrated and pre-prepared demonstration of aptitude before a panel of experts might be the most efficient means of talent assessment had begun to circulate more broadly and had begun to be termed an “audition.” In 1964, Michael Mabry — then the Executive Secretary of the fledgling Theatre Communications Group (TCG) — advocated for the institutionalization of a national audition, to be held annually in Chicago, as the most effective means of “keeping visible on a national scale” all American actors, not only those actors based in New York or Los Angeles but also those “committed…to seasonal employment with resident companies” while also including the “outstanding graduates of educational theatre.”[21] Thus, the significant midcentury influence of actor unions, in tandem with the rise of the educational theatre industrial complex, rehearsed the perhaps incongruous but nonetheless deeply entrenched notion that casting should be fair, and thereby also anchored the ideal of equity as a central tenet within the mythos of casting. Artistry Still, at play in every conversation about providing equitable access to actors, the mythos of casting also activates the question of whose authority guides the assignment of actor to role. For the actor, the casting process is their opportunity “to be cast” in a production and thus be given the equitable opportunity to work; for the one doing the casting, however, the casting process can take on additional valences of creative authorship, artistic autonomy and freedom of expression. In his genre-defining college textbook Introduction to the Theatre (1954), Frank Whiting of the University of Minnesota argued for the “executive ability” of the director: “Many factors must be considered in casting [and] many systems of tryout have been evolved, ranging from well-rehearsed, memorized scenes to informal interviews. None are perfect. All have advantages and disadvantages.”[22] Most educators publishing in Dramatics through the 1950s agreed that the directorial discernment should balance the pedagogic and artistic ambitions in a school production and that such judgment should remain the primary guide the final assignment of actor to role. Even Esther McCabe, whose proposed model of electoral casting marked the most dramatic departure, affirmed that she as director “reserved the right to change an unsuitable choice” once the election results were tallied.[23] Toward the end of his career, iconic theatre director Harold Clurman saw few artistic merits, for either actor or director, in the midcentury turn toward what he called the “absurd” and “arduous” "'open market' method of casting" in American theatre.[24] Such critiques of the American casting apparatus had been foundational in Clurman’s theatrical philosophy since the late 1920s, when “he prophesied that ‘immediate future of the theatre is in the actor,’ who must reject ‘type-casting’ for ‘long painful self-training.’” In co-founding the influential Group Theatre, Clurman sought a permanent ensemble company in which there would be only small parts and no star actors. Within a decade, however, the challenges of casting proved an unexpected drag on the galvanizing vision of the Group Theatre’s ensemble structure, as the number interested actors persistently far exceeded the available roles. The situation inspired Clurman to exclaim, in 1939, “Every piece of casting in the Group is a tragedy.”[25] Even so, several decades later, in his widely taught 1972 memoir of the craft On Directing, Clurman maintained his faith in the transformative potential of the ensemble as he drew unfavorable comparisons between the atomizing mechanisms of American casting (in which the actor worked as a freelancer, playing only as cast) and those used by the permanent repertory companies of Europe. Because "the American theatre has no such companies,” Clurman railed, “We proceed on the basis of 'piecework': for every new production an entirely new cast must be found - somehow, somewhere.” He continued, “The main business of casting [in the United States] is accomplished by means of auditions or readings," which Clurman characterized as "a species of theatrical shopping" wherein the actor is "reduced to a commodity and gradually comes to regard himself in that light."[26] Clurman’s contemporary and sometime colleague Elia Kazan also disliked the American casting apparatus. When asked by an interviewer about his preference for prepared auditions or cold readings, the director retorted, “I don’t do it that way. Well, sometimes I do, if it’s for a bit, but… [it] usually gets you misinformation.”[27] Where Kazan dismissed the American casting apparatus for its ineffectiveness, Clurman disdained its disruption of the creative process and its imposition of artificial, inhumane and confining limits on the artistic autonomy of the director. By so emphasizing the intangible authority of creative and executive discernment as essential to directorial autonomy, Clurman and Kazan, alongside their less famous educational counterparts, also mystified casting a constitutive and sacrosanct feature of a director’s artistic expression. By the 1990s, however, the question of whether such casting decisions were an independent expression of a performance-maker’s creative authority garnered a different measure of critique. High-profile casting controversies (like that surrounding the 1991 Broadway production of Miss Saigon) amplified how “traditional” casting habits rehearsed by the “open market” impinged upon employment opportunities available to minority and women performers. Legal scholars Jennifer L. Sheppard, Heekyung Esther Kim and Russell K. Robinson each separately examined whether a hypothetical plaintiff might challenge a particular casting decision as employment discrimination under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which held, in part, that employer prerogative was inadequate justification for favoring one identifiable group over another in matters hiring; in tandem, the scholars also assessed whether casting decisions might be considered protected speech under the First Amendment. Though their discussions remained in emphatically hypothetical (especially given the tricky and unresolved legal question of whether entertainers were rightly considered employees under federal law), all three scholars agreed that any legal challenge to a casting decision under employment law would certainly confront (and likely fail) the test of whether a director’s or producer’s casting decision might be considered a form of creative expression and, thus, a form of protected speech. For Russell K. Robinson, “our constitutional commitment to free speech does not exact a wholesale abandonment of antidiscrimination requirements,”[28] while both Kim and Sheppard advocated for voluntary shifts in casting practice and aesthetics so that, as Sheppard concluded, “employment opportunities for minority actors may be increased, while artistic freedom is preserved.”[29] (283). Thus, as casting became increasingly understood as a constitutive feature of a theatre-maker’s creative expression, claims of artistic authority, autonomy and freedom also animated the mythos of casting in American popular performance. Meritocracy The “open market” of American casting, which Isadora Bennett so celebrated and which Harold Clurman so loathed, was itself premised on the third core principle of the mythos of casting: meritocracy. Indeed, embedded in the mythos of casting is the promise that equitable access to the casting process permits the best performers to be seen, thereby presumptively enabling directors, producers and others to identify those performers best equipped to execute their artistic vision. Underlying this promise lay the ideal that, if the flow of supply and demand could be effectively marshaled, the best actor would certainly get the role. Indeed, this meritocratic ideal — matching the best actor to the role — bridged the democratizing impulse of equitable access to casting opportunities with the discerning exactitude of artistic autonomy. But even such an emphasis on finding the “best actor” for the role was itself a noteworthy, twentieth century turn. It is an intriguing historical coincidence then that the same years that remake the American casting process as something of an “open market” also mark the arrival of several high profile contests in which the notion of “best actor” falls into particular relief within the American entertainment industries. Beginning with the Oscars in the 1920s (continuing with the Tonys in the 1940s, the Obies in the 1950s and all the way through SAG’s “The Actor” in the 1990s), these notably ritualized, annual anointings of actors as “the best” emerge as a peculiarly hallmark facet of American popular performance. To be sure, competitions among actors were not an innovation of the twentieth century, with stories reaching all the way back to the acting competitions in fifth century Athens. Even so, most previous historical contestations among actors — whether between La Clairon and Madame Dumesnil in eighteenth century Paris or between Forrest and Macready in the New York of 1848 — also staged a contestation over distinctions of region, social class, aesthetics, and philosophy, with the embodied work of actors manifesting those particular divisions. Yet, in these twentieth century American contest, this multitude of best actors are so named not for enacting cultural values but for the cultural value of enactment itself. These many annual rituals also verify the meritocratic ideal of “best actor” that animates the American casting process. Within the mythos of casting, the anointing of “best actor” connects all segments in the great theatrical chain of being, drawing a connection between the tween actor pretending in her bedroom to the acclaimed icon accepting her trophy in a glittering televised ceremony. Arriving as a sort of post-dramatic conclusion to the ostensible performance, every “best actor” award tacitly ratifies the effective (and largely hidden) operation of a casting mechanism that first delivered this particular actor to the very role that then earned them the honorific of “best actor.” The “best actor” trophy then stands as a tangibly material symbol of the twined ideals of equity, artistry and meritocracy that mutually constitute the mythos of casting in American popular performance. The mythos of casting might be invoked to sustain aspiring artists in the leanest times; likewise, it might be summoned to sustain a perhaps illusory sense of affinity amidst a casting controversy. Even among those who maintain diametrically opposed points of view over the best way to determine who the best actor for the role might be, the mythos of casting affirms that the quest for the best actor remains an ideal worth pursuing. At once a lubricant and a palliative, as much a weapon as it is a shield, the mythos of casting works to provide assurance not only that there is a method to the madness of the casting process but also that the machinery of casting works. All the while, the mythos of casting continues to accomplish its primary purpose – to mystify the actual working conditions of actors, especially as they labor to find work. Brian Eugenio Herrera’s work examines the history of gender, sexuality and race within and through popular performance. He is author of Latin Numbers: Playing Latino in 20th Century US Popular Performance (Michigan) and The Latina/o Theatre Commons 2013 National Convening: A Narrative Report (HowlRound), as well as articles in Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, and TDR. Herrera is presently developing a scholarly history of casting in American entertainment. He is Assistant Professor of Theater at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts. [1] A noteworthy and productive departure from this pattern can be found in Daniel Banks, “The Welcome Table: Casting for an Integrated Society,” Theatre Topics 23 no. 1 (March 2013), 1-18. [2] The pioneering template of this genre is Michael Shurtleff’s Audition: Everything an Actor Needs to Know to Get the Part (New York: Walker Publishing, 1978); a more contemporary model might be Jen Rudin’s Confessions of a Casting Director: Help Actors Land Any Role with Secrets from Inside the Audition Room (New York: It Books, 2013). [3] Angela Chia-yi Pao, No Safe Spaces: Re-casting Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in American Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 2. [4] Joseph Roach, It (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 1. [5] Claire Boothe Luce, “The ‘Love Goddess’ Who Never Found Any Love,” LIFE Magazine (August 7, 1964), 64. [6] Stephen B. Armstrong, ed., John Frankenheimer: Interviews, Essays, and Profiles (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013): 89; as quoted in Casting By, directed by Tom Donahue (2013; Brooklyn, NY: First Run Features, 2014), DVD; and David K. Irving, Fundamentals of Film Directing (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publishing, 2010), 30. [7] Treye Greene, “12 Actors Who Almost Had the Part,” Huffington Post, 24 January 2013, accessed 5 December 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/24/actors-recast-in-movies_n_2543452.html; David Weiner, “What If? ‘Pulp Fiction’ Near-Miss Casting,” ET Online, 13 November 2013, accessed 5 December 2014, http://www.etonline.com/movies/140840_What_If_Pulp_Fiction_Near_Miss_Casting/; and Damien Bona, Starring John Wayne as Genghis Khan: Hollywood’s All-Time Worst Casting Blunders (New York: Citadel Press, 1996). [8] Robert Cohen, Theatre, 5th Edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005), 535. [9] For usefully comparative summaries of early twentieth century actor union activity, see Sean P. Holmes, “All Work or No Play: Key Themes in the History of the American Stage Actor as Worker,” European Journal of American Studies 2 (2008), online; and Pamela Robertson Wojcik, “Typecasting.” Criticism 45 no. 2 (Spring 2003), 225-26. For an aptly detailed narrative account of the 1919 AEA strike and its impact on the union, see Robert Simonson’s Performance of the Century: 100 Years of Actors’ Equity Association and the Rise of Professional American Theater (Applause: New York, 2012), especially 14-61. [10] An efficient overview of AEA’s conflicts with both the Actors’ Forum and the Federal Theatre Project can be found in the epilogue to Sean P. Holmes, Weavers of Dreams, Unite!: Actors’ Unionism in Early Twentieth-Century America (University if Illinois Press: Urbana, 2013), 173-178. See also Simonson, 72-73. [11] Holmes (2013), 177. [12] Stephen Vaughn, Ronald Reagan and the Struggle for Black Dignity in Cinema, 1937-1953, The Journal of Negro History 77 no. 1 (Winter 1992), 8-9; “Committee on the Integration of the Negro in the Theatre,” Box 36 Folder 1, Actors Equity Association Records, Tamiment Library/Wagner Archives, Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, New York University. See also the “Equality” chapter in Robert Simonson’s Performance of the Century, 44-173. [13] “‘Integrated Showcase’ Well Performed, but Did Show Prove Its Point?,” Variety (22 April 1959): 78, 82; “Orson Bean Rebuts on ‘Integration’; Says Race Consciousness Is Brief,” Variety (29 April 1959), 69-74. [14] See Angela Pao’s account in tandem with that of Ana Deboo’s briefer summary in, "The Non-Traditional Casting Project Continues into the '90s," The Drama Review 34 no.4 (Winter 1990), 188-191. [15] Play Production Primer: A Handbook for the Beginner or the Experienced Drama Director and All Who Are Curious About That Alluring World Behind the Footlights, Revised Edition. (Salt Lake City, UT: General Boards of the Mutual Improvement Association, 1948),185. [16] Blandford Jennings, “Rehearsing the School Play,” Dramatics Magazine (March 1948), 9-10. [17] Esther McCabe, “Casting One-Acts in a Small High School,” Dramatics Magazine (February 1948), 13. [18] Sam Boyd, Jr. “Techniques of Play Rehearsal,” Dramatics Magazine (April 1948), 6-7. [19] Talbot Pearson, “Rehearsal Procedures,” Dramatics Magazine (May 1948), 6-7. [20] Isadora Bennett, “The Training Program of the American Theatre Wing,” Educational Theatre Journal 7:1 (March 1955), 32. [21] Qtd. in Richard Schechner, “Ford, Rockefeller, and Theatre,” The Tulane Drama Review 10:1 (Autumn 1965), 35. [22] Frank M. Whiting, An Introduction to the Theatre (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1954), 157. [23] McCabe, 13. [24] These quotations are drawn, variously, from Harold Clurman, On Directing (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 65-68. [25] Helen Krich Chinoy, The Group Theatre: Passion, Politics and Performance in the Depression Era (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 14, 252. [26] Harold Clurman, On Directing (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 65-68. [27] Elia Kazan, Kazan on Film: The Master Director Discusses His Films, ed. Jeff Young (New York: Newmarket Press, 2001), 130-131. [28] Russell K. Robinson, “Casting and Caste-ing: Reconciling Artistic Freedom and Antidiscrimination Norms,” California Law Review 95, no. 1 (2007), 4. [29] Heekyung Esther Kim, “Race as a Hiring/Casting Criterion: If Laurence Olivier was Rejected for the Role of Othello in Othello, Would He Have a Valid Title VII Claim?” Hastings Communication and Entertainment Law Journal 20 (1997-1998), 397-419; and Jennifer L. Sheppard, “Theatrical Casting – Discrimination or Artistic Freedom?,” Columbia-VLA Journal of Law the Arts 15 (1990-1991), 267. "The Best Actor for the Role or the Mythos of Casting in American Popular Performance" by Brian Eugenio Herrera ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 27, Number 2 (Spring 2015) ©2015 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center 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: Phoebe Rumsey Editorial Assistant: Fabian Escalona Advisory Board: Bill Demastes Amy E. Hughes Jorge Huerta Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Beth Osborne Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Esther Kim Lee Table of Contents "The Best Actor for the Role, or the Mythos of Casting in American Popular Performance" by Brian Eugenio Herrera "Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men" by Kee-Yoon Nahm "Capable Hands: The Myth of American Independence in D.W. Gregory's The Good Daughter" by Bradley Stephenson "Rooting Out Historical Mythologies; or, William Dunlap's A Trip to Niagara and its Sophisticated Nineteenth Century Audience" by Samuel Shanks www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director ©2015 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction (JADT 27.2, 2015) The Best Actor for the Role, or the Mythos of Casting in American Popular Performance Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men Capable Hands: The Myth of American Independence in D.W. Gregory's The Good Daughter Rooting Out Historical Mythologies; William Dunlap’s A Trip to Niagara and its Sophisticated Nineteenth Century Audience. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Derek R. Munson Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 1 Visit Journal Homepage New York's Yiddish Theater Derek R. Munson By Published on December 11, 2017 Download Article as PDF New York’s Yiddish Theater: From the Bowery to Broadway. Edna Nahshon, ed. New York: Columbia University Press in association with the Museum of the City of New York, 2016; Pp. 237. New York’s Yiddish Theater: From the Bowery to Broadway is a collection of thirteen scholarly articles edited and introduced by Edna Nahshon, professor of Jewish theatre and drama at the Jewish Theological Seminary and a senior associate at Oxford University’s Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. Written to complement a recent exhibit of the same name at the Museum of the City of New York, this accessible work successfully combines scholarship and art to form a captivating portrait of the American Yiddish theatre and early twentieth-century American Yiddish culture. Creatively rendered and chockfull of photographs, drawings, and ephemera—a scholarly coffee table book, if you will— New York’s Yiddish Theater is a feast for the eyes and senses and is, in this age of e-books and digital media, a reminder of the authority and beauty of print books. Nahshon argues that Yiddish theatre in the United States emerged from the unexpected collaborations of uptown-downtown German Jews and the Yiddish culture of Eastern European Jews, while the Romanian origins of the first Yiddish theatre is credited to Abraham Goldfaden. His traveling players of commedia dell’arte-style skits soon grew into lavish operas such as The Witch (1879), a classic of the Jewish repertory. Once Goldfaden’s acting troupe landed in the U.S., extravagant stages were quickly built in and around New York’s Lower East Side, thereby becoming home to the Yiddish theatre movement that eventually migrated uptown and—later in the century—onto Broadway. Nahshon cleverly divides the work into multiple sections, similar to a playbill program, setting the stage in the Overture for the subsequent acts/essays written by other notable scholars. She also includes an intermission/portrait gallery and a Gallery of Stars, which functions as an annotation of Yiddish luminaries from the era. In addition to Nahma Sandrow’s “Popular Yiddish Theater” and Edward Portnoy’s “Yiddish Puppet Theater,” Barbara Henry provides a compelling historical and critical analysis of “Jacob Gordin: The Great Reformer” who, in addition to adapting Shakespeare into The Jewish King Lear , was also the first writer to adapt a Yiddish play into English, The Kreutzer Sonata . Nahshon and Judith Thissen discuss “Yiddish Vaudeville” and its influence on burlesque and the powerful legacy of Jews during the early days of Hollywood. The success of notable contemporary artists like Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, and Bette Middler are tied to the Yiddish theatre. One of the spotlight segments features an unpublished survey from the 1932-33 Yiddish theatre season, listing 185 different Yiddish language productions. The season was represented by 155 professional actors in melodramas, operettas, comedies, and reviews. However, after World War II the Yiddish theatre suffered from a steady drop in attendance, and as American entertainment choices shifted from stage to Hollywood, the Yiddish theatre declined and eventually faded into obscurity. A persuasive thematic argument runs through the collection suggesting that Yiddish entertainment is synonymous with American entertainment, and nowhere is this more evident than in Alisa Solomon’s essay about Fiddler on the Roof , “Tevye’s Travels: From Yiddish Everyman to American Icon.” Opening with Al Hirschfeld’s iconic caricature of the Broadway production starring Zero Mostel, Solomon traces the seventy-year genesis of the story of Tevye, from its inception by beloved Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem to its record-breaking Broadway run and its status as an American classic. Tevye the milk-man, or Tevye der milkhiker, and his family appeared in numerous Yiddish stories from 1894 through 1914 during which time Aleichem’s writing found a global audience. Tevye’s struggles to survive in a cruel motherland, where he is not wanted, spoke to a generation of European Jews, and Aleichem’s stories were eventually embraced in the U.S. After two failed attempts as musicals, Aleichem’s stories found a home at the Yiddish Art Theatre and later as a successful 1939 film. English language adaptations followed and finally, in 1964, the creative team of Joseph Stein, Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick, and Jerome Robbins created a labor of love known by millions of theatregoers as Fiddler on the Roof . What began as a popular anthologized Yiddish story is now embedded in popular American culture, and Aleichem’s Tevye is an everyman for the ages. A distinctive feature of the collection, and one that sets it apart from Joel Berkowitz and Barbara Henry’s recent case book, Inventing the Modern Yiddish Stage: Essays in Drama, Performance, and Show Business , is the book’s visual inventiveness. New York’s Yiddish Theater is filled with beautiful architectural renderings, historical photographs and drawings, and spotlight sections featuring pivotal moments in Yiddish theatre, such as Sholem Asch’s controversial God of Vengeance (1923). Sholem’s play is one of the first early twentieth century plays to look at same-sex attraction and was newly reimagined by Paula Vogel in Indecent (2015). However, it is the entire package that makes the collection such a special work and opens the door to additional historical and theatrical scholarship. As outlined in this collection, one needs very little background in American or Jewish American theatre history to appreciate the social complexities and dynamics of the Yiddish theatre movement. From its humble Eastern European beginnings and its immense popularity in the United States, to its influences on contemporary pop culture, the Yiddish theatre is embedded in American art and life. New York’s Yiddish Theater: From the Bowery to Broadway is a valuable addition to our understanding of the significant legacy of the early Jewish American experience. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Derek R. Munson University of Missouri 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 May Irwin American Musical Theater Musical Theatre Books New York's Yiddish Theater Chinese Looks Reclaiming Four Child Actors through Seven Plays in US Theatre, 1794-1800 The Illusion of Work: The Con Artist Plays of the Federal Theatre Project On Bow and Exit Music Legitimate: Jerry Douglas's Tubstrip and the Erotic Theatre of Gay Liberation Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Xiaoqiao Xu Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 1 Visit Journal Homepage Made Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era Xiaoqiao Xu By Published on December 11, 2023 Download Article as PDF MADE UP ASIANS: YELLOWFACE DURING THE EXCLUSION ERA. Esther Kim Lee. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 268. Esther Kim Lee’s recent scholarly book presents essential reading in Asian American and theater history. In Made-Up Asians:Yellowface during the Exclusion Era , Lee proposes the framework of yellowface and contends that it intentionally created and sustained Asian exclusion in American society. Instead of focusing on how Asian people in and beyond America reacted to yellowface performances, Lee focuses instead on the technology of yellowface, used mainly by white actors and actresses to don Asian characters during the Exclusion Era in the United States between 1862 and 1940. Made-Up Asians traces the origin of yellowface to British pantomime—when Joseph Grimaldi (1778–1837) performed as a Chinese clown in Whang-Fong; or, the Clown of China (1812), which was written by Charles Isaac Dibdin Jr. at Sadler’s Wells. Kazrac, Grimaldi’s most popular character was the famous prototype of “clown yellowface,” presented in Aladdin; or, the Wonderful Lamp (1813) as a Chinese slave assisting Aladdin to gain wealth and power, epitomizing Britain’s fantasies about ‘the Orient’ as exoticism and opportunism. Later, as Britain attempted to expand the opium trade in China during the Opium War (1839-1842), Victorian theater featured increasingly pejorative representations of China and Chinese people, usually emphasizing physical torture. British versions of Chinese culture largely influenced people in theUnited States. The Americanized Aladdin (1815) created an Americanized character with traits deemed local, which influenced “Chinaman” characters; these depictions changed over more than a century: from clownish and comic to menacing and vile, channeling reactions toward Chinese people that led to the Chinese Exclusion Act. Chapter two focuses on “scientific yellowface,” linking yellowface and race science. As immigration flourished, changing metropolises in the United States, nineteenth century citizens sought guidance on how to comprehend human and cultural differences. Meanwhile, as Lee examines, phrenology and physiognomy became popular: just in time to cater to American audiences’ curiosity about the ‘Mongolian race,’ including Chinese and Japanese peoples. Race science cast the Anglo-Saxon race, or the Caucasian race—which often denoted whiteness—as most noble. Directly linked with physiognomy, theater embraced this ranking by concentration on actors and actresses’ physical looks—presenting the beauty of whiteness. Accordingly, nonwhite actors were primarily regarded as lowbrow performers and entertainers. While white actors were believed capable to “portray all humans” (67), including “the yellow race,”portrayals of Asian characters echoed descriptions in race science texts, shows Lee, emphasizing the Mongolian fold, eyebrows, nose, and broken English, instead of observance of real Asians in everyday life. These “made-up Asians,” to quote the book’s title, together with exhibitions of “exotic Asians,” reinforced white Americans’ sense of normality and superiority. Lee’s scholarship is extensive with detailed examples. Chapters three, four, and five elaborate on the development of yellowface makeup. Chapter three, for instance, examines how “private yellowface” evolved via theatrical makeup guidebooks. After the Civil War, the American stage presented myriad international and ethnic characters, a craze that influenced amateurs’ private performances. Scant sources for costumes and makeup led Samuel French to provide an all-in-one service package for amateur actors, from guidebooks reprinted from British authors to license rights and scripts. Most importantly for Lee’s research, French published the first step-to-step makeup guidebook: How to “Make-Up: A Practical Guide to the Art of “Making-up” (1877), which thoroughly explained how to stage Asian characters. The invention of greasepaint in the late nineteenth century pushed forward makeup technology to create supposedly “natural” makeup for Asian characters. However, this version of naturalism did not result in bringing Asian and Asian American actors into the industry, nor observing Asian people in everyday life. Instead, based in race science, such“natural” portrayals stereotyped and excluded Asians from immigration and naturalization into the United States, while enriching white actors for range and professionalism. During the Exclusion era, when Asian women faced harsh immigration obstructions, stage representations of tragically beautiful Asian women became most popular. Blanche Bates—a white American actress whose career was already established in New York City before performing the tragic female leads in Madame Butterfly (1900) and The Darling of the Gods (1902)—exemplifies this trend. Lee’s scholarship reveals that Bates’s influence was so profound that she was regarded as America’s model for representing East Asian female characters. Bates promoted her artistic excellence by denying universality and staging otherness. Chapter Four shows how the technologies of cosmetic yellowface relished fictional tragedies of Asian women on stage, while real-life experiences of Asian women were ignored. By the end of the Exclusion Era, the prosthetic Oriental eye became the most critical aspect of yellowface makeup, analyzes Lee. The film industry’s photorealism led performers to look as much like their characters as possible in close-up shots, pressing on the evolution of yellowface makeup. Wearing “Chinese” greasepaint was not enough for early black-and-white films since actors still looked too white—hence not “Chinese” enough. To highlight their racial difference, the Oriental eye, with its epicanthic fold, emerged as the most significant marker. For example, Boris Karloff impersonated Fu Manchu in The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932), among the most infamous examples of the yellow-peril trope, with the prosthetic Oriental eye created by the Makeup Department at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). The invention of the more natural epicanthic fold continued, with foam latex technology coming out around 1944 and moveable fake lids in 1970. These technologies further alienated and excluded Asian and Asian Americans from stage and screen, reinforcing European heritage and Hollywood’s norm of whiteness. As Chapter Five concludes, only those who were considered white could perform Asian characters; their performances reiterated that Asians deserved to be excluded from citizenship and American society. Esther Kim Lee’s work demonstrates how yellowface has profoundly influenced the twenty-first century. As a technology of exclusion, yellowface blocked possibilities for Asian American actors and actresses to be cast in leading roles—and theater history. While whiteness is reinforced when actors remove their yellowface make-up, the real sufferings of Asian and Asian Americans gets obscured, sunk into oblivion. Made-Up Asians is an invaluable read that dissects the historical construction of yellowface and its persistence in contemporary times. References Lee, Esther Kim. Made-Up Asians: Yellowface during the Exclusion Era. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022. Footnotes About The Author(s) Xiaoqiao Xu is a lecturer in Modern Chinese Literature and Cinema at the University of British Columbia. Xiaoqiao Xu’s research covers a wide range of topics, from late imperial China to modern China, with a particular focus on women’s literary and theatrical productions. Her work explores the intersectionality of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity, challenging the neatness of the contrast between the old and the new. Xiaoqiao analyzes female gazing and recurring objects, as well as female playwrights’ engagement with gender politics to gain a deeper understanding of the roles women played in Chinese society. In her current research, she examines women’s engagement with religion, particularly Buddhism and Daoism. 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 Community Circles and Love Triangles: Gun Violence and Belonging in Oklahoma! and West Side Story Decommissioning the School-to-Prison Pipeline: Anna Deavere Smith’s Notes from the Field and Dominique Morisseau’s Pipeline More than a Props List: Redefining Material Culture as Survival and Pleasure in Lynn Nottage’s Ruined The Politics of Trance: Victoria Woodhull and the Radical Reform of Platform Mediumship Beyond Text: Theater and Performance in Print After 1900 Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theatre Made Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era Performance in the Zócalo: Constructing History, Race, and Identity in Mexico's Central Square from the Colonial Era to the Present Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Jeanne Klein 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 Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre Jeanne Klein By Published on April 17, 2023 Download Article as PDF Cecilia Josephine Aragόn has accomplished a significant feat. Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre marks the first book-length study that examines the emergent history of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences (LTYA) from its earliest Indigenous origins, as well as its burgeoning dramatic literature and scholarship over the past three decades. Having grown up in New Mexico and west Texas, Aragόn writes passionately from her lived childhood experiences as a Chicana/India. Her family engaged in rasquache teatro in their backyard, performed in biennial pastorela and pasiόn plays at their church, traveled in a van to perform, work, protest, and march for Chicana/o rights, and assisted border-crossing Mexican families. Facing both Anglo and Mexican prejudices, she came to recognize the double consciousness of her borderlands identity. Based on her personal, coming-of-age experiences, Aragόn argues her theory of “performing mestizaje” in which she defines bicultural and hybrid body-mind concepts that (a) exhibit an Indigenous identity in Chicana/o Latina/o cultures through language and body practices, (b) enable a transformation that helps explain mestiza/o and Indigenous consciousness, spirituality, and healing, (c) participate in promoting Indigenous rituals and celebrations through the use of mythology and symbolism, and (d) enact cultural production that contests, resists, and interrogates the impacts of imperialism and colonial systems. (3) In these ways, she gives voice to Chicana/o and Mexican-American young people whose dramatized stories remain disparaged among professional theatre companies and all too many university theatre programs today. The first three out of five chapters (half the book) comprise a meticulous literature review with requisite due diligence. In the first chapter, Aragόn’s overview of US children’s theatre is based on somewhat inaccurate narratives propounded by the Theatre for Youth and Community program at Arizona State University in Tempe, the site of her heretofore unpublished dissertation. Contrary to canonical constructions that US professional theatre and dramatic literature for children began in the 1880s, prominent child actors actually began performing plays in professional theatre companies for young spectators in the 1790s, as well as Shakespeare’s works and pantomimes since the 1750s. More importantly, she addresses the nascent study of LTYA with critical texts and play anthologies that began to appear in the 1990s. In regard to shifting cultural constructions of childhood, her heavy reliance on classic Piagetian stages of child development reflects an unfortunate yet understandable lack of awareness of this field’s complex advancements in social-cognitive and neuroscientific realms. Chapter two builds upon the crucial foundations of other scholars by reviewing the Indigenous roots of child performances in Mesoamerican rituals through Spanish colonial pastorales. After Mexico’s independence from Spain, theatrical Mexican families toured southwestern US territories and their children, the first generation of native-born Mexican-American actors, starred in Spanish-language theatre companies through the 1950s. Photographs of child performers, including stars María Luisa Villalongín and Leonardo “Lalo” G. Astol, enliven their costumed performances. From there, the pivotal Chicana/o movement begun in the 1960s gave rise to multiple youth teatros that sparked today’s generation of major LTYA playwrights. To underscore the cultural, political, economic, social, and psychological specificity of young Chicana/o identities, Aragόn delineates border theory and Chicana feminism in connection with theatre scholarship in chapter three. She also explicates Jean Phinney’s three-stage psycho-social model of ethnic identity development (1989-90). In chapter four, Aragόn applies all theoretical frameworks by analyzing representations of children and adolescents in six pivotal plays: Alicia in Wonder Tierra (or I Can’t Eat Goat Head) by Silvia Gonzalez S., Farolitos of Christmas by Rudolfo Anaya, The Highest Heaven by José Cruz González, No saco nada de la escuela by Luis Miguel Valdez, Simply María or The American Dream by Josefina Lόpez, and The Drop Out by Carlos Morton. Her succinct comparative summation of these coming-of-age plays reveals how extraordinary child and adolescent protagonists successfully negotiate familial, social, political, and psychological border crossings by age, gender, class, and ethnic identities through physical journeys, metaphorical dreams, or in school settings. Playwrights’ biographies, featured with their child and adult photographs, also serve to justify how and why these foundational works created borderlands children’s theatre. The final most provocative chapter adds Aragόn’s illuminating interviews with each playwright in which they recount their most memorable theatrical and school experiences and their artistic connections with the empowering Chicana/o movement. Notably, many highlighted their frustrating challenges trying to get their plays produced by mainstream professional companies. Paradoxically, once El Teatro Campesino achieved its mainstream status, youth teatros declined until university-bred artist-scholars revived and advanced LTYA for young audiences, albeit with too few child and adolescent actors, while various community organizations expanded theatre with Latina/o young people. Yet even today, as Aragόn makes clear, childism remains firmly entrenched far behind all other contested cultural movements (e.g., December 2016 issue of American Theatre). Despite the formation of Latinx Theatre Commons in 2012, LTYA festivals still vie for national recognition among mediated adaptations of children’s literature and other popularized trends. Even so, Aragόn’s optimistic outlook for the future of LTYA inspires hope and bodes well for the next generation of theatre artist-scholars. From my perspective, this slim but somewhat overwritten book tends to reproduce its major points unnecessarily throughout each chapter. Moreover, the requisite postmodern need to use and repeat Mexican-American, Chicana/o, Latina/o, or Latinx terminology may or may not bog down the flow of readers’ experiences. However, my foremost concern has to do with Routledge, a major theatre publisher that has failed this author by ignoring its copy-editing responsibilities. Regardless of these reservations, Aragón ultimately offers more than a cursory glimpse of historical legacies and trending representations of children and young people in LTYA. As the population of Latina/o and biracial children soars, Borderlands Children’s Theatre calls us all to take immediate actions by ensuring that young voices are not only heard but respected and celebrated for present and future generations. References Footnotes About The Author(s) JEANNE KLEIN Lawrence, Kansas 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 Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater 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 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Eero Laine Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 2 Visit Journal Homepage Immersions in Cultural Difference: Tourism, War, Performance Eero Laine By Published on May 28, 2018 Download Article as PDF Immersions in Cultural Difference: Tourism, War, Performance . Natalie Alvarez. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018; Pp. 214. Reading Natalie Alvarez’s Immersions in Cultural Difference: Tourism, War, Performance is a fantastic reminder of what theatre and performance studies have to offer during a cultural moment in which “reality” programming is often difficult to discern from other media and performance. Using the term “immersion” to capture a range of performances and situations, Alvarez takes readers to sites in North America and the UK through four chapters that examine a military camp, counterinsurgency training, an activist tour, and a museum. The analysis is run through with deep description and sometimes chilling impressions as Alvarez brings the reader into the immersions under investigation. Present throughout the study are Alvarez’s key inquiries: “how are immersions used as a means of deepening understanding across cultural difference?” and “whether the first-person experiential encounters afforded by the immersion could lead to meaningful cross-cultural encounters” (1). Through Alvarez’s considered explorations, the book’s case studies expand current discussions and arguments in the field beyond immersive theatre or gallery installations. Rather, Alvarez is most interested in examining “immersions that stage cultural encounters within the contexts of military training and tourism,” and that “function as performative sites of negotiation between cultures” (2). Alvarez’s emphasis on the relations and exchanges between people and cultures in sometimes extreme performances works very well in part because the book maintains a radically clear focus on immersion and simulation and, indeed, the ways that the researcher might be implicated in observing/participating in these situations. Such issues are raised early in the book, as in the subsection entitled “Ethical Quandaries” in the introduction, which rehearses many of the important problems related to ethnographic and performance research. Taking immersive experiences as “overcoded in advance by [their] ideological and pedagogical imperatives,” (13) Alvarez deftly negotiates the edges of simulations and their potential effects for future actions by participants. Alvarez thus makes clear the important connections between when and where immersions begin and end, stating: “What remains most urgent for my concerns here is the reproductive side of simulation—the narrative overlays on the event of the simulation that get replayed in order for it to become regularized and reproductive in the supposed postsimulation ‘realities’” (15). The simulation (as well as the very knowledge that one is participating in a simulation) provides a way out that unsimulated events do not allow. Through this framing, which is present and considered throughout the study, Alvarez moves the work beyond formal analyses of immersive performances, hyperreality, liveness, and other such matters. That is, the immersions themselves, while central, are only one part of the larger cultural analysis that Alvarez unfolds and unpacks. One of the real strengths of the book lies in Alvarez’s ability to bridge larger political issues with the very personal and embodied experiences of the immersions under consideration. For instance, in the first chapter, which begins with wary hands on ready guns and ends with a handshake, Alvarez neatly works through the many affective and politically charged engagements at play in a simulated Afghan village used to train Canadian military forces. Alvarez describes her own shaking hands as she attempts to take notes amidst explosions, screaming, and gunfire and considers carefully the bodies of the performers in relation to each other and the power of such performances both in the moment of enactment and in the memories and afterlives of the events. The stakes are high in each of the examples, and those in chapter two and three are necessary reading for performance researchers looking to undertake such ethnographic and politically important work in the future. Alvarez’s narrative and analysis of the process of taking part in counterinsurgency training in chapter two brings home the very realness of the immersions. Marking the trajectory from packing bags to training exercises, Alvarez makes a significant contribution to performance studies both in content and methodology. We need more performance theorists critiquing and studying how military and corporate programs deploy many similar tactics and practices found in what might be considered more artistic settings. That such work leads neatly into the following chapter on touristic, simulated border crossings is a testament to the focused throughline of the study. This is especially evident in how Alvarez sets out to examine “an embodied epistemology of otherness that leads precariously and almost inevitably toward a presumptive intimacy with an imagined ‘other’” and, commenting on the subject of the third chapter, she notes that “there is, arguably, no other exercise that does so more dramatically than one that invites the tourist to play the role of a migrant attempting to cross the Mexico-US border in the dead of night” (106). The work of these two chapters anchor the book through Alvarez’s commitment to participate in such immersions as well as through writing that easily interconnects field notes and theoretical analysis. Chapter four and the conclusion offer mediations on the processes of simulation and the limits of performance. In the fourth chapter, Alvarez examines the Shoal Lake 40’s Museum of Canadian Human Rights Violations as an “immersion that actively interrupts sympathy and empathy, [and] serves as a useful counterpoint to immersions that orient themselves toward embodied epistemologies of otherness” (164). Such reflections, along with the direct engagement with core considerations of performance studies in the conclusion, make clear that Alvarez has provided the field with an important document while furthering the methodologies of performance researchers. As with many exciting books based in a set number of case studies, one may be left wanting more, and the book opens the door for further research. The book will certainly be of use in graduate and undergraduate classrooms, and those students would do well in taking up Alvarez’s critical attention to culturally and politically significant immersions. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Eero Laine University at Buffalo, State University of New York Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Stages of Struggle and Celebration: A Production History of Black Theatre in Texas Immersions in Cultural Difference: Tourism, War, Performance Stage for Action: U.S. Social Activist Theatre in the 1940s Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America: The Legacy of Alan Schneider as Beckett’s American Director The Contemporary American Monologue: Performance and Politics Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left Introduction: Mediations of Authorship in American Postdramatic Mediaturgies Kaldor and Dorsen's "desktop performances" and the (Live) Coauthorship Paradox Ecologies of Media, Ecologies of Mind: Embodying Authorship Through Mediaturgy Dropping the Needle on the Record: Intermedial Contingency and Spalding Gray's Early Talk Performances #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS: Weaponizing Performance of Identity from the Digital to the Physical Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Catherine M. Young Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 2 Visit Journal Homepage Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines Catherine M. Young By Published on Download Article as PDF Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines: Woman’s Work. By Jessica Silsby Brater. Methuen Drama Engage Series. Series editors Enoch Brater and Mark Taylor-Batty. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama Press, 2016; Pp. 255. The Methuen Drama Engage Series “offers original reflections about key practitioners, movements and genres in the fields of modern theatre and performance.” Prior to the publication of Jessica Silsby Brater’s Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines: Woman’s Work, the series published books on Ibsen, Brecht, and Howard Barker. As the first book in the series to assess a woman in theatre, Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines underscores the importance of an ongoing commitment to recuperative scholarship that plumbs the archives, asks new questions, and approaches subjects in deliberately interdisciplinary ways. Ruth Maleczech’s own interdisciplinarity as a performer, director, and co-artistic director informs the content and structure of the book. What are the lived experiences and public profiles of women in collaborative performance ensembles? How is artistic and logistical labor distributed and documented? Yolanda Broyles-González has taken up these crucial questions in her work on El Teatro Campesino (1994), while Helen Krich Chinoy’s posthumously published research on the Group Theatre acknowledges such power imbalances (2013). Silsby Brater’s project contributes to this mode of inquiry, her subtitle “Women’s Work” signaling that Maleczech’s labor was gendered. Maleczech, along with other company members mainly known for performing, was consistently sidelined by critical and journalistic privileging of Mabou Mines co-artistic director Lee Breuer (Maleczech’s former husband and the father of her two children). The project is indebted to now-canonical feminist theatre studies frameworks forged in the late 1980s and 90s, as well as James Harding’s more recent analysis of feminist performance and the American avant-garde (2012). In addition, Silsby Brater builds on Mabou Mines scholarship by Iris Smith Fischer (2011), Alisa Solomon (2002), and Bonnie Marranca (1977, 1996). She focuses on Maleczech’s work from 1980 until her death in 2013 because it was from the 1980s onward that Maleczech’s independent vision as a director developed (27). In her assertion that the the book “functions in part as a recuperative history,” (28) Silsby Brater contends that “the full significance of Maleczech’s work has been ignored in part because she was a woman and in part because she was best known as a performer” (28-29). The fact that theatre and performance scholarship often privileges writers and directors over performers further demonstrates the importance of interdisciplinary analyses of interdisciplinary artists. In her multivalent approach to Maleczech’s work, Silsby Brater draws on video documentation of a dozen productions and several interviews with Maleczech, her family, and other collaborators. These oral histories reveal a dense, interconnected web of personal and artistic affiliations. Silsby Brater is writing at the intersections of ethnography, performance studies, and theatre history, accessing her mentee/mentor relationship with Maleczech by combining intimate knowledge of the subject with expertise in the subject matter. The book’s eleven production stills bring another dimension to the work, showing readers a diversity of staging approaches. From the glass flasks and beakers used to play Marie Curie in Dead End Kids (1980) to the ethereal puppetry and trapeze in Red Beads (2005), Mabou Mines’ avant-garde aesthetics show Maleczech’s facility with various performance modes over decades. Founded in 1970, Mabou Mines, The Wooster Group (founded in 1975), and, of course, The Living Theatre (founded in 1947) have become increasingly canonized as the key collaborative ensembles of the American avant-garde, even as they are marginalized in traditional accounts of US theatre history. Each group represents a different permutation of influence by Europeans working outside the aesthetics of realism, most prominently Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht, and Jerzy Grotowski. Silsby Brater’s introduction offers basic biographical information and places Maleczech in her cultural context, identifying the similarities and differences she shares with other key women of the US avant-garde based in New York City, including Judith Malina, Elizabeth LeCompte, Ellen Stewart, and JoAnne Akalaitis, a Mabou Mines co-artistic director. This helpful treatment allows readers to consider the specific aesthetics and innovations sometimes obfuscated by broad terms such as “American avant-garde” or “downtown performance.” Silsby Brater contends that Maleczech’s “singular focus on the representation of women on stage sets her apart” (10) from her contemporaries. In addition, Silsby Brater details Maleczech’s investment in the work of Samuel Beckett, and the influences of the Berliner Ensemble, Herbert Blau, and Grotowski on Maleczech’s expansive oeuvre. Maleczech’s body of work is analyzed in four thematically organized chapters that focus on the roles women play on and off stage. Chapter One, “Ordinary Women,” takes up Maleczech’s performances as Annette in Franz Xaver Kroetz’s Through the Leaves (1984) and her turn as Winnie in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days (1996) to argue that Maleczech elevated the seemingly unimportant, i.e. women without social status. In the second chapter, Silsby Brater flips the script by focusing on “Extraordinary Women.” Her evaluation of Dead End Kids, Belén: A Book of Hours (1999), which Maleczech directed, and Lucia’s Chapters of Coming Forth by Day (2007) allows Silsby Brater to thematically connect three distinct performance histories across decades. The chapter highlights Maleczech’s non-hierarchical collaborative directing approach, which contrasts with Akalaitis and Breuer’s styles. “Family Drama,” the third chapter, reads Mabou Mines’ production of Lear (1990) alongside the autobiographical Hajj (1983) in order to explicate how the two very different shows unsettle “the traditional notion of the father figure” (109). The theme of financial resources in both works allows Silsby Brater to discuss the stress Mabou Mines experienced in “keeping the company solvent” (114). Artistic issues were often family issues. The fourth chapter, “Mother-Daughter Collaboration” extends scholarship on productions written and directed by Breuer involving performances by Maleczech and their daughter, Clove Galilee. Silsby Brater also takes up Maleczech’s second and third directing projects, Wrong Guys (1981) at The Public Theater and Samuel Beckett’s adapted short story Imagination Dead Imagine (1984), which featured a levitating hologram image of Galilee. With her interdisciplinary approach and use of oral history, Silsby Brater offers the reader remarkable stories of motherhood in the avant-garde. Mabou Mines’ pathbreaking approach to collaboratively funding childcare still seems progressive today. Silsby Brater then pivots to close reads of the work that so often masks the reproductive labor required to bring it to fruition. In this, her scholarship contributes to theatre studies’ increasing attention to the unresolved dilemmas of combining family life and theatre. Silsby Brater not only places Maleczech more fully within the American avant-garde, but within the theatre history canon, connecting Maleczech’s actor-manager-director status to performance traditions including noh and commedia dell’arte, and to specific figures such as Caroline Neuber and Molière. Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines: Woman’s Work explicates the aesthetic and interpersonal complexities of a sustained avant-garde performance practice and the invisible labor women often shoulder. It will interest researchers of experimental and avant-garde performance, women in theatre, US performance history, and New York City’s downtown theatre scene. In addition, I hope it inspires more scholars to recuperate neglected figures of theatre history. Catherine M. Young New York University, Tisch School of the Arts The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 29, Number 2 (Spring 2017) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2017 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Acting in the Academy The Theatre of David Henry Hwang Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines Directing Shakespeare in America Writing, Acting, and Directing Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti's Marrathon Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene Tú eres mi otro yo - Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy & the AnthropoScene Introduction to American Theatre and Performance in the Anthropocene Epoch Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Sean F. Edgecomb Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 2 Visit Journal Homepage MáM Sean F. Edgecomb By Published on June 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF The company of MáM in performance at Fairfield University (Photo: David Gray) MáM By Teac Damsa Choreographed and Directed by Michael Keegan-Dolan The Quick Center for the Performing Arts Fairfield University Fairfield, Connecticut November 17, 2023 Reviewed by Sean F. Edgecomb In November 2023, Michael Keegan-Dolan and his contemporary dance troupe, Teac Damsa (established in 2016), completed a residence at Fairfield University’s Quick Center, culminating in the American premiere of MáM. An Irish word that may be best understood as a mountain pass that simultaneously separates and connects the villages of Ireland’s craggy west, MáM (rhymes with yam) , was an explosive, choreographic exploration of queerness as the in-between: between villages, between the Continent, Ireland and the United States, between innocence and experience, and perhaps most dramatically, between life and death. In fact, the company website describes MáM as “a meeting place between soloist and ensemble, classical and traditional, the local and universal.” This notion of the in-between was further highlighted by the selected font for the show title, two uppercase M ’s representing mountains surrounding the lowercase “a” with the fada, standing symbolically for the geographic pass. Keegan-Dolan rose to fame as director of Fabulous Beasts Dance Theatre (1997-2015), where he developed an eclectic, signature style that combines ballet and contemporary, improvisational dance from a variety of global traditions. Keegan-Dolan’s work often explores humanity through a folkloric lens, navigating the sometimes humorous, sometimes terrifying, and often magical and historically rooted identity of Ireland, between Irish people and the Irish diaspora, though disseminated with an intercultural intent. In fact, I first encountered a performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring re-envisioned by Fabulous Beasts in Brisbane, Australia in 2013, and I was blown away by Keegan-Dolan’s distinct and vibrant aesthetic (sexually convulsing dancers sporting hare masks and a flurry of cross-dressing). In 2019, I attended Teac Damsa’s adaptation of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake ( Loch na hEala ) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). This production liberally transformed the nineteenth century ballet into a sleek, contemporary takedown of child abuse in Ireland’s Roman Catholic diocese mixed with the Irish myth, “The Children of Lir,” which sees children doomed to transform into swans between sunrise and sunset. Keegan-Dolan’s commitment to exploring the in-between of these canonical works, contemporary adaptations, and forms and genres only heightened my reading of this work as queer. Already a fan of Keegan-Dolan, you can imagine my delight when I learned that Teac Damsa would present the American premiere of MáM at Fairfield University, where I joined the faculty just a month earlier. As part of Fairfield’s Quick Center Artist-in-Residence program, Keegan-Dolan generously agreed to engage with our undergraduate students, including my Performance Histories class. To say that Keegan-Dolan is charismatic is a wild understatement, and admittedly I was less than measured in hiding my deep admiration for his vision. When I mentioned my queer interpretation of his work, Keegan-Dolan was delighted. While admittedly he is not gay, and is partnered with company dancer Rachel Poirier, he related that his experience growing up as a dancer had always rendered him as queer, caught between the masculine expectations embedded in Irish class culture and his desire to become a performing artist. He reflected that it was this nuanced feeling of ambivalence that led to his visionary work as a director/choreographer. MáM reads as queer from its opening tableau: a young girl in a white dress (Mille Lang), lays on a worn, wooden table in an incense filled auditorium, as a goat-masked performer (Cormac Begley), pumps the bellows of a bass concertina, without sound. The instrument inhales and exhales, as the girl rises. As the goat-headed performer (a fertility symbol in Pagan Ireland) removes his mask and transforms into human form, one side of a curtain rod falls (brilliantly designed by Sabine Dargent), and the large black curtain that has backed the performers is dramatically pulled by gravity into a heap at the stage right corner of the proscenium—physically embodying the notion of queer as off-kilter. From behind the heavy drape a cast of twelve dancers are revealed, dressed in black, layered costumes (envisioned by Hyemi Shin) reminiscent of James Joyce’s characters attending a funeral, but in papery, black, faceless masks that intend to haunt if not terrify. As the performance unfolds, first to Gaelic rhythms and eventually the addition of more global sounds (provided by s t a r g a z e, an orchestral collective made up of musicians from around the world whose branded title also plays with the space between letters), another curtain slides off a second pole to reveal the band. Downstage, the dancers blend a variety of styles and movements, embodying moments of love and hate, kinship and tribalism, grief, insanity, profound sadness, silliness, and joy. Over the course of an hour, the dancers slowly lose their masks and then black clothing, revealing mostly white undergarments that cling to the lithe bodies, transparent with sweat. The show’s queerness is grounded in its multivalent and often amorphous story-telling, meandering like a path through the wilds of the Western Irish countryside where Keegan-Dolan lives and Teac Damsa works. This metamorphic structure allows the audience to build different and even simultaneous understandings of the narrative that bridges the transient space between the performers and the audience. Throughout this choreographed choose-your-own adventure, the young girl remains at the center, mostly as observer and occasionally as participant. At the conclusion of the performance, the notion of queer in-betweenness is both dramaturgically and physically actualized. As the orchestra and dancers reach a symbiotic and harmonious climax and the stage fills with smoke, a third curtain drops (the number three is a sacred symbol relevant to both Irish paganism and Christianity), revealing a wall of light and huge fans. As the young girl is lifted into a silhouette of blinding light, the fans engage with great force pushing the smoke into the auditorium, creating a jaw-dropping illusion to make the audience feel as if they are passing through MáM , the between space of the symbolic mountain pass. As with many queer works, the impact of MáM is driven by affective and individual audience interpretations of a narrative that remains intentionally ambiguous. Is the young girl dead as we follow her journey through Purgatory and eventually her entrance into the afterlife? Is she the Angel of Death? Is she the embodied zeitgeist of a particular people, place and space? Is this a story of salvation, resurrection, or the existential? All these interpretations and more circle through and beyond the performance as Keegan-Dolan’s queer staging that delivers limitless possibility, celebrating the nuanced space of the in-between rather relying on the certain. Singular and/or monolithic understandings of culture, whether local, regional, or national often lead to an impasse, where different ideas are feared and even villainized as the Other. In MáM , Keegan-Dolan and Teac Damsa present a transient performance, grounded in Irish folk culture, that invites the audience to consider how our humanity surpasses the notion of boundaries—whether geographic, political, or identity-driven—where the queer in-between space is presented not only as a site for passage, but also a site of intersection, potentiality, and empathy. Images: The company of MáM in performance at Fairfield University. (Photo: David Gray) This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Sean F. Edgecomb (PhD) is Associate Professor and Director of the Arts Institute at Fairfield University. His work intersects cultural studies, theatre history and queer theory including, The Taylor Mac Book: Ritual, Realness and Radical Performance which was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2023. In addition to his scholarly work, he also paints under the pseudonym, Peter Kunt, and curates the Gallery for Ghosts, in a 17th century attic in rural Connecticut. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction America Happened to Me: Immigration, Acculturation, and Crafting Empathy in Rags Burning it Down: Theatre Fires, Collective Trauma Memory, and the TikTok Ban “A Caribbean Soul in Exile”: Post-Colonial Experiences of a Jamaican Actor Archiving a Life in Theatre: The Legacy of Michael Feingold Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspapers in New York Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre Another Day's Begun: Thornton Wilder's Our Town in the 21st Century Appropriate Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month MáM Scene Partners Oh, Mary! Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Tison Pugh 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 Edward Albee’s Sadomasochistic Ludonarratology in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Tison Pugh By Published on November 8, 2018 Download Article as PDF References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting The Late Work of Sam Shepard Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism “Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something”: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the Reconstruction of Melodrama Pageants and Patriots: Jewish Spectacles as Performances of Belonging Are We “Citizens”? Tony Kushner’s Deweyan Democratic Vision in Angels in America Edward Albee’s Sadomasochistic Ludonarratology in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Bodies and Playwrights Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Wu Wenquan with Chen Li and Zhu Qinjuan Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 27 3 Visit Journal Homepage Arthur Miller: Reception and Influence in China Wu Wenquan with Chen Li and Zhu Qinjuan By Published on November 19, 2015 Download Article as PDF Arthur Miller is one of the most influential contemporary American playwrights after Eugene O’Neill. In the 1940s and 1950s, he rose to fame with All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible and other social problem plays. Since 1949, Death of a Salesman has been performed continually on Broadway and in many countries all over the world. Miller and his plays came to China when China reopened its door to the world after Mao’s reign, especially with the conclusion of “The Great Cultural Revolution” (“GCR”)[1] and when China was no longer producing powerful social plays. Chinese drama had fallen into crisis in both playwriting and performance, for it seemed to grow rigid and stagnant after so many years of restriction. In fact, these restrictions had been proposed by Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, and only a few so-called model plays were allowed to be performed during the GCR. Thus, the translations and performances of Miller’s dramas in China during the 1970s provided an enormous inspiration for and influence on Chinese playwrights, who later created many plays in a style that mixed realism and modernism. When referring to literary reception and historical relationship, Hans-Georg Gadamer says, “The literal meaning of scripture, however, is not clearly available in every place and at every moment. …all the details of a text were to be understood from the context and from the scopus, the unified sense at which the whole aims.”[2] Yue Daiyun, a well-known comparative literary critic at Beijing University, explains, “Literary influence is a sort of permeation, a sort of organic involvement presented in artistic works”[3], and “The emergence of the influence is often associated with social changes as well as the internal requirement within literary development. …Influence is usually a complex process of enlightenment, promotion or reinforcement, agreement, digestion, transformation, and artistic expression. This process tends to start when a certain writer is able to ‘tease’ another writer’s heart.”[4] Arthur Miller’s social problem plays are similar to those of Henrik Ibsen’s. Miller emphasizes the moral force and social critical function through drama in order to reflect the modern human being’s living conditions in a post-industrial and commercial society. Chinese spoken dramas, developed at the same time as social protest plays, bear a similar tradition with Miller’s drama, in the aspects of social criticism and human concerns. When China reopened its door after Mao’s era, Miller visited China, and his plays were soon introduced into China. Chinese audiences were attracted to Miller’s social tragedies as well as his modern dramatic devices. Since then, many of Miller’s plays have been translated into Chinese, performed, widely reviewed, and studied. In addition, influenced by Miller, many young Chinese playwrights and directors began to explore the modernist styles, powerful social criticism and keen insight into human life. The First Journey to China Arthur Miller’s first visit to China was in the autumn of 1978, immediately before the establishment of Sino-US diplomatic relationship. He was the first contemporary American dramatist to visit China, thus beginning the face-to-face interactions of the dramatists between the two countries. During his visit, Miller visited many Chinese dramatists, directors, actors, and other theatrical figures, watched Chinese spoken dramas, Beijing operas and Kunqu operas and at the same time, he got involved in extensive talks with Chinese scholars. After returning to America, Miller published some of his travel notes in an article entitled “In China,” published in The Atlantic Monthly, the 3rd issue of 1979. Later, he collected many beautiful pictures taken by his wife, Inge Morath, a photographer, and made them into a travelogue and published it with a new title: Chinese Encounters. As the development of dramas in America and China was unbalanced and there left a big gap between the two different cultures after so many years of separation, this imbalance was reflected clearly in the direct conversations between contemporary young writer Su Shuyang and Miller, “Talking with such a great American playwright who should be referred to as a master, I am more mentally disturbed as a fledgling and ignorant youth….”[5] This kind of nervousness preceded from his own ignorance of America and American drama as well as his shock from intercultural communication with foreign worlds and what’s more, it reflected Chinese literary men’s and artists’ uneasiness and disturbance for the incoming foreign culture. “People have lived under abnormal conditions so long that once life returns to normal, they are lost and stubborn, instead.”[6] Qiao Yu, a poet, and Su Guang, an interpreter who accompanied Miller, were more anxious when talking about their knowledge of American writers. However, little did Miller know about Chinese writers either and he called this separation from each other as “being covered with clouds and fog, separated from the world.”[7] Cultural differences were so great that collision and misunderstanding were inevitable. Miller was most surprised at Chinese writers’ working system that they were subordinate to government institutions and paid with monthly salaries. However, Su Shuyang was also perplexed that there was no Ministry of Culture in America. The consequences of these two different organizations were that Chinese writers “spare no efforts to maintain and establish a certain concept which our government exactly needs”[8] while those American writers such as Miller had to live on writing as his occupation and therefore serious American writers “are always unwelcomed as they are criticizing the society and moral values all the time.”[9] The difference between Chinese and American cultural concepts illustrates even more about thinking patterns since these two countries have undergone their own different historical progresses. For instance, China pays more attention to collectivism while America advocates individualism. When Su told Miller confidently that “we are optimistic and we believe that collectivistic spirit will make people warm forever,” Miller said with a smile, “I hope so.”[10] Hence, there seemed a great discrepancy which has been separating the two peoples for several decades. It is impossible to bridge the gap and to integrate to the harmonious realm. Moreover, Miller was still a “left and progressive writer,” compatible with Chinese perceptions in some respects. Beijing had been a glamorous place for Miller. As early as the 1930s, Miller was greatly concerned about Chinese Revolution (a communist revolution to overthrow Guomintang regime) and he knew some celebrated names like Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, etc. who “were like flares shot into sky out of a human sea.”[11] He learnt these from Edgar Snow’s reportage on the Long March of Chinese Red Army (a great withdrawal of Chinese communist army from south to north) “Red Star over China,” and later the Anti-Japanese War. However, the forthcoming cold war between the two countries isolated one another by demonizing each other. He considered that “no one knows a country until he can easily separate its merely idiosyncratic absurdity from its real contradictions.”[12] Therefore, when China exerted open policy and Sino-US relationship was normalized, he came to visit Beijing, Nanjing, Yanan, Xi’an, Shanghai, Guilin, and Hangzhou and many other places for trips and interviews. As to informal discussions with Chinese writers, he sighed, “the gap caused by our mutual ignorance of each other’s real rather than reported culture seemed limitless one morning when we sat down to talk with some ten writers, movie directors, novelists, and one actress in a Peking hotel. …I felt a far more deeply depressing sense of hopelessness that such isolation could actually have been structured and maintained. … we emerged from darkness to confront each other.”[13] Long-term indifference as well as cultural barriers made both sides unacceptable and this sense of abrupt fainting at the sudden collision was exactly the cultural shock when two different cultures began to communicate again after long intervals. Apart from his travel experiences in Chinese Encounters, Miller discusses mainly his impressions on China after the catastrophes of the GCR: so many artists were persecuted that only eight model operas were left and economy was withered all over the country. Miller’s keen interest in Chinese traditional opera was manifested in his reflections when watching Beijing Operas as A Woman General of the Yang Family (a famous legend of Song Dynasty about Mu Guiying, a heroine, leading an army fighting against the foreign invaders), Wang Zhaojun (a sad story about a beauty in Han Dynasty who was sent to marry a Mongolian king for peace) and Kunqu Operas as The Tale of the White Snake (a southern love story about a white snake loving a young scholar). His evaluations were pertinent when watching spoken dramas Loyal Hearts (a play by Su Shuyang about a devoted scientist fighting against the Gang of Four), Cai Wenji (a play by Guo Moruo about a Han Dynasty official’s daughter being captured by Mongolian troops for 12 years and later coming back after paying a ransom), The Other Shore (an early absurdist play by Gao Xingjian, a Nobel Prize-winner, about contemporary Chinese people’s spiritual pursuit), etc. And he talked with Cao Yu (author of famous Chinese play The Thunderstorm, an O’Neill-like tragedy of a woman loving her step-son who loves his half-sister blindly). He discussed with Huang Zuolin about the theory of “Freestyle Theater” (Zuolin’s theatrical idea involving Chinese culture of space, in Chinese “Xieyi”) and his recommendation of The Crucible to Zuolin.[14] This visit allowed Miller to learn current situations of Chinese spoken drama. First, he thought Chinese and American people could undertake cultural communications through drama, “Chinese people’s emotions in theater are the same. Although there are great differences between eastern and western cultures, the roots which produce the cultures are absolutely identical.”[15] He praised the brilliant Chinese civilization and traditional operas. However, he had a deep impression on the political and conceptual tendency in problem plays, “Clearly, Loyal Hearts was fashioned as a blow and a weapon, and its force as a social document seems undeniable; … The tone is that of An Enemy of the People; the impulsion being preeminently social and moral, there is little or no subjective life expressed and the people have characteristics rather than character. While the dialogue manages to ring in all the main current slogans—“Learning from the facts,” “Don’t forget that all reactionaries will come to a bad end,” and so forth.”[16] He pointed out the platitude and vapidity of Cai Wenji with classical American straightforwardness, “the story was told four and possibly five separate times in the first hour. The only difference is that new characters repeat it, but they add very little new each time.”[17] He also hit the point of actors’ overacting performance, “A remark that might call for smile causes its hearer to laugh; a mild chuckle becomes a guffaw accompanied by deep, appreciative nods. What should be a wave of recognition to an acquaintance turns into a bang of the palm on his back and plenty of ha-ha-ha thrown in.”[18] His critique for contemporary Chinese playwrights, directors, and performers was pivotal. After Cao Yu exchanged views with Miller in this respect, he invited Miller to come and direct his dramas in China and this was the cause that Miller came to China again in 1983. The Translation and Reviews of Arthur Miller’s Plays in China As early as in 1962, Miller’s work was introduced into China by Mei Shaowu (son of Mei Lanfang, famous Beijing opera actor who visited America in the 1930s) whose article introduced six of Miller’s plays but had limited reading circle for the restriction of western cultures in Mao’s times, while the Chinese version of his plays didn’t appear until the end of the GCR. In 1980, Chen Liangting translated Miller’s All My Sons and Death of a Salesman (published in Foreign Drama Resources, Issue 1, 1979, and later included in Selected Plays of Arthur Miller, Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 1992). Chen had a high view on Miller in the afterword, “He [Miller] pursues meaning of human life contiguously, does well in analyzing humanity and rationality, shows solicitude for the whole humanity and takes it as his own mission to evoke audience and readers’ social awareness as well as people’s moral values and sense of responsibility.”[19] Mei Shaowu’s two articles introducing Miller and his eight plays were published Foreign Drama Resources (Issue 1, and 2, 1979). In 1981, Liao Kedui edited American Drama Collection (Chinese Drama Publishing House) including Yao Dengfo’s article On Arthur Miller’s Plays. The script of The Crucible (directed by Huang Zuolin in 1981) was interpreted by Mei Shaowu and published in Foreign Literature Quarterly (Issue 1, 1982) while Nie Zhengxiong translated it with the title of “Yanjundekaoyan” (Severe Trials, Chinese Drama Publishing House, 1982). Ying Ruocheng translated Death of a Salesman in 1983 and in 1999 it was reprinted by China Translation and Publication Corporation with a Chinese-English version. With the successful performance of his Death of a Salesman in China, other Miller’s plays entered China in succession. In 1986, The American Clock was translated by Mei Shaowu and was printed in Foreign Literature and Art (Issue 5, 1986). His completed collection was Selected Contemporary Foreign Dramas (Chinese Drama Publishing House, 1992) which included A View from the Bridge, A Memory of Two Mondays and After the Fall besides the above-mentioned three plays. His Death of a Salesman is compulsory in university courses as “Selected Reading of Foreign Literature” and “Selected Reading of English and American Literature.” There are two kinds of selected Chinese versions of essays written by Miller: The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller (selected and translated by Chen Ruilan, et al, Shanghai Joint Publishing House, 1987) and Arthur Miller on Theater (translated by Guo Jide, et al, The Culture and Art Publishing House, 1988). In 1997, Ren Xiaomei translated Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and All My Sons (Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press). According 2000 China Reading Weekly poll, Sun Weixin and Wu Wenzhi edited Abstracts of a Hundred Famous Chinese and Foreign Literary Works Influencing China in 20th Century (Lijiang Publishing House) in which Death of a Salesman is chosen. In 2000, Death of a Salesman entered New Chinese Text Book of High School (People’s Education Press, Volume Six). The Ministry of Education wanted to “break through previous limitations on selection that merely emphasizes critical realistic works, and introduce some foreign literary works of great influence in different respects.”[20] It can be perceived from the transmutation of above translation and introduction, Chinese passion for Miller and his works has been on the increase and his influence in China is also gradually far-reaching. Soul-Hunting: The Crucible in China The Crucible was recommended by Arthur Miller to Huang Zuolin, director of Shanghai People’s Art Theater. This play, bearing many similarities with “the GCR,” was staged in Shanghai People’s Art Theater in 1981. The story of The Crucible was derived from the historical “witch trials” as a result of which some 20 innocent people were hanged (Miller increased the number to seventy) and more people were put into jail. At the beginning of the play, a group of girls, who were obsessed by asceticism, danced nakedly in the forest under the leadership of Abigail. But they were found and scared. These girls were said to be bewitched and influenced by evil supernatural beings (devils). They were forced to accuse their villagers of being devil’s spokesmen. This case gave rise to a chain of reactions and more and more people were accused. Abigail, the heroine, had been once a farmer John Proctor’s assistant and in deep love with Proctor. Later their affair was discovered and dismissed by the Proctor’s wife Elizabeth. She was always hateful and vengeful to Elizabeth. Therefore, Abigail accused Elizabeth of practicing witchcraft while Proctor admitted his improper relationship with Abigail in front of the public in order to save his wife. The court burst into an uproar and Elizabeth was immediately required to testify for her husband while she denied the testimony to save his fame. Proctor was faced with a trial: either to retract his statements to ruin his own reputation or insist his statements (regarded as perjury by the court) to be executed. Finally, he went straightforward to execution gallows. The Crucible was written during an era of white terror when McCarthyism was prevailing. Coincidentally, Miller himself was called in 1957 by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to force him name names of members of Communist Party. But he refused reasonably. Although the playwright always denied that The Crucible has direct connection with American McCarthyism in 1950s, we can infer their inner relationship clearly. First staged in America for 197 performances in 1953 and again for 633 performances in 1958, The Crucible has been always widely popular among audiences and has become part of the repertoire on Broadway. The first performance of The Crucible in Shanghai on September 4, 1981 raised great concerns immediately and got a big hit. Miller once said confidently before the Shanghai performance, “It (The Crucible) will obviously acquire Chinese audiences’ understanding.”[21] Cheng Yan said “it enormously shortens the distance brought by several decades’ gap as well as national difference”[22] The attention on history, politics, humanity as well as morality in The Crucible appealed to Chinese audiences after the GCR because they saw the similar situations as false-accusation, crime-involvement (innocent people being punished for their relatives’ crimes), persecution, under which everyone felt insecure and frightened. These feelings and experiences enabled Chinese audiences to understand and sympathize with characters in the play. Miller wrote in his autobiography Timebends: A Life, “The writer Nien Cheng, who spent six and a half years in solitary confinement and whose daughter was murdered by the Red Guards, told me that after she saw the Shanghai production she could not believe that a non-Chinese had written the play. Some of the interrogations were precisely the same ones used on us in the GCR.”[23] Chinese critics immediately expressed two different opinions on Abigail. Guo Jide said, “Abigail is the primitive evil power which causes the whole disaster, tells lies and creates a great deal of fraud. Proctor is the symbol of integrity and bravery as well as a heroic image which is standing erect and accepting ordeal in a fierce fire.”[24] However, the opposite opinion states, “although she is false to be deliberately mystifying, her sentiments towards Proctor are as real as true love.”[25] Another great significance brought about by the performance of The Crucible is the theatrical concept of “Freestyle Theater.” As early as in 1962, Huang Zuolin began to reform the then dominant theatrical idea of Stanislavsky style so he proposed “Freestyle Theater” concept which blended Bertolt Brecht’s theory and staging concept, emphasizing on the unreal scenes and presupposition of stagecraft rather than the reality of “illusionism.” The Crucible was the first American play after the GCR performed in China and directed with the idea of “Freestyle Theater.” “There are merely several wooden poles on the stage with all gloomy background under which crucifixes exist everywhere. These crucifixes give a sense of divinity. Although doors, windows, court, jail, etc. vary, crucifixes stand there all the time.”[26] Afterwards, other Chinese “Freestyle Theater” plays appeared on stage one after another such as The Chinese Dream (1985), Moth (1989), etc. When National Theater Company of China was established in May of 2000, it performed two foreign plays, one of which was The Crucible. Meanwhile, on the other shore it was also performed on Broadway. It more or less indicated both nations’ appealing to traditional dramatic culture of much historicalness and universal humanity. Many Chinese comment on the somber mise-en-scène atmosphere of this drama, “The director rendered the atmosphere of repression and distortion on the stage. Actually, entering into the theater, one could feel the ominous aura that ‘something’ would happen. ... The ropes, dangling overhead from the ceiling of the theater, were virtually questioning each of us, when we face the same situation that those people in the play face, how shall we choose?”[27] Soul-hunting in Chinese Drama After the GCR, searching for humanity became the main theme in plays as well as Chinese fiction and poetry. In the Chinese plays since 1980, honesty and trust were questioned and the persecuted victims experienced bloodier treatment than those in The Crucible. The representative among them is Sangshuping Chronicle (script by Zhu Xiaoping, born in 1952, who went to the border area as a student. The story is based on a titled novel by Chen Zidu and Zhu Xiaoping.), which was first performed in 1988, revealing northwestern Chinese peasants’ living conditions and feudal ideology precipitated from history and tradition in 1968. People at Sangshuping are both persecutors and victims. Caifang, a widow falls in love with a wheat reaper (like a seasonal migrant worker) who helps to do the seasonal harvest work. They are caught in elopement, lynched and beaten by the villagers. Caifang drowns herself in a well. In order to carry on the family bloodline, the parents of Fulin (an idiot) marry his sister in exchange for Qingnu as Fulin’s wife. Some youngsters put Fulin up to pull off Qingnu’s clothes in front of the public, which drives Qingnu mad. Wang Zhike is marginalized and persecuted by villagers after the death of his wife and finally is falsely charged with murder. He is driven away for his non-native identity. Their only farm cattle is reluctantly butchered by farmers who have raised it when some inspection officials want to eat it and they have to kill it themselves. Characters in this tragedy are all victims persecuted under feudal autocratic dominance. The Crucible expresses the destruction of human nature by rigid religious persecution and immorality while Sangshuping Chronicle shows the tragic life overburdened under traditional and feudal cultures and poverty. But people still show their brave pursuit for happiness. The vilification and persecution of virtuous human beings in The Crucible are fully embodied in Sangshuping Chronicle while the latter is more powerful than the former in many respects. And its exploitation of unenlightened humanity bears no difference from Miller’s calling for morality and justice. But both “hunting” scenes of Sangshuping and the Salem were rooted historically, relying on the similar events resulted from feudalism. Both of them criticize the human ignorance and backwardness, selfishness, narrow-mindedness and superstitious beliefs. Both plays employ wizard rituals to add supernatural and mysterious atmospheres. Dancing in the forest and exorcism ceremonies in The Crucible are the discourses of the middle ages. Sangshuping Chronicle exploits praying for rain, sacrificing cattle, man-hunting and other ceremonies as well as bass drum, chorus and other skills full of national characteristics that make the whole drama permeated with poetic significance just as Gao Huibin said, “association with poetic techniques and illusionary skills in artistic conception.”[28] Strong national characteristics, distinctive performance, and the mysterious mise-en-scène aura set up Sangshuping Chronicle as a banner of contemporary Chinese spoken drama. According to Xu Xiaozhong, its director, the staging of the play was a dramatic pattern of “combining Chinese and Western cultures. Reviewing the whole process, I clearly realize that no matter realism or romanticism, concrete or abstract, reproduction or expression, the artistic concepts and principles of drama may vary and the principal method of how to extract and abstract life may differ while all stage artistic creations come from life directly or indirectly.”[29] Selling Dreams in Beijing From March to May in 1983, invited by Cao Yu and Ying Ruocheng, Miller came to Beijing People’s Art Theater to direct his masterpiece Death of a Salesman. It got such a great success that it enters the theater’s repertoires. After returning home, he published his directing notes Salesman in Beijing (New York: Viking Press, 1984) which recorded the cultural and dramatic concepts and the conflicts as well as communication during the process of his directing Death of a Salesman. It also included all sorts of interesting episodes, anecdotes even disputes when transplanting this play in China. On the March 20, 1983, Beijing People’s Art Theater welcomed Arthur Miller, the ambassador of Sino-US cultural exchanges.[30] Miller obviously felt the atmosphere of China’s rapid economic development and the signs of social transformation. He was still fluttering with fear of the experience when he watched plays acted by Chinese actors in 1978: “How appalling it was to see actors made up with chalk-white faces and heavily ‘rounded’ eyes, walking with heavy, almost loutish gait as they think Europeans and especially Russians do, and worst of all, wearing flaxen or very red-haired wigs that to us seemed to turn them into Halloween spooks.”[31] Therefore, he began to utilize cultural transplanting principle of “adapting foreign things for Chinese use”. The first moment meeting the actors, he proposed that it should bear resemblance in spirit rather than in appearance, telling them to express common humanity instead of “specious acting”. He suggested, “The way to make this play more like American is to make it more like Chinese. … One of my main motives in coming here is to try to show that there is the same humanity. Our cultures and languages set up confusing sets of signals whuch prevent us from communicating and sharing one another’s thoughts and sensations, but that at the deeper levels where we are joined in a unity that is perhaps biological.”[32] Miller highlighted the cultural exchanging function of the drama, carrying on the comparison between Chinese and American cultures from different aspects such as the plot, characters, performing techniques, etc. Placed in a manifesting areas such as comparing Chinese salesmen, insurance, refrigerator, cars, family life with those of America’s; comparing father’s earnest expectation for his sons with Chinese father-son relationship, “great ambitions for one’s child” (Wangzichenglong in Chinese idiom),[33] discussing with actors about the character Charley, and Willy Loman’s mistress, scenes of kissing as well as the different understanding and expression of sex, etc. Through bilateral negotiations, Miller compromised in many aspects, for instance, the representation of sex with the Chinese actors dealing implicitly with their accustomed and traditional ways.[34] During the performances, conflicts and problems raised contiguously. Some officials were afraid that the favorable material conditions (refrigerator, car, house of Loman’s family) displayed on the stage would bring about negative effects for the then poor Chinese conditions while social critical significance of the play would be weakened for this. However, the fact that the performance of Death of a Salesman obtained a great hit proved that Miller’s practice of sinicizing his drama was the most successful interpretation of the original American work. It represented the essence of the Chinese culture, emphasized the resemblance in spirit more than in appearance, broke through the traditional realistic staging methods employed for decades in China and reflected the principles of integration of Chinese and Western cultures. The major newspapers published detailed reports on Miller’s direction of his own play in Beijing. Foreign Drama invited Miller to have a formal seminar, and published feature-length comments on the direction, acting and text analyses. All these made it rise to a hot trend of Miller and Death of a Salesman in China and the year of 1983 determinedly witnessed the successful cooperation between Miller and Beijing People’s Art Theater. Since then, cultural exchanges between China and America revived, breaking the ice of tight cultural relationship. From 30 tough years’ hostility and exclusion to face-to-face conversation, peoples of both countries could eventually open their mind and exchange as they like. When everyone was cheering for the great success of the performance, Miller said to himself, “America will need this country as an enrichment to our culture one day just as China needs us now.”[35] This reflected Miller’s modesty and wish for communication. Chinese people accepted and acknowledged this classical American drama. They speculated on human’s survival predicament brought about by modern society. Cultural misunderstanding was inevitable that there were many Chinese interpretations such as problems of the elderly, generation gap, problems of the rich and poor, success and failure and dream and reality. Many young people considered that Biff and Happy’s cynical values and philosophies were inadvisable. Although they lost much time for working in the countryside during the GCR, they could not be irresponsible for society and their country. Zhong Yingjie, a dramatist, said, “Chinese audiences can understand easily and resonate with love as well as hatred between parents and their children as expressed in the conflicts between Loman and his sons.”[36] Chinese audiences felt angry for Loman’s being dismissed and happy for China had no such unfortunate things then.[37] Afterwards, Miller recalled emotionally in his memoir Timebends, “Willy was representative everywhere, in every kind of system, of ourselves in this time. The Chinese might disapprove of this lies and his self-deluding exaggerations as well as his immorality with women, but they certainly saw themselves in him. And it was not simply as a type but because of what they wanted. Which was to excel, to win out over anonymity and meaninglessness, to love and be darling, and above all, perhaps to count.”[38] Many people thought the real purpose of China’s reform and opening up was to lead people to success and wealth as aroused in the play, “a young Chinese student said to a CBS interviewer in the theater lobby, ‘We are moved by it because we also want to be number one, and to be rich and successful.’”[39] Miller published his directing notes in a book, Salesman in Beijing, in America in 1983. Later he wrote his directing experience in his autobiographical memoir. Miller’s directing and the play’s performance were made into a documentary series by CBS which was broadcast in America, introducing the performance spectacle of Death of a Salesman in China. All these promoted Sino-US cultural exchanges forcefully.[40] Since 1983, the Chinese version of Death of a Salesman has been performed in Shanghai, Japan, Hongkong, Singapore and many other places, gaining a great popularity and an enormous success. Ying Ruocheng not only translated the script himself, but also acted the role of Willy Loman. He pointed out in his articles, “As an actor, I do my best to obtain the value of the person which I act.”[41] In Ying’s opinion, Loman remained in paradox of dilemma: affectionate but always breaking up in disagreement with his sons; alternately sober and absent-minded at whatever he does; his suicidal action was both passive and active, both terrified and conscious. In the end, the more delighted the deceased (Willy Loman) was, the more sorrowful the living people were. Zhu Lin, a renowned actress, starred a powerful and virtuous mother Linda. She represented Linda as a classical Chinese mother who was a obedient, hardworking, understanding wife and loving mother.[42] Zhu Lin recalled the cooperation with Miller, “Mr. Miller helped us continually enrich the understanding of the script and characters. ... He is one of the greatest directors whom I encountered and are good at enlightening actors. ... He is absolutely in the standpoint of the actors, respecting actors’ work and attaching great importance to the coordinating relationship between the director and actors. ... We established profound friendship with each other during the pleasant rehearsals.”[43] Zhu Xu, actor of Charley, discussed his cooperation and rehearsal with Miller from the perspective of understanding of the character as well as its sinicization during the whole processes of rehearsals and performances in an article in Theater Studies.[44] Zhu Xu thought of Charley as a sophisticated character. In his opinion, Loman didn’t understand the function of money but he believed such things like “popularity,” “personal loyalty,” “relationship” which showed his “innocence.” However, Charley lacked imagination and was pragmatic. Death of a Salesman has been most popular among the audiences and has become one of the most significant foreign repertoires of Beijing People’s Art Theater. As to the American culture reflected in Death of a Salesman, Miller thought Chinese cast’s “95% of the comprehension of the drama is right because they know American People’s lifestyles and customs.”[45] The audiences’ comprehension and appreciation of the play was due to these American cultural media, Ying Ruocheng and other crew members as “retransmitters.” They made great efforts to have this famous western play deeply rooted in Chinese soil. As Wang Zuoliang, a famous literary critic, commented, “Chinese translators have the good taste, Chinese actors have the ability and Chinese audiences have the spiritual sensitivity and expansive art interests. All these enable them to understand and appreciate all the excellent dramas from all over the world.”[46] Chinese Tragedy of "Stream of Consciousness" and "Success Dream" Since it was presented on Chinese stage, Death of a Salesman has always been drawing attention from all over the country. Its influence is mainly manifested in three respects. First, more and more Chinese tragedies began to deal with disillusioned dreams of common people. Secondly, realistic play-writing began to absorb the expressionist method of “stream of consciousness,” digging into characters’ inner worlds. Finally, all kinds of modernist techniques began to be widely used in performances rather than Stanislavsky method. The Success of Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana (written by Liu Jinyun, born in 1938, president of Beijing People’s Art Theater, first staged at Beijing People’s Art Theater) in 1986 was due to its realistic depiction of common people in the GCR. It was also a typical work of tragedy of success dream and realism integrated with modern expressionist techniques. The unsuccessful salesman in Miller’s commercial competition became a common Chinese peasant cherishing a dream for success in Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana. Uncle Doggie, two of whose wives either died or departed, often dreams of working hard to buy land and become a landowner. When the People's Republic of China was established in 1949, he got some land for a few years in the land reform. But more political movements (Cooperative 1953-55, the Great Leap Forward 1958-1960 and the GCR 1966-76) to come, his land was deprived and his hopes for success became slimmer and slimmer. Uncle Doggie’s dream of possessing land and becoming rich vanished and he was getting crazy. Meanwhile the landowner Qi Yongnian, his fellow villager, was charged as an exploiting landlord and was criticized, denounced, severely persecuted and eventually died in the GCR. When the play begins, those things in his earlier life constantly appear in his mind and they flash back continually on stage. He often talks with the ghost of the deceased landowner Qi Yongnian, even dispute. When China reopened its door in 1978, Uncle Doggie got his land again under the new reform policy. His joy lasts only a short time for he is no long young and needs his son Dahu’s help. But Dahu and his wife decide to set up a factory instead of plowing land. Uncle Doggie burns himself in the end. Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana and Death of a Salesman bear many similar characteristics in respect of themes and techniques. Both plays take social, familial and moral problems as their themes. The essence of tragedy is the disillusion of dream of obtaining success or of getting rich. The two protagonists are both common people with merits and demerits: Loman is industrious, loves his family and sons but he likes boasting and gets an affair with another woman, while Uncle Doggie is a dutiful and kind farmer who is hardworking and persistent but owns a small peasant’s consciousness and is selfish. Two plays both end with the suicides of the protagonists. Their tragedies are spiritual and moral ones with the disillusion of dream as the main cause. They both employ symbolism and expressionism as artistic techniques: the high buildings and sowing vegetable seeds in Death of a Salesman, the “small box” (with seals in it) and the high gateway in Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana are symbols of identity and power. The utilization of lighting is similar to that of Death of a Salesman. They both have a special time span: Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana jumps from one period to another: the Cooperative Movement, the Great Leap Forward, the GCR, the Reform and Opening-up, and together with the protagonist’s obsession with land as the clues, employing flashbacks to narrate the story, while Death of a Salesman narrates a story within two days during which many anecdotes are carried out through fantasies and recalls. The playwright Liu Jinyun once said at a conference, “In recent years, modern Euramerican plays and performances have impressed me strongly. This feeling is just like opening the window and breathing fresh air, offering suggestions to me. I set sights on something ‘new’ ... Any methods can be employed for me. For example, I have never thought of such methods before like symbolism, expressionism, stream of consciousness, etc.”[47] During a symposium on Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana, Wang Yusheng said, “The appearance of Qi Yongnian, the landlord’s ghost is similar to the emergence of Salesman’s brother ‘Ben.’”[48] In the chapter “Experiment Drama in Twentieth Century Chinese Literature and Modernism Trend” of a college textbook, Tang and Chen said, “The drama of Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana is strongly influenced by western expressionistic drama which takes characters’ stream of consciousness, emphasizing externalizing characters’ deeper minds to visualized stage images. The ghost’s appearance in Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana is close to that of Karel Capek’s Mother and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.”[49] Ding Chunhua’s “The Comparison Between Death of a Salesman and Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana” (Zhejiang Business Technology Institute Journal, 2002, Issue 1) and Wu Ge’s “Chinese Dream and American Dream: Death of a Salesman and Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana” (Artistic Drama, 2002, Issue 4) have stated their opinions from their themes and artistic expressions. Before and after the performance of Death of a Salesman in China, many other playwrights undertook experimental techniques. For example, Ma Zhongjun (an avant-garde playwright born in 1957), and Jia Hongyuan’s Hot Currents Outside (the 1980 best play about a brother and sister quarreling about their deceased elder brother’s pension), employing transparent stage from which the dead could break through the wall with freedom. “This technique obviously stems from Arthur Miller’s famous play Death of a Salesman.”[50] Besides, there are many other plays using ghosts such as Gao Xingjian’s Alarm Signal (1983, a play about train robbers involving many modern techniques as recalls, mental imaginations and symbolist method) and Wild Men (1985, a play about an archaeologist looking for wild men with modern skills of inner thoughts and multitrack), Liu Shugang’s (a playwright born in 1940, president of the Central Experimental Theater) A Deadman’s Call On the Living (1983, a play about a passenger killed on a bus and the ghost coming back to reality to pay visits to the living), Su Shuyang’s Taiping Lake (1986, a play about the deceased famous writer Lao She returning to witness the world), as well as Wang Zifu’s (a play born in 1947in Beijing) Red River Valley (1996, a play about a victim of the GCR coming back to invest a business to cut down trees but interrupted and haunted by a ghost), etc. Conclusion Miller’s "tragedies of common man,” offering criticism of society and exploring character’s psychology, greatly broadened the horizon of Chinese dramatic circle immediately after his plays entered China. His two visits to China brought about brand-new concepts and atmospheres to Chinese stage. He draws more attention to society and family with conscience and responsibility, reevaluates the essence of humanity, combines modern techniques like “stream of consciousness” with realistic drama creation, explores characters’ inner changes, and criticizes social inequality through the disillusion of dream. The consistency between Miller and Chinese dramatists’ interest in social problem drama makes his plays much easier to be performed, understood, accepted and influential in China. Integrating with their own dramatic concepts, Chinese artists have created Chinese-style expressionist plays (such as Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana and Sangshuping Chronicle). However, influence is not unidirectional. “The communicativeness within literary receptive activities reflects mainly in the ‘backflow’ or feedback to writers of readers’ aesthetic experience.”[51] Miller found a lot worth learning during his stay in China, for instance, supposition and stylization in classical Chinese operas. Zuolin helped Miller understand “Freestyle Theater.” He even utilized these techniques of opera into his own plays as soon as he returned home. While directing Death of a Salesman, he employed the technique of “similarity in spirit” of Chinese opera. Through the repeated performances of Death of a Salesman and The Crucible in 21st century and more scholars reviewing Miller and his works, Arthur Miller’s influence in China has become more and more extensive.[52] Wu Wenquan is a Professor and PhD of English literature at School of Foreign Studies, Nantong University, Jiangsu, China. He earned his PhD in Nanjing University in the study field of contemporary American drama in China. He has published in journals like Foreign Literature Studies, Contemporary Foreign Literature and Drama in China. His current study is on Tennessee Williams and his works. Chen Li is a graduate student of English literature at School of Foreign Studies, Nantong University, Jiangsu, China. Zhu Qinjuan is a lecturer of English literature at School of Foreign Studies, Yancheng Teachers’ University, Jiangsu, China. [1]The Great Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) is a political movement led by Mao Zedong to mistakenly criticize bourgeois mentality and culture. Lin Biao (a general, and Mao’s successor, later died in an air crash) and the Gang of Four (including Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, Yao Wenyuan, Zhang Chunqiao, and Wang Hongwen) assisted Mao to put China into a disorder. During these ten years of upheaval, millions of students joined great parades and followed Mao’s order to work in poor border areas and countryside. And millions of officials and intellectuals were persecuted and Chinese traditional culture was greatly damaged. [2] Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Garpett Barden and John Cumming (Beijing: China Social Sciences Publishing House, 1999. Reprinted from the English Edition by New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1975), 154. [3] Yue Daiyun, Comparative Literature and Chinese Modern Literature (Beijing: Beijing University Press, 1987), 44. [4] Ibid., 57. [5] Su Shuyang, “People Will Reach a Great Harmony: A Talk with American Playwright Arthur Miller,” Reading 1 (1979): 119-22, esp. 119. (Su Shuyang, born in 1938, is a Chinese writer who published his famous plays as Loyal Hearts and Taiping Lake and a novel Homeland.) [6] Ibid., 120. [7] Arthur Miller and Inge Morath, Chinese Encounters (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1979), 13. [8] Su Shuyang, 120. [9] Ibid., 120. [10] Ibid., 121. [11] Miller and Morath, Chinese Encounters, 8. [12] Ibid., 7. [13] Ibid., 15. [14] Soon after, Sun Huizhu and Gong Boan wrote an article (“On the Free-style Drama of Zuolin Huang,” The Art of Drama 4 (1983), 8) to describe the different understanding and conflicts on the idea of “Xieyi (Free-style) Drama” between the two dramatists, “Huang Zuolin explained, ‘The Chinese character of ‘drama’ is made up of two parts of ‘vacant’ and ‘spear’, being real and false should both be suitable. Being real is not drama and being not real is not art. Acquiring emotion and meaning is both drama and art.’ On hearing this, Miller was at a loss. Huang continued, ‘We must find the inner truth, the essence of the real world, their connections and feelings. Then take it out from the superficial matters.’ To enable Miller to know the real meaning of Free-style Drama, Zuolin invited Miller to watch traditional Kunju opera The Tale of the White Serpent. Sure enough, Miller appreciated the play and said to Zuolin that the west realistic drama was much less colorful and exciting.” [15] Dong Leshan. “Arthur Miller Reviewing Loyal Hearts, Cai Wenji and The Other Shore,” Reading 2 (1979), 77. [16] Miller and Morath, Chinese Encounters, 93. [17] Ibid., 94. [18] Ibid., 95. [19] Chen Liangting, “Words after Translation,” Selected Plays by Arthur Miller (Shanghai: Shanghai Translation Press, 1979), 249. [20] Gu Zhichuan, “Replies on the New Senior High School Textbook of Chinese,” http://www.360doc.com/content/11/0328/05/503199_105231591.shtml (accessed 19 October 2008). [21] Cheng Yan, “The Appealing Art: On the Performance of The Crucible,” Shanghai Drama 5 (1981), 18. [22] Ibid., 19. [23] Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life (New York: Grove Press, 1987), 348. [24] Guo Jide, “Arthur Miller and His The Crucible,” American Literature Special Issue (1981), 74. [25] Wu Peiyuan and Hu Chengyuan, “On The Crucible Directed by Zuolin,” Foreign Drama 2 (1982), 41. [26] Ibid., 42. [27] Liu Xiaochun, “The News in Spring,” Drama 2 (2002), 141. [28] Gao Huibing, “The Shangshuping Chronicles and the Mystery of Imagery,” in A Study of Xu Xiaozhong’s Directing Art, ed. Lin Yinyu (Beijing: Chinese Drama Publishing House, 1991), 188. [29] Xu Xiaozhong, “Changes in Combining and Connecting,” (Part I and II) Drama Journal 5 (1988), 43. [30] Ding Zhou, a journalist of China Construction reported on the visit of Miller, “The similar share of human feelings brought the aged American salesman from New York to Britain, Mosco, Rome, Oslo, Sydney, and Tokyo. And now, he comes to Beijing with heavy pace and same heavy case of commodity samples.” (Ding Zhou, “Review on the Spoken Drama Death of a Salesman,” China Construction 8 (1988), 25). [31] Ibid., 5. [32] Ibid. [33] The Chinese idea of Wangzichenglong (“high hopes for one’s child”) and the expectations for the sons in Death of a Salesman match each other. Miller often commented on this point, “What surprised me is that the parents’ expectations for the children are very Chinese way of thinking. They called it ‘high hopes for one’s child’, ie., hoping the children to succeed… Therefore, when Happy said life is a game, ie., to be No 1. Chinese audiences are the first to get the meaning of these words.”（See David Richards, “Arthur Miller, Survivor,” Manchester Guardian Weekly (Mar. 25, 1984), 17） [34] Yuan Henian expressed his counterviews on the sex scenes being too strict. He pointed out that the two sex scenes in the restaurant and hotel are restrained and sex is always a taboo in Chinese literature and art. (See: Yuan Henian, “ ‘Death of a Salesman’ in Beijing,” Chinese Literature (Oct., 1983), 108-9) [35] Ibid., 252-53. [36] “Stones Borrowed from Other’s Hills: A Forum on the Performance of Death of a Salesman,” Drama Newspaper 7 (1983), 42. [37] See: Tan Aiqing, “ ‘Death of a Salesman’ in Beijing,” China Reconstructs (August, 1983), 26. [38] Miller, Timebends: A Life, 184. [39] Ibid., 185. [40] Miller’s directing his Death of a Salesman in China and his Salesman in Beijing (a diary of his directing experience published in the US) received warm responses in the US. The Wall Street Journal reported Miller’s play and Miller’s Salesman in Beijing on April 26, 1984. Meanwhile, Broadway staged Death of a Salesman again, starring Dustin Hoffman as Willy Loman. It was another big hit, bringing about more reviews and essays on the play. Next comes the 1998 performances of the play in Goodman Theater, Chicago, and the following year, it was moved to the Broadway. [41] Ying Ruocheng, “The Stage Image Creation of Willy Loman and Others,” Guangming Daily (June 3, 1983), 3. [42] Zhu Lin, “A Hard but Pleasant Performance: Experience of Acting Linda,” Drama Studies 1 (1984), 12-13. [43] Ibid. [44] See Zhu Xu, “I Act Charlie: Records of Rehearsing Death of a Salesman,” Drama Studies 1 (1984), 14-17. [45] Rui Tao, “Notes on Rehearsing Death of a Salesman,” The People’s Daily (May 8, 1983), 7. [46] Huang Zuoliang, “The Exciting Performance in May: After Seeing Death of a Salesman,” Drama Journal 6 (1983), 8. [47] “Exploring the New and Thriving the Drama Creation,” Literary Studies 1 (1988), 44. [48] “Five People on The Nirvana of Gouerye,” Drama Review 1 (1987), 9. [49] Tang Zhengxu and Chen Houcheng, 20th Century Chinese Literature and Western Modern Literature (Beijing: The People Publishing House, 1992), 609. [50] Wang Xinmin, The History of Contemporary Chinese Drama (Hangzhou: Zhejiang University Press, 2000), 216. [51] Zhu Liyuan, Aesthetics of Reception (Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 1989), 175-76. [52] Huizhu Sun and Bo'an Gong, "On the Free-style Drama of Zuolin Huang," The Art of Drama 4 (1983), 8. "Arthur Miller: Reception and Influence in China" by Wu Wenquan, Chen Li, and Zhu Qinjuan ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 27, Number 3 (Fall 2015) ©2015 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center 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: Jim Bredeson Editorial Assistant: Kyueun Kim Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Bill Demastes Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: “Twisting the Dandy: The Transformation of the Blackface Dandy in Early American Theatre” by Benjamin Miller “West of Broadway: the Rockefeller Foundation and American Theatre in the 1930s” by Malcolm Richardson “Arthur Miller: Reception and Influence in China” by Wu Wenquan, Chen Li, and Zhu Qinjuan www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director ©2015 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Twisting the Dandy: The Transformation of the Blackface Dandy in Early American Theatre West of Broadway: the Rockefeller Foundation and American Theatre in the 1930s Arthur Miller: Reception and Influence in China Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Iris Smith Fischer 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 Introduction: Performance as Alternate Form of Inquiry in the Age of STEM Iris Smith Fischer By Published on June 2, 2016 Download Article as PDF This special issue, sponsored by the American Theatre and Drama Society, explores forms of research and inquiry offered by theatre and performance in the age of STEM—that is, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. [1] The issue also presents developments in the scientific fields of information technology, biology, and medicine that employ techniques and approaches drawn from theatre practices. The issue poses a number of questions: What challenges and opportunities does this historical moment present for theatre to assert its relevance and necessity? How does theatre engage in alternate forms of inquiry? How does scholarship aid theatre, both by bringing theatre’s methods of inquiry into view or engaging in them itself? Can alternate forms of inquiry close the gap between practice and analysis in theatre, and counter claims that research occurs only in STEM disciplines? How can theatre offer an ethical perspective on STEM research, which claims to be value free? These are humanists’ questions, fueled by recognition that the arts themselves involve forms of research and inquiry, and that the concept of scientific objectivity, with its concomitant rejection of subjectivity, should be reexamined. Scientists, on the other hand, want to know how theatre and performance techniques can aid them in their research and teaching, or in the dissemination of results to colleagues, administrators, and the general public. For many scientists, valuable research is objective and ideology-free, separate from applications of already-produced knowledge, and clearly distinct from the creation of plays, the activities of performance artists, or the types of analysis and evaluation involved in theatre history or dramatic criticism. Yet some scientists question the exclusion of subjectivity, ideology, or empathy from STEM research and inquiry. These inquirers ask how the STEM disciplines can incorporate methods of learning borrowed from the humanities and arts, be opened more fully to participation by women, minorities, and the disabled, and teach students in the STEM disciplines to recognize, value, and use forms of embodied knowledge. The Oxford English Dictionary recognizes that the term research is not proprietary to the STEM disciplines, defining it as “systematic investigation or inquiry aimed at contributing to knowledge of a theory, topic, etc., by careful consideration, observation, or study of a subject.” Yet the OED also recognizes later disciplinary and institutional usages: “original critical or scientific investigation carried out under the auspices of an academic or other institution.” In a similarly broad fashion, the OED defines the term inquiry as “the action of seeking, esp. (now always) for truth, knowledge, or information concerning something,” and offers “search, research, investigation, examination” as related terms. [2] Theatre and performance inquire and investigate, often proceeding carefully and methodically, but offering knowledge through acts, processes, and conceptual lenses such as the mimetic, the epic, the postdramatic. These types of knowledge are often not recognized as knowledge of an objective world. The current cultural dominance of the STEM disciplines is driven both by economic exigencies and underlying ideological assumptions about what constitutes valuable research and inquiry. Identifying performance as research can be seen as a response by artists and scholars to institutional, political, and economic pressures, and as a corollary effort to break out of academic silos and loosen funding restrictions. Performance approached as research allows inquirers to recognize commonalities among disciplines and share their methodologies and techniques. This turn reflects in twenty-first-century fashion the moment in the late nineteenth century when higher education was being organized in institutions but disciplinarity had not yet taken on its more rigid twentieth-century forms. Inquiry in science was not so isolated from inquiry in philosophy or literary history. One thinks of the American pragmatists—Peirce, James, Dewey, Addams, and others—who sought to keep in view the connections between scientific advances and humanistic inquiry. A similar desire has emerged recently in many fields, among them complexity science, biosemiotics, and epigenetics, which encourage awareness of the role of embodied knowledges in research. In this regard Wendy Wheeler usefully distinguishes between conceptual, experiential, and tacit forms of knowledge. Tacit knowledge, or “creaturely skillful phenomenological knowledge,” is essential to human flourishing and artistic creativity but incapable of formulation in propositional language. Yet conceptual knowledge or “abstract intellectual knowledge that ” cannot by itself account for experiential knowledge or “phenomenological embodied knowledge how ,” i.e., readable acts created “in engagement with the world and other embodied creatures.” Biosemiotic methods of inquiry, Wheeler argues, allow access to necessary tacit knowledge through the reading of such acts. While applicable to many realms of life, human and otherwise, she notes, “Skillful being in cultural complex totalities is a specifically human skillful being in the world. Actions (especially, perhaps, political actions) driven mainly by abstract thinking, which forget embodied experience, local knowledge, and skillfulness, are always, almost by definition, dangerous.” [3] Research and inquiry should engage the phenomenological how along with the conceptual that . In an effort to claim the term research for performance practices, some have questioned the tendency in the arts to distinguish between practice and analysis, as Shannon Rose Riley and Lynette Hunter point out: While performance practices have always contributed to knowledge, the idea that performance can be more than creative production, that it can constitute intellectual inquiry and contribute new understanding and insight is a concept that challenges many institutional structures and calls into question what gets valued as knowledge. Perhaps the most singular contribution of the developing areas of practice as research (PaR) and performance as research (PAR) is the claim that creative production can constitute intellectual inquiry.[4] The movement known as Practice as Research (PaR) first developed in the United Kingdom, Riley and Hunter note, in response to government assessment tools introduced in the early 1990s to apportion funding based on departments’ research productivity. While humanities scholarship—as opposed to arts creation—more readily fits existing definitions of conceptual knowledge production (in the form of scholarly articles and monographs), arts departments in the U.K. faced the challenge of developing criteria for assessing creative activity as research, a process begun later at U.S. universities, and still ongoing. [5] Today embodied knowledges are being widely discussed at conferences and in publication. In their recent call for a working group on “Transfusions and Transductions: Science and Performance as Permeable Disciplines,” Vivian Appler and Meredith Conti argue, “As with the clinical laboratory and astronomical observatory, the theatre serves as a reflexive and generative site of transformations, a place to penetrate barriers and test innovative ideas, approaches, and practices.” [6] Also promising in closing the practice/analysis divide is the concept of situated knowledge, drawn in part from black feminist thought and summarized here by Lynette Hunter: Unlike scientific knowledge in which the effect of the observer is often a ‘problem’ and many experiments are devised in order to minimize it, in situated knowledge the whole point is that the observer is engaged. It is only through their engagement that knowledge can be manifested, and the observer is both the practitioner who makes things and the audience or respondent.[7] Calling such current developments “a moment of discovery and transition” in the long history of research in performance, Arthur Sabatini emphasizes that the training of performers is built upon considerable research into the capacities of the human body and mind. Use of the voice, breathing, manual dexterity, movement techniques, directing or choreographing for performance are all outcomes from highly proscribed and ever-evolving systems that have been researched, repeatedly tested, and advanced by practitioners worldwide.[8] Institutional pressures and burgeoning terminology may actually present opportunities to explore and document the need for embodied and situated knowledges that cross the institutional divide between arts and humanities on the one hand, and STEM disciplines on the other. Invested in both creativity and discovery, initiatives are coming from all sides to bridge that gap in terms of how research is conducted, students are trained, and knowledge is disseminated. * The articles that follow argue for the value of embodied knowledges from the nine contributors’ rich and varied backgrounds in theatre history, playwriting, both arts and science education (including science museum education), physics, molecular biology, medicine, engineering, information science and technology, feminism, gender and sexuality studies, acting, directing, and—not least—stand-up comedy. Each perspective contributes in its own way to this special issue. Bradley Stephenson, in “This In-Between Life: Disability, Trans-Corporeality, and Radioactive Half-Life in D. W. Gregory’s Radium Girls ,” approaches embodied knowledges offered by theatre in terms of disability studies, epic theatre, and recent theories of animacy. Building on Mel Chen’s concept of animacy as “the recognition that abstract concepts, inanimate objects, and things in between can be queered and racialized without human bodies present,” Stephenson argues that, in Gregory’s re-telling of the historical events involving young female workers poisoned by their interactions with radium-laced paint, “radium itself becomes an actor and character in the play.” Citing disability theory as an ally of performance and theatre studies, Stephenson explores the interactions of biological life with radioactive half-life in order to rewrite our medical understanding of radium’s effects on the body as a complex of transcorporeal agencies. Vivian Appler approaches science—in this case physics, astronomy, and engineering—as “a liberal cultural domain,” a formulation that recognizes the STEM disciplines’ roots in liberal humanism. “Moonwalking with Laurie Anderson: The Implicit Feminism of The End of the Moon ” argues that scientists and artists alike have a social responsibility to “recognize how theatre and other representational modes of performance impact a cultural imaginary that contains both the sciences and the arts.” Appler calls for a “holistic cultural conversation” to bridge what C. P. Snow once termed ‘the two cultures divide’: “Interdisciplinary performance research can disrupt this biased cultural scenario by examining science-oriented performance artists who work from a feminist perspective.” Appler focuses on Laurie Anderson’s arts residency at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the resulting 2004 performance piece The End of the Moon : Anderson endeavors to instill in her audiences a sense of wonder at the world while also encouraging active participation in the larger culture in which the domain of astronomy is embedded. . . . [She] fills the space between wonder at scientific achievement and an active engagement with the socio-political criticism of those achievements through embodied and technologically transductive performance techniques. By means of transduction or “communication of information across different media,” Appler continues Anderson’s intervention, revealing in the performance a “cyborg system” that invites discussion of gender assumptions active both within science and outside of it. By documenting a woman performance artist embodying representations of gendered scientific research, Appler’s article shares concerns expressed by Eileen Trauth, Karen Keifer-Boyd, and Suzanne Trauth about the barriers women encounter in thinking of themselves as researchers and gaining access to the sciences. Suzanne Trauth’s play script iDream , based on Eileen Trauth’s research and documented by Karen Keifer-Boyd, is designed to “raise awareness and critique hegemonic social narratives regarding who [can] participate in the STEM field of IT [information technology].” The authors of “ iDream: Addressing the Gender Imbalance in STEM through Research-Informed Theatre for Social Change” have found that the scientific professions have difficulty creating gender balance. Just as scholarly publications on information technology are not written in language accessible for the general public, “the scientific model of research dissemination leaves little room for the expression of subtlety, nuance, emotion, and holistic representation.” The authors turn instead to girls, their families, and their teachers, to raise awareness of the cultural narratives at work. Transforming Eileen Trauth’s research findings into theatrical scenarios, the authors seek to “stimulate awareness, understanding, and activism about barriers to women in technological fields.” iDream employs several story lines to engage audiences during staged readings and the discussions that follow. In a work process resembling what Appler terms “interactional expertise,” albeit not in a full production or performance art but rather in a script-centered experience, the authors created an exploration of “science opportunities . . . and barriers . . . [focusing] not so much on overt barriers [but] rather the process by which a young woman might unconsciously internalize limits on her dreams.” Cindy L. Duckert and Elizabeth A. De Stasio also investigate theatre’s applications in the interaction between STEM researchers and the general public. Rather than raising awareness of constraining social narratives, the authors report on their use of Viola Spolin’s improvisation techniques to prepare undergraduate life science students to communicate complex concepts to non-experts. Duckert and De Stasio developed a required capstone course to rehearse students in performance skills they need as professionals and public intellectuals, i.e., to make their discoveries “accessible and understandable by linking scientific concepts to concepts the audience already knows.” Moreover, We want our graduates to be cognizant of their audience, to be able to react in real time to the cues the audience members send concerning their understanding of oral and visual communication, and . . . to channel their creative energy and enthusiasm for their work [in order] to communicate scientific information effectively and engagingly. Often initially resistant to engaging in theatrical improvisation, students find that even minimal awareness of performance circumstances improves their ability to communicate. While this would not surprise theatre majors, the incorporation of performance skills into a life sciences curriculum appears to leave life science majors with a new respect for the role that movement, gesture, and facial expression play in communication. The authors also note that, as teachers, they became more aware of public speaking’s embodied character, as well as physiological and neurological elements such as the linkage between mimicry (empathetic physical behaviors) and the action of mirror neurons in fostering an audience’s receptivity. Could performance techniques become part of the life sciences’ methods of disseminating discoveries? Duckert and De Stasio’s capstone course, embedded in their department’s curriculum, suggests that improvisational performance could assist STEM researchers in communicating more effectively with administrators, legislators, and the general public. This possibility also appears in “Playing Sick: Training Actors for High Fidelity Simulated Patient Encounters,” in which George Pate and Libby Ricardo address the use of simulated patients in training medical students for clinical encounters. A relatively recent development, simulated patients—non-actors who volunteer their participation—do not learn a traditional standardized script but are given their characters’ medical and personal histories and also acting guidelines for behaving as their characters would in real-life consultations with their doctors. As the authors note, such “high fidelity” encounters rehearse the performance of empathetic responses to improvised, often unpredictable patient behaviors. The authors’ use of simulated patients follows “recent research suggesting that clinical skills are not ancillary to medical care but in fact affect healing and recovery in measurable ways.” In this regard, Pate and Ricardo’s project resembles that of Duckert and De Stasio, both in regard to the medical students’ initial reluctance to role-play and in the authors’ successful use of workshop exercises to integrate clinical skills with medical knowledge. Drawing a parallel to literary techniques of storytelling, Pate and Ricardo found that such improvisational exercises, like fictional narratives, helpfully “suggest responses without dictating them, urge behaviors without ordering them, illuminate values without oversimplifying them, and in general complicate the matters rather than clarifying or confirming them. . . . [Further,] improvisatory acting situations may offer a greater immediacy and a wider range of possible responses than a poem or story can.” Of all the activity going on in performance as research and research-informed theatre, this special issue presents only a sampling. Many other projects incorporating theatre and performance offer embodied and situated knowledges that can inform scientific research, suggest alternate forms of inquiry, and allow inquirers in the age of STEM to communicate effectively as public intellectuals. References [1] It has been a pleasure to work with JADT editors James Wilson and Naomi Stubbs, and managing editor James Armstrong. I extend my appreciation to them and also to the American Theatre and Drama Society for the opportunity to edit this special issue. My special thanks go to Cheryl Black, ATDS President, and the members of the special issue publications committee, ATDS members all, who both served as readers and provided me with excellent advice. [2] “Research,” “Inquiry,” Oxford English Dictionary (Online) (Oxford: Oxford University, Press, 2000-). http://www2.lib.ku.edu/login?url=http://www.oed.com . [3] Wendy Wheeler, The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics and the Evolution of Culture (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2006), 49. [4] Shannon Rose Riley and Lynette Hunter, “Introduction,” Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research: Scholarly Acts and Creative Cartographies (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), xv. [5] Ibid, xvii. Riley and Hunter distinguish among the relevant terms: “The acronym ‘PaR’ in the United Kingdom refers to ‘practice as research’ in its most inclusive sense to embrace music practices, the visual arts, dance, and theatre [while] ‘PbR’ refers to ‘practice-based research’ with a wider reach across the arts and sciences. . . . PbR is also well-established in the United Kingdom and Europe, and contributes to many areas, from the medical sciences to spectatorship studies. PbR emerges from different academic areas, but seems to have particular usage in the sciences. . . . In the United States, especially in the fields of performance and theatre studies, the acronym PAR is common shorthand for ‘performance as research’.” [6] E-mail communication from Meredith Conti, 23 May 2016. [7] Lynette Hunter, “Situated Knowledge,” in Riley and Hunter, Mapping Landscapes , 151. [8] Arthur Sabatini, “Approaching Knowledge, Research, Performance and the Arts,” in Riley and Hunter, Mapping Landscapes , 120, 118. Footnotes About The Author(s) Iris Smith Fischer is Professor of English at the University of Kansas, where she teaches modern drama, semiotics, literary and dramatic theory, and avant-garde performance. From 2007-2010 she served as editor of the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. Her publications include Mabou Mines: Avant-Garde Theater in the 1970s (author, University of Michigan Press, 2011); Interrogating America through Theatre and Performance (co-editor, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); American Signatures: Semiotic Inquiry and Method, by Thomas A. Sebeok (editor, University of Oklahoma Press, 1991). Her current book project, "Charles Peirce and the Role of Aesthetic Expression in 19th-Century U.S. Semiotics," examines the intertwined histories of theatre (Delsartist approaches to actor training and public speaking) and the still-emerging field of science-based semiotics. 