Search Results

Tom Grady. Bristol Community College Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Tom Grady. Bristol Community College By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Gabriel Graetz and John Hardin in Hangmen at the Gamm. Photo: Cat Laine Topdog|Underdog Suzan-Lori Parks (7 Sept. – 1 Oct.) Hangmen Martin McDonagh (2 – 26 Nov.) It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play adapted by Joe Landry (9 – 24 Dec.) Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Edward Albee (25 Jan. – 18 Feb.) Twelfth Night William Shakespeare (21 Mar. - 14 Apr.) Doubt: A Parable John Patrick Shanley (9 May – 2 Jun.) The 39th season of the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm) was notable for its polished, self-assured productions. Their mission purports to “engage seriously with the most important issues of our time.” The use of “our time” is relative since this slate of plays was apparently less focused on shining a light, at least directly, upon current issues than bringing bankable titles to Rhode Island. Not a serious problem, but it is notable that two of the plays were recent Broadway revivals ( Topdog/Underdog won 2023’s Best Revival Tony Award, and Doubt: A Parable earned three 2024 Tony nominations). Certainly, the productions drew parallels to our cultural moment, but the connections were associative rather than direct. The issues are still important, but that is where their currency ended. And perhaps that was enough, especially given the quality of the productions. For the season opener, the Gamm offered a serviceable version of Suzan Lori Parks’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Topdog/Underdog . The performers in this two-hander, Anthony T. Goss and Marc Pierre, while compelling, had yet to find their way in acting and reacting in the same production. Most memorable was Michael McGarty’s stunner of a set, which completely gutted and transformed the Gamm’s interior into the world’s saddest rooming house. But first, the audience was funneled down a dim, David Lynch-y hallway, replete with scuzzy walls and electric candle sconces, one of which was fritzing on and off, only to open out to an elevated, square playing area, the audience seated on four sides. The boxing ring motif, replete with Klieg lights, pitted the play’s two brothers in the ring as they bobbed and weaved their way to the play’s inevitable knockout. While the play is almost 24 years old, its withering hopelessness for Black people’s access to the American Dream still resonated. Next up was Martin McDonagh’s Hangmen, helmed by artistic director Tony Estrella. The lavish production values and impeccable casting made this a roundhouse of theatrical showmanship. The wraparound soundscape and noirish lighting gave weight to McDonagh’s black comedy about psychos and dum-dums meting out justice. McDonagh’s elliptical dialogue provided a platform for some serious showboating, and Estrella found just the right ensemble, led by Steve Kidd, who were put to the test with some elaborate stage combat as they charged up and down Jessica Hill Kidd’s sturdy, two-tiered set. It was this season’s highlight. The staged radio version of It’s a Wonderful Life is apparently enshrined as the Gamm’s annual holiday tradition and served an easy, lived-in feel. It’s just the story performed with the actors behind mic stands, peppered with some witty commercial breaks. The standout voice work belonged to character actors Fred Sullivan and Ernie Bishop, who often switched roles, sometimes midsentence. While Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is arguably one of the most important plays of the 20th century, it is also a long, relentless battering ram of invective, and in the wrong hands, it is torturous for all the wrong reasons. The Gamm has earned its stripes to take on this behemoth. Much credit must go to director Steve Kidd for creating such tight focus and momentum. Kidd positioned the subtext for these four characters to be in a fierce competition to be seen. He staged their desperation in restless stage movement without it ever looking like “blocking.” The two leads, especially Tony Estrella and Jeanine Kane, have deepened their craft over the years; they were inside their characters instead of pushing them. This highly energized production had an extended run. Next was the Gamm’s deliriously silly take on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night . There was a moment of dread, though. Early on, an audience member was dragged on stage for a quick two-step. This was a big uh-oh for seasoned Rhode Island theatergoers who don’t necessarily appreciate “interactive” bits, such as delivering a monologue about aging while patting the bald head of an unwitting and mortified audience member. Thankfully, this tactic was kept to a minimum. Instead, this more assured production drew upon the Gamm’s skills with live music and galumphing farce. The set itself, a pair of shipping containers with swinging crate doors, escalated the absurd and showstopping entrances and exits of Malvolio, Toby Belch, and company. The Gamm concluded its season with John Patrick Shanley’s masterpiece, Doubt . This production was an apotheosis for one actor’s career. Phyllis Kay played the imperious Sister Aloysius, and as they say, it was a part she was born to play. Kay is small in stature but booming in presence, employing her voice’s lower register to decimate anyone who challenges her surety. But there was vulnerability, too, eking its way out in the play’s quiet, final moments, and it was utterly shattering. Kay knows her subtext and was ready to parry in the many bouts that occur during this investigation of veracity. The remainder of the cast was less assured. Perhaps the choice to end this season with this play had less to do with the Gamm’s mission than it did with celebrating a local artist at the height of her craft. Season 39 demonstrated the promise of a sustainable future for the Gamm and its milestone 2024-25 40th season: The Effect by Lucy Prebble, Amadeus by Peter Shaffer, Girls & Boys by Dennis Kelly, Between Riverside and Crazy by Stephen Adly Guirgis, Hamlet by William Shakespeare. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) TOM GRADY is a playwright whose work has been staged by notable companies like Trinity Repertory Company and The Drama League. He was a story consultant for David Henry Hwang’s Tony-nominated Flower Drum Song . His play An American Cocktail won the Clauder Competition, while Global Village earned the Dallas Theatre Critics Forum Award and was a finalist for a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship. He wrote and co-directed Symposium , starring Oscar-nominated Margaret Avery, winning awards at fifteen festivals. Grady holds a BA in Film and a Master’s in English, and he teaches at Bristol Community College in New Bedford, MA. 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 A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Melissa Sturges Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 2 Visit Journal Homepage Frankenstein Melissa Sturges By Published on July 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF Frankenstein Written and directed by Emily Burns Based on the novel by Mary Shelley Shakespeare Theatre Company Washington, D.C. June 14, 2025 Reviewed by Melissa Lin Sturges Thunder crackled as an explosive beam of lightning irradiated Dr. Frankenstein’s operating table. Contrasted by deep shadows, a human-sized entity stirred under flashes of strobe lights. The story is a familiar one: a tortured biologist, the monster he creates, and the family members sacrificed to his vanity. Shakespeare Theatre Company (STC)’s 2025 production of Frankenstein , newly adapted by playwright and director Emily Burns, rewrites Mary Shelley’s cautionary tale about personal responsibility for a new age. Weighing the burdens of responsibility against the privileges of familial love, Burns’s production recenters women’s voices often made unfamiliar to, but at the crux of, this classic 1818 novel. Shelley’s Frankenstein famously experiments with point of view: the novel begins from the epistolary perspective of arctic explorer Robert Walton, then transitions to the voice of Victor Frankenstein, and finally to that of the creature himself. The problem with first-person omniscience, however, is that it is notoriously untrustworthy—the tagline of STC’s production knowingly cautions its audiences to “trust him not.” Crucially, although the narrative is conveyed through dramatic dialogue, Burns’s adaptation centers on a character often overlooked in critical studies of Shelley’s work: that of Elizabeth Frankenstein (née Lavenza), Victor's adopted sister and later his fiancée. Rebecca S’manga Frank, Anna Takayo, and Nick Westrate in Frankenstein at Shakespeare Theatre Company. Photo: DJ Corey Photography. With the help a talented design team that included scenic designer Andrew Boyce, costume designer Kaye Voyce, lighting designer Neil Austin, sound designer and composer André Pluess, and projection designer Elizabeth Barrett, the production recenters the righteous domesticity of Shelley’s age-old treatise on nature versus nurture. Staged in a traditional proscenium at The Klein Theatre in downtown Washington, DC, Burns’s direction was strikingly confrontational. Much of the production was original, with select dialog direct from Shelley’s novel projected above the stage. The entire production took place within the confines of a turn-of-the-nineteenth-century kitchen, with the operating table doubling as a dining table and complete with cast-iron ornaments and preserved vegetables. With deep recesses and floor-to-ceiling windows, the truncated locale demonstrates how the Frankenstein manor is haunted in more ways than one. Brooding but cavalier, Nick Westgate played Victor as a wily suitor to Elizabeth, always assuming the best of himself and the worst of her ignorance to the greater conflict at hand. As Elizabeth, Rebecca S'manga Frank forcefully navigated the male-centric narrative with undergirds of passion, warmth and charisma. Her character responds as anyone in a committed relationship with a monster might, yet Frank skillfully preserved Elizabeth’s values and sense of self-agency. Costumed in a series of elegant period gowns, Elizabeth’s confidence abounded. During the opening scene, her colorful, bodiced frock contrasted with Victor’s haphazard pajamas as he blindfolded himself to keep from “seeing the bride on her wedding day” — a foolish way to prove to Elizabeth he is not interested in true communication. Burns takes various liberties with Shelley’s text and in many ways challenges both the literal and thematic structure of the original narrative. She foremost deepens the familial bond between Victor and Elizabeth by including flashback scenes to their childhood, when grieving their mother’s death, and during their engagement. In doing so, it becomes easier to see how Victor’s scientific endeavors, his narcissism, and his prolonged absences negatively impacted Elizabeth’s coming of age. As in the original novel, Victor returns from Ingolstadt to his home in Geneva horrified by the monster he has created. He arrives with plans to marry his fiancée of six years and assist with raising his younger brother, William. Meanwhile, his creature watches from a distance, observing the family's behaviors. When the creature murders William, a young caretaker and close family friend named Justine is falsely accused and executed for the crime. All of this rings true in Burns’ adaptation as well. Played by Anna Takayo, Justine delivers a devastating final monologue about believing she failed to love and care for William in the final moments of his life. However, whereas the creature vengefully murders Shelley’s Elizabeth on her wedding night, STC’s production offers an unexpected turn for the couple. Elizabeth attempts to call off the engagement with Victor, citing that his absence and negligence has built a wall between them. She also expresses doubts about his desire for children. However, believing that motherhood holds more for her than a loving marriage, Elizabeth pleads with Victor to marry her, to which he arrogantly concedes. While we do not see Victor interact with his creature as in Shelley’s novel, the demands of both the creature and Elizabeth converge audibly as she begs Victor to “make me a wife”— a plea that echoes the creature’s famous request in Shelley’s novel, when he demands that Frankenstein create a companion for him. Victor leaves Elizabeth during her pregnancy to settle his debts, so to speak, in Ingolstadt. He invents a story about his dangerously obsessive colleague threatening their family so that he may cover up the true source of their surveillance. When he returns to meet his five-day-old child, he begs Elizabeth to depart Geneva with him immediately. Elizabeth protests, insisting their daughter is too young to travel, to which Victor suggests leaving her behind to keep her safe. Begrudged at her inability to feed the child herself, Elizabeth has also hired a wetnurse named Esther (Takayo in a secondary role) who warns Elizabeth about the emotional toll of leaving her child behind—and to be suspicious of her husband’s motives. After a devastating argument in which audiences recognize Elizabeth’s bleeding-heart dilemma about what it means to be a good parent, the couple leave the child behind. While Burns invents this scene for her adaptation, it is ironically haunted by the novel’s deep interrogation of what it means to abandon one’s own creation. Rebecca S’manga Frank and Nick Westrate in Frankenstein at Shakespeare Theatre Company. Photo: DJ Corey Photography. A pinnacle work of Romantic literature, Frankenstein is well understood as a commentary on scientific versus godly creationism. It makes sense that in an adaptation centered on Victor’s family and romantic life, the doctor’s act of creationism would assume new meaning when juxtaposed with Elizabeth’s maternal narrative. Grieving her abandonment yet hopeful of reuniting with her daughter, Elizabeth is pushed to the breaking point. Victor continues to mislead and misguide her—dragging her across Europe for reasons still unknown to her. Upon returning to Geneva, Elizabeth adopts a small girl she believes is her own child, Eva (alternatively played by child actors Monroe E. Barnes and Mila Weir). As Eva grew, however, she caught the attention of another father figure: the creature himself, alternately portrayed by José Espinosa and Lucas Iverson. Far from the fantastical green figure so often imagined as Frankenstein’s infamous monster, this creature is a gentle, conventionally attractive young man, forced to fend for himself and build his own identity. The creature reveals the scars of his past to Elizabeth as Victor finally admits to his own responsibility. As Victor prepares a mob to vanquish his creature once and for all, Elizabeth and Eva escape with the creature’s help. The creature surrenders to the mob, finally understanding the lengths a parent would go to protect their child. Frankenstein has always explored themes of family and paternalism, and Burns’s timely production rightly brings attention to the feminine perspective in these discussions. This invites consideration of what Shelley might have felt as a woman dutifully writing in the shadow of her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and his contemporaries. Burns contemplates what it might have felt for Victor’s family to witness his descent into madness firsthand. Burns demands a more intimate reception of Frankenstein’s downfall, understanding where his tragedy truly lay and doing justice to those written out of the narrative. This bold and elegant production of Frankenstein might finally convince audiences to hold the real monster accountable for his actions. References Footnotes About The Author(s) MELISSA STURGES earned her PhD in Theatre & Performance Studies from the University of Maryland and her Masters in Theatre from Villanova University. Published in Theatre Survey , Contemporary Theatre Review , The Eugene O’Neill Review , and elsewhere, her work centers modern theatre and addiction studies as well as queer theory and adaptation. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Censorship/Public Censure and Performance Today: Special Issue Introduction Remembering Censorship in the World Premiere of Seán O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned: Lafayette, Indiana, 1959 The Stage as Networked Battleground: Dissent and Censorship in Contemporary Canadian Theatre and Performance Censor/Censure: A Roundtable Which of These Are Censorship? The Divide Between Prior Restraint and Soft Censorship How Can an Artist Respond to Censorship? The Dilemma That Faces Contemporary Creatives in the UK The LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project: A Roundtable Conversation Life is Drag: Documenting Spectacle as Resistance An Interview with Rachel Rampleman Middle Eastern American Theatre: Communities, Cultures, and Artists. Michael Malek Najjar. Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2021; Pp. xvi + 237. Lessons from Our Students: Meditations on Performance Pedagogy. Stacey Cabaj and Andrea Odinov. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 126 Choreographing Dirt: Movement, Performance, and Ecology in the Anthropocene. Angenette Spalink. Studies in Theatre, Ecology, and Performance Series, no. 3. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 116. Fauci and Kramer Our Town Frankenstein Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

grace shinhae jun 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 Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration grace shinhae jun By Published on May 20, 2022 Download Article as PDF Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration. SanSan Kwan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021; Pp. 136. SanSan Kwan’s Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration contributes a timely analysis of Asian American performance to the fields of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies, fields in which the voices of Asian American scholars are needed. Love Dances studies in great depth a series of duet collaborations that center intercultural connection, grief, loss, and impossibility. Kwan’s personal experiences of love and loss, her own duet performances, and her reflections on her late husband serve as entry points to her observant and philosophical examinations of intercultural collaborations. Kwan situates her work among scholarship that questions the ethics and politics of intercultural performances. How do intercultural collaborations, she asks, heal the harmful effects of Orientalism and colonialism; lead to vulnerability and love in the presence of radical differences; and generate powerful connections in the face of losses in translations, refusals, and grief? While dance scholarship has identified the ways Asian aesthetics have been historically appropriated in Euro-American concert dance, Kwan also outlines the history of interculturalism in theatre that emerged from appropriation and exploitation. Kwan turns to theories of “new interculturalism” that better “tease out the complexities across multiculturalism, postcolonialism, ethnic and racial difference, intraculturalism, and interculturalism” (9). She looks to the duets not for what they represent but for what happens in the process of intercultural exchange and centering the emphasis on relationality. She looks at the dance collaborations as a means to discuss the themes of love, loss, vulnerability, refusal, third spaces, and pedagogy, finding that they provide something embodied and intimate that other expressive mediums cannot. The book features Kwan’s detailed descriptions and thoughtful reflections on a progressive series of intriguing intercultural duet performances. In Chapter 1, “Talking,” Kwan analyzes the performance Pichet Klunchun and Myself between classical Thai choreographer Pichet Klunchun and French choreographer Jérôme Bel. She argues that the performance, despite being an intercultural collaboration, reinforces and reproduces Orientalist logics. She is wary of its mostly verbal exchange, with occasional dance demonstrations, as it retains power dynamics and reveals where intercultural collaboration potentially fails. Reading Klunchun as the East and therefore the keeper of tradition and Bel as the West and therefore representative of individual innovation, Kwan shows the inequities that can arise in an intercultural exchange. However, Kwan notes that this failure also provides a pedagogical opportunity to delve into histories of racialized oppression and colonialism. In the second chapter, “Mourning,” Kwan analyzes two different duet collaborations: Flash and Simulacrum. In Flash, African American hip hop choreographer Rennie Harris and Japanese American butoh-based interdisciplinary dancer Michael Sakamoto both practice movement forms stemming from histories of racial and social violence and trauma, yet their intercultural textual and movement collaboration provides strategies for healing trauma and creating cross-cultural empathy. Harris resists intimacy initially in the creative process, but Sakamoto’s hospitality and generosity and Harris’s reciprocity transformed the rehearsal space into a space of truth devoted to surviving anti-Black racism and post-incarceration Japanese American life. In Simulacrum, Kwan explores the potential for empathy. In her analysis, she delineates the ways that care and vulnerability emerge in the process of cross-cultural collaboration between Argentinian contemporary and kabuki dancer Daniel Proietto and Japanese Flamenco dancer Kojima Shoji. Both the Flash and Simulacrum duets are predicated on themes of mourning, rendering loss as absence that can also be generative. “Commiseration,” for Kwan, “is a practice of mutual empathy” (62). Through empathy, the artists show that we can have a meaningful connection to another’s cultural-corporeal history, even if we cannot fully inhabit it. In the final chapter “Loving,” Kwan turns to Vietnamese French choreographer Emmanuelle Huynh who duets with Japanese butoh artist Kasai Akira in Spiel and with Japanese butoh-informed dancer Otake Eiko in Talking Duet. Restating her interest in Leo Cabranes-Grant’s concept of intercultural encounter as an “engine of emergence” and not solely a point of contact and meeting, Kwan looks to these duets as forms of pedagogy. These textual and movement performances create third spaces to encounter alterity and otherness and reveal the incommensurabilities and impossibilities of intercultural encounters. Spiel and Talking Duet expand on the prior chapters’ text and movement analysis by centering improvisational performance. Improvisation, she argues, demands interlocutors to be receptive, responsive, “submissive but also sovereign” in ways that deepen the intercultural collaboration (104). Improvisation becomes the method of vulnerability, openness, and willingness to change. Kwan concludes this highly original and compelling study by questioning what unites collaborators even when their intercultural encounters fall short. For Kwan, the collaborative process across and between cultures bears potentiality, the practice of empathy, and the act of loving. She grounds the significance of these intercultural encounters as models of how to love, and co-create, even in the face of misunderstandings and loss. Love is a guiding principle and a necessary condition for ethical intercultural exchange, and for Kwan love does not exist without loss. Ultimately love offers opportunities to begin again and again. Love Dances contributes significant insight to Dance, Theatre, and Performance Studies from the poignant perspective of a performer and a scholar. Accessible and nuanced, Love Dances is a necessary text for practitioners looking to collaborate ethically across cultural, racial, social, and gendered spaces. 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.

Martha S. LoMonaco, Editor, New England Theatre in Review Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 1 Visit Journal Homepage Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 Martha S. LoMonaco, Editor, New England Theatre in Review By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF Welcome to the new incarnation of New England Theatre in Review , the performance review section of the late lamented New England Theatre Journal which ceased publication last year. The kind editors of JADT made space for us last fall when I had a section brimming with news on the New England theatre scene but no place to publish it, and they further offered us a continuing gig in subsequent Fall issues. This issue features three articles that provide thoughtful interrogations of political theatre in the Berkshire mountains of western Massachusetts; highlight noteworthy productions at five small independent theatres of Greater Boston; and provide a window into Long Wharf Theater’s self-reinvention: Long Wharf abandoned its physical theatre space two years ago and is now peripatetically performing in and around New Haven, Connecticut, in hopes of reaching new audiences and new theatrical possibilities. All three give insights into how American regional theatre is thriving post-pandemic, beyond the boundaries of New York City, and in addressing the needs and entertainment desires of their local communities. Since Long Wharf is now straying a bit beyond New England’s boundaries—its 2025-26 theatre season opens with a co-production exclusively performed in New York City—I’m wondering if future issues of NETIR might take a similar tactic. I invite readers to consider writing about performance that has some base in New England—perhaps it originated there or is about some area or personality associated with or inspired by New England—but you may have seen elsewhere. Or you want to profile a particular production, series of related productions, or theatre within the six New England states that is doing noteworthy work that demands to be documented. Please send your suggestions for articles to me at: unit12msl@yahoo.com . References Footnotes About The Author(s) MARTHA S. LOMONACO is a theatre director, dramaturg, historian, and writer. She is Professor Emerita of Theatre and American Studies at Fairfield University, where she was resident director and ran the theatre program for thirty-four years. She is the author of two monographs Every Week, A Broadway Revue: The Tamiment Playhouse, 1921-1960 and Summer Stock: An American Theatrical Phenomenon and an edited collection, Theatre Exhibitions , volume thirty-three of Performing Arts Resources . She has been editor of New England Theatre in Review since 2010. 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 Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale “The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. The Brothers Size Dead Outlaw 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival ZAZ Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Esther Kim Lee 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 Strangers Onstage: Asia, America, Theatre, and Performance Esther Kim Lee By Published on March 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF When I was writing my dissertation in the late 1990s, I would tell anyone who would ask that my topic was Asian American theatre. I was ready with my elevator speech tinged with obligatory graduate student’s anxiety, but mostly, I was excited to share how I was interviewing artists around the country for the project. “Actors, playwrights, communities, and producers!,” my voice would rise. Some people politely responded with “that’s interesting,” which could mean many things, but often, I would get an answer that ran something like, “oh, I love kabuki!” I would have no choice but to smile and say, “me too” because it was true and because I had to think about my follow up response. How aggressively do I explain that Asian theatre is different from Asian American theatre? How do I detail the links between Asian American theatre and other American ethnic theatres? Should I describe the stereotype of the perpetual foreigner and how it represents the exclusion of Asian Americans in the imagining of America? Or do I present a crash course on the East West Players, the first Asian American theatre company founded in 1965 in Los Angeles? Depending on the circumstance and my mood, my response varied, but generally, I tried my best to explain the significance of documenting a part of American theatre history that had been overlooked. While I grew tired of explaining my project, I also fantasized about titling my yet to be written book “Strangers Onstage” to recall Ronald Takaki’s seminal book, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (1990). Most Asian immigrants crossed the Pacific Ocean, not the Atlantic. Because of their visual and geographic strangeness compared to European immigrants, they were excluded from citizenship, accused as disloyal, interned, and disenfranchised from all sectors of the society. Theatre was no exception. American theatre, as Karen Shimakawa has brilliantly argued, has functioned as a major site of “national abjection” of Asian Americans. Feeling like a stranger myself, I wanted to tell the story of other strangers who collectively built Asian American theatre while hoping to bridge different disciplines, including Asian American studies and theatre and performance studies. On that metaphorical bridge, I had the fortune of meeting scholars, both senior and emerging, who shared my scholarly mission and who also felt like strangers in a field that was still not legible to many. Together, however, we knew the field had much potential for multiplicity of research agendas, theoretical growth, and critical intervention. In the past five years, several books have been published as a full demonstration of that potential. The titles include: Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns’ Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Empire (2013); Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson’s A Race So Different: Performance and Law in Asian America (2013); Sean Metzger’s Chinese Looks: Fashion, Performance, Race (2014); Eng-Beng Lim’s Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias (2014); and Ju Yon Kim’s The Racial Mundane: Asian American Performance and the Embodied Everyday (2015). The books showcase innovative interdisciplinary approaches and nuanced understandings of how race, body, geopolitics, history, and performance intersect. It is an incredibly formative time for those of us writing about the relationship between performance and “Asia.” I believe we are witnessing the emergence of a new field that has yet to be named. I can try to name it, although none of them are completely satisfactory: Asian diaporic performances; transnational performance in the Asias (to borrow Lim’s plural noun); and Asian/American performances (although I wince at the thought of using the slash). The difficulty in naming the field stems from the fundamental shift in how the authors pose their questions. Two decades ago, the questions I asked about Asian American theatre were about representation and empowerment onstage: for instance, how can we let Jonathan Pryce perform in yellowface makeup in Miss Saigon when talented Asian American actors do not even get to audition for the role? While such questions of representation and empowerment are still relevant, the books I mention above ask readers to look beyond the stage and to reexamine all concepts. Performance, for instance, is not simply a mode of representation, but it is an episteme. Instead of looking at performance as an object of study, as I did for my dissertation, the authors use performance as a methodological tool to examine how meaning is created both on and off stage. Similarly, Asia is not a stable geographical location but a constructed concept that connotes power structure and positionality. The books examine the interplay between the quotidian and the theatrical and between racialization and the performative to address broader questions of gender, sexuality, politics, and law. For instance, Burns uses the term puro arte to explore how the Filipino/a performing body is central to understanding the US-Philippine imperial relations. Metzger, on the other hand, focuses on fashion to trace how American perception of China has changed in the past 150 years. In all of the books, the performance of everyday, or what Kim calls the mundane, is central to identifying what is a stake in body politics. Indeed, what is at stake now? Perhaps an answer to that question can be found in how all of the authors variously describe their subjects of study as ironies, paradoxes, and ambiguities. Lim, for example, describes the Asian native boy during colonial encounters as a “critical paradox” because he embodied contradictory fantasies and fears and because his identity can be described only as queer and performative, both of which are paradoxical concepts to begin with. Chambers-Letson focuses on the legal paradox of demanding assimilation of Asian Americans while passing exclusionary laws. What can we learn from these paradoxes? Come to think of it, “stranger onstage” is also a paradoxical idea. The theatrical stage demands an illusion of reality that promises to make the stranger familiar. The stranger is still onstage, the recent books seem to say collectively, except the stage is much broader, and the stranger has many questions. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Esther Kim Lee is Associate Professor in the School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of Maryland. She is the author of A History of Asian American Theatre (2006) and The Theatre of David Henry Hwang (2015). 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.

