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Rahul K Gairola Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 1 Visit Journal Homepage Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife Rahul K Gairola By Published on November 16, 2022 Download Article as PDF Kareem Khubchandani’s Ishtyle is an innovative and refreshing critical survey of gay Indian nightlife cultures in diaspora that anchors its theoretical trajectory around the monograph’s title. The book’s originality is announced from its very start, when readers encounter the front matter. The Acknowledgments section is cleverly organized as a playlist of songs that correlate to those who have helped to shape the book’s contents, thus immediately positing readers into a nostalgic past wherein we ourselves used to make mix tapes for friends and lovers. In the Preface, Khubchandani proclaims, “I fucking love drag queens…Drag artists assemble cultural meanings of race, gender, and class on their bodies, relocating us to worlds beyond the club. They make apparent tools – dress, makeup, hairstyle, body modification, comportment, gesture, pose – we can use on and off the dance floor, in and out of the club, to reinvent ourselves, our worlds. Drag offers respite from the night, giving us instruction, emplacement, and orientation in the darkness and din” (xiii). He further details that, years later, in the geographical and untimely “absence of drag, I turned to social dance floors to examine danced styles, what I call ‘drag labor,’ that engendered the socialities described above” (xiv). These ruminations coalesce around the author’s diverse experiences and field work at the Desilicious dance parties in New York City as well as Bollywood cultures, and, as such, the book is an important mash-up between gay cultural studies and South Asian diasporic studies. Khubchandani then gets to the heart of his scholarly intentions: “I am eschewing identity politics, attending instead to aesthetics and performance, to ask: what styles are given value; what are the politics, histories, and circulations of these styles; how do people perform in line with and against dominant stylistic codes; what new forms of relation are made when performances grind against the dominant aesthetics of nightlife?” (xxiii). Khubchandani’s deviation from identity politics, a realm wherein hegemonic queer cultural studies wallow, is an exciting one as it seeks to empower practice over representation while also eschewing the racism, sexism, classism, and queerphobia that often attend, and unintentionally nourish, that critical realm. Rather, Khubchandani’s methodology presents an intersectional heuristic that demands attention to style and performance over appearance and dress, thus flinging the very real materiality of identity politics into kinetic moments that transform cultural meanings with every second. To this end, the author defines the meaning of “Ishtyle” as: “a playful and common South Asian (more particularly North Indian, and even more specifically Bombay) accenting of the English word ‘style’… I mobilize Ishtyle to work beyond its vernacular use and serve as shorthand for ‘accented style.’ Thinking broadly with accents allows me to analyze differences across borders and scales, but also to ask how brown bodies, regardless of cultural performance, are rendered accents” (6). Framing the embodied critical and political stakes of his research, he concludes, “I developed new intimacies with places I already called home, made new friends, and fell in love several times over. Nightlife, proximal to and imbricated in spaces of work, home, protest, and violence, feels present all the time” (27). To this end, the author organizes Ishtyle into three parts, which each contain two chapters. The first part’s two chapters take place and seize space in India’s tech hub, Bangalore. The first chapter, “BInaryC0des: Undoing Dichotomies at Heatwave, ” aims to demonstrate how attendees to Heatwave parties effectively resist binary identities that codify these parties in India’s “Silicon Valley.” Rather than defaulting to Western aesthetics (white, gay, cisgender, masculine, and middle-upper class), attendees resist, argues Khubchandani, corporatized gay culture in favor of accented stylistics of queer nightlife cultures. Its second chapter, “Dancing Against the Law: Critical Moves in Pub City,” focuses on legal restrictions of gay nightlife in Bangalore constellated around the postcolonial country’s notorious, Victorian-era Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. This chapter speaks to the ways in which women, trans people, and other queer folx practice ishtyle despite the city’s 2006-2014 ban on social dance – exploring how these ishtyle agents of queerness “dance” around the law. Part II’s two chapters: — “Desiring Desis: Race, Migration, and Markets in Boystown” and “Slumdogs and Big Chicks: Unsettling Orientations at Jai Ho! ” — shifts Khubchandani’s ruminations on ishtyle to the gay environs of Chicago in the United States. Chapter three thus examines the LGBTQI+ neighborhood of Boystown as a marketplace for desi bodies where white gay men view them as ornaments for homonormative whiteness. Leveraging compelling interviews and field research, Khubchandani apprises readers on how “(c)olonial legacies have affixed race, gender, sexuality, linking hyperfemininity and Asiannness, hypermasculinity and Blackness, and passion and Latinidad;” this brings the gay desi male’s “brown migrant body into a kind of good gay gender” (85). In the fourth chapter, the author demonstrates accented cultural elements of Trikone-Chicago (a nationwide, pro-LGBTQI+ South Asian organization), which hosts a quarterly Bollywood dance party called Jai Ho! that definitively challenges the overt orientalism and subtle white supremacy of commercial bars and clubs. Part III examines nightlife choreographies as global accentuations that undergird resistant practices Khubchandani described in Bangalore and Chicago earlier. Yet the author extends analysis by delving into fieldwork that centers, in Chapter five, interviewees’ memories of nightlife, childhood, and, cumulatively, different articulations of “home” and ishtyle as cultural strategies of homemaking. This homemaking occurs in the context of popular Bollywood song-and-dance numbers like those of Hindi film sirens Sridevi and Madhuri Dixit. Chapter six critically ruminates on ishtyle, analyzed through the intersectionality of class, caste, region, and, of course, gender and sexuality. Here, Khubchandani traces dappankoothu music and dance from Dalit communities, threading them through Tamil films and into a queer dance party called Koothnytz— wherein dappankoothu rejects both hetero and homonormative “respectability” by subverting propriety as another strategy of ishtyle. An award-winning volume, Ishtyle : Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife is as provocative as the cultural artifacts and films it analyses. The book is at once a glamourous explosion of queer critical cultural analysis that, like a pink-powdered Holi party, at the same time remains down to earth and exceptionally honest, based in Khubchandani’s painstaking field work and ethnographic recordings. Khubchandani has forged a fabulous, compelling comparative study of queer Indian subcultures that deploy ishtyle to subvert the normalized ways in which colonialist and white supremacist gay culture fetishizes Black and Brown bodies, as well as the English language, while lording over them in consumer cultures. While these consumer cultures are staged as celebratory steps towards gay visibility, Khubchandani convincingly urges readers to recognize that any study of non-white, contemporary queer culture is incomplete without a sober reckoning of ishtyle today. This study will be formative for students, teachers, cultural analysists, South Asianists, and general readers alike for the ways in which it encourages us to locate the inflected accents that reimagine ourselves and the daily environs that surround us. References Footnotes About The Author(s) RAHUL K GAIROLA Murdoch University Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue “An Art for Which There Is as Yet No Name.” Mobile Color, Artistic Composites, Temporal Objects The Anti-Victorianism of Victorian Revivals Tricks, Capers, and Highway Robbery: Philadelphia Self-Enactment upon the Early Jacksonian Stage “The Spirit of the Thing is All”: The Federal Theatre’s Staging of Medieval Drama in the Los Angeles Religious Community The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical; Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Peter Wood Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 1 Visit Journal Homepage Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience Peter Wood By Published on December 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience. Edited by Clelia Falletti, Gabriele Sofia, and Victor Iacono. Performance and Science: Interdisciplinary Dialogues Series. Series editors: John Lutterbie and Nicola Shaugnessy. London UK, New York NY: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 260. Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience emerged from a series of five conferences organized by the editors between 2009 and 2013, each essay resulting from "a series of encounters, collaborations, and mutual influences between researchers hailing from different geographical and disciplinary contexts” (xiv). In a collection representing scholars from seven countries and thirteen research areas, the editors do a good job at providing a wide range of scholarship as well as a structure that binds the twelve essays—divided into four parts—into a relatively coherent whole. The editors focus on two main reasons for the importance of interdisciplinary work on theatre and neuroscience. The first is that theatre practice and scholarship touches upon a vast array of “human sciences,” including anthropology, psychology, sociology, political science, history, and economics (xv). Thus, understanding how theatre affects—and is affected—by the human mind is a broadly worthwhile pursuit. The second reason stems from the editors’ desire to move theatre scholars away from the limitations of “ literary perspectives and interpretations” (xv). Because of this, the concept of embodied cognition is central to all of the essays in the book, and there are important ramifications to scholarship if one accepts embodiment as a starting point. In this, Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience is certainly not unique: embodiment is the cornerstone of many explorations of the cognitive sciences in theatre scholarship and leads to the standpoint that there is no real brain/body split: the brain may be necessary for thought and experience but it is not sufficient. However, as the title of this collection suggests, these essays are primarily concerned with what neuroscience can reveal about brain functions and how such functions relate to theatre and performance. The role that mirror neurons, mirror systems, and other such sensorimotor “resonances” play in the performance and reception of theatre is foundational to many of the essays in the book. Indeed, this foundation is highlighted by the fact that the first chapter is written by Maria Alessandra Umiltà, a member of the original research team that discovered mirror neurons in macaque monkeys. These particular neurons are motor neurons that—when a monkey watches another monkey or human perform certain actions—fire in the same way as they would if the monkey performed the action itself. While Umiltà does not address theatre directly, her essay provides a general discussion on the discovery, function, and meaning of mirror neurons. She also points out the distinction between mirror neurons directly observed in monkey and the proposed mirror systems indirectly observed and measured in humans, noting that in humans we see “a similar mechanism” (22) to mirror neurons but she is not claiming tohave directly studied individual mirror neurons in humans. There is compelling evidence for some kind of mirror system in humans, and it does make sense for theatre scholars to be interested in what such systems reveal about participation in, and observation of, theatre and performance, but often this distinction is glossed over in subsequent essays. Umiltà’s essay introduces the first of the four sections, “Theatre as a Space of Relationships: A Neurocognitive Perspective,” which relies heavily on a notion of space as both a physical space shared by people as well as a neuro-space that becomes a “shared space of action” (12). This allows for knowledge that is both pre-linguistic and totally embodied. The second section, “The Spectator’s Performative Experience and ‘Embodied Theatrology,’” argues, in general terms, that the act of spectating is never, in any ontological sense, passive and that every experience is, indeed, an embodied one. Section three, “The Complexity of Theatre and Human Cognition,” focuses on performer and actor training, while still being grounded in the relationship between the performer and the observer. Victor Jacono’s introduction to this third section argues, compellingly, for the relevance of scientific understanding on how the brain works and, in particular, how “knowing is done” (105). He suggests that “actor training is a systemic research process leading to a modification of the self, opening to the possibility of entering with the totality of one’s being in a new aesthetic and practical relation with reality” (105). While the tone of Jacono’s introduction occasionally verges into the metaphysical, his assumptions are solidly based on a current understanding of the brain’s neuro-plasticity and the ways in which learning a new tool creates physical change in a subject. The final section, “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Applied Performance,” presents several inquiries into how theatre can be used in therapeutic settings. In particular, it examines theatre and performance training as potential therapies for Autism Spectrum Disorders and Parkinson’s Disease. The individual essays range across discussions of specific experiments to more philosophical musings on things like time, Antonin Artaud, and the nature of theatre as therapy. The former, more data-driven essays are, in large part, what set this book apart and make it an important, if sometimes uneven, collection. Examples of exciting, interdisciplinary work include that of Giorgia Committeri and Chiara Fini on how the act of observing a human being within a three dimensional scene actually helps us organize spatial distances at a neuronal level and Corinee Jola’s and Matthew Reason’s fascinating analysis of data on both the neurological and the phenomenological experiences of live performance, focusing on notions of proximity and interaction. Also important is the discussion, by Gabriele Sofia, Silvia Spadacenta, Clelia Falletti, and Giovanni Mirabella, about several ongoing experiments designed to test for ways in which actor training affects reaction times in various circumstances. As the first experimental study designed to “show how theatre training modifies the neurobiology of action” (138), this is a particularly important chapter. So too is the research on theatre training as a tool in Parkinson’s therapy by Nicola Modugno, Imogen Kusch, and Giovanni Marabella, leading to the conclusion that while there is no evidence that such training leads to significant neuronal improvement among Parkinson’s patients, there is measurable improvement in the patients’ phenomenological experience of their own bodies and interactions with others. Set against these excellent studies, some of the less scientific essays in Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience seem both out of place and not entirely convincing. Additionally, the regular slippage between the concepts of mirror neurons and mirror systems in humans is not surprising, but remains something of a problem I often encounter in this area of research. However, a far more interesting issue is the somewhat utopian notion, underlying many of the chapters, that mirror neurons (or systems) necessarily equal empathy and that empathy necessarily equals a greater application of ethical care and understanding toward others. (Indeed, this sensibility underlies many other essays and books on the convergence of theatre and cognitive science and is an assumption that deserves further critical examination.) Still, the editors have put together an important collection for several reasons. The first, and most banal, is that it offers significant resources though the footnotes. Hundreds of studies and experiments are cited throughout, allowing one to explore some of the most up-to-date research on neuroscience and performance. Second, this collection presents a number of voices that many North American scholars may be unfamiliar with, revealing an alternate genealogy of research, approaches, and methodologies that will prove highly useful for anyone interested in this research area. Finally, the book presents concrete examples of theatre scholars and scientists working together through experimentation and the accumulation of data. These models can help those of us committed to the collusion between cognitive sciences and theatre scholarship to stop simply calling for such a practice (which is relatively easy) and to take the next step in a truly multidisciplinary way (which is much harder). Peter Wood, PhD Independent Scholar Head of Electronic Initiatives/Listserv Manager, ATDS.org The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 29, Number 1 (Fall 2016/Winter 2017) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2017 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Performance, Identity, and Immigration Law August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle Affective Performance and Cognitive Science Kitchen Sink Realisms Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience Everything Plus the Kitchen Sink Calculated Cacophonies: The Queer Asian American Family and the Nonmusical Musical in Chay Yew's Wonderland Historical Subjectivity and the Revolutionary Archetype in Amiri Baraka's The Slave and Luis Valdez's Bandido! Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Talya Kingston 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 Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Talya Kingston By Published on May 19, 2023 Download Article as PDF Patrick Gabridge at Mount Auburn Cemetery. Photograph by Corinne Elicone. 2018. Plays In Place is a Massachusetts-based company that collaborates with museums, historical sites and cultural institutions to commission plays that are fully produced in their space. While re-enactment on historical sites is not uncommon, this company contracts professional playwrights to pull historical information into fully realized stories that allow audiences to more fully engage with the human interactions that happened in different times and contexts. This engagement can bring new audiences in, and open new conversations, thus enlivening the site and making it more relevant in the life of its community. The commissioned playwright is similarly offered a fulfilling creative collaboration that they know from the outset will be both compensated and produced for an audience. It is perhaps unsurprising to learn that a company that centers writers, both creatively and in the budget, is run by a playwright. Producing Artistic Director Patrick Gabridge’s own work is often featured in the repertoire, but as the company has grown, he has commissioned a cadre of other playwrights (including me). Through the creative process he connects us with historical resources, strongly advocates for our creative freedom, and pays us at every stage of development. I sat down with Patrick to talk about his company’s process for developing new works of theater. I’m curious about your original inspiration for starting Plays In Place. Tell me the origin story of this playwright-led company. Plays In Place was inspired from the production of a play called Blood on the Snow that I was commissioned to write for the Bostonian Society for the renovated council chamber at the Boston Old State House. I’ve always loved writing historical work, and I’ve always loved doing site-specific work. This gave me a chance to do both together. It was clear there was a strong hunger from audiences, especially in New England. We sold out that first run before we even opened. We added a week and sold out that week. We came back in the second year for a twelve-week run. Years later, people are still calling that museum regularly asking when the show is coming back! Starting a company made it easier for me to approach other museums. Our goal is creating new site-specific plays in partnership with museums, historic spaces, and other institutions. I’ve founded theatre companies before, but in this particular case, I wanted to found a theatre company where we didn’t have to manage a space or raise money. I didn’t want a development department and I didn’t want a building. Speaking of raising money, can you describe the financial model for playwrights that you’ve developed through Plays In Place and how it differs from the traditional model of play development in this country? There are a few dozen playwrights who operate on commission for larger theatre companies, and they make money that way, and they get their plays produced that way and that’s great. It doesn’t happen for most of us – not all the time anyway! So, the typical model is you write a play on spec, you send it out to a lot of theatres and those may or may not get produced. It’s a scattershot approach to doing your work. It’s nice that you have a lot of control over what you are going to write, but your possibility of getting it in front of an audience, let alone getting paid for it, is pretty small. Even if you are in a position where a theatre company is commissioning you, they might be commissioning a bunch of different writers. They’ll do some development of your plays, and maybe they’ll pick one or two of those plays to fully produce, but maybe they won’t. So, it is good that you got paid and you still have a play that you can shop around somewhere else, but sad if the commission doesn’t end up in a production. What is different about our model is that the commission is part of the development process. We’ve learned to set up our contracts in multiple phases. Typically phase one is writers working with the institution on basic research, to come up with the storyline and structure. In this phase, the writer is paid upfront to come up with a proposal. This puts us in a good spot for phase two: the commissioning to write the plays and one or two in-house readings. And then phase three is rehearsal and production. In general, the institutions we’re working with are not developing a lot of different plays and starting the project because they intend to produce the work. This phased model allows them to raise the money in steps. It’s easier for the institutions to say yes to the partnership if I say to them that phase one is going to cost them $5000 – they might have that money, or a way to get it. Phase Two is significantly more money but it’s not a huge amount, and once we have scripts in hand, it’s easier to raise money for the rest, for the production. Plays In Place can commission playwrights at very competitive terms, especially for shorter plays. There are very few theatres commissioning one-act plays unless the playwrights are very famous. We don’t need our people to be famous, they just need to be good at what they do and willing to collaborate with the partner institution and keep their needs in mind when writing. For example, we are partnering with a historical site, so our production has to connect to the actual history. I like talking about money with writers because I think we don’t talk about it enough, and then we go into our conversations with producers a little ill-informed. Plays In Place mostly develops work in a community, which is different from the somewhat isolated traditional playwriting mode. Can you talk about the development process for writers and other artists, and how we work together with the sites? The process that you and I are involved in now [a partnership with Historic Northampton], as well as the National Parks Service’s Suffrage In Black and White , both involve three writers and we are all meeting somewhat regularly to talk about our work and to coordinate our presentations to the institutions. There is significant independence between each play, but also, I feel that it’s very important as a group to build that project together, so it has some liminal level of cohesiveness. They are plays that are going to sit together in an evening so whatever that meal is going to be for the audience it must be palatable and delivered in some stylistic framework. The model varies quite a bit from project to project. The Historic Northampton plays are shorter and all have the same director, so there will be a unifying feel between them. We are already talking about what shared actors we’re going to use and what the handoff is going to be between the plays. Whereas the Suffrage In Black and White pieces are full-length plays that will each have their own director. Plays In Place acts as a Creative Producer. We work with the teams to kind of tie them together and the writers are part of that tying things together so that we each understand what the other is doing. Having parameters for a writer can be a very stimulating part of the puzzle. We’re solving puzzles. In the traditional theatre the puzzle presented to us is pretty much “here’s a blank stage” and we act like all blank stages are the same, which I think is a fallacy, but it also causes us to create a somewhat generic version of our play. The business model in the traditional theatre is: get your play done at a professional company, have it be very successful, and have it be done by a bunch of other professional companies, and then have it be done by a bunch of community theatres, and then by a bunch of schools, and together that’s going to make you a bunch of money. Which is true when it works out, but you’ve also had to design a play that fits in all those different spaces. Our model is much less practical in some ways, in that if we do our jobs well the play can’t be done nearly as effectively in other places. For example, I just ran Moonlight Abolitionists , which is designed to be done under the full moon at Mount Auburn Cemetery as a concert reading in the dark. A friend of mine saw it and wanted to know if she could do it in her theatre in London. She could, of course, but it would lack the context that the cemetery brings and the atmosphere the moonlight brings. I wrote it for this place and time on purpose. The specificity of what we create as an artistic team is exciting to me. And I’m more interested in that than the ability of it to be done a thousand times elsewhere. It’s a tough question to ask yourself as a writer: would you be ok if this play was only ever done twice? Would it be worth the work? I will say so far, the answer has been yes. The production experiences are so intensely rich that it is worth it. Moonlight Abolitionists directed by Megan Sandberg-Zakian. October 2022. Walking around the site at Historic Northampton before I even had a story was such an inspiration. As a writer, how is the development process different when you are writing for and from a specific place? It depends on what the place is bringing. The plays are still going to be driven by story and character, but how are those stories and characters related to this place? Often the physical action and visual nature, even the sonic nature of the play, is already influenced by the setting. The question I’m always asking as a dramatist is: what is active about this place? As opposed to just a setting. In the plays that we’re writing for Historic Northampton what is interesting is the historic homes, we are in someone’s yard and so there is a familial sense that is going to inform all our writing, as our characters inhabited this neighborhood. The plays that I did at Mount Auburn Cemetery were different. Cemeteries sound like great places to write plays, except for the fact that the things you know the people for are not things they did in that place. This makes it difficult to create present scenes in the space. I wrote ten plays for the cemetery, in two sets of five. The first set was about the natural world, so that involved things that were there like salamanders and mushroom hunters and birdwatchers, all really rooted in the place. The second set of plays tended to be about people who were buried there. So, there is a play that starts out at this giant sphinx monument that is a memorial to the Civil War, but the scene is between the sculptor and the man who commissioned that piece, Jacob Bigelow, who was old and blind at the time. The scene takes place at the arrival of the sculpture, and then the way we made it active is that we know when he arrived, he inspected it with his hands. So, we got permission to bring this old wooden ladder on and the actor is actually feeling the sculpture and asking all these questions and they are in conversation about this object that is there. Matthew C. Ryan and Ken Baltin in Man of Vision . Photograph by Corinne Elicone. The action of the play is strongly influenced by the physical environment, and that in turn determines the structure. A good example is Moonlight Abolitionists . I knew I wanted to write a play to be done under the full moon, and I knew I wanted to write about abolition. So those things come together but then under the full moon, it’s going to be dark, so structurally that sends it towards a concert reading. It wasn’t going to be safe to move people around in the dark. I decided that it was OK if the characters were static physically as long as it was dynamic relationally between them. This decision also allowed the play to encompass a broad range of times. It is performed in the dark and the characters are lit only by their music stands lights, which casts this really eerie glow on the giant sphinx behind them. Lisa Timmel, who was the Director of New Work at the Huntington when I was a Playwright Fellow there, used to say, “structure is destiny” and I think place informs the structure. My mantra is “Don’t fight the site”. Understand where the site is guiding you and use it because you have so much, but if you try to go against it, you can’t win. I could do a play at Mount Auburn Cemetery set on the moon, but why? The audience will have spent all their imagination jumping to this new place. There are things that I can do in these spaces that I could never afford to pay to do. In a theatre I could make a full moon but it’s not going to be the same as a real full moon with the wind blowing on you at 9 o’clock at night in the middle of a cemetery. We also did this play about the Armenian genocide in the Mount Auburn Cemetery and when someone died, they would exit and they would walk away from the action, but the exits would take five minutes! The play would be continuing, and these people would be just walking way off in the background. When we performed at dusk when characters died, they would just wander into the gloom and disappear, in a lighting effect that would take a huge amount of money to replicate in the theatre, but the earth was doing it for us! You also have the dramatic tension in the fact that these events happened in the same place that they are being reimagined and that your audience knows this. Yes! The audience has that feeling, but so do the performers. When we were at Mount Auburn, I knew one of the actresses had gone to visit the grave of one of the people that she had portrayed in the Armenian play, this young woman who had died in childbirth shortly after arriving in America. It’s impossible for that not to deepen your performance as an actor. There is this richness that you feel. When we did Blood on the Snow it was intense because the play depicts this meeting that happened the day after the Boston Massacre, but you’re in the room where this meeting took place 250 years ago and there are 50 audience members crammed in with a dozen cast members but they are all in the room and you can feel the bones of the place all around you. The people feel so alive, and the audience soaks it in. Amanda J Collins and Robert Najarian in Consecration. Photograph by Corinne Elicone. References Footnotes About The Author(s) TALYA KINGSTON is a playwright, dramaturg and educator working primarily in new play development and theatre for social change. She is the Associate Artistic Director at WAM Theatre in Lenox, Massachusetts. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Steven Ofinoski Fairfield University 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 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Steven Ofinoski Fairfield University By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Jacob Mingo- Trent, Sheila Bandypadhyay, Michael F. Toomey, Madeleine Rose Maggio and Gina Fonseca in Shakespeare & Co.' A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Photo: Nile Scott Studios. Dear Jack, Dear Louise Ken Ludwig (26 May- 30 July) The Contention (Henry VI, Part II) William Shakespeare (17 June- 15 July) Fences August Wilson (22 July-27 Aug.) A Midsummer Night’s Dream William Shakespeare (1 Aug.-10 Sept.) Golda’s Balcony William Gibson (5-20 Aug.) Hamlet William Shakespeare (staged reading, 1-3 Sept.) Lunar Eclipse Donald Margulies (15 Sept.-22 Oct.) Thieves of Love was the theme of Shakespeare & Company’s 2023 season, which, in the words of Artistic Director Allyn Burrows, offered “an immediacy that gives the heart something to beat for . . . all these stories provide a reason for you to get drawn in to these character’s journeys as well as reflect on our own of these past years.” Certainly, audience hearts were beating for the season opener, Ken Ludwig’s charming valentine to his parents, Dear Jack, Dear Louise. Told almost entirely in letters, it charts the unlikely romance of an army doctor and an aspiring actress who meet during the chaos of World War II. Director Ariel Bock kept the action moving forward as the letters flew back and forth. David Gow and Zoya Martin were irresistible as the innocent lovers, challenged by the vagaries of war. No one would mistake the Henry VI trilogy as a high point in the Shakespeare oeuvre, but director Tina Packer, with a game cast, made Part II, here titled The Contention, into a most entertaining three hours. The flexible Packer Playhouse stage got a thorough workout as soldiers and nobles stormed up and down the aisles, across the upper gangway, sometimes making the audience more participants than spectators in the battles and rebellions. Above the stage was suspended the crown that the weakling Henry holds and that Richard of York, Senior (a nasty Nigel Gore) and Jack Cade (a hilariously numbskull Allyn Burrows) seek. They, and most of the rest of the cast of ten, did double duty with the versatile Bella Merlin taking on no less than six roles, including a very funny and feral Richard of York, who would eventually become Richard III. David Bertoldi was alternatively hilarious and heartbreaking as the hapless Henry whose hold on the crown was perilously tenuous. The only admirable character in this snake pit was Henry’s uncle Gloucester, eloquently played by Jonathan Epstein. Muffled war drums and the grisly sound of beheadings (there’s a record number of them for a Shakespeare play) provided an ominous backdrop to the dark deeds. But it was the spirited actors and the fast-paced direction that made this minor play into a major, if contentious, crowd pleaser. The second Shakespeare offering, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, was set amid the tall evergreens of the outdoor New Spruce Theater, renamed the Arthur S. Waldstein Amphitheater this year. Director Burrows put his cast through its paces with rollicking hilarity that sacrificed a bit of the play’s magic for the comedy. Funniest of all was Jacob Ming-Trent’s Nick Bottom, a soulful, singing blue collar worker, tragic stage hero, and enchanted jackass. The rest of the mechanicals were a superb troupe of clowns, and the two pairs of bewitched lovers were uniformly fine and particularly funny in the fast-paced antics of the closing acts. Nigel Gore brought a needed majesty to Oberon and Javier David was a delight as both the princely Theseus and the half-witted Flute, making the most of his comedic and acrobatic skills. Successful one-person shows move past the events of the person’s life to reveal their character and how it affected those events. Golda’s Balcony, a monodrama that saw its first production here 21 years ago, managed to do that. Annette Miller brought Israel’s first woman prime minister to vivid life from her sensible shoes to her dramatic hand gestures, ably portraying her fierce devotion to her fledging nation and the overwhelming guilt she felt for neglecting her family. William Gibson’s play is set in a tense moment in Meir’s administration during the Yom Kippur War of 1973 when she considers using nuclear weapons against her Arab adversaries if the U.S. doesn’t provide the promised military aid. “The struggle with her conscience is at the center of the play,” noted director Daniel Gidron in the program and Miller successfully captured the ongoing struggle within Meir in her electrifying performance. Fences, August Wilson’s most popular play, is, in the words of director Christopher V. Edwards, “a play about scaling down gigantic dreams to fit humble lives.” “ranney” as the flawed but heroic Troy in this enthralling production, captured the character’s aching loss, frustration, and anger, most of it directed at his son (an earnest JaQuan Malik Jones), who was chasing the same dreams of athletic glory. The supporting cast was uniformly fine, especially Ella Joyce as Troy’s long-suffering wife who brought an incandescent righteousness to the climactic scene where Troy confessed his infidelity and the child that would result from it. Jon Savage’s cluttered set with its multiple fences eloquently expressed the power of these objects to both trap people in, while keeping others out. Shakespeare & Company ended its season of love with the world premiere of Donald Margulies’s Lunar Eclipse, an enchanting two-hander about a starry summer night in the life of an aging farm couple. Life has disappointed the cantankerous George. Even the eclipse he came out into his meadow to view has let him down. Em, his wife, is the eternal optimist, while dealing with the loss of a son and a hard life that she never wanted. Reed Birney and Karen Allen inhabited their characters as comfortably as his old flannel shirt and her worn jeans. The subtle shifts in the lunar light were captured by lighting designer James McNamara and Nathan Leigh’s soundscape conjured up an enchanting chorus of chirping insects and other night sounds. The play ends in a flashback, a bittersweet coda that shows these two people at the promising start of a relationship that never fulfills that promise. Birney and Allen made the convincing transformation from age to youth with voice and body and without the help of makeup or costume. An officious off-stage voice that announced the phases of the eclipse was an unnecessary distraction to this intimate drama. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. 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 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.