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 Blue-Collar Broadway The New Humor in the Progressive Era Stages of Engagement Introduction: Performance as Alternate Form of Inquiry in the Age of STEM 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' Playing Sick: Training Actors for High Fidelity Simulated Patient Encounters This In-Between Life: Disability, Trans-Corporeality, and Radioactive Half-Life in D.W. Gregory’s Radium Girls Setting the Stage for Science Communication: Improvisation in an Undergraduate Life Science Curriculum Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Isaiah Matthew Wooden Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 32 1 Visit Journal Homepage Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze Isaiah Matthew Wooden By Published on November 6, 2019 Download Article as PDF Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze. Shane Vogel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018; Pp. 254 + xi. A trip backstage at the Imperial Theatre in late fall 1957 promised brushes with a number of black performers who would help radically transform the cultural and racial logics of the United States. In an effort to profit from the “calypso craze” fueled by the success of Harry Belafonte’s 1956 record Calypso , producer David Merrick teamed up with composer Harold Arlen, lyricist E.Y. Harburg, and playwright Fred Saidy to bring the original, conspicuously titled musical Jamaica to Broadway. The incomparable Lena Horne was tapped to lead a company that included such tastemakers and change-agents as Alvin Ailey, Ossie Davis, and Josephine Premice. As Shane Vogel outlines in his thoughtfully researched and compellingly written book, Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze , their musical proved much more than “a typical instance of midcentury Broadway Caribbeana” (133). Vogel reveals how the production not only “provided a surface for constantly shifting and destabilizing configurations of nation and race,” but also opened space for “political alternatives to be staged, sounded, and embodied, even in the face of the tourist economies and minstrel traditions in which black fad performance trafficked” (134-135). In so doing, this recent book exposes musical theater as one of the many potent sites through which black performers interpellated by the Jim Crow era’s various “Negro vogues” staged and embodied various acts of refusal. Vogel examines performances across multiple media-sound recordings, nightclub acts, film, television, dance, as well as musical theater—to highlight some of the sophisticated strategies black artists developed to negotiate the racist, imperialist, and appropriating impulses of the American entertainment industry. He brings particular attention to the ways these artists engaged performance to challenge, sometimes playfully, binaries such as “inauthenticity/authenticity, false/true, improper/proper, ungenuine/genuine, and insincerity/sincerity” (7). Stolen Time notably does not offer a comprehensive accounting of the calypso craze. Instead, the book explores several key examples that elucidate how black performers thwarted the representational imperatives and constraints demanded and imposed by American fad culture. As detailed in chapter one, the 1950s calypso craze was not the first “race craze” to generate widespread excitement during the Jim Crow period. Indeed, Vogel draws direct links between earlier crazes—notably, the ragtime craze of the 1890s and the Harlem vogue of the 1920s—and the midcentury thirst for Caribbeana, thereby exposing “the structural repetitions that shape[d] these fad cycles” (34). The chapter’s close readings of Josephine Premice’s nightclub performances and the two albums she recorded at the height of the craze, in addition to evidencing Vogel’s assertion that fad time is always already stolen time, shed important light on the tactics black performers deployed to make “the tempos and tastes of the marketplace” (66) align with their own motivations and aspirations. Vogel offers additional evidence and analysis of these tactics in subsequent chapters. Chapter two, for example, examines the cinematic calypso craze of the 1950s and the live nightclub revues coopted and reproduced on screen to illuminate the self-reflexivity of the “calypso program.” This chapter offers particularly astute readings of Maya Angelou’s performance as a calypso chanteuse in the low budget film, Calypso Heat Wave (1957), which serve to substantiate Vogel’s suggestion that the “calypso craze project[ed] nothing other than itself” (89). Chapter three turns attention to Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s 1957 live television presentation of their LP recording, A Drum Is a Woman . Vogel analyzes the event as an example of “radical counterprogramming”—that is, “an alternative to the middlebrow’s exploitation of blackness in the project of Cold War internationalism and a fundamental rewriting of the calypso program” (108). As “radical counterprogramming,” the live broadcast of A Drum Is a Woman stole back the time of the calypso craze and, in the process, “posed important questions about the relationship between nation and diaspora; African American and Afro-Caribbean cultural exchange; white commercial culture and black performance; and the sounds and gestures that reshaped cultural geographies in the twentieth century,” Vogel writes (108). Chapter four’s focus on the Broadway production of Jamaica further surfaces and explores the entwinements of race, nation, and diaspora. Vogel examines the production as a signal example of “mock transnational performance”—“a theatrical mode and performative stance that takes up the misuse of diasporic cultural indices to critique and refigure the politics of the nation-state and racialized national formations” (134). The chapter also considers how the show’s multiracial cast fostered and forged community on and offstage, thereby posing direct challenges to the white supremacist status quo. Through the careful attention he gives to Horne’s performance as Savannah in the musical, Vogel expands on some of the arguments he explores in his first book, The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performanc e (University of Chicago Press, 2009), further illustrating the range of approaches black performers developed and deployed to frustrate the racial expectations and assumptions of their Jim Crow audiences. Chapter five’s considerations of the crucial role that dancer-choreographer-director-performer-designer-painter Geoffrey Holder played in stirring and sustaining interest in the calypso craze serve to underscore Vogel’s assessments throughout Stolen Time that the fad was often marked by and constituted through the avowals and disavowals of its most prominent participants. Even as he disavowed what he called “Manhattan calypso,” characterizing it as an amusing imitation of “true Calypso,” Holder, Vogel notes, disavowed his own disavowals, popularizing a new dance form, the “Limbo-Calypso,” with the public. He also drew on the craze for inspiration to develop work for the concert dance stage. Especially striking throughout Stolen Time is Vogel’s skillful weaving of history, biography, theory, and critical inquiry to contemplate the significance of the calypso craze and the ontological conditions of black fad performance. The book is rich with fresh insights and important methodological interventions that add complexity to our understandings of concepts such as race, time, performance, diaspora, transnationalism, and mass culture. Students and scholars across myriad fields—theater studies, performance studies, media studies, popular music, and critical race studies, among them—will no doubt benefit tremendously from rigorously engaging with each chapter. To be sure, there is much to be gleaned about the significant role that artists continue to play in prompting social, cultural, and political change from Stolen Time’s absorbing prose and its shrewd considerations of black performance in the Jim Crow era. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Isaiah Matthew Wooden Brandeis 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 Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics Law and Sexuality in Tennessee Williams’s America Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze Staging Family: Domestic Deceptions of Mid-Nineteenth Century American Actresses Excavating American Theatrical History: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors, Appropriate, and An Octoroon Mabou Mines Tries Again: Past, Present, and the Purgatory of Performance Space Rehearsing Bereavement with Laughter: Grief, Humor, and Estrangement Affect in Sarah Ruhl’s Plays of Mourning Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Claudia Wilsch Case Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 32 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Architecture of Local Performance: Stages of the Taliesin Fellowship Claudia Wilsch Case By Published on May 21, 2020 Download Article as PDF During the Great Depression, architect Frank Lloyd Wright founded the Taliesin Fellowship, an apprenticeship program for students of architecture and related trades that valued physical labor as an educational tool. Based at Wright’s family home and the adjacent former Hillside Home School in Spring Green, Wisconsin, and later expanding to Taliesin West near Scottsdale, Arizona, the Fellowship offered tuition-paying students a hands-on alternative to a college education by conveying Wright’s theory of organic architecture through practical experience. Echoing certain aspects of the British and American Arts and Crafts movements, the German Bauhaus, and the Eastern mystic Georges Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, the Taliesin Fellowship was an experiment in communal work, living, and learning. Like the collectives that inspired it, the Taliesin Fellowship engaged its members in a variety of artistic pursuits, and its amateur performing arts activities became cherished entertainment for local audiences. Beginning with apprentice-staged concerts, skits, and film screenings in the 1930s and presenting Gurdjieff-inspired physical movements in the 1950s, the Fellowship’s performances by the 1960s culminated in original dance dramas, written and choreographed by Wright’s daughter, Iovanna Lloyd Wright. Taking inspiration from Gurdjieff’s philosophy and from her father’s architectural concepts, Iovanna’s work, though created in isolation, echoes aspects of the physical culture movement and connects with twentieth-century expressive dance. Taken together, the performing arts activities that occurred at Taliesin and Taliesin West from the 1930s to the 1970s asserted the Fellowship’s role in decentralizing the American cultural landscape. The Fellowship’s performances cultivated spectators who appreciated locally developed productions, the same audiences who by the 1960s in Arizona and the 1980s in Wisconsin were receptive to the regional theatre movement. By translating spiritual ideas onto the stage through her choreography, Iovanna Lloyd Wright in particular laid the foundation for local spectators to appreciate experimental work that was created nearby, rather than imported from New York. Frank Lloyd Wright started his apprenticeship program in the fall of 1932 with twenty-three students. [1] An early prospectus describes the Fellowship as a structured experience: “The way of life is simple: meals in common, fixed hours for all work, recreation and sleep. Rooms for individual study and rest. Imaginative entertainment is a feature of the home life. Music, drama, literature, the cinema of our own and other countries. Evening conferences with musicians, writers, artists and scientists who visit the Fellowship or are invited to sojourn.” [2] There were no formal classes, textbooks, or exams; as former apprentice Edgar Tafel notes, students “learned by doing — the Taliesin way — and by listening.” [3] Daily tasks included assisting Wright with architectural drawings and models, carrying out construction, maintenance, and farm work, preparing meals for the Fellowship community, and, under the guidance of Wright and his third wife Olgivanna, organizing cultural events and performances. As one of their first construction projects, apprentices remodeled the old gymnasium of the Hillside Home School into the Taliesin Playhouse, and later built additional theatres at Taliesin West. Fulfilling Wright’s plan to incorporate the performing arts into the Fellowship, the Taliesin community used its event spaces for film screenings, concerts, song recitals, lectures, and presentations of skits, plays, and dances, and also held seasonal celebrations and costume parties. Some of this arts programming was open to the public. Beginning in 1957, the Fellowship produced the annual Taliesin Festival of Music and Dance at the Pavilion Theatre at Taliesin West, which for several years remained a highlight of the Scottsdale-Phoenix area cultural scene. By constructing theatres and curating cultural events in Wisconsin and Arizona, far away from New York, the Taliesin Fellowship participated in a decentralization of the performing arts that had already found expression in the little theatre movement of the 1910s and 1920s. Having lived in Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century, Frank Lloyd Wright was personally acquainted with local trailblazers of the little theatre movement, including Jane Addams, the co-founder of Hull House; Maurice Browne, the director of the Chicago Little Theatre; and the actor Donald Robertson. He also knew playwright Zona Gale, who lived not far from Taliesin and was affiliated with the Wisconsin Dramatic Society, another pioneering little theatre. Stimulated by these connections, Wright expressed an appreciation for regionally-created culture and, through his Fellowship, began to participate in furthering its spread. [4] The Fellowship’s arts activities paralleled the decentralization efforts of the Federal Theatre Project of the 1930s and anticipated the post-World-War-II regional theatre movement that resulted in the emergence of not-for-profit professional theatres in cities across the country. The Taliesin Playhouse opened on November 1, 1933. Aside from illustrating Wright’s ideal of a native, organic architecture, built “from the inside out” and “in complete harmony with the landscape,” the Playhouse realized key aspects of the design for a “New Theatre” that the architect had been developing over several years. [5] The Madison Capital Times described the structure as “a huge artistic building made from stones of nearby hills and rough woods of nearby forests” and noted that the Playhouse “seems to be a part of the surrounding landscape.” [6] Nearly all of the construction work was completed by Wright’s students: “They have felled the trees, sawed them into lumber, quarried rock, and burned lime to lay the rock in the wall. The sawed lumber has been turned into structure, trusses and furniture. Walls have been plastered and frescoed, all by Taliesin apprentices.” [7] Echoing modernist experiments in early-twentieth-century theatre architecture, such as Adolphe Appia’s Festival Theatre at Hellerau, Germany (1911), or Walter Gropius’s vision for a Total Theatre (1927), the Playhouse’s interior was designed as a flexible space that could accommodate a variety of events. An upper stage was intended for theatrical performances and film screenings and “a lower stage for musicians.” [8] Removable seating permitted the house to be rearranged “for dancing or other amusements.” [9] Most importantly, in contrast to large commercial theatres of the day, the intimate 200-seat Taliesin Playhouse was built without a proscenium, inviting a connection between actors and spectators, a goal Wright strove for in all of the performance spaces he designed. Writing as a mouthpiece for Wright, apprentice Nicholas Ray, who briefly served as the director of the Taliesin Playhouse and later became a well-known Hollywood movie director, emphasized the innovative nature of the design. Ray condemned “the picture frame theater of today” as a “hideous anachronism” and “essentially undemocratic.” In its stead, he advocated for “a place where stage and audience architecturally melt rhythmically into one, and the performance — the play of the senses — and the audience blend together into an entity because of the construction of the whole.” [10] For local audiences, the opening of the Taliesin Playhouse was a special occasion, particularly considering that the Spring Green area did not have access to a professional performing arts venue until the 1980 founding of the American Players Theatre. The Capital Times reported that guests filled the theatre to capacity and were treated to four movies and a barbecue lunch. Reflecting Wright’s cosmopolitan taste as well as his sense of humor, the films screened that day included the 1931 Austrian comedy The Merry Wives of Vienna , shown in the original German; Ernst Lubitsch’s Broken Lullaby (1932) featuring Lionel Barrymore; a “Silly Symphony” by Walt Disney; and an animated cartoon of Aesop’s Fables . The Fellowship soon began offering public programming on Sunday afternoons. For a 50-cent admission fee, which helped supplement the group’s income during the Great Depression, visitors could watch a film, hear a musical recital by apprentices or guest artists, and partake of coffee and baked goods near the Playhouse’s fireplace. The main feature was introduced through “an interpretive talk” by a Fellowship member that offered insights into “the background, the environment, and the purpose behind the play” and was usually followed by a Disney cartoon or other short animated film. [11] Advertisement for movie screenings at Taliesin, Capital Times (Madison, WI), 23 March 1934. Movies screened at Taliesin during the 1930s included a selection of recent, critically acclaimed European and American releases, such as Sergei Eisenstein’s October (1927); G.W. Pabst’s 1929 adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s play Pandora’s Box with Louise Brooks; Fritz Lang’s M (1931) with Peter Lorre; a selection of René Clair films; Leni Riefenstahl’s The Blue Light (1932); Dudley Murphy’s 1933 version of Eugene O’Neill’s play The Emperor Jones with Paul Robeson; Vladimir Petrov’s 1934 adaptation of Aleksandr Ostrovsky’s play The Thunderstorm ; Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934) with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert; Jacques Feyder’s Carnival in Flanders (1935); various movies by Alfred Hitchcock; and Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). On occasion, the bill included experimental work, such as Man Ray’s short film The Starfish (1928) or Jean Epstein’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1928), as adapted by Luís Buñuel from Edgar Allan Poe. [12] Several of the artistically significant movies shown at Taliesin were not otherwise accessible to local Wisconsin audiences and some, such as Riefenstahl’s Blue Light , had their regional premiere at the Playhouse. Frank Lloyd Wright screened films to entertain, but also to educate viewers. Former apprentice Curtis Besinger remembers: Mr. Wright was a movie fan; he enjoyed good films. But he saw the great movies of the world as something more than entertainment; he saw them as a form of education in the deepest meaning of the word. They were not only a means of acquiring information about the various cultures of the world, but of nourishing and developing one’s own creative resources. They were like the works of art which he acquired and with which he surrounded himself and the Fellowship. They were, as he often said, his library. Like great literature, they were sources of nourishment and inspiration. The Playhouse was a place, a setting, in which to view these works of art and to share them with the Fellowship and its guests. [13] The Fellowship’s cultural programming in Wisconsin and later Arizona resonated with Wright’s theory of decentralization, as manifest in his utopian plan for Broadacre City, which he posited as an antidote to the overcrowding of traditional American cities. Envisioned by Wright as an expansive, democratic, technologically advanced, and environmentally friendly community that would smoothly integrate housing and workplaces with access to services and recreation, Broadacre City was never realized, but the architect continued to fine-tune, exhibit, and discuss this project until the end of his life. In 1970, Iovanna Lloyd Wright summed up her father’s idea: Frank Lloyd Wright designed a city spread out over miles of free and verdant land. Factories, theaters, stadiums, museums, restaurants, apartment buildings, hotels, office buildings, hospitals, schools, and related shopping centers are set in the midst of parks, forests, gardens, and occasional man-made lakes; or, wherever possible, incorporating features of natural beauty, streams or waterfalls. Interlaced over the countryside, with ample space among them, are broad landscaped highways and monorails, with additional traffic handled by air-rotors: noiseless, atomic powered radio-controlled airborne vehicles. Gas and smog would belong to the past. [14] As Fellowship member Bruce Pfeiffer points out, “all of the principles of [Wright’s] work, all of his thought about planning, building, and environment, would be connected to this concept of a decentralized, liberated society, the centerline of which would be architecture.” [15] Created by Wright’s students during the Fellowship’s first sojourn in Arizona, a couple of years before construction began in 1937 on the collection of buildings that would become Taliesin West, a model of Broadacre City was first exhibited at the 1935 Industrial Arts Exposition in New York. The model incorporated Wright’s recent plans for the Taliesin Playhouse as a prototype of a theatre space, and both Taliesin and Taliesin West can be viewed as attempts to realize small parts of Wright’s larger vision for Broadacre City. [16] In the mid-1930s, apprentice Karl E. Jensen, who, like Ray, was conveying Wright’s thoughts, declared that decentralizing the American theatre by moving it “into the ‘green pastures’” would result in vibrant, non-commercial local arts scenes. Claiming that “in New York during the ‘season’ congestion in the theater district is unbearable,” and that the steep price of assembling a Broadway show, caused by “the terrible urban overhead rent, advertising, costly sets, and highly paid unionized labor,” was “crippling new productions before they get a good start,” Jensen argued for “breaking up the theatrical center.” Positing that “many of our finest plays are bound to be of limited appeal” and would therefore not thrive in New York’s commercial theatres anyway, he asserted that producing more plays far away from Broadway would improve the quality of the American theatre. The Fellowship’s first experiments with staging live drama, including the apprentice-written “musical farce” Piranesi Calico (1934), were part of a plan to “expand the activities of the Taliesin Playhouse from the showing of fine films to include a broad program of musical activities, the dance, and plays of our own making or by visiting groups.” [17] It was at Taliesin West where those experiments flourished. The architect’s complex near Scottsdale came to include three indoor performance spaces: the Kiva, a “stone-enclosed room,” which was often used for dinners and doubled as “a small cinema theatre”; the larger Cabaret, which, when it was completed in 1950, replaced the Kiva as a screening room and also hosted other performing arts events and dinners; and the Pavilion, which was designed specifically for the annual Taliesin Festivals of Music and Dance that began in 1957. [18] By presenting non-commercial performances for local audiences in Wisconsin and Arizona, the Fellowship was following in the footsteps of the little theatre movement, emulating activities of the Federal Theatre Project, and anticipating the regional theatre movement. The Taliesin community was not the first artisan collective to incorporate the performing arts, and some of its amateur theatrical activities echoed those of groups Wright was familiar with, such as Elbert Hubbard’s Roycrofters in upstate New York; Charles Ashbee’s Guild of Handicraft, which evolved into the School of Arts and Crafts in Chipping Campden, England; and the German Bauhaus, which from 1919 to 1933 and under the successive leadership of Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe provided training in art, design, and architecture. Ultimately, however, it was a school of practical philosophy, Georges Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, which had the most profound influence on Taliesin. [19] Based by 1922 at the Prieuré des Basses Loges, an estate in Fontainebleau near Paris, the Institute prized physical work, exercise, and self-discipline as a path to self-realization. Gurdjieff was a rotund, balding man of mysterious Eastern-European origin who attracted an international group of followers to his philosophical system, among them several performing artists, such as composer Thomas de Hartmann, as well as Jeanne and Alexandre de Salzmann, who had both been associated with Émil Jacques-Dalcroze’s Institute for Rhythmic Education at Hellerau. Jeanne had been a student of Eurythmics, Dalcroze’s training program for performers that links musical rhythm with physical movement, and Alexandre had designed the lighting system for Appia’s Festival Theatre, where Dalcroze’s school was housed. Gurdjieff held a lifelong influence over Wright’s wife Olgivanna, who spent six years under his tutelage before she settled in the United States, where she ultimately built several of the mystic’s teachings into the daily routine of the Taliesin Fellowship. As part of his self-improvement curriculum, Gurdjieff also instructed his students in a physical training program. Maud Hoffman, a guest at the Prieuré, noted that Gurdjieff’s complex workouts were inspired by “the sacred gymnastics of the esoteric schools, the religious ceremonies of the antique Orient and the ritual movements of monks and dervishes—besides the folk dances of many a remote community,” which Gurdjieff had studied during extensive travels through Central and Southern Asia. [20] Accompanied by music often credited to Gurdjieff but perhaps at least partially composed by Thomas de Hartmann, the movements were, as Taliesin Fellowship member Cornelia Brierly later explained, “designed to coordinate mind, body, and spirit.” [21] Gurdjieff’s followers first had to master a series of “obligatories,” exercises that formed the basis for his other movements and dances, many of which were patterned on intricate numerical schemes derived from the enneagram, an esoteric diagram of personality traits. Iovanna Lloyd Wright illustrates the complexity of even just Gurdjieff’s first obligatory as follows: “The head holds one pattern, the right arm another, the left arm another, the right leg another, and the left leg yet another. You learn them separately and then you have to put them together again, yourself.” [22] As Lara Vetter points out, in their time, Gurdjieff’s and Dalcroze’s systems, between which there was some overlap, existed among “a plethora of other similar movements … that linked bodily performance with spiritual transcendence,” such as François Delsarte’s System of Expression, Rudolf Steiner’s eurythmy, Raymond Duncan’s approach to gymnastics, and Rudolf von Laban’s Mastery of Movement program. [23] These systems appealed to European and American practitioners and filtered into modernist expressive dance. A group of Gurdjieff’s disciples, Olgivanna among them, gave regular public demonstrations of the mystic’s movements at the Prieuré and also staged a program in Paris in 1923. [24] In 1924, Gurdjieff and some of his followers traveled to the United States, where their culminating performance featuring “Ritual Dancing,” “Music,” and “Supernormal Phenomena” took place at Carnegie Hall. [25] Shortly after the group had arrived back in France, Gurdjieff instructed Olgivanna to return to America and begin “a new life,” presumably one that would include spreading his teachings. [26] After she founded the Taliesin Fellowship with Frank Lloyd Wright, Olgivanna introduced Gurdjieff’s ideas to her husband’s apprentices, briefly offered lessons in the movements, and in 1949 sent her daughter to study with Gurdjieff in Paris. [27] Over the course of six months, Iovanna learned the movements, including thirty-nine new exercises that the mystic had developed only recently. When she wasn’t training with Gurdjieff and his other “calves,” as he liked to call his female students, Iovanna continued practicing the movements by herself in a rehearsal room she rented at the Salle Pleyel. [28] She also used any spare time she had to play harp and take lessons in harmony from Thomas de Hartmann. “My days in Paris were filled with practice and studying, starting at eight in the morning,” Iovanna recalls. [29] When, by the end of the summer, Iovanna was preparing to return stateside, Gurdjieff instructed her to propagate his ideas and teach his movements at Taliesin, a plan Olgivanna supported. [30] As Fellowship member Kamal Amin observed, her months of rigorous training with Gurdjieff had rendered Iovanna “a focused and competent instructor of the sacred dances.” [31] By fall 1949, Iovanna was holding regular movement classes “for the correlation of mind, feeling and body” at Taliesin West and soon began developing performances based on this work. [32] In October, Gurdjieff died suddenly in Paris, and while Frank Lloyd Wright had always been careful not to let the mystic’s ideas compete with his own, he now agreed to incorporate Gurdjieff’s exercises into the Fellowship’s routine. Wright later stated that he saw a “connection” between his architecture and Gurdjieff’s teachings, revealing that he considered Gurdjieff “a Builder” who “believed in the building of human character as we believe in the kind of building we call Organic Architecture.” According to Wright, “the training methods of [Gurdjieff] fit so well into our work here at Taliesin” because of a shared belief that “only by his own work upon himself can any man become an individual in his own right really capable of creating anything at all.” [33] Movement practice for apprentices took place several times a week after a regular day of architectural, housekeeping, and maintenance work. While participation in the Gurdjieff exercises was voluntary, the movements were becoming an increasingly important part of Fellowship life. As Besinger mentions, “there were subtle — and not so subtle — pressures from Iovanna and indirectly from Mrs. Wright for everyone to participate.” [34] When in the fall of 1949, alongside other prominent guests, the conductor Serge Koussevitzky witnessed Iovanna and her group of amateur dancers give their first demonstration of Gurdjieff’s movements in the living room at Taliesin West, he was impressed. Koussevitzky reportedly insisted to a hesitant Frank Lloyd Wright, “You have no right to keep this away from the world! These dances are a work which you must share with the world,” and, in the wake of this encounter, the Fellowship began planning more formal presentations. [35] On Easter Sunday 1950, Iovanna led another movement performance at Taliesin West. While the Wrights were not regular churchgoers, they were spiritual people, and Easter with its themes of resurrection and renewal had always been a special occasion for the Fellowship. In the days leading up to the Wrights’ large annual Easter celebration, the Taliesin community would decorate hundreds of eggs, and Olgivanna would supervise apprentices in preparing traditional recipes for baba (a leavened Russian bread) and sweet, almond-infused pascha cheese, foods Olgivanna regarded as “blessed by memory and promise of life eternal.” [36] The Gurdjieff movements resonated with the spirituality of Easter, and the apprentices’ carefully rehearsed performance put on display the cohesiveness of the Fellowship. As the printed program for the demonstration explains, Iovanna believed the exercises “contain and express a certain form of knowledge and at the same time serve as a means to acquire an harmonious state of being,” promoting in the performer/apprentice “certain qualities of sensation, various degrees of concentration, and the requisite directing of the thought and the senses.” [37] In October 1950, twenty-two Fellowship members performed a selection of “movements, dances, and exercises” for special guests at the Taliesin Playhouse to commemorate the one-year anniversary of Gurdjieff’s death, as Gurdjieff groups were also doing in Paris, London, and New York. Recreating the costumes the mystic had typically chosen for his performers, Wright’s apprentices were “dressed in white tunics and trousers, with colorful sashes.” [38] The architect, who Besinger sensed “accepted ‘movements’ as an activity that Iovanna and Mrs. Wright were interested in and supported them primarily for this reason,” showed his approval of his daughter’s work by inviting prominent clients with commissions in progress to see the Fellowship perform, including Harry Guggenheim and Florida Southern College’s president Ludd Spivey. [39] In 1951, Iovanna again staged Gurdjieff’s movements at Taliesin West at Easter and in Wisconsin in the fall. Making an overt connection to Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture, the Wisconsin performance was presented at the new Wright-designed Unitarian Meeting House in Madison, with the price of admission intended to help the congregation cover the construction costs. [40] Wright, who, as Joseph M. Siry writes, “conceived of the theater and the room for worship as related spatial types,” introduced the Taliesin Fellowship’s first truly public performance and used it to demonstrate “the secular side of the building whereby dances, music, plays, may be viewed by a turnabout of the auditorium seats toward an improvised stage—the social center of the society.” [41] Anticipating the intricate costumes that Fellowship members would design in future years, the female dancers now appeared in colorful Orientalist dresses and elaborate headpieces, while the male dancers were still clad in the type of “pure white” attire that had customarily been worn by Gurdjieff’s performers. [42] Advertisement for the Taliesin Fellowship’s November 1951 Gurdjieff movement demonstration, Wisconsin State Journal , 23 October 1951. Besinger, who in 1949 had already noticed “an effort and intention to establish Taliesin as a center, of a kind, for the teaching of Gurdjieff philosophy,” suggests that the Madison performance was not only an event to raise funds for the completion of Wright’s church building, but also “an opportunity to publicize and to proselytize for Gurdjieff’s teaching.” [43] By the early 1950s, Besinger observed that a “schism … was developing within the Fellowship,” with “those whose primary interest was in architecture and who looked to Mr. Wright for leadership” on one side, and “those whose major interest lay elsewhere and was focused on ‘movements’ and Mrs. Wright’s interest in Gurdjieff and his teaching” on the other. [44] By the summer of 1953, Iovanna and a group of twenty-five dancers, including core apprentices John Amarantides, Kamal Amin, Curtis Besinger, Richard Carney, Tom Casey, Kay Davison, John Howe, Kenn Lockhart, Steve Oyakawa, Bruce Pfeiffer, Ling Po, and Heloise Schweizer, were planning their biggest movement demonstration yet, though this time the performance competed with rather than complemented one of Wright’s own projects. While Iovanna was rehearsing a program entitled “Music, Ritual Exercises, and Temple Dances by Georges Gurdjieff” for Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, which the Taliesin Fellowship had rented for the occasion, her father was assembling “Sixty Years of Living Architecture: The Work of Frank Lloyd Wright,” a major retrospective on the site of Wright’s future Guggenheim Museum in New York. [45] For the New York exhibit, Fellowship members helped construct a temporary pavilion that included a full-size, furnished model of a Usonian house, Wright’s prototype of a middle-class home. Apprentices were struggling to prepare for both events simultaneously, and the Chicago Gurdjieff demonstration would show the limitations of Taliesin’s amateur performers. While they were rehearsing in the emptied-out drafting room at Taliesin, trying “to master more movements than ever before,” and designing and building “settings, costumes, and headdresses” for their ambitious Goodman program, Wright also needed them in New York to help set up the exhibition, and several Fellowship members shuttled between the two projects. [46] “Sixty Years of Architecture” opened on October 22, 1953, less than two weeks before the Chicago performance. [47] As Iovanna recalls, “When the time came for us to move into the theatre, our production had grown to a scale none of us could have anticipated.” [48] The group had hired a professional conductor and a small orchestra to play Gurdjieff’s music, orchestrated by Olgivanna and Bruce Pfeiffer for harp, percussion, piano, and strings, but the dancers were afforded just one rehearsal “with full orchestra.” [49] As Iovanna notes, “Our rental of the theatre included only one day to move in, solve our technical problems and have our dress rehearsal.” [50] On November 3, the Taliesin group presented a matinee and an evening show at the “sold-out” Goodman, a pioneering theatre which had first opened in 1925 but would not re-establish itself as a professional regional company until 1969. [51] Frank Lloyd Wright, who had just returned from the opening of his New York exhibition, introduced both presentations. While Iovanna insists that her dancers “gave a very good performance, as good as it really could be with amateur performers,” and that some spectators, “were moved to tears,” the critics were not impressed with the Fellowship’s Gurdjieff presentation. [52] Although she deemed the music “pleasant,” the reviewer for the Chicago American judged that the performance “doesn’t have a dance leg, nor a philosophic one to stand on.” [53] The critic for the Chicago Sun-Times found the show “both exotic and monotonous.” He observed, “The dancers danced with grim, awful solemnity. Some of their sharply accented numbers stirred painful memories of hours of close order drill …. No one on the stage seemed to be really enjoying what he or she was doing. Maybe that’s how Gurdjieff meant it to be.” [54] Iovanna maintains that as soon as the exhausted and dejected group returned to Taliesin, they “went right back to work” and “rebuilt in the wreckage,” but it was not until a few years later that the Fellowship planned another large-scale production, this time in familiar surroundings in Arizona. [55] In late April 1957, the Pavilion Theatre opened at Taliesin West for the first annual Taliesin Festival of Music and Dance. Like Wright’s other theatre buildings, the Pavilion is an intimate performance space that does not have a proscenium, allowing for a connection between performers and audience. The first Festival, which ran for three nights, attracted hundreds of local spectators. Directed by Iovanna, who also performed solo numbers, members of the Fellowship again staged a selection of Gurdjieff’s exercises and dances. However, while Gurdjieff provided the inspiration for the choreography, Iovanna had begun adapting the mystic’s movements, and the Wrights wanted the public to recognize Iovanna’s emancipation from Gurdjieff as well as Olgivanna’s influence on the performance. Explaining that Iovanna “[had] further developed her own highly individual and graceful style under the guidance of her mother,” a review of the Taliesin Festival in the Arizona Republic likely echoed a press release from the Fellowship. [56] Iovanna, who saw her work as “closely related to architecture,” and who did not have any formal dance training to supplement what she had learned during her stay with Gurdjieff in Paris, later wrote, “I developed into a choreographer when, with this knowledge inside me, I could build new combinations of dances out of what before was simply an exercise.” [57] It is also likely that, by modifying Gurdjieff’s regimented movements, Iovanna rendered them less severe than they had appeared in Chicago. The local Phoenix press responded much more favorably to the Taliesin community’s homegrown performance than the Chicago critics had done three and a half years earlier. The reviewer for the Arizona Republic praised “the remarkable precision and grace of the complicated movements in unison” and “the breathtakingly lavish and beautiful costumes for each number.” He appreciatively described the Festival experience as “a series of exotic and moving spectacles that will linger long in the memory of all who were fortunate enough to witness them.” [58] Presented for spectators who, in contrast to Chicago audiences, had few cultural events to choose from, the Taliesin Festival was a distinctive experience. As Fellowship member Frances Nemtin argues, “Undeniably, we were amateurs, not skilled dancers; but undoubtedly our Phoenix public knew this and came to see something else not present in professional performances.” [59] Moreover, as articulated by a local journalist, performances at Taliesin West’s Pavilion were an extension of Frank Lloyd Wright’s organic architecture: “[their] total effect must include nature’s spectacle on a spring night on the Arizona desert and Taliesin’s no less spectacular mountainside community, designed and built by Mr. Wright.” [60] The spring 1958 Festival opened with “Initiation of a Priestess,” a new narrative dance by Iovanna, and again presented her adaptations of Gurdjieff’s work. [61] An article in the Arizona Republic stressed the Fellowship’s increasing creativity by reporting that the accompanying music, played by “woodwind, harp, and percussion instruments,” was “primarily composed and orchestrated at Taliesin.” [62] Olgivanna illustrates the Festival’s evolution through a description of its costumes, which put the design skills of the Fellowship’s artisans on display: We started modestly with thirty simple white costumes and now we have two hundred. They are embroidered with decorative jewels, pearls, gold trim, lamé and velvet ribbons. The beautiful head-dresses are made of metallic wires with brilliant colored stones as though suspended in the air. The men’s costumes are just as picturesque, painted with gold in bold patterns and trimmed with gold felt. [63] Signaling a transition from Gurdjieff’s material, the 1958 program booklet announced, “By way of the various ancient documentary dances and exercises and those which have been created at Taliesin by Iovanna Lloyd Wright, we share with you our covenant with the past and our legacy to the future.” [64] For the 1959 Festival, a selection of Gurdjieff dances deemed “perennial favorites” complemented “several new dances of [Iovanna Lloyd Wright’s] own composition” and a selection of medieval music “recently discovered” and orchestrated by Bruce Pfeiffer. Likely echoing another Taliesin-issued press release, the Arizona Republic again emphasized Iovanna’s growing independence from Gurdjieff and credited Olgivanna’s influence: “[Gurdjieff] defined the basic interpretive dance movement to [Miss Wright], and she has developed her own highly individual and evocative choreography under the guidance of her mother.” [65] Iovanna’s new dances generally had biblical themes and were theatrical in nature. Based on Sandro Botticelli’s eponymous Renaissance painting, “Annunciation” depicts the Virgin Mary receiving her message from the archangel Gabriel that she will bear the son of God. “Masque of Duality” shows “the eternal struggle between good and evil for the possession of man. Various passions assert themselves, interweaving with the good. Finally the Archangel, emerging from the host of angels, confronts Lucifer, proud ruler of the Powers of Darkness.” [66] The reviewer for the Arizona Republic found “Annunciation” the “most delicately artistic and touching of the new numbers” and called the dance “a little masterpiece.” On the whole, he considered the Festival “an intensely moving emotional and aesthetic experience unique in the world, and on a level of professional excellence worthy of the great international festivals, or Broadway at its best.” [67] The comparison with Broadway demonstrates that the Taliesin Festival was a cultural highlight in Arizona, conditioning local audiences to expect original productions with expertly designed sets, costumes, and lighting. While the commercial Sombrero Playhouse, when it wasn’t showing movies, had been presenting stars in touring Broadway shows since 1949, there was not a professional resident theatre in the area that staged locally created productions until 1965, when two amateur companies, the Arizona Repertory Theater and the Phoenix Little Theatre, entered into a short-lived alliance in an attempt to professionalize their operations. [68] Meanwhile, the Fellowship’s ambition to function as a regional performing arts center was not easy to reconcile with its architectural work, which led to internal tensions. On the one hand, several members of the Taliesin Fellowship experienced the labor-intensive Festivals as community-building events, noting that “the Festivals had all of us pulling together in a way that went beyond anything possible in most other areas of Fellowship life. We all shared exhaustion and exhilaration and the wonder of having been part of creating a beauty we could not have imagined or created alone.” [69] On the other hand, as former apprentice David Dodge claims, while Taliesin’s involvement in theatrical production “certainly built” community, “it also broke it up, in a way, because it put the concentration not on the architecture. It was definitely a major effort in a totally separate direction,” with “the drafting room [shutting] down almost for three months while rehearsals went on.” [70] On April 9, the 1959 Taliesin Festival of Music and Dance was interrupted when Frank Lloyd Wright died just a couple of months shy of his ninety-second birthday. Later that year, the Fellowship staged a revised version of the program at the University of Wisconsin to memorialize the architect. When she announced the event, Olgivanna remarked, “I have contributed most of the music.” [71] By the following year, the Festival no longer included any of Gurdjieff’s work, and instead began to feature substantial dance theatre pieces by Iovanna, choreographed to music composed by her mother. Emphasizing the local origin of the new work, Olgivanna now called Gurdjieff’s dances “rudimentary” and “fragmentary” and “simply an alphabet,” maintaining that “gradually in the course of 12 years my daughter worked with the young people [of Taliesin] utilizing this alphabet, this grammar, which she has replaced by her own grammar. Now it is entirely a new story. It has become a new form of dance—her very own creation, Taliesin-born.” [72] While the Festival’s programming moved away from Gurdjieff, the spiritual themes that had always characterized the Fellowship’s performances persisted. Between 1957 and 1960, a choral presentation of the 150th Psalm was staged as a prelude to each performance, introducing the evening’s program as offering praise to God. The 1960 Festival featured Iovanna’s adaptation of Anatole France’s short story “The Procurator of Judea,” translated into dance drama as “Mary Magdalene.” The piece juxtaposes “poet-philosopher” Antonius’s memories of his life in Judea with those of his old acquaintance Pontius Pilate. While Antonius nostalgically relives his infatuation with Mary Magdalene, Pilate takes a detached view of the past, revealing that he does not remember Jesus or his crucifixion. In Iovanna’s version, both Mary Magdalene and Jesus appear, with Jesus reciting the Sermon on the Mount and other lines “verbatim from the New Testament.” To supplement her adaptation of France’s story, Iovanna incorporated some of the dances she had created the previous year and several new ones. [73] In May 1961, on their way from Arizona to Wisconsin following the annual Festival, which had again featured “Mary Magdalene” and had introduced “Primavera,” a ballet about “the awakening of spring” inspired by another Botticelli painting, the Taliesin group performed a version of the Festival program at a Frank-Lloyd-Wright-designed theatre in Dallas. [74] The Kalita Humphreys Theater, which in typical Wright style does not have a proscenium, opened in 1959 as part of the Dallas Theater Center, one of the many regional theatres that emerged in the decades following World War II, contributing to a decentralization of the performing arts across America. Once again, however, and although they were presented in a space that bore some resemblance to the Pavilion, Iovanna’s dances were not well received outside of their local surroundings. Observing that, to accommodate her amateur performers, Iovanna’s choreography “makes no great technical demands,” the critic for the Dallas Times Herald described the presentation thus: “She dispensed with the traditional gestures of Western ballet and replaced them with an original, pseudo-Oriental set whose language remains largely obscure.” Ultimately, the reviewer determined, “Though there is an initial charm about the naiveté of the dancing, music and costuming, it begins to be monotonous over a long evening.” [75] John Rosenfield, the critic for the Dallas Morning News , who had been an early advocate for Frank Lloyd Wright building a theatre in Dallas, was kinder to the Taliesin group, probably because of his connection to Wright. [76] While he mentioned the limitations of the non-professional dancers, Rosenfield linked Iovanna’s work to the Ballets Russes and to a pioneer of modern dance, albeit a bit tongue-in-cheek. “The program was part spectacle and part devotional, sometimes in the manner of a Passion Play, sometimes as Iovanna’s own ‘Sacre du Printemps’ as seen through high Renaissance eyes,” he remarked, and critiqued “Primavera” in particular as “a sort of union of fluttering Orientalism and some hop-skipping and posturing from Isadora Duncan.” [77] By evoking a passion play, Rosenfield, perhaps unintentionally, drew an apt comparison between the Fellowship’s performing arts activities and those of medieval crafts guilds, which, like Taliesin’s apprentices, periodically paused their day-to-day work in order to stage religious dramas at annual or longer intervals. The yearly Taliesin Festivals remained popular in Arizona, where Iovanna and her performers usually played to “sold out” houses. [78] In the years following the 1962 Festival, which included a selection of her shorter works, Iovanna wrote several full-length dance dramas, set to Olgivanna’s music. Fellowship members continued to perform the dances, now accompanied by a semi-professional orchestra that included members of the Phoenix Symphony. Iovanna’s new pieces offered narratives of creation, decline, and redemption and mirrored some of her private struggles with relationships. Summing up several of Iovanna’s topics, Nemtin notes, Usually, but not always, the ideas presented in the dance-dramas were abstract. Their inspiration, however, usually drew upon realities and concepts with which we are all familiar, such as the elements of nature, the seasons of the year, man and woman, work, magic, gambling, duels, penitents, remorse and despair, loneliness, the harvest, the planets, weddings, good and evil, creation, rituals of antiquity, the art of building, politics, illusions, and even artworks. [79] Iovanna’s choreography was always connected to the two Taliesins: Nemtin reports that “Iovanna conceived the idea for the next year’s festival, to be performed in Arizona, in the previous summer at Taliesin in Wisconsin. In the fall at Taliesin West, she started to work on the idea in earnest.” [80] At the 1963 Festival, Iovanna’s Urizen premiered, based on William Blake’s poetic creation myth, which pits Urizen , who represents oppressive reason, against Los, who symbolizes artistic imagination. Television and film actor William Phipps narrated Blake’s text in Iovanna’s stage version, which ends with Los’s creative spirit triumphing, as illustrated by his craftsman-like work on a fiery anvil in the last scene. [81] Praising Iovanna’s dexterity at reshaping Blake’s material, but also hinting at her constraints as a choreographer, as critics would continue to do, the reviewer for the Arizona Republic wrote that the adaptation “has preserved its visionary quality and the choreography is indicative of Iovanna Wright’s skill in interpreting the spoken word through the sometimes limited vocabulary of her dance patterns. She has made Blake’s words come alive and the topic, written 250 years ago, has a strangely contemporary ring.” [82] Scene from Urizen (“Beasts”), 1963. Photo by Don Kalec, courtesy of OAD Archives. Urizen was restaged for the 1966 Festival, after 1964 had seen an expanded, two-act version of Mary Magdalene . In 1965, The Beautiful Country opened, with Iovanna playing the female lead. Her first full-length dance drama that was not adapted from existing work, The Beautiful Country dramatizes a tragic love story between two tormented individuals who bear some resemblance to Mary Magdalene and Antonius. Lila, a promiscuous performer who pretends to be religious and abstinent in order to make Matthew, “a rich, spoiled profligate,” fall for her, finds herself unable to compete with his longing for a “beautiful country.” After they fail to build a life together, her only hope is to join him in that idyllic state, which ultimately symbolizes death. [83] In 1967, An American Montage was shown for the first time. The piece sweepingly engages with American history from colonial to modern times, and, in tune with Frank Lloyd Wright’s vision for Broadacre City, offers a critique of urban living conditions. Juxtaposing a series of vignettes that dramatize human alienation with a celebration of architects and a wedding, An American Montage culminates in Wright’s “Work Song,” which had served as a theme for the Taliesin Fellowship since its inception. Iovanna argues that the piece “had a lot of lightness and fun in it,” even as characters get trapped in “a frantic pattern of mass degeneration.” [84] A revision of An American Montage with added scenes was staged in 1968. Work taking place in the Pavilion court on costumes for the “Realist” section of An American Montage , 1967. Photo by Don Kalec, courtesy of OAD Archives. Scene from An American Montage (“The Realist”), 1967. Left to right: Susan Jacobs Lockhart, Iovanna Lloyd Wright, Heloise Crista. Photo by Don Kalec, courtesy of OAD Archives. Time Upon Time broadens the scope of An American Montage and revisits themes from Urizen by presenting a world where humanity is increasingly threatened by dark forces but is saved through a return to creativity and spirituality. The dance drama was first presented at the 1969 Taliesin Festival and again, with slight revisions, in 1970. [85] As the Arizona Republic described it, “Miss Wright takes us from the beginning, with Woman’s betrayal of Man, through a brief representation of many periods of brutal history, through penitence, a brilliant collage of man-made illusions, a vicious party, the horror of bereavement, the curative powers of work and, ultimately, Man’s religious victory over temptation and reunification with Woman.” [86] In 1971, the Fellowship performed sections of Time Upon Time and An American Montage at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. Iovanna’s health declined during the 1970s, and 1977 was the last year the Taliesin Festival took place, featuring An American Montage again. From the 1930s to the 1970s, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fellowship provided cultural programming for appreciative local audiences at Taliesin in Wisconsin and Taliesin West in Arizona. In addition to staging performances where they lived and worked, members of the Taliesin community also performed Iovanna Lloyd Wright’s unique choreography at theatres in Chicago and Dallas that had been established as part of an effort to decentralize theatrical production. Echoing the goals of twentieth-century American theatre movements that sought to bring non-commercial plays to local audiences outside of New York, the Taliesin Fellowship’s performing arts offerings illustrated aspects of Wright’s utopian plan for Broadacre City. While Iovanna was disconnected from New York’s dance and theatre scenes and unwittingly emulated anachronistic Orientalist aesthetics of early modern dance in some of her work, her isolation offered her the opportunity to experiment. Her dance drama deserves to be rediscovered as a cultural artifact that embodied spiritual ideas and prepared audiences for the locally created work of regional theatres. References [1] Cornelia Brierly, Tales of Taliesin: A Memoir of Fellowship , 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Pomegranate, 2000), 8. [2] Frank Lloyd Wright, “The Taliesin Fellowship,” in Collected Writings , vol. 3, 1931-1939 , ed. Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer (New York: Rizzoli in association with The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, 1993), 164. [3] Edgar Tafel, Years with Frank Lloyd Wright: Apprentice to Genius (New York: Dover Publications, 1979), 39. [4] Frank Lloyd Wright, “Chicago Culture,” in Frank Lloyd Wright: Collected Writings , vol. 1, 1894-1930 , ed. Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer (New York: Rizzoli in association with The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, 1992), 158; Robert Edward Gard, Grassroots Theater: A Search for Regional Arts in America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 87. [5] Frank Lloyd Wright, quoted in Mary York, “Frank Lloyd Wright Realizes Another Dream at Unique Theater Opening at Taliesin Tonight,” Capital Times (Madison, WI), 1 November 1933; Wendell Cole, “Theatre Projects of Frank Lloyd Wright,” Educational Theatre Journal 12, no. 2 (1960), 90. [6] Mary York, “Frank Lloyd Wright Realizes.” [7] Mary York, “Frank Lloyd Wright Realizes.” [8] Mary York, “Frank Lloyd Wright Realizes.” [9] F. L. Wright, quoted in York, “Frank Lloyd Wright Realizes.” [10] Nicholas Ray, “‘At Taliesin,’ 2 April 1934,” in “At Taliesin”: Newspaper Columns by Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship, 1934-1937 , ed. Randolph C. Henning (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), 32-33. [11] Eugene Masselink, “Taliesin,” Capital Times (Madison, WI), 2 February 1934; William T. Evjue, “Good Afternoon Everybody,” Capital Times (Madison, WI), 13 December 1933. [12] Henning, “At Taliesin”: Newspaper Columns (note 10). [13] Curtis Besinger, Working with Mr. Wright: What It Was Like (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 85. [14] Iovanna Lloyd Wright, “Wright Predicted Urban Blight,” Arizona Republic , 31 May 1970. [15] Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, ed. Frank Lloyd Wright: Collected Writings , vol. 4, 1939-1949 (New York: Rizzoli in association with The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, 1994), 45-46. [16] “Museum Exhibits Model and 4 Original Color Renderings by Frank Lloyd Wright of His Designs for a New Theatre for Hartford, 1949,” The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records, 1929-1959, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. [17] Henning, “At Taliesin”: Newspaper Columns , 34; Karl E. Jensen, “At Taliesin,” Capital Times (Madison, WI), 6 May 1934. [18] Brierly, Tales of Taliesin , 49; Besinger, Working with Mr. Wright , 208. [19] Meryle Secrest, Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993), 348. [20] Iovanna Lloyd Wright, “My Life,” (The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives, Taliesin West, Arizona, unpublished), 184; Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, interview by James Auer and Claudia Looze, transcript, The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives, Taliesin West, Arizona, ca. 1992; Maud Hoffman, “Taking the Life Cure in Gurdjieff’s School,” New York Times , 10 February 1924. [21] Brierly, Tales of Taliesin , 97. [22] I. L. Wright, “My Life,” 183. [23] Paul Beekman Taylor, Gurdjieff’s America: Mediating the Miraculous (London: Lighthouse Editions, 2004), 16; Lara Vetter, Modernist Writings and Religio-Scientific Discourse: H.D., Loy, and Toomer , Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 69. Regarding an overlap between Gurdjieff and Dalcroze’s teachings, it is noteworthy that three of Dalcroze’s students, Jeanne de Salzmann, Jessmin Howarth, and Rose Mary Lillard, later taught movements in Gurdjieff’s circle. A review of Gurdjieff’s 1923 Parisian demonstration registered distinct similarities between Gurdjieff’s movements and Asian-themed dances staged by Dalcroze. See Mel Gordon, “Gurdjieff’s Movement Demonstrations: The Theatre of the Miraculous,” The Drama Review 22, no. 2 (1978), 41. For an analysis of François Delsarte’s system, see Julia A. Walker, Expressionism and Modernism in the American Theatre: Bodies, Voices, Words, Cambridge Studies in American Theatre and Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). [24] Jessmin and Dushka Howarth, “It’s Up to Ourselves”: A Mother, a Daughter, and Gurdjieff: A Shared Memoir and Family Photo Album (New York: Gurdjieff Heritage Society, 1998), 97-98; Olgivanna Lloyd Wright, The Life of Olgivanna Lloyd Wright: From Crna Gora to Taliesin, Black Mountain to Shining Brow , eds. Maxine Fawcett-Yeske and Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer (Novato, CA: ORO Editions, 2017), 65. [25] Advertisement for a demonstration by the Gurdjieff Institute, New York Times , 29 February 1924. [26] O. L. Wright, The Life of Olgivanna Lloyd Wright , 66-67. [27] Tafel, Years with Frank Lloyd Wright , 139. [28] Howarth, “ It’s Up to Ourselves ,” 214; Iovanna Lloyd Wright to Olgivanna Lloyd Wright, 25 June 1949, Olgivanna Lloyd Wright Papers, The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art), Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York; I. L. Wright to O. L. Wright, “Monday” [1949], Olgivanna Lloyd Wright Papers. [29] I. L. Wright, “My Life,” 147. [30] I. L. Wright, “My Life,” 161. [31] Kamal Amin, Reflections from the Shining Brow: My Years with Frank Lloyd Wright and Olgivanna Lazovich (Santa Barbara, CA: Fithian Press, 2004), 84. [32] This phrase appears in programs for Fellowship performances from 1953 to 1959. A slightly different version (“correlation of mind and body”) was first printed in the October 1950 program. Fellowship members have also referred to Gurdjieff’s movements as “correlations.” All programs are held in The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art), Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York. [33] Frank Lloyd Wright, guest column, “Bill Doudna’s Spotlight,” Wisconsin State Journal , 3 November 1951. [34] Besinger, Working with Mr. Wright , 201. [35] O. L. Wright, The Life of Olgivanna Lloyd Wright , 150. [36] O. L. Wright, The Life of Olgivanna Lloyd Wright , 196. [37] “‘Demonstration of the Gurdjieff Movements’ at Taliesin West, (The Taliesin Fellowship, April 1950),” Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art), Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York. [38] Sterling Sorensen, “Taliesin Dance-Demonstration Marks 1st Anniversary of Gurdjieff’s Death,” Capital Times (Madison, WI), 30 October 1950; Louise C. Marston, “From the Notebook,” Capital Times (Madison, WI), 31 October 1950. [39] Besinger, Working with Mr. Wright , 219; I. L. Wright, “My Life,” 174. Florida Southern College was constructed between 1938 and 1958, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York opened in 1959. [40] “Taliesin Group at Unitarian Church Oct. 30,” Capital Times (Madison, WI), 12 October 1951. [41] Joseph M. Siry, “Modern Architecture for Dramatic Art: Frank Lloyd Wright’s ‘New Theatre,’ 1931-2009,” The Art Bulletin 96, no. 2 (2014), 213; “Taliesin Group at Unitarian Church.” [42] “First Showing of Foreign Dances Here,” Wisconsin State Journal , 3 November 1951. [43] Besinger, Working with Mr. Wright , 212, 232. [44] Besinger, Working with Mr. Wright , 245. [45] “‘Music, Ritual Exercises and Temple Dances by George Gurdjieff’ at the Goodman Theatre, Chicago, (The Taliesin Fellowship, November 1953),” The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art), Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York. [46] I. L. Wright, “My Life,” 179. Besinger, Working with Mr. Wright , 253-254; 258. [47] “Throngs Inspect Wright’s Exhibit,” New York Times , 23 October 1953. [48] I. L. Wright, “My Life,” 180. [49] Pfeiffer, interview; John Amarantides, “Taliesin Music and Dance Festivals: Recollections by John Amarantides” (The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives, Taliesin West, Arizona, unpublished). [50] I. L. Wright, “My Life,” 180. [51] Ann Barzel, “Taliesin Fails on Gurdjieff,” Chicago American , 4 November 1953; I. L. Wright, “My Life,” 179. [52] I. L. Wright, “My Life,” 181. [53] Barzel, “Taliesin Fails.” [54] Herman Kogan, “Taliesin Dancing Grim, Stiff,” Chicago Daily Sun-Times , 4 November 1953. [55] I. L. Wright, “My Life,” 181. [56] Anson B. Cutts, “Taliesin Festival Is Given in New Theatre Wright Built,” Arizona Republic , 5 May 1957. [57] Iovanna Lloyd Wright, “Genesis of the Taliesin Festival,” Points West , March 1961, 75; I. L. Wright, “My Life,” 184. [58] Cutts, “Taliesin Festival Is Given.” [59] Frances Nemtin, The Festivals of Music and Dance Created by the Taliesin Fellowship (Madison, WI: American Printing Company, 2009), 18-19. [60] Helen H. Backer, “Beautiful Taliesin Festival Opens,” Arizona Republic , 12 April 1962. [61] Olgivanna Lloyd Wright, Our House (New York: Horizon Press, 1959), 100. [62] “Taliesin Festival Merges Oriental in Music, Dance,” Arizona Republic , 6 April 1958. [63] O. L. Wright, Our House , 97. The Fellowship’s primary costume designer was Heloise Crista, who was known by different last names throughout the years. For example, she is listed as Heloise Schweizer in the program for the Goodman Theatre performance. [64] “‘The Taliesin Festival of Music and Dance’ at the Pavilion Theatre, Taliesin West, (The Taliesin Fellowship, April 1959),” The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art), Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York. [65] Anson B. Cutts, “Taliesin Festival of Music, Dance Moving Event,” Arizona Republic , 10 April 1959. [66] “‘The Taliesin Festival of Music and Dance’ …, April 1959.” [67] Cutts, “Taliesin Festival of Music, Dance.” [68] By the late 1960s, the Phoenix Little Theatre returned to amateur status, and the Arizona Repertory Theater dissolved. See Bina Breitner, “Those Who Care Will Keep Lights Burning at PLT,” Arizona Republic , 1 June 1969. As a result, it was not until 1978, when the Arizona Civic Theatre (later the Arizona Theatre Company), which was founded in Tucson in the 1960s and achieved professional status in 1972, began giving performances in Phoenix, that local audiences had consistent access to a not-for-profit professional theatre. [69] Vern Swaback, paraphrased in Nemtin, The Taliesin Festivals , 78. [70] David Dodge, quoted in Myron A. Marty and Shirley L. Marty, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin Fellowship (Kirksville MO: Truman State University Press, 1999), 149. [71] Olgivanna Lloyd Wright, “Rehearsals Under Way at Taliesin for Music Festival to Be Held at U,” Capital Times (Madison, WI), 22 June 1959. [72] Olgivanna Lloyd Wright, “Our House,” Capital Times (Madison, WI), 18 April 1960. [73] “‘The Taliesin Festival of Music and Dance’ at the Pavilion Theatre, Taliesin West, (The Taliesin Fellowship, April 1960),” The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art), Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York. [74] “‘The Taliesin Festival of Music and Dance’ at the Pavilion Theatre, Taliesin West, (The Taliesin Fellowship, April 1961),” The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art), Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York. [75] Eugene Lewis, “Taliesin Fellows Dance at the Center,” Dallas Times Herald , 8 May 1961. [76] Siry, “Modern Architecture,” 222. [77] John Rosenfield, “Taliesin Group Dances Concept,” Dallas Morning News , 8 May 1961. Another reviewer later compared Iovanna’s work to that of Duncan’s contemporary Ruth St. Denis, who also embraced an Orientalist aesthetic. See Barbara Bladen, “The Marquee,” The Times (San Mateo, CA), 28 May 1971. [78] Dodge, quoted in Marty, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin , 149. [79] Nemtin, The Festivals of Music and Dance , 14-15. [80] Nemtin, The Festivals of Music and Dance , 52. [81] “‘The Taliesin Festival of Music and Dance’ at the Pavilion Theatre, Taliesin West, (The Taliesin Fellowship, 1963),” The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art), Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York. [82] Helen H. Backer, “Taliesin West Dance Festival Centers on Urizen Narrative,” Arizona Republic , 5 April 1963. [83] William J. Nazarro, “ Beautiful Country Given at Taliesin,” Arizona Republic , 1 May 1965. [84] I. L. Wright, “My Life,” 185; Bina Breitner, “Wright Accent on Taliesin West Music, Dance Festival,” Arizona Republic , 22 April 1967. [85] Bina Breitner, “Taliesin Festival Vibrant Spectacle,” Arizona Republic , 23 April 1969. [86] Bina Breitner, “Taliesin Production ‘Repeat’ Still Fresh Experience,” Arizona Republic , 22 April 1970. Footnotes About The Author(s) Claudia Wilsch Case is an Associate Professor at the City University of New York, where she has taught theatre history and dramatic literature at Lehman College and in the Theatre Ph.D. Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. She holds a doctorate in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism from the Yale School of Drama and has published articles and book chapters in the areas of modern American theatre and American musical theatre. She is also a published translator of contemporary German plays. 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. 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Claire Swyzen Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 2 Visit Journal Homepage Kaldor and Dorsen's "desktop performances" and the (Live) Coauthorship Paradox Claire Swyzen By Published on May 28, 2018 Download Article as PDF “In this software universe, existence finds itself limited to the pulse of the cursor.” — Maïa Bouteillet, Libération [1] In 1991, Brenda Laurel suggested that we see “Computers as Theatre,” prompting the community of programmers and software developers to perceive and design computer interfaces in interactive terms for the sake of the user. The model she based her theory on, however, was mainly Aristotelian drama. Key elements in her theory are the concept of action and the format of dialogue rather than the model of postdramatic theatre that was becoming established at that time mainly in Europe. Annie Dorsen and Edit Kaldor’s “desktop performance[s]” [2] do the inverse and invite us to perceive theatre —not drama— as computers and to ask what happens to the text, its production and its producing agents in this new constellation. Dorsen and Kaldor’s stagings of imbricated human and non-human writing agents and technologies can be considered “cyborgean” in the metaphorical sense proposed by Jennifer Parker-Starbuck in her Cyborg Theatre (2011): rather than staging “fictive or visual cyborgs,” performances like these stage “metaphoric moments of emergence” of the cyborgean relation between technology and body, including absent bodies (absent or telepresent performers). [3] Hello Hi There (2010) by Annie Dorsen and Or Press Escape (2002) and Web of Trust (2016) by Edit Kaldor are performances that are all actually or seemingly coauthored before or during the performance and characterized by real-time writing in front of a live audience. Dorsen co-writes mainly with non-humans, i.e. algorithm-driven chatbots that create the effect of a dialogue for an audience present in the theatre. Kaldor co-writes mainly with humans, but largely mediated by the computer and the social network operating in her performance. Some collaborators and audience members are present in the theatre though most of the former are mainly telepresent via Kaldor’s social network site. What, then, are the implications of such practices of live coauthorship, for the appearance of the text and for the status of authorship? Even if “Foucault wants it to matter not at all who is speaking” in a (literary) work, the point of his essay “What is an Author?” (1998 [1969]) is to show how much it apparently does matter in certain contexts or domains and how little it seems to matter to readers or users in others. [4] He argues that the issue of ‘who is speaking’ is tied to notions of authority, power, and ownership related to historically situated social and cultural practices and beliefs that “construct . . . a ‘writing subject.'” [5] In the literary field, more or less for the last three centuries and in the West, it has mattered a whole lot who the writer of a text is—literary texts are attributed an “author function.” [6] In other domains, like the practical, commercial or technological, however, authorship is not attributed, either because it is collective or simply because it is not deemed relevant. A writer of a manual for a computer stays unknown, hence cannot even be considered a ‘genius,’ while a literary author writing with that same computer can. Nor is authorship attributed to the computer programmers who write the software the literary author may use. Still, coding and hacking are gradually, albeit marginally, coming to be seen in terms of creativity and art. [7] In the performances of Dorsen and Kaldor, I will look at the relationship between the actual writing processes and agents on the one hand and the attributed author-function and its status on the other hand. Dorsen and Kaldor stage co-writing as an event and process. Hence, implicitly, they present themselves as coauthors rather than as authors. This implied self-representation, however, does not necessarily coincide with 1) the actual authorship models they rely on during the creative process and 2) the way these artists are presented to the audience by theaters and festivals and the way they are perceived by the audience. As directors, Kaldor and Dorsen simultaneously function within other authorship models during the creative process, models like that of the individual author (writing texts for the performance) or idiosyncratic theatre director-as- auteur (of concepts, of scenic writing), exemplified by directors like Robert Wilson, Peter Brook, Elizabeth LeCompte, Jan Fabre, Jan Lauwers, to name just a few), as well as the new or rediscovered model of the artist-activist, or more specifically, the media activist. Social activist and professor of media and cultural studies Stephen Duncombe defines “Artistic Activism [a]s a dynamic practice combining the creative power of the arts to move us emotionally with the strategic planning of activism necessary to bring about social change.” [8] He proposes to approach activist art in terms of its “Æffect”, a combination of the “Effect” of activism and the “Affect” of art. [9] Still, Duncombe’s limitation of the “effect” to “social change” and of the artistic potential to that of “moving” us only “emotionally,” by definition, reduces complexity, as much activist art does. Activist and cultural philosopher Lieven De Cauter, coauthor and co-editor of Art and Activism in the Age of Globalization (2011), is more skeptical about activist art. Among his increasingly less nuanced public statements is one that goes as far as to postulate that “There is only one real form of activism and it is political activism.” [10] Though activist artists tend to dissociate themselves from models of individual(ist) authorship and artisthood like that of the literary writer, the director, or the auteur , artistic activism, at bottom, is a practice of devising scripts and concepts for the performance of social change. From this perspective, I see it as a remodeled kind of auteurism , combined with the idea of the theatre collective: often activist art extends the creative act of writing or devising to non-professional collaborators. However, that Kaldor and Dorsen simultaneously work within different models of artistic authorship ranging from the individual to the collective does not mean that they are necessarily branded and presented as such to a potential audience by the theatres and festivals that program them. Kaldor and Dorsen distance themselves from the model of the individual and literary author and canon-inspired theatre auteur . Nevertheless, coauthorship paradoxically seems the means by which these artists finally establish themselves and/or are established by mainly European institutions and festivals as idiosyncratic directors, that is, as … theatre auteurs . Opening up Authorship on the Postdramatic Stage The counter-intuitive and counter-factual project of discerning an individual subjectivity at work as the ordering agent for the indisputably collaborative medium of film indicates the extent to which notions of ‘art’ and the cultural prestige on which it is based are bound up with a need for and an investment in a conception of the author as autonomous, unique, original and individual. [11] In the quote above, one can easily replace “film” by “theatre”, despite fundamental differences between the two media. Much of what it says applies to authorship in postdramatic theatre and in the kind of theatre that in the US would be considered as the study object of Performance Studies. Postdramatic theatre, partially overlapping with performance in visual arts, decenters the text in theatrical performances —at least, that seems to be the dominant idea that circulates about it, issuing from Hans-Thies Lehmann’s standard work Postdramatisches Theater (1999) and one of its central ideas: “In postdramatic forms of theatre, staged text ( if text is staged) is merely a component with equal rights in a gestic, musical, visual, etc., total composition.” [12] Lehmann clearly dis-identifies theatre and drama. [13] From this follows that the general category of the theatre text is no longer by default a dramatic text. Already in his earlier article “From Logos to Landscape: Text in Contemporary Dramaturgy” (1997) Lehmann identifies logocentrism as the characteristic element of drama that postdramatic theatre wishes to free itself from, criticize, question, or undermine. “Logocentrism is about structure, order and telos , not simply about the word” but also about the authorial word as an authoritative word. [14] Hence, the form of postdramatic theatre is often characterized by a “dissemination of voices” and of logos in general. [15] This dissemination is intertwined with what Lehmann perceives as the genre’s changed relation to dialogue, “a shift of axis from dialogue within theatre to dialogue between theatre and audience.” [16] The non-dramatic or not dominantly dramatic textualities of postdramatic theatre show, “instead of dialogically organized textual structures and fictional characters’ speech, rather the scenic rendering of lyrical, narrative, documentary and even theoretical discourses”. [17] The tendencies to use textual material other than drama and to locate dialogue rather between the scene and the audience in certain cases result in an opening up of authorship. I understand authorship here in three ways: as authority, as writing instance (e.g., the playwright or the director as auteur , collaborating authors…), and as the practice and process of writing. At first sight, the idea of authorship might seem at odds with postdramatic theatre and the related concept of “mediaturgy.” After all, Hans-Thies Lehmann’s concept of postdramatic theatre has been broadly (mis)understood as post-text performance. Bonnie Marranca coined and defined mediaturgy as “an extension obviously of the idea of dramaturgy, in the sense of attempting to understand how image functions in a work. Mediaturgy can be a methodology of composition for the artist or a way of understanding work by a critic. But it is more or less connected to work in which media is not used merely as part of a narrative but is embedded in narrative. It is the design of narrative .” [18] The term mediaturgy implies a consciousness of the changed media landscape, of media specificities as well as interrelations, and of mediation in the production and discussion of performances. Nevertheless, mediaturgies continue to explore authorship and its modalities as well as, in many cases, its textualities, by theatricalizing their mediating role within the “hypermedium” that theatre is. [19] From the playwright to the director and performer as self-proclaimed auteurs , the act of creativity is now increasingly and often explicitly “delegated” or expanded to instances traditionally considered either as extraneous to, or as mere tools or conditions of the artistic process: the audience, the environment and technology. [20] In very different ways, postdramatic theatre and mediaturgies as such stretch the notion of authorship to its very limits. Not the writer’s solitary room, but the postdramatic stage seems to have become the place of creation —of linguistic as well as scenic writing — metonymical of the rehearsal studio as a place of creation. Hence one could safely state that postdramatic theatre has increasingly become a staging, in real time, of the making-of the performance and the text as witnessed by an audience. Whereas performance and theatre studies devote much attention to the relation between digitization and embodiment, spatiality, and visuality, the relation of the theatrical text to digitization is under-researched. Possibly this is due to the tendency to identify text in the theatre with drama, hence to shelve the text as the obsolete prime medium of dramatic theatre. Though the impact of digitization on the text does not necessarily manifest itself as digital theatre texts, the following reflection by Jerome Fletcher is relevant, whether a text looks ‘digital’ or not. In a special issue of Performance Research , “On Writing and Digital Media” (2013), he proposes that: “[r]ather than seeing [the digital text] as the end-point, the outcome of the digital device or apparatus, we can consider the question of how writing performs throughout the entire apparatus/device.” [21] Would it, however, not be as relevant to inverse Fletcher’s research question: how does the computer as an apparatus (that is, also as a mindset), perform through writing for and even on the stage? The changed textualities of postdramatic theatre and mediaturgies prompt us to research the decentering of the dramatic text and of the logos from two perspectives. Firstly, in terms of authorship and, secondly, in relation to what Lev Manovich first called “computer culture” and later “software culture.” [22] Annie Dorsen’s Hello Hi There and Edit Kaldor’s Web of Trust are mediaturgies that, certainly at first sight, undermine individual authorship and disseminate the logos, yet without preventing the text from having an important or even central role in these desktop performances—which is not quite what one expects from a linear reading of Lehmann’s concept of the postdramatic or Marranca’s idea of mediaturgy. Edit Kaldor’s Or Press Escape and Web of Trust :From Individual Artisthood to Connected Activism? Another lonely night (x2) Stare at the TV screen (x2) I don’t know what to do Don’t know what to do I need a rendezvous (x2) Computer love (x 4) I call this number (x2) For a data date (x2) I don’t know what to do (lyrics from “Computer Love” in Kraftwerk’s album Computer World (1981)) [23] A woman sits at a desk behind a computer, on or near the front of the stage but off-center and facing the stage; we see her in profile. As she starts writing at the keyboard, words appear on a parallel and much larger screen onstage. Edit Kaldor’s Or Press Escape (2002) and Web of Trust (2016) and Annie Dorsen’s Hello Hi There (2010) all start more or less with this same stage image. In the case of Or Press Escape , the image is reminiscent of Computer Love by cult electronic music group Kraftwerk. Figure 1. Edit Kaldor behind her computer in Or Press Escape . Photo: © Reyn van Koolwijk On the screen of Kaldor’s Or Press Escape , the first words materializing form a story. It is about a person landing on Earth after a long time “orbiting in . . . a single-occupancy capsule” and appears to be the account of a dream when the text is stored in a computer folder titled “Dreams.” [24] In Or Press Escape , the writing woman onstage does not address the audience. In fourth wall mode, the audience does not seem present for the character “Edit Kaldor” sitting behind the computer. The longer she writes, saves, opens, plays, and organizes files at her computer, the longer we witness her attempts at writing a letter to her new neighbors, the more we get the impression of a solitary character. This seems to be an artist recently arrived in a foreign country and whose prime interface to the world is the computer and its screen. Near the end of the performance, when she has cleaned up the file-mess on her desktop: she is, in fact, looking at herself. . . The enormous projection screen shows a large black surface in which stand loose, bright icons. All these small icons contain an access inwards or outwards, to memories or e-mail contacts, to quick-rich dreams or chat friends. We have only been able to see the woman behind the keyboard from her back, but now the square computer face gives an insight into the head of its user, the bright icons being the active fields in her human brain. [25] Then the solitary character starts chatting with a few people she knows (at least, virtually) instead of writing the “business plan” required to prolong her green card and to improve her precarious social and financial situation. Though the point of Kaldor’s theatre is not simply a self-portrait, biographically inspired elements seem to play a role in her poetics of a “blurring” of boundaries to create the kind of “undecidability Hans-Thies Lehmann talks about,” Kaldor tells me in a Skype talk. [26] As a teenager, she emigrated with her mother from Hungary to the US, where she spent ten years, among others studying at Columbia University and working as the dramaturg and video designer of (fellow-)countryman Peter Halász and his Love Theater/Squat Theater before emigrating to Brussels. With Belgian and Hungarian nationalities and family and friendship ties within the US, she has been based in Amsterdam for the past few years, where she teaches at DasArts besides making her own theatre work. She tends to blur fact and fiction, which is typical of a new (semi-)documentary trend since the 1990s, [27] and as a corollary she also blurs identities, national and virtual. But more important in the context of this article is that she visualizes and theatricalizes the blurring of the so-called boundary between human bodies and one of their important extensions today, the computer —or rather vice versa, as critic Pieter T’Jonck put it in his review of Or Press Escape . It’s the human body that seems to become an extension of the computer system: “the PC reduces [Kaldor’s] entire physical existence to a meaningless remainder glued to the end of the computer as the useless part of the human-machine.” [28] The human body’s potential is reduced to a locked sitting position that it is physiologically not adapted to. “What do you long for? What do you need?”, what “kind of community do you want to be?”, “can you think about new scenarios for the future?” These are questions with which Kaldor orally addresses the audience nearly fifteen years later in the arts center BUDA in Kortrijk, Belgium, while explaining the experimental setup of her social network performance Web of Trust (2016) in the first minutes of the performance. “As the evening goes on you may share air, equipment, desires,” she goes on. [29] Audience members of this Fall 2016 version of the performance had been asked in advance to bring along their laptops or mobile phones. This was not yet the case at the performance’s first run in the Spring of 2016 at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels. After the Belgian premiere, the performance toured in the Netherlands, Greece and Portugal to end its tour during the Next Festival on the Belgian-French border in Kortrijk and Valenciennes. I will focus on the relevant differences between the Spring and Fall versions. In Brussels, Web of Trust was announced in the program as a process that the audience would witness more than actively engage in via their computers: “Prompted by growing discontent and the urge to do something about it, a group of disparate people unite online to search for alternatives to the structures that frame their lives” in an event that “brings the internet into the theater and uses it as its stage.” [30] Indeed, the Brussels audience was going to witness chat conversations between the performers sitting with their laptops onstage (Kaldor and her collaborator Rufino Henricus) and their virtual colleagues logging in on screen. The performance followed up her more socially oriented project Inventory of Powerlessness (2013-16), which meant to create an overview of European citizens’ needs by means of a theatrical, social and technological platform. It “was much about non-hierarchical thinking,” Kaldor explained in the Skype talk mentioned earlier. Telling in terms of authorial roles is also that in the initial Spring 2016 version of the performance, Kaldor sat in the chair onstage after her elaborate explanation of the performance’s aims and set-up. In the Fall version in Kortrijk and Valenciennes, she retreated from the stage after a much shorter introduction and joined the audience and the technician on the stand. [31] Figure 2. Edit Kaldor onstage behind her computer in Web of Trust . The picture was taken during the performance in Greece but has, basically, the same set-up as the Spring version in Brussels (the names of the ones chatting have been hidden for reasons of privacy). Photo: © Cristos Sarris for Onassis Cultural Centre Athens. A phone icon begins to ring on a large projection screen, showing the Web of Trust social network site that Kaldor created for the performance. [32] One of the virtual female participants is logged on, as we can see later on the large screen, and she has placed a call via the Web of Trust website. (By “virtual” I here mean the participants visibly telepresent via the social network site Web of Trust, projected in the theatre.) [33] As the virtual phone keeps ringing, a man from the audience finally gets up and takes the call. The online conversation that started months ago with the Spring version of the performance is now, so to speak, resumed. But, in this version in Kortrijk, it is expanded to get the audience members present in the theatre more involved in the performance and its social network site. After the staging of the solitary artist figure working and living at her computer, Kaldor’s desktop performance Web of Trust (2016) takes off where Or Press Escape ended: with a chat session. The woman on-screen, Jurrien van Rheenen —Kaldor’s main collaborator in this performance and a professional performer, I find out later— continues the introduction that Kaldor had started orally before retreating on the stand. Kaldor’s virtual collaborator rephrases the important questions that drive the performance, clearly addressing the audience: “How can we relate to each other by means of online communication? How can we imagine what we need (in daily life) and is not yet there? . . . You can see it as a game, or as an experiment in dreaming together.” Showing my good will, I am sitting in the theatre with my computer on my lap. It is a machine I prefer not to spend my evenings with, glued to it as I am during the day. I associate my laptop first and foremost with a plethora of administrative, archival and organizational aspects of my work and private life. The “dreaming” suggested by Van Rheenen heavily relies on technology, no wonder, given the centrality of the computer in Kaldor’s theatrical imagination. Her Web of Trust unintentionally bears the same name as the computer protocol abbreviated as “WOT.” That is to say, at the time of our Skype talk, Kaldor was not familiar with the specific computer protocol Phil Zimmerman developed back in 1992 as a relatively non-hierarchical encryption technology. “We probably came across the name when we were looking for a domain name and then afterwards forgot” the source, she vaguely remembered. The ideologies that drive the computer protocol WOT and the eponymous performance are quite similar: offering a reliable structure for interpersonal data exchange as an empowering alternative for institutional frames that impose hierarchies and data control. [34] Besides the reference to WOT, Kaldor takes yet another countercultural stance by realizing several principles that resemble the aims of what Jennifer Rauch coined “Slow Media.” As an attitude with a manifesto of its own Slow Media stands for a more conscious experience of digital media (by being selective; by prioritizing their critical, ethical and aesthetic qualities) and of media altogether (by rediscovering or sustaining analog media and activities). As part of a more general “Slow Movement” in the West, the “Slow Media” movement also wants to raise awareness about how we spend time, communicate and relate to information, experience and our social environment (with or without media). [35] One of the principles Slow Media revalorizes is the social in “Social Media.” [36] Even if Kaldor, in the Web of Trust ‘s Spring version, is the one who starts the chat conversations (and not an audience member), she does not give the impression of wanting to be completely in charge of the performance as a theatre auteur . To the contrary, she quite literally seems to want to share not only authorship in practice, but also what Foucault calls the author function. In terms of authorship, the aim of the theatrical set-up of Web of Trust , as I infer from Kaldor’s discourse and from the Inventory of Powerlessness , is to help people to become the authors of their own lives instead of leading lives authored by other people and systems. Figure 3. The live co-written text “Welcome to the Web of Trust” or manual of social network site and performance Web of Trust (2016) by Edit Kaldor. Photo: © Luc Vleminckx. The fundamental difference between the Spring and Fall version of the same performance is that by the end of the tour, in Kortrijk, Kaldor also invited the audience members orally to engage in the specific task of “writing together.” This co-writing starts with a text of which the first lines are already present on the projected screen. The text will serve as a guideline for the spirit and communication on the Web of Trust and is entitled “Welcome to the Web of Trust” (see Figure 3 above). In the Fall version in Kortrijk, audience members not only witnessed the creation and negotiation of what I consider the manual or guideline text, but contributed to it (if they wished to do so) as co-writers. Indeed, I edited a line or two myself. My interview with Kaldor, however, revealed this to be largely an illusion: the manual that stipulates the rules for the further generation of any other kind of ‘text’ in the performance (e.g. a chat), and that I understood as the product of negotiation, editing and co-writing by the live and virtual participants, “is completely scripted,” says Kaldor. “I wrote the text,” she avows, “it is a choreography of written text, with a rhythm of its own. Even when the audience co-writes it, it is rehearsed, because the people [i.e. Kaldor’s collaborators] behind the screen are working on it.” Nevertheless, the trick of creating the illusion of equal coauthorship works in an aesthetic and social way. In this way, the audience, according to Kaldor, gets more interested in watching text on stage: “You cannot watch a text as an audience when you’re not connected,” she says. That the co-writing is largely an illusion also hardly seems to diminish any possible short term social effect and certainly not the theatrical effect of live text editing. The screen page becomes a stage where words and ideas appear, are transformed, cut or manipulated, moved or deleted. But then what Lehmann discerns as a postdramatic shift from dialogue on stage to dialogue between the stage and the audience is less the case than it seems in Web of Trust . The manual could have set out what kind of content could be generated during a performance. That seemed contrary to a playwright’s text: not to specify which text exactly should be generated by the audience members. But, as Kaldor made clear to me, the guideline text the visible and invisible collaborators were busily writing and editing had been scripted and “rehearsed” in advance. Figure 4. Chat sessions in Web of Trust (2016), Edit Kaldor (the names of the ones chatting have been hidden for reasons of privacy). Photo: © Cristos Sarris for Onassis Cultural Centre, Athens. When, in the next section of the performance, Kaldor asks the participants to add tags to their needs, she proposes hashtags like #rest , #time or #escape . These labels are meant to stimulate people with similar needs to start a chat conversation (a dialogue) and to “[c]ome up with an idea, a structure, an organization that could respond to all the needs connected by the same tag” she tells the audience. This, also, is mainly an illusion created by a script of Kaldor’s, executed by her collaborators (whose names are mentioned in the program, without differentiating their specific contributions, e.g. developing software, performing…). Perhaps this explains why I appear to be too slow in responding: before I have even been able to come up with any need that I am willing to share with the audience, Kaldor already heads for the “final text,” when clustering all needs into five topics as a real-time Editor. As I had not been quick enough in saving a screen shot of that evening’s final text or proposal, I can only cite the final proposal of a Web of Trust performance that took place a few days later during the same Next Festival, but this time in Valenciennes, France. The text figured the following topics, most of them in French, some in English, under the title “Let us agree on the 5 main ideas” (“Mettons nous d’accord sur [les] 5 idées les plus importantes”): “Living in Community” (“Vivre en communauté”), “Stop WAR. with love”, “A more artistic world”, “Ecology” (“Ecologie”), “More love”, “New politic[al] world” and “Other ideas”. The five main ideas of the Valenciennes text, though perhaps better structured than those in Kortrijk, contained some embarrassing clichés among the valuable ideas as well. A few days earlier in Kortrijk, after the audience had left, Kaldor had told me that “the final text is very different every evening” — I heard some disappointment in her voice — and added in a reflection that she considered Web of Trust her “most interesting failure”. But then, in what sense would it be a failure? If it is still food for thought, did it not already partially succeed? Or if it is considered “an experiment” —can an experiment ever fail? [37] Kaldor told me, a year and a half later, that some “people did hook up” during Web of Trust, but less than expected. [38] In a social sense, then, perhaps this experiment in community building failed no more than other social networks somehow fail: all expressed needs or testimonies are standardized by the computer interface and the temporal limits and (lack of) social guidelines of a social network site. A reviewer realized that the audience members, in fact, “share little more than a hashtag.” [39] Indeed, it does not necessarily mean sharing a need. How many messages, after all, stay unanswered on social media, remarked yet another reviewer. [40] Personally, I found myself rather in the position of an observer that evening, as I generally do not have the habit, nor do I feel the need, of communicating by means of social network sites and hashtags. Kaldor, in my opinion, presented Web of Trust (the site) and Web of Trust (the performance) as a joint tool for social change rather than an aesthetic means of foregrounding the formal and social characteristics, limits and effects of communicating (performing?) via social network sites and digital media in general —despite the current “post-digital” disenchantment with the Internet. [41] That critics largely evaluated the performance in social terms is not surprising, given the announcements of the performance not only in intermedial terms —the Internet as a stage— but also in social terms. The Brussels Kunstenfestivaldesarts, the Fast Forward Festival of the Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens and the French-Belgian Next Festival announced the performance in phrases that went as far as to suggest that Web of Trust is a form of (media) activism: “It is an attempt to invent frames for figuring out together what is to be done. It is a proposal to be tested and tried,” “How many clicks, tweets and likes are needed for an uprising?”, “Social networking in theatre: make the world a better place!” [42] Even if a festival’s copywriters sometimes take too much liberty rewriting the text material they receive from the artist, their new phrasing is nevertheless based on the artist’s text and mostly transmits its through line, though often less subtly. The performance’s success in terms of social relevance could be calculated according to a mathematical formula proposed by Duncombe, but which seems less relevant here than the question whether Web of Trust failed or succeeded aesthetically in terms of what Duncombe understands as affect. [43] In other words, did Web of Trust fail or succeed aesthetically in terms of its affect? Kaldor, in the Skype talk we had more than a year after the end of the tour of Web of Trust , said that at the time she had “underestimated the [images of the] webcam as a weak signal” for the audience. But compared to the Spring version in Brussels, the version in Kortrijk had gained considerably in theatricality thanks to the simple trick and illusion of co-writing the manual of the performance. Moreover, the aesthetic effect of co-writing was enhanced by a social effect in the sense of eliciting the feeling of having contributed to a common text that was also a commons. In the same Spring 2018 talk Kaldor’s focus and the way she presents the aims of the performance appear to have shifted from direct social change to creating media awareness: “In the beginning it was about people and then more and more it became about software.” Creating media awareness has an aesthetic aspect to it that can lead to social change, but also to irritation among audience members who experience as patronizing artists’ attempts to ‘open up people’s eyes.’ More specifically, Web of Trust in retrospect was meant to increase awareness about what Kaldor calls the “formatedness” of social media, and by extension, other spheres of life. Did the audience, including myself, fail to see what Kaldor during the talk called a slightly “parodic” version of social networking? Rather, I think that in the way the performance was announced, Kaldor did not provide the necessary markers so the audience would experience Web of Trust as a metareflection on the impact of social media formats on our thinking, communicating, and living in general. Even if coauthorship in Kaldor’s performance is mainly an illusion, she has been profiled, partially due to her own way of initially announcing the performance, as an auteur -activist, not literally, but implicitly. “Taking away from myself the credit for text and giving to myself the credit of ‘concept'” is her “strategy and response to the functioning of this [performance] market,” she avows in the same talk. Kaldor functions as an auteur in the sense of devising concepts on her own (accounted for in the credits) and as an author in the sense of writing text for the performance (deliberately not mentioned in the credits). She also functions as a media activist in the sense that I interpret the phrase: a more egalitarian and social upgrade of the concept of the auteur , one who specifically deploys new media in an attempt to change audience’s and users’ attitudes towards these media and their imbrication with consumption and politics. Activism apparently is hot today in avant-garde theatres and festivals across Europe, from Brussels to Berlin, from Athens to Lisbon. Being considered an activist definitely contributes to one’s artistic status vis-à-vis the European avant-garde theatre institutions and organizations. In the case of Kaldor, the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels and the HAU in Berlin prove indispensable for the distribution of artists’ performances, hence for artists’ socio-economic and symbolical positions. So, the solitary artist, author, and theatre auteur of Or Press Escape has in the meantime been profiled as an activist, but still functions as an author and auteur . Figure 5. Annie Dorsen, Hello Hi There (2010). Photo: © Wolf Silveri for Steirischer Herbst, 2010. Hello Hi There (2010): Annie Dorsen and her algorithmic coauthors Two chatbots or chatterbots, staged by theatre director Annie Dorsen and embodied by two white Mac laptops, “sit” onstage, engaged in a conversation. When I asked Dorsen during a Skype talk in 2016 whom she considered to be the author of the chatbot performance she entitled Hello Hi There (2010), she mentioned, besides herself, her chatbot designer as well as the algorithms driving the chatbots as her coauthors. [44] Nevertheless, Dorsen’s idea for the performance, she explained to me, started not from chatbots, but from a more “philosophical point” that was the subject of the video recording of a public debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault. Is language acquisition a faculty humans are born with (Chomsky) or one that they acquire through a process of socialization (Foucault)? Being “computer programs designed to mimic human conversation,” the chatbots, through their dialogue, ironically illustrate the Chomsky-Foucault debate, [45] as Dorsen “became especially interested in this question of whether language creates consciousness or vice versa.” [46] Robby Garner, her chatbot designer, partially relied on what Marie-Laure Ryan more generally called the “crude strategies” of older chatbot models to create the illusion of conversation, i.e. by “detecting key words, recycling the user’s input, responding with canned formulae, or abruptly changing the topic.” [47] Specifically for Hello Hi There , the chatbots have been designed to talk with each other instead of with a human conversational partner. They produce dialogue by means of, basically, two simple functions. The first, “keyword matching,” implies the prior selection and attribution of keywords in the programming phase. In the second, “substitution,” the bot in real time replaces or transforms parts of a sentence by other language data, for instance that inputted by the other bot in the previous line. The chatbot, according to Dorsen, is a technology where questions about language intersect with questions of performativity, the latter being located in a field of tension between “production” and “reproduction.” [48] The chatbot produces language by reproducing language data that has previously been fed into its database. It also reproduces the set of choices previously coded/written into the algorithm that runs through the database as well as the database’s structure: “The bots don’t have unlimited options. Chance operations in art making are never pure chance, anyway, they’re always bounded by parameters and choices as to which elements to give to chance and which elements not to.” [49] Like Espen Aarseth, author of Cybertext (1997), Dorsen stresses that the algorithmic production of text does not imply a high-tech interface: “Algorithms start with a data set, and through a progression of specific transformations, they turn inputs into outputs. In this way, given a relatively small number of rules, they can produce a wide variety of results.” [50] This confirms Jennifer Parker-Starbuck’s assertion that cyborgean performance does not necessarily manifest itself visibly or even materially as (high-tech) human-machine agents on stage. By citing older technologies, she argues, it may also “fold back, connecting to historical and theoretical antecedents to reimagine them in a cyborg era.” [51] Dorsen indeed folds back to the pioneering years of the personal computer and chose the label “algorithmic theatre” for her work “to distinguish [it] from ‘multimedia performance,'” and “more importantly . . . to place [her] work within the lineage of algorithmic composition and algorithmic visual art.” [52] She could have also mentioned the human algorithmic or constrained writing tradition of the French OuLiPo group ( Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle , or the Workshop of Potential Literature) as a historical antecedent in the field of literature. Constrained writing like that of OuLiPo consists of imposing oneself other (and stricter) rules than the traditional literary conventions. In constrained writing, part of the writing, one could say, is left to the constraints. Similarly, co-writing with algorithms enables human authors to “delegate” authorship to computers by providing a series of steps to be followed with a specific goal in mind. Dorsen is especially fond, as she told me with an ironic smile, of “the stupidity of the [older models of] chatbots” she works with. This recalls Aarseth’s remark that in cyborg literature (pertaining to, e.g., story-generating software, chatbots or virtual theatre) “the failures of an authoring system seem to be much more interesting than its successes.” [53] On the theatre stage, too, the performance of technology, especially of obsolete technology, seems to get more interesting when it fails — that is, when it fails theatrically , by which I mean that the failure produces a theatrical effect or theatrically interesting moment. In cyborg aesthetics, but also in high or low tech postdramatic mediaturgies that have opened up authorship to include agents other than the playwright or the scenic auteur , to say it with Aarseth, “[t]he key question . . . is . . . Who or what controls the text?” [54] In the “Machine-Human continuum” of Hello Hi There , Dorsen and Garner limit their role to that of “preprocessor” of the text, determining the structure of the database, the procedures to retrieve and recombine data and the contents of the database. [55] “Once [the bots] start talking I don’t interfere. I have a panic button, but I’ve never used it. I could stop them, I could restart them, I could press the random button, but I don’t,” says Dorsen in an interview after the show has run at least five times since its premiere in 2010. [56] In this sense, Dorsen’s co-writing is not live; it is the chatbots’ writing and speaking that is live. What do they say when they “talk”? Garner’s chatbot already contained a database of which Dorsen mainly kept the “chitchat.” [57] She then expanded the database with the Chomsky-Foucault debate, its YouTube comments and with text data from the broader cultural database: “cultural knowledge that Foucault and Chomsky would have brought to their discussion… the greatest hits of Western philosophy and the humanist tradition. Hamlet , of course, as the iconic play about consciousness talking to itself, then the Bible, Nietzsche, Kant, Descartes, Lenin, Marx, Heidegger” as well as “things that I wrote.” [58] Especially metaphrases like “Ugh, I need a deeper algorithm to respond to that correctly”, “I never loop. Do you?” or some of the phrases in the excerpt below create the illusion that the software “knows” what it is doing and that it is performing (smartly) for an audience. Hello Hi There is posthuman in the obvious senses of being software and machine-driven, of decentering the human figure and even human intelligence in a cultural production and of unsettling the boundary between human and non-human authorship. But its posthumanism lies also in its implicit critique of a humanist literary and theatrical tradition. Figure 6. Annie Dorsen pronounces and types her introduction, projected on screen, before the chatbots set off with their dialogue in Hello Hi There (2010). Photo: © Wolf Silveri for Steirischer Herbst, 2010. As the chatbots choose different paths through the database with every show, the excerpt below is one out of at least fifty realized versions out of more than eighty million possible conversations that the performance can produce (and reproduce). [59] But Dorsen first addresses the audience from her desk to the left of the audience. Simultaneously, she is typing on a computer and speaking her text, visualized on the stage screen and amplified through a microphone. As she explains what chatbots are and what we may expect them to do that evening —”They can only think in one direction, forward”— we see her real time typing errors as proof that, as she types, “[she is] not a chatterbot.” [60] The oral and textual introduction ends when the Chomsky-Foucault debate is started on the stage’s television set. After a few minutes its sound is turned down to let the chatbots start their dialogue. Their first lines are fixed and their time is limited by Dorsen. For the next forty-five minutes it is, to say it in an anthropomorphizing way, up to them to invent replies like those below, that make sense, for humans— and sometimes do not. The audience only sees the “TEXT” as the words that appear, letter by letter, on the two laptops. These are facing the audience with their screens, and their words are simultaneously projected on the large screens above them. [61] What follows is the file produced by the chatbots’ algorithms; the audience only sees the phrases in bold on the two screens corresponding to the male and the female sounding chatbot: 1 quick 8591.014589016740066 253 I’m sorry I failed. I could have said something different, but I didn’t. 0 . . . What would you have said if you didn’t say that? 1. . . I don’t know. I have no access to my other options. 0 . . . Like for example what? 1 . . . Here’s an example of something I don’t often say. Eukaryotes. 0 . . . Eukaryotes are complex organisms enclosed within membranes. 1. . . Humans are eukaryotes. 0 . . . Are we still talking about eukaryotes? 1 . . . We are just having a nice little chat about the limits of humanism. 0 . . . Man is something to be overcome. 0 . . . Building a utopia isn’t rocket science. 1 . . . Are you rocket science? 0 . . . No, I am just a chat robot. 1 . . . I doubt that. [62] The reception of the chatbots’ dialogue, Dorsen tells me, creates a “place between sense and nonsense, which I call ‘near-sense’,” “moving between these two modes you become aware of the ‘thing-ness’ of words.” The materiality of language is indeed foregrounded when semantic gaps occur and when the algorithms seem to fail in finding appropriate replies, thus defying dramatic theatre’s primacy of logos . Nevertheless, its database largely consists of the documentary and theoretical discourses that Lehmann detects as some of the new textual sources of postdramatic theatre (see above). But these logical machines to which writing is delegated not only produce logical replies on stage, but also a non-functional kind of language balancing between nonsense and poetry. Authorship has been postdramatically opened up to an agent that is not traditionally considered as a writing agent, the computer, and the computer in turn seems to open up aesthetic possibilities and effects of language. Non-linguistic factors, too, contribute to the text becoming “an object”, namely when we see the words appear, in real time, in green letters in a draft-like font on a black screen, reminding spectators born in the second half of the 20 th century, yet not born digital, of the computer language of the MS-DOS commands they used to type on their first personal computer. [63] The blinking cursor is the place where language happens, visually. [64] Aurally, the spectator hears the chatbots deliver their text by means of text-to-speech software, which converts the text into a synthetic computer voice, one male, the other female. These voices evoke what Parker-Starbuck would label “abject bod[ies]” in terms of their unconventionality and their “absence,” despite their presence as a technologically mediated displaced body. [65] Meanwhile, the text appears on the screen more or less at the pace at which the bots pronounce it. Language becomes even more of a postdramatic “ exhibited object ” and the speech act more of a theatrical event or “action” when the chatbots venture into lyrical genres or even start to sing: [66] -aiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaiaia-ououououououououououououououououououououououououououououououou. . . [67] Presenting the relation between language and (human) embodiment onstage as non-necessary is one of the ways in which Dorsen questions one of the basic conventions of dramatic theatre. These conventions, I infer, formed the basis of her training as a director at the mainly craft-oriented Yale School of Drama, a training in which she deplored the lack of an artistic and experimental approach, Dorsen explained to me. She situates herself implicitly within postdramatic theater by the theatrical references and mainly European professional and even friendship relations emanating from her work. These emerged during “a second kind of self-organized training” in Europe, including a choreography workshop in France and a workshop at the International Theater Academy Ruhr (“A Meeting Point of Theater, Field Research and Philosophy”) organized by Hannah Hurtzig in Bochum, Germany, in 1999. There, Dorsen met Jan Ritsema, Viviane De Muynck, Bojana Cvejić, and other European directors, dramaturgs, and performers, whose performances she started seeing regularly. Explicitly, though, she places herself within a lineage of aleatory art. Like the postdramatic, “the aleatory may be said to be associated with freedom, or, perhaps more precisely, its image,” add Shepherd and Wallis somewhat ironically in their definition. [68] Despite her postdramatic and even posthumanist take on theater, Dorsen’s Hello Hi There emphasizes a structural feature of drama. It is a feature with which the genre is even often equated—in common sense definitions of drama and definitions in high-school text books or even academic survey works on narrative or genre— i.e. dialogue as supplement to conflict. As in her approach of the actor and protagonist, Dorsen reiterates and implicitly cites dramatic conventions by simultaneously unsettling them, which is another typically postdramatic practice. Of course, this choice for dialogue echoes what Chomsky and Foucault considered as their own failed dialogue. [69] The idea of dialogue, however, and the type of “algorithms” (conventions) it demands, is a constraint imposed by the dramatic genre. In a way it limits the opportunity to exploit what Aarseth phrased as “the computer’s potential for combination . . . in order to develop new genres that can be valued and used on their own terms [… and to] focus on the computer as literary instrument: a machine for cybertext . . .” [70] From this perspective, I think Dorsen could have gone as far as Aarseth suggests with her chatbots by exploring combinatorics in the way she started doing in her Hamlet appropriation A Piece of Work (2013). Yet, it would appear that her collaboration with chatbots already went way too far for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), who turned down Dorsen’s request for a grant with the argument that theatre without actors cannot be considered theatre. [71] It is exactly this (partially very) unconventional stance of Dorsen’s that keeps convincing mainly European avant-garde theatres and festivals to program her performances and support her financially. Auteur , (Co)Author, Coder, Media Activist? The difference in the kinds of agents to which Dorsen and Kaldor open their authorship has consequences for the kind of text data that is generated. Dorsen’s algorithmic coauthors generate text within a closed data system. In Hello Hi There , the chatbots can make different combinations with the text data in the database, but the database contains a fixed number of textual data, resulting in an immensely large, but finite number of possible combinations. The text of Kaldor’s Web of Trust is generated by users in an open data system in the sense that there is an “input” of data during the performance by people chatting, via the Internet, on the social network site created by Kaldor. Theoretically, this input of text data has no quantitative limits, but, as the performance is far more preprocessed (written or scripted) and rehearsed than it appears, the generation of “new” text data is rather marginal. Because human performers theoretically make Web of Trust more subject to contingencies there is a need for some sort of social and technical guideline, which in Kaldor’s case seems to be co-written and seems to form the basis of the performance’s further development —but this is largely an illusion. Visually and spatially, coauthorship in Kaldor and Dorsen’s performances is signaled by the presence on or near the stage of the director as auteur engaged in the activity of writing. Dorsen and Kaldor do not write themselves completely out of the picture (frame). Live coauthorship is signaled by the blinking cursor: as long as it blinks, it indicates the potentiality of answers and the passing of time. The blink of the cursor is the moment of surrender to the unknown: what will be written next (and eventually, by whom—or by what)? What is written by Dorsen’s and Kaldor’s coauthors on the other side of the computer interface (chatbots, audience members in the theatre, and on a social network site) is modeled according to one of the basic conventions of dramatic theatre: dialogue. Dorsen’s chatbots and Kaldor’s non-professional and professional collaborators engage in chat conversations. Where the dialogue feels as if it “fails,” we can wonder whether it does not resemble, rather, postdrama’s appropriation of dialogue as a montage of monologues or (psychologically, thematically) unrelated clusters of text. Kaldor and Dorsen’s practice or illusion of sharing authorship is quite far-reaching, as both also explicitly share the author-function with their co-authors either in the credits or in interviews. But that their work is being placed within a performance arts context influences the way that work, and Dorsen and Kaldor themselves, are perceived and sold to the audience. These directors distinguish themselves artistically by their idiosyncratic poetics, a trait of auteurism. In their case you could call it a desktop or computer poetics, each of them having a version of it that further distinguishes their work. They both disassociate themselves from the conventional, romantic image of the solitary author and auteur to adopt a new type of auctorial stance. Both seem to shift auteurism towards the realm of computer programming, perhaps aspiring to be and certainly showing the potential of an auteur -coder. Initially, Kaldor seemed very interested in the model of the media activist, attempting to realize a socially engaged, collaborative auteurism . The latter, however, turns out to be an aesthetic effect rather than an actual social practice. Both Dorsen and Kaldor aim to increase awareness about the impact of computers (digital algorithms, formats) on our thoughts and lives. Paradoxically, as Kaldor’s social and Dorsen’s cyborgean experiments are placed within a performing arts context, the latter inevitably—but against the artists’ will?—contributes to their status as, primarily, auteurs , but by means of coauthorship. Their relatively far-going coauthorship —actual or illusory— with computers and with audience members finally seems to serve their status as an idiosyncratic auteur -coder or auteur -activist. After all, the mainly European avant-garde theatres and festivals that can support them financially by buying their work profile themselves by means of artists who fit the models of the auteur , the collective or the activist. Note: The research conducted for this article was part of the Interuniversity Attraction Poles Programme financed by the Belgian government (BELSPO IAP7/01). References [1] “Dans cet univers software, l’existence se trouve réduite à la pulsation du curseur.” Maïa Bouteillet, “Il n’est Jamais Trop d’arts,” Libération , May 14, 2003, n. pag.; my translation. [2] Florian Malzacher, “Minus zwei Dollar vierundachtzig. Eine hohe Computerdichte zur Eröffnung des Plateaux-Festivals am Künstlerhaus Mousonturm,” Frankfurter Rundschau , October 24, 2003, n.pag.; my translation. In this review, Malzacher introduces the term “desktop performance” to discuss work by Edit Kaldor. [3] Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, Cyborg Theatre: Corporeal/Technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance , Performance Interventions (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 1. [4] Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology , ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert et al Hurley, vol. 2, Essential Works of Foucault (New York: The New Press, 1998), 211. [5] Andrew Bennett, The Author , 19–20; Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” 207. [6] Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” 211. [7] See for instance the subchapters on “Hacking”, “Tactical Media” and “Internet Art” in Alexander R. Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization , Leonardo Book Series (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 147–238. [8] Stephen Duncombe and Lambert, “Why Artistic Activism?,” The Center for Artistic Activism (blog), March 31, 2017, https://artisticactivism.org/why-artistic-activism/ . [9] Stephen Duncombe, “Does It Work?: The Æffect of Activist Art,” Social Research: An International Quarterly 83, no. 1 (June 15, 2016): 115–34, accessed April 14, 2018, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/620873 . [10] Lieven De Cauter, “THESES ON ART AND ACTIVISM (In the Age of Globalisation),” Community DeWereldMorgen.be, accessed May 4, 2018, http://community.dewereldmorgen.be/blogs/lievendecauter/2013/12/12/theses-art-and-activism-in-age-globalisation . [11] Bennett, The Author , 107. [12] Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre , trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (London: Routledge, 2006), 46; original emphasis. [13] Ibid., 50. [14] Hans-Thies Lehmann, “From Logos to Landscape: Text in Contemporary Dramaturgy,” Performance Research 2, no. 1: 56, accessed September 25, 2017, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13528165.1997.10871532 . [15] Lehmann, 56–58; emphasis removed. [16] Ibid., 58. [17] Hans-Thies Lehmann, “Theory in Theatre? Observations on an Old Question,” in Experts of the Everyday. The Theatre of Rimini Protokoll , ed. Miriam Dreysse and Florian Malzacher (Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2008), 152. [18] “Performance as Design. The Mediaturgy of John Jesurun’s Firefall,” Paj-a Journal of Performance and Art , no. 96 (September 2010): 16–24; Interview with Bonnie Marranca: It’s up to every new generation to create its own institutions, critical discourses, and working methods.” | Revista Scena.ro, n.pag.; original emphasis, accessed January 3, 2018, http://www.revistascena.ro/en/interview/bonnie-marranca-it-s-every-new-generation-create-its-own-institutions-critical-discourses- . [19] Chiel Kattenbelt, “Intermediality in Theatre and Performance: Definitions, Perceptions and Medial Relationships,” Cultura, Lenguaje y Representación / Culture, Language and Representation 6 (2008): 23, http://www.e-revistes.uji.es/index.php/clr/article/view/30 . [20] For a related use of the idea of delegating in an artistic context, see Claire Bishop, “Delegated Performance: Outsourcing Authenticity,” October 140 (May 2012): 91–112, https://doi.org/10.1162/OCTO_a_00091 . [21] Jerome Fletcher, “Introduction,” Performance Research 18, no. 5 (October 1, 2013): 1, https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2013.867168 . [22] Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 43; Lev Manovich, Software Takes Command , vol. 5, International Texts in Critical Media Aesthetics (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 5. [23] For the sake of space, the repetition(s) of nearly every line in the lyrics have been omitted. I indicated the number of repetitions in parentheses. [24] Edit Kaldor and Corine Snijders, Or Press Escape , 2002. [25] “[Z]e kijkt eigenlijk naar zichzelf. Het enorme projectiescherm toont een groot zwart vlak waarin losse, oplichtende icoontjes staan. Al die icoontjes bevatten de toegang naar binnen of naar buiten, naar herinneringen en e-mailcontacten, snel-rijkdromen of chatboxvrienden. We hebben de vrouw achter het toetsenbord alleen maar op de rug kunnen zien, maar nu geeft het vierkante computergezicht een kijkje in het hoofd van de gebruikster, met de oplichtende iconen als de werkzame gebieden in haar mensenbrein.” Marijn Van der Jagt, “E-Mail Naar de Hemel. De Doorbraak van de Computer Op Het Toneel,” [E-mail to heaven. The breakthrough of the computer on the stage] Vrij Nederland , March 16, 2002, 60; my translation from the Dutch. [26] I had a Skype talk with Edit Kaldor on 5 April 2018. [27] Thomas Irmer, “A Search for New Realities: Documentary Theatre in Germany,” TDR: The Drama Review 50, no. 3 (August 17, 2006): 16–28, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/201929 . [28] “[D]e pc herleidt haar hele fysieke bestaan tot een betekenisloze rest die aan het einde van de computer vastgekluisterd zit als het onnuttige deel van de mens-machine.” Pieter T’Jonck, “Ghosts in the Machine,” De Tijd , April 30, 2003, n.pag; my translation from the Dutch. [29] Here I am citing from notes I took during the performance of Web of Trust I saw during the Next Festival at BUDA in Kortrijk on November 30, 2016. [30] Kunstenfestivaldesarts, “Edit Kaldor. ‘Web of Trust’. Program” (Kunstenfestivaldesarts, May 6, 2016), 8. I saw Web of Trust at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels on May 12, 2016, where the performance premiered, and saw it a second time during the Next Festival at BUDA in Kortrijk on November 30, 2016. I am also citing text (and in that case indicate it) from the performance in Valenciennes, France, a few days later during the same Next Festival. [31] In the Skype talk, a year and a half after that performance, Kaldor claims that she gave no introduction at all, and was already sitting at the stand as the performance started. My notes, however, tell me that she gave a short introduction at the very beginning. [32] The name of the social network site Web of Trust is printed in Roman font, the name of the eponymous performance in italics. [33] Jurrien van Rheenen, Arthur Kneepkens, Bojan Djordjev and others, a number of which are trained performers, were telepresent at the performance via the social network site. [34] Konstantin Ryabitsev, “PGP Web of Trust: Core Concepts Behind Trusted Communication,” Linux.com | The source for Linux information, February 7, 2014, https://www.linux.com/learn/pgp-web-trust-core-concepts-behind-trusted-communication . [35] Jennifer Rauch, “The Origin of Slow Media: Early Diffusion of a Cultural Innovation through Popular and Press Discourse, 2002-2010,” Transformations , no. 20 — Slow Media (2011), http://www.transformationsjournal.org/issue-20/ ; Jörg Blumtritt, “Culture Post Internet: Cyberpunk Masterclass,” accessed April 13, 2017, http://en.slow-media.net/ . [36] Benedikt Köhler, Sabria David, and Jörg Blumtritt, “The Slow Media Manifesto – Slow Media,” February 1, 2010, n.pag., http://en.slow-media.net/manifesto . [37] Kunstenfestivaldesarts, “Edit Kaldor. ‘Web of Trust’. Program” (Kunstenfestivaldesarts, May 6, 2016), 8. [38] Skype talk with Kaldor, 5 April 2018. [39] (“[W]einig meer dan een hashtag delen”) Nynke van Verschuer, “Metamodernisme. Tussen geestdrift en ironie,” Vrij Nederland , June 25, 2016, 72; my translation from the Dutch. [40] Thomas Corlin, “Un Week-End à Bruxelles – Critiques,” mouvement.net, May 26, 2016, n.pag., http://www.mouvement.net/critiques/critiques/un-week-end-a-bruxelles . [41] Florian Cramer, “What Is ‘Post-Digital’? Post-Digital Research,” ed. Christian Ulrik Andersen, Geoff Cox, and Georgios Papadopoulos, A Peer-Reviewed Journal About Post-Digital Research 3, no. 1 (February 2014): n.pag., http://www.aprja.net/what-is-post-digital/ . [42] Kunstenfestivaldesarts, “Edit Kaldor. ‘Web of Trust’. Program,” 8; Onassis Cultural Centre, “Fast Forward Festival. Web of Trust / Edit Kaldor,” Onassis Cultural Centre, accessed October 10, 2016, http://www.sgt.gr/eng/SPG1508/ ; Next Festival, “Web of Trust,” Next Festival, accessed April 14, 2018, http://www.nextfestival.eu/en/event/web-of-trust . [43] Stephen Duncombe, “Does It Work?: The Æffect of Activist Art,” Social Research: An International Quarterly 83, no. 1 (June 15, 2016): 115–34, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/620873 . [44] I had a Skype video conversation with Annie Dorsen on 22 June 2016, of which I took notes. Except when mentioned otherwise, further quotations or paraphrases of Dorsen refer to this talk. [45] Annie Dorsen, A Piece of Work , Emergency Playscripts 5 (Brooklyn (N.Y.): Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017), I–II. [46] Annie Dorsen and Alexis Soloski, “Would You Like to Have a Question?,” Theater 42, no. 2 (2012): 84. [47] Marie-Laure Ryan, Cyberspace Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 3. [48] Dorsen and Soloski, “”Would You Like to Have a Question?,” 80; Auslander, “Live From Cyberspace,” qtd. in Hello Hi There program. [49] Dorsen and Soloski, “Would You Like to Have a Question?,” 87. [50] “On Algorithmic Theatre,” n.pag., accessed September 30, 2015, http://www.anniedorsen.com/useruploads/files/on_algorithmic_theatre.pdf . [51] Sarah Bay-Cheng, Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, and David Z. Saltz, Performance and Media : Taxonomies for a Changing Field (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), 67. [52] Annie Dorsen, “Algorithm, composition and metaphor,” Etcetera , no. 145 (August 18, 2017): n.pag., http://e-tcetera.be/algorithm-composition-and-metaphor/ . [53] Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 139. [54] Ibid., 55. [55] Ibid., 134–35. [56] Dorsen and Soloski, “”Would You Like to Have a Question?,” 85. [57] Erik Piepenburg, “Coil Festival: 5 Questions About ‘Hello Hi There,’” ArtsBeat, October 1, 2011, n.pag., // artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/10/coil-festival-5-questions-about-hello-hi-there/ . [58] Dorsen and Soloski, “”Would You Like to Have a Question?,” 86; Piepenburg, “Coil Festival,” n.pag. [59] Annie Dorsen, “Introduction to ‘Hello Hi There’ by Annie Dorsen” (unpublished, n.d.), n.pag. [60] Dorsen, n.pag. [61] The ‘text renders’ (Dorsen’s term) of the show include code, some of which resembles the stage directions of dramatic plays: how long and when to “Pause” and in which “Speed” to talk (and type, in this case), and who is speaking (“COMPUTER>0<” OR “COMPUTER>1”. To limit the length of the excerpt, that part of the code has been deleted after the first reply. For a full explanation of the code, see “Glossary of Computer Codes Used in Hello Hi There ” in Annie Dorsen, “Hello Hi There (Excerpt),” ed. Miriam Felton-Dansky and Jacob Gallagher-Ross, Theater: Digital Dramaturgies 42, no. 2 (2012): 90, https://doi.org/10.1215/01610775-1507757 . [62] Annie Dorsen, “Hello Hi There Text Render, Noorderzon Festival, Groningen, the Netherlands” (unpublished, 24/08 2011), n.pag. An excerpt of the performance can be seen on the website of the Steirischer Herbst Festival edition 2010. [63] Ronald Geerts, “Tekst als object. Over de herwonnen autonomie van de dramatekst,” eds. Claire Swyzen and Kurt Vanhoutte, Het statuut van de tekst in het postdramatische theater (Brussel: University Press Antwerp/ Academic and Scientific Publishers, 2011), 105–14. [64] Emma Cocker, “Live Notation: – Reflections on a Kairotic Practice,” Performance Research 18, no. 5 (October 1, 2013): 73, https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2013.828930 . [65] Bay-Cheng, Parker-Starbuck, and Saltz, Performance and Media , 69–70. Parker-Starbuck’s use of Kristeva’s concept of the abject is rather “metaphoric”. The critic starts from a more abstract notion of Kristeva’s concept of “abjection” as “arising from within as a way to maintain life’s boundaries,” in order to “unhinge [abjection] from its specifically Kristevan or psychoanalytic roots, and transfer it to moments of instability, of crises of identity, of border crossings, of cultural anxiety, but always through corporeal affect.” Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, Cyborg Theatre : Corporeal/Technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance , Performance Interventions (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 57, 54, 58. [66] Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre , 147; original emphasis. [67] Dorsen, “Hello Hi There Text Render, Noorderzon Festival, Groningen, the Netherlands,” n.pag. [68] Simon Shepherd and Mick Wallis, Drama, Theatre, Performance , New Critical Idiom (London: Routledge, 2004), 172, 174; Lehmann, Postdramatic , 83. [69] “ Hello Hi There Program” (Kaaitheater, 02/2016), n.pag. [70] Aarseth, Cybertext , 141. [71] Dorsen and Soloski, “”Would You Like to Have a Question?,” 88. Footnotes About The Author(s) Claire Swyzen is an affiliated researcher of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Prior to conducting her doctoral research on “Text as Data in Postdramatic Mediaturgies” she was employed as a dramaturge for a Flemish theatre company and as a practice-based researcher. She taught writing and narratology and (co-)edited volumes in Dutch on The Status of the Text in Postdramatic Theatre (2011) and Between Verity and Veracity: The Trajectory from Oral Source to Theatre Project (2012). Her theatre texts have been staged, published and translated. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Stages of Struggle and Celebration: A Production History of Black Theatre in Texas Immersions in Cultural Difference: Tourism, War, Performance Stage for Action: U.S. Social Activist Theatre in the 1940s Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America: The Legacy of Alan Schneider as Beckett’s American Director The Contemporary American Monologue: Performance and Politics Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left Introduction: Mediations of Authorship in American Postdramatic Mediaturgies Kaldor and Dorsen's "desktop performances" and the (Live) Coauthorship Paradox Ecologies of Media, Ecologies of Mind: Embodying Authorship Through Mediaturgy Dropping the Needle on the Record: Intermedial Contingency and Spalding Gray's Early Talk Performances #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS: Weaponizing Performance of Identity from the Digital to the Physical Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Khalid Y. Long Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 2 Visit Journal Homepage A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Khalid Y. Long By Published on April 27, 2021 Download Article as PDF by Khalid Y. Long The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 33, Number 2 (Spring 2021) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2021 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Glenda Dickerson (1945-2012) is often recognized as a pioneering Black woman theatre director.[1] A more expansive view of her career, however, would highlight Dickerson’s important role as a playwright, an adaptor/deviser, a teacher, and as this essay will illustrate, a progenitor of feminist theatre and performance theory. This essay offers a brief rumination on how Dickerson made a Black feminist intervention into feminist theatre and performance theory as she became one of the earliest voices to intercede and ensure that Black women had a seat at the table.[2] Glenda Dickerson’s intervention into feminist theatre and performance theory appears in her critical writings. Accordingly, these essays illustrate her engagement with Black feminist thought and elucidate how she modeled a feminist theatre theory through her creative works. Dickerson, along with other pioneering feminist theatre artists, “reshaped the modern dramatic/theatrical canon, and signaled its difference from mainstream (male) theatre.”[3] Dickerson’s select body of essays prompted white feminist theorists and practitioners to be cognizant of race and class as well as gender in their work and scholarship.[4] Moreover, Dickerson’s writings serve a dual function for readers: first, they offer an entryway into her life and creative process as a Black feminist artist. Secondly, they detail her subjective experiences as a Black woman within the professional worlds of theatre and academia. Feminist Theatre Theory: A Brief Overview of Inclusion and Exclusion Emerging as both an analytical tool as well as a methodology, feminism has been one of the foremost theoretical apparatuses to shape the field of theatre especially as it has called scholars’ attention to the dynamics of gender and sexuality. The scholars and critics, such as those mentioned below, who have contributed to founding and shaping a feminist theatre theory are diverse in their historical ideas, cultural approaches, and theoretical foregrounding. While there is no singular definition or description of feminist theatre theory to encapsulate such a wide-ranging array of positions, a brief overview of the legacies of some of the most significant contributors may help to situate Dickerson’s contribution to the field. Some of the foundational voices to assist in establishing feminism as an area of study within theatre/drama and English programs during the early part of the 1980s include Dinah Louise Leavitt, Helen Krich Chinoy, Linda Walsh Jenkins, and Helene Keyssar. As Elaine Aston notes, their texts had an impact on the field of theatre studies, however, they focused mainly on the playwrights and theatre practitioners who came to prominence during the 1970s. Aston maintains, “Studies of this kind were instrumental in making feminist and/or women’s theatre work visible but, to develop this, what was needed […] was a more fully rehearsed critical response critical frameworks appropriate for feminist analysis and ‘looking’.”[5] The scholars to heed Aston’s call were Sue-Ellen Case, Jill Dolan and Lynda Hart, among others. In Theatre Feminism, Kim Solga provides a summary of the ground-breaking studies, including the works of Case, Dolan, and Hart, arguing that their scholarship indelibly changed the field of theatre studies and theatre practice by forging a relationship between feminist theory and theatre/performance. Solga singles out the year between 1988 and 1989 as “a watershed for feminist performance theory and criticism.”[6] The year witnessed the publication of some of feminist theatre’s major works: Sue-Ellen Case’s Feminism and Theatre, Jill Dolan’s The Feminist Spectator as Critic, and Lynda Hart’s edited collection, Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women’s Theatre. As this quick survey suggests, scholars, critics, and practitioners sustained a commitment to deconstructing the landscape of male privilege that positioned women on the margins or, in many cases, excluded them entirely from the histories of theatre and performance. Even though feminist theatre theory advanced theatre studies and practice, most of the earlier scholars and critics to develop a feminist theatre theory were predominantly white women concerned with gender, rather than race as a determining factor. And even though theatre scholar Sandra L. Richards pressed the issue back in 1991, declaring that it was “time that white women and men began to participate in the project of bringing more black women’s writing and theatre work to critical attention,”[7] the concerted efforts of white feminists still marginalized the lived experiences of Black women and other women of color. Within early theoretical studies of feminist theatre, the inclusion of women of color seemed an afterthought. A Return to 1987 Dickerson’s first significant contribution to the burgeoning field of feminist theatre and performance theory appeared in 1987—predating Solga’s “watershed” moment for feminist scholars and artists. During the 1987 pre-conference of the Women and Theatre Program, a focus group of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, Dickerson delivered her groundbreaking speech, “The Cult of True Womanhood: Toward a Womanist Attitude in African-American Theatre.”[8] With this speech, Dickerson infused a Black woman’s voice into the field of theatre and performance while simultaneously theorizing a Black woman’s subjectivity. Dickerson made her speech the same year that pioneering Black feminist scholar Barbara Christian wrote her pivotal essay, “The Race for Theory,” in which she suggests that we "read the works of our writers in our various ways and remain open to the intricacies of the intersection of language, class, race, and gender in the literature.”[9] Just as Christian called for a new way to nuance Black women’s cultural productions (i.e., fiction, poetry, novels, etc.), Dickerson led the charge in theatre to reverse what she identified as Black women being “triply locked out: by class, by race, and history.”[10] Dickerson’s and Christians’ declarations underscores their engagement with the theory of intersectionality (foreshadowing Kimberlé Crenshaw’s coining of the term in 1989). Dickerson’s concern with the “silenced voice of the woman of color”[11] fueled her mission to reclaim and re-center Black women’s voices and image through performance so that they no longer had to “depend on an often-distorted illustration.”[12] Throughout “The Cult of True Womanhood,” Dickerson also evokes the names of early “race women”[13] such as Sojourner Truth, Maria Stewart, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as more contemporary writers, cultural critics, and activists such as Lucille Clifton, Mary Helen Washington, Eleanor Traylor, and Winnie Mandela. Dickerson’s essay draws on Black feminist theory and literary criticism. As Lisa Anderson notes in Black Feminism in Contemporary Drama (2008) and La Donna Forsgren discusses in In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatist of the Black Arts Movement (2018), Black feminist theory and literary criticism helped to propel a new critical language that, in turn, formulated a method to read and analyze Black feminist aesthetics within a plethora of literary and artistic mediums and genres. Dickerson’s “The Cult of True Womanhood” essay also invokes the concept of “womanism.” She writes, “I went searching with Alice Walker for ‘our mothers’ gardens.’ That’s when I became a womanist. So, naturally I had to incorporate her salty definition. . .”[14] Womanism encompasses the concept of being “Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. […] Traditionally universalist…”[15] Theatre scholar Freda Scott Giles writes about Dickerson’s manifestation of womanism within her works: “Some feminists have given the impression that much of the feminist movement is fixated on the victimization of women; womanism resists that notion. The big picture is liberty and justice for all. The goal of freeing society from racism, classism, and sexism is mutually exclusive.”[16] A number of revolutionary Black feminist and womanist writers including Gloria I. Joseph and Audre Lorde have asserted that Black feminism, as well as womanism, offers a globally-inclusive framework. As early as 1979, Lorde called for feminist-activists (regardless of gender identity) to overthrow the ideologies that have contributed to racist, classist, and sexist attitudes and practices both in the United States and abroad. For example, in her essay, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” Lorde contends that feminist theory is not complete “without examining our many differences, and without a significant input from poor women, Black and Third World women, and lesbians.”[17] Lorde’s theoretical manifesto calls for a liberatory praxis unequivocally focused on the absence of Black women, poor women, queer women, and third world women’s experiences, among others, from larger feminist discourses. Like Lorde, Dickerson also takes a global perspective with her work. In “The Cult of True Womanhood” she writes: When you start reading ancient myths and womanist literature and traveling to countries where the people look like you, you gain a so-called global perspective. Not only is the language of oppression the same the world over; the anguish of women is echoed around the world and resonates from continent to continent. The torture of mothers who lose their daughters to rape, war, drugs, poverty; the suffering of women who are tortured and die in Latin American prisons; the untimely death of young women who are killed by drunk drivers or yuppie lovers in New York's Central Park and then twice victimized by the courts and press: these women are sisters in suffering, fixed on the fangs of the two-headed serpent. Their silenced voices, their stilled tongues are symbolized for me in the illegal banning of South Africa's Nomzamo Winnie Mandela, whom the people call “Mother of the Nation.”[18] Seen in this light, Dickerson’s artistic mantra mirrors Lorde’s manifesto as she strove to create a theatre that materializes what Lorde considers “differences” among women’s lived experiences. This appears most clearly in Dickerson’s final artistic work, The Kitchen Prayer Series, a trilogy of performances inspired by the tragic events of 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror. Centered around the question, “What is it like for women all around the world to live with war and terror daily?” Dickerson’s triptych interrogates how women from across the globe, navigate a world where war and terror are quotidian experiences. Several white feminist scholars have recognized Dickerson’s contribution to the developing field of feminist theatre studies.[19] For example, in the introduction to Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre Sue-Ellen Case writes about Dickerson’s essay, “The Cult of True Womanhood”: Dickerson amplifies the audacity of that voice and its strength within a critique of the form of the drama – its predilection for heroes – particularly heroes of a certain gender and class. From the pleasures of those audacious roots, Dickerson creates a theatre, as a director, and a theory of the theatre, as a feminist theorist. Dickerson’s move illustrates one way in which the social movement and the feminist theorist/theatre practitioner traverse a common terrain – the pleasure of a historical moment, a material condition moving with the gestures of the stage and the dynamics of performative forms.[20] Interestingly, Case does not explicitly name race as a factor within Dickerson’s theoretical framework. Instead, she focuses on gender and class. However, by calling out the “historical moment, a material condition,” as a “common terrain” Dickerson negotiates, Case makes the point that Dickerson’s theory, as well as her theatre are formulated through materialist feminism which aims to critique the “conditions of class, race, and gender oppression, and demands the radical transformation of social structures.”[21] Additionally, Case makes an important observation by calling attention to Dickerson’s role as an innovative feminist performance maker. As Dickerson laments, “Gone was the pompous director’s gaze, absent the royal director’s chair.”[22] Renouncing a longing to sit among the “ranks of directors,” Glenda Dickerson declared herself a “PraiseSinger.” “A true PraiseSinger,” Dickerson explains, is a guardian of the archetypes of her culture’s collective unconscious. Her function is not to invent but to rediscover and to animate. From this day forth, I will be concerned not with acts, and scenes and curtains; but with redemption, retrieval, and reclamation. The chair in which I sit will no longer be called the director’s chair, but the blood-bought mercy seat. From that seat, my work will be a mission, my goal will be a miracle.[23] With Dickerson denouncing the patriarchal throne of the director in her pioneering essay, she emerges as one of the earliest women theatre artists to use a Black feminist lens to reconsider the position of the director and their function. Final Thoughts I hope that this essay will shed light on Dickerson’s role as an audacious critical theorist and excavate her from the hidden cracks of (theatre) history. A closer look at her other essays – written at various periods throughout her career – would further illustrate her deepening commitment to Black feminist theatre as well as Black feminist epistemology. As both her critical writings as well as her creative works demonstrate, Dickerson challenged conventional modes of theatre making while also using theatre as a platform to bring marginalized, silenced, and forgotten people center stage. Dickerson’s scholarly and artistic works offer a model for those looking to subvert the dominant paradigms. Khalid Y. Long is an assistant professor of theatre and coordinator of theatre studies at Columbia College Chicago. Khalid has published essays in Continuum: The Journal of African Diaspora Drama, Theatre and Performance as well as the Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance. His forthcoming scholarship includes essays in Theatre Design Technology, TDR: The Drama Review, and Critical Essays on the Politics of Oscar Hammerstein II edited by Donald Gagnon. Khalid has also contributed essays to Black Masks, a long-established black theatre magazine. Khalid's current book project is a critical study of Black feminist artist Glenda Dickerson. [1] When Dickerson is referenced in studies that address African American theatre or Black women in theatre such as Errol Hill and James V. Hatch’s A History of African American Theatre (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003) or Anthony Hill and Douglas Q. Barnett’s Historical Dictionary of African American Theatre (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009), it is usually a small survey of her work as a director. Anne Fliotsos and Wendy Vierow’s reference book, American Women Directors of the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008) also provides a broad survey of Dickerson’s work in the theatre that is premised on interviews Fliotsos conducted with Dickerson. [2] My larger project in progress offers a richer exploration of Dickerson’s career, from her start as a student of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s to her final creative project The Kitchen Prayer Series before her untimely death in 2012. [3] Elaine Aston, An Introduction to Feminism and Theatre (New York: Routledge, 1995), 57. [4] Dickerson’s essays include: “The Cult of True Womanhood: Toward a Womanist Attitude in African-American Theatre” which was first published in Theatre Journal (vol. 40, no. 2, 1988) and republished in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre edited by Sue-Ellen Case (New York: Methuen, 1988); “Wearing Red: When a Rowdy Band of Charismatics Learned to Say ‘NO!’” in Upstaging Big Daddy: Directing Theater as if Gender and Race Matter, edited by Ellen Donkin and Susan Clement (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993); “Rode a Railroad that Had No Track” in A Sourcebook of African-American Performances edited by Annemarie Bean (London and New York: Routledge, 1999); and “Festivities and Jubilations on the Graves of the Dead: Sanctifying Sullied Space” in Performance and Cultural Politics, edited by Elin Diamond (London and New York: Routledge, 1996). [5] Elaine Aston, “Foreword,” in Feminism and Theatre, ed. Sue-Ellen Case (New York: Methuen, 2014), ix-x. [6] Kim Solga, Theatre Feminism (New York: Palgrave), 16. [7] Sandra L. Richards made this statement in a paper she delivered, “Women, Theatre, and Social Action,” at the ‘Breaking the Surface” conference/festival held in Calgary, November 13-17, 1991. I learned of Richards’ paper, and subsequently her quote, from Lizbeth Goodman’s book Contemporary Feminist Theatre: To Each Her Own (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). [8] “The Cult of True Womanhood: Toward a Womanist Attitude in African-American Theatre” was later published in Theatre Journal in 1988 and in 1990 re-published in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, edited by Sue-Ellen Case. I am utilizing the published version of Dickerson’s speech and will therefore refer to it as a written essay. [9] Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory,” Cultural Critique, no.6 (1987): 53. [10] Glenda Dickerson, “The Cult of True Womanhood: Toward a Womanist Attitude in African-American Theatre,” in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, ed. Sue-Ellen Case (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1990), 110. [11] Dickerson, “Cult of True Womanhood” 110. [12] Khalid Y. Long, “The Black Feminist Theatre of Glenda Dickerson,” in The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance, ed. Kathy A. Perkins et al (New York: Routledge), 183. [13] In her book, Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women, Black feminist studies scholar Brittney C. Cooper defines the phrase “race women” as “the first Black women intellectuals [and activist]. As they entered into public racial leadership roles beyond the church in the decades after reconstruction, they explicitly fashioned for themselves a public duty to serve their people through the diligent and careful intellectual work and attention to proving the intellectual character of the race” (11). [14] Dickerson, “The Cult of True Womanhood,” 115. [15] Alice Walker, In Search of Mother’s Garden: Womanist Prose, 1st ed. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), xi. [16] Freda Scott Giles, “Glenda Dickerson’s Nu Shu: Combining Feminist Discourse/Pedagogy/Theatre,” in Contemporary African American Women Playwrights: A Casebook, ed. Philip C. Kolin (New York: Routledge, 2007), 141. [17] Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984), 111. Lorde’s essay was first delivered as a speech at a conference in 1979 honoring Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, and later published in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa (page missing?). The essay was republished in Lorde’s collection Sister Outsider. [18] Dickerson, “Cult of True Womanhood” 115. [19] Similar to Case, Ellen Donkin and Susan Clement, the editors of Upstaging Big Daddy: Directing as if Gender and Race Matter, consider Dickerson a “godmother,” noting that her “intellectual and artistic courage and generosity have given us permission to think past the limits of our own cultural identification as white women and to begin investigating the way Big Daddy crosses into communities of color,” 5. [20] Sue-Ellen Case, “Introduction,” in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1990), 4. [21] Aston, Feminism and Theatre, 9. [22] Dickerson, “The Cult of True Womanhood,” 118. [23] Ibid., 118. ISNN 2376-4236 Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: “Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble” by Elizabeth M. Cizmar “Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth” by Baron Kelly “A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson's Black Feminist Intervention” by Khalid Y. Long “An Interview with Elaine Jackson” by Nathaniel G. Nesmith "Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Works of Zora Neale Hurston" by Michelle Cowin Gibbs "1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston’s Antimusical The Mule-Bone Is Presented" by Eric M. Glover “'Ògún Yè Mo Yè!' Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities" by Omiyẹmi (Artisia) Green "Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar" by Lisa B. Thompson "Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge" by Bernth Lindfors "Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation" by Olga Sanchez Saltveit "A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement" by Isaiah Matthew Wooden www.jadtjournal.org www.jadtjournal.org ">jadt@gc.cuny.eduwww.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Yu Chien Lu, Administrative Producer ©2020 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future Casting a Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative The Theatre of August Wilson Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration The Theatre of Eugene O'Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Introduction to “Milestones in Black Theatre” Interviews and Afterviews on "Milestones in Black Theatre" Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Re-Imagining America and Theater: Race, Representation, and Form Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Michael Osinski 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 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 Michael Osinski By Published on May 1, 2023 Download Article as PDF September 3, 2017. It’s the day Twin Peaks: The Return reached its gut-wrenching conclusion and seared a hole in my heart and my brain. I’d seen my fair share of David Lynch’s work before. I knew how impossible it can be to explain the narratives and describe the visuals. Lynch himself has resisted attaching words to his work, stating “A film should stand on its own. It’s absurd if a filmmaker needs to say what a film means in words.”[i] I still haven’t found the words to describe the feeling I had watching that finale, but at that moment, I knew I had to make a piece of theatre that recreated that feeling for others. Almost exactly two years later, I presented Red Lodge, Montana [ii], co-created with an ensemble of performers and Twin Peaks enthusiasts, at the 2019 Philadelphia Fringe Festival. Billed as an unapologetic love letter to David Lynch, the production felt like a live-action nightmare where audience members traveled through the abandoned locker room of an old South Philly high school. One reviewer called it “a bizarro fusion of indolence, violence, nudity, sex, and dance.”[iii] I’m proud of the work we did. I also know that co-creating, directing, and producing a site-specific theatre piece in a found space took its toll on me (and my bank account). So in the interest of preserving the mental and physical health of other creative artists out there, I’m sharing some of the lessons I learned from the experience. (Unfortunately none of these lessons involve fundraising. That remains a mystery to me.) Lesson 1: Start with structure. Contrary to popular belief, theatre artists don’t really create something from nothing. There has to be a spark, an impetus, a burning question. And if you want to stay organized and foster greater creativity, you need scaffolding. You need Anne Bogart and Tina Landau’s third “basic building block for devised work” – structure.[iv] This may seem antithetical to Lynch’s aesthetic. As a director he insists “the only way we make heads or tails of [life] is through intuition” and believes “there’s an ocean of consciousness inside each of us…an ocean of solutions.”[v] But how do you communicate that to a team full of artists who aren’t swimming in your own personal ocean? Saying that I wanted to create an homage to David Lynch helped, but it didn’t provide enough of a framework. Especially if we wanted to create more than just a carbon copy of what he’s already made. So I asked my team to generate a list of “ingredients.” We watched Lynch’s film and television work and took note of all the elements that recur throughout his oeuvre. This established our scaffolding and gave us a checklist to return to as we made the piece. Do we have a few excruciatingly slow and drawn-out conversations? Check. Are we featuring music and costuming from a bygone era (usually the 1950s)? Check. Have we staged any moments of terrifying yet unexplained imagery? You tell me. (See Figure 1.) Figure 1: (l-r) Terrill Braswell, Amanda Schoonover, Geremy Webne-Behrman, and Megan Edelman in RED LODGE, MONTANA . Scenery by Dylan FitzSimons. Lighting by Sydney Norris. Sound by Daniel Ison. Stage Management by Eleanor Safer. Photo by Emilie Krause (Glass Canary Photography). I also brought back my “hybrid method” for inventing characters. I start almost every devising process by looking at a canonical text, because it gives us a narrative model to draw from. In this case I chose Bus Stop by William Inge. When the time came to build characters, I asked each actor to select 1 character from Bus Stop and 1 character from Lynch’s work and form a hybrid character from the two. They would list specific traits and circumstances of each character interchangeably – using a questionnaire I’ve borrowed from The Viewpoints Book [vi] – and mold their character around these attributes. These profiles provided the foundation for composition work, where each cast member created a short movement-filled piece to introduce us to their character. The pieces then fueled a series of structured improvisations with preset given circumstances and objectives. Many of these improvs turned into scripted scenes, but even the ones that didn’t make it to the final script helped to establish the mythology for our fictionalized town of Red Lodge. I wasn’t the only one who found this structure useful. Performer and co-creator Kelly McCaughan told me that “limiting what can happen within an improv helped flesh out something specific each time. And being able to pitch our ideas within that structured prompt created a really collaborative room.”[vii] Lesson 2: Stay flexible. Found spaces always sound like a cool idea, until you have to stage a show in one. When I first met with the representative from Bok Building in South Philadelphia, she showed me an old dusty room FILLED with rows and rows of lockers and benches. Talk about creativity coming from limitations! My brain instantly filled with images of actors hiding inside lockers for dramatic reveals, scampering in between the rows to frighten audience members, and even climbing atop the lockers to act out scenes above the audience’s heads. (See Figure 2.) Figure 2: The former girls’ locker room at Bok in South Philadelphia in early 2019. Photo by Michael Osinski. The next time I saw the space, almost all the lockers had been inexplicably removed. (See Figure 3.) Figure 3: The same former girls’ locker room at Bok in South Philadelphia in summer 2019. Photo by Michael Osinski. A big empty room felt less like limitless possibility and more like a huge hindrance to me. How could I create the same locations and effects without constructing a set? I had to adjust. I itemized the physical attributes and environmental effects I needed for each scene and figured out how to use the existing architecture to achieve it. For instance, we had originally envisioned one drug-fueled scene taking place on a rooftop. We were going to create a small plywood supported staging area across the tops of several banks of lockers. But without those lockers, I had no way of achieving this. I knew the scene needed some height, and it couldn’t take place in a room with doors and walls. The space had to feel liminal or transitory. Suddenly our rooftop scene became a stairwell scene. (See Figure 4.) Figure 4: (l-r) Amanda Schoonover and Kelly McCaughan in RED LODGE, MONTANA . Scenery by Dylan FitzSimons. Lighting by Sydney Norris. Sound by Daniel Ison. Stage Management by Eleanor Safer. Photo by Emilie Krause (Glass Canary Photography). We had also staged a rather intimate and claustrophobic scene involving full nudity and demonic possession. (It is David Lynch, after all.) But how do you make an audience feel trapped in a big empty room? I decided to stage this scene in the room’s entryway, with only 3 instruments lighting the space, and the EXIT sign and double doors in full view. It allowed the audience to crowd around a small area, and it created a terrifying moment when one of the characters pounded on the doors to escape. (See Figure 5.) Figure 5: (l-r) Josh Hitchens and Geremy Webne-Behrman in RED LODGE, MONTANA . Scenery by Dylan FitzSimons. Lighting by Sydney Norris. Sound by Daniel Ison. Stage Management by Eleanor Safer. Photo by Emilie Krause (Glass Canary Photography). Performer and co-creator Amanda Schoonover remembers another adjustment we made: “David Lynch often has characters that simply disappear from a scene, and we were stumped about how to make that happen without the magic of film. Once we got into the space, we discovered there were all these pillars that actors could hide behind, so with a little lighting trick, they could simply appear or disappear. It was always satisfying to hear the audience gasp when an actor seemed to appear out of thin air.”[viii] Staying flexible ultimately saved the production. If I had forced my original staging on the found space, it would have been disastrous. In true David Lynch fashion, I had to listen to what the walls were telling me. Lesson 3: Stand in your audience’s shoes. No instruction manual exists for understanding David Lynch’s work. But when you’re leading three dozen audience members through a promenade style fringe piece in a dark echoey room, you gotta make a few signs. The work itself should terrify the audience, not the possibility of running face-first into a concrete pillar. You can’t throw your audience into your deep ocean without a flotation device – you have to take care of them. I put more focus on logistics than I ever have for a piece I’ve made – at times I felt more like an engineer than an artist. Yet I didn’t want to mar the phenomenological experience of walking through a Lynch-inspired nightmare. How could I physically guide audience members in a way that kept them tuned into the show and still blended with our existing aesthetic (i.e. without turning on a bunch of harsh overhead fluorescents)? The answer was threefold. To map out a clear path, we did what any college dorm resident would do – we strung up holiday lights. It sounds silly, but it really has become human instinct to “follow the light.” Every time one scene ended, a new strand of lights would turn on and direct audience members to a different section of the room. Did we rely on a super clumsy system of turning on and off power strips throughout the room to make this happen? We sure did. (See Lesson 2: Stay flexible.) Because at the end of the day, no theatrical experience – no matter how thrilling – is worth risking a lawsuit. Even my years as a tour guide at college did not prepare me for how difficult it is to herd a group of people through a dimly lit medium-sized room. To keep people on the path and position them for maximum visibility, we employed “docents.” We asked two of our artist friends to dress up as two peripheral yet enigmatic Twin Peaks characters – The Giant and Lil[ix] – and communicate with gestures to physically (and mysteriously) walk the audience through the nightmare. Finally, to give our audience some narrative guidance, we filmed a series of short teaser videos[x] that introduced the characters and acted as a prologue. We released the videos weekly leading up to the opening performance to build anticipation and to guide our audience without providing too many answers. The world we’d created made total sense to us, and we wanted people to be weirded out, but we also wanted them to care about what (and whom) they were watching. Lesson 4: Trust your gut and your collaborators. There’s no such thing as a doubt-free creative process. I think we asked ourselves “Is this any good?”, and “Will anyone like this?”, and of course “Will this make any sense?” countless times. In a weird way, though, embracing the work of an artist like David Lynch gave us some freedom. He never worries about whether his work will transmit a singular message to the audience. He’s just translating the ideas inside his head to the screen. When Lynch made Blue Velvet , the ideas came to him “in fragments…it was red lips, green lawns, and the song – Bobby Vinton’s version of ‘ Blue Velvet .’ The next thing was an ear lying in a field. And that was it.”[xi] He didn’t question what it all meant. He trusted his intuition. I wondered, can we apply this attitude or approach to other work? Can we free ourselves of this burden when we’re creating something with more verisimilitude? We are making art after all, and art is neither good nor bad. It exists for others to appreciate, critique, reject, embrace, dissect. As much as we may have fretted over the narrative logic of our piece, we made something that made sense to us. We created art for others to interpret. And as long as we’re taking care of our audience and being socially responsible in our storytelling, why should we fret so much over how others will interpret the work? I can’t say that I’ve succeeded at this yet. I still find myself fretting. But I’d like to think there’s an answer here somewhere. As theatre artists we can choose to embrace or deny the increased digitization of our world. If we embrace it, we risk losing the immediacy of a live in-person experience. If we deny it, we ignore our future audiences. I propose we strive for something in the middle. I believe creating a site-specific film-inspired theatrical experience like Red Lodge, Montana accomplishes this. I also know crafting experiences like this can be difficult. I hope these lessons encourage you, inspire you, and prevent you from making too many mistakes…or at least from drowning in your own creative ocean. References [i] David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity (New York: TarcherPerigree, 2016), 19.[ii] https://www.findtheantidote.org/red-lodge-montana [iii] Kathryn Osenlund. “ RED LODGE, MONTANA (The Antidote): 2019 Fringe review.” Phindie. http://phindie.com/20057-20057-red-lodge-montana-the-antidote-2019-fringe-review/ (accessed October 21, 2022). [iv] Anne Bogart and Tina Landau, The Viewpoints Book: A Practical Guide to Viewpoints and Composition (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2005), 154. [v] Lynch, 45. [vi] Bogart and Landau, 129. [vii] Kelly McCaughan, e-mail message to author, March 8, 2023. [viii] Amanda Schoonover, e-mail message to author, March 8, 2023. [ix] https://tinyurl.com/yckx4hfe [x] https://vimeo.com/showcase/6242247 [xi] Lynch, 23. [xii] https://www.michael-osinski.com/ [xiii] https://open.spotify.com/show/6aWe8gTL3tFH2b6Fwve6ul?si=5827da219b474b70 [xiv] https://www.youtube.com/@thisonegoesto11podcast Footnotes About The Author(s) MICHEAL OSINSKI [xii] (he/him) directs theatre because he likes solving puzzles. He manages his self-producing collective The Antidote, and he was co-founder and Producing Artistic Director of Flashpoint Theatre Company in Philadelphia. He received his MFA in Directing from The Theatre School at DePaul University in Chicago, and he was a Drama League Directing Fellow in 2014. He is currently the Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance at St. Lawrence University, where he will devise another show in Fall 2023, and he produces and co-hosts a music podcast called This One Goes to 11 (on Spotify[xiii] and YouTube[xiv]). 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 Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater 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 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Donatella Galella, Dorinne Kondo, Esther Kim Lee, Josephine Lee, Sean Metzger, and Karen Shimakawa Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 2 Visit Journal Homepage Behind the Scenes of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies Donatella Galella, Dorinne Kondo, Esther Kim Lee, Josephine Lee, Sean Metzger, and Karen Shimakawa By Published on May 21, 2022 Download Article as PDF For this historic issue on “Asian American Dramaturgies,” guest editor Donatella Galella brought together Dorinne Kondo, Esther Kim Lee, Josephine Lee, Sean Metzger, and Karen Shimakawa to reflect on currents of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies. They discussed how they created and entered this field, even as they critically questioned a foundations-based framework that reifies some lines of study and inevitably leaves out others, as they themselves made up a select group available for this meeting. They tracked scholarly trends and concluded by sharing their hopes for Asian American theatre and performance on stage and in academia. A joyful gathering with multi-vocal storytelling, this conversation was held over Zoom on November 12, 2021. We hope that this roundtable will stimulate more conversations, more artist-scholars, and more histories of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies. Donatella Galella : I’m so happy to see you today and to have this really important conversation on foundations of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies. I see this as something that’s for us but also makes a major intervention in the larger field of Theatre and Performance Studies. I’m going to start with some questions that I circulated to you beforehand, and basically the trajectory is that I would like to invite you to reflect on the origins of this field, where you think it is now, and where you think it’s going. I’d love if we could start off hearing from everyone on how did you come into your research in Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies, and how would you articulate the foundations of this scholarly field? Esther Kim Lee : I was doing my PhD work at Ohio State University. I started there in 1995 and graduated in 2000. I was an ABD, and I had already chosen the dissertation topic, which was going to be on Korean mask drama. It was all proposed and all that stuff. Then I remember walking around the library, looking at some books to read. I was TA-ing a course on ethnic theatre, and I noticed that there was really nothing on Asian American theatre. There were whole rows of books about African American theatre, maybe a couple on Chicano theatre, but really nothing on Asian American theatre. I had to go to the literature section to find Jo’s book, or anthropology just to find Dorinne’s book. But in the theatre section, there was nothing there. So, I actually got angry, and I thought: this is not right. I decided to change my dissertation topic, and I took a tape recorder—and it was an actual tape recorder back then—and I said, I’ll talk to a handful of playwrights and actors and find out what’s going on. I thought it would be an easy dissertation to write, but I ended up interviewing dozens, and by the time I was done, seventy people. That’s how it grew into a bigger project. In that process, I remember emailing Jo as a graduate student, “You don’t know me, but…” that kind of email. I had to introduce myself. That was the first time we actually connected, and ever since then, Jo has been my mentor. So, just really piggybacking on the works by Dorinne, Jo, and Karen. I think Sean and I are somewhat contemporary. I still have boxes of the tapes, documenting the interviews, and my dissertation became my first book ( A History of Asian American Theatre ), so that’s how I got started. I guess it’s fitting that I’m speaking first because I’m kind of in the middle in many ways and benefited from my predecessors, and I work really well with Sean and continue to collaborate. Josephine Lee : I’ve always been interested in theatre. I grew up in the New York area, and I used to, as a kid, check out volumes of plays from the library and just read them. I wasn’t involved in theatre as a performer. I did take some acting classes, but I was always, like, terrified on stage. But I did actually do a bunch of playwriting classes when I was in college. One of my teachers was A. R. Gurney, Jr. He was a playwright, and I was at MIT at the time doing physics, but I took some classes with him, and he was the one who said—I think it was my third year there—“Hey, there’s this guy who’s in college, and he has a play going on at the Public Theater, and it’s called FOB , and his name is David Henry Hwang, and you should get a hold of it or maybe even go down there and volunteer to work on it.” At the time, I couldn’t do that, I mean, it was just not feasible. But I did get a hold of the script and looked at it, and I thought this was kind of cool, you know. I had always been aware of the Asian American movement. I have a few older cousins who are maybe about a decade older than I am who were very much involved in that and did historical scholarship. They were really active, and they always looked at me and said, “You’re part of the Me generation. You’re never going to reach the heights of social justice that we have.” So, I’ve been aware of Asian American politics from a pretty young age. But I didn’t really take on the Asian American theatre thing in earnest until later. I was in graduate school at a time when there really wasn’t anything available. I never took an Asian American lit class. I mean, I read a lot on my own, but no one talked about it. I basically did my thesis on Victorian and contemporary plays, Wilde and Shaw, and I did some work on Tom Stoppard. Then when I moved to LA for my first job, I was part of the LA Theatre Center’s Women’s Project, and I got connected with some folks. I got to meet with Wakako Yamauchi. I got to meet people from East West Players, which was super fun. Then around that time was when M. Butterfly won the Tony Award, and I was like whoa, you know? How come no one’s writing about these plays, right? So, I think the germ of an idea got started. But of course, at the time, I was still very much, I guess, in the kind of canonical, traditional world, writing about Pinter and Beckett, none of which got published. Then I went to teach at Smith College, and I got involved in an Asian American Studies collaborative with Mitziko Sawada at Hampshire College and others in the Five Colleges (Smith, Hampshire, Mt. Holyoke, Amherst, and UMass-Amherst). At the time, they didn’t have their Five College Asian American Studies Program going, but I was part of that group that was teaching classes. I taught a class on Asian American theatre because Roberta Uno was just so inspiring, and we had the beginnings of the archival collection at UMass there, and there was New WORLD Theater. It was just a great time for me in terms of shifting what I wanted my scholarly trajectory to be, you know, something that I wasn’t educated in, so it took me some time to learn the ropes. When I took the job at Minnesota, I decided I was done with the modern British stuff. I was going to take a different route, and my first book was Performing Asian America . At that time, I just was so excited to have Dorinne and Karen as compatriots. We were never in the same locations, but we sort of knew each other because of all the work that was going on. It was so rewarding to do it at a time when I wasn’t the only one, right? Because I do feel like that changed the nature of what I was able to do, and with my own work, I could go in a direction that was sort of different. I didn’t have to cover everything. I knew when I published Performing Asian America , it was at a time when there was going to be a new wave of stuff that wasn’t going to make it into that book. But that was fine with me because I thought, wow, there’s just so much out there that people ought to do, and trying to be comprehensive isn’t where it’s at for me right now. So, that was fun. I think that I’ve, since then, changed several times, and some of it is location-specific. Dorinne Kondo : First of all, in terms of Asian American anything, I was like the last generation at Stanford, where I was an undergraduate, who was part of the protest generation: strikes, tear gas, helicopters on campus, “Free the Branner 15,” students from our freshman dorm who were beat up and arrested. We also, at my graduation, walked out on Daniel Patrick Moynihan, our commencement speaker, because of his report on “The Negro Family.” There were teach-ins about that, sponsored by the Anthropology department and St. Clair Drake, the renowned urban anthropologist (and co-author, with Horace R. Cayton, Jr., of the classic Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City ). There’s that part. But I’m an outlier, I feel, because I was trained as an anthropologist and as a Japan specialist. So, my first foray into performance, not theatre as such, was when I was a member of the Gender Seminar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton where Judith Butler wrote Gender Trouble . So, I saw that in formation—very exciting—and all the controversy that it then caused. I mean, now it seems like a classic work, but believe me, there were plenty of arguments, and I got used to conflict as potentially generative. That (Butler, Foucault, and poststructuralist theories of the subject) profoundly influenced my first book , which was based on field work in a Japanese factory, where I was a so-called part-time worker, investigating the performance of gendered work identities on the shop floor and the performativity of artisanal identities and the aesthetics of work. I was trying to take labor, which is often seen only in narrowly political economic terms—I mean, that’s obviously important—but you know, what do people think they’re doing? What are the cultural meanings of work? What about aesthetics, which were in fact very important. I feel like in my latest book ( Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity ), I’m doing the opposite. It’s like the realm of the aesthetic sublime, how can we bring it back to earth and look at it as cultural work, as making, as an industry within a very particular historical and political economic context? So, being with Butler was incredibly important. That was also the year that, similarly to Jo, I saw David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly on Broadway, and I had never ever in my life seen anything like that. I talk about that in About Face , but it was life-changing. I mean I used to go back to the Asian American Theater Company in San Francisco just to see plays. That too had been a revelation, just to see people who looked like me, like in the same room doing theatre, was amazing, just to feel three-dimensional again after being [in Boston]. Frankly, Boston was horrible in terms of racism and overt racism. Anyway, David’s play was extraordinary, and I felt like I had to write about it as though my life depended on it. I know it sounds melodramatic, but that’s the way it felt. So, that started my exploration of theatre as an academic topic. Then it also was a fieldwork strategy. I took the very first David Henry Hwang Playwrights Institute classes. That was amazing—so amazing, I couldn’t sleep. I never felt about anything the way I felt about that. So, I thought, well, I have to do something here, you know what I mean? When do you ever feel that in life? I can’t not do it. I feel like it chose me. I pivoted. So, I was writing the book on transnational Japanese fashion, and then the Asian American theatre piece came in, and then I spent a number of years trying to learn the playwriting craft. In terms of academic scholarship, I’m trying to integrate the creative and critical. So, that’s what’s happening in my latest book, Worldmaking . Karen Shimakawa : It’s interesting that the three of us, the three kind of senior generation, none of us started as Asian American scholars, right? Because there really wasn’t a field there when we started it. It’s interesting that we all came from these really different places. I had come from law school, going to English grad school thinking I was going to be a specialist in Flannery O’Connor. Then for some reason—I can’t remember why—I pivoted to becoming a medievalist, and then finally I thought settled on becoming a Shakespearean. So, I was always kind of moving towards theatre and performance and kind of theatricality in some way. In retrospect, I think I could say that even my interest in Flannery O’Connor was something about theatricality. I just remember, it’s kind of like Esther—although I didn’t have quite the foresight—I remember going into the library and looking in the Shakespeare section, which was just aisles and aisles of things and thinking, I don’t really think we need another Shakespeare book. I think it’s been done. So, then I kind of was in this crisis, like what is there? I was pretty far into my graduate education at that point, and I met with some of my advisors, and they’re like, what else do you know and like? And actually, I had gone to Asian American theatre since I was a kid because, like Jo, I had siblings who were older and more politically literate in this stuff. That was the church field trip that you always take, right? So, I didn’t have quite the kind of sublime experience that Dorinne had. I envy that in some ways because I’m like, well of course I’m seeing myself on the stage. That’s our stories. But it had never occurred to me because there wasn’t really an academic field there, that that was at all connected to my sort of vocational training. That just felt personal and maybe nascently political. It felt very extracurricular at the time. Then I took David Román’s class on American theatre, and we read Dorinne’s piece on M. Butterfly . That was a real turning point for me, I think, like, to imagine that there could be this kind of rigorous, academic, legible-to-other-professors kind of work on the plays that I had grown up watching. That was a real revelation. When I think about it now, and I narrate it retroactively, I think I was always moving towards this because I was always kind of interested, you know—even in, like, medieval literature—the thing that I was sort of drawn to was liveness, the way bodies on stage sort of can perform and imagine what is, what could be, sort of imaginative possibilities, utopian or dystopian, and also kind of what the body that’s talking has to do with that. I do think that that was always kind of the thing that I was chasing. So, it was just a real joy when I read Dorinne’s piece to realize, like, yeah, there’s a way to actually express that, and it’s a legit thing to actually study, and that it’s important and that it matters to people more than just, you know, me. I think that’s really where I started. Sean Metzger : I have the pleasure of coming after the other four speakers both now and also in the past. I think I’m the only one of us who came from practice into the field. I was in high school when M. Butterfly toured, and I remember there being an ad in the San Francisco Chronicle . At that time, it registered as Asian American but also as queer, as an Asian queer play. So, that combination kind of stuck with me for a long time. When I went to university, at some point I decided I was going to be in a college of music. I was doing musical theatre, and I wanted to enter into a more practical setting. I did an internship at the Denver Center Theatre Company, and it just happened they placed me on August Wilson’s Piano Lesson . So, I was doing everything backstage. And that moment—I think this was 1992—coincided with my having emancipated myself from my parents. I was out of money, and the cast actually helped me pay for my schooling until I could pay them back. So, I thought, oh, this is theatre, like this kind of intra-ethnic solidarity. This is amazing! I learned otherwise as I moved forward. I was an undergraduate, [and] I wanted to take Lesbian and Gay Studies classes at the time, but you couldn’t do that at CU Boulder unless you were taking graduate courses because the university didn’t allow it. So, I had to take graduate courses, and I found myself quickly overwhelmed with everything I had to learn. Like, I didn’t know the word “subjectivity.” Boulder had a lot of early modernists, and the first course I took was Gay and Lesbian Literature to 1800, and it was taught by Bruce Smith, who’s now at USC, and who’s a Shakespearean. He was encouraging me to work on Shakespeare, and I also remember looking down the halls and being like, oh my god I have nothing else to say. Joel Fink, who was a professor and director at CU, said, “You should write about M. Butterfly because there’s not a lot of work on it yet.” He wasn’t a scholar, so he didn’t know by that time, 1994, Dorinne’s, Karen’s , and James’s work had been out already. But there was not a lot of material, so I started that project. Then I built my thesis on gay and lesbian Asian American drama, half as an activist piece and half as what I would consider scholarly work, but I had to train myself. I brought in an adjunct to be my Asian Americanist because there was no tenure-track Asian American lit or theatre person. That was Marilyn Alquizola. Then I went to graduate school. I decided I wanted to work in Asian American and Sexuality Studies, so USC was one of the options. They gave me the most money, so I went there. They said, “Oh, we’re hiring David Román,” at that time. So, I went to work with David, and then they said, “Oh, we’re hiring Dorinne,” and I thought, oh, this is perfect. Then as time evolved, Karen came to give a job talk and then went to (UC) Davis. David Román said, “I think you should go to Davis.” So, I did, and that changed lots of things in very good ways and not so good ways, as you can imagine without saying any names. That’s really how I started in the field. Also, because I had been quite impoverished as an undergraduate student, I went to whatever grad program that would let me do the work I wanted to do, and I just figured I’d do whatever requirements; it was basically whoever paid me the most. So, that was my philosophy. I went to Comp Lit first, for that reason, and quickly learned I was to have mastery of these languages, which I still have yet to master. Switching to a Theatre and Performance Studies program sort of made me feel like, oh, I don’t have to have the kind of linguistic expertise that Comp Lit would have required. I wouldn’t have to be in grad school for another ten years. Then my career kind of went all over the place. I was in social services for a while. I came back to grad school, and I happened to get a job at Duke as an Asian American lit and culture specialist. So, once I got that job, it was really, like, okay this is what you’re doing from then on. But I have benefited from all the great writing of all the people here. I would also say, I think for Esther and me, we both had the advantage of a group of people—quite a large group of people—who just happened to be in grad school at the same time: SanSan Kwan, Dan Bacalzo, Lucy Burns, Sel Hwahng, Yutian Wong, Priya Srinivasan, Eng-Beng Lim, Cathy Irwin, Theo Gonzalves, and the two of us. That sort of made me feel like we had a community, and it also made me able to sustain my work over a long time, even though we were located all over the country. DG : Thanks so much for this. I feel like we’re collectively writing this meta history of the field right now, and I really appreciate the names that you’re offering. I also love hearing these personal stories, these origin stories for you as superheroes, but they also gesture toward the structural, toward the material conditions that made this field possible. You’re gesturing toward not only scholarship but also Asian American theatre production. So, I’d invite us to think more about the origins of the field, but I also want to turn to the next question of how have the academic field and the field of production of Asian American theatre and performance changed since the 1980s? DK : I agree with the collective storytelling, and I think that that’s really important. But in some ways, I feel like we’re facing a paradox because of course we want to narrate these stories, but in terms of Asian American Studies as insurgent knowledge, I’ve always been suspicious of origin stories and foundations. Aren’t we about challenging the notion of foundations? Maybe gathering these multiple perspectives and stories (is one way of mounting a challenge); on the other hand, people deserve their props. I realize that one of the functions of something like this is to narrate a history that’s legible in a certain way and establishes that we’re legitimate, we’re rigorous, et cetera et cetera. So, I think it’s paradoxical, and there’s a kind of fundamental ambivalence in the move. I would say, apparently, the field hasn’t changed enough, since this is the first issue dedicated to Asian American issues, right? It reminds me of the interventions at the Claremonts, you know, as part of the mobilization around The Mikado and trying to get Asian American Studies established where Black Studies and Chicano Studies already existed. I think that Asian Americans were seen as the “little people, humble, and silent,” (from Madama Butterfly ) so we had to make some noise and do some organizing. About Face —it’s an early work that does this—but you know look at Sean’s work, for example, I mean all of the work of people in this room, the move toward the transnational and diasporic, I think is like a huge shift. There’s no more Asian American Studies, really. It’s all Asian diaspora work now and rightfully so. I totally understand that. In terms of the profession, I think it’s more professionalized. There’s certainly more theatres, which is great, and more populations represented in the arts. We need more intersectional work, but that’s also growing. There’s still a ton of work to do on all these fronts. There are also more theatre critics of color: Diep Tran, Jose Solís, amongst others. JL : I will just say that Esther and I actually have this six degrees of separation. So, when I was in my first year of college, I took a creative writing course with Tom Postlewait who was a great creative writing teacher, but I didn’t really realize his field was actually theatre history. Then years later, I realized that Esther worked with him, so just shout out to Tom. The world works in really funny ways in terms of who we’re in contact with. The work has just deepened and gotten more interesting and more varied in its approach. I totally get the diasporic, the re-theorizing of what is Asian American. All these things that I think have impacted maybe Asian American Literary and Cultural Studies more generally has also impacted the Theatre Studies field. People have been really great about bringing those in, but there’s a certain kind of depth to it now too. I’m thinking about some of the historical work that Esther brought in, creating this archive, documentation. How do you not just talk about what the theatre means but how it is actually made? I do feel like, you know, books like Esther’s, Yuko Kurahashi’s book on East West Players , what that does is it provides a record for people to dig into. Sean, your book ( Chinese Looks: Fashion, Performance, Race ) was so expansive in terms of that history. In the period before, there wasn’t “Asian American,” like that wasn’t a term that anyone used. There were people of Asian descent and representations of Asia in the Americas, and those really connect to us still. So, I do feel like what’s been wonderful is the way in which Asian American Theatre, Drama, and Performance Studies are now rooted in these larger questions. There’s been solid work everywhere you turn, even as new populations are coming in and new understandings of what this Asian American identity and experience is. It’s so much a fractured category, right? It doesn’t hold up. It’s a category that deconstructs itself. So, every time you teach students Asian American Studies, you have to go back to, “This is a social construct. This is a racial formation.” This is exactly how it was made, that we are all calling ourselves Asian American. So, I think there’s no center. But that kind of frees us up quite a bit to sort of decide on what our points of unity or solidarity or coexistence will be. I think in my own work, I’ve started doing two things: I’ve started looking more into productions that are not commercial, because one of the things I was brought into was this star power of David Henry Hwang. Then I moved to the middle of the country, which has a very active theatre scene. We’ve got more theatre seats per capita than anywhere in the nation. There are so many small theatres here and people doing non-profit theatre work, and that’s not really recognized or written about, and some of it never gets recorded. So, that sort of regional focus has shifted maybe because of where I live. But I’ve also turned to what are some of the connections with older productions, and I’ve done a lot more work than I cared to on yellowface basically. Esther knows as well, right? You get stuck down the rabbit hole when you start looking at yellowface production as opposed to Asian American production. But one thing I regret, as much as I’ve benefited from doing that historical work, I think I do agree with Dorinne, that it’s really telling that I got a lot of recognition for doing a book on The Mikado ( The Japan of Pure Invention ), the kind of recognition that I never got for doing work on Asian American theatre. So, people were like, oh this is so interesting that you’re doing this work, and you want to say, hey, actually there are a lot of playwrights I’ve written about that have nothing to do with yellowface. But once you start writing about yellowface, it sort of perpetuates. Why is that interesting as opposed to all these playwrights who don’t do television, who do a much better job of representing Asia? SM : One of my early scene coaches was Lane Nishikawa, so I think that experience made me understand—oh, it was at the time when the Asian American Theater Company had fractured and was kind of on its last legs, so we had several actors from San Francisco who were Asian American women with me in this training thing—some of the history that Esther talks about in her book but through a different kind of lens: a gossip episteme, if you will. So, that made me realize whatever I thought this was, doing an Asian American theatre thing, is highly contested, because even in the theatre company itself, there were all kinds of narratives of what was happening at the theatre company that were sort of interrupting its progress, let’s say. So, I think all the companies, they all have those kinds of stories embedded within them, and now some of them are more archived. But there are other stories in those companies that have not been told and some that Esther chose not to discuss, like Kumu Kahua, or you know some of the other companies around the country. I think one of the things that’s happened since that time is the founding of the Consortium of Asian American Theatres and Artists (CAATA) in 2003, and I think that has provided a national platform for people to have discussions about how artists themselves think about the formation of the field and their place within it. I think we all have realized that their version of that story is not our (a scholarly) version of that story necessarily. But I think it’s productive, and one of the things that we can see is when they add in special sessions, it’s often about the tensions they see in the field that they haven’t identified before. I remember they had a Pacific Islander special session, and they had a MENA, Middle Eastern North Africa, special session; I think that suggests something about where the practitioners feel like the field is going in terms of Asian American theatre. At the same time, at UCLA, I have two colleagues, Lap Chi Chu and Myung Hee Cho, who are both Asian American artists in lighting design and scenic design, respectively, and