Dr. Kimmika L.H. Williams Witherspoon 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 From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater Dr. Kimmika L.H. Williams Witherspoon By Published on May 13, 2023 Download Article as PDF On, (May 25, 2020), for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, the world watched the callous murder of George Floyd at the hands of members of the Minneapolis police department in Minnesota and Black Lives Matter protests erupted—not just in the United States; but, in Ireland the UK and across the globe. Two years earlier, thanks to a $50,000 Lumina Foundation for Racial Justice and Equity grant, the Temple University Theater department worked with a team of faculty, administrators and staff researchers to collect data, conceive and then mount the devised theater piece, called From Safe to Brave. That play was created from a series of Interactive Community Conversations (or, ICC’s), auto-ethnography, body-mapping and poetic ethnographies that pulled together all that research on the effects of race and hate crimes on college campuses across America. It was that research and devised performance—along with the subsequent racialized and polarizing political ecology that led to the development of the Performance Social Justice Model (PSJR) for devised theater. Methodology In response to the rise in hate crimes generally and specifically on college campuses in the US, in the context of a political moment, where a nation has been made to grapple with questions around white supremacy, police violence, Black Lives Matter and socio-political and health care inequities for their BIPOC citizenry, a Temple University team of scholars, staff and administrators, came together to apply for and were awarded a $50,000 Lumina Foundation for Racial Justice and Equity grant. Out of a pool of over 312 proposals, 12 were awarded; and the Temple University project, entitled Moving from Safe to Brave Spaces through Interactive Community Conversations , was one of them (2018-2019). Fifty-seven participants took part in those community conversations over a four-month period and, out of that research, scores of auto-ethnography, body-mapping and poetic ethnographies were created and collected that would become the devised theater piece From Safe to Brave . As PI, playwright and director of just one of the principal deliverables of the grant, that performance piece, From Safe to Brave , was originally produced for Temple University’s Randall Theater (April 23-24, 2019). Playing to standing-room-only crowds for its limited 2-day run, from its conception as a devised theater ecology, the From Safe to Brave project helped us develop a model for digging deep and exploring the impact of race and racism on the relationships of individuals on and through a community like Temple University— a large, urban, educational institution, deeply embedded in what was once, a predominantly Black and Latinx community. And then, there was George Floyd! As protests emerged around the world, the Temple Theater department wanted to remount that piece following the murder of George Floyd in 2020 for a virtual audience to contribute to the discourse and encourage healing. Ethnographies In the Performative Arts and Humanities, conducting and collecting ethnography that can become “performed research” can be an effective tool for mediating difficult conversations and diving deep into the various stakeholder perspectives while capturing community for the non-threatening, non-confrontational performance space. Engaging members of the community in research that results in performance oftentimes tempers and/or defuses their usual defensiveness to publicly discuss the, oftentimes, issues of contention. Instead, these kinds of devised performances can promote a willingness to s hare the other side of the story when convinced that their views will have equal platform and voice . This devised community performance grew out of research with an intergenerational tapestry of fifty-seven community voices made up of students, faculty, administrators and resident participants from the Temple University community, that used memory, narrative, song, poetry, and dance to speak to notions of race, racism , and the impact of hate crimes on college campuses. Performed Social Justice Research (PSJR) Model PSJR Model Model Phase Items Component Parts Purpose Challenges Outcomes ICC’s Akin to Focus Groups Interactive Community Conversation 5-15 participants per ICC Information, Consent Pre and Post Surveys Packing the ICC. Never reached full capacity. Demographic data; consent, Developing a shared lexicon Reflexivity Memory Writing Prompts Identifying Stakeholder Positions. Creation of auto-ethnography and personal narratives. We slotted an hour and one half for this portion. Needs 2-hour minimum Auto-ethnography, personal narratives, & poetic ethnography Visual Model Embodied memory Body Mapping exercises Creation of Body Maps as visual ethnography. Recorded explanations of map and key–– Additional ethnography. Slotted time: 1 ½ hours. Needs to be a minimum of 2 hrs. Creation of Body Maps as visual ethnography Recorded explanations of map and key— Additional ethnography. Data Analysis Analysis of Quantitative and Qualitative data Reviewing and curating auto-ethnography Transcription, Data-mining Archival footage; Body maps Reviews the data; Audio and video ethnography Script development Framed Body Maps Dissemination of “Applied,” research data Devised Theater Auditions Casting Rehearsals Developing a DUI signage Turn-around time from rehearsals, to mounting the production. All the participating researchers should be invited to the performance. Performed Social Justice Research (PSJR) Model Following the murder of George Floyd (May 25, 2020), not long after the start of the pandemic, I was asked by my chair to remount that initial performance of From Safe to Brave . In the initial face-to-face version, my colleagues and I had used the PSJR model that we developed to collect and distill ethnographies from a wide swath of participants as they grappled with an incredibly complex racialized political ecology. As mentioned, that work became, first, From Save to Brave (2019) and then, remounted for a virtual audience, From Save to Brave Redux (November 2020). This PSJR model allows us to expand the understanding and definitions of ethnography and encourages us, as artists/activists to explore the importance of validating community stories in our work to improve social justice outcomes. Interactive Community Conversation (ICC) Relying on focus groups to inform our data collection on the efficacy of interventions, policies and procedures has been part of our work for years. Incorporating the Interactive Community Conversations or (ICC’s) into the model, relies heavily on storytelling and body-mapping. Using Interactive Community Conversations as the first phase of the Performance Social Justice Research, offers a creativity-centric tool that grounds our work in storytelling, theater and performance studies that can be employed to enhance the effectiveness of the kinds of ethnographic data that we capture that might not otherwise be gleaned from any other typical focus group. The ICC’s should still include information about the impetus for the research and mechanisms to consent to the research, as well as options as to whether they will or will not consent to the use of their auto-ethnographies, ethnographies and body maps to be used in the resulting performance. For our research, all of the reflexive auto-ethnographies that were prompt-driven were written in blue books that we provided participants at the start of each ICC. While all of the participants had the option to take part in all of the activities, at the end of each ICC, participants always had the option of keeping their Blue Books to themselves and not contributing their auto-ethnographies to the overall project. Participants could also opt to allow us to transcribe their auto-ethnographies anonymously. The PSJR model still incorporates some of the more traditional focus group components. Our project utilized pre and post-surveys. While optional, these surveys attempted to collect demographic, education and social science data, as well as to evaluative data to quantify the participants’ understanding of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion terminology and theories on race and anti-racism—both, before and after, each new activity would be introduced throughout the ICC’s. The post-surveys helped our research team evaluate the efficacy of the Reflexive Auto-ethnography and Visual Ethnography phases of the project. Cultural Competency: Developing a Shared Lexicon Following the pre-survey, to develop and encourage a shared lexicon, we introduced a discussion of terms that included words like: Power Privilege Racism Prejudice Institutional racism Violence Activism For those who will, likewise, try implementing the PSJR model, whatever your project is, identifying and defining the terms and theories that are integral to the subject matter and your research; then, reviewing and discussing those collectively with each group of participants evens the playing field , reduces the occurrences of misunderstanding and limits the instances whereby one or more participants who already know the terminology (or, terminologies) to then adopt and take on the role as specialists—and, thereby, potentially, intimidating the others. Reflexivity Model Phase Because PSJR operates as “applied performance research”, to promote community understanding and to expand the social justice ecology of the project, allowing participants to craft auto-ethnographies that speak to their own identity as one of the first reflexive exercises gives participants, not only a voice, but also gives them a sense of agency. Later, in the rehearsal process, these auto-ethnographies can be referenced to help mark and solidify how the work should be embodied. Poetic Ethnography Prompts Reflexive Writing Activities provided an easy, structured way to craft quick auto-ethnographies. For this project, we used several Poetic Ethnography prompts that I regularly use in classroom and workshop settings that are meant to operate as easy access points to promote creativity. Poetic Ethnography Prompts One Line on Identity Seven Squared Haiku on Race Happiest Memory free write Saddest Memory free write Using these reflective exercises, seemingly, made crafting and developing the auto-ethnographies easier. While some of the memories that participants wrote about and shared were indeed, rich—full of sights, sounds, feelings and emotions—some were, in fact, triggering and traumatizing. In our project, the prompt sequence allowed participants to quickly access the sometimes, difficult and challenging memories of race and racism and to expeditiously talk about those instances that so impacted their lives. If your project, likewise, tackles sensitive or triggering issues or trauma-informed memories, using auto-ethnography prompts offers a strategic way to briefly gain access to some of those challenging thoughts, feelings, and emotions. The key to collecting meaningful reflections is to keep the prompts focused, short, quick and easy and to give individuals an appropriate amount of time to share their reflections (or not to share , depending upon their comfort level.) Because the prompts are timed, individuals don’t get bogged down in over-thinking any one memory; and because they are being asked to reflect on their own individual stories, the research team has already assured them that they are already invested in each, individual participant’s positionality, personal narrative, participation and input. Visual Model Phase Rethinking Rene Descartes’ notion of Mind/Body Dualism (Rene Descartes, 1993) the Visual model phase of the PSJR work transforms Descartes’ ideas “I think therefore I am ” to one that acknowledges the importance of the emotional connections in our work as artist/activists and social justice advocates. I feel therefore I am (Williams-Witherspoon, 2020) builds on the research of people like Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and others, who acknowledge, that by “triggering moments of deep reflection, when people are thinking deeply about things that are really meaningful to them, they are triggering neurobiological connections.” (Immordino-Yang, 2016: 18) In other words, “reflection promotes deep thinking.” (Williams-Witherspoon, 2020, Performing Race : 45) Body Mapping For our project, we used Body mapping. My colleague Dr. Elizabeth Sweet, led study participants in the creation and collection of visual ethnographies . The body mapping provided for “a more kinesthetic accompanying narrative about how racism impacts the body.” (Williams-Witherspoon, 2020: Performing Race : 38) Participants were asked to think deeply about the answers to the following four questions: Draw how and where racism feels on or in your body. Draw the emotions that you feel when you observe racism. Draw the long-term impacts of racism on or in your body Draw on or in your body where you have strength to fight racism. (Williams-Witherspoon, 2020: 38 Performing Race ) In their creation of the 7-foot-tall body maps , these maps added another layer of texts that visually spoke to the trauma of racism in some spaces. (Williams-Witherspoon, 2020: 38) Before ending the body mapping activities, participants were asked to explain the Body Map Key for each map. These video-taped segments became the filmed ethnographic material and, some of the longer monologues in the final devised performances. The Interactive Community Conversations (ICC’s) validated participant’s thoughts, feelings and poetic ethnographies that would later become the devised or applied research data theatre. (Cohen-Cruz, 2010: 5) Data Analysis Model Phase Before reviewing and curating auto-ethnographies from the Reflexive Writing Activities, they needed to be transcribed. Transcription is one of the most important steps in the analysis process because so much of our communication strategies are tied to cultural competencies—gestures, eye movement, body language. In addition to the quantitative data collected from the pre and post-surveys administered to participants during each Interactive community conversation, the qualitative data gleaned from the transcripts will become the basis of the devised theater piece. From Script to Performance The transcription phase is the longest step in the performed research process. The more accurate and thorough the transcription process, the easier the step to distill the personal narratives, poetry and auto-ethnographies into a devised performance script with ensemble characters based on the real-life research participants from across the community. In performance, it is vital that everyone’s voice is acknowledged and a portion of everyone’s story becomes part of the scripted performance. In this way, we acknowledge the complexity of political ecologies and we contribute to social justice solutions by elevating and expanding community conversations. Because of COVID-19, in response to a world-wide pandemic, by Spring 2020, most of the world had experienced some manner or method of quarantine and sequestering. Many theaters were forced to cancel or reschedule performances—others, simply closed their doors. Following the murder of George Floyd and the season of summer protests that ensued, many of our nation's theaters were prompted to address growing concerns and to investigate and utilize digital and video technologies to continue to create, and to contribute to the expanding public discourse on violence and the racial reckoning. With that in mind, Temple Theaters revised fall season, included both some plays that would be performed as zoom performances along with some offerings that were intended to provide students and audience members alike with a safe in-person experience as well. As COVID numbers continued to rise, our Fall 2020 season needed to happen on Zoom ®. To speak to the racial reckoning following George Floyd’s murder, some new monologues, poems and songs were added to the original script. Actors, quarantining in their homes across the country, were sent ring lights, instruction on how to use them, and, in addition to regular zoom rehearsals, were also given blocking and tips on how to enhance their individual video-taped performance on Zoom. Using green screen technologies designed by Temple Theater graduate students and innovative video and sound editing by my colleagues, Jason Norris and Nick Gackenbach, From Safe to Brave Redux premiered on November 20th through December 7, 2020 on YouTube ®, Facebook ® and Temple Theater’s streaming links. Conclusion Ultimately, because of COVID-19, theater artists/activists, researchers and theaters had to become even more creative and entrepreneurial—for many of us, by using the PSJR Research model and dabbling and using some of the latest cutting-edge technologies to continue to tell our stories—even in a pandemic when our communities were hurting the most and needed to be separated from one another. As hate, injustice, racism, sexism, antisemitism, Islamophobia and oppression continues to raise its ugly head(s) and dominate our collective struggle for equity and justice, Social Activist theater will continue to rise in importance as a vehicle to advocate for social change. Because of the challenges of 2020 and the Covid-19 pandemic, theater as we knew it, had to transform and reimagine itself. For those of us already working with devised performance as community engagement, theater during the pandemic necessitated new theatrical devices to continue to do the work important to us as social justice artists/activists. As we have discussed in this work, Performed Social Justice Research (PSJR) is reality-based theater and instruction. It is participatory. It constructs knowledge and aligns history with more inclusive truths . By using the PSJR model, with the Interactive Community Conversations component, applied arts researchers can collect more nuanced ethnographic data beyond the more traditional focus-group studies. By using some of the methods outlined here in the PSJR model to collect, transcribe, analyze, then curate and disseminate Performance research, these same research methods can be used to extend some of the new theatrical devices we all had to develop during the pandemic and to expand our definitions of devised theater. Giving community members “voice” and allowing the ethnographies to speak for themselves, through the art and its text, as applied artists/scholars, we can contribute to our nation’s most challenging problems and to those conversations in the public discourse by providing a “genuine exchange between artists and community”(Cohen-Cruz: 3). In that way, we will not only “act as a witness” (Albert Camus, cited in Charlesworth, 1975:32); but we will also, be a catalyst for change. References Charlesworth, Max. The Existentialist and Jean-Paul Sartre. St Lucia. Queensland University of Queensland Press. 1975. Descartes, Rene. Meditations on First Philosophy , edited by Stanley Tweyman. Routledge. 34–40. London and New York. 1993. Immordino-Yang, Mary Helen. Emotions, Learning and the Brain: Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience . W.W. Norton Company. New York. 2016. Williams-Witherspoon, Kimmika L. H. "Performing Race: Using Performance to Heal the Trauma of Race and Racism on College Campuses." In Storytelling, Self, Society. Wayne State University Press. (16:1, Spring 2020), https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/storytelling/ Williams-Witherspoon, Center for the Advancement of Teaching, (CAT) Lecture Breakout Session, January 7, 2020. “Performing SHOT: Personalizing North Philly, Poverty and Performance Poetry.” In Ethnographic in Pan Pacific Research: Tensions and Positionings. Routledge: New York. 2015. 36-55. Williams-Witherspoon. “On SHOT!: A Rationale for Research and Dramas Depicting Violence in the ‘Hood.” In Theatre Topics 23, no. 2 (2013): 167-183. Footnotes About The Author(s) KIMMIKA WILLIAMS-WITHERSPOON , Ph.D. (Cultural Anthropology), MA (Anthropology), MFA (Theater), Women's Studies (Graduate Certificate), BA (Journalism); is an Associate Professor of Urban Theater and Community Engagement. Recipient of the 2013 Associate Provosts for the Arts Grant; a 2008 Research and Creative Seed Grant Co-recipient, a 2003 Provost's Arts Commission Grant; a 2001 Independence Foundation Theater Communications Group Grant, the 2000 winner of the PEW Charitable Trust fellowship in scriptwriting, and the 1999, winner of the DaimlerChrysler "Spirit of the Word" National Poetry Competition. Author of Through Smiles and Tears: The History of African American Theater (From Kemet to the Americas) (Lambert Academic Publishing, 2011); T he Secret Messages in African American Theater: Hidden Meaning Embedded in Public Discourse (Edwin Mellen Publishing, 2006). She has had over twenty-three of her plays produced. Her stage credits include thirteen productions and she is a contributing poet to twenty-six poetry anthologies. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Drew Barker 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 Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator Drew Barker By Published on May 16, 2023 Download Article as PDF Between this interview (edited for length and clarity from October 2022) and the publication of this issue, Gancher and Mezzocchi’s 2020 production of Russian Troll Farm won an OBIE Award. Since it was one of three productions to be given such an honor in the category of “Digital+Virtual+Hybrid Production,” all of which were reviewed over the last three seasons due to the pandemic, one wonders how such recognition will impact and inspire other digital+virtual+hybrid projects in the future. Regardless, it can certainly be argued that Gancher and Mezzocchi’s production (co-directed by Elizabeth Williamson) met the historical moment better than most digital theatre productions. The play satirically addresses the weaponization of misinformation via social media during a presidential election season that mirrored not only the prior presidential election season, but also the weaponization of misinformation in other parts of the world. Ultimately, using satire and a suite of digital technologies allowed the production to feel familiar and dangerous at the same time. If new times demand new forms, what will we miss if we hesitate to embrace the progress made in terms of theatrical creativity and audience engagement? We should remember what Barbara Fuchs declares: “At its most elaborate, digital theater does more than simulate the real: it complicates and remixes it, foregrounding the artifice and conventionality in how we think about production, performance, audiences, and theater itself.” [1] Playwright Sarah Gancher and multimedia creator Jared Mezzocchi collaborated on the critically-acclaimed, digital production of Russian Troll Farm in late 2020, and are now working on a new project — even as other productions of Russian Troll Farm continue their success. In this interview by Performing Arts Librarian, Drew Barker, Gancher and Mezzocchi discuss how their creative process has evolved. Barker: Your 2020 production of Russian Troll Farm was a benchmark for digital theatre during the pandemic. Now you’re both teaming up again, and the word “epic” has been tossed around. What can you tell us about this new project you’re working on? Gancher: We are working on an epic about deep time that is set throughout all the different eras of history present in one Brooklyn bar — Sunny’s in Red Hook. It has been in continuous operation since 1890. And of course, there’s a lot of history on that spot before that point, and there will be a lot of history on that spot after this time. We are asking the question: What would you learn if you were able to see all of the history in one spot superimposed on top of all the moments of history superimposed on top of each other? If you were able to hop back and forth between them, remix and match them? What would we find out about ourselves, and what will we find out about the patterns that we live? We’re hoping that when superimposed that they all add up to make a giant question that none of them make individually. I think that it’s going to be a massive participatory art project sort of made by the community, consisting of a film shoot at Sunny’s with snippets of video that are like scenes or seamless moments from across all the different eras of Sunny’s, and then after playing their part in that people can walk down the street to this big warehouse where there will be an installation showing everything that’s being shot at Sunny’s superimposed on top of each other and allowing people to hop back and forth between them and see the composite story as it begins to emerge. And there’s bluegrass involved because of the famous bluegrass jam that happens at Sunny’s. It will also have an on-line component. It’s very cool, but it’s currently hard to explain. Mezzocchi: I would add that it’s a two-part process for an audience member to participate in the scene, and then go into an entirely different space, and see how that participation plays a role in a much wider, larger container of time and space. And now you’re both the viewer of a kind of a gallery installation of live mixed video, while also seeing yourself reflected inside of it. And so, you’re kind of unlocking the history of the place, but also you’re participating in a new part of the history of the place. What does it mean when we are aware of our own immediate footprint in time? It’s like a widening of the consciousness of the participant. And I think that’s the big question for me — what does that do to a person when they know that they’re a part of the history of a place? Gancher: It’ll be an experiment and obsession, and it’s sort of in two senses: one where we’ll literally have people playing music and jamming, and then also there’s going to be a kind of like a visual jam session as people, essentially solo with images taking turns, matching the images to the music, finding and making meaning in the connection between these different moments. Mezzocchi: So, perhaps we can create a jam session, both audibly and visually. All of those things are for me, as a technologist, taking the discoveries of Russian Troll Farm which made that thing feel more full of breath in life. Because the editor was present, the editor was doing the thing live. Now in this residency [at Bethany Arts Center] working with Sarah, watching Sarah now take the reins, I don’t think our collaboration would have led to this without Russian Troll Farm . I also don’t think that my technological inventions would have brought me where I am today without Russian Troll Farm . Gancher: I think that we both — if I may speak for Jared and I certainly intend to — we found Russian Troll Farm so thrilling because we were making up something that nobody had ever done before, and that we weren’t sure whether or not it was going to work, or how it would work. And so we had to also invent a process, and we both got really into that. I mean, it’s painstaking, it’s slow. It’s frustrating. But it’s also so fun. And so cool, because you feel like you’re making a new form. Mezzocchi: And I think that, I don’t know, the older I’m getting, the more rare I’m realizing it is to find people that you can kind of run around in the dark with. And the pandemic felt like the darkest time. And I felt so fortunate with Sarah, with Elizabeth [Williamson], with that cast, that we all in the middle of a pandemic found each other and said, “Let’s keep playing tag for a second” I wanted to hold onto that accidental joy that was found in the middle of horrific trauma, because that was a joy that I’ve never felt before, ever. Barker: Sarah, you’ve written that as a playwright you’re obsessed with questions of how history shapes us. How has the pandemic shaped your storytelling process? Gancher: My main experience of the pandemic was as a parent trying to raise a five year old, who became a six year old, and then a seven year old, all while in a shoebox apartment. I went from being a full time playwright, writing a minimum of 40 hours a week to virtually having no writing time at all, and kind of going insane. It was a nightmare, watching all of the things that I had planned that I was so excited for all fall apart and crumble. But I do think those ashes have turned out to be very fertile for me, because there have been multiple things that I never would have done, never would have tried, had life continued on its original trajectory. Russian Troll Farm in particular created an appetite to try new things more. So, I just finished the first draft of lyrics for my first musical book, where I’m also writing the music. Considering this new project with Jared, which I’m so hyped on now, I’m not sure I would have been brave enough to attempt it before. And I don’t think that anybody would have thought about offering me that opportunity before Russian Troll Farm . If we’re considering the pandemic as a whole politically, the themes continued to resonate with Russian Troll Farm — disinformation, mass delusion, echo chambers, mass hysteria, and the fact that our collective unconscious seems spiraling into a deep depression — and I don’t know, we should probably get on that. Barker: Indeed. Things were different for you, Jared, but it was still an upheaval, right? Mezzocchi: Yeah, I feel like everything changed for me. I look back on the very beginning, when we did She Kills Monsters [at the University of Maryland in April 2020]. Because I decided to call the chair and say, “Don’t cancel it, we have an opportunity to do research here.” And I made that call to her while I was in a panic down in Arkansas after a regional theatre production of Curious Incident of the Dog in Nighttime that I was directing had just shut down. It had been a moment of real, positive, directorial growth for me that was stripped away the day before tech. And so I look back on that and I don’t know why I made that phone call. And I also don’t know why that same day, I called my board at Andy’s Summer Playhouse and said, “Cancel the summer. Because if we cancel now, then we don’t spend any more money preparing for a summer season that won’t happen, and therefore we have more money to deal with what this brings. And let’s go weird.” I remember the thrill of being in a support system at UMD and at Andy’s that allowed me to take a risk, because the safety net was more educational in both of those realms. And that put me in different shoes, so then I felt more courageous when walking into my freelance life and calling Sarah, which happened about two weeks later. And so, I think that being in two educational environments allowed me — and I’m really saying this for the first time — allowed me the courage and to say, “Fuck it. Like, it’s research.” The flip to using the term “research” was a big thing for me, and that hasn’t changed. And I think that getting the recognition, sharing the lessons learned, getting the positive press, and then making more connections made me realize the power of being an experimenter who could produce things, produce things quickly, and vocalize the flaws of each experiment. Suddenly the power of discovery was the thing, and I’m not ever going to forget that. Barker: How do words and design influence you both now during your creative process in terms of dramaturgy? Is it like asking about the chicken and the egg? Or, how is the story influenced by the format? Gancher: I think it’s both chicken and egg. And nobody knows where either one came from. One of the nicest things that anybody’s ever said to me in my life was when Jared said much of what he technologically invented for Russian Troll Farm only happened because of the demands of the script. A lot of people presumed that it was written for Zoom, but in fact it was barely adapted for that format. In my brain it had always been for the stage. Now in this latest residency, as we began to iterate, I start thinking about the story. What is the event? Sometimes I write “scratch drafts,” like sort of pre-writing, like scenes, but they don’t even have character names yet, you know? I’ve never shown anybody in my life work that early, but I showed it to Jared. And then that sort of kickstarted him thinking from the container and also asking, “What is the event?” What will the tech for this need to look like? And, as we ping pong back and forth, we influence each other. Mezzocchi: I would add to that if you’re coming from content, and I’m coming from form, we’re both kind of saying, “Here’s how I would take your offering and make it function inside of my brain,” and vice versa. If the text is the content constant, and the tech is the variable, here’s how function can form and then flip it and say, if the tech is the constant, and the text is the variable, here’s what happens there. Tech is a tool, and function is the space that we’re kind of finger painting in. That to me feels pretty subversive to the industry standards. Gancher: It’s more related to the sort of experimental devising world that we actually both come from — nobody knows that we’re both musicians, and nobody knows that we both come from the world of devising and experimental stuff. It’s actually quite key to the way that we work together, and it reminds me of my favorite Suzan Lori Parks quote: “Form is content.” And I think that I’m trying to work with Jared not like a playwright traditionally works with the designer, but like the other half of my brain, or like I’m the other half of his brain. Also, his live video editing skills responded to hearing the rhythm in the words, which totally amplified the humor and timing in Russian Troll Farm in a unique way. Barker: Jared, among many other things on Twitter you’ve talked about mediaturgy. Can you comment on how you position that in your current theatrical practice? Mezzocchi: That idea was actually based on a course I teach. It’s not about just telling stories on digital terms. We ask questions like: Why and how are we using technology to drive the story forward? What’s its point of view for the story? How is it used differently for each character? It’s not just spectacle. Mediaturgy informs choices which then contributes to the overall dramaturgy. Ideally, it allows for more collaboration, with the actors understanding a new language within a new process, too. Digital storytelling should be seen as a scene partner. Gancher: I would add that mediaturgy makes you consider new questions as well. For example, how are you casting the audience? Are they spying on the characters? How does the story move in digital theatre? It’s a bit of a filmic question, too, of course. Does it move in jumps, does it move in fades? Does it root us down in one spot, or does it disorient us? But more importantly, does it live up to our vision? Mezzocchi: It was helpful that the world slammed to a halt, and we had to interrogate how we use and connect through technology. As a society, and as a theatre community, in order to get to the necessary technological solutions we must also address the problems of how we use technology. We’re continuing to learn how to use the tech as a tool, not have the technology use us. Gancher: In this new process, the whole team is writing with you. As someone who teaches writing, I want to encourage that kind of collaboration even though it’s scary and difficult. We need to find the people who can make that work. www.sarahgancher.org www.jaredmezzocchi.com (Twitter: @jaredmezzocchi) References [1] Barbara Fuchs, Theater of Lockdown: Digital and Distanced Performance in a Time of Pandemic . (London: Methuen Drama, 2022), 25. Footnotes About The Author(s) DREW BARKER is the Performing Arts Librarian at the University of Maryland at College Park. As a dramaturg he has worked at Triad Stage (NC), Round House Theatre (MD), Center Stage (MD), and Theatre J (DC). He was the curator for the exhibits The Art & Craft of Puppetry (2022), Remembrance & Resilience (2021) and The Triumph of Isabella: Exploring Performance Through Art (2018-19) at the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library. His research and creative projects include information design and literacy, the U.S. Civil War, and the working relationship between playwright Naomi Wallace and historian Marcus Rediker. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Heather S. Nathans Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 2 Visit Journal Homepage Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Heather S. Nathans By Published on May 11, 2021 Download Article as PDF In 1986, during my first year at Dartmouth College, I had the good fortune to take a seminar on Black Theatre with Professor Errol Hill (1921-2003). [1] More than thirty years later I still count myself lucky to have had my introduction to the history of Black Theatre under Errol’s guidance. His rigorous scholarship and penetrating questions helped to set the standards for my own further explorations of Black Theatre History over the coming years, and I still remember our final chat many years later at a 2002 ASTR conference when he was asking me about the progress of my new book on slavery and US theatre. Errol would have been 100 years old this year. A century after his birth, he still stands as one of the giants in the field of Black Theatre scholarship. His landmark History of African American Theatre with Jim Hatch (1929-2020), his work as a playwright, his foundational study, Shakespeare in Sable , his pioneering book, The Jamaican Stage, 1655-1900 , his many edited collections of plays by Black dramatists, as well as his monumental Theatre Collection, now housed at Dartmouth College—all of these contributions have shaped the development of the field in innumerable ways for thousands of scholars and students who never had the chance to meet him. For those who did have the chance to work with him, his mentorship proved equally invaluable—generous and exacting in equal measure. The award that bears his name with the American Society for Theatre Research has recognized more than thirty outstanding works in Black Theatre since its launch in 1997. (The list of those winners is included in the Book Review section of this issue and can also be found on the ASTR website at astr.org.) What I miss most—even thirty-five years after our first encounter in Hanover, NH—is the bellow of laughter that would erupt from this most dignified and handsome of men, transforming him into a joyous figure always ready to welcome new colleagues to the field. I spoke recently with his wife, Grace Hope Hill—his partner in his life, his research, his theatrical productions, and over many years of travel and adventure. I said how much I still missed his laugh. Grace exclaimed, “His laugh was so loud.” She also shared a story of Errol’s early days that links to so many of the themes shared in this issue about the need to support and document Black Theatre. In the 1950s, the University of the West Indies in Jamaica received a 300£ donation from a British bookstore owner (at Foyles Bookshop) and Errol, then serving as a “Drama Tutor” in the program, headed out into communities across Jamaica to develop new works by regional authors. As Grace recalls, “He helped with the writing, directing, and acting… We worked with very limited funds and did everything ourselves. Errol was so passionate that he brought everyone along with him.” That statement sums up Errol’s contribution to Black Theatre Studies so beautifully – for both those who knew him and those who never had the chance to meet him, “He was so passionate that he brought everyone along with him.” Help us celebrate Errol’s legacy in this issue dedicated to Black Theatre. Honor the innumerable artists and scholars who have created and documented the field of Black Theatre for more than two centuries of passionate work and those who are propelling it forward into the future. Ronald N. Sherr, "Errol G. Hill," oil on panel, Dartmouth College References [1] For more on Errol’s extraordinary career, including his time with the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, Yale University, Dartmouth College, as a professional actor and playwright, and as an accomplished scholar, see the link to his papers now housed at Dartmouth College: https://archives-manuscripts.dartmouth.edu/agents/people/1185 . Footnotes About The Author(s) HEATHER S. NATHANS Professor, Tufts University Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to "Milestones in Black Theatre" Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration. Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Steven Otfinoski Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 1 Visit Journal Homepage Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 Steven Otfinoski By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF Above: Cherry Beaumont (Eliza Fichter) negotiates with Mr. Bezos (Noah Ilya Alexis Tuleja) in Great Barrington Public Theater's production of How To Not Save the World with Mr. Bezos . Photo: Lauren Jacobbe. Since the presidential election of 2024, theaters have turned to the political arena with both new plays that reflect the turmoil in our nation and plays of an older vintage that take on new meaning in the age of Trump. This is especially true in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts, where three major theatres—Barrington Stage Company (BSC) in Pittsfield, Great Barrington Public Theater (GBPT) in Great Barrington, and Shakespeare & Company (S & C) in Lenox—know their audience and its political bend and have chosen works that relate to the moment. One of the plays most in the moment was BSC’s N/A. The N/A of the title are former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (N) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (A), although their full names are never given, as are none of the other political figures mentioned, including a president they both detest. The play opened with the two high-powered women meeting in Pelosi’s office, AOC having just won the Democratic primary in her district. Sparks flew as A questioned the pragmatism of N’s politics and N, in turn, denigrated A’s uncompromising progressivism. Kelly Lester was a cool, aloof Pelosi, deeply committed to her causes with a withering wit that kept the laughs coming as the drama deepened. Diane Guerrero was every inch her equal, a fiery advocate and an irresistible blend of New York savvy and Latina passion. The sense of urgency was heightened by Wheeler Moon’s mind-numbing lighting and Brandon Bulls’s jagged sound design, especially in the vivid recreation of the January 6 th attack on the Capitol. In this battle of wills over how to best save our democracy, both women made a good case for idealism tempered by pragmatism, and each came to appreciate the strength and character of the other, even when in the end A turned down the retiring Speaker’s offer of House Whip to blaze her own trail. The play ends, but the drama goes on. More imaginative but no less compelling is GBPT’s production of Maggie Kearnan’s How to Not Save the World with Mr. Bezos . Artistic Director Jim Frangione called it “a rollicking, bold and thought-provoking play” and it certainly lives up to that description. The play is set in an America of the near future where it’s illegal to be a billionaire. One of the most famous of this exclusive club, Jeff Bezos, had agreed to be interviewed by journalist Cherry Beaumont (an animated and deliciously unpredictable Eliza Fichter) in exchange for information about the federal case against him. Bezos was played to a T by Noah Ilya Alexis Tuleja, right down to the billionaire’s braying laugh. As these two sparred and parried over why Bezos and the other richest of the rich couldn’t eliminate poverty and save the world, the Fact Checker (a nerdy but endearing Shai Vaknine) informed the audience of what was fact, fake, and fiction (made up by the playwright). It was a clever conceit but at times an annoying one, pulling us away from the central conflict. The two characters engaged in a lively game of beer pong and dance to Rossini’s “The Thieving Magpies Overture” and Gene Kelly crooning “Singin’ in the Rain.” (Was this a homage to Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange that set the same background music to a rape and murder?) Some of the air went out of this engaging play of ideas when it was revealed that Cherry’s secret motive was revenge for her mother, who grew up with and later worked for Bezos. The bloody finale, while powerful, was a bit predictable, and one wishes the playwright had dug a little deeper into her original argument. BSC reached further back to an earlier political era in its season opener, Eisenhower: This Piece of Ground , a one-man show starring Broadway veteran John Rubenstein as the 34 th president, a fierce defender of democracy at home and abroad. Playwright Richard Hellesen has found a solid dramatic device to propel Eisenhower’s 80-minute monologue—a historians’ survey that ranks the presidents, placing Eisenhower, much to his chagrin, at number 22. He set the record straight, musing about his long career (the play is set in 1962) in a tape recorder for a projected memoir. Rubenstein was in fine form as the indignant ex-president. Along with his triumphs he recalled his regrets—failing to defend his friend George Marshall from the red-baiting Joe McCarthy and being indirectly responsible for the death of his first-born son. Scenic designer Michael Deegan created a spacious living room in Eisenhower’s Gettysburg home for him to ramble and fume about in. An entertaining drama about a much underrated president, the play also reminded us how far the Republican Party has fallen since Eisenhower’s day, loyal not to the Constitution but to a president totally lacking the character of Ike. Eisenhower’s words, delivered with fiery passion by Rubenstein, drew spontaneous applause at the performance this critic attended. The title’s “piece of ground” refers to the farmland that Eisenhower cultivated in retirement, but by play’s end it could be seen as America itself, a ground that desperately needs saving. The presidency of Eisenhower’s successor, John F. Kennedy, is remembered as a new beginning for the nation, a time of great promise. It is forever linked to the Lerner-Lowe musical Camelot , which opened that same landmark year of 1960. BSC’s robust revival is helmed by Artistic Director Alan Paul who states in the program notes that the musical is “really about democracy.” It is also about the loss of those democratic ideals that inspired another leader, King Arthur of Britain. Both Kennedy and Arthur’s crusades ended in tragedy—the president was assassinated in November 1963 and Arthur’s reign was brought down by passion and political intrigue. Ken Wulf Clark’s Arthur is a winning combination of boyish enthusiasm and manly idealism, whose final triumph over mankind’s base desires is revealed in the play’s final moments as he mentored a young boy to carry on his mission. This “child” was African American and dressed in army camouflage, bringing out the contemporary connection. The rest of the cast is singularly fine with Ali Ewoldt as a winsome and passionate Guinevere and Emmett O’Hanlon as a stalwart, guilt-ridden Lancelot. Race and racism are major issues in our cultural wars and they were stage center in S & C’s sterling production of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson . The suffering and resilience of enslaved African Americans and their descendants is symbolized in a family heirloom, the titular piano. The two inheritors of this bitter but compelling heritage were siblings Boy Willie, a bundle of energy and earnestness embodied by Omar Robinson, and Berniece, a towering, unyielding Jade Guerra. Boy Willie wanted to sell the piano to buy the land his family share cropped on for generations, while Berniece refused to surrender it. Their struggle is witnessed and influenced by a supporting cast of family and friends that capture both the earthiness and spirituality of Wilson’s beloved Hill District of Pittsburgh. Worth singling out is ranney, who played the sly Wining Boy, who had his own conflicted relationship to the piano. The ghosts and demons of the family’s dark past were brought to life through the impressive efforts of lighting designer James McNamara and sound designer James Cannon, which in the play’s unforgettable climax transform the family home into a house of horrors. But horror gives way to love and final redemption for the feuding siblings as they awakened to a new state of self-recognition and forgiveness. Misogyny countered by a rising feminism from a far earlier time and place is central to GBPT’s production of Anne Undeland’s Madame Mozart, the Lacrimosa . From the first moment Mozart’s widow Constanze made her entrance, dragging her husband’s shrouded corpse down a staircase, it was clear she was a desperate woman. The play related Constanze’s struggle to keep her husband’s untimely death a secret until she could find someone to finish his unfinished requiem and get the money from the fickle count who commissioned it. He, along with Mozart’s assistant, who had sexual designs on Constanze, her acid-tongued mother, and all the other characters were played to perfection by Ryan Winkles, in a tour de force performance. Tara Franklin was equally fine as Constanze who grew before our eyes from a helpless widow to a tigress of a mother and preserver of her husband’s legacy. Mozart’s music was played with passion onstage by pianist Hudson Orfe, providing a dramatic backdrop to the play. Director Judy Braha brought color and light to this enchanting drama, making the most of that dominating staircase that charted Constanze’s fall and ultimate rise, an inspiration to the women of today who still struggle in a world that is still too often dominated by men. All three theatres should be commended for challenging their audiences to reflect on the chaotic times we live in with plays that keep us fixed in the moment. References Footnotes About The Author(s) STEVEN OTFINOSKI teaches in the English department at Fairfield University. He is an award-winning playwright with productions across the Eastern states and abroad. His ten-minute comedy “The Audition” won the Best Script Award at the Short + Sweet Festival in Sydney, Australia. Steve is also the author of more than 200 books for young adults and has been the long-time reviewer of summer theater in the Berkshires for New England Theatre in Review . He lives in Stratford, Connecticut with his wife Beverly, a retired teacher and editor, and their two Aussie Shepherds. 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 Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale “The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. The Brothers Size Dead Outlaw 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival ZAZ Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Isaiah Matthew Wooden Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 1 Visit Journal Homepage The Brothers Size Isaiah Matthew Wooden By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF The Brothers Size By Tarell Alvin McCraney Co-Directed by Tarell Alvin McCraney and Bijan Sheibani The Shed (Co-Produced with the Geffen Playhouse) New York, NY September 6, 2025 Reviewed by Isaiah Matthew Wooden In the nearly two decades since Tarell Alvin McCraney’s The Brothers Size debuted Off-Broadway as a part of the third Under the Radar Festival, the evocative three-hander has garnered considerable praise for its trenchant, poetic dramatization of some of the lasting questions shaping the lives and relationships of Black men in the United States. Audiences and critics alike have found much to admire in McCraney’s shrewd fusion of ancient tales drawn from Yoruba cosmology with given circumstances and dramaturgical devices of his own making that invite reflection on such themes as brotherhood, masculinity, vulnerability, love, and freedom. No doubt adding to the play’s appeal are the rich opportunities it affords the actors portraying its central trio—Ogun Size; his younger brother, Oshoosi Size; and Oshoosi’s close friend and former cellmate, Elegba—to flex an extraordinary range of performance muscles. The play’s return to New York City in 2025 in a co-production by The Shed and the Geffen Playhouse reaffirmed its status as one of the most compelling and resonant dramas to spotlight and interrogate the intricacies of the inner lives and social worlds of Black men. Co-Directed by Bijan Sheibani and McCraney, and featuring three actors who have achieved notoriety for their stage and screen work, André Holland (Ogun Size), Alani iLongwe (Oshoosi Size), and Malcolm Mays (Elegba), this revival was remarkably elegant in its simplicity, relying mostly on the physical and vocal agility of its performers to bring expressive clarity to the details of their respective characters’ at once mythic and mundane journeys. The integration of live music by Munir Zakee and choreography by Juel D. Lane enhanced the overall rhythm of the performance while also reinforcing the sense of call-and-response that McCraney’s striking incorporation of spoken stage directions aims to evoke. Suzu Sakai’s spare set design, which was anchored by an improvised circle marked out with a white, chalk-like substance in a clear nod to the symbolic spaces central to various syncretic spiritual traditions of the African diaspora, further bolstered the production’s invitation to audience members to embrace their roles as co-creators of the storytelling. This necessarily created space for some of the play’s more distinct features, including its setting in a fictional town in the Deep South at some point in the “distant present,” to accrue fresh significance, while also allowing Holland, iLongwe, and Mays to embody their characters with incredible specificity and vitality. André Holland (Ogun Size). The Brothers Size , The Shed, New York, August 30-September 28, 2025. Photo: Marc J. Franklin. Courtesy The Shed. Given Holland’s longstanding connection to The Brothers Size and to McCraney’s work more broadly—he played Elegba in the 2009 staging of the play co-produced by The Public Theater and the McCarter Theatre Center, and also starred in the McCraney-penned films Moonlight (2016) and High Flying Bird (2019)—it was especially moving to witness the layered complexity he brought to his portrayal of the elder Size brother. While Oshoosi often admonishes Ogun for moving through life with unnecessary hardness, Holland was deliberate about endowing the character with charm and tenderness. His insistence on surfacing the character’s multidimensionality made moments like his recollection of the suffering endured by his former lover, Oya, or his account of always getting blamed for Oshoosi’s troubled behavior during their youth, reverberate long after the action had shifted focus elsewhere. The sensitivity of Holland’s performance came into sharpest focus in what remains one of The Brothers Sizes’s most touching and restorative scenes. When Oshoosi yet again finds himself teetering on the brink of captivity by a criminal legal system that views all young Black male life as fungible, the elder Size brother commands that his sibling flee their distressed hometown as soon and as fast as possible. The boom and quake in Holland’s voice as Ogun vowed to deny his younger brother up to three times when the Law came looking for him, deepened the emotional intensity of the duo’s final embrace and, in so doing, further distinguished Holland as one of the most dynamic interpreters of McCraney’s sublime language. iLongwe and Mays likewise proved adept at surfacing the idiosyncrasies and subtleties of McCraney’s dramaturgy. The tremendous energy and vigor of iLongwe’s Oshoosi served to punctuate how the character’s relentless yearnings to make freedom mean something often complicated his everyday life. Indeed, while Oshoosi’s articulated aims to acquire a car and find a woman registered as pretty straightforward, at least at first blush, iLongwe’s nimble portrayal called attention to the ways they were symptomatic of his much larger aspirations to imagine and enact possibilities unencumbered by carceral and other oppressive logics. This accounted for the powerful hold that Mays’s spry and clever Elegba seemed to maintain over Oshoosi’s life. Much like the orisha of the same name, Elegba often appears at key moments of decision-making in the play, reminding Oshoosi of the beauty and power inherent in choices. Mays’s portrayal of Elegba as simultaneously sweet and crafty amplified his allure for Oshoosi while shedding light on why Ogun remained so deeply suspicious of the pair’s friendship. Malcolm Mays (Elegba), Alani iLongwe (Oshoosi Size), and André Holland (Ogun Size). The Brothers Size , The Shed, New York, August 30 – September 28, 2025. Photo: Marc J. Franklin. Courtesy The Shed. The minor script revisions McCraney made for the production underscored the crucial role that love—familial, platonic, erotic, and otherwise—can play in sustaining the bonds between Black men. These updates, paired with McCraney and Sheibani’s sleek staging, Adam Honoré’s subdued lighting, and Dede Ayite’s practical costumes, not only sharpened the overall storytelling but also accentuated the play’s enduring emotional and thematic resonances. Simultaneously and significantly, they enabled the production to make a persuasive case for why The Brothers Size ’s stirring explorations of Black men’s interiorities and vulnerabilities marks it as a singular and transformative work of twenty-first-century theatre. References Footnotes About The Author(s) ISAIAH MATTHEW WOODEN is a scholar-artist, writer, and Associate Professor and Chair of Theater at Swarthmore College. He is the author of  Reclaiming Time: Race, Temporality, and Black Expressive Culture  (2025) and co-editor of  August Wilson in Context  (2025),  Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration  (2020), and “Manifestos for Black Theatre, Then and Now,” a special section of  Theatre History Studies  (2024). Additionally, he served as the volume editor for the Methuen student edition of  A Raisin in the Sun  by Lorraine Hansberry (2025). Wooden’s articles and essays on contemporary art, drama, and performance have appeared in numerous scholarly and popular publications. As a director and dramaturg, he has collaborated on projects in venues ranging from the Uganda National Theatre to the Kennedy Center, including works by Lorraine Hansberry, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Lynn Nottage, and Robert O’Hara. 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 Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale “The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. The Brothers Size Dead Outlaw 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival ZAZ Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Kevin Byrne 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 Changes, Constants, Constraints: African American Theatre History Scholarship Kevin Byrne By Published on March 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF African American theatre history scholarship has always wanted to commit untold stories to print and it values performance on a rubric which balances artistic impulses with cultural considerations. The work is sometimes overtly political, but always politically leaning. This scholarship gives close consideration to the un- or under-represented: the missing, forgotten, overlooked, removed, ignored, or erased. In the past, the discipline focused on individual playwrights, a collection of thematically linked dramatic texts, or a specific era such as the Harlem Renaissance or Black Arts Movement. In recent years, though, black performance scholarship has moved beyond clean, assumed definitions of racial and theatrical categorizations. This development has allowed the field to expand its reach while continuing to honor the original political impetus which drove it at its founding. The methodological lenses and historical scope of black theatre scholarship have changed considerably because the underlying definitions of race, racism, and racial categorization have shifted too. It emphasizes race as a cultural product, a mutable definition that shifts and contorts over different eras due to outside social pressures. As Harvey Young cogently summarizes these ideas in his recent Theatre & Race (2013): Although race is an invention, a convenience that encapsulates perceived (or imagined) difference, it should not be dismissed as either a mere fiction or an anachronism. Its broad acceptance, seeming materiality, and staying power are anchored in its ability to provide a narrative that unifies a collective social history with the variances in individuated social perspectives. (6) Two fraught concepts—the performativity of identity in everyday life and the fluidity of racial difference—create radical alternatives to how black theatre is analyzed. These feelings of malleability and performativity allow new considerations of contemporary theatre and the reevaluation of past events. This has also helped in the reassessment of theatre events or theatre theory based in erroneous notions of racial fixity, particularly the binary of black and white. Unmooring African American racial definitions and fully committing to the cultural underpinnings of race classification is thrilling but also unnerving. Unsuccessful scholarship in this vein reduces black identity to mere artifice, or style; such works are reductive, subjective, and random. More convincing African American theatre scholarship acknowledges a dialectically opposable concept which stabilizes black performance historicizations. This opposite pole is the materiality of the African American body: its physical presence, place onstage, or reproduction in print. This equation balances the physical markers of blackness with the cultural, experiential, and historical aspects of personality. A shift from theatre to performance is a central means of historicization which expands the variety of evidence that scholars use. Uncategorizable examples are central and cross-disciplinarity is common to many investigations, upending text-focused, time-and-location-based histories. With the fluidity of race categorizations complimented by the materiality of bodies, each work is structured along thematic concerns and racial considerations. They trace trajectories amongst the evidence, even when there is no explicit (to the participants) connections between them. I am thinking, for example, of Nicole Fleetwood’s 2011 Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness , “a study of how blackness becomes visually knowable,” and the 2012 anthology The Methuen Drama Book of Post-Black Plays , which highlights racialized work from the Age of Obama by both black and non-black playwrights. All of this changes the who or what that is studied, and how it is studied. The why remains the same, though: a leftist political bent with the desire to correct the historical record and celebrate the formerly forgotten. Tavia Nyong’o’s 2009 Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory and Harvey Young’s 2010 Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body have a variety of examples and conclusions but similar racial theorizations and historical trajectories. Strikingly, both have chapters in which the authors themselves are visiting, traversing, and commenting upon museums and museum exhibits. Nearing the close of each volume, a tension and reckoning occurs in these sections that also clearly articulates the concerns felt by scholars in black theatre history today. The past and present, of course, are in these museums. So is the display and erasure of stories and narratives. Fact and supposition blend. And, inevitably, each scholar has to account for his own physical presence and personal response while navigating these spaces. In both literal and metaphorical ways, this is how African American theatre scholars nowadays approach their roles as recorders of history and interpreters of artistic legacies. A pair of recent additions to the discipline further highlight these concerns and trends: Marvin McAllister’s 2011 Whiting Up: Whiteface Minstrels and Stage Europeans in African American Performance and Faedra Carpenter’s 2014 Coloring Whiteness: Acts of Critique in Black Performance . They share some basic connections of investigations and methodology, and the fact of their near-simultaneous arrival signals a new direction within the field. What makes these books such clear indices of recent trends is that, in them, black artists interrogate white positionality/privilege (a political goal) to undermine the very idea of racial binaries or categorizations (a social/cultural goal). The books skip forward in time and between genres: McAllister discuses the late–nineteenth century musical A Trip to Coontown and Richard Pryor routines while Carpenter moves from plays to Dave Chappelle’s TV show to African American performance artists. At the core, each is an analysis of black identity. Better yet, they discuss black identities: the multiplicity of perspectives that self-identify as black. From the titles the works may seem to be about binaries of black/white but, in reality, they are about the variety of viewpoints that open up a dizzying array of possibilities for mapping connections. Whiting Up and Coloring Whiteness are interesting, innovative, scholarly rigorous examples of that potential. The most exciting and empowering aspect of contemporary African American theatre scholarship is the opportunity for new “black and…” voices to be heard—female, gay, lesbian, and others—and put in conversation with each other on the common ground of race. Importantly, this can help the discipline respond quickly to new social developments which can be incorporated into larger narratives of identity, community, and performance. May the Black Lives Matter movement allow for deeper investigations into the meanings of blackness, the black community, and black political action! From the depths of the Rachel Dolezal case, let a thousand dissertation chapters spring forth! Here’s hoping George Wolfe’s adaptation of Shuffle Along provides the right punctuation mark to the final year of the Obama presidency! Current social, cultural, and theatrical developments cause scholars to constantly reevaluate of the past, still searching for those plays, events, and people who whisper their meanings to us. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Dr. Kevin Byrne is an Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Arizona, Tucson. His recent investigations concern the materiality of blackface performance and the circulation of racist ideology. 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.