kt shorb 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 Reappropriation, Reparative Creativity, and Feeling Yellow in Generic Ensemble Company’s The Mikado: Reclaimed kt shorb By Published on May 22, 2022 Download Article as PDF A disembodied voice announces, “Places for T.L.M.,” prompting the two women holding fans to usher a man between them. The three unfurl their battered fans and begin waving them in rictus as the voice says, “Standby for telecast transmission in 5…4…3…” A jaunty introduction cues the three to bob up and down with the beat, while the two other ensemble members lie across their bunks desultorily fanning themselves. They sing, “Three little maids from school are we / Pert as a school-girl well can be…” [1] They bob and giggle behind their fans. They shuffle around the small stage in single-file, bowing and cow-towing. The music ends and the disembodied voice says, “Cut.” The ensemble members rub the forced smiles off their faces, and the man who evidently subbed in for a missing woman ensemble member nods approvingly to himself (Fig. 1). Fig. 1. Q-mates perform “Three Little Maids.” Photo by Kannou Aiana via Blue Inferno Creative. The Mikado: Reclaimed (Reclaimed) [2] uses the 1885 W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan operetta The Mikado: Or the Town of Titipu as source material to criticize anti-Asian racism inherent in both the text and present day yellowface productions. Set in a near future ravaged by a global viral pandemic, Reclaimed depicts life in an internment camp for people of Asian descent who have been deemed “carriers” of the virus. “Q-mates (short for ‘quarantine inmates’)” are forced to perform song and dance numbers portraying “happy camp life” in the national livecast, “Virus Times Live!” Produced by the Austin-based Generic Ensemble Company (GenEnCo) in partnership with The VORTEX, Reclaimed was directed by me and devised by a mostly-Asian American ensemble. Four years after closing this show, the so-called “Chinese Virus” of COVID–19 quarantines millions across the world, as anti-Asian violence escalates alongside protest against state-sanctioned anti-Black violence after the murder of George Floyd. In 2016, we could not have consciously anticipated COVID–19 and its accompanying scapegoating of Asian bodies as carriers of disease. Yet, unconsciously, we did. Through the creative devising process, collaborators not only divined elements of the future but also developed a community of resistive care that concatenated a COVID–19 futurity with a carceral past. To invite this community of resistive care, we enacted reappropriation through strategies of reparative creativity, seduction of stereotype, and feeling yellow. In this practice-as-research article, I provide the background to the impetus of Reclaimed followed by a synopsis of the show. Citing literature by Asian Americanist performance scholars, I show how our creative process interwove critical race theory with aesthetic considerations, leading to a project-specific process I call “reappropriation.” Finally, I reflect on how our process provided an opportunity for racial healing amongst the collaborators. Background and Genesis The Mikado has been produced in yellowface nearly every year since it debuted in 1885. A satire about British aristocracy set in a perceived-exotic locale, a “Japan” where flirting is illegal, the plot of Mikado is a ridiculous farce. Few elements signal a “real” Japan, like the “Mikado,” a rarely-used moniker for the Japanese Emperor. [3] Most character and place names are derisive, nonsensical words such as “Yum-Yum,” “Nanki-poo,” and “Titipu.” As an Asian American performing artist racially traumatized by Mikado since being exposed to it in college, I expressed my opposition to it in every place I lived over the span of two decades—garnering little notice or support. The Asian American community response to the Seattle Gilbert and Sullivan Society’s Mikado in 2014 sparked perhaps the first mainstream awareness of yellowface in this operetta as anti-Asian racism. When the production published publicity stills of white actors in yellowface, many local Asian American theatre artists expressed their long-held outrage. This led to Asian American-centered social media campaigns that spread to coverage by mainstream outlets such as the Seattle Times and NBC News . The yellowface Seattle production still opened, but many were put on notice. When New York Gilbert & Sullivan Players (NYGASP) announced Mikado in 2015 with a yellowface production image, Japanese American playwright Leah Nanako Winkler sounded the call to respond. [4] I was part of a national groundswell of Asian Americans responding to Winkler’s call on Twitter that led to a postponement and re-imagining of the show in partnership with Asian American artists. In a moment of frustration and sheer bravado, I announced on Twitter that GenEnCo could do The Mikado in a thoughtful, anti-racist way. Our task was set. GenEnCo’s Reclaimed occurs in a larger context of multiple Asian American and Japanese treatments of Mikado . Doriz Baizley and Ken Narasaki’s 2007 The Mikado Project portrays an Asian American theatre company struggling through financial ruin by mounting a production of Mikado . [5] This play and the subsequent independent film based on it depict ambivalent Asian American actors critiquing the Orientalism of the original while embracing its musical elements and performing emotional and political acrobatics to justify the performance. [6] The Mikado Project manages to critique the racialized harm of yellowface as well as “camp plays” set during WWII Japanese American incarceration. The film starred Asian American veterans of stage and screen, including Erin Quill, who was also part of the Twitter groundswell around NYGASP in 2015. Quill has cultivated a “no-nonsense” persona leveling ongoing critiques of racism in New York theatre on her blog, fairyprincessdiaries . [7] Under the direction of Rick Shiomi in Minneapolis, Theatre Mu collaborated with Skylark Opera and set their Mikado in Edwardian England. [8] Shiomi’s 2013 production kept the broad narrative strokes as-is with significant cultural-political interventions. References to Japan were either excised or in a form of humorous wordplay; names and terms were changed to reflect early twentieth-century English mores. Perhaps most significantly, Shiomi cast Asian Americans in these English roles, thereby upending some historical baggage of yellowface. Meanwhile, The Chichibu Mikado (2006), directed by Kyoko Fujishiro and translated by Toru Sasakibara, was sung entirely in Japanese by a Japanese cast. [9] When the rural city Chichibu gained international fame as “The Town of Titipu” following the production, the residents of the city chose to believe it was based on their own town because Chichibu could also be transliterated to “Titibu,” although there is no concrete evidence that Gilbert and Sullivan had made such a connection. Re-contextualizing the plot through Japanese modern sensibilities mapped on Japanese proto-professional actor bodies speaking in Japanese, this version conveyed a means by which Japanese citizens could gain access to cosmopolitan trappings of Britain and other western contexts. These productions engaged in widely varying degrees of critique and deconstruction through adaptation. Our Reclaimed depicts the typical “day in the life” of quarantine inmates (or, Q-mates) incarcerated during a global pandemic. We follow the story of a Q-mate repeatedly summoned by a bell to change into a Lolicon outfit to perform non-consensual sex acts off-stage (JooHee) while she falls in love with another Q-mate (Rachel, Fig. 2). We witness denied physical autonomy by glowing red “chips” embedded in Q-mates’ arms that can shock and control them. Meanwhile, a surveillance state manifests in self-silenced soundscapes. Q-mates rarely speak, and when they do, it is in whispered Korean or Tagalog. When one Q-mate (Leng) speaks about freedom in English, her chip shocks everyone and then summarily impels her off-stage where her execution is broadcast for the entire cell-block to witness via video feed. Despite the draconian context, Q-mates enact the extraordinary, joyous, and mundane. Between bouts of boredom, they sing songs for one another to pass the time (“The Criminal Cried”) or to convey warnings or woe (“As Someday It May Happen,” “Here’s a How-de-do”) while periodically singing numbers for “Virus Times Live!” (“Miya Sama,” “Three Little Maids”). JooHee and Rachel join in an ad-hoc commitment ceremony (“On a Tree by a River”), which prompts a jealous Q-mate (Annie) to betray their affair to the authorities (“Alone and Yet Alive…Hearts Do Not Break”). When JooHee is summoned to perform sexual favors again, she refuses, leading instead to Rachel’s chip-shock removal and a subsequent beating, broadcast live. Rachel is released back to the cell-block, only to die in JooHee’s arms. During JooHee’s lament (“The Sun Whose Rays,” Fig. 3), the Q-mates in the entire cell-block signal to one another a refusal to continue the oppressive status quo. When the Q-mates are prompted to deliver another livecast, they abstain from song and instead reveal Rachel’s bloodied body. The show ends with a blackout and a “shock” sound, implying that everyone dies. Figure 2. Lovers’ kiss. Photo by Kannou Aiana via Blue Inferno Creative. Figure 3. Lamentation of a lover’s death. Photo by Kannou Aiana via Blue Inferno Creative. Reparative Creativity, Feeling Yellow, and Reappropriation As Dorinne Kondo argues in Worldmaking , theatre artists, through performative acts, unmake and remake race. [10] Kondo calls such processes “reparative creativity,” saying they “[offer] a way to remake worlds counter to the affective violence of minoritarian life” while also imagining something else. [11] Creative projects allow us to examine pain and transform it into different—though related—new artifacts. She further describes how reparative creativity can revisit “histories of affective violence” that can address the complexities of facing that violence. [12] Through theatre, theatre artists of color create new meanings of race and its representations with and in response to audiences of color. Devising Reclaimed , then, was a process by which both historical and contemporary notions of race were made and unmade. [13] In both the rehearsal room and onstage we have the capacity to name and rectify the affective and physical violence inflicted upon our bodies and communities. Coming together to confront yellowface as Asian Americans who have experienced its violence forms a central part of what Donatella Galella calls “feeling yellow.” [14] Galella uses Sara Ahmed’s discourse on happiness to highlight how encounters with yellowface create dichotomies where those in power find entertainment and joy, while those “feeling yellow” have to either feign joy or hide a combination of rage, disappointment, and alienation. Galella identifies two ways that feeling yellow sparks utopic hope. One is through the “impishly gleeful” process of “making another person feel awful for their enjoyment of and complicity with racist musicals… This act redistributes pain more equitably.” [15] The other is through acts of solidarity and collectivity: “By feeling together, Asian Americans can foster solidarity and use their affect to move others just as they are moved.” [16] As an imagined, strategic, and politicized community, Asian Americans must overcome historical divisions of national origin and immigration status; such opportunities for coalition are empowering if rare. Here I note a significant paradox: Reclaimed undoes racial violence through reparative creativity while the narrative of the piece ends with all the characters dead. This collective death was chosen by the ensemble deliberately to address issues of (il)legibility of Asian Americans and anti-Asian racism in the context of Austin, Texas in 2016. The piece confronted the invisibilized racial harm enacted upon bodies of Asian descent in the form of yellowface. In laying bare the hidden, Reclaimed unmade the violence of this erasure. Depicting resistance to carceral violence narratively onstage also cultivated a culture of care in the rehearsal room. In addition, while the specific stereotypes contained in Mikado were aimed at what Josephine Lee calls a Japan of “pure invention,” the production employed a majority non-Japanese ensemble of Asian Americans who had differing stakes in “Japanese-ness” but similar stakes in generalized Orientalism. [17] Though we could not articulate it at the time, the collaborative team for Reclaimed sought a space of healing and repair that could connect ensemble members’ experience of harm with the audience. If Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado is a prime example of appropriation, Mikado: Reclaimed is that of reappropriation. Reappropriation, broadly, is a process whereby a community whose cultural legacy has been defaced through harmful misinterpretation takes an object of that misinterpretation and transmutes it into something that furthers an identitarian strategic project. Lee takes up reappropriation in her treatments of works by David Henry Hwang and Philip Kan Gotanda where she notes the allure in the “excessiveness of the stereotype.” [18] She contends that reappropriation has the power to dissect stereotypes and its racialized histories, showing that it can have “the potential for its disruption.” [19] She goes further to illustrate that undoing the stereotype is not simple or easy, but the inherent theatrical power in the stereotype can serve as a potential tool for liberation. For the collaborators of Reclaimed and its audiences, reappropriation was a means of taking Orientalizing and white supremacist texts and transforming them. It was not reclamation. Reappropriation requires a breaking down of a text into components that still contain discernable referents to the original but re-create meanings different from—if not counter to—the text from which it draws. Keeping a musical number but setting it with different staging, design, and arrangement can not only excavate different implications from the original, but also reveal the political and cultural subject positions of those performing the reappropriation. Indirectness is key to how reappropriation works. To simply refute each element in the original would have repeated the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta in relief, not transform it. We began the project by watching a recording of a yellowface production of The Mikado . [20] It left the cast angry. We fluctuated between revisiting the original and sharing childhood experiences of racial formation, not being taken seriously, and failed attempts at assimilation. From the super “woke” person who knew critical race theory to the “model minority” who announced that she “never encountered racism, just ignorance,” everyone expressed a sense of otherness they have felt in their lives. In order to mitigate the potential for re-traumatization, we devised a check-in/check-out process whereby collaborators could name what they wanted to “bring in from the world” or “leave in the rehearsal room.” We were committed to examining the pain as a means of healing. The actors’ initial anger brought on by having seen the original led to the ideas of overt resistance through visceral offense—eating Asian foods with strong smells such as durian or natto, enacting slasher fantasies on white effigies, and so on. We wanted to be, as Eve Oishi has called it, “Bad Asians.” [21] Our aversion, combined with knowledge of how Mikado is a part of popular culture, helped us narrow down the song list. While learning songs, we conducted parallel research. The “Muslim ban” had only been mentioned by one Republican candidate in passing during the 2016 primary campaign, and it frightened all of us, not just the sole Arab American member of the ensemble. It prompted us to examine images of Syrian refugees. These images felt familiar, echoing the detainment of people seeking asylum in border states. As Asian Americans confronting heightened yet casual racism in the form of yellowface, we were also keenly aware of how such representational violence could easily slip into yellow peril and detaining over 100,000 people of Japanese descent as potential enemy combatants. We realized that an internment camp was the requisite setting for our production. As the setting and tone became clearer, we began to imagine how we might find ourselves incarcerated again. Using the knowledge of a biologist in the cast, we created a detailed backstory around potential viral outbreaks that many scientists (rightly) considered inevitable. We then returned to the original operetta to poach as many elements as we could while homing in on what we wanted to say. Each actor chose a character they would emulate in devising their own character. We began criticizing subtler aspects of Mikado , such as the sexually-exploitative relationship between Yum-Yum and Ko-Ko and the casual treatment of death. One element specific to GenEnCo we deliberately included was a normalizing (but certainly not normative) existence of queer romance, sex, and friendship. GenEnCo was founded specifically to show bodies, aesthetics, and stories onstage that I—as a queer, non-binary, mixed-race Asian American—found to be everyday and “generic.” Our mission has always been to center queer people of color in our theatrical storytelling. I take inspiration from José Esteban Muñoz’s words that “[q]ueerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality.” [22] And that “[b]rownness is already here. Brownness is vast, present, and vital.” [23] We did however make one major textual revision that mobilized reappropriation to transform meanings in the original. Most productions of Mikado update the lyrics in “As Someday It May Happen” to reflect the undesirable subjects in the zeitgeist. In Reclaimed, these revisions provide plot context, diegetic rules, and analysis of how anti-Asian racism manifests and provides an example of reparative creativity: There’s the Centers for Disease Control who sounded the alarmThe epidemiologists, I’ve got them on the list!And the “cheap and chippy” chippers who installed these in our arms,Nanotechnologists, they never would be missed!Then the bigot who denounces with enthusiastic tone,Every race but his, and all religions but his own;And the Poo-Bah of the Quarantine, the boss man of “The Cage,”Who takes a shine to pretty girls who are less than half his ageAnd the lovers of Chinoiserie, the Asian fetishists,I don’t think they’d be missed, I’m sure they’d not be missed! [24] As we continued to create material, I asked the actors to explore mimicking white people performing yellowface. The actors were understandably disgusted at first. The disgust turned into ridicule, to rupture, then to catharsis. Through repetition of the original material, we somehow found a way to parse the past from the present, as if we were reverse engineering the racial trauma the original operetta symbolized. Rehearsing the classic earworm “Three Little Maids” was particularly informative. The song about three women “who, all unwary/ come from a ladies’ seminary” and who are “filled to the brim with girlish glee” is often performed with shuffling feet and giggles behind hands. [25] I associated this song with a falling-out with a white college friend. At first, as we rehearsed the piece, I was transported to my own past and the end of that friendship and the violent incidents around it. Due to the passing of time, I was able to manage potential emotional triggers. Partly to ground myself in the present, and partly in solidarity, I committed myself to learning all three sung parts with the actors. The repetition was at first very painful. Moving forward, however, my experience of the past began to shift. The pain became more manageable. Traumas slowly healed as the experiences of racial violence were merged with and overwritten by moments of being together as a community. We figured out a way to sing that very hurtful song while feeling yellow. The resistive care that GenEnCo created through reappropriation served as a balm to the ensemble. In hindsight, although one of the ensemble members was a trained psychologist, I would have provided more formal and robust mental health resources to examine racial trauma. That said, Reclaimed is an example of how employing reparative creativity and feeling yellow enabled minoritized theatre makers to transform both the art and the communal experience of racial trauma. References [1] Arthur Sullivan & W. S. Gilbert, The Mikado, Or, the Town of Titipu. (New York: G. Schirmer, 2002), 69. [2] Generic Ensemble Company, “The Mikado: Reclaimed,” Vimeo, 1 May 2016, https://vimeo.com/160895296. This performance featured the following actor-devisers: JooHee Ahn, Annie Kim Hedrick, Jonathan G. Itchon, Laura Khalil, Abigail Lucas, Rachel Steed, and Leng Wong. Additional collaborators on the workshop version of the piece were: Kanoa Michél Bailey, kubby, and Saray de Jesus Rosales. [3] Josephine Lee’s The Japan of Pure Invention provides an in-depth analysis of the myriad contexts of Mikado . Josephine D. Lee, The Japan of Pure Invention: Gilbert and Sullivan’s the Mikado (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). [4] Leah Nanako Winkler, “‘The Mikado’ in Yellowface Is Coming to The Skirball Center of the Performing Arts and We Should Talk About It,” Leah Nanako Winkler (blog), 15 September 2015, https://leahnanako.com/2015/09/15/the-mikado-in-yellowface-is-coming-to-the-skirball-center-of-the-performing-arts-and-we-should-talk-about-it/. See also: Victor Maog and Leah Nanako Winkler, “Leah Nanako Winkler, The Mikado , and This American Moment,” Howlround Theatre Commons (blog), 7 October 2015, https://howlround.com/leah-nanako-winkler-mikado-and-american-moment/. [5] Doris Baizley and Ken Narasaki, The Mikado Project (New Play Exchange, 2007), accessed 2 February 2022. [6] The Mikado Project , directed by Chil Kong, featuring Tamlyn Tomita, Allen C. Liu, Erin Quill, and Ryun Yu (New Cyberian, 2010), DVD. [7] Quill, Erin. fairyprincessdiaries (blog), https://fairyprincessdiaries.com/. [8] Diep Tran, “Building a Better ‘Mikado,’ Minus the Yellowface,” American Theatre , 21 June 2021, https://www.americantheatre.org/2016/04/20/building-a-better-mikado-minus-the-yellowface/; Rick Shiomi, “Director Removes Racism and Yellowface from Minneapolis Staging of ‘the Mikado,’” Star Tribune , 8 March 2019, https://www.startribune.com/director-removes-racism-and-yellowface-from-minneapolis-staging-of-the-mikado/506842272/. [9] The Chichibu Mikado , directed by Kyoko Fujishiro, translated by Toru Sasakibara, International Gilbert & Sullivan Festival, Buxton, Derbyshire, England, 1 August 2006. [10] Dorrine K. Kondo, Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 25. [11] Ibid., 212. [12] Ibid., 212. [13] A note about tense: to differentiate between production and process, I refer to the performance in present tense and the process in past tense. [14] Donatella Galella, “Feeling Yellow: Responding to Contemporary Yellowface in Musical Performance,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 32, no. 2 (2018): 67-77, http://doi.org/10.1353/dtc.2018.0005. [15] Ibid., 74. [16] Ibid., 73. [17] Lee, The Japan of Pure Invention . [18] Josephine Lee, Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), 91. [19] Ibid. , 96. [20] The Mikado , DVD, directed by Brian MacDonald (Canada: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1999). [21] Eve Oishi, “Bad Asians: New Media by Queer Asian American Artists,” Countervisions: Asian American Film Criticism, eds. Darrell Hamamoto and Sandra Liu (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), 221-241. [22] José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 1. [23] José Esteban Muñoz, The Sense of Brown (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 121-122. [24] The Mikado: Reclaimed . [25] Sullivan and Gilbert, 69-73. Footnotes About The Author(s) kt shorb (they/them/their) is Assistant Professor of Acting and Directing at Allegheny College and the producing artistic director of the Generic Ensemble Company. Their current research focuses on anti-racist and anti-colonial rehearsal room practices and actor training. As a director, they focus on devised work by underrepresented communities and new play development as well as opera stage directing. kt is currently the Vice President for the Consortium of Asian American Theaters & Artists. They will be joining Macalester College this fall. Deepest gratitude to Rick Shiomi who sent footage and score copies of his adaption of The Mikado. Many thanks to James McMaster, siri gurudev, Margaret Jumonville, Priya Raman, and Alexis Riley for giving me in-depth feedback on drafts of this article. 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.

Theresa J. May Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 2 Visit Journal Homepage Tú eres mi otro yo - Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy & the AnthropoScene Theresa J. May By Published on May 14, 2017 Download Article as PDF ! Widget Didn’t Load Check your internet and refresh this page. If that doesn’t work, contact us. In 1994 Una Chaudhuri challenged theatre artists to provide new visions of what it means to be human within an ecological context, writing that the art of theatre must participate in “a transvaluation so profound as to be unimaginable at present.”[1] As the environmental crisis entered a new era of globalization in the 1990s, the embodied, immediate, and communal art of theatre became an apt site for illuminating the personal and social impact of significant ecological change. In the past two decades theatre artists and scholars have spun counter narratives and invented alternative forms that resisted environmental and cultural imperialism by exposing its mechanisms, amplifying the voices of those places and peoples it has silenced or ignored, and advocating ecological reciprocity between and among land and people.[2] When I first used the term “ecodramaturgy” in 2010, I sought to acknowledge and coalesce this praxis, and to emphasize the ways it might imaginatively intervene to forward environmental justice, sustainability and democracy.[3] Meanwhile, the fate of humans and other life forms on the planet continues on a trajectory of unparalleled risk. Scientists have suggested that we live on the cusp of a new epoch, the Anthropocene—in which human-caused changes to earth systems have outpaced all “naturally occurring” geologic, biologic, and atmospheric factors. Debate continues about whether the Anthropocene began with the age of colonization, the rise of extractive capitalism and the industrial revolution; or more recently, just after WWII when the planet saw an exponential increase in population, coupled with a rise in fossil fuel use, consumer consumption, urbanization, and nuclear radiation. This rise in CO2 in the planet’s atmosphere during the baby-boomer era is known as “the Great Acceleration.” The arts are vital in such times of crisis not only to imagine all that is at stake, but to enter feelingly into what Jeremy Davies calls “the predicament of living in the fissures between one epoch and another.”[4] In what follows I look first at Harvest Moon by José Cruz González (1994), which in many ways is emblematic of ecodramas that sought to expose the impacts of industrial and agricultural capitalism on land and communities. The play argues for environmental justice and affirms sustaining values of community, family and culture. I then turn to Burning Vision by Marie Clements (2003), an ecodrama reflective of the looming realities of the Anthropocene, which include trans-global interdependencies, irreversible exposures and losses, and generational breakage. The purpose of juxtaposing these two (separated only by a decade and which share much in common) is not to make predictions based on uncertain scenarios of “before” and “after” tipping points, but rather to search for what might become the stories of what Donna Haraway calls “ongoing and living worlds.” Stories and performances are the very expression of what she calls a necessary “tentacular thinking” that continuously reaches out, nurturing the “generative recursions that make up living and dying.”[5] Cruz González and Clements both employ a-chronological storytelling, moving freely and fluidly between times and places in works that demonstrate the shared vulnerability between people and land. Both expose environmental racism and capitalist imperialism; both reclaim people’s traditional rootedness in and rights to land; and both use theatre to presence the dead among the living, re-member lives lost, hearts broken, and histories forgotten. Both are instructive on ways to live in the fissures, but each envisions and embodies resilience differently. In Harvest Moon, hope resides in generational continuity as the play affirms the activist vision of a world in which sustainability and justice are possible. In Burning Vision, tentacular tellings embody what Haraway calls “co-presence”—neither hope nor despair, but a state of bearing witness to the breakage and living and loving through it. A Continuum of Shared Vulnerability: Harvest Moon The environmental justice movement of the 1980s and ‘90s represented the single most important conceptual gain in environmental thought of the late 20th century. [6] In 1991 the Environmental Justice Summit redefined “environment as the places where people live, work, play and worship,” demanding attention and redress for those (women, children, communities of color, and the poor) who have been disproportionately impacted by the shadow sides of industrial/consumer capitalism, such as landfills, incinerators, toxic waste sites, and other “sacrifice zones.”[7] The EJ movement dismantled the longstanding conceptual binary of “nature” vs “culture,” asserting a human place in, not apart from, the natural world. It claimed urban environments as spaces worthy of environmental concern and ecological tending, and demanded that environmental organizations examine the white privilege of their most ardent proponents and heroes. In many ways the conceptual openings of the EJ movement were responsible for the recognition that theatre has been always/already rife with ecological ideologies and implications. Ecodramaturgy emerged to emphasize the intersectionality of community, identity, the body and the land, and to celebrate the power of communities and individuals to enact meaningful change in the creation of a more just and sustainable world. Many Chicano/a and Latinx playwrights had engaged ecological issues in their works long before ecotheorists ever articulated such a project, illuminating a continuum of shared vulnerability between lands and peoples, and revealing the complex ways that oppression and displacement from homeland, family, history, heritage, and language has had consequences for human and environmental health. Yet, with the exception of Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints and the work of Teatro Campesino, Latinx theatre has been underrepresented in studies of ecotheatre.[8] Harvest Moon is an act of remembrance, resistance and resilience through which José Cruz González tells the history of four generations of a Mexican-origin American family. [9] Their stories assert the presence and vitality of the family’s real-world counterparts in a century of North American environmental history. Developed and workshopped as part of the Seattle Group Theatre’s 1991 Multicultural Playwrights Festival, Harvest Moon premiered at the Group Theatre in 1994, at a time (like ours) of heated national debate about immigration Particularly in the western states, debates over bi-lingual education and citizenship for the children of undocumented workers were becoming increasingly polarizing and xenophobic. (Proposition 187, denying many basic services to non-citizen residents, had just been approved in California.)[10] The action begins as Cuauhtemoc, a contemporary young man of the early 1990s, returns to the mural his mother (Mariluz) painted before she died.[11] On a wall “near a harvest field” in “a valley filled with dozens of farms” so that it will “greet the farmworkers on their way to work and on their way home," the mural, like the land itself, is an archive of his family’s history and cultural heritage. Cuauhtemoc “carries a backpack and a small tree seedling wrapped in burlap. He looks at the mural…searches for a place to plant the tree…begins digging a small hole but discovers something”—his mother’s paintbrush buried in the soil. In this moment Cuauhtemoc encounters his mother’s spirit, and what was “faded and overgrown with weeds” comes to life around him (11-14). Cuauhtemoc encounters his parents, grandparents, and great grandparents, and is able to forgive his mother (who died when he was a small boy) for spending so much time during her final days painting a mural rather than playing with him. [12] His ancestors’ stories of commitment, skill, cunning, and sacrifice become the ground on which he stands. Like the tree Cuauhtemoc plants for his mother, the play lives into and informs his life going forward, arguing not only that social, economic and environmental justice are integrally connected, but also that making sustainable and just choices requires us to remember our histories, listen to the stories of our ancestors and the land itself. Muralists like Mariluz helped transmit the stories that birthed the mythos of Aztlán, rooting the movimiento in a shared ancestral story, and siting that history in the neighborhoods, streets, alleyways, underpasses, and parks of the communities whose story they told.[13] Murals like Judith Baca’s Great Wall of Los Angeles or Chicano Park in San Diego function as a visual representations of oral histories, proactive and public assertions of presence that (re)claim both past and future. Inspired by a mural that he passed on the way to school as a young man, Cruz González suggests that theatre, like a mural, may be best understood as a visual form that can summon history much in the way that memory functions—associatively, anachronistically, emotionally—treating spaces and places of habitation as archives of memory and records of human action. [14] Throughout the performance, actor/characters move into and out of tableaus that bring to life the history that the mural represents, transforming history into flesh and blood presence on stage. As memory associates with memory, the story moves in and out of time periods, and characters appear at various ages in significant moments in their lives. As memories connect and collide in the space of the theatre, the audience also encounters the full arc of 20th century American environmental history—a history in which Mexican-origin Americans are present and integral. Working the generations backwards from 1990, we might imagine that Cuauhtemoc was born in the late 1970s; his mother, Mariluz, was born in the early 1950s, growing up and coming of age during the movimiento and witness to the early years of the farmworkers’ movement in California. Her parents, Ruben and Gloria, were born during the Dust Bowl and Depression; Henry and Lupe, Cuauhtemoc’s great-grandparents, would have come to the United States from Mexico in the years following the Mexican Revolution of 1910, when economic and political turmoil caused many to emigrate in search of work and safety. Woven into this arc, other significant moments in the environmental history of the continent come to life.[15] A first generation US citizen, Ruben came of age during WWII, when the US government instituted the bracero program that sought Mexican guest workers for US fields, canneries, and slaughterhouses. Soto, Henry’s friend, and a kind of uncle figure in the play, remembers “an army of laborers. Hundreds of men attacked the harvest each day. There’s not enough work for us all and yet we come by the truck loads” (17). Laborers in the booming post-WWII California agricultural industry lived in barracks without adequate food, clean water or sanitation. “I’m surprised these old barracks are still standing. I can’t believe we ever lived in them. The Grapes of Wrath or what?” muses a 17 year old Mariluz. Her reference is a reminder to the audience that the hardships endured during the Depression and Dust Bowl by white families like John Stienbeck’s beloved but fictional Joads were also felt by Mexican-origin Americans.[16] Cesár Chavez’s family was one among many landowners in the southwest who lost land in the farm consolidations and liquidations precipitated by the drought of the 1930s, and who came to California looking for work in the growing agricultural industry.[17] In this way, Cruz González couples the experiences of Anglo American workers’ struggle to unionize for just wages and healthy living conditions in the 1930s with the farmworkers movement of the 1960s, and the experiences of economic immigrants in the 1990s. Union organizing in the 1930s resulted in labor laws that improved working conditions and wages across many industries, but farmworkers were excluded from guarantees and protections that white workers gained. Meanwhile, the influx of white farmworkers to California as a result of the Dust Bowl migrations displaced Mexican-origin workers. Many were deported to Mexico, including, ironically, families who had lived on and worked the land since California was part of Mexico.[18] It was not until 1978 that farmworkers won a minimum wage on par with other workers; and they are still not adequately protected from industry toxins. In 1994 Harvest Moon resonated with ongoing debates over so-called guest worker programs under H-2A, as well as larger questions about immigration, citizenship, and the economic migration that promises to increase as a climate change proceeds.[19] The generational perspectives of his mother, grandparents, and great-grandparents help Cuauhtemoc understand that the politics of unionizing, immigration, green cards, and the undocumented are personal, and shaped by the history his elders have lived through. In a scene set in the 1960s, some family members are inspired by the young Cesár Chavez and the organizers who have come to town. Ruben’s wife, Gloria, becomes a union organizer, but the older Henry warns against making trouble. “We have no papers," he reminds Lupe. Henry’s fears are multiple and layered, including not only the immediate threat of deportation, which would separate great grandparents from children and grandchildren, but also a justified fear of violence. Throughout the 1930s and ‘40s, union organizing frequently was violently suppressed by state and local law enforcement who carried out the bidding of agribusiness.[20] Soto, on the other hand, is both a US citizen and a decorated WWII veteran, and his legal status allows him to stand up and speak out in a way that Henry and Lupe cannot. As he puts on his WWII uniform to proudly participate in a UFW rally (United Farm Workers of America), we learn that he supports an extended family in Mexico. Through these family elders, Cuauhtemoc learns the complicated ways in which each generation carries Mexico within them; the way each lives in the borderlands, regardless of citizenship. The environmental justice movement of the 1990s fueled public outrage over farmworkers' exposure to pesticides. Companies like Monsanto sold miracle chemicals promising bigger crop yields, but the shadow of such harvests comes to rest in the bodies of farmworkers and their families. In a party scene (also set in the early 1960s), Soto arrives with tomatoes for Lupe. “Hijole, those tomates are huge,” Henry exclaims. The harvest was good, Soto tells her, but while the patrons are vacationing in Europe and buying new trucks. The workers have only “a few centavos in our pockets, some tomates the size of grapefruit” (21-22). Post WWII agro-chemicals that made California the “breadbasket of the world” (and the 5th largest economy in the world by century’s end) did not trickle down to farmworkers. Mariluz remembers that she and her brother Manuel worked alongside their parents and grandparent in the pesticide-laden fields. As the scene comes to life, Ruben shouts at the sun, exhausted from the heat. “This shit is robbing me!” Henry tells him to drink some water and get himself under control because the patron is watching. “I don’t need water! It’s dignity!” he shouts. “We live in an old bracero barrack. We bathe outside from a pipe. My children are always sick …” (31-32, my emphasis). Ruben’s rage at dehumanizing conditions is redoubled as the sound of an approaching crop dusting plane overtakes the scene. “Where are the children?” Gloria runs at the airplane, shouting the name of the grower, pleading for the safety of her children. “Don’t spray Mr. Matterson!” and then “It’s too late.” Exposures to pesticides and herbicides have been at the center of the UFW's concerns since the beginning of La Causa. In 1969, Chavez testified before the House of Representatives about the grave dangers of economic chemicals—part of the increased mechanization of food production. His testimony cites the regular practice of spaying workers, including children, in an unregulated industry, and the illness, injury and death that occurred with regularity in the fields.[21] We later learn that Mariluz’ father Ruben died of heart failure while working in the fields, a reminder that farmworkers suffered increased health risks and shorter life expectancy as a result of labor and living conditions. Mariluz, who comes of age during the movimiento, is part of a growing Mestiza consciousness that prized newly reclaimed heritage.[22] Even after her diagnosis, Mariluz spends what little time she has left painting the mural, making sure her own son has a record of his history. Some key agricultural pesticides were regulated in the 1970s and ‘80s, including DDT (banned in 1972 in the US). But the then new Republican governor of California, George Deukmejian, refused to enforce regulations and hold growers accountable to the law, prompting Chavez to organize a second grape boycott with its goal to ban the “economic poisons” suspected of causing higher incidences of cancer in farmworkers when compared to the general population. Mariluz’ premature death from pesticide-related cancer in the early 1980s indicts the government’s disregard for the health impacts of pesticides on families like Cuauhtemoc’s. In another scene set in the 1970s, Mariluz’ brother, Manuel, announces he has joined the Navy. Mariluz worries he will be sent to Vietnam, a war in which Mexican-American soldiers took risks and gave their lives in higher numbers than Anglo soldiers, in part to signal their “American-ness” in the face of racism at home. In Vietnam they were exposed (together with others who served in combat) to chemical herbicides and pesticides. Defoliant weapons like Agent Orange used in Vietnam were not so different from chemicals used regularly in the fields.[23] Throughout the play Cuauhtemoc is haunted by the Jaguar Warrior, who appears in the play at moments when courage and ferocious resistance are required. Played by the actor who plays Ruben, the Jaguar Warrior connects Ruben’s anger at systemic injustice with the mythic fierceness of Aztec warriors who fought the conquistadors, and for whom his grandson is named. The Jaguar Warrior binds human and animal together with the story of Aztlán, rooting the struggles of the twentieth century in an older, sovereign, connection to the land on both sides of the border. The Jaguar Warrior entreats Cuauhtemoc to recognize himself, yet Cuauhtemoc demands, “What do you want from me? [...] Who are you?” After his journey through his mother’s mural stories, Cuauhtemoc begins to understand the Jaguar’s answer: “In Lak’ ech.” “Tú eres mi otro yo,” Mariluz translates. “You are my other self” (73). Mariluz’ impulse to paint a mural of her family history comes when she is diagnosed with cancer. Like the trees her family the mural will live on in real time and space, nourishing a community‘s future long after her individual death. The mural is “alive before you, transcending time and space just like the ancients did long before Einstein!” she explains to Cuauhtemoc (13). At the end of the play, Cuauhtemoc returns to his seedling. “I am planting a fruit tree for you….I now know why I’m planting it.” Mural and tree give flesh to the past in a way that changes the future. The mural is a message of empowerment and pride, and a reminder of a lineage of belonging, and like the tree, requires cultivation: It is meant to call forth a consciousness in Cuauhtemoc that will empower him in the world, and that he must tend within himself. In this way, painting the mural, planting the trees, and the performance of the play itself are acts of habitation: life-giving, sustaining actions that contribute to the vitality and ecological health of the community. But as Cruz González’ memory of the mural that had fallen into disrepair on his school route suggests, both the mural (community history) and the trees (ecosystems of that same community) need to be tended. Anchored in the counter-narrative of a Chicano/a imaginary that provided a foundation to the movimiento, Harvest Moon connects myth and history to geography and personal lived experience: Tú eres mi otro yo. We are bound to one another and to the land in ways that transcend time and national borders. The land is our other self; what we do to the land we do to ourselves. “Can the dead forgive the living?” Cuauhtemoc asks. Can the dead forgive us for making the same mistakes they made? In Harvest Moon, human destinies are linked to one another and to the planet in ways that will require not only a recognition that “Tú eres mi otro yo,” but also a reckoning with the costs of having ignored for too long our human interdependence with one another and with the more-than-human world. Enter the Anthropocene The interdependency celebrated in Harvest Moon as a kind of generational continuity between past, present and future is increasingly under threat. Our shared vulnerability with the natural world has ruptured into an entirely contingent, and in many ways random, chance of survival. Where is theatre's efficacy in a world that has sown the seeds of its own destruction? In the section that follows I use Marie Clements’ Burning Vision, to illuminate an ecodramaturgy for the Anthropocene. In The Birth of the Anthropocene, Jeremy Davies follows argument and counter argument as stratigraphers struggle to agree on the epoch’s beginning. [24] Davies also weighs the “backlash” against the idea of the Anthropocene in light of its ethical, political and social implications. Cultural theorist Donna Haraway pushes back against dangerous cultural interpretations of the Anthropocene, arguing that naming this new epoch “Anthro” perpetuates a human exceptionalism that, ironically, may include our own extinction. Why quibble over a name? Once our collective bones and material remains of our varied dreams are laced into earth’s geologic tapestry of deep time as a thin strand of stone, what does it matter? Names matter because they privilege points of view and can accumulate imprecise meanings in the popular imagination, like debris settling into consciousness, and in this way, Haraway suggests, they may not only name but call forth a particular future. Naomi Klein, Jason W. Moore and others suggest that humans as a species are not the cause of climate change, certainly not all humans equally. It is not humans, but capitalism—that economic juggernaut that rides roughshod over the planet in ever increasing extractive speed and efficiency, gouging its “marks in earth’s rocks, waters, airs and critters” –that is the geologic force of epoch proportions. The Capitalocenes and the Anthropocenes are both counterfeit Haraway argues, because each tends to succumb “to abstract futurism and its affects of sublime despair and its politics of sublime indifference,” ignoring the grieving voices of mothers (human and non-human), and forgetting the work of spiders, microbes, rocks and moisture, for these too are working to “save” the planet.[25] Both terms, she argues, perpetuate and privilege those very aspects of collective human-ness that fueled the engines of climate change—technological supremacy, managerial science, western chauvinism and determinism, along with historicity that fails to account for, or even be concerned about, the lived experience of people, creatures, and places. [26] The annihilative forces of industrial capitalism, including fossil fuel use, nuclear testing and radiation, and consumption-based cultures, are products of colonization that has been (and still is) played out on and in human and other animal bodies, ecologies, and geographies. To be clear, Haraway does not take issue with the science (among scientists there is no debate that human-caused climate change will precipitate geologic shifts, marking the planet forever). Rather, she cautions against the Anthropocene’s seemingly implicit vision: scenarios of mass extinction, economic collapse, human death, and the end of so-called civilization as we know it. As these narratives layer into the popular imaginary, they naturalize catastrophe and invite an attitude of “game over,” which in turn nurtures dis-compassion, disconnection, and intellectual distance from lives and living that will be ongoing. It is precisely this aspect of her critique that has been useful in thinking through the potential contribution of theatre in the age of the Anthropocene, asking: what visions of our intermingled future will we call forth? Davies might dismiss Haraway’s quibbling as nonsense, and indeed such discussions may seem academic to those who attend community meetings to strategize in the face of rising seas. As Davies points out, the term has many uses and a wide girth of meanings that invite not only geoengineering trajectories, but philosophical and political ones. The term itself, he suggests, is a wake-up call that provides “an opportunity to comprehend the environmental calamity in its full dimensions.” [27] In the Anthropocene, he argues, “environmental movements will need to be concerned above all with environmental injustice and with fostering ecological pluralism and complexity in the face of the simplifying tendencies of the Holocene’s final phase.”[28] Urging a “living within the crisis” that parallels Haraway’s emphasis on earth systems kinship, Davies calls for “vigilant resistance against the searing away of multifaceted socioecological systems and their replacement by vulnerable, saturated monocultures” in order to insure that the “jerky crossing between epochs can be cushioned by upholding states of life—both ecosystems and human societies—that are variegated, intricate, and plural, one in such lively forces of all kinds contend with and interweave with one another.”