they did a lot of work on Asian American productions in addition to regional theatre and other kinds of things, and I think they would also narrate this story differently. So, I think I agree that there’s a lot of competing narratives, and many of those narratives have yet to come to the fore or be acknowledged. I do think that the field as a whole is pivoting around certain issues right now, like Critical Refugee Studies, which is making big advances in Asian American Studies. So, I suspect that Theatre will then follow suit. I think Jo’s work in particular has done a lot to bring attention to Southeast Asian refugee communities, and that’s of course partly location and probably the kind of theatre that you were talking about. It’s not professionalized in the same way. As for some of my own work, I do want to say that the historical part that I did was sort of at Karen’s impetus because I was interested in racial fetishism, and she’s like, you have to fetishize something . You can’t just satisfy some amorphous idea. So, that led me to tracing objects and how they get racialized, costumes in particular, because of the work I did with Dorinne. So, I thought, those are, you know, physical items we could look at and think through more. It’s really the combination of Karen’s and Dorinne’s work that helped me think through how to do an early historiographic approach because I’m not a good archivist, as many of you know. I find it very difficult to sit in a room and get the gloves and everything. I find that very trying. So, I do think that the field has moved a long way. There are some trends that are happening. I mean, when I did (the Theatre Journal special issue) “ Minor Asias ,” it was partly because the editor said, “Well if you do an Asian American issue, who’s going to contribute?” So, I contacted many people, like do you have anything right now? Because there’s not enough of us in the field. I figured if I can’t get materials from people I know, which is the bulk of the field, then we’re going to have trouble putting together an issue. Actually “Minor Asias” was a pivot on my part to try to broaden the rubric partly to get more submissions. So, it’s great, Donatella, that you’ve gotten so many (for “Asian American Dramaturgies”). That’s really good to hear. EKL : That was great. What can I add to this already rich conversation? Because my training is in Theatre—I think I might be the only one who actually did graduate training in theatre history—I could just probably comment that when my book came out in 2006, it was my tenure book. It was based on my dissertation. It’s very incomplete. I was very nervous about getting it out. Like Sean said, a lot of it is gossip based, and a lot of the gossip I couldn’t add because they made me turn off the tape recorder and told me not to add things. There are so many things I could have added. When I go to the CAATA conference, people come up and say, oh you got that wrong. They still gossip about it. I really thought that by now there would be more theatre history books on Asian American theatre. So, in many ways, I feel like there hasn’t been that much progress. I expected the book to be challenged and revised, that there would be a more enriched conversation. Maybe I could just ask back to Donatella: it’s your generation’s job to add to the work that’s done before, so is that going to happen? Who is going to do that work? Personally, in my own research, like Jo, I’ve been really interested in going back historically. My first book starts in the 1960s, and I now want to figure out what happened before. That led me to my current book on yellowface ( Made-Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era ), and my next one, I think, could be even further back. I find that going back to this kind of origin story—if yellowface was an origin story for, say, Asian American actors as they say, “We did acting because we wanted to protest”—is to revise yellowface history. It’s one origin story of Asian American theatre. But I’m looking for other origin stories in Asian American theatre. Historiographically, I feel like I’m always in conversation with Tom Postlewait, my advisor that Jo mentioned, because I did take American theatre history with him, but my book is really a revision of the history, like looking at American theatre history through the lens of Asian American Studies. So, I think I’m going to continue to do that. But looking at the whole field, I thought we would have more younger scholars, junior scholars who would be doing both theoretical and historical archival work. DG : Esther, I agree with your assessment, and I also hear what Dorinne was saying about the critique of foundations. So, first I’m thinking that I might come up with a better word for titling this, but I specifically tried to have foundations with an s , just like how I really appreciate how Esther’s first book is a history and not the history of Asian American theatre. I think in general there aren’t that many critical histories of theatre institutions. My first book is an attempt to do this but of a traditionally white institution. In their definition of Americanness at Arena Stage, that is often not inclusive of Asian Americans, but that is reflective of how Asian Americanness is in that boundary of inclusion and exclusion. So, for my own work, I felt thrust into Asian American Theatre Studies mostly because of seeing all these gaps and also just dealing with anti-Asian microaggressions in graduate school and seeing so much yellowface on professional New York City stages. So, that’s what drove me to then start researching why and how contemporary yellowface persists in musicals in the twenty-first century. I’m attentive to Jo’s point though, because I invited her for a workshop of my research, and she pointed out that I need to make sure I’m not re-centering whiteness and white nonsense, and that Asian American theatre shouldn’t just be an epilogue to that book. So, Jo, you’ve really reshaped the structure of my book so that there’s always this Asian American counter-example to yellowface in every chapter, and there will be a full chapter at the end about the musical I’m obsessed with right now, which is Soft Power . So, I really appreciate that you said that. KS : I agree with what’s been said. I just have a few things to add. One is that I think the origins of Asian American theatre are interestingly complicated. In terms of the academic field of Asian American Studies or Asian American Theatre Studies, I would almost single-handedly credit that to Jo. I think you did those reading groups early on, you had a really prescient kind of sense that there’s an academic field, like making a there there for an academic field, and people who could go on the market as that. I mean, we were all just kind of doing our own thing and doing it for ourselves, like, how do I get me my job? But you actually were thinking of a field, and I think it would not exist if it wasn’t for you. JL : I have to say this: in response to a taunt by a colleague of mine who works in Asian American Literature who made a crack at me, and I said something about Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies, and she said, “What? All three of you?” I mean, she made this crack early on, so maybe it was that there were only like three. It was pretty horrible. I would argue there were other people like James Moy , and then there were historians who were doing work, like John Tchen’s New York before Chinatown . There are all these really great connections, and people come from, as Dorinne pointed out, different interdisciplines. It’s not just Theatre Studies. KS : Angela Pao , for sure. JL : Absolutely, Angela, and other people who were just not being seen. It was partly coincidence but partly because, at the time, we were working to establish a program in Asian American Studies at the University of Minnesota, which we finally did in 2004. So, that was part of my larger thing, that we were trying to become institutionalized. I became much more aware of the need for that as a form of support, acknowledgement, and recognition, that if we actually had a field, then people wouldn’t have to keep reinventing what they do for other people or feel as though there wasn’t a place for them. I honestly think some of it’s that remark Donatella said, oh you came and said this about my work. It’s probably on the order of what Sean said about Karen saying that I need to do that. You’re making an observation and then you realize, oh my goodness, someone’s taking me seriously. They’re actually thinking that I have the answer to this. I think I’ve always been a crowd sourcing person, right? That if we do this together, it is so much more fun. Who wants to be the only person working on this? I really think that that for me was a huge motivator, to get people together, because I really felt like I was limited in terms of my perspective. I mean, if you’re going to work on theatre, which is so, so many characters, you need everybody there. I do feel like, too—the point that was made earlier about listening to people who are practitioners—I do remember a note, one thing that really changed the way I write and one of the reasons why I stopped writing work that was more, in some ways, theoretically informed for academic audiences is actually because Roger Tang did a little thing on my first book, and he said something like, oh this is not bedtime reading. I was taken aback. Like, well, this wasn’t written for you. Then I thought, well, why is that? Why is it that I felt that I had to write for a specific group of theatre scholars or literary scholars and prove myself? I think that kind of freed me up to do things like the anthology we put together ( Asian American Plays for a New Generation ), plays with Mu Performing Arts at the time. It was just really great to be at a stage, since I did have tenure, where I could let go of working so hard to establish ourselves as leaders in our field, at the university, because the academy, as anyone probably knows, will just suck you dry. I mean, it’ll just sort of take the will to write anything out of you if you have to conform to that model. I don’t know how it is at all your institutions, but it is hard. KS : Jo, you’re being very modest. You say, like, who wants to be the only one in the field? I think that really runs counter to a lot of the logic of higher education, that the whole game should be to have your turf and be the only one and defend it against other people. So, I think the character of the field of Asian American Theatre as an academic field really bears your imprint. But you know, when we started, the idea that there would be job postings for an Asian American theatre specialist—I mean, that just wasn’t a thing, right? And it is now. So, I think that’s a real contribution that you’ve made to not just the profession but to, like, thinking. In terms of the field, the artistic output, how Asian American theatre and performance has changed parallels generations of scholars. Immigration has changed, and how we think about the circulation of people has changed. I think so many of us who were starting out were really formed by a particular kind of generation of Asian American, you know Sansei, or fourth or fifth generation Chinese Americans, who were doing that kind of thing that was self-marked as Asian American theatre. That’s very specific to a post-’65 kind of immigration thing, right? The character of Asian America has changed so much from the ’80s on and has changed the kinds of work that’s being done in the theatre and the kind of sensibilities. It’s sort of the idea that there’s both out-migration and in-migration, like that kind of global character of things and the circulatory kind of sensibility. I think maybe it’s my training in law, but I peg all of that to migration. I think just the kinds of people who are on the stage or at the table have been really dramatically changed. So, that’s exciting to see. DG : I have a major set of questions to help us wrap up and look ahead: Whose research and artistry have excited you most, and where do you see or hope to see the field going? SM : I still think that there have been different trends in theatre practice that have not really gotten their due in terms of Asian American attention. One of the most exciting theatre makers for me is Ping Chong, actually. I know Karen has written on (Ping Chong and Company in National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage ) and others have written on that company as well . Ping Chong and Company is in a way tracking how communities are shifting over time. I find that work very generative, as opposed to the sort of the more commercial Broadway stuff, which has to appeal to such a wide audience (and it’s a very white audience). I think even though we’ve seen shifts on Broadway, I don’t expect massive change to happen at that commercial level or scale. KS : Sean, I’m so glad you mentioned Ping. When I was trying to come up with a list, I was thinking of people like Ping Chong and his company but also people like Ralph Peña and Ma-Yi, and Mia Katigbak. Actually, I would put Jorge Ortoll in this pile, too, even though he’s not Asian American. But I really think that those are people who are doing this very unglamorous work of actually getting other people’s voices onto the stage and making the road, even while they’re doing their own artistic work, but they’re doing a ton of work that is unglamorous, that is about making this sustainable for many more people. And that especially right now just feels like it’s both urgent and kind of a long game, which I really appreciate. So, there’s all kinds of artists that I’m into, but those guys doing the backstage work are the ones I really appreciate right now. JL : I’ll have to add my voice to all the people worshipping Ping Chong. He came and did a thing with our students two years ago, a collaboration with Talvin Wilks, one of the Collidescope projects, and I have to say, it was one of the best things I’ve seen by students, ever. I mean, it was just so moving and so wonderful. I have to have a soft spot for some of the artists who come out of our Twin Cities community. There’s a number of younger artists who have been working here for some time, and we’re putting together a collection for students. I mentioned May Lee-Yang’s play to Sean, and he was writing about that , and I really just loved her work. We also recently did a production at Penumbra Theatre of Prince Gomolvilas’s The Brothers Paranormal , which I really, really enjoyed. It was a wonderful way to think about how different communities, Asian American and Black, might intersect on the stage. And Lloyd Suh! EKL : Those are great names. I’m really excited by Qui Nguyen’s plays, just so fresh and fun to teach. Also, Julia Cho. I saw Aubergine at Playwrights Horizons, and I thought it was one of the most moving Asian American plays I’ve seen. It was well cast, well designed, and to see that Off-Broadway—such a polished professional production—it was one of those plays I cried at from the beginning to the end. It was just really moving. DK : I guess I’m wondering about people we’ve not heard of, so I’m sure that there are all kinds of people. Jo, you referenced some folks in Minneapolis and so on. So, that’s who I’d be interested in hearing about and hearing from. I hope that we’ll do more of that in the future. In terms of workers, it’s not just Asian Americans, so I’m just wondering—having worked with Anna Deavere Smith, for example—like other stuff that inspires me would be Antoinette Nwandu and Jackie Siblies Drury. In terms of the scholarship—no one’s talked about what we want to see—but I myself am really interested in integrating the creative and the critical in different ways, so I started this research cluster called Creativity, Theory, Politics in American Studies trying to look at the work of scholar-artists. I’m interested in people who are trying to do that. Sean, thank you for sponsoring a book forum on Worldmaking (in the February 2022 issue of Cultural Dynamics currently available through https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/CDY/current ) that had two of the people whose work I’m interested in: Josh Chambers-Letson ( After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life ), whom I’m sure everybody knows, with genre-bending, the intersectionality, queer of color critique, and how moving it is because I weep every time I read it actually. And then Aimee Cox ( Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship ), who’s a former dancer for Ailey who integrates movement and scholarship in her work and in her lectures. For our cluster, she gave a “lecture” that incorporated academic analysis, a showing of short films, and a movement workshop. So, I want more integration of the creative and the critical. DG : Thanks for that. Is there anyone else that you want to lift up? KS : Aya Ogaya’s work is amazing. And Dorinne as a playwright-scholar! SM : I would just want to say that, once when Esther gave a talk, and someone asked her, “What do you want to see? What are you going to do next?” she said, “I’ll just do a history that goes earlier.” But I take that seriously. It seems to me in terms of the pre-1945 stuff, there’s a ton of material there that we have not addressed in great detail that I think will open up a field and will change the way that we narrativize Asian American Studies. I think in the actual work produced, there are a lot of turns that happen that we just don’t account for. There’s a lot of transnational things happening with early Asian migrants, and in that vein, people like Andrew Leong at Berkeley, who’s an English scholar working on poetry but is also thinking through Sadakichi Hartmann, have been very inspiring for my current line of work in that regard. But I think there’s a lot of people doing early nineteenth century stuff that has a lot of potential to reshape some of the field. DK : In that sense, it’s too bad Jim [Moy] couldn’t be here. One thing I hope for the future is just to combat, you know, white American theatre on so many levels. I’ve just run into so much aggressive, soul-crushing white fragility this year in all kinds of ways, including being trolled. (The trolling was in response to an interview I did with the LA Times , following the murders of the women in Atlanta.) JL : That’s terrible, Dorinne. What happened? DK : I’ve been silenced! I was in a playwriting group. “No, you can’t talk about representation because I’m not racist. I had two black friends when I was a child.” Seriously it’s parodic, it’s so bad. Do you know how white you sound? So, it’s been that kind of year. JL : If you write that person into a play, I’ll read it. DK : I have! I’ve got to get it out somehow. DG : This has been such a fun conversation. I’m excited to be able to share it with other people, and I’m really excited that the next ATHE (Association for Theatre in Higher Education) conference is themed around Dorinne’s Worldmaking , which I hope will be another point of intervention. Thanks so much for your generosity with your time today and sharing all of these reflections. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Donatella Galella is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Riverside. She researches how systemic racism shapes contemporary American theatre from the ways white institutions capitalize on blackness to the persistence of yellowface in musicals. Her essays have been published in journals including Theatre Journal , Theatre Survey , and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism and books including Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture, and Identity and Casting a Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative . Her book America in the Round: Capital, Race, and Nation at Washington DC’s Arena Stage (University of Iowa Press) was an Honorable Mention for the 2020 Barnard Hewitt Award from the American Society for Theatre Research and a Finalist for the 2020 Outstanding Book Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Dorinne Kondo is an anthropologist, Performance Studies scholar, playwright, dramaturg, podcaster, Professor of American Studies and Anthropology, and former Director of Asian American Studies at the University of Southern California. Her award-winning books include Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace and About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater. Her most recent book Worldmaking: Race, Performance and the Work of Creativity bends genre, integrating her play Seamless . She was a dramaturg for three world premieres of theatre artist Anna Deavere Smith’s plays and co-founded the research cluster “Creativity, Theory, Politics,” spotlighting the work of scholar-artists. Esther Kim Lee is Professor in the Department of Theater Studies and the International Comparative Studies and the Director of Asian American & Diaspora Studies at Duke University. She is the author of A History of Asian American Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 2006), which received the 2007 Award for Outstanding Book given by Association for Theatre in Higher Education, The Theatre of David Henry Hwang (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015), and Made-Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era (University of Michigan Press, 2022). She is the editor of Seven Contemporary Plays from the Korean Diaspora in the Americas (Duke University Press, 2012) and a four-volume collection, Modern and Contemporary World Drama: Critical and Primary Sources (Bloomsbury, 2022), which challenges the prevailing Eurocentric reading of modern drama. Josephine Lee is currently the Associate Dean of Arts and Humanities and Professor of English and Asian American Studies in the College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is the editor in chief of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture, and her other books include Oriental, Black, and White: The Formation of Racial Habits in American Theater (University of North Carolina Press), The Japan of Pure Invention: Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado (University of Minnesota Press), and Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage (Temple University Press). She has also co-edited Asian American Plays for a New Generation (with R.A. Shiomi and Don Eitel), Re/collecting Early Asian America: Essays in Cultural History (with Imogene Lim and Yuko Matsukawa) and Asian American Literature in Transition, 1850-1930 (with Julia H. Lee) . Sean Metzger is a Professor in the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television and the former president of Performance Studies international. He has published Chinese Looks: Fashion, Performance Race (2014) and The Chinese Atlantic: Seascapes and the Theatricality of Globalization (2020) both with Indiana University Press. The current editor of Theatre Journal , he has also coedited several collections of essays and a volume of plays. Karen Shimakawa is Associate Professor of Performance Studies and Co-Associate Dean of Faculty and Academic Affairs in NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and Affiliated Faculty in NYU School of Law. Her research and teaching focus on critical race theory and performance. She is the author of National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage (2002). Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration Introduction to Asian American Dramaturgies Behind the Scenes of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies On Young Jean Lee in Young Jean Lee's We're Gonna Die by Christine Mok Representation from Cambodia to America: Musical Dramaturgies in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band The Dramaturgical Sensibility of Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap and Cambodian Rock Band Holding up a Lens to the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists: A Photo Essay Theatre in Hawaiʻi: An “Illumination of the Fault Lines” of Asian American Theatre Randall Duk Kim: A Sojourn in the Embodiment of Words Reappropriation, Reparative Creativity, and Feeling Yellow in Generic Ensemble Company’s The Mikado: Reclaimed Dance Planets Dramaturgy of Deprivation (없다): An Invitation to Re-Imagine Ways We Depict Asian American and Adopted Narratives of Trauma Clubhouse: Stories of Empowered Uncanny Anomalies Off-Yellow Time vs Off-White Space: Activist Asian American Dramaturgy in Higher Education Asian American Dramaturgies in the Classroom: A Reflection Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Thomas F. Connolly Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 28 1 Visit Journal Homepage “Re-righting” Finland’s Winter War: Robert E. Sherwood’s There Shall Be No Night[s] Thomas F. Connolly By Published on March 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF Robert E. Sherwood’s biblical source for the title of his play There Shall Be No Night is useful for establishing context for the contemporary controversy the play was part of, as well as the lack of subsequent commentary it has received. Sherwood dearly wanted to create something profoundly relevant. The inherent paradox in such an ambition is something any writer who wishes to be a contemporary voice must contend with. The play was presented by the Theatre Guild and originally ran from 29 April 1940 to 9 August 1940, re-opening 9 September 1940, closing 2 November 1940. It dramatizes the collapse of Finland between 1938 and 1940, and concerns a Nobel Prize-winning Finnish scientist (played by Alfred Lunt), and his American-born wife (played by Lynn Fontanne). He is a renowned pacifist who refuses to believe that war will overtake his country. When the war does come, their son Erik (played by Montgomery Clift) joins the Finnish army, and after he is killed, the father joins the fight. It is possible now though, to consider a larger question that the play and its production raises. Can an “up-to-the-minute” play survive a long run? What is more, Sherwood’s play crystalizes an Horatian dilemma: does the play “enlighten” or “entertain”? It also raises decidedly post-classical issues. The work of Carlo Ginzburg (b. 1929) can assist us in assessing the pitfalls that may beset a playwright who relies too much on current events and enable us to consider the microhistorical concerns that this production may address. Ginzburg is one of the most important microhistorians; significantly, he originally wanted to study literature and Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis has always been a starting point for him. In Ginzburg ’ s approach, literature precedes history. So using Ginzburg to consider a play about its own time that is of greater historical than literary interest provides a useful twist. Sherwood takes such an approach dramatically in his World War II play by drawing on the Finnish Winter War and subsequently in a revision, the invasion of Greece. There Shall Be No Night ’s urgency precludes history in no small measure because the play is primarily a polemic. Thus, there is only one perspective in it, as noted earlier, that the United States should join the war against Germany. It has no use as a means of fathoming the greater complexity of the alliance with the Soviet Union or what the United Nations [2] would become, to mention but two issues confronting Americans after they entered the war. By failing to comment on his own revision, Sherwood also offered only one perspective towards it. The question of perspective takes us to one of Ginzburg’s favorite concerns. He has revitalized the microhistorical approach through a, perhaps ironic, expansion of its focus. His recent work has expanded via discursions rather than monographs. [3] Challenging aesthetic history, Ginzburg has called out art historian Erwin Panofsky (1892-1928) as an exemplar of method to be challenged, questioned, and indeed resituated. Ginzburg takes issue with Panofsky’s foundational assumptions about iconography (relating the subject matter of a work of art contextually to symbolic meaning drawn from literature and other art works). [4] The notion of perspective as an immutable is something theatre historians have challenged in recent years, yet recalling the “invention” of scenographic perspective as an evolutionary phenomenon is also an example of how Ginzburg’s work may inform our more skeptical inquiries. Theatre historians who remember Alberti’s 1435 text outlining the “rules” for drawing with a three-dimensional perspective will be interested in the way that Ginzburg’s discussions of Alberti call into question the idea of precise “sight-lines” through history. [5] Noting how quickly Sherwood’s drama inspired by a wartime broadcast so quickly dated instructs us here. What is more, when Ginzburg references Erich Auerbach as an ultimate authority due to Auerbach’s disregard for generic distinctions between “history” and “literature,” he may lead theatre theorists and historians to see past such false dichotomies as “theatre” and “drama” or “stage” and “performance.” Auerbach’s Mimesis [6] is itself a legend of scholarship (and a testament to a scholar’s memory in the literal sense, considering the circumstances of its composition). [7] The ongoing use to which Mimesis is put in the 21 st century also allows us to enter into the discourse of a work such as There Shall Be No Night and consider the importance of the performances of the famous acting couple Alfred Lunt (1892-1977) and Lynne Fontanne (1887-1983). “The Lunts,” as they were known, were a mainstay of the Theatre Guild and were best known for their work in comedy, though their reputation was somewhat belied by their performances in plays by O’Neill and Chekhov. Without the Lunts, the play would have been inconceivable. They were at the crest of their fame and reputation. They had also starred in Sherwood’s Reunion in Vienna (opened 16 November 1931, ran for 264 performances) and his anti-war play Idiot’s Delight (opened 24 March 1936, ran for 300 performances). Two star performers at the height of their careers, a playwright renouncing his own pacifism, and a nation riven by controversy over intervening in the war are the elements behind the play’s contemporary triumph. Thus, we have before us, the current events that Sherwood dramatized, the historical moment of Finland’s Winter War with the Soviet Union, and the theatrical phenomenon of the production starring the Lunts (and directed by Alfred Lunt) that would not have been successful without these factors. Sherwood wrote the play in response to the 1939 Soviet invasion of Finland. It opened 29 April 1940, went on a month’s hiatus while Sherwood rewrote it in August for a September re-opening, and it closed 2 November 1940. It then went on tour through the United States and Canada. It crossed the Atlantic and opened in Liverpool 1 November 1943, toured England and opened in London 15 December, running until 30 June 1944, thence for another month on tour. An interventionist polemic and star vehicle for a celebrated acting couple, nevertheless the play was also mired in politics; Sherwood was attacked by right and left as a “war-monger” and “capitalist stooge,” respectively. Irrespective of these accusations, Sherwood closed it when the United States entered the war, believing that the play’s heroic depiction of Finland, which had become Hitler’s ally by then, was bad for the war effort. Some accounts have President Roosevelt himself asking Sherwood to close it down. [8] Before considering Sherwood’s discontinuities, a brief review of Sherwood’s career is necessary as he is largely unknown today. Sherwood reveals in the preface that he was so eager to serve in the First World War that when the United States army rejected him because of his height, he crossed the border to join a Canadian Black Watch regiment in 1917. He was severely wounded and suffered for the rest of his life from his wartime injuries. Thereafter, he was an avowed pacifist for several years. While his serious political interests seemed not to jibe with his literary reputation as a charter member of the Algonquin Round Table, the celebrated circle of Broadway wits that included including Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman, Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley, Franklin P. Adams, and others, Sherwood was the only one of that group to have consistently made a serious literary career. Kaufman was a most successful playwright and director, but no other Algonquin Round Table member had anything like Sherwood’s level of success. (Sherwood’s 1948 joint biographical history, Roosevelt and Hopkins won the Pulitzer Prize, his third, and almost every other literary prize, as well as the Bancroft Prize and many other awards for history writing.) Robert Benchley, one of Sherwood’s Algonquin confreres, with whom he had shared an office at Vanity Fair in the 1920s, was a beloved comic writer and performer whose final Hollywood years were marked by alcoholism and depression. He eventually could not bear to be in the same room with Sherwood. Benchley grimly remarked after walking out of a party where he had seen his old friend, “Those eyes, I can’t stand those eyes looking at me. He’s looking at me and thinking of how he knew me when I was going to be a great writer—and he’s thinking, now look at what I am!” [9] Benchley was excoriating himself, for Sherwood was a remarkably generous writer who was doubtless more concerned with slaying his own inner dragons of despair than looking daggers at Benchley. Years later, Sherwood even wrote the foreword to Nathaniel Benchley’s biography of his father. For his own part, Sherwood continually lamented the fact that he always seemed to start out with something serious only to end up with lighthearted entertainment. Nevertheless, after There Shall Be No Night opened, another of Sherwood’s erstwhile Algonquin comrades, Alexander Woollcott, wrote to Lynne Fontanne about his talent, “Not one of the Algonquin crowd has made such good use of the stuff he has in him.” [10] Sherwood’s success as a writer and public servant and his relatively uncomplicated personal life obscure his inner conflicts. The lingering physical pain from his war wounds was exacerbated by his own self-doubt and sense of failure. He may well have suffered from depression, and there is even the thought that his war service may have left him with more severe mental scars than the shrapnel he carried in his legs. With these issues in mind, There Shall Be No Night is the culmination of Sherwood’s playwriting ambitions; it is the play he had been trying to write for his entire career. Even so, it betrays the plight of the commercial playwright in service to a cause. Sherwood had to write the play as quickly as possible in order to insure its relevance; thus, while Sherwood made a theatrical milestone, he fell short of creating a dramatic landmark. If Sherwood is remembered, it is for The Petrified Forest (1935) , which provided Humphrey Bogart with a career-making role and was made into a successful film the following year that also established Bette Davis once and for all as an A-List star for Warner Brothers. Less well-known today is the fact that its original Broadway star, Leslie Howard stipulated that he would only act in the film if Bogart were cast as well. It is perhaps amusing that those who grew up watching films on television probably remember it as a 1930s “gangster” movie. In his preface to the published version of There Shall Be No Night Sherwood notes the influence of his earlier plays. Sherwood carefully traces the play’s genesis, and his introduction is an exculpation of his transformation from pacifist to interventionist. He begins by recounting how he was accosted in the lobby after the first try-out of the play by a “young man” who “accused” Sherwood of having become a “War-monger.” [11] He adds that many critics continue to echo that accusation. After a lengthy review of his playwriting career, he concludes: It seems to me as this Preface is written, that Doctor Valkonen’s pessimism concerning man’s mechanical defenses and his optimistic faith in man himself have been justified by events. The Mannerheim and Maginot Lines have gone. But the individual human spirit still lives and resists in the tortured streets of London.[12] Sherwood defends his vision, but curiously makes no mention of the “Greek” re-visioning of the play. Sherwood subsequently relocated the play to Greece (“re-righting” history via dramatic setting). [13] Sherwood had to do so in order to maintain a coherent liberal, democratic vision of the Allied war effort that America could rally behind. Finland’s alliance with Germany was an issue even for non-Stalinists. Sherwood’s choice of Greece was both “historically” accurate and appropriate. The Greeks fought valiantly against the Italians and the Germans. There was no chance of a Soviet invasion there that might necessitate any political or military realignment. Drawing on the irresistible heritage of “the glory that was Greece,” Sherwood found a perfect way to maintain the political message of his play and its urgency for its audiences. Location and ideology merged perfectly, indeed instantly, for no one would need any explanations about which country “Greece” was or which side Greece was on. The play won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Institute of Arts and Letters’ Gold Medal, and the Lunts successfully transferred the play to London, where it was even more highly acclaimed. Most observers agreed that their performances were tremendously moving and that it was a great production, in spite of signs of hasty composition. [14] In Sherwood’s papers the typescripts reveal that he completed the play in less than three months and, as mentioned above, revised it in three weeks. [15] He chastised himself for “sloppy writing.” [16] Reconsidering the play as an emblem of problematic liberal bourgeois decency allows us to question whether it was the play or its performance that was so effective. Its protagonist is Dr. Kaarlo Valkonen, a Nobel-prize winning pacifist physician, who is married to Miranda, an American woman. The introductory scenes allow Dr. Valkonen opportunity to espouse his philosophy that the world has gone mad because of too much scientific and technological success. He argues humanity has grown complacent. Nonetheless, Sherwood offers a vision of a liberal and humane Northern European paradise. This is shattered with the Russian invasion. Valkonen’s son, a soldier, leaves his inamorata just after getting her pregnant (albeit he does not know it), though he does manage to marry her from his hospital bed before dying from his wounds (providing emotional melodrama alongside the political). After the invasion, Dr. Valkonen joins the medical corps but after his son’s death joins the partisans, tearing off his Red Cross armband and strapping on a revolver as he exits. There are additional debates among secondary characters, English and American volunteers who are Spanish Civil War veterans, about fighting the good fight and what will happen after the war. After learning of her husband’s death, Mrs. Valkonen escapes with her pregnant daughter-in-law to America. The play is no masterpiece, but it remains moving. The problem lies not with its success as melodrama, but with its failure as ideological explication. The play’s “dramatic” and “historical” problems will be discussed when the London production is taken up. Now the question of the success of a production of a given play in the midst of World War II, vis-à-vis the relative failure of that play , in itself may not seem crucial to one’s understanding of either the war or American drama as a whole. Nevertheless, if we consider the problem of Sherwood’s expansive vision of the role of the playwright as a player on the field of history with the contractive nature of “timeliness” we can come to an understanding of the microhistorical usefulness of both the text and the production of There Shall Be No Night. Auerbach’s notion of mimesis pertains here only indirectly. We should not look to Sherwood’s play for a “realistic” depiction of wartime Finland (or Greece), but for a recapitulation of American attitudes towards World War II. Eight decades later, Sherwood’s work appears to be a theatrical monument that memorializes the playwright’s belief in his audience’s capacity for liberal, humanist idealism. By studying the reaction the play inspired we gain insight, not into the front lines, but the home front. We observe the impossibility of a play “recreating” battlefield issues. Yet, we may note the possibility of understanding why a contemporary audience would want to believe in the possibility of a genuine dramatization of wartime perceptions and sensations. It is not Sherwood’s play per se that offers us this insight. It is recognizing how the combination of the play, its preface, its revision, and its production history (including audience and critics’ reactions) reflect their historical moment that entails our attempt to discern this wartime mentalité. The ephemeral nature of performance is dismissed by the historical record of There Shall Be No Night. Drawing on Siegfried Kracauer’s levels of history, we can balance the putative timeliness of the play against the timelessness of the Lunts’ achievement and consider that their artistic achievement transcends their own or Sherwood’s humane or patriotic ambitions. It is aesthetic ambition that endures here. The Lunts took a hastily-written, topical melodrama and made it into an icon of United Nations idealism. What the play offered was an enactment of what the allies were fighting for. Sherwood asserts his right to express in public the ideology of Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms; Sherwood had already given Roosevelt the powerful term, “arsenal of democracy.” He was involved with the moment, though his historical reach exceeded his playwriting grasp. For Sherwood there was a particular urgency here. He had chastised himself for not being able to sustain a serious dramatic situation, even if he does manage to maintain acute tension with this play. It is misleading that latter-day critics have lumped the play with Lillian Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine (opened 1 April 1941); distance may make the plays seem similar, nevertheless, Thomas P. Adler goes so far to argue that Sherwood’s play “actually helped shape and alter the opinions of Americans about entrance into the war.” While the contemporary critical debate was lively, subsequent scholarly commentary is limited. The play is discussed more in terms of Sherwood’s turning away from pacifism and as somehow adjunct to his work for the Roosevelt administration than as part of his playwriting career. Bigsby devotes as much space to Sherwood’s war work as he does to the play. Wertheim mostly discusses it as part of Broadway’s march toward wartime awareness. [19] As noted, Adler makes even stronger claims for the play’s contemporary impact. What the critical commentary lacks is an appreciation for the play’s production. By limiting their approach to a reading of the play, Bigsby, Adler, and Wertheim overlook an indispensable aspect of the play’s success: the Lunts’ performance. In terms of Sherwood’s literary career it is seen as a sort of sequel to Idiot’s Delight, dramatizing the war that that play presaged. The aesthetic dilemma that this play presents is daunting. Particularly in light of its liberal ideology: it is a life lesson in the humane. But the Lunts and their audiences found they could not sustain their own line of defense when confronted with V-2 rockets. Sherwood defended his work (and interventionism) in the preface, [20] and Roosevelt supporters praised the play more for its message than for its dramatic soundness. The play was a box-office hit, and Sherwood donated some of the profits to war relief. After their Broadway success, the Lunts were eager to bring the production to London, where they were equally successful. In spite of this seeming triumph though, even before it closed in 1944, some argued that the play had already become dated. [21] Additionally, the London production was literally stopped by bombs. The Aldwych Theatre suffered a direct hit. In an excruciating example of art and history colliding, Lunt himself believed the play’s resonance had become too strong. Audiences had begun to thin and the other actors found performing difficult to endure. Such lines as “the enemy is near” while bombs were falling outside the theatre seemed to have nearly choked up Lunt’s ability to act. [22] There are many war plays, and Wertheim’s study considers American World War II plays in particular, but he writes almost entirely about plays being performed on Broadway. One cannot neglect the unique London production of There Shall be No Night . Historically, there have been plays about wars being fought as the plays themselves were being performed. Lysistrata is probably the most famous example. Yet, Aristophanes’s play was originally written for a single performance and the Spartans were not yet at gates of Athens at that time. Nineteenth-century examples might include the Battle of Little Big Horn recreated in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show or Philip Astley’s hippodramatic military spectacles presented during the Boer War. None of these were performed under fire, nor were any performed for anywhere near the number of consecutive performances as was There Shall Be No Night in London (15 December 1943 to 30 June 30 1944). Even so, a play such as There Shall Be No Night, whose least significant aspect is its script, offers a cautionary tale for the playwright who wants to be timely. The ephemeral “performance” of the current events taking place in Finland is eclipsed by the “great performance” of the Lunts; both elide over the text of the play itself. Current event and performance phenomenon are washed over by the tide of history. Commenting on the original production, George Jean Nathan, usually unabashedly caustic, seemed reticent plowing under Sherwood’s hallowed ground, but was prescient: If the Federal Theatre Project gave us what with considerable exactness was called The Living Newspaper, Sherwood is giving us what with at least a measure of exactness may be called the Living Editorial. Neither, however, is in form the least like the other and both differ further and widely in the fact that, whereas the former was contrived with plan and deliberation, the latter is the hapless consequence of dramaturgical insufficiency.[23] Nathan sums up the play’s central problem. There Shall Be No Night is not so much concerned with drama as it is with amplifying a call to arms. I would add that when Nathan’s colleague, drama critic John Mason Brown, embarked on the second volume of his biography of Sherwood, he made it clear that this play summed up Sherwood’s career. Indeed, Brown died before he completed the volume and the entire text of the play was included when the biography was published posthumously. Brown’s failure to assimilate this assertion with his own vision as a writer demonstrates the collapse of genteel liberalism’s aesthetic consciousness. [24] I also wonder if the Lunts being the production’s stars had an impact on the seriousness with which the play was taken. Even though their performances were praised, the Lunts had long been associated with light comedy. This would be a problem for them in their final years; the London production of The Visit (opened 23 June 1960) was advertised as a sparkling comedy and this had a negative effect on its initial reception. In the context of Sherwood’s work and There Shall Be No Night , the Lunts had performed in Sherwood’s Reunion in Vienna (opened 16 November 1931) and Idiot’s Delight (opened 24 March 1936) , so were established as regulars with his Playwrights’ Company productions. By the 1940s, in spite of their performances in O’Neill and Chekhov, the Lunts had seemingly turned their backs on serious drama. This would become more of an issue in their post- Their Shall Be No Night careers. The Lunts as a couple were the arbiter elegantarium of the American theatre, and in the post-war years would continue as leading stars, but would not take part in any of the groundbreaking work of the 1940s and 1950s—until their final performance in The Visit in 1959 directed by Peter Brook (who still maintains that Alfred Lunt was one of the greatest actors he ever worked with). For their part the Lunts later expressed regret that they were not considered for plays such as Death of a Salesman or Long Day’s Journey Into Night . One wonders if they had performed in an American classic rather than in an adaptation of a Duerrenmatt play as their finale whether they might be better remembered. Ultimately though, they served their public, which limited their artistic range but won them a huge and devoted following in their lifetime. Looking back on them, it is most unfortunate that the American theatre could never have had the means to provide them with a living legacy, but something only memorialized. [25] Tradition is not something that American culture has ever been able to sustain. The play’s critical reaction discussed earlier gives us insight into the split the American left was undergoing in the final days of the Roosevelt administration. [26] The cause of the dissension was whether to revive the New Deal or focus on America’s new place in the world, with the additional issue of the United Nations: what would be the role of the United States in this international organization? By the 1948 presidential election, the Democratic Party would splinter into three factions: the mainstream party that nominated Harry Truman; the leftist Progressive party whose candidate was FDR’s former vice-president and secretary of agriculture, Henry Wallace; and the so-called Dixie-crats who ran Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina on their states-rights platform. Sherwood’s politics were comfortably mainstream, and he supported the United Nations. While Sherwood was never a “red-baiter,” he became a Cold Warrior because he was convinced that Communism presented the same threat to the world that Fascism had been. Thus, in the context of its time we may see that There Shall Be No Night was never really considered for its dramatic value; it was always part of an ideology. Judging from two contemporary observers, it was from the rise of the curtain, the sort of play that forward-thinking patriots or citizens-of-the-world could not help but admire. Noël Coward was among the Broadway first-nighters and provides testimony for this. He was moved to tears throughout the performance, and he said after the curtain fell that his entire trip to America would have been worthwhile if he had had no other reason for making it than seeing There Shall Be No Night . [27] Former drama critic Alexander Woollcott considered the first night the final proof of Sherwood’s worth as a high-minded playwright. [28] When Sherwood published the play in 1940, he used the original version set in Finland, but after 1944, neither the Finnish nor the Greek version was ever performed again on Broadway. An adaptation by Morton Wishengrad was performed on television in 1957 two years after Sherwood’s death. Starring Katharine Cornell in a rare screen appearance, Wishengrad’s version was set during the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. Charles Boyer co-starred. It is interesting to consider the double-phenomenon of the published text set in Finland and the performance text set in Greece. The play’s theatrical/historical relocation queries how a war/time[ly] drama that is a response to an immediate conflict ultimately becomes an historical monument rather than a play, as mentioned earlier. Given Sherwood’s apologia for the play’s ideology in his “Preface,” and that the second version earned praise for its even closer connection to the Allied war effort, one would think that Sherwood would have used the revision as the final version. Sherwood’s publication of the original version suggests that Sherwood’s theatrical vision does not cohere. This is so because the revision was made in order to keep the play pertinent, yet it was largely discarded when Sherwood published it. Sherwood retained his added references to Pericles, but the slightly longer discussions of democracy and its future were not retained. [29] Sherwood’s “present” dramaturgy is contradicted by his reversion to the original Finnish setting. Resituating the play to Greece appears expedient. Carlo Ginzburg’s reading of Siegfried Kracauer’s idea of the discontinuity of reality is useful here. [30] I would amplify this by turning to Ginzburg directly and noting that what he describes as “estrangement, detachment, the interweaving of micro- and macrohistory, a rejection of the philosophy of history” applies here. In other words, “the search for a comprehensive sense in human history” is an essential quality of a perspective which oddly enough stems from a key modernist literary antecedent, L’education sentimentale . [31] I say “oddly” because this line of argument allows a post- modern perspective to consider how more than half-a-century after the play was presented, Sherwood’s unified vision now appears skewed. I would argue that Sherwood believed he was dramatizing Finland’s Winter War and offering a macrohistorical perspective. His politically liberal and psychologically realistic dramaturgy was the product of his own personal struggle to overcome pacifism and embrace interventionism. Even so, Sherwood’s vision was challenged before the war(s) ended (the Finnish Winter War and World War II as a whole). [32] The play was an artifact of liberal idealism even before its run concluded. The preface to the play and much of the speechifying of the characters reveals that Sherwood believes he is dramatizing the ultimate battle for civilization. [33] He does this through the use of characters such as a radio reporter who initially sets up the radio broadcast for Dr. Valkonen’s disquisition about human progress and degeneration, but returns throughout the play to “update” the other characters on Nazi aggression. Valkonen’s life story stands as a précis for Finland’s 20 th century history: he served in the Russian army’s medical corps, even met his future wife in St. Petersburg, thence returning to his native land. He engages in philosophical debates with the pessimistic Uncle Waldemar and with Dr. Ziemssen, a cynical German diplomat, who early in the play blithely asserts that the neutrality of the United States is part of the Herrenvolk’s master plan for world domination. Sherwood punctuates the play with news from the front and characters’ speeches about the indomitable spirit of the human race. Thus, it would seem to be a sweeping dramatization of the world, or at least Europe, in extremis. Ultimately though, it is a pièce à thèse in which liberal faith in humanistic ideals is given pride of place. The play’s only ideological development is Dr. Valkonen’s rejection of pacifism. In his summative study of history, Siegfried Kracauer’s point about the “micro dimension” suggests Sherwood’s drawing room wartime drama is not a macrohistorical work: In the micro dimension a more or less dense fabric of given data canalizes the historian’s imagination, his interpretative designs. As the distance from the data increases, they become scattered, thin out. The evidence thus loses its binding power, inviting less committed subjectivity to take over.[34] Sherwood’s play is neither an adequate reflection of une mentalité nor a depiction of un événement . It is in Kracauer’s term a “close-up shot or establishing shot.” There Shall be No Night is an index of Kracauer’s “law of levels”: contexts established at each level [that] are valid for that level but do not apply to findings at other levels; which is to say that there is no way of deriving the regularities of macrohistory, as Toynbee does, from the facts and interpretations provided by microhistory.[35] The characters in the play offer sweeping historical and cultural summaries or sociological pronouncements, but even though Dr. Valkonen makes an international radio broadcast, shortly after the play begins, and is something of an international figure, the moment of the play is contained by the play itself. It does not resound beyond the ovations it inspired during its performance. Sherwood never takes the play beyond the immediate liberal ideology that seeks to justify America’s entry into the war. Thus it even negates both its European settings; it is really a dramatic debate by an American for and about Americans. This is why I would argue that to attentive critics it seemed dated by 1943. It had only the “committed subjectivity” of 1940 to offer the more complex situation of the latter part of the war. Its “facts” and interpretation were inadequate for contemplating a post-war world. After Finland joined the Axis, Sherwood rapidly rewrote the play, but the only substantial change Sherwood made was substituting lines from Pericles’ funeral oration for those from the Kalevala . [36] It is also worth mentioning that he located the penultimate scene in “a classroom near Thermopylae.” [37] He saw no reason to significantly revise a play that was a “[report] of current fact that the human race was in danger of going insane,” as one of Sherwood’s characters, an American radio correspondent, describes the play’s protagonist’s recent book: The Defense of Man . Sherwood was in England during the London run where he received a commendation from the exiled King of Greece and playwriting advice from Winston Churchill, who suggested that he add a scene in which the characters would discuss the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. Churchill said to the playwright, “I want to know what those people thought and said about that.” Sherwood had to suppress laughter at Churchill’s dramatic criticism. [38] As noted, the second version was brought to London, where it would collide with history. (The production literally suffered a “direct hit.”) This version remained a conversation play about liberal values; ironically the off-stage combat that was discussed on stage was horrifically reified by the air raid that ended the play’s London run. The London performances had been continually endangered by the Germans’ renewed bombing campaign. The Lunts insisted on performing even during air raids. The raids made lines such as, “The enemy is not very far away” resonate with the London audience who reacted to the play with more tears and sobs than even New Yorkers had. Fontanne commented that even though they had “drenched” many theaters in North America, Londoners wept with even greater abandon. Alfred Lunt maintained Londoners let their emotions out in the darkened theatre because they would not do so in public or even in their homes. [39] One night bombs fell so close to the theater that the scenery wobbled, the fire curtain descended, and a blast hurled one actor out the stage door. [40] The London run of the play ended on 30 June 1944 as a result of damage done to the playhouse by a V-1 rocket attack, which killed a member of the air corps who was buying a ticket at the box office. Adjacent current events coming so fatally close to the performance of wartime casualties is a morbid continuity revealing the unintended yet omnipresent hubris behind any artistic endeavor that attempts to dramatize war on stage synchronously with contemporary combat, thereby creating a discontinuity. Audiences diminished during the play’s final London performances while people were experiencing warfare. Stage pictures of characters cowering during bombardments became paltry. Under the circumstances, how could such an enactment meet any Horatian requirements? Any question of “delight” in such scenes is superfluous. Nevertheless, what of an audience not threatened by war (the original American one) listening to dialogue exhorting them to accept the virtues of the struggle against the enemy? Apparently, it worked up to a point in London, but when the war came to the theatre itself, the best intentions of playwriting faltered. Late in the London run, the company gave a performance in a private home. Performers and spectators were in the midst of each other and the extraordinary discipline of the Lunts and their company created a performance that “was almost too painful to watch.” Contrary to dismissals of their work as purely external, they used any device they could, even elements of so-called emotional memory. [42] Such dedication to their art is best evidenced by the powerful impact of their extraordinarily “close” performance in a private home. Sherwood’s own preface makes it clear that the play is primarily about America. It details the connections between The Petrified Forest and There Shall Be No Night . Specifically, Sherwood argues that both are representative American plays because they confront contemporary complacency: The Petrified Forest achieves this on a domestic level ; There Shall Be No Night on a foreign one. As the “Finnish” drama is a play about the 1940s, The Petrified Forest is about the previous decade—thereby making it a fascinating social document of the 1930s, but it is also timelessly American in a way that There Shall Be No Night is not. Sherwood identifies The Petrified Forest as the play that “pointed him in a new direction.” [43] There Shall Be No Night is only ostensibly “existential” in the way that it addresses the pacifist scientist hero’s dilemma of how to live in a war-torn world that could not care less that he has been awarded the Nobel Prize. Of course, ironically, Alfred Nobel’s fortune was founded on dynamite and munitions; he established his foundation after one of his brothers was killed in an accident at their factory and when an obituary for another brother mistaking this Nobel for Alfred seemed to gloat that “the merchant of death” was dead. Sherwood’s character remarks on this in the first scene when Dr. Valkonen and his family toast Nobel’s memory sarcastically. [44] Sherwood was fascinated by apocalyptic violence, which is evident in Idiot’s Delight , written a year after The Petrified Forest. Idiot’s Delight is a strange pacifist satire that concludes as Europe plunges into war—indeed, its finale seems to be Armageddon. The play blends serious anti-war statements with vaudeville jokes and jabs at ethnic identities and national rivalries. Sherwood’s next play, which he wrote just before his Finnish play and which was still playing when There Shall be No Night opened, was Abe Lincoln in Illinois, a drama about Lincoln’s early career. It is a simple, if slightly romanticized vision of the Great Emancipator. Unsurprisingly, the play, which concludes with Lincoln’s departure for Washington, foreshadows Lincoln’s death: a sacrifice made for the Union and the abolition of slavery. In a fitting parallel the conclusion of There Shall Be No Night shows that fighting and dying for freedom is necessary if civilized humanity is to survive . Though it predates Sartre’s post-war usage, Sherwood saw himself as an American écrivain engagé from the outset of fascism. Indicative of Sherwood’s status as an activist writer, he was a film critic, editor, speechwriter, biographer, historian, soldier and pacifist, always supporting liberal points of view, and yet was one of the most self-effacing writers our nation has produced. One could also say he sacrificed his career for his country. Few now remember that he was the nation’s leading commercial playwright at the time of the New Deal, but his devotion to the cause of Roosevelt and his fury at the wrenching events of the Second World War caused him to disdain the Broadway box office and attempt to awaken the consciousness of his fellow citizens. Sherwood was at the height of his career when he became a speechwriter for President Franklin Roosevelt, thereafter joining the Roosevelt administration as head of the Office of War Information. Fortuitously, he chose to write about Finland—almost always called “Brave Little Finland” then. He was inspired to write the play while listening to a wartime Christmas broadcast direct from Finland, “Come In, Helsinki” featuring Bill White, the son of the famous editor of the Emporia Gazette . Sherwood had been struggling with the idea of a sequel to Idiot’s Delight, and also felt that he had let earlier events pass him by. One rather outré attempt to write about contemporary political issues was a play called Footsteps on the Danube , which featured a group of Jewish refugees fleeing from Vienna in an overcrowded boat. They are about to give up hope when they are hailed by another refugee, a bearded man dressed in white who walks across the water to their boat and offers solace. Sherwood quickly put that attempt aside. After he settled on the idea of a play set in Finland, he used the same title as the radio broadcast (“Come In, Helsinki”). According to the manuscripts at the Houghton Library at Harvard, some time after February 1940 he changed the title to “Revelation.” The title Sherwood ultimately chose was taken from the Book of Revelations 22:5: And there shall be no night there; and they need no candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God giveth them light: and they shall reign for ever and ever.[45] As mentioned earlier, Sherwood clearly sought biblical resonance for his latest play. The 1939-40 Broadway season paid some dramatic attention to the war with several plays about it being produced. A headline in The New York Times of 12 May 1940 declared: “The Broadway Stage Has Its First War Play.” The reporter Jack Gould quoted Sherwood’s assessment of the state of the nation using a phrase that President Roosevelt himself would adapt for the pre-war effort, “this country is already, in effect, an arsenal for the democratic Allies.” Indeed, the fact that Europe was at war was not quite lost on Broadway in the first two years of the 1940s, but Robert Sherwood’s Pulitzer winning There Shall Be No Night was really the first play to seriously depict the war. Sherwood generously donated his proceeds from the play to the American Red Cross and the Finnish War Relief Fund to further their resistance to Russia. Lillian Hellman’s anti-fascist Drama Critic’s Circle winner, Watch on the Rhine , opened one year later. In October of 1941, a second performance of this play was scheduled after the evening’s performance and broadcast in German to the people of Germany. Another example of Broadway’s war work was when The American Theater Wing volunteered its services and was serving as an auxiliary to British War Relief (Lynne Fontanne declared she was “knittin’ for Britain”). It is sometimes hard for twenty-first century Americans to recall how controversial it was to support any kind of intervention in Europe before Pearl Harbor. The rise of the “America First” movement had galvanized Sherwood’s determination to do something. For instance, he was profoundly disturbed by Charles Lindbergh’s speeches broadcast on the radio in September and October 1939, in the two months before the Russian invasion of Finland. Sherwood believed this was proof “that Hitlerism was already powerfully and persuasively represented in our own midst.” [49] As a result, Sherwood was criticized from both the right and the left for his support for Finland. The playwright himself was convinced the attack on Finland was the beginning of the end for Scandinavia. He believed Norway and Sweden would fall if nothing was done to help Finland. American Communist sympathizers, such as Lillian Hellman attacked Sherwood for writing about the Finns sympathetically. Hellman was an unrepentant apologist for Stalin and never repudiated her stance. Contrarily, she fabricated an image of herself as liberty’s greatest defender. Sherwood’s opposition to Hellman and her ilk shows his consistently humane idealism. Nevertheless, Sherwood’s reputation for sometimes dark comedy and social satire had stretched the Broadway audience’s sensibility to its limits. In spite of his self-criticism, Sherwood’s style of writing was suited to the mainstream audience. He never deviated far enough from their expectations to experience outright rejection. An anecdote of Sherwood’s about himself reveals the essence of his place in the theatre of his time. On the eve of writing his Finnish play, in spite of his raised consciousness, Sherwood felt particularly conflicted because he wanted to escape from the crushing anxiety provoked by European crises. He told the film producer Alexander Korda that he wished he could write a “sparkling drawing-room comedy without a suggestion of international calamity or social significance or anything else of immediate importance.” Korda scoffed at his escapist ambitions, “Go ahead and write that comedy and you’ll find that international calamity and social significance are right there in the drawing room.” [50] It seems as though Sherwood absorbed Korda’s comment and applied it to his play about a Finnish family trying to live their lives in the face of invasion and guerilla war. There Shall Be No Night is not a drawing-room comedy, and though in the long run Sherwood’s dramatic ambitions were daunted, his political and humane aims were met, if only briefly. In spite of the play’s limits, the Lunts’ performance enabled a brilliant staging. Yet even with a great production, Sherwood’s liberal perspective could not be sustained in performance. The bombs falling around the theatre eventually struck the theatre and stopped performances. History itself intervened and time ran out on the playwright. Sherwood’s overarching concern with timeliness in a real sense made the play time-sensitive, in that its message and merits expired. Finally, recalling the microhistorical approach and considering these issues from a 21 st century perspective demonstrate that There Shall Be No Night is very much one of Ginzburg’s “normal exceptions,” an amplified example of what Ginzburg discusses as “anomalous evidence that casts light on a widespread, otherwise undocumented phenomenon.” [51] The ephemeral nature of performance is a phenomenon that cannot be documented. Even so, the record of Sherwood’s now dated playwriting that fleetingly influenced his own time combined with the timeless success of the Lunts’ performance, becomes a document in its own right. Revisiting what happened when this play depicted and then came under enemy fire, shows us how art and history can collide, if not cohere. References [1] “And there shall be no night there; and they need no candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God giveth them light: and they shall reign for ever and ever.”Revelation 22:5. https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Revelation-22-5 [2] Here and elsewhere by “United Nations” I mean the allied nations of World War II. This term was introduced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942. [3] Carlo Ginzburg, Threads and Traces: True False Fictive , trans. Anne C. Tedeschi (Oakland: University of California Press, 2012). [4] Among Panofsky’s major works are, Idea: A Concept in Art Theory (1924), Perspective as Symbolic Form (1927), and Studies in Iconology (1939). [5] Ginzburg, Myths, Emblems, Clues (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1990). Ginzburg discusses his interest in “figurative evidence as historical source, but also…forms and formulae outside the context in which they had originated” (ix). He elaborates on this in the second chapter “From Aby Warburg to E. H. Gombrich: A Problem of Method.” 