Janet Werther Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 2 Visit Journal Homepage Fauci and Kramer Janet Werther By Published on July 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF FAUCI and KRAMER By Drew Fornarola Directed by Kate Powers First Look Buffalo, Canturbury Woods Performing Arts Center Buffalo, NY March 17, 2023 Reviewed by Janet Werther What do you want? Why are you here? These questions drive the dramatic action in Drew Fornarola’s play FAUCI and KRAMER . In the play, Fornarola imagines the variously bombastic and heartfelt (but always witty) repartee that would inevitably ensue if playwright and AIDS activist Larry Kramer returned to haunt his longtime public foe/dear friend, Dr. Anthony Fauci. Set shortly after Kramer’s death in May 2020, Fornarola’s play is part ghost story, part memory play, and part historical docudrama. Indeed, the dramaturgical instability produced by crisscrossing these always-already permeable generic boundaries is key to the play’s affective charm. FAUCI and KRAMER received its world premiere in early 2023. It was produced by First Look Buffalo , a Western New York theatre company dedicated to developing new works by regionally affiliated playwrights. The play’s discursive focus is Fauci and Kramer’s shared history of the early HIV/AIDS pandemic, but the anxiety and isolation of the early COVID-19 pandemic are its backdrop and setting. Sarah Waechter’s simple yet elegant set design captured pandemic sensibilities by dangling an assortment of face masks from Dr. Fauci’s computer screen and placing a canister of Clorox wipes and a partly used container of bright green hand sanitizer on prominent display. Kate Powers’s direction further reinforced the climate of pre-vaccine precarity. Before Fauci returned from a brief retreat to the restroom, for example, he mumble-sang “Happy Birthday” from offstage, a practice familiar, if now defunct, from a time in the early pandemic when many of us believed (or at least wished) we could ward off the virus simply by washing our hands for twenty tuneful seconds at a time. Beloved local actors Steve Jakiel and Louis Colaiacovo played Fauci and Kramer, respectively, to emotionally resonant if not always visually precise effect. This is not to suggest that FAUCI and KRAMER —in its script or costume design—failed to evoke the real men whose public images bear the weight of the play’s philosophical concerns. Colaiacovo certainly resembled Kramer in denim overalls, a chunky sweater, necklace, and small, red glasses. A full, barely graying beard and clean-shaven scalp completed the visual transformation. Unlike Dr. Anthony Fauci, however, Jakiel is a large man. Towering over his scene partner, Jakiel looked quite dissimilar to “America’s Doctor,” though attired in a suit befitting his prestigious station and professional public demeanor. This dissimilarity was acknowledged in the play’s first moments in a direct address to the audience, then mostly ignored. Verisimilitude is less important here than the affective weight of evocation, achieved through Fornarola’s words and the actors’ attention to movement, pacing, and the tensile force of their respective deliveries. Dr. Anthony Fauci (Steve Jakiel) and Larry Kramer (Louis Colaiacovo) stand in separate pools of light in front of the set for Dr. Fauci’s living room in Drew Fornarola’s FAUCI and KRAMER at First Look Buffalo (2023). Photo ©Tomas L. Waz Colaiacovo brought a bounding, enthusiastic energy to bear on his performance as Kramer, explained as the privileged agency of the dearly departed: as a ghost, Kramer has chosen to return in his prime. He remains frustrated at inequities and indignities big and small, yet Kramer’s characteristic anger was tempered in performance by good-humored annoyance at the pitiful excuse for a cup of coffee provided by Fauci’s Keurig machine. Colaiacovo’s lightly comic performance of this coffee lazzo —wanting a cup of coffee, balking at the travesty of the Keurig and Fauci’s K-cup options, considering a trip to buy better coffee, reassuring his friend that a ghost cannot get COVID at the corner store, considering that perhaps a ghost cannot buy coffee, either, brewing a K-cup, bemoaning its quality, and so forth—cast the irascible activist as crotchety but relatably human. Jakiel’s Dr. Fauci, meanwhile, remained calm and relatively unfazed in the face of frustration and uncertainty. Yet unlike Kramer’s spry ghost, he was clearly exhausted. Kramer has descended (or perhaps ascended , as the pair joke) to Fauci’s living room as the doctor labors through another sleepless night during another once-in-a-lifetime pandemic brought on by another novel and capricious virus. Kramer’s presence and the specter of HIV were, in this context, reminders of how much can be lost when medical bureaucracy acts sluggishly. Yet Fauci’s bombastic activist friend and compatriot is also a reminder of how much shared purpose and diverse tactics can accomplish, both within and outside established institutions. As the play progressed, it became increasingly immaterial whether or not actors Jakiel and Colaiacovo realistically resembled their real-life counterparts. (In a personal interview I conducted, Fornarola intimated that he’d be interested in seeing future productions of FAUCI and KRAMER pursue expansive casting choices for both roles.) Homing in on big ideas about justice, collaboration, and living a meaningful life, the arguments between these iconic (and in Kramer’s case, iconoclastic) characters develop both in personal detail and in broad, ideological strokes while the men themselves became increasingly symbolic avatars. As Jakiel and Colaiacovo stood in for Fauci and Kramer, Fauci and Kramer began to stand in for a notion of shared purpose inflected by different personal styles and political approaches to collective action. This abstraction enabled Jakiel and Colaiacovo, hometown heroes of the Buffalo, NY regional theatre community, to engage local audiences directly and intimately in the play’s dialectics: Colaiacovo is youthfully middle-aged like Kramer’s ghost, whereas Jakiel is significantly older; Colaiacovo is openly queer, whereas Jakiel is the heterosexual father of some of Buffalo’s favorite homegrown local talent. Despite their differences, however, these men are brought together by shared purpose—mitigation of harmful illness and death for Fauci and Kramer, and the intersubjective work of the theatre for Jakiel and Colaiacovo. Explicitly inviting disparate local constituencies to share space in the theatre, FAUCI and KRAMER used political and activist history as a prism through which local theatre audiences could experience co-existence, compromise, and the complex intimacy of connection across difference. When the play’s ghost first arrived, both men assume that Kramer has returned to teach Dr. Fauci some lesson. “This is no Christmas Carol ,” however, Kramer quips. Rather, the drama’s emotional climax unfurled in relation to Kramer’s personal weaknesses in a moment of fraught ambivalence. As Kramer characteristically excoriated Fauci for the shortcomings of his pragmatic approach to public health, Fauci reminded Kramer of the perhaps hypocritical preferential treatment he once received for liver failure. Ethically, shouldn’t the organ transplant have gone to a younger, healthier individual? And someone without HIV? By the end of the exchange, Kramer was stopped in his tracks. Standing at the edge of the stage, as if at a precipice, the loquacious rabblerouser was, finally, at a loss for words. Without turning to look at his scene partner, Kramer insisted that the liver was life or death. “I remember,” Fauci replied, gazing sympathetically at his all-too-human friend. After all, Dr. Fauci revealed, he was one of the doctors on Kramer’s team. The shock of this revelation, for unfamiliar audiences, is that Larry Kramer—the longtime agitator and self-styled beacon of principle—would stoop to individualism and self-preservation. As Kramer defended his individual right to survival, Fauci nodded silently along. Perhaps this is the play’s simple message: It is okay, even good, to survive. A montage of video footage from the early days of the COVID-19 vaccine roll-out concluded the performance. This miracle of medical expediency would likely never have been achieved without the lessons learned from the early days of the still ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic. Still, as my lover and I re-lived the hope and relief of those early vaccine deployments from our seats in the audience, it was hard not to notice that she and I were the only attendees wearing face masks. What would Kramer really say, looking out at all those uncovered faces as COVID still rages? Wouldn’t he rail at us? Perhaps. What’s more important, however, is what we agree to expect—and accept—from one another. I hope that future productions will encourage local producers, collaborators, and audience members to ask themselves, clearly and directly: What do you want? Why are you here? For regional theatre to flourish, the local development of new works must encourage communities to ask ourselves what we collectively need from live performance now. Who are our unique constituencies, and how can the work we produce bring them together as a community, as FAUCI and KRAMER did, if only for the length of the show? The ghost of Larry Kramer (Louis Colaiacovo) kisses the forehead of Dr. Anthony Fauci (Steve Jakiel), who is hard at work behind his home-office desk in Drew Fornarola’s FAUCI and KRAMER at First Look Buffalo (2023). Photo ©Tomas L. Waz References Footnotes About The Author(s) JANET WERTHER (they/them) holds a PhD in theatre & performance from The Graduate Center, CUNY and an MFA in dance from Sarah Lawrence College. They are currently engaged as an assistant teaching professor in theatre at the University at Buffalo. Janet’s work sits at the intersections of embodied arts practice, education, activism, and research/historiography. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Censorship/Public Censure and Performance Today: Special Issue Introduction Remembering Censorship in the World Premiere of Seán O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned: Lafayette, Indiana, 1959 The Stage as Networked Battleground: Dissent and Censorship in Contemporary Canadian Theatre and Performance Censor/Censure: A Roundtable Which of These Are Censorship? The Divide Between Prior Restraint and Soft Censorship How Can an Artist Respond to Censorship? The Dilemma That Faces Contemporary Creatives in the UK The LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project: A Roundtable Conversation Life is Drag: Documenting Spectacle as Resistance An Interview with Rachel Rampleman Middle Eastern American Theatre: Communities, Cultures, and Artists. Michael Malek Najjar. Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2021; Pp. xvi + 237. Lessons from Our Students: Meditations on Performance Pedagogy. Stacey Cabaj and Andrea Odinov. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 126 Choreographing Dirt: Movement, Performance, and Ecology in the Anthropocene. Angenette Spalink. Studies in Theatre, Ecology, and Performance Series, no. 3. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 116. Fauci and Kramer Our Town Frankenstein Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Interview with James C. Nicola, Tanya Elder, and Diego Daniel Pardo 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 Archiving a Life in Theatre: The Legacy of Michael Feingold Interview with James C. Nicola, Tanya Elder, and Diego Daniel Pardo By Published on June 6, 2024 Download Article as PDF Headshot of Michael Feingold from 1973. Photo: William Baker. Courtesy Feingold Archive. Art is of the artist, and the artist has to find and create it his own way, but art is for the audience, and to refuse to be relevant, to refuse to communicate, to refuse to make the attempt, on any grounds, is to be less of an artist. Art cannot exist for the past, for there is no past; and because we have serious doubts that there will be a future, it dare not exist for the future. To make art fully meaningful for the present is to absorb into it both the past and the future, to make them, in the minds of the audience, the now-serving continuum that they make in reality. —Michael Feingold, “Do We Need Greek Drama?” yale/theatre , Spring 1968 Introduction The 1968 journal precursor to Theater magazine, yale/theatre, asked whether modern audiences needed Greek theatre. Michael Feingold’s fellow editor, Ren Frutkin, wrote that they wanted to gather the “activities of the Yale School of Drama: the theatre, thought, discussion, dream, art, people through essays, plays, poems, reviews and graphics” in this new publication. The canon of Greek plays was relevant to their first issue because Greek theatre “resonates with people in the process of changing their way of thinking about themselves.” These young theatre students—with their provocative lower case journal title—were graduate drama students during the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Bobby Kennedy. A changing world was around them as LBJ gave way to Nixon, and Michael Feingold, literary criticism major, was ready to tell the world that its theatre needed to reflect the past and the present in meaningful ways to impact an unknown future; “ancient civilizations are metaphors,” wrote Feingold, “like works of art, in the image of contemporary civilization.” Michael Feingold (1945-2022) wore a variety of hats in the theatre, though primarily known as a theatre critic for the radical Village Voice from 1971-2013 . Few know that he was an original editor at yale/theatre and the first literary manager (or dramaturg) of the Yale Repertory Theatre, as well as the Guthrie Theater and American Place Theatre. He was the General Editor of a set of groundbreaking experimental theatre publication known as the Winter Repertory . He spent summers nurturing playwrights such as Adrienne Kennedy and August Wilson at O’Neill Playwrighting Conferences. He wrote and published poetry, both original and translated. He translated Romance and Germanic Language plays into English including Brecht/Weill, Copi, Goldoni. His works were performed on Broadway and off-Broadway, in California, Norway, and Singapore. He was a director, a playwright, an adaptor, and while he had a caustic personal style, he knew theatre history, and would make sure everyone knew it. When Michael died in 2022, he left a large rental apartment full of books, albums, DVDS and audio-visual material, 18th through 20th century theatre memorabilia, art, and theatrical posters from Yale to Lincoln Center of shows he was involved in. In total, 109 bankers boxes of papers including correspondence, childhood photographs and actor headshots, scripts sent to him in press packets or authors seeking advice, as well as his own personal work at Columbia and Yale, the Winter Repertory, and his own reviews, which are currently neither digitized nor available to the public. This is the “Feingold Project,” as it is called by the team put together by preliminary estate executor, Daniel Diego Pardo, his husband, playwright Brian Quirk, and project archivist Tanya Elder. Pardo gathered a crew who had worked with or knew Michael, packed his belongings and transferred them to office space in Tin Pan Alley (an appropriate location, Feingold would say) where his collection was inventoried, and Pardo and Quirk began the impossible task of finding homes for what Feingold called, “his accumulations” in a New York Stage Review article from 2012 titled “Of Merch and Memorabilia.” The Feingold Project continues its search to place Michael’s rich collection of personal papers into an archive. In April 2024, Feingold’s long-time friend and collaborator, Jim Nicola—recently retired as beloved Artistic Director of the New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW)—spoke with Pardo and Elder regarding Feingold’s papers, his place in theatre history and scholarship (including the rich world of LGBTQ+ artists) in the American theatre for American audiences. They met at the Feingold Project offices, where Nicola was able to view some of the archival materials in the collection and reminisced about their own work together on Two Blind Beggars at the old WPA Theatre. Tanya Elder: When I first looked at Michael Feingold’s vast archive of posters, programs, correspondence, books, and art, one of the things I remember from when I studied experimental theatre at NYU is the journal yale/theatre , which was the precursor to the Theater magazine. yale/theatre had biting material about theatre and politics. And I think Yale is where Michael got a lot of his groundwork for life. It was the height of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. Jim Nicola: When was he at Yale? Elder: He graduated with a BA from Columbia [English/Comparative Literature] from 1962-1966. And then he attended Yale from 1966 to 1972 for an MFA. Daniel Diego Pardo: He was there when critic and writer Robert Brustein was in his first year. He met Brustein at Columbia. When Brustein got a job at Yale, he brought Michael there. Elder: There are letters in the archive between Brustein and Michael. Michael writes “Can you get me in?” and Brustein writes back: “Read the newspaper tomorrow and you'll find out your answer.” Pardo: And they inaugurated Yale Rep. Michael was its first literary manager. Nicola: Yes, when it was still a relatively new form. Elder : We have the program and poster from the Yale production of The Frogs (1974). On the third page, you'll see cast members Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver, Christopher Durang, and the rest of the cast. Pardo: It is signed by the entire cast, including Stephen Sondheim and Burt Shevelove, and Michael had a bootleg recording of the production as well. Elder: We spoke to the Sondheim Foundation and are waiting to hear back... Pardo: The production took place in a swimming pool! And you can hear the water on the recording. Elder: This began his relationship with actor Alvin Epstein. Pardo: [ Reading names on program.] Alvin. Carmen de Lavallade. Steve Lawson. Jeremy Geidt. Jeremy Dempsey. Jonathan Marks. These are incredible people! Pardo: We are hoping that the archive will find a home soon. But it’s a complicated process. Elder: The second thing I want to point out is that Michael was one of the most pivotal people in experimental theatre in New York. He was there at the beginning. He was the first person to publish Mad Dog Blues by Sam Shephard and other plays for his Winter Repertory series (Feingold, Winter Repertory 1970-1973), which included six other volumes from different playwrights including Tom Eyen, Rochelle Owens, Robert Patrick, María Irene Fornés, Amiri Baraka, Jim Jacobs, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, and Warren Casey. Nicola: Wow. Elder: One of the volumes was supposed to be Jean-Claude van Itallie’s India Journal which didn’t end up happening, but we have the copy that has both van Itallie’s notes and Michael's notes about publishing it. Michael was the first to publish Grease . Pardo: He wrote the foreword for Grease . I believe it might be the off-Broadway version. We have one Grease hardcover version with Jim Jacob’s autograph in it. Elder: One of the most incredible things about Michael is that he kept everything . Pardo: Yes, even if it was a random piece of paper with his production notes, or a program from an Off-Off-Broadway play that he saw. The archive is a little like a time capsule of history from the Off- and Off-Off Broadway Movement. Elder: He kept the flyers of every performance he went to, including obscure downtown theatre. There's a lot of stuff with David Greenspan, for example. Nicola: The Beggar's Opera ! Do you have any of the shows that he and I did together? Pardo: It's probably in here somewhere. Elder: He… Pardo: …saved everything. Nicola: He did a translation of an Offenbach one-act operetta called Two Blind Beggars . Elder: We have it. Nicola: I directed it. He brought it to me. We did it at the old WPA on Bowery on a double bill with Trial by Jury . Elder: We have everything that he ever wrote and everything he ever saw. Nicola: [ Pointing to headshot of Michael taped to wall. ] Oh, look at that wonderful picture! What year would that be? Pardo: 1973. That was just after his time at Yale. Nicola: I remember him then. Pardo: Remember this? It’s the Grove New American Theatre: An Anthology (Feingold, Grove New American Theater 1992) edited by Michael Feingold. It includes Mysteries and What’s So Funny by David Gordon; Sincerity Forever by Mac Wellman; The American Plan by Richard Greenberg; Theory of Total Blame by Karen Finley; Das Vedanya Mamma by Ethyl Eichelberger; and Dead Mother or Shirley Not All In Vain by David Greenspan. It was published in 1993. He was such an advocate of experimental theatre. Elder: He excoriated the theatre and politics, as he felt the theatre should impact the audience and use their collective memory to elevate the audience to react…. and he felt that these plays were necessary as the basis of good theatre that was politically active. Nicola: This is incredible. Elder: Here are the first four volumes of yale/theatre beginning in Spring 1968 with the question, “Do We Need Greek Theatre?”. The second was entitled “Crisis 1968: Politics and Imagination,” the Spring 1969 edition was dedicated to the Living Theatre, who appeared at Yale when they returned to the United States after a self-imposed and tax-related exile in Europe, and the fourth, “New Playwrights.” We have the full run of the journal, which included about eleven issues with two editions containing individual short plays. Michael was on the editorial board, with Ren Frutkin and Joseph Cazelet in the first volume, and David Copelin for the third volume with various editors. The publication ran to 1975. I believe Michael was involved until about 1972. Pardo: In 1972, he was already established in New York as a critic at the Village Voice . Elder: Yes. And he wrote for more than just the Village Voice . He also wrote for Mirabella , Plays and Players Magazine, if you remember that. Nicola: Yes, I have a stack of Plays and Players . Elder: The problem with publications like this is that many libraries already have the publications themselves, the same goes for a stack of Plays and Players . It’s difficult to move some of that stuff in the archive. But we have so much of it. However, Michael retained the source materials for yale/theatre and the Winter Repertory . Original copyedited material, correspondence, photographs for both publications. Nicola: This is incredible. I grew up just outside of Hartford. And I graduated from high school in ‘68. So, I lived the founding with Robert Brustein arriving at Yale. It was something I was excited about. It is my impression that Brustein and Michael created the notion of a dramaturg in American theatre practice. Elder: That is the job of an archive—to figure out where this stuff is going to go and get an overview of the impact it had then and now. Pardo: With this archive, a PhD student in theatre and performance could delve into it. This would be a beginning or a kind of a springboard into where and what was happening back then. Nicola: Was his MFA in Drama Criticism? Elder: It was in Literary Criticism. Nicola: Yes, because they didn’t have a “dramaturgical” focus yet at that time. It ultimately became “Criticism and Dramaturgy,” I believe. Elder: In this volume of essays editor David Copelin mentions at midnight on the day of the funeral of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., from the second yale/theatre volume on “1968: Crisis and Imagination” that “a group of drama school students was to attend the dress rehearsal of Sam Shepard’s Icarus's Mother at a New Haven playhouse.” And Michael also mentions in his essay in the issue that New Haven was burning. Pardo: What I would want as an outsider to the archive is a frame of entrance. When did Dramaturgy start to officially come into American theatre practice? And when did they start hiring Dramaturgs? There was a while there when it was called “literary manager.” Elder: This is what Michael was called in the early days. Pardo: He was the literary manager at the Guthrie. Nicola: In so many ways, he was a pioneer. Elder: Someone could search out Michael’s Yale-era papers to really think about that development. He did have many opinions, and he wrote about them very strongly, even at Yale. Nicola: He was inspired by the Russian and German theaters. Pardo: That could very well be a PhD thesis. Nicola: It could be a hook to so much to discover about that period. Growing up in Hartford in the 1960s, and being an adolescent then, I witnessed the birth of the Hartford Stage, Yale Rep, of Long Wharf, of the now defunct Stage West in Springfield. Goodspeed. The O’Neill. All of that within ten years. Michael was at the center of it. But he was also one of the observers and articulators of it all. Elder: Here are some of his papers from his undergraduate days at Columbia that kind of formed him. He got A’s on all of them. It’s his first year of college. He’s a sophomore here, or freshman. Pardo: [ Reading a title of one of Michael’s papers. ] “The Development of Tragic Characters in Richard the Third and Richard the Second: Hero and Anti-hero.” He is doing deep thinking at such a young age. Elder: He talks about Richard the Third a lot. I just found another play that he wrote as well. This was at Columbia. It’s called Marie Lafarge , a play in one act. “Good books, good old fashioned movie writing. But can you get Garbo?” That was the teacher’s comment on it. Nicola: ( Laughing. ) He writes all of these in longhand. It’s hard to imagine now. Pardo: Yeah, he was probably a senior at that point and getting ready to go to Yale. Nicola: Oh, there’s comments here. Carbon copy and a typewriter. Oh my God. Yes! Elder: We have materials by other playwrights as well that he worked on. Here is the play More War in Store with Peace as Chief of Police , a play by Lonnie Carter. I think Lonnie Carter also went to Yale. Nicola: Yes. Elder: His Yale graduate professional newsletters included some of his first reviews. Nicola: This reads like he’s speaking to today. Elder: He also has a ton of programs from Yale. There is a series of letters that he wrote about theatre and education which, I think, ended up in one of the yale/theatre issues. Nicola: This brings me back to my youth. Pardo: With your experience, how would you stimulate someone’s imagination that this is valuable for our life today? You know, not just as part of the history, but … Nicola: Just exactly the experience I had right now. This is a metaphor. Historical metaphor for what we are living right now. Pardo: Because he lived through Vietnam. Nicola: He commented on it. He was a part of it. Elder: His introduction to “Crisis 1968: Theatre and Imagination” in yale/theatre basically speaks to us now. How American theatre tries to reinvent itself every twenty years when we go through a political crisis. Pardo: And there's always a political crisis. I mean, historically, during his lifetime, there was the AIDS crisis, which killed a lot of theatre artists and Michael’s friends, but also the whole issue with the National Endowment of the Arts. Nicola: Yeah, that was a huge storm. That we still are feeling the effects of Jesse Helms. Elder: “Death, Or the Theatre” is one of the things that he wrote about, and he argues that when you lose a theatre artist too young, it’s not like losing a regular person or a film or television star. A theatre artist is only really there on the stage. There’s not a lot of video of them. So it feels like more is lost with no way to access what they did. But this archive points to some of that. Pardo: Yes, you also miss out on the growth of the artist if they die young. Michael wrote about this tragic reality. Elder: He also wrote two articles in a series called “Art and Sanity,” where he specifically talks about Jesse Helms, and around the time when Mac Wellman’s play Seven Blowjobs was going on. Pardo: He was also trying to bring attention to actual theatrical works. For example, he would write about the productions to encourage people to go. Nicola: What strikes me about Michael as we are talking is that he was present at, and a participant in, the forging of 20th century American theatre. Elder: People don't really know about the things he did outside of critical reviews. Pardo: He was very much engaged. And the theatre today would not be what it is had he not been around. [ Tanya shows political buttons from the collection .] Look at this button, it’s hilarious! “Vote the Motherfuckers Out.” Nicola: “Take a Playwright to Lunch.” Oh. That's good. “Carol Bellamy”. Wow, Carol Bellamy! Elder: Mind blowing from back in the day, right? She got nowhere near the Mayordom. Pardo: “I Read Banned Books.” Nicola: My god. We’re still having this fight about banned books. What strikes me when you look at the totality of who he is, or was , he was a participant in the creation of the structure and the aesthetics of modern American theatre—art theatre as opposed to commercial theatre. The forging of the not-for-profit theatre. The real theatre, in my opinion. And then he moved along to be more of a spectator and observer and marker or recorder of its progress. Elder: Yes, he was a cultural historian and commentator as well as a critic. Nicola: He was somebody who was engaged, who had a full knowledge of the field. I think his work still speaks to what we are going through now because we’re in a similar period of collapse. Pardo: Especially with funding. I mean, it’s ridiculous that an Off-Broadway theatre production is almost the same ticket price as a Broadway show. And Broadway is always going to win because they do big musicals. And there's nothing wrong with that, but it’s commercial theatre. Nicola: That’s America. That’s who we are. And that’s another element that I’ve always thought was powerful about the not-for-profit theatre: it's going against capitalism. It's rejecting those ideals and proposing an alternative idea. A way of being and being together collectively. But that’s who I think he really was, even if unconsciously. Using his gifts, to speak to another generation or to further generations as they start to contend with what is what, not only what is an art form, but what life is and what it means. Theatre is such a communal event. You can't do it by yourself. Pardo: It's true, it's a community. In drama school, you