[29] The Anthropocene also requires creative and critical methodologies for decolonizing (not just de-capitalizing); specifically for naming the ways in which climate change has been a product of historical patterns of white supremacy predicated on land taking, rapacious extractive practices, slavery, and rampant disregard for the rights of life and land. It will be some time before cultural theorists and scientists find cohesive ways of talking about the future of earthlings, and so this paper does not seek to reconcile the disparate and protesting voices that endeavor to chart a path of maximum compassion into the unknown. The tension between Haraway and Davies is useful, however, because it suggests an ecodramaturgy that not only foregrounds the disproportional effects of climate change, tracking the intersectional ways that gender, ethnicity, and economics inform the severity of impact, but also one that puts the shoulder of theatre to the wheel of envisioning a future, helping humans and non-humans inhabit the ambiguities and contingencies of relentless transition. While this direction is not terribly different from what I urged in 2006, when I wrote that ecodramaturgy must map “the connections between social injustice, human and other bodies, and environmental exploitation,” the urgency is greater in the face of recent political events.[30] Indeed, the usefulness of theatre has increased not only as a provocateur of activism, but as a means to engage in embodied and affective exploration of ways-of-connecting, coping and grieving. Stories that envision apocalypse, Haraway contends, are luxuries of the (yet) un-endangered. Her advice to dramatists is to heel close to the site of impact: the embodied experiences of creatures including humans living-with and dying-with one another. De-centering not only the human, but the primacy of biological notions of kindship, and taxonomies altogether, she urges envisioning kinship across all matter (“making oddkin”), and attending to our individual and collective response-ability in these times. In this way theatre can take a stance that Haraway calls “staying with the trouble”—neither driven by activist hope, nor elitist despair (despair is always a mark of elitism: elephants, refugees and coral reefs have no such luxuries), but “tuned to the senses” and mindful of “mortal earthlings thick copresence.”[31] Theatre can help us develop the kind of soulful muscle that staying with the trouble will require. Just such a poly-attentive a way-of-being-in-the-world is apparent in Marie Clements’ Burning Vision, as it illuminates a web of ecological, cultural and personal consequences of the atomic age. For some stratigraphers the birth of the Anthropocene, could be “set with unimprovable specificity on July 16, 1945, ‘at 05:29:21 Mountain War Time’…This is the moment of the Manhattan Project's first nuclear weapon test, Trinity: white light in the pre-dawn New Mexico desert.”[32] Whether this geologic moment will ultimately be the “golden spike” matters less than the specter of annihilation that both the bomb and the Anthropocene have unleashed in the collective imaginary. Burning Vision is a tentacular story of the making of the first atomic bomb that foregrounds multiple and multiplying relationships across time, space, culture and species (including species of mineral). The action begins on August 6, 1945, with a countdown followed by the “sound of a long, far-reaching explosion that explodes over a long, far-reaching time,” and then a cascading flash of detonation (20). The arc of the play transpires in the split second between that first flash of light and its reign/rain of sudden death, and the stories of the play’s 18 characters are told by the light of the earth-shattering, history-destroying, human-made culmination of what Ta-Nehisi Coates calls the plundering of the planet. Clements’ Burning Vision presences and makes visible the lived experiences of humans whose bodies were plundered in the service of the forces that precipitated climate change.[33] Written in four “movements” like an orchestral score, Burning Vision is meant to be embodied, not read. Dramatic structures of beginning/exposition, middle/action, end/resolution are non-existent. This is a play about being in the middle. Like an Escher painting, the middle moment is a site of intersection where form is undone in a process of becoming. Local places, individual people and creatures, diverse and specific cultures across the globe, and different historical moments across time collapse into one another in a kind of double and triple exposure. The play blurs the boundaries of space/place and ruptures any sense of geographic logic, as characters in Japan emerge from the bottom of a lake in Northern Canada, or a factory worker from Pittsburgh descends into the belly of the earth where he meets a woman who works as a radium dial painter from the 1920s. Unfathomable time is both expanded and compressed. Like the “deep time” geologists assign to the Anthropocene, the bomb turns our gaze back on this moment of now, asking how we will be-in-relation as the world changes utterly. The play also insists on another kind of time: an intersecting, simultaneous time that bends upon and within itself, defying rational chronology in favor of the embodied present of the theatre. The voices and images of each movement emerge, overlap, intersect and collide. Between each movement, the sound of caribou hooves on tundra give voice to a time immemorial when traditional Dene communities follow the migration of caribou around Great Bear Lake in the Northern Territories.[34] Through the sounds of hooves and the voice of the Dene elder and prophet, the action of the play proceeds and comes round to where it began: the moment of “now,” the middle moment. Burning Vision presences a time-space that Laguna Pueblo poet and theorist Paula Gunn Allen explains as an “achronology” particular to indigenous authors: a “tribal concept of time [that is] timelessness.” Similarly, a tribal concept of space is multidimensional. Gunn Allen’s time-space is similar to contemporary physics in that the self is conceived “as a moving event within a moving universe.”[35] The play’s achronological structure allows a searing vision to rupture the hegemonic assumption that humans are separate from one another, other critters, the planet, or our collective earth-history. But it does something more, something essential to the project of living in the Anthropocene—affirming survivance even as evidence accumulates to the contrary. In Decolonizing Methodologies, Linda Tuhiwai Smith recognizes that scholarly and creative deconstruction of hegemonic systems (like those that precipitated climate change) provides “insight that explains certain experiences,” but does not “prevent someone from dying.”[36] Decolonizing, Smith argues, consists of (re)claiming (stories, lives, land); celebrating (culture, women, survivance); indigenizing, or “centring of the landscapes, images, languages, themes, metaphors and stories in the indigenous world”; and from that vantage point envisioning a different future, a way forward. Burning Vision carries out what Smith calls “indigenizing projects,” not only by dissembling the ideologies and systems of plunder that make all humans “test dummies,” but asserting improbable intimacies and incongruous solidarities. Burning Vision grew out of Clements’ desire to trace her First Nations/Dene family history in the Northwest Territory, a history which in telling reclaims stolen lands. “I had taken a trip to the Great Bear Lake region with my mother. I wanted to tell this story of my family’s genetic connection to the history of the land up there, and to the running of uranium.”[37] The play follows the hand-to-hand route of the “black rock”—from which both radium and uranium are harvested and plutonium is made—from the theft that set claim to it and the miners that unearthed it, to the Dene ore carriers, boatmen, stevedores, and “sandwich girls,” that worked along its watery passage across Great Bear Lake and down the Mackenzie River to Fort McMurray, where it was loaded on trains bound for Ontario refineries and, ultimately, the labs and test sites of the Manhattan Project. Staying with the trouble—that is, insisting on the primacy of relatedness—Clements accounts for the disproportional impact that uranium mining had (and climate change is having) on Dene communities. Weaving together the stories of those who worked on and in the mine with the stories of Japanese characters in Hiroshima, where the material stolen from Dene land was ultimately ignited, Clements challenges how we remember and whom we remember, creating a transnational countergeography that makes previously invisible relationships explicit. “What was extraordinary to me,” Clements said, is that “one person’s decision not only impacts that person and their community, but has an effect beyond, in this case, an effect that encompasses the whole world.” In a similar way, theatre can ground the abstraction of the Anthropocene in human decision, desire, and agency. The “money rock,” as the Dene called it, was claimed by the Labine Brothers, white prospectors who laid claim to the ore and founded El Dorado Mine on Great Bear Lake. According to the oral account of Dene elders (which carry the same authority as written eye witness accounts under Canadian law), the whites traded sacks of flour for the ore: “They say it was…Beyonnie, who first found the money rock at Port Radium. Beyonnie gave it to the white man, for which he received a bag of flour, baking powder and lard about four times.”[38] Signaling the land theft operative in their extractive capitalist exploits, the brothers thrash about in the dark of the theatre, collide with walls and objects, and discuss what to trade for their claim. “What’s an Indian gonna do with money? We’ll give him some lard and baking powder and he can bake some bread. Sure! What the hell! What the hell is an Indian going to do with a rock anyways, at least he can eat the bread.”[39] Meanwhile, in the center of the stage, the rock itself waits, fearing discovery. In Dene worldview the ore is a living being, personified in the play as Little Boy, a “beautiful Native boy…the darkest uranium found at the center of the earth.” Little Boy is “discovered”, chased, captured; then escapes and runs away, desperate to “go home”, back to his place in the earth. But once loose upon the earth he cannot return. Discovered in the beam of a flashlight, the boy runs for his life; like the many children who ran away from Canadian Indian boarding schools, his place in the world has been destroyed. His new place is not one he chose, rather one precipitated by the commodification of his rock-flesh as part of the first atomic bomb. Throughout the play's tentacular weaving of a trans-national, trans-temporal, trans-species, inter-cultural community, Rose, a young Métis woman makes bread. A kind of payment for the ore from which the bomb was made, bread calls attention to the flesh of human bodies and that of the plants and animals we take for sustenance. She describes herself as a “perfect loaf of bread” that “is plump with a rounded body and straight sides. I have a tender, golden brown crust which can be crisp, or delicate. This grain is fine and even, with slightly elongated cells; the flesh of this bread is multi-grained” (58). Each of us is just such a grainy substance, and we make and unmake ourselves, Rose suggests, by the way we engage the elements of the earth. In the first Movement, Rose carries a sack of flour over her shoulder. As she walks, a thin stream of flour leaks out, inscribing a circle in the space of the stage—a circle in which the audience is implicitly included. She mixes the ingredients—a recipe learned from her mother. “Substances meeting like magic” she says (39). “Flour, yeast, salt, sugar, lard, liquid. Bread” (59). By the third Movement, the sacks of flour become indistinguishable from the sacks of uranium ore carried by Dene workers. The wind mixes the white flour leaking from Rose’s sack with the black dust that infects the environment. “The wind’s blowing it everywhere,” Rose observes, “The kids are playin’ in sandboxes of it, the caribou are eating it off the plants, and we’re drinkin’ the water where they bury it…I guess there’s no harm if a bit gets in my dough” (103). Both bread and ore are material aspects of the earth’s body-becoming-human-body, permeable, interwoven. Fat Man and Little Boy, non-human characters named after the actual bombs dropped by the US on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, become oddkin to humans. Fat Man is a “test dummy” living in an above-ground Nevada test site, where mock homes, complete with foodstuffs, canned goods, appliances, and manikins representing the stereotypical 1950s nuclear family, were constructed to test the deadly effectiveness of “the gadget.” Fat Man animates the mindset that made the bomb; ideology incarnate, he is an all-American male, a “living room soldier” (94). Both Little Boy and Fat Man demonstrate Jane Bennet’s notion of “vital matter,” in which the distinction between life and non-life is dubious at best.[40] All matter, she argues, has a kind of life that can come to life, with which humans and other critters interweave, and to which humans have obligations as oddkin. By the fourth Movement, Fat Man realizes that, he too is expendable, one whose body and labor have been commodified in the military-industrial project of nuclear arms superiority. Even Fat Man is radicalized when he discovers that, like the ore, the lake, and the air itself, his life force has been mined. Finally aware of his connection to the others, outraged and embattled, he screams at the Brothers Labine: “This is my neighborhood, you hear me … you…you…liar. […] you are all a pack of goddam liars!” (115) Great Bear Lake is one of the largest and deepest freshwater lakes in the world, and its presence percolates through the soundscape of Burning Vision. The lake is the center of life for traditional Dene who depend on it for sustenance. Dene villages fished for trout and followed the seasonal migration of caribou herds around the lake. Clements draws on and bends a Dene legend that tells of a medicine man who journeys to the heart of Great Bear Lake. As the story goes, after a “trout steals the medicine man’s hook…he dives deep into the lake’s abyss” to retrieve his hook. There he “takes on the spirit of the loche” and finds the “living, breathing heart, called the Tudzé” that gives life to the world of plants, animals and human beings. In Clements’ play, Eldorado’s wet-mine tunnels become liminal passageways that extend to the other side of the earth. At the moment of the atomic blast in Hiroshima, a Japanese fisherman named Koji, holding a trout he has just caught, looks up and cries out, “Pika!”—the Japanese word for the brilliant flash of atomic detonation and meaning “the light of two suns.” Koji falls into darkness, journeys through the heart of the earth, and surfaces (like a trout) in Great Bear Lake. Two Dene stevedores aboard the Radium Prince haul him out of the water; Rose gives him dry clothing, and the possibility of new life. Koji’s path mirrors a 1998 journey taken by six Deline residents from Port Radium, Canada, to Hiroshima, Japan, on the anniversary of the atomic bomb to convey the Dene people’s regrets and sorrow that ore from their land was used in this destructive way.[41] Meanwhile, a Dene Widow keeps a vigil fire for the ore-carrier husband she has lost to cancer caused by radiation exposure. Foregrounding the ways humans are commingled with the land, as well as asserting the longstanding kinship of Dene with their traditional lands, Clements' play suggests that ceremonial remembering and grieving in relation to loss of land and loved ones may be a right response to climate change.In “Climate Changes as the Work of Mourning,” Ashlee Cunsolo Willox argues that “grief and mourning have the unique potential to expand and transform the discursive spaces around climate change to include not only the lives of people who are grieving because of the changes, but also to value what is being altered, degraded, and harmed as something mournable.”[42] Traditional Dene practice is to burn the earthly possessions of those who die so that they may cross over, but the Widow cannot let go of her lover’s clothes, especially a jacket that she made and beaded. The Widow knows that the land resides in the fabric of our bodies: “I miss the smell of sweat on his clothes after a long day hunting. I miss how the land stayed in the fabric even when he got inside the cabin” (44-45). She pulls him to her in a dream, calling on their historic kinship with the earth, and resisting the doomsday change that her waking hours struggle to comprehend. “There are plenty of trout and caribou to last us till we die” (70). Yet, each day she wakes to his absence. Like the theory of the Anthropocene, Clements' characters are concerned with remains—those traces that contain stories. “It is always the little things of his that take my breath away. The real things like a strand of his hair lying on the collar of a caribou hide jacket he loved…the real things like the handle of his hunting knife worn down from his beautiful hands that loved me. The real things…” (87-88). Koji also sites/sights the real, the “little things,” as his spirit roams the post-blast “landscape of notes.” “There are notes left on anything that still exists. On pieces of houses, on stones shivering on the ground, on anything that did not perish…hope remains nailed to what has survived…a tin box of pictures, a rock wall, a rice bowl…a chair, a typewriter, a neighbor, a woman” (51-52). Remains point both toward past and future. Both nuclear holocaust and the cataclysm of climate change provoke questions of what remains, but also what carries on? For philosophers and cultural workers, the questions of the Anthropocene also include, what is called forth? For it is a vision, and as a collective imaginary has power to recast what it means to be a human. The danger, Haraway argues, in the apocalyptic vision of the Anthropocene (like the vision of nuclear annihilation) lies in forgetting that individuals, families, and communities of earthlings will live through the troubles ahead, even as many already have. After the bomb is dropped, Fat Man muses, “only Indians and cockroaches will survive”—a reminder to those who imagine the collapse of "civilization as we know it," that indigenous people of North America have already lived through that particular cataclysm once to survive and thrive (83). Burning Vision invites a radical shift in world views, staging an anthropoScene that lives through and loves into the future. Rose, we implicitly understand, dies of cancer from the radioactive dust in her bread; but the child she conceived with Koji, the Japanese fisherman who fell through the world, lives on with the Widow, who tells him: “You look like her. You look like him. You are my special grandson. My small man now. My small man that survived. Tough like hope” (121). In this way, Burning Vision resists narratives of annihilation, and instead demands survivance, participating in what Haraway calls “threads of reciprocating energies of biologies, arts, and activisms for multispecies resurgence.”[43] In recent years ecodramaturgy has emphasized theatre as a way of knowing at once imaginative, affective, immediate, embodied, and communal, suggesting both new methodologies and meanings as scholars and artists work together to exercise a vigorous engagement with ecological ideas, communities and geographies.[44] This proactive ecodramaturgy moves beyond the call for new works and sustainable production practice to envision, as Chaudhuri writes, “putting the vast resources of lived embodied performance at the service of the program of radical re-imagination called for by the perilous predicament we find our species—and others—in today.”[45] What that theatre looks like, how it feels, and how it interfaces with the community it serves is an anthropoScenic task: to bear witness to the unfolding present and presence, making visible and palpable the interwoven ways, as Harawy writes, “we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles. We become-with each other or not at all.”[46] Perhaps a significant aspect of theatre’s anthropoScenic leverage lies in the ways it can reimagine and revitalize the relationships between and among communities (human and otherwise) and places (material and imagined) even as they continue to be at risk. Going forward, anthropoScenic ecodramaturgy must not only foreground environmental justice, using theatre to illuminate the lived experience of people and non-human others feeling the disproportional impact of climate change, it must also forge theatre as a place of infinite enmeshment of us-ness, of unexpected intimacies across previously isolated differences with shared ecological vulnerabilities that enliven living through this epochal transition. Staying with the trouble includes understanding compassion as action, and offering a vision of how to inhabit a living-if-turbulent present. “[M]any different paths forward are possible,” Davies writes, reminding us that “the chaotic nature of the crisis means that the flap of any given butterfly’s wings might have disproportionate influence on the new world…”[47] This is time for butterfly wing theatre: conceived as a state of vigilance, a practice of humility, the work of mourning, the necessity of anger, a comic send up of the why-can’t-we-fix-this frustration of test dummies, and an invitation to honor our oddkin of radioactive rocks, caribou, sturgeon, and women pregnant with the future child of a future child who will see our marks and hear our voices across time, and like the Dene See-er, look back at a history that has not yet happened, saying in another tongue, “Tú eres mi otro yo.” Theresa J. May is Associate Professor at the University of Oregon. Her research explores intersections of ecology, cultural studies, and embodied performance. Previous publications include: Salmon is Everything: community-based theatre from the Klamath Watershed (OSU Press, 2014); Greening Up Our Houses (Drama Book 1994); co-editor of Readings in Performance and Ecology (Palgrave, 2011); articles in Theatre Topics, Canadian Theatre Review, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Journal of American Drama, Theatre Insight, American Theatre, and Howlround; chapters in Performing Nature (Peter Lang, 2005), Community Performance: A Reader (Routledge, 2007); Contemporary Women Playwrights (Palgrave, 2013). She is co-founder of Earth Matters on Stage (EMOS) ecodrama festival, and co-founder of ASTR’s Ecology & Performance working group. [1] Una Chaudhuri. “’There Must Be A Lot of Fish in that Lake’: Toward and Ecological Theater,” Theater 25.1 (Spring/Summer 1994): 24. [2] . Ecodramaturgy is concerned with three interwoven aspects of theatre: 1) the lived experience of those represented in and present on stage (human and more-than-human), 2) the mode, means and methodology of production, and 3) the larger cultural context or historical moment of production, including theatre’s relatedness to the community it serves, and the politics into which it speaks. The first use of “ecodramaturgy” appeared in my “Kneading Marie Clements’ Burning Vision,” Canadian Theatre Review, 144 (Fall 2010): 5-12. See also, "Beyond Bambi: Toward a Dangerous Ecocriticism," Theatre Topics 17.2 (September 2007): 95-110; Wendy Arons and Theresa May, Readings in Performance and Ecology, eds., New York: Palgrave, 2011; “Ecodramaturgy and/of Contemporary Women’s Playwriting.” Contemporary Women Playwrights, eds. Lesley Ferris and Penny Farfan (New York: Palgrave MacMillian, 2013: 181-196. [3] The ecodramaturgy of the 1990s stressed theatre’s potential power to serve as a provocateur of change and a harbinger of transformation, and includes theatre making grounded in an activist ecological sensibility, as well as historiographic and critical projects that work to sharpen our ecological imagination. See May, 2007, “Some Green Questions to Ask a Play,” 96. [4] Jeremy Davies, The Birth of the Anthropocene (Oakland: University California P, 2016), 2. [5] Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham and London: Duke University P, 2016), 33. [6] Giovanna Di Chiro, “Nature as Community: The Convergence of Environment and Social Justice,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 298-320; Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (San Francisco: Island Press, 2005), Chapter 7. [7] See, for example, Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein, eds. The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics and Pedagogy (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002); Ronald Sandler, and Phaedra C. Pessullo, Environmental Justice and Environmentalism: The Social Justice Challenge to the Environmental Movement (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). [8] With the exception of Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints, Latinx plays and productions receive scant ecocritical attention—a gap that runs the risk of reinscribing the persistent “whiteness” of both mainstream environmentalism and theatre. See, for example, Cless, Downing. “Ecotheatre USA: The Grassroots Are Greener,” TDR 8.2 1996: 41-5; Linda Margarita Greenberg, "Learning from the Dead: Wounds, Women, and Activism in Cherríe Moraga's Heroes and Saints," MELUS 34.1 (2009): 163-185W; and Arons and May, 2014. [9] Here, I follow environmental historian Devon G. Peña, using Mexican-origin Americans to register the intersection of culture and shifting boundaries of nation states. Peña deploys this term as inclusive of those who claim American citizenship, but also those without papers but with a long-standing claim to the land, as well as those economic migrants who have “returned” to live and work on land that prior to 1849 was part of Mexico. Devon G Peña, Mexican Americans and the Environment: Tierra y Vida (Tucson: U Arizona Press, 2005). [10] See Herbert Dittgen, “The American Debate about Immigration in the 1990s: A New Nationalism after the End of the Cold War?” Stanford Humanities Review, 5.2 (1997). https://web.standford.edu Accessed 4 April 2017. [11] Cuauhtemoc was the Aztec warrior who ruled Tenochtitlan at the time of Spanish invasion and ultimate conquest (1520-21). The character name is itself indicative of the reclaiming of indigenous heritage that was foundational to the movimiento. [12] José Cruz González, Harvest Moon (Woodstock IL: Dramatic Publishing, 2002). All subsequent quotations from the play will be indicated in paraenthesis. [13] The Great Wall of Los Angeles, designed by Judith Baca, reclaimed the Tujunga Wash of the Los Angeles River; the murals of San Francisco’s Mission District by Juana Alicia and other muralistas throughout the 1970s and ‘80s reclaimed and renewed neighborhoods and alleyways; and Chicano Park in San Diego arose out of direct action by a community whose home-places had been destroyed in the construction of the Interstate 5 freeway and the Coronado Bay Bridge. See Lucy R. Lippard, Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America (New York: New Press, 1990), 170-71. [14] Similar strategies are employed by playwrights addressing climate change and climate justice in their work. See, for example, the Howlround series on Theatre and Climate Change curated by playwright Chantal Bilodeau. www.howlround.com . [15] See Peña, Mexican American Environmental History; Laura Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest (Tucson: U Arizona Press, 1996, 1998). [16] See, for example: Don Mitchell, The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1996) [17] Ilan Stavans, ed. “Chronology,” in Cesár Chavez: An Organizer’s Tale: Speeches (New York: Penguin Group, Inc.), 2008: xxxvii. [18] Sarah Wald, The Nature of California: Race, Citizenship, and Framing since the Dust Bowl (Seattle: University of Washington Press), 2016. [19] Useful analysis of the H-2A program and its historical context can be found in “No Way to Treat a Guest: Why the H-2A Agricultural Visa Program Fails U.S. and Foreign Workers” compiled by Farmworker Justice. www.farmworkerjustice.org . [20] See Pulido, Chapter. 3. [21] Stavans, An Organizer’s Tale, “Before the House of Representatives,” 65-74. [22] See Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books (1987), 2007). [23] Agent Orange and other herbicides were used against Vietnamese farmworkers—irony across geographies, cultures and nation-states that Luis Valdez ironizes and indicts in his play, Vietnam Campesino. See Jorge Huerta, Chacano Theater: Themes and Forms (Tempe, AZL Bilingual Press, 1982), 86-91. [24] For slightly differing narratives of the first use of the term “Anthropocene,” see Davies, 42-45; Haraway, 44-47; and Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Un-natural History (New York: Pacador / Henry Hold and Co., 2014), 107-110. [25] Haraway, 4. [26] See Haraway Chapter 2. [27] Davies, 194, and generally,“Conclusion: Not Even Past,” 193-209. [28] Davies, 6. [29] Davies, 6, 194; Haraway, 34. [30] May, 2007, 101. [31] Haraway, 4. [32] Davies, 102-104. [33] Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Speigel and Grau, 2015), 149-152. [34] See Kerry Abel, Drum Songs: Glimpses of Dene History (Montreal: McGill Queen’s U Press, 2005). [35] Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 69-70. [36] Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (University of Otago Press, 1999), 3, and 142-162. [37] Personal interview. 12 Nov. 2009. [38] Cindy Kenny Gilday, “A Village of Widows,” in Peace, Justice and Freedom: Human Rights Challenges for the new Millennium, eds. (Gurcharan S. Bhatia, et al, Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 2000), 108. [39] Marie Clements, Burning Vision (Vancouver, BSL Talon Books, 2003), 37. All subsequent quotations from the play are from this edition and will be cited in parenthesis. [40] See Jane Bennett, Vital Matter: the Political Ecology of Things (Duke University Press, 2010), 1-19. [41] Clements, 17. [42] Ashlee Cunsolo Willox, “Climate Change as the Work of Mourning,” Ethics and Environment, 17:2 (Fall 2012): 141. [43] Haraway, 5. Thank you to my quick-witted colleague, Tricia Rodley, for her trope of “anthropoScenic,” during my process of revision. [44] See Una Chaudhuri and Shonni Enelow, Research, Theatre, Climate Change and the Ecocide Project (New York: Palgrave, 2014), 1-21. [45] Chaudhuri and Enelow, 2. [46] Haraway, 4, my emphasis. [47] Davies, 200. “Tú eres mi otro yo - Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy & the AnthropoScene" by Theresa J. May ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 29, Number 2 (Spring 2017) ©2017 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Curtis Russell Editorial Assistant: Christine Snyder Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: “Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy in the AnthropoScene” by Theresa J. May “Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene" by Shelby Brewster “Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine” by Lisa Jackson-Schebetta “The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti's Marrathon" by Milton Loayza “Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity" by Clara Jean Wilch www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director ©2017 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Acting in the Academy The Theatre of David Henry Hwang Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines Directing Shakespeare in America Writing, Acting, and Directing Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti's Marrathon Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene Tú eres mi otro yo - Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy & the AnthropoScene Introduction to American Theatre and Performance in the Anthropocene Epoch Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Leticia L. Ridley Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 1 Visit Journal Homepage “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells [Her] Story”: An Intersectional Analysis of the Women of Hamilton Leticia L. Ridley By Published on December 9, 2021 Download Article as PDF The availability of Lin Manuel-Miranda’s Hamilton (2015) on Disney+, the official streaming site of The Walt Disney Company, has offered musical theatre fans and other interested parties the ability to revisit the musical or experience it for the first time. Hamilton ’s rising popularity has influenced the increased concentration on the Black and Latino men at its center, and this is evident in mainstream publications such as Vox , The Undefeated , CNN , and The New York Times . [1] Even scholars’ and historians’ commentary on the musical, for the most part, has been solely focused on the men represented. [2] While these analyses create necessary discourse on the musical’s omission of slavery, erasure of Indigeneity, use of non-traditional casting, and impact in a post-Obama era, so much attention on Hamilton has been directed toward the men that it has eclipsed critical attention from the “werk” (to borrow a refrain from the show) that the women do within it. On the one hand, when the women performers of Hamilton have been examined in popular publications, they are celebrated because they acknowledge the presence of women in the historical record. [3] On the other hand, academic research has been much more critical of the musical’s inclusion of women, with many scholars interrogating what they see as its hollow feminist politics. [4] Both critics and scholars alike tend to overlook the way that race structures how these women’s bodies are read on stage and within the musical libretto, suggesting a universalization of gender that ignores the intersection of race . While I am encouraged by and appreciate the attention to the women of Hamilton , apparently the possibility that women of color spectators of the musical construct alternative meanings from the performances of Phillipa Soo, Renée Elise Goldsberry, and Jasmine Cephas-Jones is not considered viable. In this article I complicate previous studies of the musical’s treatment of race and gender, arguing that the actresses’ embodiment in Hamilton disrupts normative, white gender constructions while highlighting the labor of women of color in musical theatre. I contend that the intersections of race and gender are vital to reading and analyzing the women of color performers in the musical and that failing to account for this erases the interconnected, racialized, and gendered histories that the actresses’ bodies bear. Throughout the article, I read Hamilton ’s casting of these women of color by applying Brandi Wilkins Catanese’s theorization of “colorblind” theatre, and I adopt the concept of “transgression” to “expose the moral limitations of transcendence as a viable strategy for social change by acknowledging the histories of social location that people wear on their bodies and that inform all of our interpretive frameworks.” [5] I employ Catanese’s framework in this article as I refuse to read the women of color in the musical through a single-axis framework (i.e., race over gender and/or gender over race). I do so to avoid foreclosing the nuances of women of color’s embodiment in Hamilton as demonstrated in its original Broadway cast and production. [6] The various restagings of productions in Chicago, London, New York, Puerto Rico, and the multiple tours running concurrently in the United States illustrate that Hamilton ’s creative team is committed to continuously casting the show with non-white actresses. For example, I attended a production of the musical at Washington D.C.’s John F. Kennedy Center in which Asian American women portrayed all the principal roles, which facilitated a range of readings of the women characters that might be different from the original Broadway production. Any given theatre piece can be (re)shaped by varied performances; thus, conversations on embodiment remain central in how audiences receive messages in theatre. Despite the proliferation of global productions of the show, the availability of Hamilton via Disney+ has canonized the original Broadway cast as the standard to which all other future productions will be compared. As performance scholar Brian Herrera notes, casting is a term that “describes not only the process through which performers are assessed for and assigned to roles, but also the meanings, effects, and implications that are activated when the selected performers enact those roles.” [7] Keeping this in mind, one cannot and should not separate these women (and their racialized, gendered bodies) from their roles; to do so maintains a white supremacist paradigm that problematically centers white womanhood as a marker for women of color, thereby erasing the embodied realities produced by the actresses. I find it more pressing and productive to consider how the bodies on stage affect the musical’s ability to engage in feminist work; in the spirit of performance studies scholar Robin Bernstein, I am interested in the musical’s how , rather than its what . [8] By leaning into the nuances that the musical offers and recognizing how it actively engages with feminist principles (particularly from women of color feminisms), this article creates space for the existence and exploration for subtleties and contradictions of people of color. I do so, not to propose that Hamilton should not be critiqued, but rather to assert that analysis with women of color feminisms allows for new interpretations of the characters which contest the overwhelming whiteness in musical theatre scholarship. I use a Black feminist dramaturgical lens to search the gaps and margins of Lin Manuel Miranda’s award-winning Broadway musical Hamilton to locate the dormant meaning that is activated through the embodiment of the actresses of color. Black Feminist Dramaturgy Black theatre scholar and practitioner Michelle Cowin Gibbs argues that Black feminist dramaturgy “demands an audience to witness and affirm” the various modes of seeing that happen on stage. [9] In particular, Black feminist dramaturgy magnifies theatre’s interpretive possibilities which disclose the multiple layers of meaning that are activated not only by the bodies on stage, but also by the audience members who watch them. Crucial to Black feminist dramaturgy is the ability to offer analyses of theatre and performance that privilege the “outsider-within” position that Black women often occupy due to a prevalent focus on whiteness and/or maleness. [10] Black feminist dramaturgies invite us to search on and through the body of the actresses of color in Hamilton for the gap, the break, or the sites where other formations of knowing and being are happening. As many theatre scholars and practitioners are aware, dramaturgy encompasses many elements; however, it typically refers to the comprehensive study and understanding of a play’s historical, theatrical, and intellectual contexts. [11] My theorization of Black feminist dramaturgy is also significantly influenced by Black dramaturg and theatre scholar Faedra Chatard Carpenter’s dramaturgical orientation and practice. While “dramaturgical concerns” cover a range of different aims and interests when applied to the inner workings of a performance piece, among these concerns is the need and desire to design and guide the interpretative possibilities associated with a particular production. Accordingly, these considerations are also inclusive of the rationale behind specific casting choices. Carpenter proposes that one must acknowledge a play’s “time and context” and the site of production which informs how the play will be received by audiences. In addition, Carpenter notes that the awareness of “the embodied and enacted text, beyond its literary form” is vital to the dramaturgical process. In other words, the interpretative possibilities increase dramatically when performance is activated by bodies rather than remaining stagnant on the page. Further, Carpenter pays close attention to the audience, suggesting that the “consideration of audience reception and impact of artistic framing” is an important dramaturgical task; a dramaturg must predict how the audience will understand and read the bodies of the women on stage in tandem with the artistic elements, or else the framing could distract or create unintended interpretive themes. [12] To this point, Black feminist dramaturgy traces how the presence of racialized and gendered bodies on stage may reverberate beyond it. Furthermore, José Muñoz’s theory of disidentification expands the theoretical consideration of Black feminist dramaturgy. Muñoz’s theory of disidentification (a survival strategy he traces through the art, activism, and lives of queers of color) monitors “the ways in which identity is enacted by minority subjects who must work with/resist the conditions of (im)possibility that dominant culture generates.” [13] Disidentification attempts to rewrite the dominant script by maneuvering within dominant ideology and spaces in an effort to subvert it from the inside. [14] Muñoz’s insightful theorization also identifies a core component of how I situate Black feminist dramaturgy and how it challenges dominant ideological underpinnings. In the case of Hamilton , this means considering how the performances by women of color in the musical can (to a certain extent) disrupt racialized and gendered expectations. Therefore, Black feminist dramaturgy illuminates the way in which an actor’s embodied experience serves as a critical source of study, aids in disrupting historically stereotypical iconography, and promotes intersectionality as a concept that is vital to the entanglement of gender with whiteness and Americanness. Put another way, to apply a Black feminist dramaturgical lens to Lin Manuel-Miranda’s Hamilton is to magnify and complicate the analysis of the women of color in the musical. [15] Act One: Angelica Schuyler and Black Feminist Potential Angelica Schuyler, portrayed by Renée Elise Goldsberry in the original Broadway production of Hamilton , was the oldest child of Phillip Schuyler, a wealthy general in the Continental Army. [16] In Miranda’s musical, Angelica is depicted as a woman who is intellectually on par with (and even beyond) her male counterparts. Miranda describes her as the smartest character in the show, who demonstrates her intellectual prowess by reciting the most intricate raps. [17] In the musical, we first meet Angelica alongside her two sisters in the song “The Schuyler Sisters.” While it may be easy to classify Angelica as merely a source of inspiration for the men who actually do things in history, her character takes on additional significance when played by a Black woman. As a result, she is a character who is deemed equal in intelligence to men while overturning representations of Black women as innately promiscuous. In examining Goldsberry’s physical body within live theatre, it is important to also consider “flesh,” which Hortense Spillers, Black feminist scholar and cultural critic, differentiates from the body. Spillers asserts, “Before the ‘body’ there is the ‘flesh,’ that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography. . . . If we think of the ‘flesh’ as a primary narrative, then we mean its seared, divided, ripped-apartness, riveted to the ship’s hole, fallen, or ‘escaped overboard.’” [18] To this point, Goldsberry’s flesh serves as a witness to the wounds and scars experienced by Black people in American history. As she performs a show about the birth of America, her flesh carries the trauma of slavery that for hundreds of years this country maintained and from which it profited and built its economic foundation. Miranda makes visible her “flesh” within this story and in doing so, he signals the subversive potential that challenges spectators to consider how power and meaning function in the creation of gender for the Black body. This interpretation runs counter to scholars’ essays which have critiqued Hamilton for “whitewashing” the travails of Black Americans by failing to directly address the issue of American slavery in the show. While these critiques are necessary and should be addressed, I contend that the outright dismissal of Hamilton’s effort to disrupt and destabilize whiteness is overlooked. [19] The musical’s casting choice disrupts the notion of white normative gender constructions as the primary way to understand Goldsberry’s embodiment of this white historical figure. Theorizing the flesh (à la Spillers) in theatre and performance leads to conceptualizing Goldberry’s racial and gendered embodiment serves as an entryway to further engage with her actions in the musical that supersedes a white female subject position and/or gaze. The very first moment the audience encounters Angelica in the musical, she is standing by her sisters—not by a man. The character demonstrates her intellectual prowess in the song “The Schuyler Sisters.” She raps: I’ve been reading Common Sense by Thomas / Paine. / Some men say that I’m intense or I’m insane. / You want a revolution? I want a revelation / So listen to my declaration. / We hold these truths to be self-evident / That all men are created equal.’ / And when I meet Thomas Jefferson, / I’m ‘a compel him to include women in the / sequel! [20] As the only woman who raps in the musical, Angelica demonstrates and asserts a (Black) feminist position and shows she is intelligent and just as politically savvy as the men. In addition, she goes further to explain that she influences policy by manipulating men. Though this could be read as a promise of Angelica’s intellectual prowess—one that is never fulfilled—the use of hip hop provides a subversive inscription of the representation of Black women. As hip-hop feminists have argued, “Hip hop culture and rap music hold radical and liberating potential. . . hip hop provides a space for young black women to express their race and ethnic identities and to critique racism. Moreover, hip hop feminists contend that hip hop is a site where young Black women begin to build or further develop their own gender criticism and feminist identity.” [21] Therefore, hip hop serves as a practice of taking ownership of one’s underprivileged position. Furthermore, hip hop is a way Black women can own their stories and retell histories that have historically erased them. Angelica navigates her position, which she doesn’t let limit her ability to improve her status. Indeed, she disidentifies by “working on and against” her subservient role, to which she sometimes conforms, but also subverts by manipulating men into serving her own agenda. [22] Angelica’s relationship with Hamilton is influenced profoundly by that of circumstances, even as they both share equal affection for one another. As performed by Goldsberry, Angelica is “a headstrong society woman who loves Hamilton, but loves her sisters even more.” [23] In a similar vein, Angelica understands that she is limited by the demands placed on her as the eldest daughter, singing in “Satisfied,” “I’m a girl in a world in which / My only job is to marry rich. / My father has no sons so I’m the one / Who has to social-climb for one.” [24] Angelica is aware that if she wanted Hamilton, she could have him. However, her status in society requires her to “marry rich.” At the end of “Satisfied,” Angelica does not choose a sexual relationship with Hamilton, even though she desires him. Angelica explicitly performs and expresses sexual desire for Hamilton, but she does not pursue a physical relationship with him out of commitment to her sister Eliza. Angelica’s denial of her feelings for Hamilton takes on a new meaning in Goldsberry’s Black female body. This denial of romantic longing provides a counternarrative to the stereotype that Black women are overcome by their insatiable desire of sex. The expression of Angelica’s sexuality, embodied by Goldsberry, gestures towards historical embodiment of the Black female body, which Miranda subverts by reframing Angelica as simultaneously intelligent and sexually desirous. Notably, Miranda manages this subversive representation while avoiding oversexualizing or desexualizing Angelica, releasing the Black female body from “controlling images.” Thus, Goldsberry’s body serves as a host and traitor to American history and stage representations of Black femininity. Her character does not indulge in her desire for Hamilton nor is she relegated to the domestic sphere. Rather, Goldsberry embodies a character who is able to influence politics from her position yet is still seen as a woman who is sexually desirable. Notably, most critics have not weighed in on the alternative modes of labor inscribed by Angelica in the musical, the refusal of ontological categorization of Black women as asexual or hypersexual, and the recalibration of the Black woman as intelligent and desirable within a model of marriage. Additionally, Hamilton’s casting of Goldsberry and other women of color continues to challenge spectators of Hamilton to reconsider who can be a part of American history and what role they may play in it. [25] That the casting notice for Angelica Schuyler does not specify that the role be played specifically by a Black woman, but generally by a non-white actress, highlights the commitment of the Hamilton creative team to place dynamic and complex depictions of women of color on stage. Act Two: Maria Reynolds’s Deviant Possibility In “Say No to This,” Hamilton raps about his affair with Maria Reynolds, and the song is juxtaposed with Maria’s R&B influenced vocality as she provides her perspective of the events. As the affair progresses, her husband James extorts money from Hamilton; the men make a deal, ensuring that the affair is kept secret. Jasmine Cephas Jones, the mixed-race (Black and white) actress who originated the role of Maria, says, “On the page, her affair with Hamilton could be a mere scheme of extortion, a trap she sets because it’ll help her survive in her marriage. What makes ‘Say No to This’ interesting is the possibility that she’s also falling in love with him.” [26] Even though Jones’s claim that Maria is also falling in love is possible, Stacy Wolf observes that this position is not actually supported by the lyrics of the song. [27] Even though Jones’s interpretation of Maria’s feelings for Hamilton are not supported by the lyrics, Maria’s character is still more complex than she seems. Scholars such as Wolf may read Maria as falling into the jezebel trope (a controlling image derived from slavery that portrays African American women as having excessive sexual appetites), but this argument overlooks the ways that Jones’s embodiment of Maria subverts the trope. Put another way, categorizing Maria in this way obscures the power of Jones’s performance to upend audience assumptions about the sexuality of Black women as always already deviant. Maria, in Jones’s racialized body, utilizes the only capital she has—her body—to navigate her troubled life. Jones’s embodiment of Maria allows her to recalibrate and challenge the simplistic characterization of Maria, and Black women in general, as sexually deviant. Borrowing from Uri McMillian, the role of Maria reveals how performance allows “black women performers [to make] meaning within problematic representation structures.” [28] Performance, therefore, aids in addressing the construction and malleability of categories structured by race and gender. Rather than figuring Maria as depraved or framing her as simply a “whore,” Jones’s embodiment of Maria subverts expectations by illustrating how deviance can be a liberatory site, one where Maria harnesses a survival strategy, financial viability, and love. To gain insight into Maria Reynolds, I employ Black queer studies scholar Cathy Cohen’s politics of deviance as a means to examine “deviant practices and behaviors as productive…potential for resistance” for those who fall outside of the white heterosexual male, upper class position, particularly poor Black women. [29] Politics of deviance locates the agency of Black women who are deemed outside of normative sexual politics. Cohen proposes that poor Black women neither conform fully, nor wholly reject, the possibility of deviance as a strategy to improve their material conditions. Similarly, Maria may be seen as a “whore” and more complexly interpreted. Cohen’s politics of deviance is useful as it offers a theoretical lens to locate “the limited agency available” that Maria uses to “secure small levels of autonomy in [her] life.” [30] This is demonstrated in “Say No to This” when Maria, from the outset, informs the audience of her life, singing, “My husband’s doin me wrong / Beatin’ me, cheatin’ me, mistreatin’ me. / Suddenly he’s up and gone / I don’t have the means to go on.” [31] As the lyrics demonstrate, Maria is unfulfilled by her marriage and, as a married woman, she is unable to work to provide for herself; therefore, she must create an alternative way to survive. Maria reconfigures herself within her marriage, superseding the sexuality prescribed to white women of a certain class and position. Maria approaches Hamilton for her own financial and emotional needs with the means available to her as a woman in the eighteenth century. Classifying Maria as a sexual object, a body that is a tool used for sexual pleasure, inscribes the racialized female body as available solely for male consumption. However, Jones’s embodiment of Maria can be understood as a performance of disidentification, in which sexuality and desire are used as viable methods to shift power. Maria’s agency provides an alternative prescription for how Black women’s bodies can be read, especially in matters of sexuality. Racialization influences how sexuality is circulated and performed in Hamilton ; the musical counters this reading by positioning Maria as a figure in the historical record without faulting her for Hamilton’s downfall, and instead places the onus on Hamilton and her husband. Ultimately, Maria is not the reason for Hamilton’s eventual political downfall. Rather, Aaron Burr, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison use Hamilton’s affair to undermine him. This begins when Burr, Jefferson, and Madison accuse Hamilton of committing treason, and in an effort to clear his name, Hamilton informs them of the affair and his extortion by James Reynolds. Hamilton’s downfall is not due to Maria and her seductive prowess; instead, Burr, Jefferson, and Madison’s goal to prevent Hamilton from becoming president leads Hamilton to implicate himself by revealing his affair. Maria, as a minor character, is merely a pawn used in the political machinations to facilitate Jefferson and Madison’s overthrowing of Hamilton. It is important to note that none of the characters in the musical blame Maria for the affair: Hamilton never places the blame on her; Angelica Schuyler, once she learns of the affair, blames Hamilton not Maria; and even Eliza Hamilton, when she sings of the affair in her ballad “Burn,” does not blame her for what happened, but, rather, focuses on Hamilton’s domestic betrayal and failure. Reading Maria as the culprit of Hamilton’s political misfortune overlooks the musical’s narrative as a reputable source that informs the spectator, and instead, chooses to lean on Reynolds’s categorization of his wife as a whore. Accepting Reynold’s words—“You can keep seeing my whore wife/ If the price is right”—is siding with her abuser and discrediting her in the process. [32] Adopting this categorization offered by Reynolds, a figure that the musical establishes as a disreputable character, in effect, prioritizes the sentiments and worldview of Reynolds over Maria’s own account which troubles easy and judgmental assumptions about her sexuality and choices. Act Three: Eliza Schuyler’s Re-telling Phillipa Soo, a Chinese American woman, originated the role of Eliza Schuyler, the second oldest of the Schuyler sisters. [33] As Eliza spends the majority of the play in a marriage with Hamilton, Stacy Wolf has criticized the musical for Eliza’s lack of agency in the show, describing her as “more passive than active at every turn,” rendering her only as a romantic and domestic partner of Hamilton. [34] Eliza may seem to be the most submissive character in the musical due to her confinement in the domestic sphere after her marriage to Hamilton. Some could read this confinement of Eliza as reflecting a lack of desire to move beyond the expectations of women during the eighteenth century. It is important to note that reading Eliza in this way makes an assumption that mothers and wives cannot engage in feminist praxis. By doing so, this overlooks the socio-political work and labor that is done in the domestic sphere. Instead, I propose that Eliza embraces her role as a mother and wife while simultaneously subverting her position within the home to negotiate, as Muñoz proposes in Disidentifications , a “phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform.” [35] Eliza must navigate her position and status as a woman to elude consequences for more outward displays of non-conformity. For instance, when Eliza writes to George Washington that she is pregnant in order to prevent him from sending Hamilton into battle, she writes the narrative that then affects the rest of Hamilton’s political career. This moment is illustrative of how Eliza maneuvers the space given to her; rather than writing a letter to Hamilton, she writes to George Washington, the General of the Army. In doing so, Eliza sidesteps the patriarch of the family to achieve her own desires and needs. Including race in an analysis of Eliza’s agency shows how women of color feminisms, and specifically Asian American feminism, are uniquely different than those of white women and Black women. Soo’s race in the original Broadway cast serves as a means to grapple with Asian American women’s relationship to American citizenship and subvert stereotypical tropes of Asian American womanhood. [36] As literary scholar Traise Yamamoto explains, “The experiences of Asian American women have either been defined as identical to that of Asian American men or subsumed within the experiences of white women; both moves attest to the failure of representing Asian American women as sites of the complex intersections of race, gender, and national identity.” [37] Historically, Asian femininity has been portrayed as an idealized femininity. Since the politically insurgent feminist movement in the 1960s, images of Asian women circulated depicting them as hypersexual, de-vocalized, and subservient to white men. [38] At first glance, one might believe that the musical capitalizes on the stereotypical imagery of an Asian woman by pushing Soo’s character to the home and because of her performance of docility for Hamilton. [39] However, the musical counters potential readings of her body as hypersexual and submissive. When Eliza tells Hamilton that she wrote a letter to George Washington in the song “That Would Be Enough,” Hamilton immediately replies “No,” marking his disapproval with her action. [40] Nonetheless, Eliza is steadfast in her choice; in singing to Hamilton, “I’m not sorry,” she declares her own active participation in their life, even if she must go against societal norms. When Miranda speaks about this song, he gestures to a conversation with Hamilton director Tommy Kail during the workshop of Hamilton , where Kail challenged him to make “Eliza more active” in this moment instead of just having her express the sentiment to Hamilton. [41] Eliza literally and figuratively writes herself into history, not in an effort to resist her husband, but as a means to construct a narrative of legacy in which she is simultaneously an active participant and author. The recurring narrative-inscription motif woven throughout the musical further illustrates Eliza’s agency: she asks to be included in, removes herself from, and places herself in the narrative of Hamilton’s life. This motif is first represented in the song “That Would Be Enough,” in which Eliza announces to Hamilton that she is pregnant, singing, “Let me be a part of the narrative / In the story they will write someday.” [42] In Eliza’s second-act solo song “Burn,” [43] she learns of Hamilton’s affair with Maria Reyonlds and sings, “I’m erasing myself from the narrative / let future historians wonder how Eliza reacted.” [44] This moment in the musical, described by Stacy Wolf as the moment of agency for Eliza, is when she decides to leave Hamilton and obscure her own thoughts about the affair. [45] This moment signifies a rejection of the stereotype that Asian women are submissive. The musical motif comes full circle in the final song, “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tell Your Story,” in which Eliza sings, “I put myself back in the narrative.” [46] In arguably the most powerful agentive moment in the entire show, Eliza reinserts herself back into the story, becoming an activist speaking against slavery, founding New York City’s first private orphanage, and raising funds to memorialize the men Hamilton fought beside. Alexander Hamilton may be the subject of Hamilton , but Eliza is the author. Eliza plays an active role in the construction of this narrative, a narrative that is as much hers as it is his. As the author, Eliza uses Hamilton’s legacy for her own political purpose; she makes the choices of what is deemed important or not. In the closing musical number, the lyric states that Eliza devotes the next fifty years of her life to sharing Hamilton’s legacy, but also to claiming her own place in it. Eliza, in tandem with Angelica, sings, “We tell your story,” referring to Hamilton’s history. [47] A few moments later, Eliza questions, “Will they tell our story?” [48] and the company queries, “Will they tell your story?” (emphasis mine). [49] In this moment, Eliza actively places herself in the narrative by making her retelling of this history a telling of her history, too. The ambiguity of the “your” sung by the company can be interpreted either as contemplating whether the world will tell Eliza’s story, or as a gesture toward a collective story that still needs to be told. Regardless of how one reads these lyrics, the ambiguity of who the company is singing about suggests that the individual story is indistinguishable or inseparable from the collective story. At the end of the musical, Hamilton and Eliza, along with the company, emphasize that Eliza’s story is just as important as Hamilton’s story. Eliza is not merely a teller of history, but a maker of history who was pushed to the margins because of her gender and race. As the musical questions if the audience will remember Eliza, Hamilton engages in a feminist mode of history writing and meaning making. This begs the bigger question of Hamilton : are the bodies that tell history just as important as what happens in history? Eliza’s story provides a resounding “yes.” The character of Eliza, who many claim has the least amount of agency, is the character who documents not only her husband’s story, but her own. This is particularly resonant because Soo’s Asian American body, as Karen Shimakawa theorizes, is marked by its constant oscillating relationship to American citizenship. [50] Placing Soo literally and figuratively within the nation-state, a site of tension for Asian American people, the musical encourages us to think about the limits of American citizenship. As Shimakawa reminds us, Americanness itself is defined by the “positioning of Asian Americans, as foreigners/outsiders/deviants/criminals or as domesticated/invisible/exemplary/honorary whites.” [51] Miranda recognizes the importance of Asian American women as central to America by positioning Eliza, embodied by Soo, a Chinese American actress, center stage to tell history from her perspective. Hamilton also challenges popular depictions of Asian American women on stage that only exist to serve the needs, desires, and journey of a white male character. Soo’s embodiment of Eliza is not merely an imitation of past stereotypical representations of Asian American women in theatre, such as in the musicals of Miss Saigon and The King and I. Instead, she is in control, wielding her own pen in her theatrical presentation, moving away from how musical theatre has scripted Asian American womanhood. Categorizing Eliza as merely a wife is limiting as it does not consider how the musical subverts and recalibrates Eliza’s role to incorporate the actress’s own embodiment. It also overlooks the importance of the wife’s role in male political figures’ lives and in politics in general. If one measures women of color to this standard of white womanhood, they will fall short every time. While women of color and white women may have some shared experiences of oppression, one must avoid generalizing in scholarly analysis to signal solidarity. Doing so erases the specific voices, experiences, and trauma of women of color. Hamilton combats this not only by positioning a woman as the final voice at the end of the musical, but a woman of color. Eliza’s act of writing history and telling Hamilton’s story—Hamilton and Eliza’s story—appeals to a feminist telling of history; as she tells her own story, she is simultaneously telling the story of the family, the nation, and, most importantly, of women of color. Even when Soo stands in the spotlight at the conclusion of Hamilton , she is not alone, nor is her presence divorced from the women who have shared the musical with her. It is noteworthy that in “The Schuyler Sisters,” when the three women are first introduced, they are identified as a collective. Also, of note: the actual song “The Schuyler Sisters” (which Miranda described as a “Destiny’s Child-esque” song) builds upon familiar “girl group” images, such as coordinated outfits and harmonies signaling a communal goal. Alongside the content of the song, “The Schuyler Sisters” illustrates how these three women, who bring different but equally important vocal styles, skills, and prowess to the musical number, are working together for the collective good. Our introduction to these women creates a purposeful contradistinction to the introduction of John Laurens, Marquis de Lafayette, and Hercules Mulligan. In “Aaron Burr, Sir,” the men are also introduced as a trio. But unlike the women, they all try to “one-up” each other during the hip-hop cypher. The hip-hop cypher, by definition, is simultaneously communal and competitive as rappers enter the space to illustrate their linguistic and performative prowess over one another, while also working to outlast the rest of the rappers in the circle. [52] In the musical, Hamilton is the one who is victorious in the cypher, which ultimately crowns him as the group’s leader. The format of the song, the staging of “Aaron Burr, Sir,” and the transition to “My Shot” demonstrate the deeply competitive nature of the men, who are overly concerned with individual legacy, and who almost exclusively work together to achieve their own personal goals. By contrast, the women ask us to consider the importance of sisterhood and investing in collective consciousness. Hamilton’ s grouping of the three principal actresses and their characters demonstrates a revolutionary call for women of color feminist collaboration. It asks that audiences consider how these women invest in modes of care for one another and challenges the role that patriarchy has in determining how they see each other. This is the major feminist work that the musical does. The collective investment in women of color’s coalition that the musical models, reiterates Chicana feminist Cherríe Moraga’s call for women of color to “create bridges of consciousness” by imagining women of color working together among, across, and in spite of difference. [53] It is these women of color’s embodiment on stage that signals women of color’s coalition building. Even if the musical does not always abide by this principle, the unified presence of Goldsberry, Soo, and Cephas-Jones and their laboring bodies on stage (as characters and as actors) urge us to consider the “work,” or “werk,” that women of color have done in the face of violence and erasure. Hamilton imagines and conceives white female historical figures as women of color, and while I have argued that Miranda’s casting subverts dominant racial and gendered expectations, I also recognize the limits of casting as a strategy in addressing the calls of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) in theatre. While Hamilton is not the first show to use casting to address dominant societal and cultural values, it arguably sparked a resurgence of Broadway producers and fans celebrating Broadway revivals that adopt non-traditional casting methods to signal a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. [54] This trend relies on casting to fix the systemic issues that displace marginalized theatre artists from the Broadway stage. Miranda’s (and his creative team’s) casting choices differ in critical ways; the musical from its inception intentionally cast non-white performers in the roles of white historical figures. [55] The meanings from these choices may be read differently, but the casting choices are anything but circumstantial. In fact, the identities and bodies of the actors are central to performance meanings. Beyond Hamilton, casting choices made in theatre should not simply function as ornamentation to obscure the racist and sexist meanings of a show. Instead, dramaturgs must explore how the corporeality of performers change characters and stories. When theatrical production and, arguably, theatre criticism, critically examine the corporeality of actors as a meaning-making practice, we can destabilize whiteness in our theatrical imagination. In the case of Hamilton , audiences may be better off noticing the impact of raced and gendered bodies in their perceptions of shows, instead of maintaining that race and gender is irrelevant to their experience of the musical. Hamilton’s representation of women of color attempts to embrace the complexity and the contradictions that cause the audience to repeatedly interrogate themselves, as well as the history of racial and gender oppression in the United States. References [1] See Aja Romano, “ Hamilton is Fanfic and, Its Historical Critics Are Totally Missing the Point,” Vox Media, https://www.vox.com/2016/4/14/11418672/hamilton-is-fanfic-not-historically-inaccurate; Ed Morales, “The Problem with the Hamilton Movie,” CNN Worldwide, https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/05/opinions/hamilton-movie-mixed-messages-black-lives-matter-morales/index.html; Stephanie Goodman, “Debating Hamilton as it Shifts From Stage to Screen,” The New York Times , 10 July 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/movies/hamilton-critics-lin-manuel-miranda.html; and Soroya Nadia McDonald, “Five Years Ago, Hamilton Turned a Revolution into a Revelation – what now?” ESPN Enterprises, https://theundefeated.com/features/five-years-ago-hamilton-turned-a-revolution-into-a-revelation-what-now. [2] See Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter, eds., Historians on Hamilton : How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018). This anthology weighs the pros and cons of the Hamilton ’s representation of history. Notably, out of the fifteen essays included in the anthology, only two give critical attention to the women of Hamilton : Allgor’s “‘Remember…I’m Your Man’: Masculinity, Marriage and Gender in Hamilton ” and Patricia Herrera’s “Reckoning with America’s Racial Past, Present, and Future in Hamilton .” [3] See Aly Semigran, “The Women of Hamilton , Making Herstory on Broadway,” Legendary Entertainment, 1 September 2016, https://amysmartgirls.com/the-women-of-hamilton-making-herstory-on-broadway-e507820a319. Semigran’s review provides a short exposé on the actresses in Hamilton and praises the musical. Semigran exclaims, “They aren’t the women behind the Founding Fathers in this critical chapter in American history, they are the ones standing at their side, all the while standing up for themselves and making history all their own.” See also Michael Schuman, “The Women of Hamilton ,” The New Yorker , 6 August 2015, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-women-of-hamilton. Schulman also praises the show, stating: “Miranda has placed a pair of vividly imagined female characters” in the musical. However, Schulman, then questions if Hamilton is feminist, and ultimately answers himself: “Almost.” He contends that Hamilton reiterates “that men do history, and women just tell it.” However, Schulman later retreats somewhat, giving Miranda recognition for positioning women in the musical alongside the men and not behind them. [4] See James McMaster, “Why Hamilton Is Not the Revolution You Think It Is,” Emerson College, 23 February 2016, https://howlround.com/why-hamilton-not-revolution-you-think-it. James McMaster interrogates the absent feminism in an essay for HowlRound. McMaster argues that the female characters’ desires, fears, hopes, and plans within Hamilton exist only in relation to Hamilton. See also Stacy Wolf, “ Hamilton ,” The Feminist Spectator (blog), 24 February 2016, https://feministspectator.princeton.edu/2016/02/24/hamilton. Shortly after the publication of McMaster’s essay, Wolf penned a guest blog on The Feminist Spectator in which she argues that each main woman in the musical is an archetype, categorizing Angelica Schuyler (sister-in-law of Hamilton) as a muse, Eliza Schuyler (Hamilton’s wife) as a wife, and Maria Reynolds (the woman with whom Hamilton has an affair) as a whore. For a more developed version of this argument, see Wolf, “ Hamilton ’s Women,” Studies in Musical Theatre 12, no. 2 (June 2018). Here, Wolf contends that Hamilton epitomizes a paradox for the feminist spectator, one that is structured by a love/hate relationship, or what she calls “dissonant pleasure.” Throughout this article, Wolf examines the choreography, musical numbers, and narrative arc of the women characters, arguing that Hamilton illustrates the potential of the women as socially and political engaged citizens, but ultimately fails in fulfilling this promise. See Indebted to Wolf’s critical engagement with Hamilton ’s women, in her chapter from Historians on Hamilton , “‘Remember…I’m Your Man’: Masculinity, Marriage, and Gender in Hamilton ,” Catherine Allgor reiterates Wolf’s sentiment about the positioning of women on the periphery in Hamilton . Allgor examines how gender operates in the musical alongside the historical record, noting that Hamilton fails to illuminate how gender is a significant organizing principle. For Allgor, this oversight hides the subordinate legal status that women faced and perpetuates the belief that women only played minor roles in history. Allgor ends by noting that Hamilton’s revolution relies on its attempt to “decenter history” and that this can inspire others to build upon Miranda’s work. [5] Brandi Wilkins Catanese, The Problem of the Color(Blind) Racial Transgression and the Politics of Black Performance (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 22. [6] It is important to note that this article focuses on the original principal actresses of Hamilton ’s Broadway production (performers that reprised their roles of Eliza, Angelica, and Mariah for the Disney+ version of the musical) and how the racial and gender identity of these performers influence potential readings of their respective characters. [7] Brian Eugenio Herrera, “Looking at Hamilton from Inside the Broadway Bubble,” in Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past , eds. Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018), 230. [8] Robin Bernstein, “Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race,” Social Text 27, no. 4 (2009): 69. [9] Michelle Cowin Gibbs, “Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston,” The Journal of American Drama and Theatre 33, no. 2 (Spring 2021). [10] See Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (London: Unwin Hynan,1990). Collins explores the intellectual tradition fostered by Black women scholars, non-academics, and artists. Tracing ideas and concepts propelled by Black women, most notably the term “outsider-within” and “matrix of domination,” Collins argues that Black women will always fall outside of “feminist and black social thought” due to their focus on whiteness or maleness. Yet, according to Collins this “outsider within” position produces a knowledge source that is more nuanced than feminist and Black social thought. [11] Bert Cardullo, What Is Dramaturgy? (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), 3. [12] Faedra Chatard Carpenter, Coloring Whiteness: Acts of Critique in Black Performance (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 13. [13] José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 6. [14] Ibid, 23. [15] While my primary analysis is through Black feminism, I recognize that women of color feminisms are distinct and different. Utilizing other women of color feminisms will also magnify new interpretative possibilities for the musical. [16] The Hamilton casting call describes Angelica Schuyler as a mix of Desiree Armfeldt and Nicki Minaj. [17] Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter, Hamilton: The Revolution (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2016), 79. [18] Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 67. [19] See Lyra D. Monteiro, “Race-Conscious Casting and the Erasure of the Black Past in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton ,” National Council on Public History, 10 June 2016, https://ncph.org/history-at-work/its-not-just-a-musical; Annette Gordon-Reed, “ Hamilton , the Musical: Blacks and the Founding Fathers, 6 April 2016, https://ncph.org/history-at-work/hamilton-the-musical-blacks-and-the-founding-fathers; and Ishmael Reed, “ Hamilton , the musical: Black Actor Dress Up like Slave Traders…and It’s Not Halloween,” CounterPunch, https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/08/21/hamilton-the-musical-black-actors-dress-up-like-slave-tradersand-its-not-halloween for their essential critiques of the musical’s erasure. [20] Miranda and McCarter, Hamilton , 44. [21] Whitney Peoples, “‘Under Construction’: Identifying Foundations of Hip-Hop Feminism and Exploring Bridges between Black Second Wave and Hip-Hop Feminisms,” in No Permanent Waves Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 404. [22] Muñoz, Disidentifications , 6. [23] Miranda and McCarter, Hamilton , 2. 4.y of Minnesota Press, 1997), 29.ect. istorical embodiment of the black female body, that I offer Miranda subverts through th [24] Ibid, 82. [25] In the essay, “On the Perfect Union of Actor and Role with Allusion to Renée Elise Goldsberry” in Hamilton: The Revolution , Miranda speaks about the first time that Goldsberry auditioned for the musical and how she was the perfect person for the role. Not only does this essay provide further insight into how character and actor are central to the musical, but it also highlights Miranda’s role in casting of the show. [26] Miranda and McCarter, Hamilton , 175. [27] Stacy Wolf, “Hamilton’s Women,” Studies in Musical Theatre 12, no. 2 (June 1, 2018): 176. [28] Uri McMillan, Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 24. [29] Mireille Miller-Young, “Preface: Confessions of A Black Feminist Academic Pornographer,” in A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography (Durham, NC; Duke University Press, 2014), x. [30] Cathy J. Cohen, “Deviance as Resistance: A New Research Agenda for the Study of Black Politics,” Du Bois Review 1, no. 1 (2004): 27–45, 30. [31] Miranda and McCarter, Hamilton , 176. [32] Miranda and McCarter, Hamilton , 177. [33] Phillipa Soo’s racial ambiguity had led some historians to read her as white, specifically Annette Gordon-Reed who asserts that Phillipa Soo is read and coded as white. While the audience may have difficulty fitting her into a racial category, I do not read Phillipa Soo’s embodiment of Eliza Schuyler as white. [34] Wolf, “ Hamilton ’s Women,” 169. [35] Muñoz, Disidentifications , 4. [36] As a reminder, because the casting breakdown specifices that a “non-white” actress should play the role, Eliza has been played by other non-Asian women of color; therefore, the meaning of the performance can and has changed depending on who portrays her. I analyze Soo’s performance because it has undoubtedly influenced later productions and it allows me to highlight that a generic (i.e., white) analysis will not serve the various meanings conjured by the bodies of the women of color who will embody this role in the future. [37] Traise Yamamoto, Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity, and the Body (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1999), 67. [38] Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Women and Men: Labor, Laws and Love (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1997), 34. [39] For most spectators of the musical, Soo’s body signals a generic Asian-ness or mixedness, thus rendering her representative of all Asian Americans and denying her the particularities of her Chinese American identity. I refer to her as Asian American throughout the paper to point out how the United States’ systems of racial classification require Soo’s body to be easily consumable for the American public. In this way, Soo comes to stand in for the diverse population of Asian Americans, despite her desire or choice too. [40] Miranda and McCarter, Hamilton , 110. [41] Ibid. [42] Ibid. [43] There is no historical record of Eliza Schuyler’s reaction to finding out about the affair; Miranda’s imagines what her reaction would be in this song. [44] Miranda and McCarter, Hamilton , 238. [45] Wolf, “ Hamilton ’s Women,” 175. [46] Miranda and McCarter, Hamilton , 280. [47] Ibid. [48] Ibid, 281. [49] Ibid, 281. [50] Karen Shimakawa, National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2002), 3. [51] Shimakawa, National Abjection , 3. [52] H. Samy Alim, Roc the Mic Right: The Language of Hip-Hop Culture , (New York: Routledge, 2006), 97. [53] Cherríe Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back, Fourth Edition: Writings by Radical Women of Color , ed. Gloria Anzaldúa (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1981, reprint 2015), 16. [54] For example, the recent Broadway revival of the Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! cast the female lead as a Black woman. [55] Michael Paulson, “ Hamilton Producers Will Change Job Posting, but Not Commitment to Diverse Casting,” The New York Times , 30 March 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/31/arts/union- criticizes-hamilton-casting-call-seeking-nonwhite-actors.html. Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience: The Tourist as Actor. Jennifer A. Kokai and Tom Robson, eds. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019; Pp. 292. The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy: Gambling, Drama, and the Unexpected. Edwin Wong. Victoria, Canada: Friesen Press, 2019; Pp. 363. Susan Glaspell’s Poetics and Politics of Rebellion. Emeline Jouve. Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2017; Pp. 258. Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry. Soyica Diggs Colbert. New Haven: Yale, 2021; Pp. 273. The Mysterious Murder of Mrs. Shakespeare: Transgressive Performance in Nineteenth-Century New York “What Will Be Changed?”: Maxwell Anderson and the Literary Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti Theatre of Isolation “A Certain Man Had Two [Kids]”: Tragic Parables, “The Prodigal Son,” and Edward Albee's The Goat “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells [Her] Story”: An Intersectional Analysis of the Women of Hamilton Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Raymond Saraceni Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 1 Visit Journal Homepage Tricks, Capers, and Highway Robbery: Philadelphia Self-Enactment upon the Early Jacksonian Stage Raymond Saraceni By Published on November 25, 2022 Download Article as PDF Introduction During the early decades of the nineteenth century, Philadelphia became besotted by its own reflection—a growing desire to perceive and to reflect upon itself is clearly manifested in the work of contemporaneous painters, novelists, and organizers of street pageants, as well as in the work of dramatists and theatre impresarios. Perhaps the bustling and industrializing metropolis that was in the process of supplanting the supposedly genteel Federalist city of the preceding century sought something reassuring in beholding itself. The federal government had decamped for the banks of the Potomac in 1800, while with each year the significance of Philadelphia as the birthplace of the nation was slipping further from the space of living memory; meanwhile, immigrants from Ireland, Germany, and even the French Caribbean further altered the deportment and civic culture of the city, as did blacks fleeing slavery in the American south. [1] Given such changes, the need to reflect upon and represent precisely what the city was and how it is signified in the present became increasingly important. Broadly speaking, representations of Philadelphia on canvas or in engravings took one of two forms: one emphasizing the city’s grand architecture and orderly thoroughfares, the other its often boisterous and irrepressible citizens. William Russell Birch, an English-born painter who published four editions of Philadelphia street scenes between 1800 and 1820, created elegant depictions of the city that called viewers’ attention to Philadelphia’s graceful Georgian buildings and its broad boulevards. His images of an orderly Philadelphia peopled by well-mannered and deferential citizens are notable too for a kind of antiseptic quality: the garbage and manure that would no doubt have been found throughout the city’s streets and byways are nowhere to be found. [2] John Lewis Krimmel, born in 1786 and a recent immigrant from Württemberg, was also a painter of Philadelphia street scenes, but his work is of a very different kind than Birch’s. While human figures are of marginal importance to the latter, they are Krimmel’s primary focus. Paintings such as Fourth of July in Center Square (1812) and Election Day at the State House (1815) call our attention not to those buildings that frame the action, but to the crowds themselves: swaggering, celebratory, combustible, and heterogeneous. The energy of his work is equal parts dynamism and hazard—despite the affability of certain of his human subjects, one could easily imagine being pushed aside, pick-pocketed or worse in the midst of such a swirling tumult of urban types. What we find in such aquatints and etchings we also find just a few years later upon the Philadelphia stage; the social energies unleashed as the city’s identity shifted from the eighteenth-century “Birthplace of the Nation” to the nineteenth-century “Workshop of the World,” were echoed, reified, challenged, and reconfigured in Philadelphia’s playhouses. By the end of the 1820s, Philadelphia was struggling to understand and represent the tumult and dislocation of its present in terms of what had already become for many an idealized past. As Gary B. Nash has argued, the “formative decade” of the 1820s was characterized by the construction of a “web of memory” in the Quaker City, a process that involved the founding of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in the wake of the Marquis de Lafayette’s visit in 1824, an institution whose very purpose was to collect those artifacts that might help “to preserve [a] memory of the past or use it to refurbish the present.” Such a process was, however, “made all the more complicated by the fact that Philadelphians, in their growing diversity, came to understand that memory-making was [not] a value-free and politically sanitized matter, [for] . . . as soon as people began to see that the shaping of Philadelphia’s past was a partisan activity, . . . the process of remembering Philadelphia became . . . contested . . . and has remained so ever since.” [3] Representing contemporary Philadelphia to Philadelphia audiences thus became aesthetically compelling at precisely the same moment that Nash considers as decisive in the city’s first serious encounter with shaping historical memory. Both processes were equally fraught. In the following pages, I wish to consider in particular Robert Montgomery Bird’s City Looking Glass , and the Walnut Street Theatre’s staging of both The Mail Robbers and Doctor Foster in Philadelphia . What did these entertainments signify for contemporary Philadelphians? How did audiences reflect upon these performances of self-reflection? When Bird and his contemporaries held a looking glass before the face of America’s First City, what did its audiences behold? These plays, I will argue, allow us to apprehend the formation of Philadelphian civic identity at an inflection point, with the stage itself at the heart of the city’s self-enactment. Indeed, it is not possible to understand this moment of civic identity formation and/or dissolution without working to grasp how it was experienced by those Philadelphians who attended and called upon the theatre to reflect, upend, or further reify the realities they felt themselves to inhabit at the beginning of the Jacksonian era, when the tensions touched upon in the works of Birch and Krimmel reached a kind of climax. Whereas scholars have long worked to situate Philadelphia performances of the antebellum period within the context of the development of American cultural identity, comparatively little attention has been given to the work of the Philadelphia stage relative to the development of Philadelphia civic culture itself. Bird’s Looking Glass , read alongside Mail Robbers and Doctor Foster , confirms a sense that when Philadelphians beheld their city at the end of the 1820s, they saw a place that was no longer the gentlemanly Quaker metropolis of William Penn and his heirs anymore than it was exclusively the eighteenth-century cradle of liberty and shrine of American independence. Instead, audiences beheld a heterogeneous and volatile, dangerous yet exuberant modern metropolis—one characterized by instability and menace as well as by a kind of phenomenologically liberating and disruptive knavery. In these plays, we will find that the exterior street scene becomes the primary space for contesting civic identity, just as it was in the work of painters and engravers like Birch and Krimmel. Bird’s Looking Glass In July of 1828 the ambivalent physician and aspiring dramatist, Robert Montgomery Bird, did something extraordinary: he held up a mirror to the city of Philadelphia. With the publication of his City Looking Glass , Bird invites audiences to look into his dramaturgical “mirror of the times . . . to see such knaves and asses / [a]s, we hope, can’t be seen in your own looking glasses.” [4] The comedy he presents offers us a comprehensive picture of Philadelphia types: wealthy merchants and their headstrong daughters, seedy procuresses and blackmailers, street-savvy rakes and pugnacious (if good-natured) sailors, as well as a promenading African American woman and a visiting Southern gentleman, not to mention servants, constables, and various “young bucks” reflecting various degrees of moral turpitude. On the one hand, the play appears as a somewhat conventional variation on a theme by Terence: sentimentality and mistaken identities abound, even as we encounter the familiar device of a long-lost child reunited with her aged, pining father. At the same time, however, the play’s rambunctious and youthful energy – its gleeful determination to consider the seedy underbelly of life in the Quaker City – mark Bird’s entertainment as being worlds away from what the European larmoyant tradition had formerly wrought of the same comic paradigm. Though apparently never brought to the stage, City Looking Glass may be read as heralding an emergent impulse on the part of Philadelphia to perceive and perform itself, as well as an impulse on the part of dramatists and theatre managers to contest the city’s established reputation as a place of congruity, regularity, and gentlemanly deportment. Bird extends and develops the metaphor of the looking glass throughout his prologue, hoping (or lamenting) that “when some pleasing liniment is shown, / . . . each might softly whisper, ‘That’s my own!’ / And where an uglier product of our labour [sic], / [w]ith the same readiness, say ‘That’s my neighbor!’” Seeking to present a timely, up-to-date urban comedy, Bird next promises his audience “certain tricks and capers / [s]uch as you look for daily in the papers.” [5] What is extraordinary here is not Bird’s deployment of the mirror as a metaphor so much as the way in which he does so, as well as the situation of his Looking Glass within the context of Philadelphia’s emergent obsession with seeing itself in the theatre. As Tim P. Vos has pointed out, the mirror was a popular signifier in the literature of the early American republic, but not necessarily a sign of “objectivity’s normative ascendance.” Instead, the looking glass was most often deployed as “a metaphor for the self-examination of one’s soul or character by holding up individuals either to be emulated or abhorred . . . the mirror was not simply a material article for returning light it received, it was a cultural artifact for returning enlightenment and judgment.” [6] In Bird’s comedy, the play itself is the looking glass—a looking glass absent in the material form but imagined instead as forcefully present in and as the act of performance. Indeed, Bird maintained a persistent fascination with images and reflections—with ways of constructing, refracting, and performing (or re-performing) phenomena of various kinds—throughout his life. In the 1840s and 50s, he famously experimented with an early photographic process called the Calotype, developing not only some of the first photographic images of Philadelphia but also developing an image of his own portrait, painted on canvas by his wife, Mary Mayer Bird. Thus, just as he would eventually reflect upon and replicate an image of his own image in light and shadow, with Looking Glass the dramatist may be understood as presenting us with the city itself as engaged perpetually in its own protean self-enactment—though here the subject is not an individual but a civic, corporate phenomenon. In his study of Philadelphia’s literary history, Samuel Otter argues that eighteenth and nineteenth-century writers in the Quaker City “shared a sense that Philadelphia was a place where, in concentrated form, a peculiarly American experiment was being conducted,” that the public sphere in Philadelphia developed in a unique way “through a series of violent episodes that were interpreted as tests of individual, racial, and civic character.” He goes on to say that “the border status of the city, its symbolic value and political history, its resilient African American population, and its circumstances of extremity provoked inquiries that unfolded in a range of texts over decades.” [7] Otter’s interest here is literary, so while he considers the work of Philadelphia authors like Charles Brockden Brown and George Lippard (both of whom sought to challenge the normative representation of Philadelphia as the refined and gentlemanly capital of Penn’s enlightened Commonwealth), his attention to drama and theatrical performance is slight. It thus should not surprise us that in considering the work of Robert Montgomery Bird, Otter almost entirely overlooks his plays in favor of his prose fiction. Nevertheless, there is much that is useful in Otter’s work relative to an understanding of Philadelphia drama and performance. During the early years of the nineteenth century, Otter writes, urban life in the Quaker City “seemed newly legible . . . as a limit outside the self that shaped identity, [as] . . . a felt excess that resisted such limits, and as a possibility for transformation.” [8] But if this was the moment that Philadelphia became legible, I argue that it is also the moment that Philadelphia become performable ; Otter claims that during the early years of the nineteenth century “Philadelphia came into fiction, and fiction became Philadelphian.” [9] So is this the case for drama and performance, particularly toward the end of the 1820s and most notably at first in Robert Montgomery Bird’s The City Looking Glass ? The play involves the machinations of two brothers who come to Philadelphia in order to make a fortune passing counterfeit bills; one of the brothers, Ravin, is also blackmailing a procuress named Mrs. Gall as he seeks to take possession of her ward: the beautiful and virtuous Emma. This same young woman has also won the heart of our hero, Mr. Roslin, a scion of a respectable family whose hopes for marriage are dashed when he learns that Emma is essentially being raised in a house of ill repute. Meanwhile, Roslin’s old school chum—a southern gentleman named Raleigh—has come to town to court Diana Headstrong, Roslin’s cousin. At first, Raleigh’s hopes for marriage are frustrated because of his being misidentified by Headstrong as a notorious swindler, a charge that brings the young man’s father, the elder Raleigh, to Philadelphia in defense of his son’s reputation (this despite the old man’s enduring heart-brokenness as a result of his young daughter’s disappearance many years before). At long last, however, all obstacles to marriage are removed when Emma is discovered to be Raleigh’s long-lost sister, and the villainous Ravin the very swindler that Headstrong (falling victim to Ravin’s manipulation) had earlier misidentified as Raleigh himself. By the end of the play Ravin’s brother, Ringfinger, has been compelled to give evidence against his brother and the two villains are hauled off to receive their just desserts. The play compels attention not so much for its intrigue, however, as for its disruptive depiction of the Quaker City as a disorderly and unruly space. It is as if Philadelphia were here reflected via a distorted funhouse mirror—a kind of giddy exercise in grotesquerie. Such an enterprise was not without precedent or progenitors, to be sure. Tom and Jerry, or Life in London (that episodic celebration of urban slumming, low-life milieux, and rakish misbehavior) had crossed the pond and debuted at Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street Theatre in April of 1823. Francis Wemyss, a leading actor who had himself recently arrived from Britain and who would serve as manager of several Philadelphia theatres over the decades, records that Tom and Jerry was so popular upon its first appearance in the city that it was picked up and performed by Cowell’s “circus corps” as soon as the Chestnut Street company disembarked for its sojourn to Baltimore and Washington, and was presented at the Walnut Street for the remainder of the season. [10] In his study of populist and underclass performance on the nineteenth-century American stage, Peter P. Reed explores the influence of Tom and Jerry ; he argues that theatres in the United States sought to ensure the continued popularity of the play “by tapping the urban lore of American cities” so that “[g]limpses of the distant metropole’s underworld gave way to representations of a newly localized urban culture, [as] Tom and Jerry helped constitute a specifically American urban public sphere built upon complex rituals of underclass performance and elite patronage.” [11] While The City Looking Glass is not a direct iteration of Tom and Jerry , the energies unleashed by the latter seem to play a role in Bird’s treatment of Philadelphia as a series of street scenes, dives, and the low performances associated with both—a local and particular manifestation of Americans’ increasing consciousness of and investment in “the entertainment value of their own urban low scenes [and their] fascination with stagey underclass characters” who continue to appear throughout the first half of the nineteenth century on the stage and in print. [12] Stagey, underclass characters abound in Bird’s play; they are far more memorable than the ladies and gentlemen, just as the action of the play’s street scenes and exteriors is more memorable than the goings-on in the parlors or drawing rooms of its respectable homes. For it is on the city’s byways and back lanes, as well as in the showboating of its volatile young “bucks” (characters like the sometime lawyer, Bolt, and his streetwise henchmen, Mossrose and Crossbar), that Philadelphia is meant to perceive most clearly its disfigured reflection, to experience most dramatically its contested character. Indeed, Philadelphia’s civic character was already long-understood as being manifest in its streets, specifically in its gridiron arrangement of thoroughfares intersecting at right angles and organized around a series of five open squares framing deep individual lots for houses and gardens — an arrangement proposed by William Penn and his surveyor, Thomas Holme, at the very founding of the colony. Philadelphia’s character as a planned settlement with broad, straight avenues as an alternative to the overcrowded, walled, medieval cities of Europe was an important aspect of what gave the place its initial cachet and self-image as a modern city founded on Enlightenment principles. Philadelphia, as Samuel Otter observes, sought to understand itself as defined by the “symmetry and discipline” of its orderly thoroughfares, as the “perpendicular array of streets and squares . . . were linked with the rectitude of its founder and its Quaker inhabitants.” [13] However, the sameness and regularity characteristic of its general appearance engendered, too, a quality of stultifying rigidity ripe for contestation and aesthetic sabotage. When visiting Philadelphia in the summer of 1830, Mrs. Trollope wrote that the city was “built with extreme and . . . wearisome regularity,” and that “all is even, straight, uniform, and uninteresting.” [14] Just three years later, the Scottish traveler Thomas Hamilton wrote similarly that Philadelphia represented “an infringement on the rights of individual eccentricity—a rigid and prosaic despotism of right angles and parallelograms.” [15] Local dramatists had gotten there even earlier. In his 1806 comedy, Tears and Smiles , James Nelson Barker gives us the character of Nathan Yank, domestic and runner-of-errands for the play’s romantic hero, who repeatedly loses his way amidst the wearisome sameness of Philadelphia’s streets, much to the consternation of his employer and the complication of the plot. While Barker’s sentimental comedy walks the streets of prosaic sameness rather than those of symmetry and rectitude, he is not so much interested in contesting the self-image of Philadelphia as he is in enjoying a good-natured jest with his knowing audience. Nor is the city as such at the center of Barker’s dramaturgy: the final acts of the play take us out of Philadelphia altogether, to a quiet country estate in Fairmount. Bird, by contrast, cannot imagine leaving the city behind, for what would his Looking Glass have to show us then? Otter has written about Benjamin Franklin’s autobiographical writings as, among other things, a guide “to crafting appearances that unsettled the relationship between character and performance,” deploying tales of his youthful progress in the city to “help create a public arena in which individuals were taught to be acutely conscious of their own social performances.” [16] Bird continues this work, albeit in a different key, with an early scene between his malefactor brothers where Ravin upbraids the less-assured Ringfinger over the latter’s persistent weakness for picking pockets. Picking pockets is, Ravin tells him, “a damned low vice” when set against the more refined criminal endeavor of counterfeiting. Refusing to aim higher has had a deleterious effect on Ringfinger, whose “gentility sits as clumsily upon [him] as new clothes.” Gentility and breeding, the sine qua non of the Philadelphia gentleman, are simply matters of wearing the costume well and of playing the role with confidence, for “character . . . is oftener established by conceit than by natural privilege.” [17] This troubling of the relationship between substance and “mere” appearance prefigures the promiscuous relationship in Bird’s Philadelphia between the gentleman and the scoundrel; nowhere is this more clear than in the character of Bolt, a good-for-nothing rogue whose ill-treatment at the hands of the brother villains leads to their demise. Roslin describes Bolt as indeed a “gentleman,” but one with a “black eye.” He expands upon this observation, noting that Bolt is the very “representative of a Philadelphia buck” one who has had opportunities of becoming a gentleman, [but] amends his gentility by the addition of certain accomplishments peculiar to the vulgar; that is, he has been half-educated at college and half bred at home; is seen sometimes at a lawyer’s office [but] … more frequently in the tavern with a terrapin under his nose and a wine bottle at his elbow: he fiddles a little and boxes to admiration; wears a costly coat; keeps a mistress, and sometimes a dog; above all can brag of having shot one grouse on the Jersey colings and one man on the Delaware lines. [18] Bolt is thus an apparently successful Philadelphia lawyer who hails from a supposedly well-bred Philadelphia family. Yet he is a man of halves: part genteel cavalier, part vulgar roughneck. Otter notes that in Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia, “a strategic display of enterprise might lead to worldly success [as] . . . habits of industry, discipline, and virtue” serve to “secure character.” [19] Bolt, however, particularly in Roslin’s representation of him, destabilizes character in his troubling of any distinction between high and low. Not simply a slumming gentleman, he appears to be downright dangerous: while Bolt engages in genteel pastimes like grouse hunting (albeit with limited success), his shooting a man “on the Delaware lines” might betoken either a refined duelist or an unstable sociopath. Indeed, Roslin’s servant, Nathan Nobody, observes that all aristocratic families of the city are most likely mere whited sepulchers, asserting to his master in the spirit of hearty “republicanism” that whenever he sees one of their coats of arms he can only conclude that “they have formerly . . . had in the family more arms than ears; that their titles are registered in a jail book; that their family house was a dunghill and their tree of genealogy a gallows.” The colorful and dexterous Nobody appears to have learned this sort of leveler’s vision at the theatre, where he also came to appreciate “how a wise man can climb on the shoulders of fools.” [20] In Bird’s variation on Abbott and Costello’s verbal monkeyshines, Nathan Nobody is a Somebody, while the aspirational aristocrats of Philadelphia are the real Nobodies. As mentioned above, it is largely upon the byways and back alleys of the city that Bird’s drama of contestation and shifting selves is played out. The “wearisome regularity,” of Philadelphia’s streets, the “symmetry and discipline” of its gridiron pattern of thoroughfares, are here reworked so as to prepare a common space for emergent and variable identity, the sort of undertaking which Elizabeth Maddock Dillon regards as “the shared terrain … of embodiment and representational force.” [21] Indeed, most of the decisive action of Looking Glass takes place out of doors on the city’s thoroughfares. In the course of the play’s five “street scenes” Roslin and Nathan agree on an undertaking that drives the early action, Bolt flirts indecorously with a series of ladies (bringing on the decisive intervention of the sailor, Tom Taffrail), Diana is rescued by Raleigh after she has taken flight from Bolt, Emma is rescued from Mrs. Gall and Ravin by Roslin, and finally, Nathan is delivered from Ravin’s clutches by Tom Taffrail (thus setting up the play’s concluding action). In the course of such intrigue, Philadelphia is transformed into an utterly unrecognizable landscape – or seascape – of protean, Bosh-like strangeness, perhaps best represented by Tom Taffrail’s indignant retort to Bolt that he is not the only man that has been run foul of by unlawful cruisers in this here cursedty [sic] deceitful town. There’s sharks and swordfish enough, though they keep their heads underwater, to nibble one’s eyes out of his head and run their snouts into one’s keel. I have seen a painted pirate run up into a gentle-man’s headquarters as naturally as into a Spanish West-India harbour [sic]. [22] The good citizens of Philadelphia are here reduced to sinister sea creatures or the keels of renegade corsairs (the latter identification pungent with sexual innuendo)—a comic but nevertheless disquieting depiction that conflates machine with man and beast. Nor is it an arbitrary choice to give these sentiments to Tom. “Seafarers and their families dominated certain parts of the Philadelphia cityscape,” Simon P. Newman reminds us, enjoying “a vibrant and highly visible culture.” While Philadelphia’s sailors “participated in the street politics of the early republic alongside laborers, mechanics, and other working men and women, more than any other group they had witnessed and experienced revolutionary transformations, and they participated in American politics within that context.” [23] A peculiar and pugnacious combination of rube and sea-dog, Tom is also the consummate street performer, belting out a spooky moritat about a murderous sailor and his mistress’ ghost as part of Nobody’s deliverance from Ravin’s clutches. Not only has Bird tapped into and deployed what Newman regards as the self-conscious display that characterized the behavior of Philadelphia’s seafarers, whose “scarred” and “tattooed” bodies vividly “proclaimed their profession,” [24] but he also allows the character who would have most closely been identified with the revolutionary energies of the Atlantic World the power to most memorably re-inscribe the streets of Philadelphia as unsettling sea-lanes of depravity, full of predatory creatures best policed by guileless sailors with powerful fists and strong singing voices. Indeed, fisticuffs are never far off in Bird’s Philadelphia. It is Tom who earlier thrashes Bolt and his cronies when the part-time lawyer assails Diana on a street corner; frightened and angry, she demands vengeance, insisting that her suitor, Mr. Raleigh, “come along and make ready to beat somebody.” “Isn’t this the City of Brotherly Love?” protests the Southern gentleman. [25] It would appear not. In her New World Drama , Elizabeth Maddock Dillon writes of how dramatic texts as well as theatrical performance engender “operations of representation” that oscillate between “riotous disorder and collective consent,” for drama and performance make visible “the possibility of consensus in the making as well as the possibility of . . . dissolving [a] collective sense of meaning . . . into one of noise and riot.” [26] I suggest that The City Looking Glass accomplishes precisely this work: dissolving a consensus image of “the City of Brotherly Love” as an ordered, gentlemanly, Federalist city while proposing another. Bird’s play offers us a Philadelphia at once less-familiar and more frightening—more volatile yet more exuberant—than the metropolis imagined by James Nelson Barker, a rendering that also seems to lure us away from the possibility of consensus. Indeed, the City of Brotherly Love has here become the space of rough-and-tumble and free-for-all, of disorderly “noise and riot.” If Bird’s looking glass may be apprehended in and as the act of performance, those reflections we do not see—or those performances we glimpse only fleetingly—are at least as significant as those that command our fuller attention. Though largely absent from the play, Bird would seem to deploy Philadelphia’s African American population as a further signification of disruption and dissensus at the performative heart of the city’s contested character. Samuel Otter has commented upon Bolt’s humiliation when one of the female passersby he seeks to accost turns out to be a finely-attired African American woman, arguing that staging such a “misalignment between costume and visage, and playing this exposure for shock and laughs” underlines a point of juncture between Bird’s treatment of African Americans in Looking Glass , and Edward W. Clay’s notorious print series, “Life in Philadelphia.” [27] Certainly this moment in the play performs work similar to Clay’s etchings, widely popular and first issued between 1828 and 1830: to mock social posturing amongst the city’s African American population. At the same time, Bird’s text is more multivalent here than we might think, very much as Clay’s print series also seems to have been. Otter reminds us that Clay’s African American caricatures represent “a mixture of class desire and African American satire, in ratios impossible to recover.” [28] This point is further clarified by Christian DuComb, who speaks of Clay’s aquatints as “lampooning the pretentious manners of both whites and blacks . . . [albeit] Clay’s mockery of affluent whites seem[s] comparatively mild.” [29] What is especially interesting about Bolt’s brief encounter with the black woman is that, though finely dressed, she is hardly displaying or performing herself in the way that Bolt and his cronies seem to be: indeed, what first attracts Bolt’s attention is that she “bends her head and walks fast” as she passes by, anxious (most likely) to avoid the attention of these white men. Douglas A. Jones, Jr. has explored the significance of self-display and parade for African Americans during the early years of the nineteenth century, arguing that such phenomena signified that “their (black nation within a) nation existed,” [30] such moments of self-enactment functioned in a sense “as rituals do, in that they aestheticized, formalized, and sustained structures of (national) feeling among their [African American] participants.” [31] Looking Glass may thus be said to undermine and/or deny such moments of efficacious self-display for/to Philadelphia’s African Americans. There is no such “national feeling” in evidence at such a hurried and apparently apprehensive moment. It is Bolt, in fact, whose swaggering self-performance is called to our attention—though such behavior hardly makes a favorable impression here, merely reinforcing (as one of his henchmen would have it) that Bolt “prides himself on being an ignoramus.” [32] Every bit as compelling is the utter absence of African American characters otherwise. The invisibility of the city’s African Americans in Bird’s Looking Glass may very well have been a function of their irreducible visibility in the cultural and political life of contemporary Philadelphia. By the decade of the 1820s, Philadelphia was “the most important center of free blacks in the country, [its] black churches, schools, and mutual aid associations . . . more numerous than any other American city’s.” [33] Such a reality unsettled white historians like John Fanning Watson, who in 1830 lamented that “the aspirings [sic] and little vanities” of contemporary black Philadelphians “have been rapidly growing,” and “while twenty to thirty years ago they were much humbler, [now] they show an overweening fondness for display and vainglory.” [34] The villainous Ravin seems especially perturbed by the city’s blacks, exhibiting a penchant for perceiving Philadelphia itself through the lens of its African American population (perhaps as a reminder of his hailing from less racially heterogenous New Hampshire). Outraged by the behavior of Raleigh, Ravin accuses him of possessing “more impudence than a Philadelphia negro.” [35] Later, in drunken exasperation, he laments to Mrs. Gall that “they allow no nuisances here, except negro class meetings, dogs, and church bells.” [36] Such class meetings did indeed signify to many of Philadelphia’s uniquely visible and influential African American population; ever since clergyman Richard Allen established the first such black communion in Philadelphia in 1786, such class meetings symbolized “equal privileges for blacks,” even as they engendered “recalcitrant white opposition” from the very beginning. [37] Interestingly, in his descriptions of Philadelphia’s blacks, Ravin uses the term “negro”—an appellation that John Fanning Watson reports was no longer favored by the city’s more-assured and self-conscious African Americans, who increasingly preferred to call themselves “coloured” [sic]. [38] It is hard to know whether Ravin’s turn of phrase signifies his own or Bird’s indifference to this preference (or indeed, whether or not Watson is even entirely correct). What is more certain, however, is that Bird’s Looking Glass reflects its author’s (and most likely white Philadelphia’s) ambivalence about its African American population, a population that is at once largely absent from the play as well as inseparable from all the “noise and chaos” inherent in the representation and signification of Philadelphia’s combustible, boisterous, and often-antagonistic urban character. Highway Robbery In City Looking Glass , Ravin arranges for an ersatz kidnapping of Diana so that he himself might “rescue” her from the clutches of his co-conspirator. The plot (which quickly unravels) is set to take place as Diana travels by coach along the Ridge Road. [39] The primary thoroughfare connecting Philadelphia and Reading, the Ridge Road had been in use since the early years of the eighteenth century; it was heavy with traffic in Bird’s day, offering weary travelers a number of inns and fashionable hotels where they might rest after a long day’s journey. It was a dangerous route as well, and in the year following the publication of City Looking Glass , a real incident took place on the Ridge Road that riveted the attention of all of Philadelphia. In the early morning hours of 6 December 1829, the Reading Mail Stage was set upon by three highwaymen named Porter, Poteet, and Wilson. According to contemporary accounts, these men were weavers residing in Northern Liberties, a district at the time that was just outside of the City of Philadelphia. Porter seems to have been the ringleader: he apparently organized the undertaking and it was he who robbed the passengers and rifled through the mailboxes while Wilson and Poteet guarded him with their pistols. [40] Eventually, the three were apprehended; Porter would be tried and executed upon Poteet’s testimony, while Wilson’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by President Jackson. These men belonged to Philadelphia’s growing population of Irish immigrants, many of whom resided in Kensington and the Northern Liberties, where they were often employed as semi-skilled handloom weavers. Indeed, tensions in the former neighborhood had already ignited into rioting in 1828, with immigrant Roman Catholic Irish weavers pitted against Protestant American Nativists. [41] Charles Durang speaks of the “unprecedented excitement” in Philadelphia “resulting from the trial and conviction of the three mail robbers” in the spring of 1830, going on to mention that “business at the Walnut Street Theatre had not been very brisk, and it struck [manager] Sam Chapman that to dramatize the subject of this excitement would prove a clever card to attract the audience who then patronized the house.” [42] Called The Mail Robbers , the play would premiere on 10 May of that year. Clearly, the crime struck a chord and Chapman aimed to capitalize. Mrs. Trollope herself notes the “great interest” shown by a number of Philadelphians in the case of “two criminals who had been convicted of robbing the Baltimore [sic] Mail, and who were lying under sentence of death.” She was told that “one of the prisoners [Wilson] was an American, and the other [Porter] an Irishman,” the former convinced that his sentence of death would be commuted. She goes on to report that several of her companions, “in canvassing the subject, declared that if one were hanged and the other spared, [Porter’s] hanging would be a murder and not a legal execution, [as] very nearly all the white men who had suffered death since the Declaration of Independence had been Irishmen.” [43] This sympathy for Porter is perhaps surprising, particularly given the fact that the Philadelphia Saturday Bulletin had described him as a terrifying criminal, “the blackest and most fiendish we ever looked upon,” whose “very childhood exhibited symptoms of a bold, audacious and vindictively wicked disposition, which defied all advice and correction.” [44] The discussion described by Mrs. Trollope reminds us that the production at the Walnut Street was extremely attuned to the obsessions of Philadelphia. Indeed, the fates of Porter and Wilson had yet to be resolved at the time The Mail Robbers was presented; Porter would not be executed until 3 July 1830—about two months after the play’s premiere. While The Mail Robbers , along with Looking Glass , seeks to challenge, redefine, and reconfigure notions of what Philadelphia means and how the city signifies to/for its inhabitants, there is one especially important difference to consider here. The response to the former play is shaped in certain especially significant ways by its performance (the latter play, as mentioned above, seems never to have been staged). In both plays, Philadelphia (and particularly its hinterlands in the case of Mail Robbers ) is a place characterized by real danger, but that danger seems to have been more urgently and unambiguously presented in Mail Robbers— perhaps not surprisingly, given the episodes dramatized here were inspired by true events. As we will see, what is especially interesting is the way in which the real-life and enacted dramas seem to have been to some degree conflated by individuals like Charles Durang, whose History of the Philadelphia Stage provides us with a sense of the peculiar semiotic disruptions that Chapman and his play may have accomplished for audiences of the Quaker City. Once more, the locus for contesting the character of the city and its environs are the streets and byways of the region, as the venerable old Ridge Turnpike becomes a place of mayhem and crime. Federal Philadelphia may have built its primacy upon the port and docks that connected it to the wider Atlantic world; by the beginning of the 1830s, however, Philadelphia’s commercial supremacy as a shipping port was slipping badly, with New York and Baltimore on the rise. Even so, rich deposits of iron and anthracite extracted upstate began to transform Philadelphia into the nation’s primary center of manufacturing. [45] In Mail Robbers , the city’s focus is turned from the Delaware wharves toward the transshipment centers, factories, and coalfields of Schuylkill County and the Lehigh Valley. According to the Columbia Star , Porter was especially interested in setting upon the Reading Mail because it carried valuable goods and well-to-do travelers between Philadelphia and the increasingly-prosperous industrial hubs of Reading and Pottsville. [46] In turning the city toward its own backcountry, Chapman was also offering his audience a kind of anthropological night journey into the wastes of Philadelphia’s contemporary “urban wilderness.” In doing so, his drama would seem to have undermined the ways in which Philadelphia had long sought to deploy its urban and semi-urban green spaces not as signifiers of wastes and danger but as “carefully constructed rural ‘stages’ upon which to perform” itself. [47] Naomi J. Stubbs has argued that it was within and upon “stages” such as the gardens at Gray’s Ferry just across the Schuylkill River, and those located at Vauxhall at Broad and Chestnut streets, that a salubrious “oneness with nature” might be enacted; indeed, by “highlighting those features . . . most clearly conforming to the rural idyll, proprietors [of these sites] capitalized on ideas of rural innocence and its relationship to patriotism through” the enactments of those various entertainments offered at such locations. [48] The rural and semi-rural space that served as the locus for Mail Robbers was apparently reconfigured as savage and terrifying by Chapman and his creative team, however, presenting its audience with a picture of human beings, not as well-pruned cultivars, but as untamed and intractable prodigies of nature and liberty run amok. Yet here it is not simply urban or semi-rural spaces that function as sites of contestation: the actor-manager at the helm of the Walnut Street, the playmaker who had crafted The Mail Robbers, became himself the locus of contested viewings and interpretations. A playbill promoting the drama suggests that Chapman sought to sell the play as a bit of moral edification, for we read that the theatre managers “ever desirous to display vice in its true colors and to show the rising generation the inevitable consequences of crime, have embraced the leading features of the late atrocious mail robbery in forming the present drama.” [49] Durang reports that the play was repeated on the evening after its premiere to “a full pit and gallery,” despite the fact that “the boxes were thin.” [50] This would seem to suggest that responses to the play were divided along class lines, with more respectable and genteel theatregoers turning away from what more robust, populist viewers applauded. Such a conflicted response comes as no surprise when we consider the variety of ways in which Porter and his behavior were understood in Philadelphia, as well as the various ways of reading or viewing Chapman himself. Despite the depiction of Porter in the Philadelphia Saturday Bulletin as little more than a savage, Mrs. Trollope’s companions clearly sympathized with him, as the city’s growing Irish population doubtless did as well. The American Sentinel and Mercantile Advertiser reported that “special constables,” as well as a corps of “Marines from the Navy Yard” were placed on alert the day that Porter met the hangman, as “many persons were apprehensive that [his execution] would be attended with riot,” most likely by Irish immigrants from Kensington and Northern Liberties. [51] Most compelling here, however, is Charles Durang’s response, for he seems to conflate Chapman and Porter while at the same time evaluating both men’s “performances” quite differently. He describes the latter as an Irishman (a stout, thickset man, with a very sinister countenance pitted with the smallpox) [who] seemed to give all the orders to his associates in villainy. He exhibited not only that quality which in an honorable cause would have been called chivalrous bravery, but also, in rifling the passengers, displayed much courtesy and politeness. [52] Durang goes on to report that Porter’s chivalry manifested itself most memorably in his refusal to take a silver watch given to one of the passengers by his mother and that he even went so far as to return a piece of tobacco. Clearly, we are encountering here what Peter P. Reed regards as a fundamental characteristic of the rogue protagonist upon the early American stage: the demonstration of “singular and spectacular outlaw charisma.” [53] What is especially interesting about Durang’s recollection of the crime is that no such behavior is attributed to Porter in the account of the robbery printed in the Columbia Star , where it is Poteet who is said to have returned a watch (supposedly a family heirloom) to one of the passengers, as well as half-dollar to another. Given that his description of the real Porter and the actual crime is offered in the context of a description of The Mail Robbers , one begins to feel that Durang’s recollection of the former may have been shaped by the latter. If so, does this supposed depiction of Porter and his behavior provide us with a rough sense of what Chapman’s Mail Robbers —and the performance of Porter—may have offered audiences? We can do little more than speculate here, but certainly, Durang is much less sanguine about Chapman’s portrayal than Porter’s self-enactment. He is especially critical of Chapman’s “false and trashy, melodramatic coloring,” for while conceding Chapman an “artist in that species of clap-trap drama, . . . the chaste and high behests of Melpomene” being absent from his craft, his acting was merely “pretentious and illusory,” his gifts sufficient only for dramatizing “local subjects of a startling and horrid nature.” [54] The conflation of Porter’s charismatic lowness with Chapman’s less-admirable low style would seem to present Chapman / Porter as what Reed might call “a contested site of cultural valuation,” part of that larger process whereby the stage “transforms the outcasts and conscripts of circum-Atlantic modernity into entertainment.” [55] Indeed, the conflation of Porter and Chapman seems itself to be a function of that “stagey low [which] emerges from and destabilizes the identity formations, collective affiliations, and disciplinary practices of Atlantic modernity.” [56] Further destabilizing rogue representations, however, is the contrast between Durang’s ungenerous assessment of Chapman’s capabilities and what we find elsewhere, particularly when we turn to the reminiscences of Francis C. Wemyss, the British theatre impresario who brought him from Covent Garden to the United States in 1827. [57] Wemyss writes that to his mind Chapman was “a man of varied talent, of much knowledge and a universal favorite,” going on to note that “had he lived, he would have produced an entire revolution in minor American drama.” [58] Unfortunately, Chapman met his demise soon after the premiere of The Mail Robbers —indeed, as a direct result of his staging the play, at least in Durang’s telling. “For the purpose of dramatizing this abhorrent event,” he writes, “Chapman, with his scene painter Wilkins or Harry Isherwood (we forget which) went on horseback to view the spot [where the robbery took place], so as to give an accurate description of its localities.” [59] While at the scene, Chapman was wounded in a fall from his horse; the wound was further infected when later that evening he donned his costume at the Walnut Street—including a brass armor breastplate which he wore against his skin. “Verdigris poisoned the wound,” Durang goes on to report, and Chapman died a few days later, on 16 May. [60] Reinforcing Reed’s sense that presenting the underclass on American stages represents a constant tension between “discipline and unruliness,” [61] it is not especially difficult to read Durang as celebrating Porter’s unruliness while also offering us a tale of stage sensationalism and hack melodrama justifiably disciplined: Chapman the “claptrap” performer is hoist with his own phenomenological petard, the enactment of his unseemly drama leading directly to his demise. However, the question remains, why is Chapman so obviously Durang’s bête noir ? Here we must turn again to the particulars of the Philadelphia stage. Reed writes of how, beginning in the 1820s, “the clubby, personal world of managers and actors who had produced the post-revolutionary generation of theatre had begun to disappear.” [62] In Philadelphia, a development which is sometimes understood as a gradual phenomenon happened with a bang, at a very particular moment. Though Philadelphia was “the emporium of all the regular dramatic talent of the United States” during the 1828–9 theatre season, according to Francis C. Wemyss, “this season was also the most disastrous one ever known; the actors being literally in a state of desperation.” [63] By the end of the season, the three principal theatres of the city (the Chestnut Street, the Arch Street, and the Walnut Street) had closed their doors. William Warren, manager of the venerable Chestnut Street and direct heir of its Federal Era founders, was obliged to surrender his responsibilities to a new management team, consisting of Wemyss himself and Mr. Pratt. William Wood, formerly Warren’s co-manager and himself struggling to helm the tottering Arch Street, wrote subsequently of this crisis as one brought about by over-competition between the three principal theatres, going on to say that the drama “was at sixes and sevens” during the tumultuous 1828-9 season. According to Wood, it is at this moment that the history of the Philadelphia theatre, “that is to say, any history of a continuous and regular management” now “comes to an end,” for there had been “a complete debacle, or breaking up of everything that had been.” [64] The new men who were left standing in the wake of this catastrophe were managers like Wemyss and performers like his protegee, Sam Chapman. Thus, we see how Chapman may have signified the inauguration of a cheaper, tawdrier, less-decorous chapter in the history of the Philadelphia theatre—at least for men like Durang—with Mail Robbers serving as the instrument of Chapman’s subsequent (and not wholly unwelcome) removal from the stage. The Devil and Dr. Foster However, to fully grasp Chapman’s signification upon the Philadelphia stage, we must also understand his role relative to the Walnut Street’s production of an 1830 pantomime entitled Doctor Foster in Philadelphia . As with Mail Robbers , actual events lie very much at the center of the play’s energy and signification: a tale of misrepresentation and theft and naked chutzpah. Here, however, the culprits are not banditti but the impresarios of the Walnut and Arch Street theatres themselves. Similar to what we saw in the Looking Glass , the most memorable episodes of Doctor Foster take place on the street, within the public sphere and the space of public action—though the resolution offered by Foster appears to have been pitched to a different key. If Looking Glass expresses a kind of troubled, admonitory pleasure in the shifting sense of what Philadelphia means, Foster seems all giddy delight as the action winds up – it is a coming out party of sorts in celebration of a civic identity just coming into its own. Likewise, if Mail Robbers allows us to appreciate how the conflation of performance with real event works for Durang and most likely for others to represent both the nobly wicked (Porter) and the opportunistic (Chapman) as receiving their just desserts, Doctor Foster’s resolution is zanier and more explosive. With one stroke, the restoration of order appears to have been presented here as both accomplished and unlikely—perhaps even unhoped for. Doctor Foster grew directly out of what William Wood regards as a self-destructive battle between the city’s primary theatres, in particular the Arch Street and the Walnut Street. Indeed, Doctor Foster was intended in part as an ironic response to rival productions of a pantomime entitled Doctor Faustus ; the Walnut Street’s staging opened on 12 December 1829, the Arch Street’s four days later. There was a bit of skullduggery involved, however, for Durang reports that “the Chapman dynasty” at the helm of the former playhouse infiltrated the Arch Street under the pretense of confraternal solicitude, only to highjack the particulars of that theatre’s much-anticipated production of Faustus and rush the Walnut Street’s staging onto the boards just prior to its rival’s. [65] Durang reports that “public opinion was much divided on the relative merits of the piece as brought out by the two theatres,” though it is clear that he disapproves of Chapman’s decision to “reciprocate those marks of civility” extended to him on the part of the Arch Street management by “literally uprooting” its staging of the pantomime and transposing it to the Walnut Street. [66] Clearly, this was not the sort of “regular” and gentlemanly management that was said to have long-characterized the Philadelphia theatre, and whose loss is so bemoaned by William Wood above. Unsurprisingly, Francis Wemyss represents Chapman’s actions quite differently, arguing that his protegee’s gambit “was a fair business rivalry for which S. Chapman deserves great credit,” for “he reaped, by promptitude, the reward that belonged to [Arch Street manager] Philips.” [67] Once more, we see the Philadelphia stage and its rival theatres at the heart of Philadelphia’s self-enactment, for it seems to have been impossible for audiences to view either staging of Faustus without also seeing the performance of the city’s leading cultural institutions as themselves being indissolubly part of the drama. This point becomes even more clear when we consider that the Walnut Street also presented, on the same evening as the eleventh performance of Faustus (25 th December), an historical melodrama entitled William Penn; or the Elm Tree . Durang seems to regard this staging of Philadelphia and its past as a kind of antidote to the unsavoriness of the Faustus affair (though Chapman appeared in the play as the Quaker, Hickory Old Bay), conflating its romantic evocation of a bygone age with nostalgia for his own youth. All the local scenes in and adjacent to our city wherein … Penn’s first interview with the Indians occurred were accurately taken and beautifully painted. The Great Elm Tree (under whose wide-spreading branches we have passed in our boyhood), the ship Welcome floating under the bank of the