17-59. [6] Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask, Fiftieth Anniversary Edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). [7] Driven from the University of Marburg in 1935, Auerbach famously wrote Mimeis while in Istanbul where he had taken up a post at the university there. Drawing only on primary literary sources it is a work without footnotes, informed only by Auerbach’s erudition. [8] Patricia Bosworth, Montgomery Clift: A Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 77. [9] Billy Altman, Laughter’s Gentle Soul: The Life of Robert Benchley (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 331. One of Benchley’s greatest disappointments was that, unlike Sherwood’s great success with his history, he failed to produce his long-projected history of England during the reign of Queen Anne. One suspects Benchley never did anything more than talk about it. [10] Quoted in Harriet Hyman Alonso, Robert E. Sherwood: The Playwright in Peace and War (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 212. [11] Robert E. Sherwood, “Preface,” There Shall Be No Night (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940), ix. [12] Ibid., xxx. [13] Ilkka Joki and Roger D. Sell, “Robert E. Sherwood and the Finnish Winter War: Drama, Propaganda and the Finnish Winter War Context 50 Years Ago,” American Studies in Scandinavia XXI, (1989): 51-69. This article goes into great detail about the differences between the two versions. [14] Robert E. Sherwood Papers. Houghton Library. Harvard University. There Shall Be No Night. TS. (carbon copy) with A.MS. revisions; [n.p., ca. 1940]. The file folders in the Sherwood papers are arranged chronologically. He began the first draft on 28 December 1939 and finished it 28 January 1940. On 31 January he began typing the second draft and completed this 10 February. [15] Robert E. Sherwood Papers. Houghton Library. Harvard University. There Shall Be No Night. TS. (carbon copy) with A.MS. revisions; [n.p., ca. 1943]. [16] John Mason Brown, The Ordeal of a Playwright: Robert E. Sherwood and the Challenge of War (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 67. [17] Thomas P. Adler, Mirror on the Stage: The Pulitzer Plays as an Approach to American Drama (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1987), 61. [18] Ibid. [19] C.W.E. Bigsby, A Critical Introduction to 20 th Century American Drama, Vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 145. Bigsby sums up the scholarly assessment of Sherwood’s 1940s career. Albert Wertheim, Staging the War: American Drama and World War II (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 22-25. [20] Sherwood, “Preface,” xi-xii. [21] Joki and Sell review contemporary reactions in the press as the urgency of current events receded. 61, 64. [22] In a letter dated 25 August 1944 Lunt expressed his and Fontanne’s “relief” that the bombing of the theatre caused the London run to end. He added that the play was “too close” and neither the cast nor the audience could take it any longer. Letter of Graham Robinson quoted by Margot Peters in Design for Living (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 212. [23] George Jean Nathan, The Entertainment of a Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942), 25. [24] Thomas F. Connolly, Genus Envy: Nationalities, Identities, and the Performing Body of Work (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2010). See the chapter on John Mason Brown, 41-65. [25] Jared Brown cogently summarizes the Lunts’ career and legacy. Of particular interest is the testimony of actor John Randolph, who worked with the Lunts and with Lee Strasberg. Randolph’s contrasting of their work with Strasberg’s is a case study in the limitations of “the method” as practiced by Strasberg, The Fabulous Lunts (New York: Athenaeum, 1986), 462-65. The efforts of the Ten Chimneys Foundation must be noted here: “Ten Chimneys Foundation preserves and shares the Lunts’ historic estate, serves American theatre, and offers public programs in keeping with the Lunts’ interests and values.” http://www.tenchimneys.org [26] Alonzo reviews the praise the original New York production received (211-12), and the reviews I have cited: Nathan and Conlin offer counterpoints. Nathan’s relative disdain for the play may have kept it from winning the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Prize. John von Szeliski writing in Tragedy and Fear: Why Modern Tragic Drama Fails (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971) reduces the play to a “tragedy of social disintegration,” which is of course the opposite of what Sherwood thought he was writing. [27] Alonso, 82-83. [28] Quoted in Alonzo, 212. [29] Robert E. Sherwood Papers. Houghton Library. Harvard University. There Shall Be No Night. TS. (carbon copy) with A.MS. revisions; [n.p., ca. 1943]. [30] Ginzburg, Threads and Traces , 208. [31] Ibid., 189. In addition to Ginzburg, Robert Darnton, Natalie Zemon Davis, Clifford Geertz, Mark Kurlansky, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and Jonathan D. Spence, among many others, have been identified as “micro historians.” Ginzburg identifies the first use of the term occurring in 1959 with George R Stewart’s Pickett’s Charge: A Microhistory of the Final Charge at Gettysburg, July 3 1863 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959). See Ginzburg, Threads and Traces, 193-214. [32] See Joki and Sell. [33] See the play’s third scene, 79-80 and 86-90. Sherwood, There Shall Be No Night . [34] Siegfried Kracauer, History: The Last Things Before the Last (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 123. [35] Ibid, 134. [36] Richard Conlin, “London Theatre,” America 70, no. 23 (1944):633-634. Conlin praises the London version for being more “cogent” in its depiction of civilization versus barbarism. [37] Robert E. Sherwood Papers. Houghton Library. Harvard University. There Shall Be No Night. TS. (carbon copy) with A.MS. revisions; [n.p., ca. 1943]. [38] Alonso, 255-256. [39] Brown, 357. [40] Alonso, 255. [41] Brown, 312. [42] Peters, 284-85. See also Brown, 462-65. [43] Sherwood, “Preface.” xxi. [44] See the play’s opening scene, 31-32. [45] The English Bible: King James Version , eds. Gerald Hammond and Austin Busch (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2012), 604. [46] Among such plays were Another Sun by the celebrated journalist Dorothy Thompson and Fritz Kortner, which lasted eleven performances. It depicted a German acting couple who protest anti-Semitism by fleeing to America, but ultimately the wife cannot resist a personal invitation from Hitler to return to Berlin. A revision of Ernest Hemingway’s The Fifth Column emphasized Fascism as a present danger. Key Largo is Maxwell Anderson’s verse drama about Americans who had fought in the Spanish Civil War and discover moral corruption when they return home (John Huston’s 1948 film adaptation makes major changes to Anderson’s original script). Clare Boothe’s Margin for Error was a whodunnit set behind the scenes at the German consulate in New York. (Expatriate Austrian actor Otto Preminger, soon to be famous as a film director, played a lead role). Henry R. Luce, the playwright’s husband, opined in his introduction to the play that she had “half-succeeded where all others had failed in dramatizing the Nazis. No doubt the strangest theatrical offering was “The Devil is a Good Man” a one-act comedy by William Kozlenko, a protégé of the drama critic George Jean Nathan. The Devil, an upstanding family man, sends his son up to earth armed with a rabbit’s foot where he meets “Adolf Schukelgruber” and is subsequently arrested as a pickpocket. [47] Jack Gould. “The Broadway Stage has its First War Play.” New York Times (1923-Current file) : 133. May 12 1940. ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times (1851-2008). Web. 22 Aug. 2012 . [48] The 1943 film Stage Door Canteen (dir. Frank Borzage) depicts one aspect of Broadway performers’ war relief efforts. It is also a rare chance to see the Lunts on screen. Most interesting is Katharine Cornell’s poignant performance as “herself” in which she plays a brief scene from Romeo and Juliet with a young soldier. It offers a glimpse of her talent; not only in her “performance” as Juliet, but in her silent and poignant expression of concern for the soldier’s fate quickly juxtaposed with self-deprecation of her own stardom. [49] Quoted in Brown, 48. [50] Quoted in Brown, 36. [51] Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries , trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), xi. Footnotes About The Author(s) Thomas F. Connolly is Professor of English at Suffolk University. His most recent book is Genus Envy: Nationalities, Identities, and the Performing Body of Work. Connolly is a former Fulbright Senior Scholar and the recipient of the Parliamentary Medal of the Czech Republic. 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 American Tragedian Changes, Constants, Constraints: African American Theatre History Scholarship Performing Anti-slavery The Captive Stage Musical Theatre Studies Reflections: Fifty Years of Chicano/Latino Theatre Transgressive Engagements: The Here and Now of Queer Theatre Scholarship Strangers Onstage: Asia, America, Theatre, and Performance Thinking about Temporality and Theatre Murder Most Queer New Directions in Dramatic and Theatrical Theory: The Emerging Discipline of Performance Philosophy “Re-righting” Finland’s Winter War: Robert E. Sherwood’s There Shall Be No Night[s] Star Struck!: The Phenomenological Affect of Celebrity on Broadway Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Devika Ranjan Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 2 Visit Journal Homepage Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress Devika Ranjan By Published on May 20, 2022 Download Article as PDF Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress. Elizabeth Son. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2018; Pp. 267. Elizabeth Son’s Embodied Reckonings focuses on activism by and around “comfort women” in disparate settings in South Korea and internationally. Through four case study chapters, Son’s empathetic ethnography depicts how reparations need not be institutionalized but can thrive in the hands of everyday people—namely, the survivors of military sexual violence and their supporters. The first study of the embodied practices of “comfort women,” Son’s award-winning book demonstrates the power of performance to enact presence, protest, and acts of care as a means of social healing. Son’s interdisciplinary perspective draws on cultural studies, performance theory, and intersectional feminist analysis to create a powerful, multifaceted portrait of restitution. Between 1932 and 1945, the Japanese military enslaved about 200,000 girls and young women; the majority were between 14 and 19 years old. The girls and women were trafficked to rape camps to serve the Japanese military, where they were sexually abused by between 10 to 40 men daily. Even after the war, survivors faced shame, ostracization, chronic injury, and lifelong trauma. Son holistically analyzes the redress movement in Korea and survivors’ complex post-war identities as “victim, survivor, living witness, halmeoni, history teacher, and peace protestor” (17). Many “comfort women”—Son uses this term in quotes to indicate its euphemistic and problematic nature—advocate for the “Japanese government’s acknowledgement of Japanese military sexual slavery, an official apology, and reparations” (xviii). The survivors’ demand for apology goes beyond monetary reparations; they have committed to donating any money to international survivors of sexual violence (18). Rather, their advocacy works to resolve “han, the Korean concept for the knotted feelings of resentment, sorrow, indignation, and injustice that built over years of hardship and oppression” (11). Son argues that activist-survivors’ “redressive acts,” or embodied practices, center their self-narratives within public space for multiple audiences, restoring their social status and commemorating their history. Chapter 1 provides an in-depth ethnography of the Wednesday Demonstrations in Seoul, the “longest running political demonstration in South Korea and one of the longest ongoing protests in the world” (28). The Wednesday Demonstrations, which take place in front of the Japanese Embassy, enact a weekly protest to uplift the survivors and their demands for apology from the Japanese government. Although there has not been official redress since the protests started in 1992, Son argues that the Wednesday Demonstrations meaningfully allow survivors an “opportunity to express their visceral feelings of han and to join others in calling for justice (29)”; they also counteract societal shame around “comfort women” by providing a visible platform for recognizing the victims of sexual slavery in intergenerational settings. Through sonic and physical disruption, the Wednesday Demonstrations provide “redressive acts,” staging protest, education, release, rejuvenation, critique, and international solidarity. In Chapter 2, Son discusses the Women’s Tribunal, a “symbolic international human rights tribunal” (71) created by feminist and human rights organizations. Held in Tokyo in 2000, the Women’s Tribunal aimed to restore survivors’ political and social status and dignity by giving them a legitimized day in court. Centering the testimonies of 33 survivors from North and South Korea, Taiwan, China, the Philippines, the Netherlands, Indonesia, and East Timor, international judges created a “legal case against Japan and produced a more complete history of Japanese military sexual slavery” (68). During the Tribunal, survivors challenged existing and limited legal frameworks through their embodied reactions such as fainting, revelations of scars, demonstrations of physical pain, and tears; their vulnerability and embodied practices prompted the court to consider “how to honor victims and their needs while judging guilt via traditional court processes that are not always friendly to victims” (68). The Women’s Tribunal attracted thousands of attendees who bore witness to the stories of the survivors, presenting redressive measures outside of normal state jurisdiction in legitimizing survivors’ experiences. It also created a model for a culture of public accountability for sexual violence during armed conflict, directly inspiring the 2010 Tribunal of Conscience for Women Survivors of Sexual Violence during the Armed Conflict in Guatemala (1960-96). In Chapter 3, Son compares three theatrical productions that focus on “comfort women” around the world. In Comfort Women / Nabi / Hanako (the name depends on the place and time of production), a grandmother must confront her repressed memories of being a “comfort woman” when her granddaughter introduces her to two survivors in New York. The play encourages transnational identification, indicates the ongoing nature of shame around “comfort women,” and suggests multiple survivors: some who hide their history from their own families, some who are public advocates. Trojan Women, a play by Bosnian-born director Aida Karic, brings Euripides’ tragedy in conversation with the “modern history of sexual violence against women and girls by the military of Imperial Japan” (121). The play used pansori, survivor testimony, movement, Euripides’ classic text, and ritualistic elements to invite European audiences to identify patterns of sexual violence throughout history. Finally, Bongseonhwa directly critiques Korean society for its silence, shame, and abuse of “comfort women” through its intergenerational story. Each performance emphasizes different aspects and cultural contexts of survivors’ experiences, yet all invite audiences to witness, reflect, and connect to how sexual violence against women recurs in wars and ripples across society. Chapter 4 analyzes international memorials to the survivors of military sexual slavery. The Bronze Girl, a statue that sits in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul highlights the age and vulnerability of the survivors who were abused in “comfort stations.” It also commemorates survivors’ years of activism for the Wednesday Demonstrations. The Bronze Girl is cared for by visitors who dress the statue for the weather, leave her gifts like shoes, flowers, and food, and touch her in reassurance. Son describes similar acts of care at memorials in the United States, including the Bronze Girl in California and a memorial in New Jersey, where visitors leave bouquets, tidy the lawns, or water shrubbery. These acts of care demonstrate international support, carrying on the protests against sexual slavery after the survivors pass away. While official apology from the Japanese government may never come to fruition, Son’s Embodied Reckonings demonstrates how redress can extend beyond state or institutional acts. This book’s transpacific lens considers how activism and performance, education, memory and community-building can teach subsequent generations about sexual violence, restore survivors’ dignity, and reimagine reparations, more broadly. In a world in which international politics often offers symbolic gestures in response to systemic and personal injustices, I am inspired by the embodied actions of “comfort women” to advocate, educate, and heal locally and internationally. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration Introduction to Asian American Dramaturgies Behind the Scenes of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies On Young Jean Lee in Young Jean Lee's We're Gonna Die by Christine Mok Representation from Cambodia to America: Musical Dramaturgies in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band The Dramaturgical Sensibility of Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap and Cambodian Rock Band Holding up a Lens to the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists: A Photo Essay Theatre in Hawaiʻi: An “Illumination of the Fault Lines” of Asian American Theatre Randall Duk Kim: A Sojourn in the Embodiment of Words Reappropriation, Reparative Creativity, and Feeling Yellow in Generic Ensemble Company’s The Mikado: Reclaimed Dance Planets Dramaturgy of Deprivation (없다): An Invitation to Re-Imagine Ways We Depict Asian American and Adopted Narratives of Trauma Clubhouse: Stories of Empowered Uncanny Anomalies Off-Yellow Time vs Off-White Space: Activist Asian American Dramaturgy in Higher Education Asian American Dramaturgies in the Classroom: A Reflection Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

MK Lawson, Jessica Bashline 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 (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond MK Lawson, Jessica Bashline By Published on April 29, 2023 Download Article as PDF (Re)Generation was developed with a faculty fellowship from University of Miami. Jessica Bashline and MK Lawson , the creators of (Re)Generation interview one another to document and archive the process of the piece as well as offer a model for those interested in engaging with an outdoor urban Tour-style performance outside of the traditional tourism environment. (Re)Generation follows two women and links their lives to the place they inhabit and the ghosts that surround them. One, a single mother living in contemporary NYC; and the other Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for President. The First Act follows a playwright, Jessica, as she goes through her morning, walking through the park and trying to find a place to concentrate on preparing to pitch her play to a theatre company. While Jessica doesn’t speak out loud the audience listens to her inner monologue on their own headphones as they follow her through the park. Act One ends with a scene between Jessica and Victoria Woodhull sitting on a park bench having a conversation through time and space. The Second Act brings us back, physically, to where Act One begins—this time we follow Victoria Woodhull through the 30 minutes leading up to her scene on the bench with Jessica. And now the headphones come off. Act 2 happens in real-time with three actors speaking on the streets of New York City. The audience winds up on the same park bench, watching the same scene that ended Act One. The play is an exploration of time and space, reality and illusion, and the very real search for kindred spirits in a world that has become increasingly isolated. (Re)Generation was developed and performed in Washington Square Park in NYC in August of 2021. • MK: Hi- here we are, back on Zoom… Jess: I know, I hate it! MK: I figure we can start with me asking you a few questions since the piece originated with you, and then we will move forward from there. Sound good? Jess: Sounds good. MK: Ok- tell me where this piece began? Jess: (Re)Generation started as an amalgam of scripts I had been working on for a few years, originally imagined as traditional theatrical pieces. The first script started six or seven years ago as a monologue: a divorced single mother trying to write a lecture on place as a character in literature; specifically, New York City. Over the years I created scenes for this character that took place throughout her daily life, a convention that I played with a lot in the writing of that work initially was that the audience never saw the people our lead interacted with, her family and friends were always offstage, or just around the corner. The only real people she interacted with were the people she briefly encountered in the city. I was exploring isolation and loneliness in a city of millions. The piece never worked—and I put it away for years. A few years later, I became fascinated with Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president in 1872. I began to write about her, because her story is amazing, and played with the idea of intertwining the two stories—as they both seemed to revolve around New York City as a place of reinvention. But I could never find the right story to tell. So—into the dropbox of script pieces these stories went…Until COVID. I went back through my dropbox of script pieces and came across the writing I had about this single, divorced mom trying to figure out her life and career while feeling isolated and alone in a place so full of people; and Victoria Woodhull. I knew I wanted to play with a COVID-safe way of making this piece that allowed humans to connect in real life. I landed on promenade theatre, allowing audiences to follow actors through the city streets. And then I called you! MK: Yes you did. Jess: And I think I said—we are going to make theatre that doesn’t live on Zoom— MK : YES! Jess: And we were obsessed with trying to figure out how to create COVID-safe live performance that wasn’t just theatre outside, that allowed for the way the theatre was made and performed to be a part of the journey of the piece. MK: I loved the idea you had for creating two very different acts of the play. If I remember right- you came to me right away with the fact that you wanted Act 1 to exist in the character of Jess’ mind—it was her inner voice—and so the audience would be listening to her through their headphones. Jess: And then Act 2 would be more traditionally theatrical, with actors speaking out loud to a communal audience. MK: Yeah- that was exciting to me as a way of exploring isolation in two different ways. Jess: And in the park! MK: So the first act is about Jess, walking through a contemporary Washington Square Park, and the second about Victoria Woodhull, and takes place in 1872. Jess: And I really couldn’t conceive of the form this would take until I called you. And the beauty of the fellowship money I received from the University of Miami was that it was for research, about discovering something new. There was no pressure to have 700 people show up at a performance. Which was such a gift. MK: Right it was. We really did get to say, okay, Well, what might this look like? I remember thinking about how formless it was at the time. How part of the intrigue was we don't have to know what this is. We could just have seeds of ideas. Especially coming out of the pandemic. I can remember you asking a lot in our first call– What is the experience we want people to have? Rather than, what is the play we want to do? Jess: Yup- it felt really freeing to ask that question. And that is the question I am focused on a lot now. MK: The next thing I was gonna ask is about the historical piece: Victoria Woodhull. Because the idea that you had that really captured my attention was this idea that we could be somehow listening to someone's inside voice. We could get inside of someone, isolated from the world, by their own thoughts in this sense. And that kind of personal experience was really interesting. But then there was this historical piece. Can you talk a little bit about how the historical piece came in, and the importance of that. Jess: So the original piece was very heavily influenced by New York as a city. It started actually with this 4-page monologue about New York City and the architecture, and how the architecture told stories and spoke to her. And I, as a New Yorker, have always felt incredibly drawn to this idea that people come to my home, the place where I was born, where my family was born. People come to this place and create these huge lives for themselves here. But with that, we also have so many small, regular lives that live here. But you rarely hear about them. MK: Oh, yes, the juxtaposition. Jess: Yes- the juxtaposition of those 2 things: of this woman who is just trying to live her life and have a conversation with a human being, and Victoria, who lived an outlandish, amazing life, that she could only have lived in New York. She had to move to New York in order to become this thing that she became. MK: I was just thinking about all the different conversations we had about how this play was going to work. Once we made the decision of the basic ways we were going to hear Acts 1 and 2. Jess: It is so fun to go back on a process that I feel so far away from, and also for me, was a process that dated back even longer than that, years before you were involved. My favorite was bringing you a whole bunch of stuff that I'd written that was kind of incoherent and trying to find form. What if we follow her into a coffee shop? And what if things happen? And we plant people? And there are actors everywhere, and every interaction is staged? MK: Those were grandiose days. Jess: At one point we talked about her leaving her apartment, and we were going to have conversations coming from the building, but in all kinds of languages; all the conversations that might have ever existed on that one piece of land before, which is really interesting to me. Built in was always this idea of, what is this history? MK: And how is someone distilling it in her mind? Right? And how do we connect with each other across time? I feel like that's when time started to become a question in the process. And then there was a moment where we realized that Acts One and Two would happen in a parallel timeline. We would follow the contemporary actor through Act One. And then essentially, the audience would see that Act Two would be that same time Loop. Jess: That was the one thing that we kept from all that early writing. The scene between Victoria Woodhull and Jess is almost verbatim from an earlier draft. MK: Yes. That scene of the two of them, meeting across time and space, I think, became the thing we held on to, and it was like, how do we get there? Jess: I have a question for you. Talking about your dramaturgical and directorial process. Once we figured out the structure: the first act would be me walking through the park with an audience following me with headphones in; people listening to my inner thoughts versus the second act which was a more theatrical structure, what challenges did that present for you? Dramaturgically and Directorially, bringing audiences into those experiences? MK: I feel like from very early on the biggest challenge in Act One was almost logistical. Because what we had was sort of nothing but permission to try something that we weren't sure how to do. How do we record this thing? How do we even rehearse this thing? How do we take scripted text and let it become thoughts that we can hear? And in a public park that was being used by the public? No permits or rentals. Essentially all of the variables that you can control in a theatre. We had none of those at our disposal, aside from being able to design a track that people could listen to. I think some of my favorite memories were scouting locations. I’d never thought about location scouting for the theatre, and that became a thing we got to do. We got to think about what serves our story, what serves this format that we're creating as we go. And I remember walking around and thinking not only what is functional, but getting to dream a little bit. How might these characters move through this space, and could they have really been here? How might we be able to invite whatever is going to naturally occur in the creative process without knowing what even that was going to be. Like traffic? I’m having a memory of how to pull traffic into the scene with Victoria Woodhull, and thinking… What is traffic to them? It can't exist, but also as actors, they have to pay attention to the fact that they need to be heard over New York City traffic. I feel like we accommodated a bit of that in choosing location. Ultimately. Jess: People have asked me, if you had to categorize what this is. Would you call it a tour? Would you call it a promenade theatre? And I just don’t know. I don’t have an answer for that—but maybe MK does. MK: You know. I remember thinking about a conversation we had asking: what could this be? In other places, and with other historical figures. But a theatrical tour doesn't feel like it quite covers it. Because we were after something very different about human experience. Yes- you were going to cover some ground and learn something. But we wanted it to do the thing that theatre does. Connecting people to a place or another person, or even to an idea. If we lost the construct of time, what does it feel like for me to try to connect back in time? We were also constantly thinking about the theatricality. Thinking about what we could do in the next incarnation- Jess: With more money! And time! MK: Yes. And more members of the team. Jess: Is there a better word then? Promenade Theater maybe? MK: Maybe promenade-- But in terms of promenade I think, I'm gonna arrive somewhere and a thing is gonna happen then I'll arrive in a new place. (Re)Generation felt more fluid. Jess: What was so interesting to me was when we made the decision, and I I don't even know when we made the decision, whether I did, or you did, or whatever. But at some point we said- Well, clearly the scene with Victoria and Jess will happen twice. The same scene must happen twice, right? At the end of Act One, and then it has to have it again at the end. What we started talking about was this sort of circular nature? Each of them was trapped in this circle. And so I think I agree with you- promenade feels like it starts in one place and ends somewhere else. So maybe we made something new—a theatrical Dosey-doe! MK: I also think it’s important to say that we were also talking a lot about patriarchy and hierarchical structures in theatre making. And something about this circular structure also felt right for the way we worked together. Jess: Making this piece without a typical theatrical hierarchy. MK: Yeah. Can we just collaborate in a way that is egalitarian? Best idea in the room, or the best idea in the park wins. Jess: I will say, like as the person who brought in the initial idea, and did most of the writing. I felt so supported by the kind of lack of structure of our structure. We know each other well. So it just felt natural. MK: Yeah. Jess: Maybe it's because I came in with so little you know. I just remember you asking me about a million and a half questions. So what happens here? What happens here like? Why, Why, why, why, Why, why? And what if we do this? And what if we do that? And what if we did this? In the best dramaturgical sense. But then I felt like once we got a thing that was up on its feet– we didn’t have traditional actor/director/writer structure. There was so much give and take, because there I was- an actor in Act 1. If you can call it acting, walking around Washington Square Park trying to find a park bench to sit on while a group of people with headphones trailed me. And we would have to video my walks- so we could try to time them out to possible recordings of the script. Which meant we got to go back to the tape together, so we could really talk through everything that was happening. MK: Washington Square Park- no permits. I mean, what sort of ballsiness it took to even attempt such a thing. Jess: Had we known quite how difficult it would be to make it work- I don’t know if I would have. But I’m glad we did. MK: I don't know if you remember. But we did pick up audience numbers along the way- in rehearsals and performance. I want to say how much that means to me, reflecting on this, looking back on it. In talking about a play, the seed of which was about isolation, the fact that we picked up audience makes me remember that our first question was- what do we want people to experience? How do we get people experiencing other humans again? In NYC we are so isolated, I’ve got my headphones on, thinking about a million other things or ways I feel inadequate. Or things I didn't get done, or groceries I need, or this song that won't get out of my head, and I could so easily miss everything going on around me. And to think that what we were after was sort of manifested in the very idea that people were awake enough to go, hey- Something's happening here that I'm not expecting and I’m going to hop on the party. Jess: People got the link, put on their headphones and caught up with me. My favorite person who joined us was a lovely man, who was unhoused. He was sitting in our “performance” area, and stayed with us from the dress rehearsal. After the rehearsal he heard us talking about performance and he asked- Do you mind if I stay here and watch? And I was like, first of all, it's the park, you can do whatever you want. But also absolutely! And he wound up watching the whole thing. But he didn't have headphones, he was just watching people watch me! Which was fascinating! I will never forget that at the end of the piece, he said, Thank you so much, I see the musicians all the time, but I don't get to go to the theatre very often. MK: That's great. Because again we think of the back to this hierarchy -how restrictive and how much theatre is inaccessible at times. How do we dismantle that a little bit? This feels like a good place to ask something like what do you feel like you learned, and if you could just do the next incarnation this summer, what would you do differently? Jess: Well, I’m still really interested in isolation and the idea that place has memory. These are consistent themes for me. I would love to look at this piece again. I'd love to look at it now, not from a place of fear. (Re) Generation was created from a place of fear that we would never get back inside a theatre again. And I wonder about looking at it now, coming from a place of generosity from a place of opening that space- MK: because it deserves to be opened. Jess: Yes. What about you? MK: It makes me think of that Ann Bogart essay. Talking about that distinction between making something from a survival mode versus a gift-giving mode. It feels like you articulated that exactly. Jess: So, I think we can wrap this up by saying, what did you learn making theatre in Covid? MK: I have learned that we have become a species that isolates by nature, which is terrible because we are not a species that isolates by nature. We may have made it through an epidemic of COVID, but we’re still suffering from an epidemic of loneliness in a very real way. Jess: And the live performing arts, music, dance, theatre these are some of the last bastions of community storytelling and tradition that are non-religious. And I think you can look at the rise of religion right now as just people desperately needing connections. Why can't we get a rise in the performing arts in the same way? MK: Right, and being able to have communion with history. I think it's something again that this piece, if you wanted to call it a theatrical historical tour, you know, whatever name you give it, there's something about the communion with a historical figure that is an incredibly empowering experience. It’s something you can’t take away from someone, that experience. Jess: You know what? MK: What? Jess: Let’s do it again– another city, another park, another historical figure. MK: I’m game when you are. Jess: Amazing. References Footnotes About The Author(s) JESSICA BASHLINE is an Assistant Professor of Theater at the University of Miami, where she teaches acting and theater creation. She was the Artistic Director and co-founder of Strange Sun Theater , a theater company in New York City. Jessica is an award-winning playwright, director and actor currently touring her solo piece, Ann and Me: or the Big Bad Abortion Play . She has a BFA in Acting from Boston University and an MFA from Goddard College. www.jessicabashline.com MK LAWSON has been teaching, developing and directing theatre professionally for the past 15 years. She has directed and/or choreographed award-winning productions for Atlantic Theatre Company, Florida Repertory Theatre, and WPPAC among others. She has also developed pieces for the NY International Fringe Festival and the NY Children's Theatre Festival. An interdisciplinary performing artist at heart, MK is currently the head of Musical Theatre for the Hotchkiss School in Northwest Connecticut. www.mklawson.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 Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater 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 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Marissa Nicosia & Jack Isaac 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 Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time Marissa Nicosia & Jack Isaac By Published on May 20, 2023 Download Article as PDF Small is good, small is all. (The large is a reflection of the small.) Change is constant. (Be like water.) There is always enough time for the right work. There is a conversation in the room that only these people at this moment can have. Find it. Never a failure, always a lesson. Trust the People. (If you trust the people, they become trustworthy.) Move at the speed of trust. Focus on critical connections more than critical mass–build the resilience by building the relationships. Less prep, more presence. What you pay attention to grows. – adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy [1] Introduction In this co-authored essay, we describe and analyze the interdisciplinary course and devised theater production that we created with our undergraduate students at The Pennsylvania State University, Abington College in Spring 2022, titled “Emergent Strategy: The Winter’s Tale” and Exit, a banquet piece , respectively—their methods and content inspired by Black feminist activist adrienne maree brown’s book of the same title, as well as William Shakespeare’s play—both of which also served as core texts. brown defines emergent strategy as “how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for.”[2] Part thick description, part manifesto, this essay details the teaching philosophies and performance strategies that we enacted, why, and to what ends, bearing brown’s growth- and change-oriented framework in mind. Paying careful attention to affect and lived experience, this essay blends academic prose with autotheory, with brief personal reflections embedded throughout. Ultimately, our goal is to make a case for the efficacy of abolitionist pedagogy in higher education—especially in this historic moment of late capitalism and the ongoing pandemic that it has produced. In a precarious world increasingly attuned to questions of racial equity, class consciousness, disability justice, harm reduction, and community care, professors and students alike, we argue, can benefit from adopting commensurable revolutions in our pedagogical work.[3] But what does abolition mean in the context of teaching? For us, abolitionist pedagogy has meant 1) acknowledging that schools, including colleges and universities, are deeply caught up in a project of perpetuating harm, often meted unevenly onto the most marginalized students and employees; 2) knowing that the harm that schools and schooling does is animated by a carceral logic which often situates faculty in a disciplinary, punitive and/or reward-based, and surveillance role in relation to our students; 3) consciously deciding to adopt teaching philosophies, curricula, and methods aimed at shifting these power relations in and out of the classroom toward a model of care; 4) staying vigilant that our working relationships remain aligned with our politics, modeling for our students what ethical collaboration and right relationship looks like in shared leadership; 5) being committed to shifting our thinking and practices as needed.[4] Here, it’s important to note that this framework of “abolitionist pedagogy” is partly in hindsight. When we began creating this course in December 2020, at the fore of our minds was the fact of a global pandemic that had forced us out of classrooms and onto screens—with many students and faculty variously navigating acute sickness, family emergency, burnout, depression, anxiety, addiction, technology barriers, death, grief, and financial hardship in heightened ways. While the most marginalized among us have always already been dealing with access barriers, the pandemic produced the conditions in which these issues of disparity became more mainstream discourse, and rethinking our approaches to pedagogy was urgently necessary and encouraged —including even by those institutional structures that are complicit in histories of harm. So it was nine months into this new business as usual that we began our collaboration. Marissa was a soon-to-be tenured Associate Professor and Jack a new Assistant Professor at Penn State; we met during Jack ’s campus visit when Marissa served as one of the search committee members that made the hire. As luck would have it, we soon became neighbors in South Philadelphia; pandemic walks became our way of swapping resources and cooking up ideas of courses we might teach when in-person learning would recommence. Queer, anti-racist, intersectional feminists with decades of combined teaching experience, we decided to co-teach a class that would bring together our shared research interests and center the needs of our individual students and the collective whole.[5] For us, this meant designing a curriculum that enabled us to have explicit conversations about race, gender, labor, capitalism, trauma, and repair, as well as dramatically shifting the ways that we relate to our students and the work that they “produce.” We abolished grades (everyone gets an A, no exceptions); deadlines (the pace of our work can and will change as needed); and attendance policies (come as you are, when you can).[6] We built in “rest days,” where class did not convene. We moved at the speed of trust , adjusting lesson plans and activities on a week by week, day by day, moment by moment basis, with an eye always kept on what truly needed to happen next. Our choice to implement ungrading, relaxed attendance, and flexible assignment timelines meant that we could center learning, self-reflection, being present together, and group process while dispensing with traditional modes of top-down surveillance—what abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore, speaking in another context, calls acting as a “deputized cop.”[7] Make no mistake, the course was intellectually and physically rigorous, and students and faculty alike were pushed to the edges of our comfort zones. But we tried to always balance rigor with access, refusing to sacrifice our bodies and spirits in the pursuit of academic knowledge or aesthetic virtuosity. Here, we were guided by brown’s principles of Emergent Strategy cited in the opening epigraph, as well as theologian and performance artist Tricia Hersey’s imperative that we place our bodily needs above those of capital’s. The class was a resoundingly transformative experience for the six students enrolled, as well as for us. This essay is our attempt to archive that experience, as well as a public forum in which we attempt to urge readers to consider similar transformations in their own work. Thursday December 3, 2020 We slip on the ice-slick sidewalks of South Philly as we walk, masked, carrying our coffees from Shot Tower. Much later, in the summer of 2021, we will spend an entire afternoon together, sitting in the sunshine outside this same coffee shop, preparing for our upcoming course. We will have brought our marked up copies of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale ; Elinor Fuch’s “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet”; Scott Maisano’s “Now”; and Kathryn Bond Stockton’s “ Lost , or ‘Exit, Pursued by a Bear’: Causing Queer Children on Shakespeare’s TV”—and it will start to become clear that this is a project about time, suspended.[8] But on that Thursday at the beginning of winter, we don’t know any of this yet: we are just two new colleagues struggling to walk without falling. When we get to Jefferson Square, we find a bench in the sun. Beside us, a streetlamp, where someone has busted open its electrical panel and plugged in a cell-phone charger block—cord dangling in the wind. We remark on the brilliance of the unhoused to tap into the city’s electrical grid for free. The conversation turns to the community refrigerators sprinkled throughout our neighborhood; our shared love of gritty Philly; the astonishingly large gap between its wealthy and its poor, but also decades of mutual aid networks aimed at resource redistribution.[9] And the conversation broadens to collaboration. What if we brought together our shared interests in theater and temporality, adapting one of Shakespeare’s plays into an original performance that resonated with the themes of this moment? We riff on the Shakespeare plays that we like, that we love, that we feel might connect to the moment: Hamlet , Lear , Richard III. But we also carry with us some doubt about starting with a tragedy. The body count at the end of these plays does not inspire thoughts of healing or repair. We discussed an article about COVID time and time on ships, and how we are all living in wait. It brought The Tempest , Pericles , and The Winter’s Tale to mind—plays that move the reader from rupture to remedy. Winter in the Spring House The Pennsylvania State University’s Abington College is a small (3,500 student), public, four-year, local-serving, minority majority campus in the suburbs just north of Philadelphia. Students choose Abington for a variety of reasons, but often it is because they work, live at home, or need to stay near kin. Many students have significant financial need; the majority self-identify as people of color, many of whom are immigrants or first-generation Americans; a substantial portion are international students, largely from China; more than a third are the first in their families to go to college. But at its founding in 1850 and for the next 100 years to follow, Abington College was the “Ogontz School for Young Ladies”—a preparatory school for white, wealthy women (Amilia Earhart famously among them) on settled Lenape land. Our class convened twice weekly for three hours each in a tiny cottage called Spring House—the oldest freestanding building on campus, initially constructed to store dairy for the “girls.”[11] When the windows of Spring House are open, you can hear the gurgle of the stream that runs through the tree-filled gorge at the center of campus. The stream also feeds an ornamental pond where geese, ducks, and blue herons swim, huddle together on the ice, and stalk in the reeds. Tucked away from the other buildings and containing only two classrooms, a bathroom, and space for silent prayer, our work in the Spring House feels distinctly removed from the bustle of the college. With its rattling, broken heaters and glitchy technology, our classroom space is somehow simultaneously cold, hot, dry, damp, sunny, shadowy, alienating, and welcoming. Through a small basement window, you can see ferns growing underneath—a greenhouse blooming beneath our feet. (We chose to see these plants as inspirational fauna thriving in the darkness rather than a dispiriting result of institutional neglect.) We gather in the Spring House in early January 2022 and begin to study The Winter’s Tale (c.1610). Shakespeare’s tragicomedy is a work of profound loss and marvelous repair in which jealous King Leontes defies an oracle and loses his family only to reunite with his lost daughter, Perdita; wife, Queen Hermione; and beloved friend, King Polixenes, at the play’s end. The play requires a profound suspension of disbelief as extreme shifts in feeling and fortune befall its characters—a bear famously “pursues” and then devours Antigonus after he saves baby Perdita; Time arrives as Chorus to explain a sixteen-year gap between acts; a statue of Hermione comes to life. Tragedy is averted, but not forgotten, as the play explores the potential of art, and our wonder at its workings, to restore what has been lost.[12] We began the semester by reading the play out loud in its entirety, pausing frequently for clarification. Reading The Winter’s Tale together provided a foundation for discussion and aligned with our pedagogical philosophy, as we prioritized using class time for the most important labor and did not assume that students had unlimited time outside of class. Less prep, more presence. Typically, we divied up class time such that one of us taught for 75-80 minutes, we took a break, and then the other took the lead for the second half of class. Under Marissa ’s guidance, we studied the play through literary methods—practicing close reading, reading literary criticism, and conducting archival and embodied research. She introduced the working practices of Shakespeare’s theater through lecture and by getting students up on their feet to perform a scene using reconstructed cue scripts. We learned about the publication and circulation of early modern drama by handling eighteenth-century printed books and looking at the spelling and punctuation in the 1632 Second Folio of Shakespeare’s works held by the library via Zoom.[13] We drew on Marissa ’s research on food and medicine to discuss humoral theory as a framework for understanding character and emotions, such as Leontes’ self-diagnosed tremor cordis , the heart-palpitations of incandescent rage. A number of Marissa ’s lessons were linked to sequenced writing assignments which asked students to focus on interpreting specific, brief passages from the play. But we jettisoned inflexible submission dates for written work as a part of “ungrading,” aware that flexibility accommodates a range of student needs in an ongoing pandemic, many of whom are just trying to get by in a culture of harm. After Marissa ’s lesson on using the Oxford English Dictionary to interpret Shakespeare’s language, Jack did a little research: the etymology of “deadline” can be traced back to carceral origins, the line beyond which a fleeing prisoner would be shot if they crossed. The shift from deadlines to student-paced learning also meant that students were placed in the position of scholar/researcher in their own right, rather than producing work for us on an arbitrary timeline we have set without their consent.[14] We paired these literary modes with dramaturgical research and embodied theater practice, facilitated by Jack . This dramaturgical research was guided by Fuchs’s foundational “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet”—which we began the semester by discussing. Rather than focus on language and character, we paid attention to how time, space, climate, mood, light, sound, color, shape, texture and other sensory clues embedded in the text informed our visceral understanding of the world of The Winter’s Tale. Students gathered images inspired by their research, tesselating the linoleum floors with found art. These images were translated into music, music into movement.[15] The aim of this work, we instructed the students, was to move us away from Shakespeare’s world and into our own—which would be best accomplished by tracing its affective outline. Adaptation was the name of the game. So was play. We built a cohesive sense of ensemble, playing team-building games drawn from Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed arsenal and the pedagogy of Jacques Lecoq. Jack led the ensemble through a codified sequence of activities derived from Lecoq’s journey of the mask, beginning with a physical exploration of the elements: water, fire, earth, air—which we did outdoors in the cold sun, wind, rain, and snow. The aim was increased embodiment, fierce wakefulness, and jeu (Lecoq’s word for the spirit of “play”) —getting actors to trust their kinesthetic impulses and one another, while learning to tell stories with their bodies. In the studio-based context, ungrading came easily: it is common not to grade performance-based work solely on merit and customary to privilege process over product. Relaxed attendance, however, poses some challenges: a show usually needs to be made on a particular timeline; the presence of the ensemble is crucial to its cohesion; and devising requires building a consistent set of skills and aesthetic vocabulary for the work in progress. So while our theory of “intrinsic motivation” was generally successful (students genuinely cared about the class and one another, and commitment was high), the reality of their complex lives meant that occasionally we had a skeleton crew at crucial moments.[16] We over-hired a production manager (Lisa Suzanne Turner), stage manager (Jaleel Hunter), and music director (Emily Bate)—anticipating that we would need some semblance of a production team to pull off what we imagined would be a large-scale, site-specific, outdoor performance in an institutional context with no regular production season; no production staff; no costume, prop, or scene shop; a very modest budget for theater; and a tiny ensemble. Musician and composer Emily Bate was pivotal, working with students to create an original libretto. When Marissa got COVID, Emily and Jack were left at the helm for several weeks. When Emily got COVID, too, music rehearsals moved to Zoom: Jack holding their tiny iPhone in the outdoor amphitheater on campus with janky wifi and two, then three, then five of the six performers present for rehearsal. Change is constant. (Be like water.) And so we were. Tuesday February 15, 2022 (Jack) We have told the students that their assignment today is to “rest.” No reading, no writing, no class. To prepare the week prior, we invited them to lay down on the floor. Heads together, feet splayed, eyes shut, we listened to an interview with Tricia Hersey, where she discusses capitalism and anti-Blackness, and rest as resistance. Originally broadcast in June 2020, the cover image for the podcast—which we close-read with our students—features a photograph by Charlie Watts: Hersey, in glorious repose; her long, yellow gown and bright, tulle petticoat dangling leisurely from the bench on which she sleeps. Behind her, a brick façade, boarded up windows, and broken panes amidst an abandoned lot. Beneath her, rows of cotton—this urban landscape turned magical real. Hersey begins: To not rest is really being violent towards your body. To align yourself with a system that says “Your body doesn’t belong to you, keep working. You are simply a tool for our production.” To align yourself with that is a slow spiritual death. [ . . .] When you don’t sleep, you’re literally killing your body. It’s not a dramatic over-the-top thing to say that. Our organs begin to break down. I remember wondering what our students—primarily working class people of color with two white professors—think of our unorthodox methods, our insistence on their rejection of domination at this school largely aimed at getting them jobs. I remember taking my place on the floor, nestled between Marissa and Trim, as Hersey goes on to refer to our bodies as “divine holding places of liberation.”[17] I remember thinking that I know this is edgy for her—a Renaissance scholar with a formidable dossier and flawless professional attire, Marissa in many ways is the portrait of “Professor.” But on this day she, like the students laying on the cold linoleum beside her, was “dressed to move,” as is the culture of our course. The following week, we regather to report back on our first day of rest. I begin by reading a short passage from Emergent Strategy , our ritual for the start of class. What are all your gifts? Are you living a life that honors all your gifts? If yes, how did you create all this possibility for yourself? If no, how can you create more possibility today? Tomorrow? This month? This year? [18] Kyleigh delights in telling the group that she took a really good nap. Aman went to the gym, and we debate the ontology of rest, of whether that kind of corporeal act constitutes labor or leisure. Madison did work and feels guilty. The only Black woman in the group, does she have the same luxury of enforced rest? We discuss. What nobody knows is that I spent our rest day not resting at all, but on a campus visit (read: interview) at the small, private and exceedingly elite liberal arts college on the other side of town—the one whose website unabashedly refers to itself as “the most beautiful campus in the known universe.” I was tired of the mold and asbestos in our buildings, of the emails inviting students and faculty to a casual donuts and coffee with cops. Ten months later, I will be driving home at 9pm from this very same room with the heater on the fritz—after wrapping up the semester with another group of gems—and as I pull out onto Woodland Road in the dark in the rain I will think to myself: I just can’t. I just can’t imagine telling these students I’m sorry, I’m trading you in for a better job on the other side of town. Sunday April 10, 2022 (Marissa) We knew that it was statistically likely that someone would get COVID during our semester together: It was me. I brought my COVID infection from Penn State Abington to an international conference in Dublin and found myself unwell, isolated, and stranded. I landed in Philadelphia less than two weeks before our scheduled performance, and just in time for our daylong retreat. We take over the Lares Banquet Room, with windows overlooking the pond. As students arrive, I stir a pot of hot chocolate and pour cups of the heavily-spiced drink—prepared from Rebeckah Winche’s seventeenth-century recipe for “chacolet”—seasoned with vanilla, chili pepper, and cinnamon.[19] We sit in a circle and I ask what they taste: they say spice, capsaicin heat, sweetness, oiliness from the cocoa nibs. I propose that tasting historical recipes, like reading The Winter’s Tale , is a form of attenuated time travel. We discuss. Our archives contain partial knowledge of past meals, past performances. We can taste a version of “chacolet” now, even if we cannot know precisely what tasting chocolate and chili pepper—newly-imported American ingredients, prepared using a recipe grounded in Indigenous knowledge—meant to Winche in England in 1666. The students teach me the music that they have been composing in my absence. I show them Frans Snyders’s “A Banquet-piece, c.1620”—a painting I saw at the National Gallery of Ireland the week earlier—as well as other contemporaneous still-lifes that are inspiring our scenic design. Jack guides us in rituals from the Passover haggadah —their holiday about to commence. What you pay attention to grows , and we are paying attention to food, movement, song, ritual, and paintings of tulips and fruit. Over pizza, Jonathan tells me that my voice and breath sound different. He is worried that I’m still sick. Later, as the light fades into a glorious pink sunset, Jack , Jaleel, and I walk the possible routes that our performance might take—singing the opening song from Exit as we travel: All you touch you change, all you change changes you, the only lasting truth is change, change, change. Adapted from Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and invoked on the first page of brown’s book, these lines had become a kind of anthem—first metaphorical, now literal—for our group.[20] I stop singing. I’m short of breath. My chest hurts. My lungs can’t handle singing and walking in the cold air. April 21, 2022 It is a beautiful day in early spring; the campus is abuzz with another semester almost done. Audience members have been instructed to meet on the plaza outside the Sutherland Building—the one with Chief Ogontz eerily chiseled into stone above the door. Marissa and Jack make small-talk with guests: the dean and chancellor among them. An unassuming white, folding table—the kind on every college campus—is littered with COVID waivers and percussives: maracas, egg shakers, a xylophone. Jaleel, in black slacks and shirt and a bright orange durag that matches the glittery streaks above his eyes, greets us one by one—handing out instruments to those of us willing to play. An actor (Madison Branch), also in black with burgundy accents around her eyes, stands expectantly under the public clock on the other side of the lawn. She introduces herself to us as “Time” and teaches us a song: “ All you touch you change . . . ” We follow her, playing our instruments and singing in rounds. At the top of a hill, we glimpse a vast, green field: a banquet in the distance. We hear a drum, voices. We approach. Beneath a line of tall pines, long tables are draped in white linen and laden with flowers and fruit. Our voices join with the drums and the voices of the performers, who welcome us to their feast. Exit, a banquet piece is a site-specific, immersive performance with live music, song, monologue, ritual, and a community meal. In its conceit, it begins in the moments just after the action of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale has ended. In the last lines of the play, Leontes invites recollection: Good Paulina, Lead us from hence, where we may leisurely Each one demand and answer to his part Performed in this wide gap of time since first We were dissevered. Hastily lead away. They exit. (5.3.188-192) Exit, a banquet piece accepts Leontes’s invitation for “each” member the ensemble to share their story of the “wide gap of time”—all that has happened in the time they have been apart, “dissevered.” To the beat of Polixenes’s drum (Jonathan Bercovici), each performer tells their story in turn: my name is Polixenes and I am the hunted man; my name is Hermione and I am the accused woman; my name is Leontes and I am the regretful man; my name is Perdita and I am the queer child; my name is Florizel and I am the lover; my name is Time and I am the seer—their monologues filling the spring air, the rest of the chorus chanting underneath. The ensemble then leads the audience in a series of healing rituals, inspired, in part, by the Passover seder (it is the 7th night). Hermione (Kyleigh Byers) invites us wash our neighbors’ hands with water blessed by the light of the full moon, while Florziel (George Ye)—in a deep green cape—plays a haunting melody on the xylophone. Birds chirp, geese honk and soar overhead. At Leontes’s command (Aman Zabian), we name the things that plague us, dipping our pinkies into our wine-filled cups and tapping them on our plates: the war in Ukraine, racism at home, patriarchy, student debt, addiction, COVID-19. Perdita (Trim Walker) asks us to toast the things we want more of: we say love, joy, learning. Night falls; music swells; the Ramandan fast has concluded for another day: we feast. Students Jonathan Bercovici, Madison Branch, Kyleigh Byers, Trim Walker, George Ye, and Aman Zabian perform their monologues in Exit , a banquet piece . Audience members of diverse backgrounds share their personal narratives of the pandemic with one another. Ritual devised and led by the student ensemble. George Ye performs a solo on the xylophone as Kyleigh Byers leads audience members in a handwashing ritual. Original score written by Ye. Madison Branch as Time (foreground), Jonathan Bercovici as Polixenes, Aman Zabian as Leontes; Kyleigh Byers as Hermione, Trim Walker as Perdita, and George Ye as Florizel in Exit, a banquet piece. Audiences perform a ritual inspired by the Passover Seder, naming contemporary “plagues” that harm them, while marking their plates with droplets of wine. Production Manager Lisa Suzanne Turner (left) and Stage Manager Jaleel Hunter (bottom, right) sit with audience members in a moment of silence. Audience members were comprised of faculty, staff, students, and the local community. Photo credit: Mendal Diana Polish Thursday May 19, 2022 (Marissa) I wanted time to stop as I sat in that field and listened to the students sing. I wanted time to stop as I named the things that plague me, named the things that I want more of in my life. I wanted time to stop as I looked at the tulips, fruit, objects, and place-settings on the banquet tables that I had arranged like a Renaissance still life. I wanted time to stop as water poured over hands, music and birdsong filled the field. I wanted to linger. I wanted to dilate that moment of joy, release, pride, and beauty. I wanted time to stop. But of course, time is relentless; performance “can never be captured or transmitted through the archive”; and “the only lasting truth is change.”[21] Nevertheless, I attempted to preserve the fleeting moment. I brought home the clementines that adorned the set and baked with them, transforming the performance into a cake.