work together and you rely on each other. The director makes compromises, as does an actor, and a designer. You work together to present something. Elder: But that sometimes it failed, too. Nicola: Of course. Everything has moments of failure. Anything human does. Elder: Instances where he failed in this collection is highlighted when he was supposed to be the translator of Kiss of the Spider Woman . Starting about 1981 to 1986, there are letters from Manuel Puig saying, “Michael, where’s my translation? This movie is hinging on this [Broadway translation].” But that was also at a time when his mother was passing away. Also, there were a couple of years, maybe a decade, where he took on a little too much and couldn’t satisfy everyone, possibly even himself. He never really said why he didn’t do things. Pardo: And what about the gay plays? Elder: When it comes to gay and lesbian material, he wrote some original materials, translated others, nurtured performers. But he’s connected with Caffe Cino, and with tons of playwrights who were gay, straight, and otherwise, particularly Robert Patrick, John-Claude von Itallie, and Joe Chaikin. Michael’s translation of Grand Finale by Copi was published in Gay Plays: An International Anthology in 1989. Pardo: And he also loved the Ridiculous Theatre. Elder: And Robert Patrick, the playwright. He worked a lot with Patrick at the beginning. There’s an autographed copy of Patrick’s Truly Gay News . There is a folder for the Gay American Arts Festival in 1981. Here is Flatbush Tosca . He had a lot of correspondence back and forth with Harvey Fierstein as well. And here’s an interview he did with Sam Shepard on The Chairs in 1985. Pardo: It’s for WBAI radio. Is this Shepard and Joseph Chaikin in this recording? Elder: We should get this digitized. Nicola: Yeah, absolutely. The Gay American Festival was incredible. Everybody from the gay literary world is in here. John Rechy, who wrote the novel City of Night and the non-fiction book The Sexual Outlaw . Jonathan Ned Katz. Harvey Fierstein. “An Evening with Harvey.” A Gay Publishing Roundtable with Felice Picano, Joan Larkin, two major poets. And Michael Denny. And lesbian poets Susan Jordan, Joan Larkin, and Audre Lorde. Incredible. Pardo: He was very well connected. He knew everybody and everybody knew him. Elder: Here are the first or some of the first copies of Christopher Street Magazine. I’m not quite sure if he wrote for these, or if they were sent to him. Pardo: Does Christopher Street still exist as a publication? Nicola: No. Nor does Christopher Street as we knew it either. Pardo: Well-put, Jim. Richard Hauer, a poem. “Superwoman and the Wheelchair.” Elder: He had a lot of correspondence with Stanley Kaufmann as well. And we have Robert Patrick's Truly Gay News. Nicola: A gay humor magazine from 1967. And signed! Renee Richards autobiography, remember? “Renee Richards autobiography would definitely be titled ‘Better Off.’” “Rex Reed has a crack in his ass from sitting on the fence.” That’s hilarious. Elder: Here is Robert Patrick's Cheep Theatricks published in the Winter Repertory . The Winter Repertory was a series of seven published books of plays with Michael as general editor of the series, starting in 1971 with Kenneth Bernard’s Night Club and Other Plays. And here’s Maria Irene Fornes. Promenade , written with Al Carmines. So much of the New York experimental theatre is represented in this archive. He's got a few things in the archive from Al Carmines. Nicola: This is the history of American playwriting. Elder: The last thing I'll show you from the Winter Repertory is Mad Dog Blues and Other Plays by Sam Shepard. Here are photographs that were used in the publication taken by Gerard Malanga. Malanga was a Warhol photographer as well. And there's O-Lan Jones in here someplace, too, Shepherd's wife. O-Lan and Patti Smith in the same volume. One thing that blew me away is that Patti Smith, for this volume, wrote in her own way a history of her friendship with Sam Shepard. And she signed it, and she said “don’t edit it,” and then they edited it, since it needed a comma. So don’t tell Patti! Pardo: It’s here somewhere as part of the archive. Elder: When I was going through his stuff, I was shocked about the depth and range of his life. Everything I learned in the Experimental Theatre Wing at NYU came rushing back. Nicola: Quite a journey that Michael took that parallels the American theatre journey from 1960 to 2022 when he died. Elder: He was a nerdy theatre kid. So he’s got programs in here dating back to the 50s. Nicola: It's a generational perspective. Really informed. And I keep going back to it that he was both a participant and an observer/commentator. And not many people are that. It was part of what made him special, in my opinion, when he was working at the New York Theatre Workshop. Because other cultures that I’ve visited and got to visit, it was a surprise to me that people who were critics were also working artists or dramaturgs employed by theatrical institutions. He was both the critic at the Village Voice observing the work of Off- and Off-Off Broadway, and he was also part of that world as a playwright. And the rest of American culture is separated, like the people who are critical are often not “in” the community. They’re separated. But in German and French theatre, they’re part of the community. And it’s much healthier. I think he really displayed that dual role in his life, and his work and sets a good example for the future. Nicola: There is a paper from college where he quotes from Shaw... Pardo: It's a paper that he wrote when he was an undergraduate. Nicola: Yes [ Reading from paper .] “I stand for the future and the past. For the posterity that has no vote and the tradition that never had any. I stand for the great abstractions for conscience and virtue, for the eternal against the expedient, for the revolutionary appetite, against the day’s gluttony, for intellectual integrity, for humanity, for the rescue of industry from commercialism and of science, from professionalism. For everything that you desire as sincerely as I am.” That’s from The Apple Cart by George Bernard Shaw. Pardo: And this is early on, 1962. He’s so young, a new kid on the block. And he puts this quote from Shaw on the cover of this report. It tells you a lot of who he is at 18 or 19 years old. Nicola: And that didn't change. Elder: Around 1998, he wrote “Death, or the Theatre” for the Village Voice . I think this encapsulates his entire vision of what the theatre could be. The introduction is biting. But it’s not something that he hasn't written before. He’s very pessimistic, too. Pardo: At this point in time, we were dealing with AIDS and with the NEA mess. Elder: He didn’t really talk a lot about Judaism. He had a bar mitzvah. He grew up in the conservative tradition that he turned his back on, but I think a lot of it informed his politics and life. I work at the American Jewish Historical Society, so I don’t want to forget that he also grew up in that Judaic idea of fairness. Pardo: In his 1991 Miss Saigon review, he says something about blowing up the New York Times . “Every generation gets the theatre they deserve. And we get Miss Saigon .” Elder: His dad emigrated from Lithuania. His mom was born in Philadelphia. I don't know exactly when he emigrated, but I read somewhere that some of his family did perish in the Holocaust. He doesn’t really talk about it in his work to my knowledge, though he did write an unpublished script called The Hitler Play . Nicola: You know, I glanced at the Obie Awards in the collection. And that seems to me that he had a huge influence on what it became then. And it's not anything like that anymore. Elder: Yes, there is a connection between home grown theatres in New York City. HERE Arts Center is represented in the archive. So is New York Theatre Workshop, Theatre for the New Audience, and La MaMa. People who went in and out of downtown theatre flowed in and out, and it's incredible because you never really think of a critic talking to theatre people about actually crafting their work. Pardo: That's what a dramaturg does, isn’t it? I think this is why, every year, he went as the dramaturg at the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Center. It’s how you learn to craft a play. Nicola: This is breaking down those walls. Pardo: When they accepted August Wilson, he had sent in a play that was hundreds of pages long. But when Michael read it, he said something like, “this is an incredible thing. This guy has such an imagination. We must accept this guy and we'll cut it down. We'll turn it and make it into a presentable play.” Nicola: Was that Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom ? I think it was. And then O’Neill developed three or four plays of his. Elder: It seems like people don’t really understand that Michael was more than a critic. I was surprised to learn that he was also a translator and an adapter. He was also a lyricist. He was a dramaturg, a literary manager. He had his hand in so many different aspects of crafting theatre. Pardo: One example of this is his work with The Kurt Weill Foundation. They found a song that had never been translated into English. And they had Michael do it. He also worked with the Cole Porter Foundation, and so many others. He also worked with the Cole Porter Foundation to re-write the book of Porter's Aladdin musical. Michael went through the lengthy process of creating a brand new Aladdin musical just before Disney released their version, not by Cole Porter. Alas, bad timing. Nicola: He did Happy End , right? Pardo: Yes. That was his first Brecht/Weill translation. It had Meryl Streep and Christopher Lloyd. It started at Yale and then it moved to Broadway. Elder: He also had like 10,000 albums and 8000 books. Pardo: He has a Threepenny Opera t-shirt autographed by Sting. Nicola: This archive, while the remnants of one person’s life, is actually the story of the American theatre of half a century, or more. This overlaps with my own rumination on the time, the life, that I’ve had in the theatre in America. The big, underlying thought that I wasn’t able to hold on to until now, now that I’m finished. Only now can I see a clear beginning, middle, and end to my professional life. What Michael’s accumulation is revealing to me is that this thing we have all been engaged in on the deepest possible foundational level has been trying to persuade this culture that the role of the artist has value. And you can see in those early years and the materials from Yale with people like Christopher Durang, Meryl Streep, Robert Brustein—you can see they were pushing this. The role, the value of the artist, not just their output. It’s the process of making art. It’s the thing. It's the enterprise, the commitment. Pardo: The remnants of a brilliant mind.... This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) James C. Nicola was the Artistic Director of New York Theatre Workshop from 1988 to 2022. Prior to that, he was first a National Endowment for the Arts Directing Fellow and then Producing Associate at Arena Stage (with Zelda Fichandler). He was a Casting Coordinator at Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival. He worked as a director or assistant Off-Off Broadway, and in London at the Royal Court Theatre and The Young Vic Theatre. He is a graduate of Tufts University, and was awarded a Special Tony Award and a Lifetime Achievement Obie Award. Tanya Elder is the Senior Archivist of the American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS). She studied theater and archival management at New York University and helped organize the records of the HERE Arts Center, the Mark Amitin papers, and worked with the American Theater Archive Project (ATAP). At the AJHS, she re-processed and wrote on the Raphael Lemkin papers. She has also published essays in In Our Own Voices: The Changing Face of Librarianship . Diego Daniel Pardo is an actor who has worked in professional theatre, film, and television. He is also a professional dialect coach. He holds a Master’s Degree in Speech Pathology from CUNY (Lehman) and is an alumni of the Juilliard School Drama Division. He is the preliminary executor for the estate of Michael Feingold. 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.

Maurya Wickstrom 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 Thinking about Temporality and Theatre Maurya Wickstrom By Published on March 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF Over the past couple of years, I have been increasingly taken with the question of temporality. Giorgio Agamben writes in Infancy and History that: Every conception of history is invariably accompanied by a certain experience of time which is implicit in it, conditions it, and thereby has to be elucidated. Similarly, every culture is first and foremost a particular experience of time, and no new culture is possible without an alteration in this experience. The original task of a genuine revolution, therefore, is never merely to “change the world,” but also—and above all—to “change time.” Although Agamben first published this astonishing recommendation in Italian in 1978 and in English in 2007, I first encountered it in a 2012 book by art historian Christine Ross. In her volume The Past is the Present: It’s the Future Too , Ross identifies characteristics-in-common of work by artists who she sees as participating in what she calls “the temporal turn.” It seems that in the visual arts (including video, performance and installation), artists have for awhile been attuned to and working specifically on alterations in common assumptions about, and the lived experience and capitalist formations of, temporality. Similarly, in queer studies, and in other analyses like that of the brilliant Cruel Optimism , by Lauren Berlant, both visions of changed time, and the identification of new forms of neoliberal time have been underway for some time. Although theatre as a medium is strikingly fluent in and fluid with temporality, we have not perhaps been as engaged with temporality in its own right as some other disciplines have been. This is not to say that there has not been brilliant work of lasting significance in theatre scholarship that has touched on temporality and time. At the risk of generalization, I would say that this work has tended to circulate around phenomenology, finitude, death, memory, hauntings and returns, as well as aspects of Delueze’s thought. And at the risk of generalization, I will repeat that most of this work has not been engaged with the question of temporality per se, with opening out the very meaning and practices of temporality itself. Increasingly, my interest, and the interest of a growing number of scholars and theatre artists, is in how theatre and performance are engaging with time in ways that do just this, guided by explorations undertaken through a variety of philosophical and theoretical apertures which influence political thinking in unfamiliar ways. I think we could say that, if not always explicitly stated, this work wonders how we might continue to open up new insights and practices in order to gesture toward forms of “revolution” initiated by changes to time. Matthew Wagner’s 2012 book Shakespeare, Theatre, and Time stands as one of the few monographs specifically on time currently available in theatre and performance studies. Although guided by some of the conceptual apparatus of phenomenology, Wagner’s book is an important step toward opening temporality and theatre as a significant sub-field within theatre studies in that it is explicitly and fully about time and its multiplicity and variations. I applaud his goal “to revitalize our temporal sensibilities in respect to theatre.” Although remaining committed to the familiar assumption that theatre is implicitly temporally bound to and limited by a passage through time that always must come to an end, Wagner insists throughout on the unruliness of time in the theatre, its refusal to obey the clock. The past few years have seen other work emerging that opens the field more radically, departing from phenomenology as the philosophical center for theorization and description. I will mention just a few of these in the short space that I have. The excellent 2014 issue of Performance Research opens an international and interdisciplinary scope for thinking about temporality and performance. The issue follows from the 2013 Performance Studies Conference at Stanford University entitled “Now Then: Performance and Temporality”—a conference which staged a plethora of emerging thought on time. The essays range from a consideration of cyclical time in a twelve-year Finish performance, to an exploration of translation and temporality through Anne Carson’s translation of Antigonik , to the Chinese concept of yu zhou (something like Einstein’s unified field of space and time), to the concept of dyssynchrony in performance in Bogota, Columbia, to name a few examples. Nicholas Ridout’s 2013 monograph Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism, and Love is for me an exemplary innovation in thinking about theatre and time. While the book engages most deeply with labor (in its amateur forms), part of Ridout’s work is to articulate the ways in which labor (capitalist and otherwise) is always caught up in time. In one chapter in particular he places Walter Benjamin front and center, reaffirming Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” as the central text that it is, above and beyond the familiar (although endlessly rich), image of the angel of history. Agamben, in the quote above, forcefully reminds us that one must think about temporality in conjunction with history and vice versa. He reminds us thus, as Benjamin does, to problematize dominate conceptions of history by drawing them through time. One of the ways I have been investigating temporality is through historically introduced genres, especially tragedy. Two wonderful books are helping my own efforts and should be of note for our field. One is David Scott’s 2014 Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice , and the other is the 2016 The Black Radical Tragic: Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution by Jeremy Glick. The latter is a constellation of a study moving among Brecht, Glissant, C.L.R. James, Paul Robeson, Eisenstein, Adorno, Brecht, Badiou, and Fanon among others to study in part the timeliness or untimeliness of tragedy. The former questions the temporal expectations implicit in revolutionary planning and puts those expectations up against revolutionary failure and devastation, suggesting a temporality of the tragic genre. Another work, Freedom Time , by Gary Wilder, includes a close examination of the political temporalities imagined and practiced by Aimé Césaire, with particular attention to his play about Toussaint Louverture. I cannot close this very partial overview without mentioning, at least in passing, some of the most striking theatrical work with temporality that I have seen in the past year. These include Andrew Schneider’s You Are Nowhere , Gob Squad’s Before Your Very Eyes and Western Society , William Kentridge’s Refuse the Hour , and, most recently, the counter-tenor, “Negro-gothic” performer, M. Lamar. Each of these works experimentally and courageously in modalities of time that seem to be invented before our eyes. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Maurya Wickstrom is Professor of Theatre at The Graduate Center and the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. Her newest monograph, Fiery Temporalities in Theatre and Performance: The Initiation of History , is forthcoming from Bloomsbury Methuen Drama’s Engage series. 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.

Philip Brankin 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 Oh, Mary! Philip Brankin By Published on June 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF Conrad Ricamora and Cole Escola in Oh, Mary! Photo: Emilio Madrid Oh, Mary! By Cole Escola Directed by Sam Pinkleton Lucille Lortel Theatre New York, NY March 5, 2024 Reviewed by Philip Brankin Thinking about Oh, Mary!–– a play set during the close of the American Civil War––I cannot help but conjure up a line from the comedic persona Philomena Cunk as she ruminates on the life of Abraham Lincoln in the BBC mockumentary Cunk on Earth. In her noted droll style, she deadpans, “Lincoln’s story didn’t have a happy ending. Five days after the North won, a terrible fate befell him. He was forced to go to the theatre to watch a play.” This is the level of dark-humored irreverence found in Cole Escola’s sold-out smash hit that opened at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in New York City and is now about to open on Broadway. But in this play, Lincoln is not the subject, only the by-product. Everything about the play and its production is meant to center Mary and highlight its star’s feral talent. Cole Escola (they/them) has created a career-defining production after years of paying their dues on a spectrum of stages from YouTube to Joe’s Pub at New York’s Public Theater. The production of Oh, Mary! is seemingly an autobiographical study of sorts of Escola’s own self-perception as a fledgling cabaret talent told through the removed lens of a mock biography of First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln in the events leading up to the death of her husband, President Lincoln. The queering of this momentous history is enacted through turning the lens on the First Lady, re-positioning her as an ahistorical antiheroine, and essentially making every character/historical figure homosexual or utterly camp, particularly when revealing their true selves on stage. Escola’s gag is to make Mary’s super-objective to be a cabaret star, or rather, to make a comeback to the stage as the star she sees herself as. Escola’s artistic license is fully on display in this production as they present a queer revision of history. Mary’s boredom with her life, fueled by alcoholism and an inflated ego, are exacerbated by her husband’s barely veiled homosexuality. Lincoln is her distant, bewildered husband who we learn early on is more beleaguered by Mary’s obsessive fixation on stage stardom, fueled by alcohol, than the War. Abe indulges her by hiring an acting coach in the form of none other than his secret (and jealous) lover John Wilkes Booth. So, everything is in service of Mary. The program conspicuously lists the cast all not by their names but their relation to Mary (i.e. Lincoln is listed as “Mary’s husband”). Despite this, the casting is consequential. Both Lincoln and Booth are played by stars of the all-queer helmed film Fire Island , another recent entry for queer comedy. Booth convinces Mary that he has secured for her an audition for none other than the fateful production of Our American Cousin , the play the president would later be assassinated at while watching from his box seat. But this bit of history is immaterial to the audience as we are following Mary’s journey towards stardom or self-destruction. I have been following Cole Escola and their career since the early days of content creation on social media, the place I consider to be the birthplace of their dexterity as a character actor and comedy writer. Escola’s work has always focused on queering culture and historically minded camp sensibilities. After years of digital shorts, pithy tweets, and one-person shows in cabaret spaces, this production feels like the culmination of Escola’s ability to fully realize their singular vision. As Mary Todd Lincoln, Cole Escola sets the same tone for the play from her first line. She desperately cries to Washington’s portrait in the Oval Office, “Oh mother! Why did I marry him?” Oh, Mary! is as much concerned with queering sacred American history as it is with queering other deconstructions of history on Broadway, such as Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton . Oh, Mary! is a testament to the current generation of mad, queer excellence and those who might find kinship with the idiosyncratic Escola. The play takes the historical subtexts of Mary and Abraham and blows them campily out of proportion, centering the marginalized aspects of their personalities, such as Mary’s mental health or Abraham’s sexuality. By showing these characters navigate those blatantly erroneous identities and making all the wrong choices, the production frees the audience of expectation or the normative urge to conceive that anything could or should be thought of as sacred. Conrad Ricamora and Cole Escola in Oh, Mary! Photo: Emilio Madrid Oh, Mary! might be one of the most offensive comedies to play Off-Broadway, but its subversiveness plays like a labor of love for the idea of the overshadowed and oft-misunderstood First Lady, or any woman that sits at the fulcrum of history. Though the play was delivered with a massive laugh greeting nearly every single line, in a work helmed by Escola there usually comes a moment when an earnest truth is allowed just enough room to peak through and catch the audience off-guard. Diehard fans of Escola will recognize this nuance from the recent digital short film Our Home Out West in which Escola plays a Gold Rush-era Madam, in Belle Watling drag––paradigmatic of the Escola oeuvre––and works as a felicitous, subdued counterpart to their high energy Mary Todd. At one point in the film, the brothel owner’s orphaned ward asks her, “Why do people hate you so much?” In contrast to Oh, Mary! ’s atmosphere of scatological farce comes an eschatological homily on the nature of bigotry. As Cole explains, “I think because life is basically not very fair and so people like to make up their own little rules… they believe that if they follow their rules nothing bad will happen to them. So, when they see someone who’s not following their rules and doing just fine makes them scared that their rules don’t really matter and when people get scared, they get mad.” Oh, Mary! harkens back to past texts of queer import like Charles Busch’s Die, Mommie, Die! (a drag, psycho-biddy send-up of Aeschylus’ Oresteia ) or Split Britches’ Belle Reprieve (a drag satire of A Streetcar Named Desire ). All of them share a similar approach to remixing history and the historiography of Western drama. The play has some structural similarities to Roxie Hart’s journey that leads to the final, triumphant stage number that rounds out the story in the denouement of Chicago . Yet, when watching the “madcap medley” of Mary ’s grand finale, the ludicrous joy of watching the play is more akin to seeing “Little” Edie Beale of Grey Gardens finally become the singer and dancer she always said she could be (technical talent be damned!). Little Edie and Mary are both characters steeped in American (presidential) history by association, yet who enjoy basking in their own self-made mythologies. The production is a celebration of an anachronistic, gonzo-style approach to historical fiction on stage. For one thing, the setting predates what we understand and refer to as cabaret, and the cabaret finale includes music from over one-hundred years later, including the kitschiest hits of the 1970s and 80s, all while twirling and dropping a baton. Though Escola and director Sam Pinkerton are not at all interested in fidelity to dramaturgical accuracy, the production creates a consistent vision of this pivotal moment in American history. That consistency is defined in the program as “the lens of an idiot.” Escola has stated that they “wrote the show from the point of view of the audience, which is our collective third grade understanding of who Mary Todd Lincoln was.” The curls in Mary’s wig are not meant to resemble the true style of the period, but are there to accentuate her every manic move. The set, by in-demand designer dots, is meant to resemble the Oval Office, yet evokes Our American Cousin pastiche in childlike, broad strokes with blown-up proportions and spurious designs contrived from a capricious imagination. For example, the books are all clearly not real, except for the one hollowed out and hiding the hooch. The saloon setting in the latter half could be pulled from a shooting gallery in a Western theme park. Did the DC-area have saloons with swinging doors and player pianos at this time? The answer is likely “Who cares?” but more importantly, “Look at Mary go!” Everything acts as a campy gesture to the past—right down to the mock gas footlights. But the gesture is always purposefully pointing in the wrong direction and with a middle finger. Tony Macht, Bianca Leigh, and Cole Escola in Oh, Mary! Photo: Emilio Madrid Everything feels very correct in its incorrectness —a kind of purposeful queer failure à la J. Jack Halberstam. The show embraces its own failure to grasp historical accuracy and dramaturgical dignity. The camp of Oh Mary! lies in its ability to resist the normative desire of biographical texts that prop up the sedate figure of sober greatness that stands behind every great man. There’s an alienation in camp fit for Brecht. But the Verfremdungseffekt is most potent for the queer initiated of the audience. We are meant to be alienated from canonical history. Escola’s success represents a generation of queer alt-comedians with origins from social media platforms like Youtube, Instagram, TikTok, or X (formerly known as Twitter). These queer performers have carved out spaces and followings for themselves that slowly but surely gained them due recognition that they could parlay into the more dominant or traditional spaces of culture. In a time when queer subculture and counterculture are becoming the culture, what’s lost along the way may be up for debate. But what is clear from Oh Mary! is that it is leading the queer vanguard and delivering mainstream audiences a high priestess of camp. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Philip Brankin is a Visiting Professor of Theater Studies at Emory University and a doctoral student in Theatre & Performance Studies at the University of Georgia where he received an MFA in Dramatic Media. His research involves queer performance cultures in digital media, focusing on social media platforms as a locus for queer identity formation today. As a practitioner, he has worked as a director, producer, actor, dramaturg, writer, and media designer. A Chicago native, he has worked with Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, Second City, The Piven Theatre Workshop, About Face Theatre, Bailiwick, Chicago Opera Theatre, and Nothing Without a Company, among others. 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.