Delaware, reposing … under the shadows of the majestic elm, were all very beautifully depicted. [68] Durang subsequently goes on to argue that “the representation of such historical subjects … impresses the mind with a love of country and brings pleasant memories back to the mind of age,” even as the Philadelphia stage here becomes “a normal institution to impart moral lessons in relaxation.” [69] We thus see in those dramatic offerings presented at the Walnut Street on Christmas night of 1829 contested representations of what Philadelphia is, contested representations of the work accomplished by its cultural institutions. Once more, Otter’s characteristic “set of rhetorical instabilities” is reconfigured here as a set of performative instabilities, as Philadelphia’s “spatial complexities and local urgencies” compel its dramatists to present the city “as an event, [as] the place where . . . civic identity [was] forged while the country and a transatlantic audience watched.” [70] William Penn also seems to have something in common with one of Stubbs’s several pleasure gardens: spaces on the cusps of things where cultural identity, “being intrinsically tied to the rural idyll, [to] simplicity, and innocence” feels itself to be challenged and even “supplanted by increasingly urban and modern ideas.” [71] It is this tension between rural simplicity and urban modernity—not to mention a related tension between the idealizing mission of art and its more subversive, populist vitality—that is on full display when we consider the double bill of William Penn and Doctor Faustus relative to the staging a few months later, of Doctor Foster in Philadelphia . The latter, which opened on 23 rd March 1830, is described as a “local burlesque parody” [72] of the Faustus tale, and represents a celebratory fortissimo relative to the symphony of unfolding, disruptive, and insurgent energies that we have been exploring. Certainly, there was nothing new in a burlesque treatment of Faustus , nor in the resituating of the good doctor’s medieval career within a bustling, contemporary metropolis; such treatments were already familiar to London theatre-goers, who had seen their first Faustus harlequinade as early as 1723. [73] What is unique about the Walnut Street’s treatment, however, is its determination to deploy the form as a way of seeing and enacting Philadelphia itself, utilizing as it does the sudden transformations and visual sleights-of-hand so characteristic of pantomime to destabilize any representation of the city as the gentlemanly, “distressingly regular” metropolis so famously bemoaned by Charles Dickens about a decade later. [74] The action begins in an “old times suburban schoolhouse in the vicinity of Philadelphia,” where Dr. Foster (played by Sam Chapman’s brother, William) first raises Mephistopheles, quickly shifting to “a view of the old Hall of Independence” peopled with “political loafers and office seekers.” Here a parade of rowdies apparently spoofed a popular song, “March, March, March Along Chestnut Street,” the scene reducing to ridicule one of the city’s most solemn sites, especially once a huckster appears to hawk Swain’s Panacea to “ladies, negroes, cripples and . . . Siamese boys.” [75] It is fairly easy to understand such a “graphic and miraculous representation” of lowlifes and the urban hoi polloi as an instance of what Dillon describes as “the local and embodied nature of the performative commons,” an embodiment imparting to an otherwise-invisible populace the enduring force of “possibilities . . . that can be mobilized at the site of ontic and mimetic intersection . . . in scenes of dissensus and epistemic disruption.” [76] In fact, what Durang calls “the old Hall of Independence”—a kind of national “performative commons”—had only quite recently been awarded this illustrious sobriquet, for it was the Marquis de Lafayette’s visit to the site upon his grand tour of the United States in 1824 that helped to shape the Philadelphia public’s growing awareness of the city’s history. As Nicholas Wainwright has noted, Lafayette’s official reception in the East Room of the State House brought the building itself “which had hitherto been accorded little reverence,” to the attention of the guarantors of Philadelphia’s cultural patrimony. [77] On that day a parade very different from the one described in Durang’s account of Doctor Foster passed before the State House. Beneath a triumphal arch some 24 feet high marched Lafayette’s military escort: 4000 cavalrymen, infantrymen, artillerists, and riflemen, along with 150 veterans of the Revolutionary War and a number of floats carrying several hundred cord-winders, rope-makers, weavers, shipbuilders, butchers, and coopers. [78] While few in the audience would have experienced the events of 1776, Lafayette’s parade had taken place less than six years before Doctor Foster was presented and would have thus been very much alive in civic memory. The parade of loafers and office-seekers, of hucksters and mountebanks and cripples, thus conflates, undermines, and destabilizes several of the most celebrated moments in Philadelphia civic memory by reclaiming the “performative commons,” while at the same time deflating the aesthetic aspirations of the Doctors Faustus presented just a few months earlier. High culture and momentous history are here reduced to dispute and ridicule, even as such ridicule opens up a space for an irreverent, and impertinent present—a present (and a city) that increasingly prided itself on a refusal to stand on ceremony. A subsequent transformation then hurls Foster into the midst of what we have already discovered to function as a signifier of robust, “chaotic,” and decidedly contemporary Philadelphia: an African American scene—specifically a religious meeting quickly expanding into a euphoric, disorderly “general melee.” [79] While we have only Durang’s performance reconstruction to work from, it would seem rather easy here to apply the lens offered to us by Eric Lott when attempting to grasp the multivalent semiotics of such a moment. This church celebration presided over by a “sable gemman” [sic] invites the Walnut Street’s predominately white audience both to participation and derision, to “disavowal or ridicule of the Other” as well as to “an interracial identification with it” [80] —the “Other” in this case almost certainly white actors in blackface, further destabilizing any one definitive reading of this performative moment. Despite the difficulty of determining Durang’s particular attitude here (patronizing affection or ridicule are only two options), the deployment of what Douglas A. Jones, Jr. has called “linguistic incompetence” in his description of the religious meeting (“sable gemman”) would seem to reinforce the “belief that African Americans were inherently lacking as speaking subjects and therefore unqualified for full freedom in the increasingly modern world.” [81] As Jones, Jr. points out, in the absence of slavery, culture was deployed by white Northerners as a strategy for keeping African Americans captive in a realm of “existential indeterminacy.” [82] Given the relatively large size of Philadelphia’s African American population, not to mention the city’s proximity to the slave-owning Southern states (the city’s upper classes were dominated by Copperheads), [83] such a strategy was particularly and characteristically fraught in the Quaker City. In the midst of such a discussion, it is difficult not to think of Pavel Petrovich Svinin’s famous rendering of Philadelphia’s Black Methodists Holding a Prayer Meeting , executed in watercolor and pen and ink sometime around 1813. This outdoor scene is equal parts ebullience and chaos; its depiction of the celebrants in what would appear to be a contagious moment of communal spiritual ecstasy is equal parts ridicule and fascination – the artist both identifying with and determinedly distancing himself from his subjects. Svinin thus may be said to refract and to reiterate Jones, Jr.’s “existential indeterminacy” in this work. With much less to go on, Durang’s tone (as well as Doctor Foster’s ) may very well reflect a similar fluidity, accomplishing the work of the “captive stage” in the slippery space between ridicule and subversive high-spirits, between racist mimicry and patronizing fascination. In the following scene, after Foster has escaped from the Arch Street Prison (where he had been incarcerated for attacking a local politician), we find ourselves on Prune Street, “next to the old jail wall,” where Foster “appears as Colonel Pluck of the Bloody Eighty-Fourth Regiment.” [84] This is a particularly dense moment of the pantomime, one which we can only understand by situating it within the city’s particular past and present. The “old jail wall” on Prune Street where Foster finds himself doubtless belongs to what was known as the Walnut Street Penitentiary, a structure that extended from Walnut to Prune Street and from Fifth Street to Sixth. Established in 1773, the prison had been subsequently transformed “from a simple holding place for those awaiting trial . . . into a place and instrument of punishment and reformation in and of itself, wherein the minds and bodies of criminals might be attuned to responsible work.” [85] In new construction undertaken in the 1790s, it was specified that there be added cells “for separate and solitary confinement,” thus inaugurating what would become perhaps the most distinctive feature of the so-called Pennsylvania System of prison reform. [86] The Arch Street Prison from which Foster has escaped represented a subsequent (and failed) attempt at reform; inaugurated in 1823, it proved a notoriously disagreeable place whose inmates suffered from an outbreak of cholera just weeks after the prison was opened. Peter P. Reed has commented upon the ways in which theatrical forms, and pantomime in particular, were put to use in the early Republic, pointing out how such entertainments allowed the “stagey low” to emerge from and destabilize “identity formations” and “disciplinary practices of Atlantic modernity.” [87] Here Doctor Foster deploys the quick transitions and transformations characteristic of pantomime to destabilize the often-misplaced idealism and moral pretentiousness that compromised Pennsylvania penal reform in the fraught transition from theory to praxis. Neither the Arch Street nor the Walnut Street prisons can contain nor forestall the hijinks of the protean Dr. Foster (at once a Philadelphia schoolteacher, Doctor Faustus himself, and now Colonel Pluck) as the sheer performative gusto of the character makes him impervious to imprisonment and utterly resistant to the sort of “responsible work” that the penal system was supposed to engender in all those who were locked away. Instead of turning to thrift and industry, Foster turns to mock aria, belting out “It’s my Delight to Learn Them to Write in our City,” before the scene shifts “slap dash” to yet another exterior, where Foster raises visions of specters from steamy washtubs. [88] Disciplinary practices (and institutions) are not for him. Foster’s appearance as Colonel Pluck also situates the pantomime as an act of phenomenological vandalism carried out against Philadelphia’s decorous, gentlemanly self-image as propagated and circulated by the city’s elite. Since the passage of the Militia Act in 1792, Philadelphia workingmen had bristled at the requirement that all able-bodied white males between the ages of eighteen and forty-five serve with local, self-governing militia detachments. While elite volunteer units (disparagingly called “Silk Stocking Companies”) formed the upper tier of Pennsylvania’s militia during the first half of the nineteenth century, the public militia companies ranked far below these in civic esteem. All eligible men unable to afford private company membership were required to enroll in such public companies, where they could expect only the poorest sort of training, often at the hands of indifferent or incompetent officers. Taken from work without compensation and often fined for non-compliance, these men also had to equip themselves at their own expense. [89] The Northern Liberties 84 th Regiment was one such company, and in 1825 its members elected John Pluck, a hostler or perhaps a tavern keeper described in contemporary accounts as bow-legged and hunchbacked, as their colonel. On Muster Day, in an attempt to “irritate middlebrow spectators with a drawn-out parody of the militia system,” [90] Pluck led the men of the 84 th in what the Saturday Evening Post described as a “Grand Military Farce.” [91] He was “mounted on a spavined white nag, behatted with a huge chapeau-de-bras , [and] a . . . woman’s bonnet . . . burlap pants clinched up with a belt and enormous buckle [as well as] a giant sword parodying ceremonial military dress.” [92] Pluck quickly became a national celebrity, appearing on stages in New York, Boston, Providence, Albany, and Richmond before returning to Philadelphia and finding himself court-martialed. Sean DuComb tells us that the erstwhile Colonel’s “name and likeness circulated widely for more than a decade after his national tour,” though by 1832 Pluck would undergo a transformation from an “agent of parody” into “an object of contempt, [a] symbol of racialized disorder” conflated with African American organizers of annual parades anticipating (and later celebrating) the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies. [93] Intriguingly, Doctor Foster seems to represent Colonel Pluck in mid-career, a parody of Philadelphia elite pretension and “Silk Stocking” affectedness rather than a burlesque of African American aspiration (indeed, the only musical number that is not explicitly identified as a parody in Durang’s description of Doctor Foster is a serenade performed on the Kent Bugle by Philadelphia’s celebrated African-American maestro, Frank Johnson). Here an 1825 Muster Day lampoon of proud militiamen on display is replicated onstage (rather in the manner of Richard Schechner’s “twice-behaved behavior”) to produce both a simulacrum of an earlier event as well as a further destabilization of aristocratic Philadelphia at the hands of the “stagey low.” In eighteenth-century afterpieces like The Necromancer , as John O’Brien points out, when Harlequin Faustus is at last taken to Hell, a convocation of pagan deities typically arrives for a concluding masque, the presence of the gods “a sign that order has been restored to a cosmos disrupted by [Faustus’] illicit magic.” [94] When Dr. Foster is carried off to the infernal regions, however, the effect and intention seem very different, the audience enjoying a grand and most sudden ingenious change of [Carter’s Livery Stables] into frying pandemonium. Chorus of fryers, bakers, brewers, bailers, roasters, stewards and broilers [crying] “Put him in the pot & make him hot. Hot pot, make him hot.” [95] The Walnut Street’s burlesque refuses us a sense of order restored from on high. For it is not the gods, but a combustible and uproarious gang of kitchen laborers who take the stage—managing to punish Foster while at the same time declining to resolve the silliness and visual anarchy of the evening into anything like regularity and order. We are left here in a space halfway between charivari and street party, a space where “anything can happen and it probably will”— Hellzapoppin’ on the streets of the Quaker City. Indeed, Durang’s closing remarks concerning the play point to the final transformation that Doctor Foster was able to accomplish. “This truly ridiculous burlesque upon the drama of ‘Faustus,’ the production of which had caused so much bitter rivalry between the Arch and the Walnut houses, to both of their detriment, now created much fun and laughter.” [96] The play reimagines Philadelphia itself as a kind of urban Cockaigne, a chaotic city of grotesque yet thoroughly delightful anarchic misrule and semiotic plenitude—exorcizing the specter of morally edifying (and financially ruinous) high drama from both the Arch Street and the Walnut Street houses, clearing a space on the Philadelphia stage for the delight of the masses rather than their moral edification. We are here a long way indeed from Penn’s Greene Country Town, from his Great Elm Tree, and from the good ship Welcome , just as we are a long way from the street scenes created by William Russell Birch—from a city characterized by nostalgia, genteel regularity, and a “prosaic despotism of right angles.” In the Philadelphia of Sam Chapman and Robert Montgomery Bird, a city that had only just begun to see and to perform itself as such, the angles are forever crooked and the conduct provocatively irregular. Conclusion When Philadelphia audiences of the early Jacksonian era beheld for the first time their (very contemporary) city reflected back to them from the stages of Philadelphia’s several playhouses, they encountered something deliberately other than the rural idyll of Penn’s Holy Experiment as well as something deliberately alternative to the eighteenth-century Shrine of Liberty. The civic culture of the Quaker City was at an inflection point, and Philadelphians went to the theatre in part to experience the reworking, the re-presentation, of that civic identity in performative time. What they found was a heterogenous and volatile, dangerous yet exuberantly modern metropolis—a place of “noise and riot” characterized by depravity and violence as well as by a raw and free-wheeling absurdity, by the grotesque as well as the gleeful. Indeed, plays like Mail Robbers and Doctor Foster in Philadelphia invited audiences to apprehend not just the “stagy low” but the theatres themselves as sites where contemporaneity was being constructed—with the playhouses and their managers often engaged in self-referential sleights-of-hand. Here the relationship between signified and signifier becomes a shifty and promiscuous one, whether deliberately (dueling Doctor Faustus productions become the singular travesty of Doctor Foster , with Philadelphia and her theatres themselves as protagonists), or by semiotic happenstance (an actor-manager suffers a mortal blow for the crime of bad taste, while the somehow nobler though more dangerous Porter who inspired his performance faces execution on the gallows). For its part, Robert Montgomery Bird’s City Looking Glass seems to have inaugurated the sort of semiotic rough-and-tumble characteristic of a thoroughly reimagined urban-cultural landscape. Here we find ourselves for the first time in a space where Quaker earnestness and solemnity dissolve into the outrageous and the preposterous, where street scenes reveal neither “wearisome regularity” nor patriot parades but instead crooked alleyways peopled by morally-misshapen lowlifes whose machinations drive the action of the play and who seem intent upon finishing off once and for all any lingering sense of Philadelphia propriety or the idealism that supposedly characterized the city’s founding. Consensus becomes dissensus, with Philadelphia placed on display as a site for the contestation of identities. The City of Brotherly Love had stepped through the looking glass, and the streets now firmly belonged neither to sober Square Toes nor to stalwart patriots, but to the rascals, the reprobates and the scoundrels. References [1] Gary B. Nash, First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 124. [2] Ibid., 109. [3] Ibid., 8-9. [4] Bird, City Looking Glass (Philadelphia: 1828), 4. [5] Ibid. [6] “A Mirror of the Times: A History of the Mirror Metaphor in Journalism” Journalism Studies , vol. 12, no. 5 (2011): 578. [7] Samuel Otter, Philadelphia Stories: America’s Literature of Race and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 8. [8] Ibid. [9] Ibid. [10] Francis Courtney. Wemyss, Twenty-Six Years of the Life of an Actor and Manager (New York: Burgess, Stringer and Co., 1847), 84–5. [11] Peter P. Reed, Rogue Performances: Staging the Underclasses in Early American Theatre Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 133. [12] Ibid., 137. [13] Otter, Philadelphia Stories , 11. [14] Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (New York: Alfred K. Knopf, 1949), 260–61. [15] Hamilton, Men and Manners in America (New York: Augustus M. Keeley, 1968), 337–38. [16] Otter, Philadelphia Stories , 73. [17] Bird, City Looking Glass , 6. [18] Ibid., 66. [19] Otter, Philadelphia Stories , 88. [20] Bird, City Looking Glass , 18. [21] Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649 – 1849 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 3. [22] Bird. City Looking Glass , 114. [23] Simon Newman, Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 122–3. [24] Ibid. [25] Bird, City Looking Glass , 48. [26] Ibid., 49. [27] Otter, Philadelphia Stories , 105–6. [28] Ibid., 87. [29] Christian DuComb, Haunted City: Three Centuries of Racial Impersonation in Philadelphia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 60. [30] Douglas A. Jones, Jr., The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 34. [31] Ibid. [32] Bird, City Looking Glass , 45. [33] Nash, First City , 147. [34] John Fanning Watson, Annals of Philadelphia: Being a Collection of Memoirs, Anecdotes, and Incidents of the City and Its Inhabitants (Philadelphia: 1830), 479. [35] Bird, City Looking Glass , 30. [36] Ibid., 52. [37] Gayard Wilmore, ed., African American Religious Studies: An Interdisciplinary Anthology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), 7. [38] Watson, Annals of Philadelphia , 479. [39] Bird, City Looking Glass , 21. [40] Columbia Star and Christian Index (Philadelphia: 15 May 1830), 318. [41] Michael Feldberg, The Philadelphia Riots of 1844: A Study of Ethnic Conflict (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1975), 4, 13. [42] Charles Durang, The Philadelphia Stage from 1749 – 1850 (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Sunday Dispatch, 1854-55), vol. III, 243. [43] Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans , 286. [44] Philadelphia Saturday Bulletin . INCOMPLETE CITATION, (Philadelphia: 15 May h , 1830). [45] Nash, First City , 157. [46] Columbia Star and Christian Index. INCOMPLETE CITATION, 318. [47] Naomi J. Stubbs, Cultivating National Identity through Performance: American Pleasure Gardens and Entertainment (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 54. [48] Ibid. [49] Quoted in Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 275. [50] Ibid. [51] American Sentinel and Mercantile Advertiser (Philadelphia: 3 July 1830). [52] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 243. [53] Reed, Rogue Performances , 10. [54] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 243. [55] Reed, Rogue Performances , 5. [56] Ibid. [57] Oscar Weglin, Early American Plays, 1774 – 1830: A Compilation of the Titles of Plays and Dramatic Poems Written by Authors Born or Residing in North America Previous to 1830 (New York: The Literary Collector Press, 1905), 21. [58] Francis Courtney Wemyss, Theatrical Biography, or The Life of an Actor Manager (Glasgow: Griffin & Co., 1848), 160. [59] The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 243. [60] Ibid. [61] Reed. Rogue Performances , 186. [62] Ibid., 15. [63] Wemyss, Theatrical Biography , 153. [64] William Wood, Personal Recollections of the Stage (Philadelphia: Henry Carey Baird, 1855), 353. [65] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 266. [66] Ibid. [67] Wemyss, Theatrical Biography , 154. [68] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [69] Ibid. [70] Otter, Philadelphia Stories , 14. [71] Stubbs, Cultivating National Identity through Performance , 59. [72] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [73] John O’Brien, Harlequin Britain: Pantomime and Entertainment, 1600 – 1760 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 110. [74] Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation , ed. Patricia Ingham (New York: Penguin, 2000), 104. [75] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [76] Dillon, New World Drama , 29–30. [77] Nicholas B. Wainwright, “The Age of Nicholas Biddle: 1825–1841” in Philadelphia: a 300-Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1982), 301. [78] Rosemarie K. Bank, Theatre Culture in America , 1825–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 14. [79] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [80] Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 124. [81] Jones, Jr., The Captive Stage , 49. [82] Ibid. [83] Nash., First City , 231. [84] The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [85] Newman, Embodied History , 10. [86] LeRoy B. DePuy, “The Walnut Street Prison: Pennsylvania’s First Penitentiary.” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies . vol. 18, no. 2 (1951): 131. [87] Reed, Rogue Performances , 5. [88] Durang, Philadelphia Stage , vol III, 271. [89] Nash, First City , 201. [90] DuComb, Haunted City: Three Centuries of Racial Impersonation in Philadelphia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 90. [91] Saturday Evening Post . (Philadelphia: INCOMPLETE CITATION AND DATE FORMAT 21 May, 1825). [92] Susan G. Davis, “The Career of Colonel Pluck: Folk Drama and Public Protest in 19 th Century Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography , vol. 109 no. 2 (April 1985): 188. [93] Ducomb, Haunted City , 89–91. [94] O’Brien, Harlequin Britain , 110. [95] Durang, The Philadelphia Stage , vol. III, 271. [96] Ibid. Footnotes About The Author(s) RAYMOND SARACENI teaches in the Center for Liberal Education at Villanova University. He is a company member of Iron Age Theatre and holds a Ph.D. in drama from Tufts University. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue “An Art for Which There Is as Yet No Name.” Mobile Color, Artistic Composites, Temporal Objects The Anti-Victorianism of Victorian Revivals Tricks, Capers, and Highway Robbery: Philadelphia Self-Enactment upon the Early Jacksonian Stage “The Spirit of the Thing is All”: The Federal Theatre’s Staging of Medieval Drama in the Los Angeles Religious Community The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida Rise Up! 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Collin Vorbeck Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 32 2 Visit Journal Homepage Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies Collin Vorbeck By Published on June 12, 2020 Download Article as PDF Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies . Edited by Rhonda Blair and Amy Cook. London: Bloomsbury, 2016; Pp. 243+xii. Rhonda Blair and Amy Cook’s co-edited volume Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies advances the cross-disciplinary discourse inspired by the cognitive turn by interrogating the ways practitioners and audiences make meaning through our varied encounters with theatre. Buoyed by their individual groundbreaking scholarship in the field, the editors curate a complex collection of American and international perspectives that how “the implications of embodied, embedded, enacted and extended minds” impact engagement with a variety of performing arts (3). Their volume invigorates the intersection of theatre and cognition with incisive case studies that partner physiological and psychological research to expand our awareness of how we generate understanding of performance. Blair and Cook argue that our embodied experiences shape the meanings we draw from theatrical encounters, and they structure their book to explore the three cognitive relationships evoked by their subtitle: interpretation of the text, communication through action, and synergy of performance and environment. This structure subtly mirrors a production process and moves organically from script analysis through the rehearsal process to engaged performance, exposing cognitive revelations with each progression. The editors provide a salient overview of the current landscape of cognitive studies, and they succinctly introduce each section to frame their selected essays. Blair and Cook augment their cross-disciplinary emphasis by concluding each section with a response from a preeminent cognitive scholar. Culminating in an inventive After Words section, this invitingly conversational volume offers practitioners and scholars fresh perspectives on how theatre and performance create meaning on the page and on the stage. Blair and Cook’s first section explores the way language creates and sustains realities onstage by applying cognitive linguistics and metaphor theory to dramatic texts. Barbara Dancygier investigates how the materiality embedded within the script influences reception. She outlines what she calls the “dramatic anchors” in Julius Caesar and Richard II that trigger deeper meanings and layered connections throughout each play, directly citing Caesar’s mantle and Richard’s mirror as material elements that activate understanding (32). Laura Seymour’s essay also draws from Julius Caesar , focusing on the behaviors of the conspirators prior to the assassination. Seymour studies the act of kneeling and other bodily-situated references to address how these seemingly acquiescent actions engender metaphorical associations in readers and audiences. Vera Tobin moves away from specific dramatic texts to inspect the inherently theatrical elements of irony. She borrows from conceptual blending theory to illustrate how comprehending irony requires the activation of multiple mental spaces derived from “how we move around within a particular viewpoint configuration” (66). Cognitive linguist Mark Turner responds to this section by praising its interdisciplinary endeavors and outlining methodologies that will bolster future partnerships between cognition and performance. The second section examines the ways the enacted body creates and sustains meaning through a wide variety of artistic engagement, partnering performance strategies with neuroscientific research to investigate the power of perception. Neal Utterback’s essay proposes a theatre training model, for instance, that draws from the psychological and physiological rigors of Olympic competition to create an actor-athlete regimen. To prepare his student actors for sustained engagement in their performances, Utterback developed a process that uses “power posing combined with mental imagery and positive self-talk” to connect the benefits of cognitive perception to embodied results (80). Dance scholar Warburton surveys ArtsCross , an international collaborative event, and zooms in on the psychophysical experiences enacted during the rehearsal process. He compares the physical and mental output utilized when marking versus dancing full-out and concludes that the compression and compartmentalization of marking “reduces the multi-layered cognitive load used when learning choreography” (102). Christopher Jackman furthers the discussion of memory and suggests “an enactive model of cognition” that attempts to avoid the hurdles of self-consciousness in performance (108). Jackman’s mindful approach to training at times feels overcrowded, but his goal to build and maintain the skills of acting through neuroscientific methods is intriguing. Cognitive psychologist Catherine J. Stevens responds to this section by citing recent interdisciplinary studies that seek to deepen understanding of the embodied experiences explored by these essays, specifically attuned to dance and movement. The final section of Blair and Cook’s ambitious book considers how cognition evolves dynamically through engagement with the environment, stressing the importance of accounting for spatiotemporal realities when assessing potential meanings of a given event. Evelyn Tribble’s essay provides a broad overview of these relationships, using television cooking shows, the English Restoration theatre system, and copious cross-disciplinary sources to support her argument. Tribble contends that “distributed cognition” makes possible the “overwhelming cognitive load” required to perform, and that structures external to the body – a theatre, a school, or a familiar kitchen set-up – play a crucial role in understanding how to navigate a given situation (134). Similarly, Sarah McCarroll parallels the cultural signification of fashion with historical stage performances to argue that conscious “body images” and pre-cognitive “body schemas” coalesce to form what she calls the “body map” (144). Her fascinating study of the costume choices in J.M. Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton illustrates how clothing combines with the environment to both enable and restrict embodied action. Shifting modalities, Matt Hayler introduces a new approach to digital technologies and asks readers to actively engage online with his chosen examples. He argues that such engagement results in “reflexive relationships” that impart circular cognitive meaning by continually informing the experience through feedback loops (162). Philosopher Shaun Gallagher responds to this section by applying his “prenoetic” theory of human cognition to each essay, demonstrating the subconscious ways the body interacts with environments, clothing, and technology to make meaning (175). Blair and Cook further their cross-disciplinary endeavor by crafting a unique After Words section that provides deeper insights into the existing scholarship undergirding the emerging field. Through personal essays and interviews with a wide range of theatre practitioners, Blair and Cook reveal how pervasive cognitive studies has become to scholars and creators alike. Their conversation with Deb Margolis is particularly illuminating as the performing artist, teacher, and playwright discusses her own understanding of the important connection between the physical and cognitive limitations of the body. In a time when gathering for live performance is no longer an option due to pandemic, Theatre, Performance and Cognition finds a way to ingeniously engage with elements of the embodied experience that are simultaneously obvious and revelatory, and its essays speak to all levels of cognitive curiosities. What is more, the editors curate an excellent balance of dense but illuminating neuroscientific data and complimentary theatre-making examples. Blair and Cook’s thoughtful commentary throughout this book provides theorists and practitioners alike with inventive methods to approach current work and to create new scholarship, cognizant of the dynamic processes within our bodies that shape our understanding. Interest in cognitive/theatrical scholarship shows no signs of waning, and this volume further demonstrates the value of addressing complex aspects of performance with interdisciplinary lenses. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Collin Vorbeck Texas Tech University Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl A Player and a Gentleman: The Diary of Harry Watkins, Nineteenth-Century US American Actor The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography Introduction: Local Acts: Performing Communities, Performing Americas The Architecture of Local Performance: Stages of the Taliesin Fellowship “La conjura de Xinum” and Language Revitalization: Understanding Maya Agency through Theatre Exploring the History and Implications of Toxicity through St. Louis: Performance Artist Allana Ross and the “Toxic Mound Tours” Finding Home in the World Stage: Critical Creative Citizenship and the 13th South Asian Theatre Festival 2018 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Verna A. Foster Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 32 1 Visit Journal Homepage Excavating American Theatrical History: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors, Appropriate, and An Octoroon Verna A. Foster By Published on November 6, 2019 Download Article as PDF In creating his plays Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has repeatedly chosen to rewrite, adapt, or otherwise appropriate earlier theatrical styles or dramatic texts. Three of his plays, in particular, Neighbors , Appropriate , and An Octoroon —described by one critic as a “trilogy of highly provocative and fantastical explorations of race in America” [1] —radically excavate and revise historical styles of performance or dramatic literature to explore ideas of blackness and racial attitudes in contemporary America. In Neighbors Jacobs-Jenkins updates blackface minstrelsy; in Appropriate he borrows, or appropriates, characters, situations, and motifs from “every play that [he] liked” in the genre of American family drama in order to “cook the pot to see what happens”; [2] and in An Octoroon he adapts Dion Boucicault’s nineteenth-century melodrama The Octoroon as his own “meta-melodrama.” Jacobs-Jenkins has commented that these three plays “are all kind of like me dealing with something very specific, which has to do with the history of theater and blackness in America and form.” [3] In a more recent interview Jacobs-Jenkins sharpens his earlier ideas about theatrical form in a striking image that will inform the rest of this essay; he says that he thinks of “genre or old forms” as “interesting artifacts that invite a kind of archeology of seeing.” [4] Neighbors , Appropriate , and An Octoroon enable the multiple-layered seeing that Jacobs-Jenkins is talking about because they require comparative viewing across the adapted and adaptive works themselves and across the cultures or historical periods that produced them. The diverse ways in which Jacobs-Jenkins excavates “old forms” in these three plays both reveal and create new layers of historical meaning that call for new ways of seeing and thinking about America’s racial heritage. [5] Jacobs-Jenkins’s innovative work makes possible a fresh and experiential interracial discussion of race relations in America—a discussion that is much needed in the present tense political climate. At the same time his plays push the boundaries of what adaptation can accomplish and offer further refinements to the current discourse on adaptation theory. Adaptation has increasingly become a major object of study by literary scholars. In the mid-twentieth century, much of the pioneering work consisted in studies, both practical and theoretical, of the adaptation of novels into film. Since 2000, scholars such as Linda Hutcheon and Julie Sanders have extended the discussion to adaptations of other literary genres, myth, visual art, history, and biography in multiple media. In A Theory of Adaptation (first published in 2006) Hutcheon defines an adaptation as “an extended, announced, deliberate revisitation of a particular work of art.” [6] While adaptations often entail changing the medium or genre of the source text, they may include any intermedial or intramedial, intergeneric or intrageneric updating or other reworking of an earlier work. The process of adaptation may entail retelling stories, reimagining characters, changing geographical and temporal contexts. It may include “transmotivation,” “transfocalization,” or “transvalorization”—terms used by Gérard Genette in Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (1982), an important theoretical work on the relation between “hypertext” (adaptation) and “hypotext” (adapted work) that anticipated by a couple of decades the recent surge in adaptation studies. [7] Often transmotivation, transfocalization, and transvalorization work together. Adaptation is a creative, interpretative, and political act. In Adaptation and Appropriation (2006) Sanders notes that while adaptations serve to perpetuate and confirm the canonicity of adapted works, they also frequently subvert the assumptions of their source texts or reinterpret them from a contemporary political perspective to make them “fit,” in a quasi-Darwinian sense, for new cultural environments. [8] An adaptation may criticize either the assumptions of the adapted text or the adapter’s own society or both. Jacobs-Jenkins’s plays variously demonstrate how adaptation operates creatively in producing new works and also critically and politically, not in this instance by reinterpreting the adapted texts, but by exposing how their damaging and supposedly outdated racial assumptions continue to inform contemporary racial attitudes. It is in the interstices between adapted work and adaptation, or to use Jacobs-Jenkins’s archeological metaphor, in the stratigraphy, that the important cultural and political work of adaptation takes place. Neighbors , Appropriate , and An Octoroon are all intrageneric adaptations; that is, they are plays that adapt other plays, or in the case of Neighbors other performances, in the same dramatic genre. Intrageneric adaptation has received less theoretical attention than intergeneric or intermedial adaptation. It is, however, precisely the similarities in formal attributes (and in dramatic adaptation, in styles of performance)—not just resemblances in events or characters—between adapted work and adaptation that enable the complex layered seeing advocated by Jacobs-Jenkins. This “archeology of seeing” goes beyond the “oscillation” between texts that Hutcheon suggests is characteristic of audience members’ reception of adaptations; rather it entails what she calls their “palimpsestuous” experience as layers of text are “multilaminated” onto one another. [9] Following Hutcheon, Jane Barnette notes that a palimpsest “can be read simultaneously or sequentially—that is, (to an extent) one can isolate layers for consideration, or take in the entirety of the palimpsest at once,” and, importantly, she reminds us that the “stage palimpsest will necessarily” be based more on “image and sound” than on the words in the play text. [10] Simultaneous “tak[ing] in” implies the audience’s experiential engagement with what they see and hear; “consideration” of separate layers (as in archeology) requires Brechtian critical distance and analysis. Neighbors , Appropriate , and An Octoroon call for both kinds of reading. While all three plays perform similar kinds of cultural work, in each play Jacobs-Jenkins adapts a different historical form of theatrical entertainment and adopts correspondingly different kinds of innovative adaptive strategies designed to manipulate audiences into a self-conscious recognition of their own complicity in the racial assumptions he excavates. An Octoroon most closely adheres to, though it also transcends, Hutcheon’s definition of an adaptation as “an extended, announced, deliberate revisitation of a particular work of art.” Neighbors and Appropriate expand the parameters of adaptation in other ways, the former by adapting and recontextualizing an historical form of popular entertainment, the latter by adapting not a particular play, but an entire dramatic subgenre. I will discuss the three plays separately in order to bring out their distinctive qualities as intrageneric dramatic adaptations. Asserting that he was not afraid of black images that would generally be found offensive, in the earliest play in the “trilogy,” Neighbors (2010), Jacobs-Jenkins adopts tropes from the nineteenth-century blackface minstrel show that are uncomfortably crude and undeniably racist. [11] By exaggerating the embodiments of blackness and the comic and musical routines characteristic of the minstrel shows to the point of an absurdity so explosive that laughter becomes problematic, Jacobs-Jenkins launches a savage satiric attack on racist stereotypes. At the same time by theorizing and teaching his audience about the history of blackface entertainment through the dialogue of the minstrels themselves, Jacobs-Jenkins invites a more dispassionate Brechtian evaluation of the emotionally charged minstrel show devices he depicts. Finally, by placing his minstrel characters in a contemporary context and eliciting empathy for them as human beings and as artists, Jacobs-Jenkins opens up a yet more complicated and difficult way of seeing his nineteenth-century source material while confronting audiences with the ways in which the minstrel stereotypes continued to operate in popular culture and populist politics throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Like stratigraphic layers in archeology, the layering of past and present in Neighbors requires complex seeing. First performed at the Public Theater in New York in 2010, and subtitled “an epic with cartoons,” [12] Neighbors depicts what happens when the Crows, a family of minstrels played by actors in blackface, move in next door to the Pattersons—Richard, a black classics professor, Jean, his white wife, and Melody, their teenage daughter. The Crows, to the best of my knowledge, have always been played by black actors in blackface, although a note in the text states, “the ethnicity and/or gender of the actors playing the Crows is not specified.” [13] The play combines dramatic realism in the scenes involving the Pattersons with satirically exaggerated blackface minstrelsy. The Crows—Mammy, Zip Coon, Sambo, Topsy, and Jim Crow—play updated versions of the infamous parts suggested by their names. Zip Coon, “very well-dressed,” sporting a top hat, and walking “ jauntily ” and “ dandily ” (250, 230, 238) is the classic dandy of nineteenth-century minstrel shows; Mammy, “ample” of bosom (301) and forceful of manner, channels Hattie McDaniel’s character in Gone with the Wind (310), while Topsy is both “picaninni” and a version of Josephine Baker. The Crows wear black paint, have huge red lips, and, except for Jim, and Zip in his conversations with Jean, speak with the caricatured dialect and malapropisms of their nineteenth-century originals. For much of the play Jim Crow refuses to take on the eponymous role of his late father, though by the end he too performs his part in a rousing