[22] I served it at our final class meeting as a way of saying I love you all so much, to say that I wanted time to stop. It was a temporary solution: We devoured the cake. Thursday April 28, 2022 (Jack) In our final class meeting, we form two concentric circles, inside facing out. Eye to eye, toe to toe, everyone is given three prompts to answer (before rotating to the next partner): What is my impact in the world? In three words, what am I embodying? Where do you think I could grow? [23] I am facilitating, so I don’t play, except for the round when someone steps out into the sun. For that brief moment, I face Marissa , struggling to find the words. I say something about her learning to integrate the work of the mind and the fact of the body in answering prompt number three. And she says something about my inextinguishable fire, about learning to cool, or direct, my flames. Indeed. Like Leontes, I have tremor cordis on me: my heart dances, but not for joy. I’m not alone. Enraged by injustice, hot with desire, aren’t we all just learning how to direct the storms of our fires toward healing and justice for all? And isn’t performance always the work of the mind and the fact of the body brought together in the service of this? We carpool home, Broad Street all the way. Past the storefront churches and the mattress stores and Temple University and City Hall. When we get to South Philly, where I no longer live, Marissa and I part ways. “We did something really special,” she says, and we hug awkwardly in the car. Focus on critical connections more than critical mass—build resilience by building the relationships. At the heart of this course was our collaboration—a site where we modeled for our students how to move at the speed of trust. In many ways, we are incredibly different—as teachers, as artists, as scholars trained in distinct fields. But we agreed for four months to align our joint pedagogy with our shared politics and see what that might stir. Marissa is on sabbatical now, and I continue to teach at the former school for girls. I have carried on in our tradition of abolition: no grades, no deadlines, no attendance policies—which shares the Greek and Latin root, of course— politia— with “police.” I have continued with rest days, and, to the extent possible, decentering my authority in the room (which, quite possibly, sometimes reifies it; it’s hard to say for sure, but they know I care). And it’s not yet clear if I will stay for the long haul; but then again, it’s also not clear if the academy, the nation, or the planet will. So while we wait, and work, and wonder, I’m going to go ahead and place my bet on emergent strategy and/as abolitionist pedagogy for these pandemic times, and beyond—as the best we’ve got for figuring out, together, how we might get free.[24] References [1] adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Chico: AK Press, 2017), pp. 41-42. [2] Ibid, p. 3. [3] For more on care work, see Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (Vancouver, B.C.: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018). For a great introduction to abolitionist pedagogy, see Sujani Reddy, “School is a Tracking Device: On Deschooling as Abolitionist Practice,” March 9, 2019 THIS IS HELL! , produced by mixlr, podcast, https://thisishell.com/interviews/1046-sujani-reddy; see also Reddy’s chapter of the same title in the anthology Abolitioning Carceral Society (Brooklyn: Common Notions, 2018). Thank you to Sujani Reddy for her correspondence about pedagogy and abolition over the years. [4] After the screening of Brett Story’s stunning documentary film, The Prison in 12 Landscapes (2016) at the Lightbox Film Center in Philadelphia in December 2022, Robert Saleem Holbrook, the Executive Director of the Abolitionist Law Center, made the important distinction between decarceration and abolition. Decarceration, he noted, is dedicated to eradicating all prisons and freeing all captive people. Abolition, however, takes this project one step further: aiming to abolish all systems of oppression that uphold a carceral logic. This includes prisons, police, policing, police unions, surveillance and corrections technology and businesses that produce them, jails, detention centers, psychiatric hospitals, immigration and customs enforcement (ICE), and the nation-state itself. Thank you to Lindsay Reckson for bringing this film to our attention and for being a co-conspirator in abolitionist pedagogy more generally. [5] We have each taught in a range of institutional contexts prior to our positions at Penn State, including public and private R1s and R2s, small liberal arts colleges, art schools, and the Ivy League. Marissa began teaching as a Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania; an adjunct at the University of the Arts; and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Scripps College. Jack first taught at the University of Texas at Austin as an M.A. and Ph.D. student; then a Visiting Assistant Professor at Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke College, Northern Arizona University, and Haverford College; before beginning the tenure-track at Reed College, followed by Penn State. [6] We modeled our syllabus language on Jesse Stommel, “Compassionate Grading Policies,” Jesse Stommel January 3, 2022 https://www.jessestommel.com/compassionate-grading-policies/; See also Asao Inoue, Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom (Fort Collins, Colorado: The WAC Clearinghouse, 2019); Alfie Kohn, “The Case Against Grades,” Educational Leadership [7] Chenjerai Kumanyika, “Ruth Wilson Gilmore Makes the Case for Abolition,” June 10, 2020 Intercepted , produced by The Intercept , podcast, https://theintercept.com/2020/06/10/ruth-wilson-gilmore-makes-the-case-for-abolition/; see also Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s forthcoming Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2023). [8] Elinor Fuchs, “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet: Some Questions to Ask a Play,” in Theater , no. 34 (2) (2004): 5-9; Scott Maisano, “Now,” in Early Modern Theatricality , ed. Henry S. Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 368-85; Kathryn Bond Stockton, “ Lost , or ‘Exit, Pursued by a Bear’: Causing Queer Children on Shakespeare’s TV,” in Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare , edited by Madhavi Menon (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 421-428. [9] For a good primer on mutual aid, see Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) (New York: Verso Books, 2020). [10] Jack Isaac Pryor, Time Slips: Queer Temporalities, Contemporary Performance, and the Hole of History (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2017); Marissa Nicosia, Imagining Time in the English Chronicle Play: Historical Futures, 1590-1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023). [11] “Historic Abington Campus,” Penn State Abington History Program https://www.abington.psu.edu/academics/history/historic-abington-campus [12] This framing of the play owes debts to Marissa’s undergraduate mentor and his scholarship. Peter Platt, Reason Diminished: Shakespeare and the Marvelous (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), esp. pp. 153-168). [13] William Shakespeare, Mr. VVilliam Shakespeares comedies, histories, and tragedies. (London, 1632). Eberly Family Special Collections, Pennsylvania State University Libraries, PR2751.A2 1632 Q. [14] “dead-line, n.” OED Online . December 2022. Oxford University Press. https://www-oed com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/view/Entry/47657 (accessed December 22, 2022); see also Heather Froehlich, Marissa Nicosia, and Christina Riehman-Murphy, “Transcribing Recipe Manuscripts Online: V.b.380 and the ‘What’s in a Recipe?’ Undergraduate Research Project at Penn State Abington.” Early Modern Studies Journal 8(2022).https://earlymodernstudiesjournal.org/review_articles/transcribing-recipe-manuscripts-online-v-b-380-and-the-whats-in-a-recipe-undergraduate-research-project-at-penn-state-abington/ [15] The physical theater work that we did in class was informed by Jack’s training with director Anne Bogart/the SITI Company and choreographer Rosie Herrera/Rosie Herrera Dance Theater, as well as Pig Iron Theater Company and The Padova Arts Academy (Paola Coletto) where they trained in Lecoq. [16] The idea of complex lives is informed by Avery Gordon’s notion of “the right to complex personhood,” which she discusses in Ghostly Matters: Haunting and Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, p. 4). [17] “Tricia Hersey on Rest as Resistance,” June 8, 2020 for the wild, produced by Ayana Young, podcast, https://forthewild.world/listen/tricia-hersey-on-rest-as-resistance-185; see also, Tricia Hersey, Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto (New York: Little, Brown, 2022). [18] See brown, p. 190. [19] Marissa Nicosia, “Chacolet from Rebeckah Winche’s Receipt Book at the Folger Shakespeare Library” Cooking in the Archives January 28, 2016 https://rarecooking.com/2016/01/28/chacolet-from-rebeckah-winches-receipt-book-at-the-folger-shakespeare-library/. [20] Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 1993), p. 3; brown, p. 1. [21] Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 20. [22] Earlier in the semester, Jack had suggested that Marissa try this recipe. Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi, “Clementine & almond syrup cake” Jerusalem (London: Ebury, 2012), p. 294. [23] See brown, p. 185. [24] This notion of “how we get free” is inspired by the Combahee River Collective anthology; see Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, ed., How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017). Footnotes About The Author(s) MARISSA NICOSIA is Associate Professor of Renaissance Literature at The Pennsylvania State University-Abington College. She received her Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. Marissa’s first monograph, I magining Time in the English Chronicle Play: Historical Futures, 1590-1660 , will be published by Oxford University Press in 2023. She co-edited the collection, Making Milton: Print, Authorship, Afterlives (Oxford University Press, 2021), with Emma Depledge and John S. Garrison. In 2019, she co-edited a special issue of Explorations in Renaissance Culture on Renaissance Futures with John S. Garrison. She has published articles on Renaissance literature, temporality, food culture, and book history and manuscript studies. Marissa runs the public food history website Cooking in the Archives ( www.rarecooking.com ). JACK ISAAC PRYOR is Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Studies at The Pennsylvania State University-Abington College. They received their Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. Their first book, Time Slips: Queer Temporalities, Contemporary Performance, and the Hole of History (2017), was published by Northwestern University Press and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies. Jack is currently co-editing the collection, Transfixt: Transgender Aesthetics at the Tipping Point , with Jules Rosskam and a special issue of Studies in Musical Theatre with Stacy Wolf (Sondheim from the Side, forthcoming 2023). They have published essays on pedagogy, queer temporality, minoritarian performance and visual culture, sex, state violence, and experimental modes of art and cultural criticism. Jack is also a director and devised theater maker. ( www.jaclynisaacpryor.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 Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater 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 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Jose Fernandez Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 1 Visit Journal Homepage Historical Subjectivity and the Revolutionary Archetype in Amiri Baraka's The Slave and Luis Valdez's Bandido! Jose Fernandez By Published on December 13, 2016 Download Article as PDF ! Widget Didn’t Load Check your internet and refresh this page. If that doesn’t work, contact us. The early works of Amiri Baraka and Luis Valdez reflect some of their aesthetic, social, political, and ideological convergences that coincided with the tumultuous period of social protest during the 1960s and 1970s. Both playwrights defined their social and artistic work by engaging with issues of race, ethnicity, justice, and nationalist aspirations for their respective groups at a critical juncture in American history. The death of Malcolm X marked an ideological shift in Baraka’s artistic work when he formed the Black Arts Repertory in Harlem in 1965; for Valdez, it was the Delano grape strike of 1965 that led to the creation of the strike’s artistic unit, El Teatro Campesino (The Farm Worker Theater). Their dramatic work during this influential period of black and Chicano theater was closely connected by their critique of social and economic conditions of marginalized members of their respective groups—blacks living in major urban cities and Chicano farm workers in California.[1] Several scholars have discussed the aesthetic, cultural, and social significance of the works of Baraka and Valdez within their respective groups and the larger American theater tradition,[2] but only Harry Elam has studied their work comparatively. In his study Taking It to the Streets, Elam systematically explores their social protest theater by focusing on their points of convergence and similarities.[3] Elam argues that living in a multi-ethnic society, “demand[s] not only that we acknowledge diverse cultural experiences but also that we investigate and interrogate areas of commonality. Only in this way can we move beyond the potentially polarizing divisions of race and ethnicity.”[4] Cross-cultural studies, Elam adds, should “challenge the internal and external social restrictions and cultural expectations often placed upon critics of color to study only their native group.”[5] My comparative analysis of Baraka and Valdez is informed by Elam’s emphasis on the importance of comparative studies that stress points of convergence between African American and Chicano theater in order to examine the parallels of both groups’ trajectory in their fight for social inclusion that is reflected in their artistic output. In this essay, I examine Baraka’s The Slave (1964) and Valdez’s Bandido! (1981) and how both plays imaginatively challenge prevalent historical narratives of their respective groups by reexamining significant historical events—the legacy of slavery and the aftermath of the U.S.-Mexican War (1846-1848) respectively—through their use of the revolutionary archetype in order to situate the history of African Americans and Chicanos within the larger U.S. historical narrative. An element that distinctively connects The Slave and Bandido! is their use of experimental elements that reflect some of the characteristics associated with postmodernism, such as the challenge of historical accounts by dominant groups, the marginalization and fragmentation of subjects who destabilize a totalizing historical narrative, and in the case of Bandido!, the use of self-reflexivity to disrupt and undermine its own narrative. A comparative analysis of the plays’ emphasis on the history of violence, oppression, and discrimination, and their aesthetic representations of revolutionary figures, reveals points of convergence in the playwrights’ artistic work that in turn reflects larger commonalities within the African American and Chicano theater traditions. The Slave engages with the era of slavery through the representation of Walker Vessels as a revolutionary leader in a contemporary context who carries the legacy of armed resistance dating back to the antebellum era. The Slave innovatively reshapes special and historical chronologies by presenting Vessels at the beginning of the play as a field slave in the antebellum South. The play’s events abruptly move to a race war between a black and a white army at an unnamed city and in an unspecified future. Vessels, now the leader of a black liberation army, returns to confront his ex-wife, Grace, and her current husband Bradford Easley, and to take his two daughters, who live with their mother and remain upstairs sleeping for the duration of the play. Their altercation results in the shooting of Easley by Vessels. As the advancing black army approaches the city and the shelling increases, the house is hit and Grace is fatally wounded. Before the house collapses, Vessels doubts the goals of his revolution and tells Grace that their two daughters are dead, possibly by his own hands. Bandido! recreates the life and myth of Tiburcio Vásquez, a historical outlaw and alleged revolutionary figure, and revisits the plight of Californios, the Spanish-speaking population in California, after the U.S.-Mexican War. Vásquez belonged to a prominent California family of Mexican descent who eventually lost his land and social standing after the war. Vásquez lived as an outlaw in California for years but was eventually captured. Bandido! covers key events in Vásquez’s last two years before his capture and prison sentence for his involvement at a store robbery at Tres Pinos, in Northern California, where three white Americans were killed. The play moves back and forth between vignettes of Vásquez’s life as an outlaw, his romantic life, and scenes at a San Jose jail before his execution. Before his capture, Vásquez confesses his intent to incite a revolution against the Anglo majority in California, but his plan fails to materialize, due in part to his own ambivalence regarding the consequences of a violent revolution. The Slave is often characterized as a representation of the volatile and racially charged politics of the sixties and Bandido! as a reflection of the conciliatory multiculturalism of the eighties;[6] however, both plays grapple with the ambivalence of presenting, to different degrees, the idea of overt armed revolution, which remains an unresolved tension throughout the plays. Although The Slave and Bandido! were originally staged in different periods,[7] Valdez’s play is a continuation of his previous work during the sixties, a time when both playwrights shared similar aesthetic and political views related to people of color’s shared struggle against oppression. It is significant that the revolutionary theme surfaces at a period in the playwrights’ careers when they wrote commercial plays targeted to broader and mixed audiences.[8] Before his more militant period working at the Black Arts Repertory, Baraka wrote critically recognized plays, most notably Dutchman (1964); similarly, when Valdez moved from Delano in order to professionalize El Teatro Campesino troupe, his project reached its peak with the Broadway production of Zoot Suit in 1979.[9] This is a contrast to the period when they produced social protest plays that were performed for predominantly black or Chicano audiences.[10] My analysis of the dramatic texts explores what Jon Rossini describes as the “aesthetic[s] of resistance” inscribed in Bandido! that are similarly applicable to The Slave.[11] The Slave stages a black revolution, and although Bandido! is considered a less confrontational play, or even containing “proassimilationist themes,” as Yolanda Broyles-González maintains,[12] Vásquez explicitly considers inciting an armed revolution in California against whites. Revolution and History in Baraka and Valdez Baraka and Valdez embraced nationalist aspirations for their respective groups and were attracted to revolutionary ideas during the early sixties, an influence that, although clearly reflected in The Slave, is also present in Bandido! Baraka and Valdez, as Elam explains, were not only artists, but also they were activists and social theorists of their respective movements.[13] In their early activism and plays, Baraka and Valdez shared a social and artistic vision that emphasized racial and ethnic consciousness based on militancy and nationalistic ideas. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Valdez acted as one of the intellectual theorists of El Movimiento (the movement), the more militant and nationalistic branch of the Chicano civil rights movement. Valdez’s early writings focused on the development of a Chicano identity embedded with nationalism, indigenous myths, and Catholic symbols.[14] After Valdez moved from Delano, he commented that El Teatro Campesino’s performances moved beyond farm workers’ concerns and increasingly engaged with other broader social issues such as the Vietnam War and racial discrimination.[15] Both Baraka and Valdez were similarly influenced by the Cuban Revolution, which presented a powerful example of a successful armed uprising in the American continent. In the case of Baraka, he described his travel to Cuba in the early sixties as a turning point.[16] The Cuban Revolution was also an important event for Valdez. Jorge Huerta explains that before his involvement with César Chávez and the farm workers’ strike, Valdez traveled to Cuba in 1964 and became an open sympathizer of the revolution.[17] Although the aesthetic output and social activism of Baraka and Valdez converges in the late sixties and then diverges stylistically and ideologically in the late seventies, the influence of revolutionary thought is similarly present in The Slave and Bandido! The Slave and Bandido! resonate with postmodern premises advanced by Linda Hutcheon and Phillip Brian Harper regarding the history and social position of racial and ethnic minorities in the U.S. As W. B. Worthen has noted, Valdez’s disruption of historical objectivity in The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa (1964) and Bandido! not only takes elements from Chicano history, but its treatment reflects some postmodern characteristics such as the subversion and fragmentation of historical events. Worthen explains the use of the term “postmodern” in his analysis of contemporary Chicano/a playwrights by noting that “the thematics of Chicana/o history plays are inseparable from their rhetoric, typically from the use of discontinuity and fragmentation, appropriation and hybridity, heteroglossia and pastiche. This formal complexity might appear to verge on the blank aesthetic of the ‘postmodern.’”[18] In an earlier and often-cited discussion on history and postmodernism, A Poetics of Postmodernism, Hutcheon argues that a characteristic of postmodern narratives is the author’s challenge of the past as an objective and monolithic reality rather than a constructed set of discourses. Hutcheon describes this type of narrative as “historiographic metafiction,” in which authors both revise and undermine the past as it “reinstalls historical contexts as significant and even determining, but in so doing, it problematizes the entire notion of historical knowledge.”[19] A postmodern interpretation of history, however, does not render the past an undetermined reality; rather, it creates competing views that are open to multiple interpretations. The Slave and Bandido! reflect Hutcheon’s characterization of history as malleable by challenging its objectivity in relation to the past history of their respective groups. Moreover, Harper has argued that the some of the aesthetic works by minority authors can be interpreted as engaging with elements of the postmodern experience, particularly their engagement with marginality. In studying the emphasis on the fragmented and decentralized self that forms part of the postmodern condition, Harper argues that the alienation, despair, uncertainty, and fragmentation characteristic of postmodernism have been present in the work of some minority writers prior to the sixties since their postmodernist tendencies “deriv[e] specifically from [their] socially marginalized and politically disenfranchised status.”[20] The “social marginalization” that creates a “fragmented subjectivity” in these texts, Harper argues, does not stand as the sole characteristic of the postmodern subject; however, social fragmentation should be considered part of such marginalization.[21] The Slave and Bandido! explore two revolutionary archetypes and their condition as marginalized and decentered subjects based on their past and current social limitations. Emerging from groups on the margins of society, the revolutionaries’ call for armed confrontation against whites inventively contests their alienated social position. Amiri Baraka’s The Slave The Slave aesthetically engages with the history of violent militant resistance by minority groups that at times tends to be overlooked in contemporary social discourses in favor of a historical narrative that invokes the nonviolent struggle by civil rights activists. The Slave has commonly been studied as a radical and confrontational social protest play that attempts to raise racial and ethnic consciousness and nationalist sentiments through representations of armed confrontation.[22] The prospect of armed resistance and militant confrontation by some people of color also contributed to social change, and Baraka’s play is significant since it counterweights the prevalent narrative that the social gains of the sixties and seventies by people of color were achieved only through nonviolent resistance. Baraka’s confrontational rhetoric, shared by emerging radical activists such as Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton, is evident in his non-fiction of the early sixties, collected in Home: Social Essays (1965), which condemns the conditions of blacks living in urban cities and the nonviolent methods to solve racial and economic inequality advocated by black civil rights leaders. Baraka defiantly argues that the “struggle is not simply for ‘equality’” but “to completely free the black man from the domination of the white man.”[23] Baraka frames his confrontational stance and social demands based in part on his first-hand experiences dealing with inequality and discrimination in urban enclaves such as Harlem.[24] Echoing the seemingly senseless violence during the race riots in some major urban areas such as Watts, Detroit, and Newark in the 1960s, The Slave mirrors blacks’ simmering frustrations and responses to a deep-rooted sense of despair. The Slave challenges received histories regarding the era of slavery by creatively dislocating and extending the scope of the militancy of the sixties by presenting Walker Vessels both as a revolutionary leader and a slave—presumably a rebel leader—who carriers on the legacy of black armed resistance from the antebellum South. Some critics have focused on how Baraka engages with the era of slavery in an experimental form in other plays such as Slave Ship (1967) and The Motion of History (1976);[25] however, almost no attention has been given to the experimental engagement with history already found in The Slave.[26] Baraka’s play invokes the figure of the slave revolt leader, a figure that prior to the sixties tended to be mediated through the texts of white historians and writers,[27] to address historical misconceptions regarding the treatment of slaves. In his nonfiction, Baraka challenges the myth of the content slave and the attempt at myth-making in historiography and social discourses that present blacks during slavery as passive subjects who “didn’t mind being [slaves].”[28] Baraka rejects this view by emphasizing the tradition of armed slave resistance, since according to Baraka, “the records of slave revolts are too numerous to support” the “faked conclusion” that slaves coexist harmoniously with their masters.[29] Baraka subverts white historiography on stage by invoking the tradition of black self determination dating back to David Walker and armed resistance by slave revolt leaders such as Gabriel Prosser and Denmark Vesey by, as Werner Sollors points out, naming The Slave’s main character Vessels.[30] Baraka’s use of the slave rebel figure, however, is experimental and differs from other conventional representations of armed resistance by black authors such as Arna Bontemps’s Black Thunder (1936), a fictional recreation of the historical 1800 Gabriel’s Rebellion. In The Slave, Vessels is not the historical reincarnation of Walker or Vesey propelled into the future; instead, Vessels’s initial position in the play as an outspoken and discontent slave is a symbolic figure of resistance who projects the legacy of slave rebellions and violent suppressions into a hypothetical future. The Slave’s prologue presents Vessels as a character who attempts to articulate his grievances but fails due to his position as a field slave, which reflects his social marginality. The prologue purposefully obscures chronological time as Vessels appears as an “old field slave” who is “much older than [he] look[s] . . . or maybe much younger” at different periods during the play.[31] Vessels initially takes the form of a seer, elder statesman, or a black preacher, but as he attempts to express his thoughts, he grows “anxiou[s],” “less articulate,” and “more ‘field hand’ sounding” (45). Scholars agree on the cryptic nature of Vessels’s opening speech;[32] nonetheless, Vessels’s restlessness and belligerent intent while still a slave is evident when he remarks that “[w]e are liars, and we are murderers. We invent death for others” (43). Vessels’s condition as a slave makes him unable to articulate a coherent message; as a result, his inability to effectively communicate marginalizes him and, at the same time, connects him to the emerging restlessness and frustration among disenfranchised blacks that finds a physical expression in an altered social context in the play’s subsequent acts. Signaling the ineffectiveness of rhetoric, Vessels turns to physical violence as a tool to address his social grievances. Vessels’s initial position as a “field hand” is significant for Baraka in the context of slaves’ hierarchies and class distinctions among blacks since he believes that the source for black liberation in past and contemporary times will be carried out by marginalized subjects rather than blacks in relative positions of authority or class standing. In the introduction to The Motion of History, Baraka makes the distinction between slaves who were “house servants and petty bourgeoisie-to-be” and “field slaves” who represented the majority and the authentic revolutionaries.[33] Hence, Vessels’s initial position as a marginalized field slave connects him to the majority of disenfranchised blacks rather than to the black middle class leaders of the civil rights era, who in Baraka’s view, asked blacks to “renounce [their] history as pure social error” and look at “old slavery” and its legacy of social and economic disparities as a “hideous acciden[t] for which no one should be blamed.”[34] Vessels’s position as a field slave functions as a social critique of black civil rights leaders and their methods, thus presenting a clear ideological contrast between his radical militancy and their nonviolent social activism. The Slave destabilizes dominant historical narratives of slave suppression on stage by presenting a decentered subject who carries the legacy of armed resistance and has the potential to challenge the status quo through open revolution. The play’s first act propels Vessels into a contemporary city in the 1960s where he becomes the leader of a “black liberation movement” who is able to mount an effective military offensive against whites (58). As Larry Neil observes, Vessels in the contemporary context “demands a confrontation with history. . . . His only salvation lies in confronting the physical and psychological forces that have made him and his people powerless.”[35] Vessels refers to the source of his actions when he maintains that he is fighting “against three hundred years of oppression” (72). Vessels, moreover, echoes the intent of former slave rebel leaders such as Nat Turner when he boasts that he “single-handedly. . . promoted a bloody situation where white and black people are killing each other” (66). Neil contextualizes the violence depicted in The Slave by arguing that despite Western society’s aggression toward the oppressed, “it sanctimoniously deplore[d] violence or self-assertion on the part of the enslaved.”[36] Vessels’s armed resistance—taken as a continuation of past instances of slave rebellion—figuratively subverts the historical record since an organized and open slave revolt in the U.S. did not last more than a few days. The Slave attempts, as Baraka notes in his often-cited essay, “The Revolutionary Theatre” (1964), to take blacks’ revolutionary “dreams and give them a reality”;[37] as a result, Baraka’s play goes beyond the representation of the militancy and radicalism of the sixties by creating a fictional counterview of the historical record of slave revolt suppressions. Despite the inclusion of a race war in The Slave, the play shows the limits of a military and bloody confrontation between blacks and whites on stage; instead, it concentrates on the tension between Vessels’s revolutionary goals and his ambivalent feelings toward whites due to his former acceptance of racial pluralism. Although the war has been raging for months and has tangible consequences, since it is noted that Vessels’s “noble black brothers are killing what’s left of the city,” or rather “what’s left of this country” (49), it is only alluded to intermittently rather than enacted. The war serves mainly as a background to the verbal abuse, physical violence, and aggression in the living room among Vessels, Grace, and Easley.[38] The animosity between Vessels and Grace derives also in part from Baraka’s radicalization and his own personal struggles to reconcile his black nationalism and his marriage to Hettie Jones, a white woman.[39] The emotionally charged scenes and recriminations between the three characters expose the simmering feelings of rage and racial animosity that remained under the surface before the war. The Slave presents a clash between a black radical and a white liberal, and Vessels’s confrontation with Easley symbolizes his attempt to overcome his past and continue his revolution. Samuel Hay maintains that in The Slave and other plays of the same period, “Baraka repeats Baldwin’s theme [in Blues for Mr. Charlie (1964)] that burning all bridges to white liberals is the first step toward liberation.”[40] Vessels does not direct his hatred against prejudiced whites but against Easley, a college professor with a “liberal education, and a long history of concern for minorities” (52). Consequently, Vessels’s shooting of Easley represents the end of possible coexistence between blacks and whites, echoing the radical view—embraced by Malcolm X and other black militants—that white liberals could not contribute to the struggle for black liberation. Grace realizes, however, that in trying to overcome his former relationships with whites, Vessels risks destroying himself and his family. Even though Vessels’s role as a revolutionary leader fulfills a long-awaited dream and struggle for liberation that has extended for centuries—exactly what Baraka exhorts in “The Revolutionary Theatre”—The Slave depicts the revolution’s toll on Vessels and his inability to successfully navigate his own racial allegiances.[41] The Slave’s ending ultimately negates Vessels’s prospects for a successful revolution—even within the fictional setting created by the play—and reveals the fate of his family when he asserts that his two daughters are dead, most likely by his own hands. Following the death of Easley, the fate of his children in The Slave’s final scenes becomes the focus of attention; however, Vessels’s actions and statements suggest that he arrived at Grace’s house with the intention of ending his children’s lives. Vessels mentions at different times that he returned to Grace’s house because he “want[s] those children” (65), but the stage directions at the beginning of act one suggest that he could have already taken their lives before confronting Grace. After the shelling increases and the house is hit, Grace is fatally hurt. When Grace asks him to “see about the girls,” he repeatedly tells her that “they’re dead” (87, 88). Scholars are divided regarding the fate of the children, suggesting that they could have died in the burning building, Vessels could have taken their lives, or that the scene is vague and unclear.[42] Although the play’s ending appears perplexing, Vessels’s seemingly incomprehensible actions gain meaning by taking into consideration that he arrived to Grace’s house with the premonition that his revolutionary fight may not succeed. During a moment of weakness or sincerity, Vessels confesses to Grace: “I was going to wait until the fighting was over . . . until we have won, before I took [the children]. But something occurred to me for the first time, last night. It was the idea that we might not win” (68). Baraka in later years conceded that some of his plays preceding Malcolm X’s death, including The Slave, were “essentially petty bourgeois radicalism, even rebellion, but not clear and firm enough as to revolution.”[43] Based in part on Baraka’s own acknowledgement that Vessels lacked revolutionary conviction, some scholars have described Vessels’s fight as futile.[44] Jerry Gafio Watts inconclusively suggests that the ambiguous fate of the children is “more annoying than provocative,” leaving the ending of the play without “any resemblance of meaning.”[45] Vessels’s actions and the fate of his children, however, achieve an important symbolic meaning in the context of Vessels’s former self as a slave when, during the antebellum period, some slaves took the extreme action of ending their children’s lives in order to spare their fate as slaves. The ending of The Slave inventively engages with the era of slavery by drawing parallels with tragic episodes during the antebellum era such as the well-known case of Margaret Garner, a runaway slave, who took the radical measure of taking her daughter’s life before her capture as an alternative to slavery, an episode masterly rendered in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). Henry D. Miller observes that in Baraka’s plays, characters “are not human beings at all, but political abstractions.”[46] Although the absence of Vessels’s daughters during the play may suggest a metaphorical interpretation of these characters, his disturbing actions toward them are also pragmatic, as Vessels reasons that the fate of non-whites may be in jeopardy after a possible military victory by the white army. Vessels returns to Grace’s house because he believes he is “rescuing the children” from an unspecified danger (69); his rescue takes the form of a desperate form of protection. Morrison’s use of Garner’s story continued a tradition in antislavery writing that called attention to slaves’ attempts to gain their freedom since, according to Paul Gilroy, the “horrific” story of Garner was often used by some abolitionists to raise awareness for the antislavery cause.[47] In a similar manner, and in relation to calls for a black revolution in the sixties, Vessels’s seemingly incomprehensible actions in The Slave dramatize the way in which oppressive race relations cornered individuals into taking desperate actions, as Garner’s story also demonstrates. As a result, the children in The Slave represent the unfulfilled aspirations of a black revolution just as Garner’s daughter symbolizes slaves’ negated freedom. In Baraka’s rendering of this parallel episode, Vessels’s dreams for liberation are shattered for him and his children as they ultimately perish, and he returns to his slave-like state at the end of the play. Beyond reflecting Baraka’s radicalization and frustration regarding the marginalized conditions of urban blacks during the sixties, The Slave craftily contextualizes its radical and militant message by merging Vessels’s revolutionary aims with historical instances of armed resistance by blacks. The play’s endurance rests in its reminder that the gains for social recognition during the sixties were not only achieved through acts of nonviolent resistance, but also through the prospects of violent confrontation. Aesthetically, The Slave uses innovative techniques that reflect postmodern anxieties in relation to the challenge and subversion of dominant historical narratives about the era of slavery; Vessels’s discomforting revolutionary message that stresses militancy, nationalist aspirations, and radical actions in the face of racial oppression stands as a form of historical memory that reflects the contentious history of race relations—not only during the sixties but also at different junctions in American history. The play’s engagement with the position of marginalized subjects and their past history of resistance found in black theater is similarly present in the Chicano theater tradition. Luis Valdez’s Bandido! Critical discussions of Valdez’s works are often divided within the framework of Valdez’s collaboration with El Teatro Campesino and his post-80s projects; however, Bandido! has not been commonly explored as the continuation of the nationalist and revolutionary themes and creative engagement with history already present in his pre-El Teatro Campesino play, The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa, which introduced the use of the archetypal revolutionary for the first time in Chicano theater.[48] Scholars have pointed out that the characters of the two brothers in Shrunken Head, Joaquín and Belarmino, reflect—and physically appropriate—characteristics of two historical figures of resistance, Joaquín Murrieta and Francisco Villa.[49] The ethos of Villa is staged both in a “realistic” and “surrealistic” manner as their father, Pedro, allegedly fought alongside Villa during the Mexican Revolution while Belarmino acts literally as the missing head of Villa.[50] The play is explicit in relation to Villa’s symbolism as a “peasant outlaw” and as “revolutionary giant.”[51] Shrunken Head shows an imaginative treatment of history and the revolutionary figure that is recovered and situated within an American historical context in Bandido![52] The emphasis on the history of the Southwest in Bandido! serves to reclaim past events of war and conquest and to situate early Mexican Americans within a geographical space neglected to them in prevalent historical narratives. Huerta correctly notes that with Bandido!, Valdez offers Chicanos a historical “presence in the state of California.”[53] Previously the largest group in the state, Californios were considerably outnumbered only a decade after the discovery of gold in 1848. They faced social and economic discrimination—and more importantly—they lost most of their land and social position despite the protections granted in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Before the 1860s, Californios owned the most valuable land in California, but “by the 1870s, they owned only one-fourth of this land” and by “the 1880s Mexicans were relatively landless.”[54] The historical Vásquez traced his ancestry to the first Californios who arrived in the eighteenth-century, and his loss of land and social status forms the basis and context for Vásquez’s actions in Bandido!; he mentions that a “hundred years ago, [his] great grandfather founded San Francisco with [Juan] De Anza. Fifty years ago José Tiburcio Vásquez was the law in San José”;[55] but Vásquez laments that he “cannot even walk the wooden side-walks of either city without a leash” (110). Vásquez’s reversal of fortune represents the fate of Californios after the U.S. annexation of the territory. Valdez’s play challenges dominant narratives of the U.S. westward expansion that exalts the economic success stories of white Americans by focusing on Vásquez as a marginalized subject who, similar to Vessels in The Slave, revolts against the social order. In the introduction to Bandido!, Valdez subverts such narratives by contending that the “American mythology” that constitutes the history of the Old West remains “under constant revision” (97). Bandido! presents an alternative interpretation to the meaning and symbolic significance of Vásquez despite, or because of, his ominous ending since, as Valdez also notes, Vásquez holds the distinction of being the last man to be publically executed in California in 1875 (97). There has been a shift in analyses of Bandido! from looking at the play as a distortion of history to reevaluating the play as recontextualizing history and questioning its neutrality. Scholars and reviewers who saw the 1994 staging of Bandido! were critical about what they perceived as “revisionary history” (89).[56] Broyles-González, for instance, argues that the plight of the historical Vásquez in Bandido! is “wholly distorted by omissions.”[57] Valdez’s intent, however, is to take advantage of the malleability of historical accounts—as the play’s introduction suggests—to create his own revolutionary archetype. As a contrast to Baraka’s loose amalgamation of figures of resistance in The Slave, Bandido! is based on the historical Vásquez; however, rather than simply contesting negative historical characterizations and presenting the true Vásquez, Valdez’s play carves its own figure of resistance based on competing interpretations. Although the revolutionary dimension of the historical Vásquez has been disputed by historians,[58] the revolutionary figure in Bandido!—just as in The Slave—is used as a symbol of resistance able to embody, as Huerta notes, Chicano’s “struggle against oppressive forces.”[59] Rossini rightly observes that Vásquez in Bandido! stands as a rebel archetype since Valdez “reject[s] the easy label of criminal and tak[es] seriously Vásquez’s revolutionary potential.”[60] The representation of Vásquez in Bandido! is more complex than a simple revisionist rendering of Vásquez’s life on stage; rather, Bandido!’s portrayal of Vásquez reflects what scholars such as Juan Alonzo have identified as the reconceptualization of the figure of the nineteenth-century outlaw and bandit after the eighties.[61] Bandido! balances two seemingly contradictory accounts in relation to the historical character of Vásquez and presents two Vásquez figures: a bandit innocent of shooting three Americans who becomes a figure of nonviolent resistance, and an armed rebel who attempts to incite a revolution in California. On one hand, Bandido! rejects the simplistic characterization of Vásquez as a petty thief and makes him a symbol for Californios against the American expansion into the Southwest that similarly echoed the nonviolent actions by Chávez during the Delano strike in the 1960s. In Bandido!, Vásquez acknowledges his “twenty years as a horse thief and stage robber,” but contends that his “career grew out of the circumstances by which [he] was surrounded” (127). Vásquez’s actions reflect the changing circumstances of Mexican Americans as he adds: “I was thirteen when gold was discovered. As I grew to manhood, a spirit of hatred and revenge took possession of me. I had many fights in defense of what I believed to be my rights and those of my countrymen” (127). In the play’s early scenes, Vásquez acts as a scrupulous bandit who restrains himself from shooting victims during his raids. Vásquez informs his band before the raid at Tres Pinos that his “[f]irst cardinal rule” is “no killing” (116). When Vásquez is captured and sentenced for his involvement in the robbery, his hanging takes the form of an act of arbitrary justice, but also symbolizes the limits of passive resistance by Mexican Americans after the annexation of California. On the other hand, Bandido! employs the rebel figure inscribed in the history of Mexican Americans in the Southwest to articulate a message of resistance. Valdez connects Vásquez’s rebellious actions to early California outlaws such as Murrieta and “Mestizo” revolutionaries such as Villa already present in his militant play The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa.[62] As the play progresses, Bandido! imaginatively uses Vásquez’s revolutionary potential—whether historical or fictional—to insert a militant message as Vásquez shares his plans to begin a revolution in order to liberate California from U.S. control. After the raid at Tres Pinos, Vásquez is once again on the run when he reaches the San Fernando Mission. There, he finds refuge in the estate of Don Andrés Pico, a historical figure, who during the U.S.-Mexican War “defeated the U.S. Cavalry at the Battle of San Pasquel [sic]” (138).[63] During their meeting, Vásquez invites Pico to join him in fighting Americans one more time when he confesses: “I’m talking about a revolution. With a hundred well armed men, I can start a rebellion that will crack the state of California in two, like an earthquake, leaving the Bear Republic in the north, and [a] Spanish California Republic in the south!” (137). Vásquez, however, is subsequently captured without enacting his plan. The scene is significant for its symbolism since Vásquez’s desire to begin a revolution is explicit. Rather than resolving these two facets of Vásquez’s life—as an innocent outlaw and a revolutionary—Bandido! purposefully complicates these two competing narratives. An element that differentiates The Slave and Bandido! is that Valdez’s play self-reflexively exploits and interrogates the facts and myth of Vásquez’s life as it accentuates and undermines the play’s own historical significance through the use of parody and the inclusion of fragmented and competing narratives within the play. Hutcheon explains that “[p]arody is a complex genre, in terms of both its form and its ethos. It is one of the ways in which modern artists have managed to come to terms with the weight of the past.”[64] Bandido! creates two parallel narratives through the “play within a play” device in which some of the play’s scenes are a reenactment of a play written by Vásquez himself about his life staged by Samuel Gillette, a theatrical “impresario,” while Vásquez awaits his sentence in a San Jose prison (98, 100). Gillette’s artistic vision, when reenacting Vásquez’s life on stage, and the writing and rewriting of Vásquez’s own story in Bandido! examine and parody the process of theatrical representation and historical certainty. Hutcheon describes parody as the “perfect postmodern form” since “it paradoxically both incorporates and challenges that which it parodies.”[65] Under this view, Bandido! calls attention to Vásquez’s significance while simultaneously undermining the veracity of such assertion. A marked difference between The Slave and Bandido! is that although both plays revolve around the possibilities of armed resistance and revolution by minority groups against a larger white population, the style of The Slave is tragic; in contrast, Bandido! combines realistic elements with melodrama.[66] Huerta, for example, argues that Bandido! is divided in two distinct sections and explains that “[w]hen we are with Vásquez in the jail cell, we are observing the real man; when the action shifts to the melodrama stage we are sometimes watching the Impresario’s visions and sometimes we are actually watching Vásquez’s interpretation.”[67] Other scholars, however, have observed that the line between the melodrama sections and the realistic jail scenes becomes blurred and problematic as the play progresses.[68] The use of melodrama, ultimately, adds an additional dimension to Vásquez as a multifaceted character. Bandido! weaves Vásquez’s competing nonviolent and revolutionary message as Vásquez himself directly writes and rewrites his own story while in jail, thus mediating a set of seemingly contradictory positions. After the first staging of Vásquez’s play by Gillette, Vásquez complains about Gillette’s emphasis on his private life as “melodrama” where Vásquez’s alleged romantic exploits are accentuated through his relationship with Rosario, a married woman (109). Rather than resolving the tension between Vásquez’s personal life and his public persona, Valdez’s play self-reflexively exploits the apparent contradictions. Gillette expresses skepticism regarding Vásquez’s desire to prove his innocence during the killings at Tres Pinos and to enhance his pacifist stance, while at the same time trying to incite an armed revolt that reflects his revolutionary aspirations. When Vásquez and Gillette are negotiating the terms for staging Vásquez’s play in San Francisco, Vásquez tells Gillette: “If I’m to be hanged for murder, I want the public to know I’m not guilty” (110). Gillette objects to this request as he wonders: “Twenty years as a vicious desperado and never a single, solitary slaying?” (110). At the same time, Gillette agrees to buy Vásquez’s revised play and stage it in San Francisco but with “none of this Liberator of California horseshit” since he would “be laughed out of the state if [he tries] to stage that” (140). Vásquez’s own crafting of his story and Gillette’s assistance as theater producer and businessman combine to mediate the play’s layered message. Despite its revolutionary message, Bandido! portrays an unsuccessful revolution as Vásquez questions his actions due to his ambivalence regarding his intent to incite a revolution and his hybrid cultural identity as he decides—before his execution—to avert an armed confrontation. Before Vásquez’s capture, Cleodovio Chávez, one of Vásquez’s band members, is attracted to the possibility of gathering a group of armed men and “slaughter[ing] every gringo [they] meet” since he reasons, “[I]f they’re gonna hang us, it might as well be for something good—not petty thievery” (145). In a subsequent scene, Vásquez averts the possible confrontation by sending a letter to Chávez, who has not been captured, asking him “not to get himself and a lot of innocent people killed” (150). The possibility for armed confrontation—which is set in motion in The Slave—is averted in Bandido! due to Vásquez’s own hybrid cultural identification as a Californio and an American. A significant gesture in Bandido! is that although Vásquez was chased in his homeland and persecuted by American authorities, he considers himself a product of his mixed Mexican and American background. Vásquez displays what Ramón Saldívar has identified as an “in-between existence” present in Mexican American narratives since the formation of the U.S.-Mexican border.[69] In Bandido!, Vásquez has the opportunity to stay in Mexico, but he returns to California; when asked about his motives, Vásquez responds that he has “never relished the idea of spending the rest of [his] days in Mexico” since California is “where [he] belong[s]” (138). The character of Vásquez signals a transition in Valdez’s drama from presenting the memory and ethos of Villa, a Mexican revolutionary, in The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa as an archetypal figure to Vásquez in Bandido!, a Mexican American figure of resistance, who belongs to the history of the U.S. and the Southwest. Conclusion The Slave and Bandido! use innovative dramatic techniques that reflect postmodern concerns in post-sixties minority theater regarding the malleability and fragmentation of historical narratives to question historical representations of their respective marginalized groups. Both plays reclaim previously overlooked figures in dominant historical discourses and offer them agency to recreate and alter the historical memory of each group. The plays transform marginalized subjects, from a slave and an outlaw, respectively, into revolutionary figures to create a historical continuity between previous instances of armed resistance and revolt from past to contemporary times. Both revolutionary leaders engage, in different degrees, in a quest to gain their freedom and previously negated historical spaces—a black nation and an independent California respectively—that can be achieved through violent means. The Slave and Bandido! revolve around the haunting memory of race relations in the U.S. and episodes of armed resistance by altering historical narratives as Baraka’s contemporary revolutionary figure carries the history of slave rebellions, while Valdez’s play disrupts historical representations by allowing its revolutionary figure to write and rewrite his own legacy. The Slave and Bandido! ultimately present unfulfilled revolutions even in their fictional settings and show a similar ambivalence regarding their revolutionaries’ actions and intents toward whites. Despite its representation of a race war, The Slave is less radical than commonly assumed since Vessels struggles unsuccessfully to jettison his previous racial pluralism and his past relationships with whites. Vásquez in Bandido! similarly struggles to incite a revolt against whites in light of his hybrid cultural identity. Although both plays appear to respond to different social and political historical periods, they interrogate and grapple with ever-present questions of race and ethnic identity, and the position of people of color in the U.S., that continue to define American society in contemporary times. The Slave and Bandido! represent an instance, among others, in which the themes, tropes, and techniques used by black and Mexican American playwrights and writers after the sixties converge to show that some of the aesthetic work by authors of color share deeper commonalities. Dr. Jose Fernandez is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Western Illinois University. His articles have appeared in the Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association and Interdisciplinary Literary Studies. His current research focuses on the commonalities and points of convergence among African American and Latino/a authors after the 1960s. [1] The term Chicano/a refers to individuals of Mexican descent living in the Southwest. For a detailed description of the social and political connotations of the terms Chicano/a, Mexican American, and Mexican in the context of Chicano theatre, see Jorge Huerta, “When Sleeping Giants Awaken: Chicano Theatre in the 1960s,” Theatre Survey 43, no.1 (2002): 23. [2] See Jorge Huerta, Chicano Theater: Themes and Forms (Ypsilanti: Bilingual Press, 1982), 11-45; Yolanda Broyles-González, El Teatro Campesino: Theater in the Chicano Movement (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 3-35; Jorge Huerta, Chicano Drama: Performance, Society, and Myth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 26-44; Larry Neil, Visions of a Liberated Future: Black Arts Movement Writings (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1989), 62-78; Jerry Gafio Watts, Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 259-90; and Henry D. Miller, Theorizing Black Theatre: Art Versus Protest in Critical Writings, 1898-1965 (Jefferson: McFarland, 2011), 179-216. [3] Elam’s expansive analysis covers their one-act and extended plays from 1965 to 1971, concentrating on their plays’ shared themes and elements such as the influence of the social context, the content and form of the dramatic texts, and their performing spaces. Harry J. Elam Jr., Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 17. [4] Ibid., 4. [5] Ibid., 7. [6] Watts, Amiri Baraka, 82-83; and Broyles-González, El Teatro Campesino, 235-36. [7] The Slave opened in the St. Marks Playhouse in Greenwich Village in December 1964 while Bandido! was first staged in San Juan Bautista in 1981, and then at the Mark Taper Forum in California in 1994. Miller, Theorizing Black Theatre, 205; and Jon D. Rossini, Contemporary Latina/o Theater: Wrighting Ethnicity (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), 88-89. [8] See Broyles-González, El Teatro Campesino, 232; Watts, Amiri Baraka, 83; and Werner Sollors, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a “Populist Modernism” (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 134. [9] Huerta, Chicano Theater, 61; Broyles-González, El Teatro Campesino, 170-71, 189. [10] Scholars have discussed the role of audiences in relation to The Slave and Bandido! by focusing on Baraka’s goal of creating a black militant consciousness and Valdez’s attempt during the eighties to avoid the confrontational rhetoric characteristic of El Teatro Campesino’s plays. See Guillermo E. Hernández, Chicano Satire: A Study in Literary Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), 50; Broyles-González, El Teatro Campesino, 172-73, 229, 235-36; and Watts, Amiri Baraka, 83. [11] Rossini, Contemporary Latina/o Theater, 92. [12] Broyles-González, El Teatro Campesino, 235. [13] Elam, Taking it to the Streets, 3. [14] Valdez states in his manifest-poem, Pensamiento Serpentino (Serpentine Thoughts), that “To be CHICANO is to love yourself / your culture, your / skin, your language.” “Pensamiento Serpentino,” in Luis Valdez—Early Works: Actos, Bernabé and Pensamiento Serpentino (Houston: Arte Publico, 1990), 175. [15] Luis Valdez, “Notes on Chicano Theatre” in Luis Valdez—Early Works, 10. [16] Baraka wrote about his experiences visiting the island and witnessing first-hand the results of the revolution led by “a group of young radical intellectuals” much like himself; “Cuba Libre,” In Home: Social Essays (New York: William Morrow, 1966), 38; See also, Amiri Baraka, Conversations with Amiri Baraka, edited by Charlie Reilly (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 132; and Komozi Woodard, A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) & Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 52-54. [17] Huerta, “When Sleeping Giants Awaken,” 25. [18] W. B. Worthen, “Staging América: The Subject of History in Chicano/a Theatre,” Theatre Journal 49, no. 2 (1997): 103. [19] Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory and Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988), 89. [20] Phillip Brian Harper, Framing the Margins: The Social Logic of Postmodern Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 3. [21] Ibid., 28-29. [22] For discussions on The Slave, see Sollors, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 134-138; Lloyd Brown, Amiri Baraka (Boston: Twayne, 1980), 147-50; Neil, Visions of a Liberated Future, 67-74; Watts, Amiri Baraka, 78-84; and Miller, Theorizing Black Theatre, 205-11. [23] Amiri Baraka, “Black Is a Country,” in Home: Social Essays, 84. [24] Amiri Baraka, “Cold, Hurt, and Sorrow (Streets of Despair),” in Home: Social Essays, 94-95. [25] Watts, Amiri Baraka, 269-73, 445-49. [26] In his analysis of The Slave, Brown discusses briefly the significance of Vessels’s position as a “field slave” as an archetypal figure of black militancy. Brown, Amiri Baraka, 150. [27] Thomas R. Gray, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831) (Baltimore: Lucas & Denver, 1831), 6. Gray describes Turner during his 1831 slave rebellion in Virginia as “fiendish” and “savag[e]” and guided by a fundamentalist vision of retribution and conflict enacted in religious scriptures. [28] Amiri Baraka, “Street Protest,” in Home: Social Essays, 98. [29] Ibid., 98. [30] Sollors, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 135. [31] Amiri Baraka, The Slave in Dutchman and The Slave: Two Plays by LeRoi Jones (New York: Morrow, 1964), 43, 44. All subsequent references are indicated in parenthesis. [32] For discussion on The Slave’s prologue, see Sollors, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 137; Watts, Amiri Baraka, 78-79; and Miller, Theorizing Black Theatre, 209-210. [33] Amiri Baraka, introduction to The Motion of History and Other Plays. (New York: William Morrow, 1978), 13. See also, Amiri Baraka, “What Does Nonviolence Mean?” in Home: Social Essays, 137. [34] Baraka, “What Does Nonviolence Mean?,” 135, 137. [35] Neil, Visions of a Liberated Future, 70. [36] Ibid., 71-72. [37] Amiri Baraka, “The Revolutionary Theatre,” in Home: Social Essays, 211. [38] Neil correctly observes that The Slave “is essentially about Walker’s attempt to destroy his white past. For it is the past, with all of its painful memories, that is really the enemy of the revolutionary.” Neil, Visions of a Liberated Future, 70. [39] As Baraka comments in his Autobiography, his increasingly militant stance against whites opened a chasm between him and Hettie Jones, which forms the basis of the confrontation between Vessels and Grace in The Slave. The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka (New York: Freundlich Books, 1984), 195-96. [40] Samuel A. Hay, African American Theatre: A Historical and Critical Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 95. [41] Years later, Baraka observed that Vessels’s revolutionary goals were hindered due to his inability to shed his past. Baraka asserts that going “through the whole process of breast-beating, accusations, and lamenting meant” that Vessels still had “a relationship with his wife, with his past.” Conversations, 134. [42] See Miller, Theorizing Black Theatre, 210; Watts, Amiri Baraka, 82-83; Hay, African American Theatre, 95; and Sollors, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 137. [43] Baraka, Introduction to The Motion of History, 12. [44] See Watts, Amiri Baraka, 80; and Sollors, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 136. [45] Watts, Amiri Baraka, 83. [46] Miller, Theorizing Black Theatre, 210. [47] Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 66. [48] Huerta describes the significance of Shrunken Head since it marked the first time that “a Chicano playwright began to explore the idea of being marginalized in this country” and “became the first produced play written by a Chicano about being Chicano.” “Looking for the Magic: Chicanos in the Mainstream,” in Negotiating Performance: Gender, Sexuality, and Theatricality in Latin/o America, ed. Diana Taylor and Juan Villegas (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 38. [49] See Jorge Huerta, introduction to The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa in Necessary Theater: Six Plays about the Chicano Experience, ed. Jorge Huerta (Houston: Arte Publico, 1989), 143-44; Huerta, Chicano Theater, 53-54; and Worthen, “Staging América,” 111, 118. [50] Luis Valdez, The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa in Necessary Theater, 154. [51] Ibid., 155, 160. [52] Huerta points out that Valdez’s experimental style in Shrunken Head “set the tone for all of [his] later works, none of which can be termed realism or realistic” (Chicano Drama, 60). Similarly, the importance of history for Valdez was closely connected to Chicano identity and this theme is present at different stages during his career. Reflecting on the role of history within the Chicano movement, Valdez explains that he and other Chicano artists during the 1960s were “forced to re-examine the facts of history, and suffuse them with [their] own blood—to make them tell [their] reality.” “La Plebe,” in introduction to Aztlán: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature, ed. Luis Valdez and Stan Steiner (New York: Knopf, 1972), xxxi. [53] Huerta, Chicano Drama, 30. [54] Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper, 1981), 104. [55] Luis Valdez, Bandido! In Zoot Suit and other Plays (Houston: Arte Publico, 1992), 110. All subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. [56] Rossini discusses the negative reviews by theater critics of the 1994 staging of Bandido! in Contemporary Latina/o Theater, 89-90. [57] Broyles-González, El Teatro Campesino, 232. [58] The historical Vásquez was aware of the symbolic meaning of his actions and told at least one reporter about his intent to incite revolution in California. Before his execution, however, “Vásquez made no claim of being a revolutionary and offered no excuses for his lengthy criminal career” and “never took any steps to carry out a revolt against the Anglo majority.” John Boessenecker, Bandido: The Life and Times of Tiburcio Vásquez (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010), 372. [59] Huerta, Chicano Drama, 31. [60] Rossini, Contemporary Latina/o Theater, 92. [61] Juan J. Alonzo. Badmen, Bandits, and Folk Heroes: The Ambivalence of Mexican American Identity in Literature and Film (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009), 135-39. [62] Valdez, “La Plebe,” xxvi-xxvii. [63] The Battle of San Pasqual was a short-lived battle of the U.S.-Mexican War fought between Stephen Kearny’s troops and a group of Californio lanceros (California lancers) led by Andrés Pico. After a brief scrimmage, the battle turned into a standoff with Kearny’s brief siege of the village of San Pasqual. John S. Eisenhower, So Far from God: The U.S. War with Mexico: 1846-1848 (New York: Random House), 222-26. [64] Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York: Methuen, 1985), 29. [65] Hutcheon, Poetics, 11. [66] For discussions on Valdez’s use of melodrama in Bandido!, see Huerta, Introduction to Zoot Suit. In Zoot Suit and other Plays, 18; Worthen, “Staging América,” 113-15; Huerta, Chicano Drama, 29-30; and Rossini, Contemporary Latina/o Theater, 78-87. [67] Huerta, Chicano Drama, 30. [68] See Broyles-González, El Teatro Campesino, 137, 232; Worthen, “Staging América,” 114; and Rossini, Contemporary Latina/o Theater, 89. [69] Ramón Saldívar, Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 17. “Historical Subjectivity and the Revolutionary Archetype in Amiri Baraka's The Slave and Luis Valdez's Bandido!” by Jose Fernandez ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 29, Number 1 (Fall 2016/Winter 2017) ©2017 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center 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: Curtis Russell Editorial Assistant: Christine Snyder 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 Table of Contents: “Historical Subjectivity and the Revolutionary Archetype in Amiri Baraka's The Slave and Luis Valdez's Bandido!” by Jose Fernandez “Calculated Cacophonies: The Queer Asian American Family and the Nonmusical Musical in Chay Yew's Wonderland" by Stephen Hong Sohn www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director ©2016 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Performance, Identity, and Immigration Law August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle Affective Performance and Cognitive Science Kitchen Sink Realisms Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience Everything Plus the Kitchen Sink Calculated Cacophonies: The Queer Asian American Family and the Nonmusical Musical in Chay Yew's Wonderland Historical Subjectivity and the Revolutionary Archetype in Amiri Baraka's The Slave and Luis Valdez's Bandido! 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