Bess Rowen and Benjamin Gillespie Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage Editorial Introduction Bess Rowen and Benjamin Gillespie By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF As 2024 comes to a close, we are grateful for the contributions, collaborations, and interactions we have had through this journal. Although uncertain times lie ahead, we remain committed to the importance of the exchange of new ideas, the rigor of peer review, and the indefatigable forward motion of the field of Theatre and Performance Studies. This issue’s array of articles, book reviews, and performance reviews once again provide a snapshot of the dynamic work happening all around us. We begin with Catherine Heiner’s piece, “A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play ,” which examines the gendered expectations about Black women upon which Jeremy O. Harris’s play relies. Using a post-show discussion as an entry point, Heiner’s work puts comedic discourse into conversation with discussions of race and gender to perceive Slave Play in a new light. Alisa Zhulina’s essay, “Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita : Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov,” also challenges gender norms, this time by putting adaptations of Lolita from two queer feminist playwrights into context alongside society’s rife relationship with the source material. Zhulina specifically highlights the challenges and taboo of Lolita in live performance. The following essay, “‘It’s Cumming yet for a’ that’: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century” comes from Thomas Keith, whose thoughtful meditation on Alan Cumming’s work on the dance theatre piece Burn mixes adept performance analysis with historical context. Finally, Allan Johnson’s “Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin ’s Alternate ‘Theo Ending’” brings fresh attention to the 1972 musical with a dramaturgical focus on its use of the popular device of metatheatricality together with psychology The next two entries come from a new series of interviews which will run over the next several issues of JADT called “Queer Voices.” Each involve a conversation with a contemporary queer theatre maker or writer. Our first two pieces feature Jim Wilson in conversation with renowned Tony Award-winning playwright and performer Harvey Fierstein and Bess Rowen speaking to Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright James Ijames. We end our issue with the book and performance review sections, which continue to reflect the scholarly and production offerings of the current moment. In this issue, our performance review section is serving a rather somber purpose. As many of our readers know, New England Theatre Journal has been forced to shutter after decades of close coverage of regional theatre in that area of the country. When Stuart Hecht approached the editors to ask if he could find a home for the completed performance review section–which, in NETJ , covers entire seasons of programming instead of specific performances–we were proud to oblige, despite the unfortunate circumstances. We are running that section intact with introductions and assistance from both the journal’s editor, Stuart Hecht, and the performance review section editor, Marti LoMonaco. We are also happy to report that JADT will continue to partner with the editors of NETJ to make sure that these theatres still receive coverage going forward. We hope that you enjoy JADT ’s rich offerings this issue and that readers will be inspired to submit new work. Our Spring special issue will be on the topic of Censorship, so stay tuned for that eerily timely topic. But, as Tennessee Williams would say, “ En Avant! ” This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) BESS ROWEN (PhD) is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Villanova University. She is also affiliate faculty for both Gender & Women's Studies and Irish Studies. She is a member of Actors' Equity and an intimacy choreographer. Her first book, The Lines Between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment (2021) focuses on affective stage directions. Her next book project looks at the theatrical archetype of the “mean teenage girl.” Other recent work can be found in Milestones in Staging Contemporary Genders & Sexualities , Theatre Survey , and The Eugene O'Neill Review , among other publications. She also serves as the LGBTQ+ Focus Group Representative at ATHE and as the Co-Editor of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre . BENJAMIN GILLESPIE (PhD) is Doctoral Lecturer in Communication, Gender Studies, and Theatre at Baruch College, City University of New York. His essays and reviews have been published in Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, Theatre Survey, Theatre Topics, Performance Research, Canadian Theatre Review , and a wide range of scholarly anthologies. He is currently editing two volumes: Split Britches: Fifty Years On and Late Stage: Theatrical Perspectives on Age and Aging , both to be published by the University of Michigan Press. He is Co-Editor of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre . 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 A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Stuart J. Hecht, (former) Editor in Chief, New England Theatre Journal Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 Stuart J. Hecht, (former) Editor in Chief, New England Theatre Journal By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF How long should a scholarly journal continue? For how long can it function meaningfully? It is really a case-by-case question, determined by some combination of opportunity, support, and demand. This past December New England Theatre Journal lost its funding and was forced to cease publication after a thirty-five-year run. In the mid-1980s, years immediately prior to the founding of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), there was an organizational gap for those interested in publishing scholarly work on theatre in purely theatrical terms. Theatre Journal continued but had shifted toward European-based theory, leaving no setting for studies that considered theatrical practice from a historical context. [A few years later ATHE began Theatre Topics to correct this, though it only focused on practice, thereby creating a permanent schism between thought and practice between the two.] In 1952, legendary Boston theatre critic Elliot Norton helped establish the New England Theatre Conference (NETC) as a regional theatre organization designed to serve mostly local practice: youth theatre, professional theatre, community theatre, and secondary theatre were its primary focus. It offered prizes for playwriting, operated annual auditions for summer stock theatres nationally, and hosted a vibrant annual convention. In time, its board included faculty representatives from Tufts, Emerson, Boston University, Berklee School, Northeastern, Brown, and Boston College, as well as leading professionals and Elhi educators. Yet it did not offer much by way of opportunities for advanced theatre study. The NETC’s then-president, Joyce Devlin of Mt. Holyoke, led efforts to respond to this gap by working to develop a new scholarly publication, under the auspices of NETC, which would balance advanced theatre scholarship and practice. She assembled a team entrusted with developing a new publication titled New England Theatre Journal . It would be open to scholarship from the regional to the international, would include a Books in Review section, as well as a New England Theatre in Review section. In keeping with its NETC’s regional mission, efforts were made to ensure NETJ’s leadership would be drawn from the New England states. The planning team included Charles Combs, Jeffrey Martin, Mort Kaplan, Robert Colby, Arthur Dirks and Jack Welch of Baker’s Plays. A key influential advisor was Don Wilmeth. Charles Combs was named the first editor of NETJ with Jeffrey Martin serving as co-editor. I served as a reader on that first issue and then became “the other” co-editor by its third year. It was an annual publication and all submissions were vetted blindly by outside evaluators. We were fortunate in the quality of work submitted by authors such as J. Ellen Gainor, William Grange, Bernard Dukore, Kim Marra and Richard Schechner, to name but a few. Our pages have featured important work by established scholars such as Laurence Senelick, Felicia Hardison Londré, Rosemarie Bank, Frank Hildy, John Frick, Barry Witham, Bruce McConachie, Kim Marra, Odai Johnson, James Fisher, Anne Fletcher, Cheryl Black and Arnold Aronson. They also included young authors just beginning significant careers, like Heather Nathans, Soyica Diggs Colbert, Rob K. Baum, Amy Hughes, Stephen Bottoms, La Donna Forsgren, Michelle Granshaw, Maya Cantu and many more. Over two hundred full-length articles in all. Personally, having had my own articles unceremoniously rejected without explanation by another publications, I believed that it crucial to provide authors with quality feedback on their submission, whether accepted or not. This would give authors an explanation for our decisions, but would also provide guidelines on how to improve their work should they wish to submit it elsewhere. We hoped this would contribute to the health of our field overall, as well as provide realistic encouragement for each author. It was never the plan for me to serve so long a term as Editor in Chief of NETJ . Charles Combs gave way to Jeffrey Martin, causing me to bump up to first co-editor, with another colleague taking over the second co-editor slot. Then when I, in turn, took over the lead spot from Jeffrey, we lost both of our co-editors: one took over as lead editor for Theatre Topics and the other did not receive tenure. From then on we kept looking for replacements among the New England region, but were unsuccessful doing so, for one reason or another. In the meantime, I kept on as lead and was most fortunate that Jeffrey Martin decided to return to a co-editor position, alongside me, for all these many years. Because most academic journals are directly affiliated with major organizations, ours is not, which has afforded us a continuity of philosophy as well as core personnel. We also benefited for many years by the impeccable copy/format work of Tobin Nellhaus as well as a stable of outstanding outside evaluators, most notable for his many years of such assistance, Jonathan Chambers. Furthermore, while we have occasionally published work that reflects our New England roots, there have otherwise been no geographical restrictions on authors or topics. In fact, we welcomed being a site for work that often bucked current trends, where authors with new ideas or perspectives could find a home for non-mainstream work of still-meaningful value. A quick glance at past issues reveals that we published the last interview with Spalding Gray and an interview with Kenny Leon on directing August Wilson; theatre performed on American military bases and an article on theatre in Japanese internment camps; theatre in China, theatre in Nigeria, even though most articles centered on theatre in the Americas, there is much concerning race and gender to be found among them. Cultural trends have shifted and turned over the years of our existence and we have tried to navigate them as best we could, trying to maintain our commitment to ideas (rather than theory) in application (on stage for a live audience). Sympathetic to historical dynamics, it was always fascinating to find work where authors found parallels between the past and the present, noting how the fundamental dynamic of performance/audience tended to remain constant even as societal concerns might shift. For example, I loved how a recent issue of NETJ included a piece on new (!) discoveries of the original staging of the ancient Egyptian Abydos Passion plays, another on the “echoes of Cervantes” as found in Othello , alongside an article on Thornton Wilder’s cycles of history as well as another about a most recent feminist adaptation/production of Macbeth . A small journal such as ours is subject to chance when it comes to submissions; we usually cannot insist on a particular topic or approach, instead are dependent upon the vagaries of whomever happens to submit their work in any given year. And yet we were occasionally able to feature such more specialized sections over the years, rather than the usual eclectic mix: for example, our 2009 issue featured a subsection on Theatre and Undergraduate Education, edited by Nancy Kindelan; in 2013 Arvid Sponberg edited a subsection on the roots of contemporary Chicago theatre; Heather Nathans’ 2005 article on diasporic imagination led to her offer to support and edit an entire extra issue of NETJ in 2008, which focused entirely on the work of August Wilson. Still, we always celebrated the eclectic because it tended to reflect the variety of work being done in our academic and professional theatre world; hence our final 2023 issue of NETJ was composed of articles on Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht, on the historical shifts in China’s classic play, The White-haired Girl , an essay on using theatre to combat AIDS in New York, and a study of feminist violence in a recent adaptation of Jekyll and Hyde. Add to this a subsection on musical theatre that included a piece on the use of traditional Fado performance in Bahai, another on how the Spiderwoman Theatre in New York remixed a performative treatise towards a queer politics of Indigenous femme existence, while our last article offered guidelines for introducing anti-Racist strategies when teaching a college-level musical theatre course. I wonder what subsequent issues of NETJ might have offered readers. It’s been a fascinating, informative journey! However, sad to say, in late 2023 New England Theatre Conference notified us that they no longer could afford to support NETJ , forcing us to close shop. It was a sad day, but perhaps inevitable. Hopefully our legacy will remain on paper and online. To all who contributed, past and present, I offer a mighty word of thanks. A key component of NETJ was our Theatre in Performance section. Rather than just offer a setting where reviewers could simply send in reviews of live performances, we hoped to establish an archive of professional, non-profit theatre work as done in the New England region during the course of each past year. Ideally, we hoped to make NETJ into an assemblage of the best regional work over a period of several decades, a source for future students,researchers, as well as fans. This section’s success relied upon whoever happened to be reviewing a given production, as well as whoever happened to be the Editor of this section; some years were better than others. While some Editors viewed this as a setting to promote those theatres uncritically, it was tougher to find those equipped to evaluate according to higher standards. While some Editors proved perhaps more effective than others, in recent years, this section of NETJ thrived under the stewardship and supervision of Martha Schmoyer LoMonaco, who built up a string of reviewers, expanded the number of theatres covered, and established high and consistent standards by which to assess their work. When we learned of the demise of NETJ this past December, Marti and her reviewers were already in the middle of reviewing the 2023-2024 New England theatre season. While the rest of the journal had not yet begun to process work, and hence not really impacted by the sudden and unexpected halt, it seemed a shame that the work of this arm of NETJ should not find readership. I made some inquiries of peer journals and was delighted when the editors of The Journal of American Drama and Theatre stepped forward, offering to publish this last remnant of NETJ’s work. Rather than being downcast, we were thrilled to find supportive colleagues willing to give us a more celebratory send-off. I think I speak for all the editors and authors of New England Theatre Journal when I say thank you to JADT for this generous gesture. Thanks also to our many contributors and readers who have enabled us to survive, grow and flourish. Your support has been more than appreciated. Below please find our NETJ 2023-2024 theatre in review section. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) STUART J. HECHT is Associate Professor of theatre at Boston College and also the long-standing Editor of New England Theatre Journal . In addition to publishing many scholarly articles and book chapters, Hecht authored Transposing Broadway: Jews, Assimilation and the American Musical, a basis for the Peabody Award-winning documentary, “The Broadway Musical: a Jewish Legacy.” He also co-edited Makeshift Chicago Stages: a Century of Theatre and Performance . A Member of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre, Hecht served on the artistic staffs of both the Goodman and Wisdom Bridge theatres in Chicago and was founding Chair of the Boston College Theatre Department. He is currently writing a book on Jane Addams’ Hull-House and its theatre. 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 A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Paul E. Fallon Cambridge, Massachusetts Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Paul E. Fallon Cambridge, Massachusetts By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Jennifer Mogbock and company in Toni Stone at The Huntington. Photo: T. Charles Erickson Prayer for the French Republic Joshua Harmon (7 Sep-2 Oct) Fat Ham James Ijames (22 Sep-22 Oct) The Band’s Visit Itmar Moses and David Yazbeck (10 Nov-17 Dec) The Heart Sellers Lloyd Suh (21 Nov-23 Dec) Yippee Ki Yay Richard Marsh (27 Dec-31 Dec) Stand Up if You’re Here Tonight John Klovenbach (20 Jan-23 March) John Proctor is the Villain Kimberly Belflower (8 Feb-10 March) Toni Stone Lydia R. Diamond (17 May-16 June) In July 2023, Christopher Mannelli became Executive Director of The Huntington, following Michael Maso’s forty+ year run as Managing Director. Mannelli took over a strong organization, fully recovered from the pandemic, that offered an extensive season performed in three venues. The Huntington’s first full season with Loretta Greco as Artistic Director opened on the main stage in grand style. Prayer for the French Republic is an expansive three-hour journey across five generations of French Jews. Everything about The Huntington’s production matched the play’s ambitions that began with full color, enlarged (8.5”x11”) program books at a time when some theatres shifted to QR codes. The set featured a rotating dining table that provided critical clues to following the sprawling story. Tony Estrella, as the narrator, delivered historical context directly to the audience, while the remaining cast enacted their private trauma. Carly Zien, as Elodie, delivered an astonishing stream-of-consciousness monologue that illustrated humans’ complex discrepancies. Meanwhile, at The Calderwood, 2022 Pulitzer Prize winner, Fat Ham served up a comedic rap on Hamlet at a Black family backyard barbeque in the American South. Each character bears attributes of their Shakespearean equivalent, plus invented twists. Juicy: misunderstood; moody; and contemplative as any Hamlet, was also obese and gay. The production shredded the fourth wall, fed off our familiarity with Shakespeare’s play, and then skewered it with potato salad, sausage, and pulled pork. The comedy was often broad, always inciteful. Juicy’s karaoke number began so badly it was hilarious, until it turned chilling. Standouts among the cast included Lau’rie Roach as Tio and James T. Alfred at Rev/Pap. Shaken with laughter, I wondered how Fat Ham could mirror Hamlet to the end. Let it be said that death visits the barbeque in ways both funny and fitting. “Nothing is as beautiful as something you don’t expect,” Dina, an Israeli kibbutznik, suggests to Tewfiq, the Egyptian band leader. The sentiment encapsulates the simple pleasure of The Band’s Visit . The Huntington, in collaboration with Speakeasy Stage, delivered unexpected beauty in this musical that infuses traditional Middle Eastern music with a Broadway sound. Director Paul Daigneault highlighted music and broad comedy over the slim plot of this feel-good confection, where scenes unrolled as cross-cultural vignettes that elevated shared humanity over political differences. The Huntington celebrated a non-traditional Thanksgiving. Lloyd Suh’s The Heart Sellers emphasizes comedy over pathos when Filipino immigrant Luna (Jenna Agbayani) and Korean immigrant Jane (Judy Song) come together on this strange holiday in a strange land in 1973. When Luna utters, “So, we’re the lucky ones,” with a profound sigh, she pierces the comic surface of baffled immigrants trying to cook a frozen turkey to reveal two lonely souls. The set was remarkably appalling: a messy studio apartment lined with glossy wallpaper, boxed in a black frame, elevated above the stage. One wall incorporated a sliding glass door, the only opportunity for variable light. Whenever they dreamed of a larger life, the women drifted toward the light. An equally unconventional holiday gift, Yippee-Ki-Yay , is part reenactment of the classic 1980s film, Die Hard ; part confessional of a Die Hard geek; part stand-up comedy; all unspooled in awful meter. Uninitiated audience members were probably perplexed by Darrel Bailey’s zany performance: fluffing imaginary big hair from his bald head; turning the bloodthirsty villain into a pirouetting diva. Those of us familiar with the source, however, anticipated every corny cliché and witty takedown of the movie’s profligate confusions. I received an email a few days before Stand Up if You’re Here Tonight , directing me to enter the theatre through the back alley. Street construction, I figured. On a drizzly January night, one stark light from a small door illuminated the dark alley and beckoned me up two flights and into the rear of the Michael Maso Studio, littered with dusty furniture, clouded mirrors and consignment-quality rejects. Eventually, an old man walked among the clutter and began. Several times. Each diversion was humorous. When wiry, wonderful Jim Ortlieb proclaimed such witticisms as, “Two pots near each other never boil. Make pasta in the space between,” I understood this as a play about nothing. Turns out, the back-alley intimacy was critical to the show’s success, so willingly did supposed grown-ups participate in silly hijinks. It might seem a stretch to legions of high school students burdened with Arthur Miller’s The Crucible that John Proctor could be the villain. Yet playwright Kimberly Belflower makes a convincing case that John Proctor is the Villain . This remarkable resetting shifts witch hysteria in seventeenth-century Salem to a twenty-first century Georgia high school, where coming-of-age girls are treated as suspect while male authorities are exalted, despite whatever horrifics they’ve performed. The ensemble cast featured five outstanding women drowning in adolescent torment and triumph. Their friendships and jealousies ricocheted around the stage, exposing the emotional complexity of becoming adults. Yet, the stand out was Benjamin Isaac as Lee Turner, the school nobody, whose character realizes the greatest emotional growth. It was pure delight to watch this man-boy (potentially the next generation’s adulterer) find new understanding of himself and his relationship to women. Toni Stone , the season’s finale, was a hit. The Huntington’s long affiliation with playwright Lydia R. Diamond ( Stick Fly, Smart People, The Bluest Eye ) scored in this funny, poignant bio of Toni Stone, the first professional female baseball player who played in the Negro leagues in the 1950s. As Toni, marvelous Jennifer Mogbock told us straight up she’s no good at telling stories in the right order, then launched an opening monologue that fast pitched the joys of baseball. She also held her own against the supporting cast of ten men playing an array of characters. The second act made a few errors, perhaps because accurate biography doesn’t align with theatrical climax. Two production numbers, fabulously choreographed by Ebony Williams, provided the buoyancy of a Broadway musical, while Diamond’s sparkling script and crisp direction beautifully modulated the euphoria and struggles befitting a lonely woman playing in a dwindling league. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) PAUL E. FALLON is an architect who spent over thirty years designing housing and healthcare facilities. A commitment to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake became the focus of his first book, Architecture by Moonlight . In 2015-2016, Paul bicycled through each of the 48 contiguous states and asked everyone he met the same question. How Will We Live Tomorrow? became his second book. Returning to Cambridge, MA, Paul continues to write blog essays, plays, and NETIR articles about Boston-area theatre companies. 