version of the minstrel song and dance number “Jump Jim Crow,” his new-found talent inspired apparently by the admiration of Melody. [14] Jacobs-Jenkins uses Melody and Jean to introduce the audience to the Crow family as people rather than “cartoons.” A romantic relationship develops between rebellious Melody and shy Jim Crow, beginning with the “ awkward tenderness ” of the moment when Jim gently removes an eyelash from Melody’s face (232). Meanwhile Zip Coon suavely charms Jean, encouraging her to talk about herself and taking an interest in her poetry in contrast to Richard’s obsession with his own career and status. Richard is horrified by the Crow family’s moving in next door. They represent for him his worst nightmare about how his white neighbors might perceive him despite his education and professional, middle-class standing: “People will see them and . . . think we’re related!” (250). His intolerance alienates his wife and daughter, who turn to the Crows for love and support. The Crows have been on “hiatus”—the word is used repeatedly (231, 235, 242)—after the death of Jim Crow, Sr. for an uncertain period of time, suggesting that they may have come literally from the nineteenth century, and are, like Pirandello’s Six Characters, in search of their life on the stage in the form of their much-vaunted “comeback” (261). Certainly, they belong to a different theatrical world and tradition than the Pattersons. Throughout the play the Crows rehearse and quarrel about who should do what in their upcoming show. In parallel scenes the Pattersons, themselves relatively new to town, enact the realistic drama of modern marital and generational conflict inflected by anxieties over social and professional status in a new job, new school, and new neighborhood. Interspersed among the Crows’ comically fraught rehearsal scenes and the Pattersons’ emotionally fraught domestic scenes are two lectures on Greek tragedy given by Richard to his students and four “Interludes,” in which Zip, Sambo, Mammy, and Topsy each in turn performs a grossly exaggerated version of the specialty acts typically included in minstrel shows. [15] Zip struggles to transport an armful of musical instruments, drops them, and with his pants falling down finally succeeds in carrying a bugle in his anus. Sambo is chased repeatedly across the stage by a lawnmower, loses his grass skirt, and uses his long “ firehose penis ” to have sexual intercourse with a watermelon, which he then eats (273). After setting a pile of leaves on fire with a cigarette, Mammy puts out the fire with milk spurting from her enormous breasts, with which she also feeds two white babies, twirling them around in the air from her appendages. The emphasis on huge body parts, especially eyes, lips, and feet, was characteristic of representations of black people in minstrel shows. [16] Jacobs-Jenkins takes these grotesque depictions to a new level, savagely satirizing white obsession with black male sexuality and white appropriation of black female fecundity. [17] The representations of minstrelsy in Neighbors send ambiguous—or multilayered—messages to the play’s audiences, who have responded accordingly with embarrassed, confused, and uncertain laughter or have not known whether they should laugh at all. As reported by one reviewer of Company One’s production of Neighbors in Boston in 2011, for example, the cast “keeps you uncertain of whether you’re expected to laugh or cringe, engage or retreat, and sends you off wondering why you reacted in whatever, inevitably complex ways you did.” [18] Another reviewer of this production commented that “it feels like we should applaud [the Crows’] shtick as members of the fictional audience, but not as the actual audience.” [19] Jim Crow’s song and dance, while not one of the formal “Interludes,” is a case in point. Jim’s performance, so admired by Melody that she gives the dazed Jim a blowjob, seems, according to Jacobs-Jenkins’s stage directions, designed to be genuinely remarkable and worthy of the theatre audience’s admiration as well as Melody’s. At the beginning of his performance, dressed in “ straw hat, striped suit, and enormous bowtie ,” Jim looks “ ridiculous ,” but also “ amazing ” (285). Caught up into his act, Jim is “ like a hurricane unleashed ,” “ the most incredible thing you have ever seen in your entire life ,” even though he also shares characteristics with his minstrel forebears — “ eyes bugged out, limbs loose, moving, dancing, mo’ coon than a little bit ” (288). Jacobs-Jenkins here invites audiences to engage in an act of complex seeing, requiring them simultaneously to cheer Jim for his newfound expertise and to censure his embodiment of his nominal stereotype, to admire aesthetically what they must also condemn historically. But this is not all. Jacobs-Jenkins introduces Jim’s real feelings. He is “ humiliated ” by what he has to do (285). He is able to perform only by becoming “ almost like a man possessed ” (288) . And at the end of the act he holds a musical note so long that the cookie jar holding his father’s ashes explodes, “ releasing an enormous cloud of ash ,” whose haze “ should remain present ” for the rest of the play (289). Jim’s brilliant performance contains so much pain and anger that it breaks open his family’s theatrical past with lingering consequences. At the end of the play the Crow Family Minstrels do not give us the “comeback” show that their rehearsals have perhaps led us to expect but something much more radical. Topsy’s “Interlude” late in the play (labeled “Interlude/Interruption” [309] to mark its difference from the other Interludes) contributes in a different way to Jacobs-Jenkins’s creation of an “archeology of seeing” in Neighbors . In the form of a “stump speech” (in minstrel performances a ridiculous lecture replete with malapropisms on a topical subject [20] ), Topsy talks to the audience about what she hopes they have been enjoying so far. While respecting her family’s traditional show pieces, Topsy feels they are too “commercial.” She sees herself as a more forward-looking “artist” and expresses her own ideas about how art should deal with “the shared human experiamentience.” She presents to the audience “summa the stuff” she has been working on, which turns out to be “ the history of African Americans onstage” crammed into three spectacular minutes of music, video projections, dance, etc., etc. (depending presumably on the resources of the theatre). The effect, according to the stage directions, is supposed to be “ absolutely nothing less than utter, utter transcendence ” (310). At this point the play celebrates the history of African-American entertainment from Josephine Baker, channeled by Topsy in her diamond-studded halter top and banana skirt (309), to artists such as Sister Sledge, Beyoncé, and others, whose songs may be incorporated here or may have been used throughout the play as in the New York production of Neighbors . [21] At the same time, as Charles Isherwood of the New York Times notes, Jacobs-Jenkins’s contextualization of the performances of these later artists within Topsy’s act suggests that they too can be seen as just another form of minstrelsy. [22] Jacobs-Jenkins’s final direction for Topsy, “ And maybe it ends with her masturbating with a banana. In front of a strobe light ” (310), comically undercuts the “ utter, utter transcendence ” he has just described, but it does so in such a way as to mock (give the finger—or the banana—to) what has been historically a largely white and often exploitative entertainment industry rather than the artists themselves. By opening up the “old form” of the minstrel show, Jacobs-Jenkins exposes old meanings and layers new ones onto them. In talking directly to the audience about the show they are watching, Topsy serves an educational function, metatheatrically drawing attention to Jacobs-Jenkins’s work of theatrical excavation. In this respect her role anticipates that of the authorial figure BJJ in An Octoroon , who teaches his audience about melodrama. More literally educational are Richard’s lectures on Greek tragedy, which can be seen as his form of performance, or his interludes. In the first lecture Richard explores the origin of tragedy in our lives, suggesting that it comes from choices we have made in the past that “haunt” us “deep into our very present” (240). In his second lecture—on Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis —Richard layers his own experience as a black man in America onto the story of Agamemnon and Iphigenia. Richard explains that the origin of Agamemnon’s tragedy lies in events that occurred before the action of the play begins. By boasting that he was as good a hunter as the goddess Diana, Agamemnon had “the gall to get ‘uppity’” with the gods (291). As a punishment Diana denies him wind to sail to Troy and requires the sacrifice of his daughter to appease her. Richard, however, blames the sacrifice not on the gods (standing in for white people in his mind) but on the demands of Agamemnon’s “uncouth, country-ass soldiers with no self-control, sitting in the port raping women and drinking all the time and ain’t got no jobs and don’t talk Greek good” (292)—clearly, for Richard, a version of the Crows. Richard then conflates Iphigenia’s willingness to sacrifice herself with what he sees as Melody’s defection to the Crows. (During the lecture the audience can hear Melody giving her blowjob to Jim Crow.) Richard believes that Agamemnon, “a new breed of Achaean,” should have resisted and saved his—Richard, distraught, slips and says, “my”—daughter (292, 293). By layering African-American history onto Greek myth, Richard constructs an alternative “archeology of seeing” to Topsy’s—and Jacobs-Jenkins’s—excavation of the minstrel show that is the play’s main focus. While the minstrel show provides the bedrock of his dramatic archeology, Jacobs-Jenkins also exposes the later cultural and political stereotypes of blackness that have been layered onto the tropes of minstrelsy. This cultural stratigraphy is especially apparent in the sequence late in the play in which the Crows encourage Jim not to be nervous in the upcoming show because, Mammy says, the audience “luvs evathang we does” (317). Topsy, Sambo, and Mammy (Zip is busy fighting Richard) recite a litany of what white people readily enjoy about black performance, staged or otherwise. They begin with the repertoire of minstrel shows and the comic roles played by black characters in the early films and television programs that succeeded them, move on to the repertoire of contemporary cultural stereotypes, and conclude with the repertoire of protest: “They luvs when we dance,” “When we guffaws and slaps our thighs lak dis,” “When we be misprunoudenencing wards wrongs en stuff,” “When we make our eyes big and rolls em lak dis”; “When we be hummin’ in church and wear big hats and be like, ‘Mmmm! Testify!,” “When we ax all sad and be like, ‘Dat’s de bluez’,” “When we say stuff lak, ‘My baby mama!’”; “They luvs it when we soliloquizing like, ‘The white maaann!’,” “‘The white man put me in jail!’,” “‘I can’t get out the ghettooooo!’,” “‘Respect me, white maaaaan!’,” “‘’Cause I’m so angrrryyyy!’” (317–18). All of these historically situated stereotypes, Jacobs-Jenkins implies, are based in white views of black performative behavior deriving ultimately from the minstrel shows. The kind of dramatic excavation practiced in Neighbors is thus a form of both pedagogy and political protest. The protest becomes most explicit at the end of Neighbors when the Crows finally put on their show. Instead of performing themselves, they put the (real) audience on display: “ We watch them. They watch us. We watch each other ” (319). Channeling perhaps Peter Handke’s Offending the Audience , the Crows work to make the theatre audience, laminated onto their own dramatic audience, conscious of itself specifically as an audience and as consumers of black entertainment wittingly or unwittingly complicit in the stereotypes they have witnessed: “ the family point to people in the audience and whisper together, sometimes mockingly, sometimes out of concern. Maybe they giggle ” (319). In this finale Jacobs-Jenkins deprives his audience of their collectivity and requires them to question their own individual reactions to his play. The Crows’ uncomfortable, not to say embarrassing, interrogative gaze anticipates that of the zanier Br’er Rabbit, who wanders through An Octoroon slyly inviting the audience of that play to reflect upon their own and each other’s responses. The audiences’ self-reflections that Jacobs-Jenkins so carefully constructs in response to all three of his plays constitute a further layer in his “archeology of seeing.” After the conclusion of their “show” the Crows take a curtain call, but that is not the end. There is a coda, which members of the audience leaving the theatre (according to Jacobs-Jenkins’s stage directions) might or might not see. Melody, looking “ different now ,” meets Jim at the stage door and asks him how he feels, and “ the actor playing Jim Crow starts to tell her how he really feels ” (319). In this moment Jacobs-Jenkins blurs illusion and reality by introducing the actors as actors and by inviting any spectators present (or at least readers) to imagine what the attitude of the twenty-first century actor playing Jim Crow might “ really ” be towards the part he has played. Unlike historical excavations, which lead archeologists ever deeper into the past, in Neighbors Jacobs-Jenkins excavates upwards into the present, reaching his deepest layer in the feelings of a putative contemporary actor beneath those of a reluctant performer beneath those of a minstrel character. The archeology of Appropriate (2013) works in a rather different way. Jacobs-Jenkins’s excavations in this play are broad rather than deep and as much literary as theatrical or performative. In Appropriate Jacobs-Jenkins layers his own work on top of familiar topoi from the genre of American family drama. Such plays, with their focus on “family dysfunction and buried secrets,” [23] include Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night , Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , Sam Shepard’s Buried Child , Horton Foote’s Dividing the Estate , and Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County . In writing in this well-worked vein of white family drama, Jacobs-Jenkins aimed to produce a play in which, he says, blackness is “invisible” yet still “charge[s] the room.” [24] Appropriate is about a white family—overbearing, divorced sister (Toni), conventional businessman brother and his Jewish wife (Bo and Rachael), prodigal brother and erstwhile sex offender (Franz), his much younger New Age fiancée (River), and various children. The family return after their father’s/grandfather’s death to the old family home in Arkansas: a decaying mansion with ancestral and slave graveyards on the property of what was once a plantation. Bo hated the plantation with its bugs and its “endless stories” about Civil War ancestors. But Toni says, “I always liked Grandma’s stories. Though I can’t remember any of them now. . . . This place has history—our history.” [25] If the plantation clearly symbolizes America’s history, the members of the Lafayette family represent its contemporary cultural geography. Toni returns from Atlanta, Bo and Rachael from New York, and Franz and River from Portland. According to Jacobs-Jenkins, Toni represents the “New South” with its feeling of being “betrayed by the rest of the country”; the West represents new possibilities, enabling Franz to “reinvent” himself; and New York connects Bo (with his smart phone) to a “bigger world” and “forward momentum.” [26] While atmospheric cicadas make symbolic noise in the background, the family members quarrel over long-standing grievances and over their inheritance, which, to their horror, includes an album filled with photographs of lynchings. The unseen photographs of lynchings in Appropriate anticipate the even more profoundly shocking real-life photograph of a lynching that audiences do see in An Octoroon . Over the course of the play the album is passed from one family member to another, eliciting various “white” responses (including “shock, disgust, curiosity, fascination, disregard, aversion”) as each of them has to try to find a way to deal with what it represents about their father, their family history, their own racial attitudes—and whether or not they can sell the photos for a substantial sum as collector’s items. [27] The family’s various responses are “white,” Kee-Yoon Nahm explains, because they are the reactions of people who can in no way share in the experiences documented by the photos. [28] In the end Bo is prevented from selling the photos because Franz feels called to “cleanse” himself and his family by jumping into the nearby lake, taking the photos with him: “I took everything—all my pain, all Daddy’s pain, this family’s pain, the pictures—and I left it there. I washed it away” (97). Franz’s desire for redemption is another “white” response; Nahm reminds us of those “not included in the healing ritual.” [29] The play’s ending suggests that while some personal progress may be possible in healing family rifts, especially for younger members of the family, only time can cleanse the house of its racial past by demolishing it. In the play’s final sequence, representing an indeterminate period of time marked by stylized blackouts followed immediately by the lights coming up again, the audience bears witness as the house, established by now as a representation of America, is casually inhabited by various strangers and literally falls apart. Appropriate bears many of the generic markers of American family drama. But Jacobs-Jenkins’s adaptive strategy in this play is less explicit than it is in Neighbors or An Octoroon , in which he incorporates explanations of the genres or texts he adapts—in the Crow family’s comments on their work in Neighbors and in educational addresses to the audience from dramatist BJJ and Dion Boucicault himself in An Octoroon —for the benefit of those who might not be familiar with his sources. His comments in interviews on the generic affiliation of Appropriate suggest that Jacobs-Jenkins assumed that audiences would already be sufficiently familiar with American family drama to interpret this play’s complex stratigraphy without further pedagogical intervention on his part. [30] In Appropriate , contrary to Hutcheon’s exclusion of “short intertextual allusions to other works” from consideration as adaptations, [31] Jacobs-Jenkins works primarily through such brief allusions to adapt, not a particular prior text, but a whole genre. He alludes both to tropes common across American family drama—a genre characterized by its content and its realism rather than by any particular structural features—and to specific details from well-known plays. This strategy produces a general sense of familiarity that, as reviewer Erin Keene, observes, “creates a comfort zone for audience members who are then periodically shocked out of their complacency—we know these people, we know this genre—by the reemergence of the album.” [32] The broadly familiar content of Appropriate is punctuated, too, by more precise allusions that Jacobs-Jenkins chooses to italicize and engage with in order to render visible within the parameters of the white American family play a discourse about blackness. In one way Jacobs-Jenkins puts his whole play in quotation marks through his opening and closing sequences that stand outside stage time and outside the realism usually associated with American family drama. At the beginning the “ incessant chatter ” of cicadas “ fills and sweeps the theater in pulsing pitch-black waves ” (13), assaulting the audience’s senses in an almost Artaudian manner for what seems like an unbearably long time; at the end alternating darkness and light represent the passing of many years as the house falls apart and the cicadas fall silent. In between these striking bookends Jacobs-Jenkins follows his predecessors in his chosen genre from O’Neill to Letts in depicting—sometimes with an exaggeration so subtle that it barely puts a dent in the ostensible realism of his presentation—family secrets, unhappy marriages, sibling rivalry, and conflicts between parents and children fueled by drugs or alcohol. The play’s opening sequence, however, invites the audience to adopt a critical stance to what they are about to see, especially in those moments when Jacobs-Jenkins’s layering of a new meaning over an old motif makes itself most sharply felt, giving Appropriate its revisionist edge. Appropriate opens with the initially unexplained arrival of Franz and River jumping through a window into a “ very disorderly ” living room cluttered with old and new furniture as cicadas hum in the background (15). It is an opening that comically echoes the odd, unexpected homecoming of Vince and his girlfriend, Shelly, who enter an equally bizarre and decrepit living room to the incessant sound of rain at the beginning of act two of Buried Child . Franz and River are startled by the waking of a figure on the couch, who turns out to be Rhys, Toni’s son, just as Shelley is startled by Dodge, Vince’s grandfather, whom she arouses from sleep. The next time we see River, she has taken over the kitchen as Shelly eventually does to make bouillon for Dodge. While the “text” that Appropriate adapts is the genre of American family drama as a whole, Buried Child , itself “a veritable patchwork of allusions to well-known family plays,” will, in fact, prove to be the most significant single analog for Jacobs-Jenkins’s play. [33] The homecoming motif with which Appropriate opens quickly transforms into the airing of past grievances and the quarrel over inheritance, channeling such plays as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Dividing the Estate . Toni complains that she has always done most of the work; Rachael believes that her father-in-law was anti-Semitic. Though Toni denies this accusation and is shocked when later Rhys refers to Rachael as “the Jew bitch,” her own unreflecting anti-Semitism is apparent when she thoughtlessly says that she is not “some kind of shylock” (77, 34). Rachael makes a point of excusing both her father-in-law’s anti-Semitism and what she sees as his racial prejudice because “he cannot be held responsible for how he may have been brought up to feel or think about other people” (40, 42). The motif of anti-Semitism furthers the play’s evocation—and excavation—of the closed, racist cultural environment that enabled lynchings and is an inheritance the Lafayettes would like to disown. The debt-ridden, lost plantation over which the family quarrels evokes A Streetcar Named Desire and Dividing the Estate , as well as the play that lies behind both of them, The Cherry Orchard . Jacobs-Jenkins quotes from Lopakhin’s speech after he buys the estate on which his “father and grandfather were slaves” as an epigraph for his own play (11). Familiar character types, too, reappear in Appropriate , further establishing the play’s generic affiliation with the American family drama that Jacobs-Jenkins set out to adapt for his own purposes. The dead patriarch has counterparts in Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Beverly in August: Osage County , both of whom are absent (dying or dead) for much of their respective plays. Underscoring the link, Toni sarcastically refers to her brother as “Beauregarde ‘Big Daddy’ Lafayette” (35). Toni’s diatribes may be more unrelenting than Violet’s in August: Osage County , but the two matriarchal figures engage in similarly vitriolic attacks against members of their family. And in both plays verbal conflict degenerates into physical violence. More significant than these echoes is the familiar symbolic equation of the family home with America. In August: Osage County , for example, Barbara conflates the decay of home and family with the decay of America: “This country, this experiment, America, this hubris: what a lament, if no one saw it go.” [34] In Dividing the Estate when family members, no longer able to depend on money from their land, contemplate getting jobs at “Whataburger,” schoolteacher Pauline comments, “That’s what they say America is becoming, you know, a service economy.” [35] And in Buried Child when Shelly tells Vince that his home is “like a Norman Rockwell cover,” Vince replies, “It’s American.” [36] This “American” house with its fraught relationships and dark secrets is explicitly Vince’s “ inheritance ” (128), willed to him by his grandfather, Dodge. As Thomas P. Adler observes, Shepard displays a “peculiar power in his highly symbolic family problem plays of allegorizing the American experience, of deflating the myth of America as the New Eden.” [37] Jacobs-Jenkins transforms Shepard’s implied equation of literal and symbolic inheritance—embodied in Appropriate in the photo album of lynchings—into an explicit and particular indictment of America’s racial and racist history and its present-day consequences. Jacobs-Jenkins nods most explicitly towards his “sources” in American family drama when Rachael, trying to draw her squabbling in-laws back to the topic of what to do about the photo album, says, “Can we sit around being casually dysfunctional later and focus for one second?” (59). Despite the discovery of the explosive contents of the album, not to mention a jar of body parts—more collector’s items—and a “ pointed white hood ” (103) in which the youngest child, Ainsley, unwittingly dresses up, the Lafayettes find themselves distracted from dealing with their history by their constant need to attack and occasional attempts to reconcile with one another. Into the familiar dramatic context of this white family’s absorption in its own dysfunction Jacobs-Jenkins inserts the photo album as a reminder of the family’s and America’s deadly legacy of racism. Through this strikingly original use of the photo album, Jacobs-Jenkins achieves his objective of “writing a ‘black’ play—a play dealing with blackness in America—that has no black characters in it.” [38] Photographs, unsurprisingly, figure in many plays about families. In A Streetcar Named Desire only an unseen photograph of Belle Reve denotes Stella’s past for the people she now lives among in New Orleans, and they are not much impressed. Her neighbor, Eunice, describes the plantation house matter-of-factly as a “great big place with white columns”; Stanley boasts that he pulled Stella “down off them columns,” and she “loved it.” [39] In Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog/Underdog a “ raggedy family photo album ” (13), its photos also unseen, represents the uncertain history of brothers Linc and Booth and symbolizes as well the absence of African Americans from American history. [40] The photo album in Appropriate , by contrast, belies the apparent absence of blackness in the play by embodying and giving it an explosive motivating power that forces the white characters to confront a legacy of racism that they prefer not to acknowledge. The most significant precursor of Jacobs-Jenkins’s deployment of the photo album in Appropriate occurs in Buried Child . In Shepard’s play Shelly inquires about photographs, again unseen by the audience, that she has found upstairs—photos of a woman with red hair, a woman holding a baby, a farm, corn. She tells the family patriarch, Dodge, that they represent his past: “Your whole life’s up there hanging on the wall.” It is a past that Dodge refuses to recognize: “That isn’t me! That never was me!” (111). He does acknowledge, however, that his wife, Halie, has a “family album” that can explain “the heritage . . . all the way back to the grave” (112). The unseen album, telling its symbolic story of a “long line of corpses” (112), of incest and infanticide, prefigures the more shocking album of lynchings and dead black bodies that mesmerizes the Lafayette family in Appropriate . The photograph album in Appropriate is particularly shocking because these photos are to be understood, not only as symbolic representations, but as literal artifacts of American history. The album is deeply embedded in the action of the play as the characters try to figure out what it means and what to do with it. As an object, the album is constantly presented to the audience’s view and its unseen contents to their imagination. As a symbol, the album suffuses the consciousness of both characters and audience. The photo albums in Buried Child and Appropriate reveal what has been kept hidden. In both plays the “buried secrets” are discovered to be dead bodies. In Buried Child , Halie’s and Tilden’s murdered baby (apparently drowned by Dodge, as Franz tries to “drown” the photos of lynchings) has been literally buried in the soil behind the house. At the end of the play Tilden enters “ dripping with mud ” and carrying “ the corpse of a small child ” consisting mainly of “ bones wrapped in muddy, rotten cloth ” (132). Jacobs-Jenkins repeats this striking visual image towards the end of Appropriate when Franz enters “ soaking wet ,” carrying “ a pile of wet paper pulp—the remains of the photo album—a mess ” (108) that he has rescued from the lake. The precise resemblance of the two visual images creates a palimpsestic layering that enables the audience to see the human reality of the black flesh and bones that the now pulpy photos represent. By excavating one of the most memorable stage images in the drama of the American family and layering his own meaning on top of it, Jacobs-Jenkins italicizes his original contribution to the genre. He has written an American family drama about blackness in America that has no black characters in it but in which their absence pervades and powers the play. Shepard’s dark vision of American plenty (the harvest of corn, carrots, potatoes that grow where the murdered baby was buried) rising out of the family’s (symbolically America’s) destructive past informs and transforms into Jacobs-Jenkins’s vision of an America falling apart, undermined by its legacy of racism. [41] The image of Franz holding the sodden remains of the photos of dead black people laminated onto Shepard’s image of Tilden holding the remains of the dead baby elicits especially clearly what Jacobs-Jenkins calls an “archeology of seeing.” The meaning of this moment in Appropriate lies in the stratigraphy, and especially in the gap between layers that provides space for interpretation. The whole of An Octoroon (first produced in 2014 and remounted in 2015 by Soho Rep in New York) works through an even more radical process of layering and drawing attention to the gaps between layers to produce this kind of multiple seeing. As in Neighbors ,Jacobs-Jenkins shines a light on the politics of the play’s stratigraphy by explaining directly to his audience the features of the genre he is adapting. The technique is explicitly pedagogical and in An Octoroon inventively meta-adaptive as the contemporary playwright BJJ—a stand-in for Jacobs-Jenkins—is joined by the Playwright—the author of the source play “Dion Boucicault” —in teaching the audience how they should respond to the adaptation. In An Octoroon Jacobs-Jenkins excavates and adapts both a specific play text whose racial content would otherwise preclude performance in the twenty-first century and the now unfamiliar genre of nineteenth-century melodrama to which it belongs, including the theatrical/performative features of that genre: sensational plot, stereotypical good and bad characters, mix of comedy and pathos, spectacle, tableaux, and mood music. [42] Jacobs-Jenkins retains most of Boucicault’s main characters and substantial amounts of his dialogue as well as his plot. In the main plot George, the white hero, falls in love with a beautiful “octoroon,” Zoe, who poisons herself rather than succumb to the white villain, M’Closky, who has bought her; in the subplot, photographic evidence demonstrates that M’Closky, not Native American Wahnotee, has murdered slave boy Paul in order to steal the document that would save George’s plantation and prevent Zoe from being sold. But as well as preserving much of Boucicault’s work, not least his artistic focus in manipulating his audience’s emotions, Jacobs-Jenkins incorporates his own words with Boucicault’s, transforms melodramatic techniques into Brechtian techniques, and uses racially cross-cast actors in whiteface, blackface, and redface, inviting audiences to join him in excavating the play’s different levels of meaning and to see them simultaneously. Even more thoroughly than in Neighbors and Appropriate , adapted work and adaptation bleed into one another. Since I have discussed Jacobs-Jenkins’s adaptation of The Octoroon at length elsewhere, I shall confine my remarks in this essay to a brief examination of the ways in which in An Octoroon the playwright extends to almost every feature of the play the archeological techniques he develops in Neighbors and Appropriate . [43] In all three plays Jacobs-Jenkins adds innovative techniques to the toolbox available to theatrical adaptation and further wrinkles to adaptation theory. Most distinctively in An Octoroon and with far-reaching dramaturgical consequences, Jacobs-Jenkins racially cross-casts several of the characters. Both the white hero, George, and the white villain, M’Closky, are played by the same black actor in whiteface. In the auction scene he has to fight himself over Zoe. The superimposition of hero and villain upon one another suggests that the moral difference between them is less clear-cut than melodramatic stereotypes would have it and illustrates, as Lisa Merill and Theresa Saxon note, “the uncomfortable similarity between desire to own, master, or marry” Zoe. [44] The Native American Wahnotee is played by a white actor in redface. And the slaves Pete and Paul, according to Jacobs-Jenkins’s textual directions, are to be played by a Native American actor (or an actor who can pass as Native American) in blackface. This use of make-up reverses the nineteenth-century theatre’s casting of white actors in blackface to play the enslaved characters and comments ironically on racist stereotypes and the theatrical convention that perpetuated them. The device of racial cross-casting inevitably creates a gap between actor and character, superimposing the stylization of Brechtian distance on the stylization of melodramatic stereotyping. Through such Brechtian techniques as cross-casting and meta-commentary from the play’s internal playwright, BJJ, Jacobs-Jenkins ironizes Boucicault’s story and the racist attitudes of his characters. When a black actor in whiteface makes a racist remark (George’s reference to “the folksy ways of the niggers down here,” for example), the line is necessarily italicized and held up for the audience’s critical inspection. [45] Similarly, the old slave Pete (in blackface) clearly performs his role as loyal house slave. At the beginning of the play, upon hearing the approach of white people, Pete drops his normal conversational voice and “ transforms into some sort of folk figure ” speaking the dialect constructed by Boucicault: “Drop dat banana fo’ I murdah you!” (19). [46] Jacobs-Jenkins further makes The Octoroon “fit” for its twenty-first century theatrical environment through the adaptive processes of transmotivation, transfocalization, and transvalorization described by Genette. This strategy is most apparent in his depiction of the enslaved female characters, who are little more than comic props in The Octoroon . In scenes added to Boucicault’s play Jacobs-Jenkins humanizes Dido, Minnie, and Grace by giving them “distinct backgrounds and personalities” and voices, desires, and agency of their own. [47] Their voices (borrowed from the dialect of contemporary sitcom) are the most vibrant and compelling in the play. About their apparently imminent sale, for example, Dido says, “This is about the worst damn day of my life! It’s even worse than the first time I got sold!” And Minnie replies, “Yeah, I didn’t wake up thinkin’ this was where my day was gonna go” (41). The gap between tone and content is at once disturbingly funny and appalling. Even more pointed is Minnie’s advice to Dido, “I know we slaves and evurthang, but you are not your job” (58), an anachronistic cliché that reminds us that Dido, in fact, has no life outside her job. Through the familiarity of the contemporary comic idiom Jacobs-Jenkins induces the audience to laugh—in effect, at slavery—and then to question their own and other audience members’ laughter. As well as giving vigorous contemporary voices to Dido, Minnie, and Grace, Jacobs-Jenkins replaces their unquestioning loyalty to their owners in Boucicault’s play with aspirations and dreams of their own. Grace wants to escape—she is co-head of the “Runaway Plannin’ Committee” (40)—and Minnie and Dido at least want to choose the nature of their servitude, supposing that if they can persuade Captain Ratts to buy them to work on his steamboat, they will enjoy a life of romantic adventure. Minnie imagines “coasting up and down the river, lookin’ fly, the wind whipping at our hair and our slave tunics and shit,” being admired by the “muscle-y” men on the boat, and eating “fresh fish” instead of “these fattening pig guts” (42). The women’s fantasy, however, will prove ephemeral. The steamboat blows up, and as I have remarked elsewhere, “The two women are trapped inside Boucicault’s plot just as Tom Stoppard’s reimagined Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are trapped inside Hamlet and Dido and Minnie’s real-life counterparts were trapped in the institution of slavery.” [48] Nonetheless, as Merrill and Saxon cogently observe, by focusing on Dido and Minnie’s hopes and fears for themselves instead of on Zoe’s tragic death in the play’s last scene and by granting them critical insights into their condition, Jacobs-Jenkins “forces today’s audiences to refocus their attention on the material conditions and lives of ordinary black women rather than the eponymous octoroon.” [49] Jacobs-Jenkins similarly reconfigures and overlays Boucicault’s sensation scene with a more relevant one of his own. In act four in place of—or actually in addition to—Boucicault’s innovative use of the new art form of photography and his spectacular exploding steamboat (offstage in An Octoroon ), Jacobs-Jenkins provides for his audience a stunning contemporary sensation: a blown-up photograph of a real-life lynching. BJJ explains, with the help of Boucicault, how melodrama works and how it has been necessary for An Octoroon to adapt some of the melodramatic features of the earlier play. Where Boucicault cleverly uses a photograph of the real murderer of Paul to prevent a miscarriage of justice, Jacobs-Jenkins has to go further to produce a similarly sensational effect for his contemporary audience. The blown-up photograph of a real-life lynching—against which background George makes an impassioned defense of Wahnotee against the “wild and lawless proceeding” of “lynch-law” (51)—is profoundly shocking but also positions spectators as complicit in the voyeuristic gaze of the photograph’s “enthralled white gawkers.” [50] While this is the most disturbing moment in the play, there is no ambiguity about the kind of horrified response called for by the photograph of the lynching. The numerous comic episodes, however, involving Pete, Dido, Minnie, and Grace, scenes in which Jacobs-Jenkins induces the audience to laugh at slavery almost before they are aware, produce more subtly disquieting—because more questionable—effects. Reviewer Chase Quinn observed that the audience at Soho Rep was in an “unceasing state of anxiety,” as each audience member was left “to negotiate for him or herself” when and how much to laugh. [51] Jacobs-Jenkins’s well-attested concern with evoking strong and complicated individual responses from his audiences adds a new wrinkle to adaptation theory. [52] For his own political purposes, in An Octoroon he adapts not only his source play and the melodramatic genre in which it is written but also the swiftly changing responses that genre typically elicits, allowing, as Rosa Schneider notes, “a twenty-first-century audience to feel some of the same effects as their nineteenth-century counterparts.” [53] Following Boucicault, Jacobs-Jenkins skillfully manipulates how his audience responds from moment to moment. Boucicault puts his audience on a thrilling emotional roller-coaster for its own sake as is typical of melodrama; Jacobs-Jenkins abruptly alternates not only pathos with laughter and laughter with horror but also emotional engagement with critical detachment to produce in his contemporary audience a Brechtian self-consciousness about their own and other spectators’ reactions. Effectively, he adapts melodrama’s audience for his own meta-melodramatic and political purposes. Checking on the audience’s reactions is a whimsical giant Br’er Rabbit (clearly an authorial figure and originally played by Jacobs-Jenkins himself) who wanders through the show at will, staring at the spectators (much as the Crows stare at their audience at the end of Neighbors ). Br’er Rabbit’s gaze is designed to ensure that spectators take note of their own and each other’s responses to racist stereotypes presented as comic. In doing so, Br’er Rabbit—or the dramatist himself—assesses the political impact of Jacobs-Jenkins’s adaptation. Neighbors , Appropriate , and An Octoroon all attest to Jacobs-Jenkins’s fascination with “genre or old forms” as “interesting artifacts.” But it is his detailed, scholarly knowledge of minstrel shows, American family drama, and nineteenth-century melodrama that enables him to manipulate these forms and the audience responses they typically generate to elicit an “archeology of seeing.” Jacobs-Jenkins’s sensitivity to and command over the forms he appropriates are apparent in the tropes of the plays themselves, in the characters’ own commentary on the genres they are inhabiting, especially in Neighbors and An Octoroon , and in the playwright’s numerous comments in interviews on the generic affiliations of his work. [54] Because Jacobs-Jenkins appreciates the works and genres he adapts —even at some level the black minstrelsy of Neighbors [55] —he encourages audiences similarly to appreciate and to enjoy his own versions of them. But as audiences laugh (or squirm) at the Crows’ outrageous minstrel show turns, or speculate knowingly about the quarrels of the Lafayettes, or weep for Zoe and laugh at the performances of Minnie, Dido, and Pete, Jacobs-Jenkins simultaneously compels contemporary spectators to confront the racial assumptions he has excavated along with the dramatic forms that contain them and to worry about their own and each other’s complicity in the continuing legacy of those assumptions. In Neighbors , Appropriate , and An Octoroon Jacobs-Jenkins puts his own adaptive versions of the minstrel show, the American family play, and Boucicault’s melodrama into an edgy but productive dialogue with the forms that he excavates. The tension between the old forms and the new meanings layered onto them generates uneasy and uncertain laughter that engages audiences in a much-needed, if in the theatre implicit, dialogue of their own about racial attitudes in contemporary America. References [1] Jeff Lunden, “One Playwright’s ‘Obligation’ To Confront Race And Identity In The US,” All Things Considered , National Public Radio, 16 February 2015. Transcript. https:www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/02/16/383567104/one-playwright-s-obligation (accessed 11 February 2019). [2] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, quoted. in Ben Brantley, “A Squabbling Family Kept in the Dark,” New York Times , 16 March 2014. http:www.nytimes.com/2014/03/17/theater/in-appropriate-branden-jacobs-Jenkins-subverts-tradition.html?-r=o (accessed 12 August 2015). [3] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, quoted. in Lunden, “One Playwright’s ‘Obligation’.” [4] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, “An Archeology of Seeing. An Interview with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Lila Neugebauer,” Signature Theatre . http://www.signaturetheatre.org/News/An-Archeology-of-Seeing.aspx (accessed 19 May 2017). Jacobs-Jenkins is speaking here of Everybody (2017), his adaptation of the medieval morality play Everyman . [5] Suzan-Lori Parks anticipates Jacobs-Jenkins’s use of an archeological metaphor for a slightly different purpose. In her 1994 essay “Possession,” she argues that it is necessary to “dig for bones” in order to locate and recreate “unrecorded” African-American history. “Possession,” The America Play and Other Works (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995), 4. [6] Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation , 2 nd ed. with Siobhan O’Flynn (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 170. [7] Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree , translated by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). [8] Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). Hutcheon also notes the Darwinian implications of the term “adaptation.” A Theory of Adaptation , 31. [9] Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation , xvii, 6, 21. [10] Jane Barnette, Adapturgy: The Dramaturg’s Art and Theatrical Adaptation (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), 55, 62. [11] Jacobs-Jenkins grew up in a home full of “black memorabilia” such as “mammy dolls” and “Colored Only” signs, according to Laura Collins-Hughes in “Provocative Play Sees the Faces Behind the Blackface,” The Boston Globe , 16 January 2011. http://archive.