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 A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Johan Callens, Guest Editor 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 Introduction: Mediations of Authorship in American Postdramatic Mediaturgies Johan Callens, Guest Editor By Published on May 30, 2018 Download Article as PDF For a good understanding, the Spring 2018 American Theatre and Drama Society issue of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre is best considered as an initiative that follows up the BELSPO sponsored international research project, “Literature and Media Innovation: The Question of Genre Transformations.” Running from 2012-2017, it brought together six research teams, four of which hailed from Belgian institutions—two Flemish (KULeuven & VUB) and two Walloon ones (Louvain-la-Neuve and Liège)—besides one from Canada (UQAM) and one from the US (OSU). [1] Among the many genres analyzed and fields explored in light of the increasing mediatization of the arts and society at large, theatre and performance fell to the Center for Literary and Intermedial Crossings (CLIC) at the Free University of Brussels. On March 17, 2016, this Center organized a conference already devoted to the theme of the present journal issue, even if the ATDS contributions zoom-in on specifically American inflections of the topic. Still, in a globalized world, the mobility and mixed roots of artists, besides the constant need to find sponsors, renders the characterization of projects in national terms perhaps questionable and their mediaturgical interests seldom exclusive. As Jacob Gallagher-Ross, one of the speakers at the Belgian conference, in the meantime has argued, it is somewhat ironical that the first installment of Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s media-enabled Life and Times project, “singing the sorrows and pleasures of a very American childhood, was featured in Berlin’s Theatertreffen festival as one of the ten best German productions of the year.” [2] Aside from the ironies of international funding, and scholarship, we may add, I here want to mention, as a preliminary, some of the more general issues that the March 2016 VUB conference tackled. [3] Thus, Matthew Cornish (Ohio U) dealt with the reliance on diagrammatic scripts by the English-German theatre collective Gob Squad to support their improvised encounters with people on the streets, synchronously relayed into heavily mediatized stage productions. Bernadette Cochrane (U of Queensland) discussed the destabilization of the spatio-temporal locators of productions and audiences in global but not necessarily democratizing “livecasts,” whether from New York’s Metropolitan Opera or London’s National Theatre. Dries Vandorpe (UGent) returned to mediaturgical theatre’s related deconstruction of the vexed ontological distinction between live and techno-mediated performance on the grounds of diverse arguments (spatiotemporal co-presence and spectatorial agency, affective impact and authenticity, contingency and risk, unicity and variability…)—arguments all flawed because of logically defective classification systems. With the aid of some intermedial choreographic work by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, I myself queried the reciprocity between technology’s invitation to appropriation and adaptations’ increasing hybridization because of that very technology, a process challenging the logical discreteness, self-presence or self-sufficiency, as well as hierarchical character of generic, media, and gender identities, both, much like traditional authorship, making for an empowering yet disenfranchising exclusiveness. [4] The themes of the Brussels conference and present ATDS issue also adhere closely to the remit of the doctoral project conducted by CLIC member Claire Swyzen, here represented by an essay on the Hungarian-American Edit Kaldor and New Yorker Annie Dorsen. Kaldor’s Or Press Escape (2002) and Web of Trust (2016) are shown to open up the theatre stage to the social media, converting it into a more apparently than actually co-authored media-activist site, joining physically present and tele-present audience members. As a result, the authorship here already signaled towards Michel Foucault’s more discursive author function. Dorsen’s Hello Hi There (2010) in fact consisted of a staged conversation between two chatbots mouthing text bits partly culled by computer algorithms from an interview between Foucault and Noam Chomsky on whether language creates consciousness or vice versa. [5] As indicated by Dorsen’s post-human talk show, whose textual database was expanded with material from the Western humanist tradition, the scope of Swyzen’s research and of postdramatic mediaturgies obviously exceeds the American context, reaching out to the very processes of cognition. The term and concept of the “postdramatic” were nevertheless popularized by German scholars like Gerda Poschmann and Hans-Thies Lehmann who theorized the notion with the aid of the varied theatre practice in Germany and surrounding countries during the late 20th century. [6] As recently as 2015, Marvin Carlson still argued the relative absence of postdramatic theatre from the North American mainstream, despite important contributions from experimentalists like the Wooster Group, Richard Foreman, and Robert Wilson. [7] On both sides of the Atlantic, however, there have been misconceptions regarding the precise nature of the postdramatic, leading to confusions with collective, interdisciplinary, and devised theatre productions. [8] After all, these just as easily allow for the contribution of independently active playwrights with a lingering dramatic bent as for the more broadly defined writing integral to postdramatic mediaturgies. Central features of postdramatic theatre are the reconfiguration, if not abandonment, of Aristotelian dramatic concepts and traditional theatrical notions such as character, action and plot, proscenium stage and set, normative temporality and spatiality, etc. As a corollary, conventional drama’s underlying mimetic premise is challenged, too, though illusionistic effects, whether aestheticizing, activist, or media-critical, remain common, as Swyzen demonstrates with regard to Kaldor’s Web of Trust . These illusionistic effects are also hard to resist, as when critics interpreted the fragmentation of Spalding Gray’s recollections in India and After (America) (1979) as reflections of his cultural alienation and psychological breakdown, as argued by Ira S. Murfin in his contribution to the present ATDS issue. Mimesis possibly survives the postdramatic mediaturgical turn in the guise of reenactments which problematize any arguable paradigm shift, insofar as the “post-dramatic” signals both continuities and discontinuities. Reenactments therefore could be said to limit dramatic theatre’s creation of a “fictive cosmos” [9] to the overt recreation of a “reality,” whether artistic or not, often with the help of advanced technology, as in the scrupulously reproduced everyday speech, at times verging on uncanny nonsense, in the productions of Nature Theater of Oklahoma. This invites comparison with what Dorsen calls the occasional “near-sense” of the chatbots’ dialogue foregrounding the thingness and materiality of language, undermining dramatic theater’s logocentrism as well as infusing postdramatic theatre like Dorsen’s with an unexpected lyricism. As Gallagher-Ross argued at the Brussels conference and in his subsequently published study on Theaters of the Everyday: Aesthetic Democracy on the American Stage (2018), the technology-based practice of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, besides documenting an extant reality, touches on the very processes of perception and thought, struggling to achieve verbal expression prior to any artificially imposed aesthetic or (post)dramatic form, given that in the different installments of their epic Life and Times they also experiment with extant genres and media forms. Reenactments do not, for that matter, automatically reclaim realist art’s function as illusionistic slice of life. To the extent that this function indeed depends on maintaining the fourth wall, it actually staves off everyday reality to the benefit of some Platonist ideal controlled by the dramatist. Gallagher-Ross traces the roots of America’s theaters of the everyday, like that of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, to American Transcendentalism but this democratic homebred tradition represented by Emerson and Thoreau, revalorizes the aesthetic value of daily life as personally experienced. Quite surprisingly, a similar impulse may be at work in Kaldor’s work, insofar as it seems to share characteristics with the Slow Media movement, as argued by Swyzen. This reflective, contemplative impulse should be distinguished from European idealist aesthetics permeating the continental dramatic tradition via Hegel’s abstract moralism up to the late 19th century and beyond, which is not to say, as Gallagher-Ross argues, that there is no ethical-critical dimension to an enhanced awareness of our everyday experiences, be they technological or not. [10] In Swimming to Cambodia (1985), one of Spalding Gray’s “talk performances” discussed in the present JADT issue by Murfin, the manner in which Gray incessantly and obstinately pursues an idealized yet heavily mediatized “Perfect Moment” makes him oblivious to the everyday beauty Emerson advocated. On Karon Beach in the Gulf of Siam Gray apparently found his “Shangri-La,” evocative both of perfect Kodachrome color spreads for luxury resorts and of Robert Wilson’s mediaturgical theatre of images. [11] Emerson is explicitly referenced by Gray when he mentions his own studies at Emerson College and in his moment of “Cosmic Consciousness” echoes the philosopher’s famous “transparent eye-ball”-passage from his essay on “Nature.” The eventual shift to a non-contigent idealism making timeless abstraction of the evanescent everyday could be seen as evidence of Murfin’s claim that Gray’s early talk performances solidified in later productions under the influence of the very technologies he initially played off to preserve his monologues’ freshness. Put differently, Gray’s talk performances, as here argued, moved away from a more postdramatic authorship deflected by “intermedial contingency,” to a more self-authored dramatic literary model. Lehmann in this regard speaks of realist drama’s and the dramatic form’s “catharsis” of the real, [12] supplementing tragedy’s much debated abreaction of pity and fear (or the negative features of these emotions) in the course of a dramatic action thereby completed and closed off. Postdramatic theatre, by contrast, tends to reduce the dramatist’s control, it opens up the stage to the everyday, and redistributes authorial power. This happened partly under the influence of technology, partly by promoting the performer-audience relation or so-called theatron axis, [13] thus releasing a social activist potential in the joint “creation” of text and performance. What is eventually lost in terms of illusionistic representation, aesthetic pleasure and entertainment value may be gained in terms of political awareness, as the physical embodiment and exposure of, and to the mediation returns a sense of agency in a mediascape obfuscating its operations, material and immaterial, for whatever reasons (sheer complexity, profit, ideology…). The media’s prominence in contemporary dramaturgies has led Bonnie Marranca to coin the term “mediaturgy” for those productions where the technology is integral to the composition of the theatrical performance rather than a surface phenomenon. [14] Cases in point she provided at the time were Super Vision (2005-2006) by The Builders Association and Firefall (2007-2009) by John Jesurun. This is one of the reasons why the Brussels conference on postdramatic mediaturgies featured Shannon Jackson (UC Berkeley) as keynote speaker, with a talk on “The Relational Construction of Form and Authorship in Cross-Arts Collaboration.” In that talk, she explored a variety of institutional settings—museums, theaters, festivals, installations—and considered how conceptions of form and authorial signature change accordingly. Depending, in part, upon the curatorial conventions of the venue, a performer may be a collaborator, a subordinate, or a form of material. Similarly, moving work across institutional venues may shift the stance taken towards artistic contributions, whether by the artists-creators or spectators-consumers. Work discussed included that of The Builders Association, on which Jackson and Marianne Weems published the first lavishly illustrated monograph, and which Marranca deemed exemplary of postdramatic mediaturgies. [15] That Weems, the director of The Builders Association, together with several company members, should have co-authored this critical-genetic study which is partly archive, partly (auto)biography, marks the extent of her creative practice and possibly the postdramatic remediation of a retrograde seeming, paper-based platform, all too easily lending itself to linear single-authored stories. [16] The meticulous crediting of each and every one involved in each of the Builders Association productions is further evidence of the dispersion of traditional authorship, which may well have been the default of theatrical creation. To quote from the book’s intro: “Early pieces such as Master Builder , Imperial Motel (Faust) , and JUMP CUT (Faust) restaged and rearranged classic tales across unorthodox architectural assemblies of screens and bodies, a practice of postdramatic retelling to which The Builders returned in their recent restaging of House/Divided .” [17] The epilogue, too, in a conversation between Weems and Eleanor Bishop, extensively dwells on the mediaturgical aspect of The Builders Association’s work at large, more in particular the prominence of computer-aided media design as dramaturgy and the medial creation of meaning and implementation of media-related ideas, like the networked constitution of self by such a mediascape. [18] Thus the media become material and metaphor. This reciprocity gets reflected in Jackson’s critical vocabulary when she speaks of the company’s “theatrical operating systems” and “storyboard” phases—terms derived from computer science and cinema to designate the mediaturgical postdramatic (re)assembly process, “that may or may not be post-narrative as well.” [19] The resulting “smart” productions are directly addressed to a “smart” audience perhaps too much at ease with “smart” technologies [20] to fully fathom or question their implications. Hence these technologies have become the means and object of theatricalization, as in Super Vision , dealing with the economics and politics of “dataveillance,” or Continuous City (2007-2010), exploring global social networking technologies and their impact on how we inhabit local geographies. John Jesurun, that other exemplar of postdramatic mediaturgies Marranca singled out, has been at the center of the scholarship which Christophe Collard generated in the context of the inter-university research project on genre transformations and the new media. Like the predoctoral work of Swyzen, some of his wide-ranging postdoctoral work is here sampled, albeit with a more programmatic contribution in which Jesurun’s “ecological,” i.e. organic and holistic interrelational interpretation of the mediaturgical concept allows for a brief survey of his creative output. In the course of his playwriting career, Jesurun has collaborated with Weems’s Builders Association, as well as with Ron Vawter, founding member of the Wooster Group, on scripts that were subsequently produced by other companies, too. [21] But Jesurun is also reputed to reduce his live performers to language-machines, as here argued by Collard. This again attests to the lingering tension between the loosening and tightening of authorial control, equally evident in Dorsen’s algorithmic theater, where the options for the chatbots’ conversation in Hello Hi There have been preprogrammed and are thus contained by Dorsen and her collaborator, the chatbot designer Robby Garner. Even in Kaldor’s Web of Trust , the seemingly co-authored protocol in retrospect was prescripted, as Swyzen discovered. Whereas Kaldor herself may have obfuscated the “rehearsal” of the protocol for her Web of Trust prior to its live performance, Gray’s critics were the ones who tended to miss or neglect the reliance on media of reproduction in his low-tech monologues. [22] At first sight, his early “talk performances” seem diametrically opposed to Dorsen’s chatbot and Kaldor’s computer desktop performances. Yet Murfin in his discussion of Gray’s monologues demonstrates their postdramatic mediaturgical stance by foregrounding his deliberate extemporaneous use of language as material and process rather than narrative content, in reaction to medial fixity and dramatic linearity. This resonates with the aleatory artistic tradition in which Dorsen also inscribes her work partly because of the manner in which freedom is generated by constraints, just as for Jesurun language provides an enabling limit for his performers and technology, even if he opposes his actors’ improvisation. Contrary to his later reputation as unassisted “solo” performer, Gray’s monologues were heavily determined by media objects. During the creation and performance of his early work these were used as found or documentary material triggering improvisation rather than as support of a fixed script, whether the taped interviews with family members, slides, and vinyl recording of The Cocktail Party in Rumstick Road (1977), a dictionary in India and After (America) (1979), or his journal entries on a West Coast tour, framed by contemporaneous newspaper, magazine and book excerpts in The Great Crossing (1980). However, Gray’s reliance on the same media (writing, print, audio and video recordings) for the development and circulation of his monologues, in a sort of feedback loop fixed them, whereas the human recall and extemporization earlier on made for fragmentation and discontinuity, at the expense of an authoritative voice and story. What may have accelerated this process, Murfin argues, is the artist’s need for a commodifiable format or comedy act. By doing without the diary entries in Nobody Wanted to Sit Behind a Desk (1980) Gray very much resolved the dilemma in favor of the dramatic lineage and replication, but at the expense of intermedial contingency. Gray’s autobiographical talk performances, dependent on predominantly analogue media, form a radical contrast with the collective identity performance of in-groups by means of social media and the web, dealt with by Ellen Gillooly-Kress. This hybridized live and digital identity construction through visual signposts, insiders’ language and performative gestures, rather than solidify in the course of time, as argued by Murfin for Gray, keeps changing, as the markers of identity are appropriated by opposite parties, like anti-fascists and white supremacists. The hazards of the social media are indeed such that any meme can be co-opted and abused in ideological conflicts. This recalls Roland Barthes’s claim that the only way to outwit myths is to remythify them in turn, the more since myths in his definition exchange a physical reality with a pseudo-reality, much like the internet may be said to do. The partly arbitrary choice of a meme as vehicle for a new ideological content also fits Barthes’s myths, though in both kinds of appropriation, the original content is still needed as support of the new signification. [23] The initiative for these appropriated identity memes and their ideological reinscription may have been taken by individuals or be limited to the policy-makers of the ingroup. Yet, the memes’ viral spread on the social media and imageboard websites like 4chan and Reddit collectivizes authorship, short of exploding it altogether. Through its antagonistic rhetoric, making for a war-like scenario, the digital and discursive performance, when picked up by the traditional media, also risks spilling over from the internet back into the physical world and actual violence. This was the case with #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS , an unmoderated live stream participatory performance, set up by Nastja Säde Rönkkö, Luke Turner, and Shia LaBeouf on the occasion of Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2017. Apart from traveling from New York to Albuquerque, Liverpool and Nantes, this installation and its reception provide a more disconcerting, inflammable hybridized “theater of the everyday” unlike those with which I started this introduction, in a space where physical and digital identity formations merge to end up forming what Gillooly-Kress calls a “hypermediated haunted stage” with all too dangerous consequences. By way of conclusion, I want to thank Cheryl Black and Dorothy Chansky, the former and current ATDS Presidents, for offering another forum next to the 2016 VUB conference platform; the ATDS members who submitted their work to this Spring issue of the JADT ; and last but not least, the ATDS members who acted as anonymous peer-reviewers. All generously contributed to the scholarship here presented, offering what I hope is an exciting and thought-provoking sample of American postdramatic mediaturgies in which authorship is variously modulated along different spectra, operating between the human and the non-human, the analogue and the digital, the individual and the collective, the distributed and the delegated. References [1] For a brief presentation of the overall project see Jan Baetens, Johan Callens, Michel Delville, Heidi Peeters, Myriam Watthee-Delmotte, Robyn Warhol, and Bertrand Gervais, “Literature and Media Innovation: A Brief Research Update on a Genre/Medium Project,” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 64, no. 4 (2014): 485-492. [2] Jacob Gallagher-Ross, Theaters of the Everyday: Aesthetic Democracy on the American Stage (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018), 152, original emphasis. [3] The VUB theatre conference program can be found online at http://www.vub.ac.be/en/events/2016/mediations-of-authorship-in-postdramatic-mediaturgies-conference . The March 17 event was matched the following day by a second series of talks, presented at Leuven University (UCL) under the title, “Intermediality, or, the Delicate Art of World-Layering” dealing with non-dramatic genres. See http://research.vub.ac.be/sites/default/files/uploads/clic-cri_confer_flyer_final.pdf . [4] Johan Callens,”Rosas: Reappropriation as Afterlife,” in Routledge Companion to Adaptation Studies , eds. Dennis Cutchins, Katja Krebs, and Eckart Voigts (London: Routledge, 2018), 117-127. [5] The Chomsky-Foucault debate was moderated by Fons Elders and broadcast in 1971 by Dutch television as part of a series. Elders first included the transcript in a collection of three interviews he edited, Reflexive Water: The Basic Concerns of Mankind (London: Souvenir Press, 1974). He reprinted it separately as Human Nature: Justice vs Power. The Chomsky-Foucault Debate (London: Souvenir Press, 2011), though by then A.I. Davidson had already released the text in Foucault and His Interlocutors (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1997), 107-145. Elders’s 2011 edition consists of an introduction, followed by the two-part transcript. The first part tackles the question of human nature, knowledge, and science, the second deals more with politics. [6] See Gerda Poschmann, Der nicht mehr dramatische Theatertext. Aktuelle Bühnenstücke und ihre dramaturgische Analyse (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1997) and Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre , trans. and introd. Karen Jürs-Munby (London: Routledge, 2006). [7] Marvin Carlson, “Postdramatic Theatre and Postdramatic Performance,” Brazilian Review of Presence Studies / Revista Brasileira de Etudos da Prescença 5, No. 3 (Sept.- Dec. 2015), 579. [8] Carlson, “Postdramatic Theatre and Postdramatic Performance,” 582. [9] Lehmann, Postdramatic Theater , 22. [10] The gap between European idealism and Emerson’s Transcendentalism is somewhat diminished in his theory of visuality, holding that sight, like language, is a way of inhabiting a visual field and integrating its objects, at the cost of distorting both by the idealizing operations of language and perspective, the visual distortions of the one and the other’s fixations by figures of speech and generic conventions, and we might add medium specificities. See Branka Arsić, On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 55, 68, as discussed by Gallagher-Ross, Theaters of the Everyday , 50-51, 68. [11] See Johan Callens, “Auto/Biography in American Performance,” in Auto/Biography and Mediation , ed. Alfred Hornung (Heidelberg: Winter Universitätsverlag, 2010), 287-303. [12] Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre , 2006: 43; rptd by Gallagher-Ross, Theaters of the Everyday , 18. [13] Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre , 128. [14] Bonnie Marranca, “Performance as Design: The Mediaturgy of John Jesurun’s Firefall ,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 96 (2010), 16. [15] See also chapter 5, “Tech Support: Labor in the Global Theatres of The Builders Association and Rimini Protokoll,” of Jackson’s Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (London: Routledge, 2011), 144-181. [16] In fact, Weems has always combined creative with critical work, whether as a founding member of the V-Girls and Builders Association or as dramaturg for the Wooster Group, also co-directing Art Matters and lecturing at different universities. [17] Shannon Jackson and Marianne Weems, The Builders Association: Performance and Media in Contemporary Theater (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 2015), 3. [18] Jackson and Weems, The Builders Association , xiii, 384-385. [19] Jackson and Weems, The Builders Association , 17. [20] Jackson and Weems, The Builders Association , 8, 393. [21] Faust/How I Rose , which The Builders Association used for Imperial Motel (Faust) (1996) and JUMP CUT (Faust) (1997-1998), received major runs at the National Theater of Mexico, while his Philoktetes , after featuring in Philoktetes Variations , as directed by Jan Ritsema in 1994, was revived in October 2007 by Jesurun himself at the SoHo Rep with a cast featuring Will Badgett (Odysseus), Louis Cancelmi (Philoktetes), and Jason Lew (Neoptolemus). See Johan Callens, “The Builders Association: S/he Do the Police in Different Voices,” in The Wooster Group and Its Traditions , ed. and introd. Johan Callens, Dramaturgies Series: Texts, Cultures, and Performances vol. 13 (Brussels & Bern: Presses Interuniversitaires Européennes-Peter Lang, 2004), 247-261; Johan Callens, “The Volatile Value of Suffering: Jan Ritsema’s PhiloktetesVariations,” in The Trojan Wars and the Making of the Modern World , ed. and introd. Adam J. Goldwyn, Studia Graeca Upsaliensia vol. 22 (Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, 2015), 223-244. 2015; and Christophe Collard, “Processual Passing: Ron Vawter Performs Philoktetes,” Somatechnics 3, No.1 (2013), 119-132. [22] See also Claire Swyzen, “‘The world as a list of items’: Database Dramaturgy in Low-Tech Theatre by Tim Etchells and De Tijd, Using Textual Data by Etchells, Handke and Shakespeare.” etum: E-Journal for Theatre and Media 2, No. 2 (2015), 59–84, accessed May 15, 2018, https://cris.vub.be/en/searchall.html?searchall=swyzen , for an interpretation of one British and two Flemish low-tech postdramatic mediaturgical productions: Broadcast/Looping Pieces (2014), Peter Handke en de wolf (2005) and Elk wat wils. Iets van Shakespeare (2007). [23] Roland Barthes, “Le mythe, aujourd’hui,”Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957), 191-247; “Myth Today,” Mythologies , ed. and trans. Annette Lavers, Noonday Press (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), 109-164. 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 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.

I. B. Hopkins Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 2 Visit Journal Homepage Our Town I. B. Hopkins By Published on July 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF Our Town By Thornton Wilder Directed by Shawn Sides CRASHBOX Austin, TEXAS November 15, 2024 Reviewed by I. B. Hopkins You would be forgiven for remembering Thornton Wilder’s Our Town as quaint. The Pulitzer Prize-winning staple of the American dramatic repertoire has so frequently been produced by schools and community theatres since it premiered in 1938 that its edge—at least in recollection—may have dulled somewhat from sheer exposure. The play depicts a small New Hampshire town going about its everyday routines in the early twentieth century and takes pains to stress its ordinariness at every turn. In their recent production, Austin-based theatre collective the Rude Mechs articulated a desire to neither reinvent nor see something new in the classic. Instead, the company rather puzzlingly advertised, “We’re gonna try as hard as we can to do it as Wilder intended.” This statement of intent acknowledges the company’s long history of remixing classics, such as their “fixing” Shakespeare series or locating transcendence in Tennessee Williams’s bit parts in The Method Gun . Doing Our Town “as Wilder intended” decidedly breaks from their punkish approach to adaptation, intimating that there may be more lurking beneath its inoffensive surface than audiences might assume. For director Shawn Sides and company, the appeal and enigma of Our Town seemed to be distilled in its first-person plural title. Situated in the intimate and unadorned CRASHBOX performance warehouse in Austin’s gentrifying Eastside neighborhood, the environment gratifyingly contrasted the traditional Americana of Wilder’s fictional Grover’s Corners. The rural, church- and family-centered, and presumed white world of the play is ostensibly incompatible with the Texas capital’s progressive and multiethnic brand of urbanism. Far from tritely extolling the universality of love or family, however, the script effectively doubles down on local particularity by specifying that the actors portraying townspeople be verbally identified by their names. Inasmuch, the Rude Mechs’s gambit to fulfill Wilder’s intentions also highlighted casting choices that reflect Austin’s diversity, though this was more than just presenting an array of bodies on stage that vary along dimensions of race, gender expression, and size. In the context of the Performing Garage-like setting, the production’s execution of the script’s instruction to narrate actors’ names also points up Our Town ’s striking anticipation of later experimental theatre works and the long tradition of ensemble-driven, devised performances. The original play has famously absent scenery, but this production went further with rehearsal-quality furniture, no affected New England accents, and costume designer Aaron Flynn’s inconspicuous, contemporary choices. In her gray jeans and dark neutral top, for example, Mrs. Webb could easily have been out shopping at H-E-B, the local central Texas grocery store. Seeming to strip even the costumes of their costumey-ness announced a certain rejection of the play’s lingering pretenses, an escalation of Wilder’s first stage direction: “No curtain. No scenery.” This design scheme deviated notably from many productions, including both the 1938 premiere and the 2024 Broadway revival. In short, Sides and the cast worked to countermand any sense that Grover’s Corners might serve as an idyllic Anytown, USA or a parable for human experience. Without altering a word of Wilder’s text, they redirected abstract nostalgia to focus on the here and now simply by subtracting production elements that suggested early twentieth-century New Hampshire. What was left in the compact space was a room full of Austinites, many of them longtime members of the local arts community. This staging seemed to find the Rude Mechs attempting to manifest our town , the one to which they and the audience belong, and which has undergone such tremendous growth and changes since the collective formed twenty-five years ago. To that end, dividing the Stage Manager role among four of the collective’s co-producing artistic directors (Madge Darlington, Thomas Graves, Lana Lesley, and Alexandra Bassiakou Shaw) most directly manifested the production’s sense of diffusion, the our -ness of Our Town. Even casting that resists the avuncular, “hat on and pipe in mouth” type indicated by Wilder affords a great deal of stage time and power to a single, starring role. By dividing these place-setting and contemplative monologues among a quartet of performers speaking in unhurried, matter-of-fact tones, this Our Town defamiliarized the warmth of small-town life, which continually brought the audience back to presence in the CRASHBOX. The Stage Manager, it is important to recall, is not nostalgic in the text, and the chorus of narratorial voices served to heighten their somewhat clinical distance from the emotional churn of the story even as they also amplified the poetic turns of Wilder’s language by rendering them less conversational. Functionally, they contrasted the diegetic events among the Grover’s Corners denizens, adding a layer of oblique commentary to elevate the townspeople’s lives. Correspondingly, the cast of eight other actors committed to a meticulous style of realism in their performances to cast the townspeople in relief. In this respect, Rommel Sulit (Doc Gibbs), Liz Fisher (Myrtle Webb), and Eric Ramos (George Gibbs) excelled in the precision of their psychologically rich, clearly motivated acting choices, providing a sharp distinction between the everyday world and the narration hanging above it. Ceremoniously presiding at a remove from the townspeople’s lives, the multi-voiced Stage Managers spoke directly to the audience with a gentle insistence that this is, in fact, their town. Their seated positions in the inner ring of the audience and sober tones underscored the emotional distance between the audience and the townspeople, the unbridgeable gap between past and present which is also famously dramatized in Emily’s return in act 3. Like Emily, the audience only gets a bitter glimpse at the quiet beauty of this community for a short time. Kira Small (“Emily”) and Eric Ramos (“George”) in Our Town. Photo courtesy Rude Mechs. There are limits, however, to just how much literalized community this interpretation of the script can manage. At select intervals, tertiary roles had been pre-distributed to willing audience members, who then read a few lines. Even when audibly delivered, this bid to draw the audience more tightly into the town also made Wilder’s script appear ungainly and overfull when the joke or the flash of poetry did not land. Staging the production in the round more effectively delivered on the aim to make the Austin community its subject, and Brian H. Scott’s lighting design complemented the arrangement by keeping most audience members’ faces visible as they sat alongside members of the cast. Simply repositioning a minimal number of chairs instantly placed spectators at eye level and quite close in (variously) a kitchen, a pew during a wedding, and, finally, the local cemetery. No flashiness nor trickery, just thoughtful staging. The straightforward theatricality of such gestures bespoke underlying faith in the principle behind the script’s iconic use of pantomime. If a certain action can represent stringing beans even when no beans are present, then the simple turning of a chair should just as effectively transport the scene to a new location. When artfully applied, this technique denaturalized the relationship between actors and their earthly trappings, suggesting that verisimilitude is not as vital as human striving in performance. Wilder’s fixation on what he has the Stage Manager call the world’s “straining” does, in fact, reach for the universal, and—intended or not—this urge’s tension with the reality of theatre’s constraints to here, now, and us characterized the production’s finest moments. Lana Lesley, for instance, as the town drunk and choir director Simon Stimpson, conducted the offstage choir in Act 1 with tremendous fervency down a corridor that left her visible to only perhaps a quarter of the audience. Later, when Simon spoke from the dead, his lines about “what it was to be alive … To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another” bit with particular ruefulness because Lesley’s zeal portrayed his ennobling passion for his art alongside his dependence on alcohol. The quick but bitter sensation that not every member of the audience could have seen this character so fully exemplifies the production’s refreshingly unsentimental take on the play’s plea to appreciate life while we can. On their website, the Rude Mechs write, “We’ll be using what we learn about Our Town to make a completely new piece in 2025/26.” Taken together with the stated goal of matching the playwright’s intent, we might best understand this production as a genuine experiment by one of America’s most consistently innovative performance collectives to systematically examine Wilder’s script, to understand its workings but also to find out through doing how the line between its familiar quaintness and its persistent darkness might be drawn. In the process, they may have discovered that the redrawing, the return, the perennial reperformance of Our Town is the very thing that keeps Grover’s Corners weird. References Footnotes About The Author(s) I. B. HOPKINS is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Texas at Austin, where he also earned his MFA in playwriting. He has been the recipient of a Fulbright Grant and Michener Fellowship. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Modern Drama , Theatre Annual , Theatre Journal , and the E3W Review, as well as Austin arts publications. Hopkins’s dissertation, titled “Bad Actors,” explores the aesthetics of historical drama and adaptation in depictions of the U.S. South. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Censorship/Public Censure and Performance Today: Special Issue Introduction Remembering Censorship in the World Premiere of Seán O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned: Lafayette, Indiana, 1959 The Stage as Networked Battleground: Dissent and Censorship in Contemporary Canadian Theatre and Performance Censor/Censure: A Roundtable Which of These Are Censorship? The Divide Between Prior Restraint and Soft Censorship How Can an Artist Respond to Censorship? The Dilemma That Faces Contemporary Creatives in the UK The LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project: A Roundtable Conversation Life is Drag: Documenting Spectacle as Resistance An Interview with Rachel Rampleman Middle Eastern American Theatre: Communities, Cultures, and Artists. Michael Malek Najjar. Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2021; Pp. xvi + 237. Lessons from Our Students: Meditations on Performance Pedagogy. Stacey Cabaj and Andrea Odinov. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 126 Choreographing Dirt: Movement, Performance, and Ecology in the Anthropocene. Angenette Spalink. Studies in Theatre, Ecology, and Performance Series, no. 3. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 116. Fauci and Kramer Our Town Frankenstein Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Johanna Hartmann and Julia Rössler Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 2 Visit Journal Homepage Introduction: Reflections on the Tragic in Contemporary American Drama and Theatre Johanna Hartmann and Julia Rössler By Published on January 28, 2019 Download Article as PDF In Tony Kushner’s provocative play Homebody/Kabul (2002), Milton reassures his daughter Priscilla during their trip to Afghanistan where they investigate the disappearance of Pricilla’s mother and Milton’s wife, “we shall respond to this tragedy by growing, growing close. . . .” Priscilla blankly replies, “people don’t grow close from tragedy. They wither is all, Dad, that’s all.” [1] While Milton interprets their situation as a tragic story from catastrophe to future hope, growth, and communality, Priscilla’s view is focused on the concrete suffering, defeat, and regress that will not contribute to some higher purpose. At the heart of this brief exchange between Milton and Priscilla lies a profound paradox which speaks of Kushner’s shrewd placement of tragedy between the human subjects’ transcendence and his or her irrevocable defeat. Similarly, in her play Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief (1994), Paula Vogel, deeply disturbed by the fact that when seeing Shakespeare’s Othello she would rather empathize with Othello than with Desdemona, poses the question if Desdemona deserved death, had she indeed been unfaithful to Othello. In Vogel’s rewrite of this classic tragedy, she reflects on how our individual response to what we see, our pity and empathy, depend on the formal and structural properties of a play but also on our sense of the social legitimacy for these feelings. [2] She shifts the focus from Othello to Desdemona and from Othello’s “flaw” of rogue jealousy to the systemic suppression of women in a patriarchal society. Tony Kushner and Paula Vogel are two representative writers of contemporary American drama and theatre who exhibit a strong interest in tragedy from aesthetic and ethical perspectives. As the articles in this issue reveal, it is in particular the notion of the tragic that, as a mode of thought, presents the social, historical, and cultural predicaments of contemporary human existence. As the plays reconsider and renegotiate our understanding of human suffering, deadly defeat, irreversible conditions of existence, and the loss of hope, they are highly reminiscent of various core tenets of Greek tragedy. [3] Yet, tragedy seems to be an unlikely genre in American literature and theatre, as the dominant cultural narratives foster individualism, self-reliance, the belief in continual progress, speak of self-made men who realize their versions of the American dream, and even bestow the pursuit of happiness as one of the fundamental and “inalienable” rights on Americans. However, these ideals and dominant narratives relegate responsibility to the individual and thereby increase the sense of failure and suffering if they are not fulfilled. [4] Furthermore, they stand in stark contrast to the sense of precarity and vulnerability which Foley and Howard describe in their introduction to the PMLA special issue The Urgency of Tragedy Now as “a pressing sense that crucial social and political institutions are in danger, as is the planet itself.” [5] This feeling has, if anything, intensified over the last five years due to the rise of right-wing parties, the disregard of human rights, the erosion of democratic institutions in various countries, environmental disasters, the fear of a looming economic recession, political tribalism, and the resulting polarization of American society. In our everyday lives, we routinely encounter the ubiquity of the terms “tragedy” and “the tragic” in a wide variety of sad and sorrowful events and occasions. Steiner claims that the “semantic field” pertaining to these terms “remains as indeterminate as its origin . . . rang[ing] from triviality . . . to ultimate disaster and sorrow.” [6] The use of these terms in order to refer to suffering in the real world is reflected by our familiarity with tragedy as a literary genre. As Lehmann reminds us, the tragic is not a representation of reality but a “perspective,” a “mode of seeing” that is produced and facilitated by the “echo chamber of tragic art.” [7] At the same time, as Foley and Howard point out, a rhetoric of the tragic can veil “complicity” by framing events as inevitable instead of resulting from deliberate actions and personal responsibilities. [8] Beyond its colloquial meaning, tragedy refers to one of the most long-lasting dramatic genres. Its history is marked on the one hand by a “tradition of hostility to tragedy” from Plato to Steiner, but also by the recognition of its value from Aristotle to Felski. [9] For example, Steiner famously declared that tragedy as a dramatic genre loses its meaning in our contemporary culture because according to him, “the metaphysics of Christianity and Marxism are anti-tragic.” He concludes: “That, in essence, is the dilemma of modern tragedy.” [10] Even though Steiner was convinced that true tragedies can only exist under strictly limited conditions, looking at the history of the American drama and theatre, there is strong evidence that—despite the lack of academic attention at times—tragedy as a dramatic genre and theatrical practice has been a timely and expressive dramatic form to articulate and comment on the conditio humana in the contemporary world throughout the twentieth century—from Eugene O’Neill and Susan Glaspell, to Arthur Miller, David Mamet, and Suzan-Lori Parks. [11] In fact, during this period, tragedies written by American authors have expressed and thematized realities that dominant ideologies and systems of values have suppressed and marginalized. Steiner’s definition of tragedy does not “fit” these contemporary plays as they are not based on a belief in the metaphysical entities that defined the fate of the tragic hero in antiquity, Shakespeare’s time, and early modern France. However, from a theoretical point of view, over the last 20 years or so, tragedy as a genre has been reevaluated by scholars of various disciplines, [12] and Steiner’s book The Death of Tragedy has permanently shaped the discussion. [13] In this issue on the tragic in American drama and theatre, we offer reflections on the tragic in the tensional field between theory and practice and its potential to explore universal themes of human existence in relation to contemporary realities. Tragedy’s presence in the contemporary theatre landscape [14] —ancient, Shakespearean, or contemporary—gives expression to a “tragic sensibility” that is fueled by the complexities of life today but also by “the toxic matter bequeathed by the past to the present.” [15] In fact, tragedy as a literary and dramatic form has lost none of its creative, thematic, and aesthetic fascination and attracts dramatists, theatre practitioners, and philosophers alike. Tragedy and the tragic are often used interchangeably. Yet, what constitutes the idea of the tragic in American drama and theatre of today? Contemporary playwrights search for ways of expressing a sense of the tragic by exploring the inconsistencies of American myths with the individual’s situation. The essays collected in this issue explore these reflections on the tragic in contemporary American drama and theatre by combining an interest in aesthetics with a reference to current and local cultural, social, and political debates. They address in particular how American dramatists reflect on, rewrite, actualize, and interrogate the potential of the tragic and tragedy as a dramatic form in regards to the troubling question of what constitutes pain and suffering. The essays speak of a fascination with the tragic as a model of thought which manifests itself in a mode of writing, interpretation, and expression through which playwrights raise fundamental questions about the causes of human suffering. Some draw compelling connections to the state of national politics, the alarming generational traumas caused by wars fought by the US throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and oppressive and dehumanizing societal structures that allow for racism and discrimination. In this respect, many plays conceive of the tragic not as a metaphysical category but as a mode of interpretation and as a symbolic representation that correlates human suffering with particular moments and conditions in US American society and history. The tragic dimensions of human experience that the plays envision dispel an exile of responsibility, cause, and guilt to the metaphysics of fate, gods, and an indifferent universe. Instead, they reveal their particular potency as a mode of affect and formal experimentation and thereby invoke an ethics of self-reflexive confrontation. Almost all plays discussed in this issue (e.g. the plays by Kushner, Hudes, Rabe, and McLaughlin, and the stage adaptation of Bechdel’s book) draw on music, musical genres, and the return of the past through spectres and ghosts. On a formal level, they provoke the audience’s reflection on contemporary life conditions and renew “perceptions [which have] become increasingly habitual and automatic.” [16] As the essays in this issue show, the tragic offers strong images of making sense of human suffering, freedom, and will. Even though the authors often suggest that the failure of or resistance to human agency are central ideas that inform the sense of the tragic that contemporary plays envision, they also stress the dramas’ remarkable departure from tragedy’s metaphysical determination. Human suffering is captured no longer as inescapable but as a result of the paralyses, grievances, injustices, and negative developments within a society. Indeed, contemporary drama resonates with Christopher Bigsby’s view that, “rebellion ultimately lies at the heart of the tragic sensibility.” [17] This raises ethical questions of individual, collective and structural responsibilities, and “answerability,” but also focuses on agency and control. [18] In this respect, Toby Zinman’s claim that “tragedy demands more of us than tears,” is a reminder that tragedy is also a matter of our commitment and responsibility. [19] In contemporary drama, this recourse to action and agency as important mechanisms in the overcoming of injustices caused by socio-political and historical circumstance is relevant in order to envision alternative, contested, and open, but eventually less dogmatic and normative narratives of change and progress. In his essay “Rewriting Greek Tragedy/Confronting History in Contemporary American Drama: David Rabe’s The Orphan (1973) and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003),” Konstantinos Blatanis investigates two rewritings of Greek tragedies in the context of recent US American history, arguing that in The Orphan , David Rabe rewrites Aeschylus’s The Oresteia to address the relation between historical circumstance, trauma, and violence. Blatanis elaborates that in this self-reflexive gesture, the play appropriates its own means of interpretation and reflection as it speaks, of the “urgency of its own historical moment” to address the policies and politics of the Vietnam War not only by discursive but also by artistic-affective practices and means. He further argues that the “conscious theatricality through which the play interrogates its own position in history” relates directly to its intention to draw attention to “historical agency as well as . . . political accountability” in recent US history. In a continuation of the essay’s argument, Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003), which is also modeled on Aeschylean tragedies, acknowledges the interrelation between history and human tragedy. According to Blatanis, the process of rewriting ancient Greek tragedies speaks of the critical possibilities offered by the tragic form for dramatists to respond to the failing acknowledgment of historical agency during the Iraq war. Consequently, tragedy resurfaces as a model of reflection most apt for dramatists in order to negotiate the impact and effects of recent historical events. Reading these plays as a “historiographic venture” means viewing the tragic subject in concrete relation with history as a material and actual agent of human existence. In her article “Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy ,” Nathalie Aghoro discusses how the Elliot Trilogy (2012–2014) by acclaimed Latin-American dramatist Quiara Alegría Hudes unearths the tragic mark that US wars left on three generations of a Puerto-Rican family living in present day Philadelphia. Aghoro reads Hudes’s family trilogy as an exploration of the “isolated, tragic subject” that returns from war and his necessity to reconnect and reintegrate into the community. After his service in Iraq, Elliot, the tragic hero of the play, returns to Philadelphia and embarks on an emotional quest to reconnect with the past of his family as he tries to build new relationships in order to overcome a profound feeling of alienation and isolation. The play stages three years in Elliot’s life which are haunted by what Aghoro terms a “fatal error in judgment”: Elliot’s first shooting victim looms in the play as an unceasing, invisible presence. Yet, instead of conceiving of the Aristotelian hamartia as an exemplification of destiny and as an end of human agency, Hudes’s play links this fatal flaw to the inhumane forces of war in which agency itself reveals a highly precarious interrelation between human action and the attribution of guilt and responsibility. On a formal level, Aghoro points out, the expressiveness of a Bach fugue, jazz music, and Puerto-Rican folk music supplement the subject matter as an elemental dramatic force in all three plays and expresses the tragic fragmentation of its characters between disintegration and reintegration, isolation and communality, desperation and hope, and death and life. Aghoro views the trilogy’s rethinking of the tragic as a prism to unearth the play’s engagement with the actual realities of war in light of severe interpersonal alienation and isolation that are internalized by the tragic subjects. In line with its emphasis on the importance of the community as a vital “network of human connections,” the play symbolically represents and stages forms of recovery and healing. The essays collected in this volume show that contemporary American drama’s response to injustices, terrors, and dehumanization are not to be sought in metaphysical forces that are beyond human control, but result from actual material conditions and real historical circumstances. In her article “‘Take Caroline away’: Catastrophe, Change, and the Tragic Agency of Nonperformance in Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change ,” Joanna Mansbridge interprets the internalized subservience and reluctance to participate in change by the black maid and main protagonist Caroline Thibodeaux as a “tragic agency of non-performance.” Set in 1963 in the deep south of Louisiana, history is the one agential force that leads to tragic circumstance as the play stages the commodification of black female labor against the omnipresent symbolic legacy of structural oppression and racism. Caroline’s inability and refusal to participate in change draws attention to the play’s interest in the sources and circumstances of Caroline’s existence, which, according to Mansbridge, is marked by an inner rift as she “inhabits an ontological space of abjection—neither subject nor object.” Recalling Blatanis’s reading of contemporary plays, Mansbridge argues that Caroline rejects the unavoidability of human agony as the tragic condition of human existence in order to foreground that “suffering is not inevitable” but results from “larger social conditions” that “reverberat[e] as an ongoing historical present.” Tony Kushner’s preoccupation with theatre as a site to raise questions about the sources and circumstance of human suffering and agony in relation to actual economic, cultural, and political realities of US American society also centrally informs his landmark play Angels in America (1991). In her article “The Poetics of the Tragic in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America ,” Julia Rössler explores how Kushner’s rethinking of the tragic condition is very much grounded in a political gesture that situates human suffering in relation to unjust and unequal material and historical circumstances that define contemporary American society in the 1980s as one of permanent struggle against the oppressive forces of utopian ideals, one-directional politics, racism, religion, and sexual discrimination. On the one hand, the “poetics of the tragic” that Rössler identifies in Angels in America refer to the play’s rethinking of the tragic condition outside the familiar notions of irreversible fate and finality as it links tragic necessity to the transformative powers of human will and agency. On the other hand, Rössler argues, Kushner develops a distinct dramatic style as the dynamic of interpersonal conflict and the constant clash of different world-views characterize the play’s unique oscillation between conflict and resolution, past and future, defeat and victory, self and other. This reveals the dialectical movement of the play as symbolically referring to the play’s vision of struggle as an elemental force in the striving for societal equilibrium which overcomes the paralyzing forces of tragic circumstance by foregrounding, according to Rössler, the “value of human will and agency.” The tragic as a mode of interpretation and affect is also central to Maureen McDonnell’s discussion of the Broadway musical Fun Home (2015), which is based on Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006). McDonnell explores in “Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home : Activism and the Advertising of a ‘Lesbian Suicide Musical’” how the marketing campaign dropped the musical’s main themes of suicide and sexual orientation in order to advertise the production as a musical about father-daughter relations, thus emptying the innate tragic dimension of the story of its relevance and meaning. McDonnell discusses how the erasure of the musical’s core subject matter of homosexuality and the fear of centralizing a strong masculine female shows the marginalization of pressing social issues in the genre of the musical, which, McDonnell adds, often offers accessible entertainment and life-affirming stories and is under high pressure to earn a profit. Moreover, McDonnell outlines how lesbian women are usually highly misrepresented and function as comic elements in musical productions rather than as human subjects worthy of serious contemplation: “By featuring a butch lesbian as its lead, Fun Home was culturally revolutionary, providing a cultural—and commercial—landmark for mainstream musical theater,” McDonnell writes. Lesbian women are often framed as essentially tragic figures who are “isolated, doomed, and suicidal.” Fun Home discards such a flat and one-dimensional depiction of a lesbian protagonist as abnormal and insane. Viewing Fun Home through the prism of the tragic reveals its resistance against consensual stereotyping as the tragic conditions of the protagonist’s life result from loss and stigmatization, supposed “normalcy,” and deviation from these arbitrarily set standards. As maintained by McDonnell, these experiences innate to everyday human existence establish the lesbian female protagonist as a more universal character and pave the way for a new and timely politicized tradition of musical productions (for instance mirrored in the legalization of equal marriage at the time of the musical’s run). The essays collected in this guest-edited issue add to the ongoing research and discussion of tragedy and the tragic in contemporary American drama and theatre, even though the limited scale of the project led to the exclusion and neglect of other relevant dramatists. [20] By adding to the debate reflections of concrete examples with regard to the tragic, these essays provide insights into a diverse selection of plays, and the ethical, cosmic, and civic structures they envision through the lens of human action in moments of crisis. As the “persistence of a tragic mode in modernity” pertains to human experiences in a universal way even today, it is increasingly determined by changes and upheavals in the political and socio-cultural dimension that change over time. [21] It is this simultaneity of permanence and variability that requires for the tragic to be continually historicized, rethought, and re-envisioned. This issue is a result of the conference “Tragedy in American Drama and Theatre: Genre—Mediality—Ethics,” held at the University of Augsburg in 2017, a project that was generously supported by the German Research Foundation, the Bavarian American Academy (Munich), Gesellschaft der Freunde (Society of Friends) and the research program Ethics of Textual Cultures (both Augsburg University). We are thankful for all authors who have agreed to publish their research in this issue. Furthermore, we would like to extend our thanks to the peer reviewers who have generously offered their expertise during the process, and in particular to the editors of JADT , Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson, for their support and interest in our project. Finally, we would like to thank Hubert Zapf for his insightful comments and support during the organization of the conference and Katharina Braun for meticulously proof-reading the essays. References [1] Tony Kushner, Homebody/Kabul (London: Nick Hern Books, 2002), 40. [2] Paula Vogel, Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief , in The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2013). [3] For a discussion of the aesthetic and formal dimensions of ancient tragedy in opposition to a “modern tragic sensibility” see Rita Felski, “Introduction,” in Rethinking Tragedy ed. Rita Felski (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2008): 10–11. [4] Compare with Rita Felski’s summary of Terry Eagleton’s argument in “Introduction,” 9. See also David P. Palmer, “Introduction,” in Visions of Tragedy in Modern American Drama: From O’Neill to the Twenty-First Century ed. David Palmer (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2018), 8–9; and Peter Lancelot Mallios, “Tragic Constitution: United States Democracy and Its Discontents,” PMLA 129, no. 4 (2014): 708–72. [5] Helene P. Foley and Jean E. Howard, “Introduction: The Urgency of Tragedy Now,” PMLA 129, no. 4 (2014): 617. [6] George Steiner, “‘Tragedy,’ Reconsidered,” in Rethinking Tragedy , ed. Felski, 29. [7] Hans-Thies Lehmann. “Drama, Tragödie und Auslaufmodell Stadttheater,” interview by Arno Widmann. Frankfurter Rundschau, 26 August 2014, (our translation). [8] Compare with Foley and Howard, “Introduction,” 617. [9] Adrian Poole, Tragedy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 62. [10] George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1961), 324. [11] Compare with Palmer, ed., Visions of Tragedy ; Brenda Murphy, “Tragedy in the Modern American Theater,” in A Companion to Tragedy , ed. Rebecca Bushnell (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 488–504. [12] Compare with Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, reprint 2007); John D. Lyons, Tragedy and the Return of the Dead (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018); Stephen D. Dowden and Thomas P. Quinn, Tragedy and the Tragic in German Literature, Art, and Thought (Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2014); Miguel de Beistegui and Simon Sparks, eds., Philosophy and Tragedy (London, New York: Routledge, 2000). [13] For a range of essays on the theorization of tragedy and the tragic before the 1960s see Laurence Michel and Richard B. Sewall, eds., Tragedy: Modern Essays in Criticism (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1963). [14] For example, Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh (Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre), Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (Neil Simon Theatre), Paula Vogel’s Indecent (Cort Theatre). See also Eleftheria Ioannidou, Greek Fragments in Postmodern Frames. Rewriting Tragedy 1970–2005 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). [15] Poole, Very Short Introduction , 35. [16] David Savran, “Loose Screws: An Introduction,” in The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays , Paula Vogel (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1996), xi. [17] Christopher Bigsby, “Foreword,” in Visions , ed. David Palmer, xvii. [18] Felski, “Introduction,” 11. [19] Toby Zinman, “American Theatre since 1990,” in Visions of Tragedy in Modern American Drama , 213. [20] E.g. Robert J. Andreach, Tragedy in the Contemporary American Theatre (Lanham: University Press of America); Palmer, Visions ; Kevin J. Wetmore, Black Dionysus: Greek Tragedy and African American Theatre. (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003). [21] Felski, “Introduction,” 14. Footnotes About The Author(s) JOHANNA HARTMANN is a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, where she works on her second book project on the modernist short play. In her research, she is interested in American drama and theater, short literature, literature and politics ( Censorship and Exile , V&R 2015; co-edited with Hubert Zapf), literary visuality, and contemporary prose literature ( Literary Visuality in Siri Hustvedt’s Works: Phenomenological Perspectives (Königshausen & Neumann 2016; Zones of Focused Ambiguity in Siri Hustvedt’s Works (De Gruyter 2016; with Christine Marks and Hubert Zapf). She is one of the organisers of the international conference “Tragedy in American Drama and Theatre: Genre – Mediality – Ethics” and guest-editor of this issue. JULIA RÖSSLER works at the department for North American Literary and Cultural Studies at the Catholic University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt. In her dissertation, she considers the principal role of mimesis in contemporary Anglophone drama. She is one of the organisers of the international conference “Tragedy in American Drama and Theatre: Genre – Mediality – Ethics” and guest-editor of this issue. Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Johanna Hartmann and Julia Rössler Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction: Reflections on the Tragic in Contemporary American Drama and Theatre "Take Caroline Away”: Catastrophe, Change, and the Tragic Agency of Nonperformance in Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change The Poetics of the Tragic in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America Rewriting Greek Tragedy / Confronting History in Contemporary American Drama: David Rabe’s The Orphan (1973) and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003) Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home: Activism and the Advertising of a "Lesbian Suicide Musical" Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches. Edited by Sharrell D. Luckett with Tia M. Shaffer. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017; Pp. 233. Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences. Compiled by José Casas with Christina Marín, ed. Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing, 2018; Pp. 581. The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era. Jonathan Shandell. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018; Pp. 213 + xii. Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, & the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization. Judith Hamera. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017; Pp. 286 + xvii. A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams. Katherine Weiss, ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2014; Pp. 290. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.