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2011/01/16/neighbors_exposes_racial_history_on_stage/ (accessed 5 December 2016). [12] Charles Isherwood, “Caricatured Commentary: Minstrel Meets Modern,” The New York Times 9 March 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/10/theater/reviews/10neighbors.html (accessed 1 May 2017). [13] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Neighbors . American Next Wave: Four Contemporary Plays from HighTide Festival Theatre . (London: Methuen Drama, 2012), 222. Subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. [14] For the history and content of nineteenth-century minstrel shows see Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), especially 25–57; and Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). The earliest minstrels were white performers in blackface, but there were also troupes of African-American performers. [15] See Toll, Blacking Up , 55. [16] See ibid., 67. [17] On white obsession with black male bodies in minstrel shows, see Lott, Love and Theft , 3, 9. [18] Jason Rabin, “Stage Review: ‘Neighbors’ at Company One,” Blast Magazine , 14 January 2011. http://blastmagazine.com/2011/01/14/stage-review-neighbors-at-company-one/ (accessed 27 April 2017). [19] Nancy Grossman, “Company One Wants You to Meet the ‘Neighbors,’” Broadway World , 17 January 2011. http://www.broadwayworld.com/boston/article/Company-One-Wants-You-to-Meet-the-Neighbors-20110117 (accessed 5 December 2016). [20] Toll, Blacking Up , 55–56. [21] See Isherwood, “Caricatured Commentary.” At one point in the published text Jacobs-Jenkins calls for a rearrangement of Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” (263). [22] Isherwood, “Caricatured Commentary.” [23] Jacobs-Jenkins quoted in Amy Wegener, “About Appropriate ,” Appropriate . Humana Festival 2013 The Complete Plays , edited by Amy Wegener and Sarah Lunnie (New York: Playscripts, Inc., 2014), 146. [24] Jacobs-Jenkins quoted in Margaret Gray, “Spotlight Shines Brighter on ‘Appropriate’ Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins,” Los Angeles Times , 24 September 2015. http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-ca-cm-branden-jacobs-jenkins-20150927-story.html (accessed 27 April 2017). [25] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Appropriate . Appropriate/An Octoroon . Theatre Communications Group: New York, 2019), 73–74. Subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. [26] Jacobs-Jenkins quoted in Wegener, “About Appropriate ,” 147. [27] Kee-Yoon Nahm, “Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men ,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 27, no. 2 (2015). http://jadtjournal.org/2015/04/24/visibly-white-realism-and-race-in-appropriate-and-straight-white-men/ (accessed 30 December 2016). [28] Ibid. [29] Ibid. [30] See notes 2 and 23. [31] Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 170. [32] Erin Keane, “Review/Family Secrets Fester in ‘Appropriate’,” 89.3 WFPL News Louisville , 20 March 2013. http://wfpl.org/review-family-secrets-fester-appropriate/ (accessed 30 December 2016). [33] Stephen J. Bottoms, The Theatre of Sam Shepard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 159. [34] Tracy Letts, August: Osage County (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2008), 123–24. [35] Horton Foote, Dividing the Estate. Three Plays (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008), 76. [36] Sam Shepard, Buried Child . Sam Shepard: Seven Plays (Toronto and New York: Bantam Books, 1981), 41. Subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. [37] Thomas P. Adler, “Repetition and Regression in Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child ,” in Matthew Roudané, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 112. [38] Verna A. Foster, “Meta-melodrama: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Appropriates Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon ,” Modern Drama 59, no. 3 (Fall 2016): 286. [39] Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire . The Theatre of Tennessee Williams . Vol. 1 (New York: New Directions, 1971), 249, 377. [40] Suzan-Lori Parks, Topdog/Underdog (New York Theatre Communications Group, 2001), 13. For the details of this argument see Verna A. Foster, “Suzan-Lori Parks’s Staging of the Lincoln Myth in The America Play and Topdog/Underdog ,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 17, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 24–35. [41] Bottoms suggests that Buried Child “is dealing metaphorically with America’s collective tendency to bury the intolerable memories of its bloody history of slavery and genocide, and so forth” ( The Theatre of Sam Shepard , 176). Adler adds that “the nation’s guilty past” in Buried Child might be “racism, or religious and ethnic prejudice, or . . . the Vietnam War.” “Repetition and Regression in Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child ,” 121. [42] On nineteenth-century American melodrama, including its depiction of slavery, see Rosa Schneider, “‘Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something’: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the Reconstruction of Melodrama,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 31, no. 1 (Fall 2018). [43] Foster, “Meta-melodrama.” [44] Lisa Merrill and Theresa Saxon, “Replaying and Rediscovering The Octoroon ,” Theatre Journal 69, no. 2 (2017): 151. [45] Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2015), 20. Subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. [46] In Definition Theatre Company’s 2017 production of An Octoroon in Chicago, Pete and Paul were played by an African-American actress in blackface, producing an even more pointed Brechtian comment on the absurdity of Boucicault’s racist and gendered characterizations. [47] Schneider, “‘Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something’.” [48] Foster, “Meta-melodrama,” 299. [49] Merrill and Saxon, “Replaying and Rediscovering The Octoroon ,” 152. [50] Chase Quinn, “Laughing (and Crying, and Laughing Again) about Slavery,” Hyperallergic 24 February 2015. http.//hyperallergic.com/185346/laughing-and-crying-and-laughing-again-about-slavery/ (accessed 20 May 2015). [51] Ibid. [52] See Foster, “Meta-melodrama,” 300–01. [53] Schneider, “‘Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something’.” [54] For Jacobs-Jenkins’s knowledge of American family drama see Wegener, “About Appropriate ,” 146. For his research into Boucicault’s aesthetic principles and into melodrama see Foster, “Meta-melodrama,” 286, 290, 293 and Schneider, “‘Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something’.” [55] See Collins-Hughes, “Provocative Play Sees the Faces Behind the Blackface,” and note 11 above. Footnotes About The Author(s) Verna A. Foster is Professor Emerita in the Department of English at Loyola University Chicago. Her publications include The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy , the edited collection Dramatic Revisions of Myths, Fairy Tales and Legends: Essays on Recent Plays , and numerous articles on early modern and modern drama. She is currently working on ambivalent motherhood in contemporary adaptations of Medea . Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics Law and Sexuality in Tennessee Williams’s America Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze Staging Family: Domestic Deceptions of Mid-Nineteenth Century American Actresses Excavating American Theatrical History: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors, Appropriate, and An Octoroon Mabou Mines Tries Again: Past, Present, and the Purgatory of Performance Space Rehearsing Bereavement with Laughter: Grief, Humor, and Estrangement Affect in Sarah Ruhl’s Plays of Mourning Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Mohamadreza Babaee 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 Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking Mohamadreza Babaee By Published on May 26, 2023 Download Article as PDF fig. 1: The installation room for Global (re)Entry. 2D game and multimedia installation. “Unforgetting” exhibition, University of California, Santa Cruz, Apr. 2022. Photo by author. Have you ever held a grenade in your hands?” The participants read on a monitor screen in a room with a view of the Pacific Ocean (fig. 1). A projector screen obstructs the view and displays the live footage of the participants from a bird’s-eye angle. With white walls, a desk, a chair, and a desktop computer and monitor, the room seems desolate. An ambient soundtrack is playing in the background, projecting various sounds that travelers usually hear in any US airport: the occasional announcements, suitcases being dragged on smooth floors, the beeping sound of various scanning machines, and the occasional roarings of airplanes taking off. If the participants sit behind the computer long enough, they could hear the ambient soundtrack of the airport fading into distant notes of a piano playing in an empty alley, birds chirping in a dim forest, and raindrops falling onto thirsty leaves. The question on the screen remains visible until the participants decide to use a “Cosmic” tool to change it. If they click on the cosmic tool icon on the right side of the screen, hover the mouse over the question, and hold down left-click, the question visually morphs into the same text, with one important difference (fig. 2): “Have you ever held a kitten in your hands?” fig. 2: The redesigned immigration form question. Global (re)Entry, 2D game and multimedia installation. And such is the core mechanic in Global (re)Entry , a video game-multimedia installation that gives the participants an opportunity to rewrite the racially presumptuous questions that immigrants need to answer in their change-of-status petition forms and in-person interviews. [1] Made in collaboration with recent University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) alumni, [2] the project was first on display as a part of “Unforgetting,” an MFA exhibition of digital arts and new media projects on display at UCSC from Apr. 22 nd to May 1 st , 2022. The different projects—ranging from video games to multimedia performances—seek to address the common themes of lost histories, hidden realities, and haunting. “The artists,” writes Yolande Harris, an artist-scholar and the exhibition’s curator, “are questioning and actively participating in the destruction of old systems of oppression by imagining new systems in their place.” [3] The system in question in Global (re)Entry is the US immigration system, particularly the process through which an immigrant can petition for residency in the US. While the legal pathway to becoming a permanent resident remains a privileged route to which many undocumented immigrants have no access, Global (re)Entry aims to point out the deficiency and impracticality of legal procedures in the US immigration system built upon historical prejudice and racial bias. In Global (re)Entry , I take a critical and parodic look at the Global Entry program designed by the US Customs and Border Protection agency. Similar to other Trusted Traveler programs, Global Entry allows “low-risk” US citizens and permanent residents to use an automated machine to receive their clearance for crossing international borders. The conditions through which Global Entry considers a traveler as low risk are not disclosed publicly and are open to interpretation and bias. My project borrows textual and visual assets from the US Department of Homeland Security’s (and the associated agencies’) online documents to simulate and repurpose the traveler screening program. The player needs to answer several questions in the game to receive their travel clearance card. However, their resistance to participating in state-sponsored security theatres unlocks a new gameplay branch that leads the player to a utopian way of reimagining the US immigration system. While players can play the game to learn more about unfair border control strategies and oppressive state policies targeting immigrants, they can also creatively redesign discriminatory US immigration forms and generate pro-immigrant, antiracist manifestos. Before discussing the conceptual development of Global (re)Entry in relation to my performance background, I need to elaborate on why I am discussing this project in the special issue of a theatre and performance studies journal. This issue invites reflections on new work development with attention to how theatre artists respond to the realities of the ongoing global pandemic. I designed Global (re)Entry as a playful digital intervention into discriminatory US border politics. Although the project represents my training as an artist in experimental game design, my current work is in continuation of my years-long practice as a theatre director. I started my journey as an artist by designing, directing, and supporting experimental theatre and performance pieces about the memories that immigrants leave behind, the human impact of financial sanctions on Iran, diasporic experiences of queer people of color, and fearmongering and Islamaphobia that ensued after the terrorist attacks of Sep. 11 th , 2001. Over time, I moved away from traditional understandings of theatre to embrace postdramatic and multimedia ways of staging diverse immigrant experiences. Digital mediums and technologies play a central role in my recent projects, but I need to clarify that this digital turn in my practice is not an inevitable assimilation into the techno-utopian rhetorics hailed by megacorporate amalgamations around the country (and the world). Instead, I embraced digital methods of representation and creative intervention as I became increasingly weary of the limited access a live performance space offers to the audience. How could I make more performances about/for immigrants and refugees while many of them did not have the privilege of being in the performance space? The shortcomings of designing a performance around the physical notion of space led me to adapt digital forms of communication, representation, and intervention. Without a doubt, going through a global pandemic, which severely reduced social gatherings, contributed an additional layer to my rationale for opting for a digital sense of performance space as a site of potentials apt for facilitating human-computer interactions. [4] Global (re)Entry represents my investment in interactive digital art as a conditionally more accessible medium [5] while remaining strongly tethered to my experience as a performance maker and scholar. [6] In the following pages, I offer a brief description of Global (re)Entry as a collaborative work of art inspired by my learnings in performance theory. That is not to say that I consider the project a performance piece. Rather, I want to delineate my conceptual itinerary to clarify the significance of performance discourses in my current new work development in digital arts and new media. I am less concerned with disciplinary demarcations and more with the value of interdisciplinary creative production. The initial idea for Global (re)Entry arose from a simple question: What is a utopian vision of the US immigration system? José Esteban Muñoz’s foundational study of utopias informs my investment in utopian art making. Writing on the contemporary politics of queer of color identity formation, Muñoz believes that minoritarian individuals should imagine their lives beyond what he calls the “quagmire of the present.” It is the present-focused thinking that, according to Muñoz, stops the oppressed from imagining a better future outside the contemporary tyranny of systems. Muñoz proposes a “utopian modality” in which feelings, thoughts, and actions follow a utopian function for “fragmenting darkness” and illuminating a “world that should be, that could be, and that will be.” [7] Muñoz dismisses abstract ideas of utopia as they remain dormant in the realm of fantasy. Instead, he calls for concrete conditions of utopia that can invoke a “not-yet-conscious” potentiality, presenting the collective wish of a group that looks back at the “no-longer-conscious” past and renders hopeful “potential blueprints of a world not quite here, a horizon of possibility.” [8] Inspired by such ideas, I approached several immigrants of color that I knew personally and asked them about their utopian visions of the US immigration system. They all expressed a wish to replace the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) with a network of support that facilitates border crossing, not border policing. Concomitant to their utopian thinking was a wish for educating more US citizens about the gross flaws in the legal pathway to becoming a resident and the mental, emotional, and material toll the process could take. Global (re)Entry gives the participants an opportunity to take a critical look at the US immigration system and creatively redesign it in utopian ways. Therefore, the project represents what Claudia Costa Pederson calls “utopian ludology,” a critical-creative perspective that considers games as “places of the radical imagination,” sites that take playfulness as “enabling interactions that afford the necessary freedom to generate new kinds of thinking, feeling, and empowerment to concretize a future that dominant culture renders unthinkable.” [9] Games imbued by concrete ideas of utopia, Pederson asserts, can be “tools of persuasion,” which “open up the question of alternatives” and “reject the mimetic ideals… and commodity models of the video game industry.” [10] While I hesitate to label Global (re)Entry as merely a “persuasive game,” I am inspired by persuasive game designers who use video games for “cultural and social change” and “do so in recognition of the persuasive power of the medium, which is based on its appeal to fantasy and imagination.” [11] Utopian survival strategies of the queer of color, as theorized by Muñoz, shaped how I approached making the game. I could certainly try to make a live performance piece about border crossing (something that I had done in the past), but I could not comfortably make art for immigrants, fully knowing that many of them could not cross the myriad of borders to partake in the privilege of live physical co-presence. I remain cognizant of the ongoing debates in the field as to what constitutes liveness, namely Philip Auslander’s provocative assertion that live experiences are culturally and historically codified in relation to technological changes. [12] But if we allow ourselves to decenter our scholarly polemics in favor of making room for lived experiences of those with less transnational mobility, the question at hand might become as simple as who is in the room and who is not. As I mentioned before, digital liveness and digital spaces continue to be subject to the same question, as not everyone has equal access to entering a digital room, but I take the odds of more people worldwide having access to the internet to download a small-size, low-tech video game over US government easing up on admitting more immigrants to the country. fig. 3: Screenshot from a cutscene inside the game. Global (re)Entry. 2D game and multimedia installation. In addition to queer of color critique, I also used critical discussions of border surveillance to design Global (re)Entry . While I borrowed from scholars in different humanities fields, performance theory continued to play an essential role in my development process. Trusted traveler programs such as Global Entry are ostensibly designed to facilitate easier border crossing experiences, but in fact, they are just a ruse for easy screening of travelers and separating them into potential suspects and trustworthy users. [13] Since Homeland Security agencies are exempt from racial profiling rules, [14] race plays a vital role in designing and implementing border surveillance strategies. Writing on the surveillance of Blackness in the US, Simon Browne uses “racializing surveillance” as a term to describe systematic moments “when enactments of surveillance reify boundaries along racial lines, thereby reifying race, and where the outcome of this is often discriminatory and violent treatment.” [15] Browne contends that racializing surveillance is a “technology of social control” and suggests “how things get ordered racially by way of surveillance depends on space and time and is subject to change, but most often upholds negating strategies that first accompanied European colonial expansion and transatlantic slavery that sought to structure social relations and institutions in ways that privilege whiteness.” [16] Expanding her analysis into the racialized practices of surveillance at US airports, Browne uses the concept of “racial baggage” to identify situations in which certain acts and certain looks at the airport weigh down some travelers, while others travel lightly.” [17] Trusted traveler programs, Browne continues, are clear evidence of how racializing surveillance is practiced at airports to identify, separate, pat down, and investigate the racial baggage some travelers carry across borders. [18] In the racializing matrix of airports, questions of privacy become contested. The state watches travelers, but in that watching, not all travelers are equally suspect. As Jasbir Puar delineates, “the right to privacy is not even on the radar screen for many sectors of society, unfathomable for whom being surveilled is a way of life…the private is a racialized and nationalized construct, insofar as it is granted not only to heterosexuals but to certain citizens and withheld from many others and from noncitizens.” [19] Furthermore, Puar uses the Foucauldian notion of panopticon to suggest that the ever present surveillance technologies throughout borderlands forcefully encourage self-regulation of a sort that is “less an internalization of norms and more about constant monitoring of oneself and others, watching, waiting, listening, ordering, positioning, calculating.” [20] Performance, communication, and feminist studies scholar Rachel Hall similarly focuses on the notion of self-regulation at airports to frame airport security as a “collaborative cultural performance” that requires some passengers to continuously perform “voluntary transparency.” [21] Transparency, in Hall’s critical opinion, is a privilege, the “new white,” that if performed successfully, will grant the traveler with a moment of innocence. [22] However, Hall continues, not all travelers are given equal access to such privilege; within the post-9/11 context, military and security experts design “mediated spectacles of diabolical opacity” to produce “the stubbornly noncompliant, noncitizen suspects in the war on terror.” [23] In sum, there is a clear connection between how the state surveils populations and creates racial categories. Surveillance at airports is a racializing act that seeks to produce transparent travelers and suspect figures of the national adversary. The ubiquitous implementation of surveillance technologies at airports regulates self-monitoring practices requiring travelers to disclose their information voluntarily. Those who successfully perform their transparency might achieve a temporary moment of innocence, but travelers with racial baggage need to struggle against a racist state that considers them likely perpetrators of violence. Global (re)Entry fictionally simulates and repurposes the Global Entry trusted traveling program to (on top of encouraging utopian thinking) draw attention to intrusive methodologies that the Homeland Security agencies incorporate to produce prejudiced surveillance data, specifically about immigrants of color. The game starts as an invitation for voluntary performances of transparency, as theorized by Hall. The participants are asked to submit to an intrusive screening process requiring their biometric data. However, in line with the utopian performance-making rhetorics that undergird the projects, participants can refuse to perform transparency and, as such, unlock an alternative gameplay path that leads to creatively redesigning discriminatory US immigration forms. I use digital technologies and mediums to create interactive art about marginalized experiences. I cautiously navigate this path and remain vigilant about digital accessibility limitations, particularly in the global south. The new projects I develop represent my increasing interest in digital arts and new media. I, however, continue to also identify as a performance maker, an artist of color whose creative journey demonstrates an intertwined and growing web of performance and game design skills. As long as the adapted medium and methodology can empower me in my commitment to increasing representations of immigrants of color, the new work development process personally remains a dynamic terminology applicable to all artmaking practices. In Global (re)Entry , I follow an artistic mission that draws from the power of representation to enable utopian thinking as a necessary first step toward creating change in society. The utopian thinking that Global (re)Entry encourages is my intervention in the ongoing ostracization, surveillance, deportation, incarceration, and murdering of immigrants that state forces commit at US borders. In the face of such destructive realities, my project does not call for neoliberal reformations of the US immigration system. Instead, Global (re)Entry dares to ask the participants to muster the radical audacity, subversive creativity, and insurgent hopes necessary for entirely disabling a killing machine cloaked as the US immigration system. References [1] You can play Global (re)Entry at https://www.mbabaee.com/global-re-entry . [2] Music and sound by Madeline Doss, 2D art and UI by Fion Kwok, and Unity programming by Avery Weibel. [3] “Digital Arts and New Media | MFA Program at University of California, Santa Cruz,” accessed January 9, 2023, https://danmmfa.ucsc.edu/ . [4] Nadja Masura, Digital Theatre: The Making and Meaning of Live Mediated Performance, US & UK 1990-2020 , Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology (Springer International Publishing, 2020), 42. [5] I acknowledge that access to digital technology remains unequal, particularly in Global South. Steven Dixon, for example, writes that even though new digital technology and internet revolutionized performance forms across the US in the 90s, such revolution was absent or less tangible in other parts of the world with less to no resources for building the digital infrastructure that the new digital age demanded. For more, look at Steve Dixon, Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015). [6] Although the project was originally presented as a multimedia installation, it is available online to players around the world. [7] José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia (New York University Press, 2009), 1. [8] Muñoz, Cruising Utopia , 22, 25, 97. [9] Claudia Costa Pederson, Gaming Utopia: Ludic Worlds in Art, Design, and Media (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021), 6. [10] Pederson, Gaming Utopia, 184. [11] Pederson, 222. [12] While Auslander initially made this comment in Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (1999), he later revisited his argument to clarify that he does not believe technologies (vs. the people) to be the determining agent in what is live. For more, look at Auslander, Philip. “Digital Liveness: A Historico-Philosophical Perspective.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 34, no. 3 (2012): 3–11. [13] See Matthew Longo, The Politics of Borders: Sovereignty, Security, and the Citizen after 9/11 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). [14] See Nicole Nguyen, Suspect Communities: Anti-Muslim Racism and the Domestic War on Terror (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019). [15] Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015), 8. [16] Browne, Dark Matters , 16, 17. [17] Browne, 132. [18] Browne, 135. [19] Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times , 10th ed. (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017), 125. [20] Puar, Terrorist Assemblages , 156. [21] Rachel Hall, The Transparent Traveler: The Performance and Culture of Airport Security (Duke University Press, 2015), 12. [22] Hall, The Transparent Traveler , 14. [23] Hall, 46. Footnotes About The Author(s) MOHAMADREZA BABAEE is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre, Drama, and Contemporary Dance at Indiana University, Bloomington. Their interdisciplinary scholarship and transmedia practice primarily focus on issues of migration and surveillance, particularly in connection to the Middle Eastern and Iranian diasporas in the US. Their first manuscript project, tentatively titled Modded Diasporas: Performing Iranian Identity , combines performance studies and critical game theory to explore how Iranian immigrants modify the circumstances of their systematic oppression to turn them into empowering opportunities, tools, and mediums. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Christen Mandracchia Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 1 Visit Journal Homepage More than a Props List: Redefining Material Culture as Survival and Pleasure in Lynn Nottage’s Ruined Christen Mandracchia By Published on November 26, 2023 Download Article as PDF A small mining town. The sounds of the tropical Ituri rain forest. The DemocraticRepublic of Congo. A bar, makeshift furnitureand a rundown pool table. A lot of effort has gone into making the worn bar cheerful. A stack of plastic washtubs rests in the corner. An old carbattery powers the lights and audio system, a covered birdcage sits conspicuously in the cornerof the room. ([1]) How might you approach these opening stage directions from Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Ruined ? Would you start by picturing specific pieces of furniture? Does the quality and type of sound come to mind first? How does your own positionality inform these choices? As a theatre and performance scholar who also serves as a production manager, designer, and professor, I am rarely able to separate a scholarly reading from the material conditions of production. Thus, I approach these stage directions through many different lenses. For example, as a sound designer, I notice that the first specific thing Nottage mentions is the “sounds of the tropical Ituri rain forest” followed by a reference to an audio system that is plugged into “an old car battery.” These details would impact technical and artistic choices I might make. Similarly, as a lighting designer, I notice that the same battery powers the lights, which means that a production would likely need practical lighting instruments to be hung around the set, in addition to the stage lights. A props-centered approach is particularly compelling because Nottage lists “makeshift furniture” – a phrase which sparks a larger conversation, not just about the logistics of acquiring or building these objects for the stage, but one which hails the production team into the world of the play and into the minds of the characters. Therein lies the challenge. Ruined is a 2011 drama which tells the story of Mama Nadi, a Mother Courage-like figure who owns and operates the described bar in the Congolese rain forest. Her patrons are often miners of the mineral coltan, used in cellular phones, and soldiers on both sides of a bloody civil war. What does “makeshift furniture” look like in the world of this play? What objects are available to these characters, and where do these objects come from? What were these objects originally intended for and what does their second life as “makeshift furniture” reveal about the objectives, survival, innovation, and pleasure of the characters? When members of a production team must put themselves in the place of the characters to make artistic decisions, other aspects of our positionalities manifest themselves as assets or limits in this theatrical process. For example, how would my experiences as a white-ethnic, middle-class, and queer theatre scholar/practitioner in the United States help or hinder my ability to access the world of the play and the lived experiences of the characters to make well-informed, ethical, and dramaturgically accurate production decisions? I begin with this discussion of props because I contend that delving into the specific material histories of objects in the text provides new avenues of nuance and complexity that can help bridge the gap between Western scholarly, practical, and personal lived experiences and those of the characters. An article like “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” by Chandra Talpade Mohanty establishes what is at stake when Western knowledge production relies on archetypes instead of the material realities of the “third world” — especially women. She describes this archetype of the “average third world woman” as falling into gendered stereotypes such as sexual constraint, and “third world” stereotypes of “ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented, victimized, etc.” ( [2] ) She then argues that the victim narrative, in particular, reduces the complexities of the lives of “third world” women to socioeconomic or sexual terms, reinforcing the sexist stereotype of women as weak. ( [3] ) In focusing on the material objects listed in a play like Ruined , through an application of material culture theory as a methodology, this article outlines how Western theatre makers and scholars can approach plays set in the “third world” in a way that Mohanty argues would be more grounded in the “material and ideological power structures” which shape these women’s lives. ( [4] ) Toward this end, Ruined is a useful vehicle for the application of a material culture reading precisely because the play was created with the intent to “sustain the complexity” of the civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, knowing that her Western “first-world” audience would only know about the conflict through fragmented news clips. ( [5] ) Nottage wrote the play based on ethnographic testimony of real women who survived the war, but she also uses specifically-named material objects in the text to ground the character’s larger given circumstances in material reality. In the play’s first descriptive paragraphs, referenced above, Nottage paints a picture of a place that is “ worn ” but “ cheerful ,” “ rundown ” but “ tropical ”—evoking a comfortable place more than a war zone. As a play about what Mohanty terms the “third world” written for a “first world” audience, Nottage does not fully immerse the audience in the horrors of war immediately. I use the phrase “third world” in this context throughout this paper because it is the word that Mohanty uses to describe the groups of women who fall under this Western label. “Third world,” in its immediate context, refers to the Cold War language which identified the “first world” as the capitalist nations, who were in opposition to the Soviet Union and the expansion of communism. As Mohanty details, this term has taken on more cultural meanings than its technical use from the Cold War era—so that even words like “Western” are tied to the division between “first” and “third” world. I use the term, knowing that it is outdated and problematic in many ways, but also knowing that many of the perceptions associated with this word still exist. I use it with the knowledge that it is a cultural touchstone, conjuring a specific iconography which I hope to complicate. Hence, I will keep it in quotations to highlight the fact that it is a construction. The first allusion to violence happens five lines into the first scene, where Mama Nadi exclaims to her stock supplier Christian, a “ perpetually cheerful traveling salesman ” that she has been expecting him for three weeks. Christian explains that “Every two kilometers a boy with a Kalashnikov and pockets that need filling.” ( [6] ) Nottage begins to reveal the larger given circumstances of the play through specific mentions of an object: the Russian-made and distributed Kalashnikov, often referred to in American lexicon as an “AK.” ( [7] ) In his book on gun history aptly titled The Gun , CJ Chivers informs readers that More than six decades after its design and initial distribution, more than fifty national armies carry the automatic Kalashnikov, as do an array of police, intelligence, and security agencies. But its fuller terrain lies outside the sphere of conventional force. The Kalashnikov [culturally] marks the guerilla, the terrorist, the child soldier, the dictator, and the thug — all of whom have found it to be a ready equalizer against morally or materially superior foes. ( [8] ) Because the AK, especially the infamous AK-47, is often wielded by the NATO members’ military opponents, it is often viewed, in the American cultural archive, as a “bad guy” weapon. Conversely, it is often seen by those who wield them as a symbol of defiance against colonial powers and Western, capitalist values. For the characters in the first scene of Ruined , it represents their position as both citizens of a post-colonial, “third world” country and their vulnerability to violence at the hands of their own countrymen — thus complicating the “bad guy/good guy” or “Western/Anti-Western” binaries. Nottage’s specific mention of the Kalashnikov and other objects in the script serves as what the Combahee River Collective calls “the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.” ( [9] ) Nottage’s ability to “sustain the complexity” of many topics has earned her much critical acclaim and scholarly attention. According to data from American Theatre , Nottage was the most produced playwright for the 2022-2023 theatre season in the United States. ( [10] ) Her play Clyde’s earned the top spot as the most produced play, with her Pulitzer Prize-winning Sweat at number five. Intimate Apparel was the most produced play of the 2005-2006 season and the fifth most-produced play of the 2006-2007 season. ( [11] ) Ruined held the fourth spot in the 2010-2011 season. Poignantly, Intimate Apparel returned to the top-ten list in 2016-2017, and Sweat was second in the 2018-2019 season before returning to the list for 2022-2023. The data suggests that Nottage’s plays have enjoyed many “lives” beyond their initial premiere dates. As Nottage’s work continues to weave in and out of America’s top ten lists, it is necessary for scholarship to reexamine her work and the body of scholarly and dramaturgical literature dedicated to her plays. Each new “life” evidences a relevance or usefulness to public discourse in the United States on political issues of national interest including immigration, deindustrialization, globalization, and incarceration. Likewise, as national discourses now include robust discussions of the environmental and moral ethics of mining minerals in “third world” countries for electric vehicle batteries, Ruined offers readers and spectators a material methodology that can help to circumvent many of the traps of homogenization, reduction, or “Othering” that can too-often arise in public discourses on the “third world” and its women. Third World Feminism and Material Culture Theory Cultural theorist Celia Lury defines material culture as “ a culture of the use or appropriation of objects or things. ” ( [12] ) She continues: “The first half of the term — ‘material’ — points to the significance of stuff, of things in everyday practices, while the second half —‘ culture’ — indicates that this attention to the materials of everyday life is combined with a concern with the cultural, with norms, values and practices.” ( [13] ) A material culture theory reading of Nottage’s script follows what Mohanty insists that Western beholders should do every time we encounter stories of women in the “third world.” Material culture theory is an interdisciplinary way of analyzing the various ways that objects are connected to larger given circumstances and power dynamics. For marginalized groups who might be absent from the written archive, material culture theory is a way to give voice to the voiceless, or to highlight the everyday lives of people who never wrote about themselves. Material culture theory, however, is not to be confused with materialism or the Marxist tradition of historic materialism, which often only regards material objects in terms of their means of production, consumption, and the role they play in exploitation. In centering the systems of oppression in a discussion on “third world” Black women, there is a danger of falling into the “archetypal victim” that Mohanty warns against. Material culture theory considers the role that objects play in these negotiations: its production — particularly the unseen labor that goes into making it and maintaining it — but also its intended function, the ways that it participates in the creation of self-identity, its special relationships to people and other objects, and how these meanings change over time. ( [14] ) A study of objects in the script reveals the interlocking oppressions which affect the characters’ everyday lives, but also how these objects can be used as sites of agency, survival, resistance, or other negotiations of power within that structure. The play’s original director, Kate Whoriskey, states, “As a director committed to staging complexity, my task is to counter the drama with humor, spirit and wit, and to treat the stories collected in Central Africa with the understanding that at every moment the Congolese are determined to survive.” ( [15] ) I am interested in the way that role that objects play in the leveraging of these dramatic moments in favor of survival, as reflective of the way that real women in the Congo, such as the ones that this play is based on, do the same. Furthermore, material culture theory resists the anti-materialism (victim/passive) narrative that suggests that consumers are manipulated or subordinated into purchasing or gathering things. The production and consumption of material objects can just as much oppress an individual as it can empower one. Like “third world” feminism, material culture theory demands that a methodology be used to consider the individual circumstances of an object’s relationship to a person, time, and place to “sustain the complexity,” as Nottage would say. I’d like to push the conversation beyond mere survival into one of joy and pleasure. Mohanty warns that confining the “third world” woman to a survival narrative can perpetuate their image as “archetypal victims,” and “freezes” them into “objects-who-defend themselves.” ( [16] ) This essay thus considers how material objects can be used as both a means of survival and pleasure. This positioning comes in direct response to critics who have chosen to praise the play’s portrayal of sexual violence but decry the fact that Nottage wrote a romantic ending for her principle leads. Other scholars, such as Jeff Paden, have defended the play’s romantic ending in the name of its political potency. ( [17] ) Is the ending of a Black/postcolonial play predetermined to be sad or ambiguous? If so, who determines this? It is possible that this ending disturbed critics because it challenged preconceived Western notions of what the “third world” is supposed to be. And perhaps the justification of “third world” characters’ pleasure determined by its political efficacy. In the context of this paper, “third world” feminism manifests itself as both Black feminism and postcolonial feminism with an emphasis on self-definition, and how material objects are used to that end. A material culture theory reading of the text that considers how these objects contribute to the world-making that Nottage employs insists that the objects in the script are more than a props list. They are a means understanding the complex world contexts that a production has taken on the responsibility to portray. Fanta, Don’t You Wanna? The field of material culture theory has a plethora of methods for analyzing these relationships. Many are in the form of a series of questions which can be applied to an object. This section will use the questions developed by Igor Kopytoff to go through the objects in the script for Ruined to identify the characters’ material circumstances, which reveal their position in larger systems and “interlocking oppressions.” While detailing the material circumstances and synthesis of oppression is only a first step, it is a vital one. Kopytoff approaches the above considerations of a material object as a “cultural biography” of a thing. “In doing the biography of a thing,” he says, “one would ask questions similar to those one asks about people: What sociologically, are the biographical possibilities inherent in its ‘status’ and in the period and culture, and how are these possibilities realized?” ( [18] ) Kopytoff is working within an anthropological framework, however, this paper is not an anthropological treatment of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. While the characters and events of the play are based on ethnographic testimony from real women from the DRC, Ruined is ultimately a theatrical script, and the material objects in this play exist within the larger given circumstances that Nottage has created for the stage. In this material culture reading, anthropology is replaced with script analysis and dramaturgical research, although the same questions that Kopytoff asks are used. Consider the opening stage directions of the play: “ A small mining town. The sounds of the tropical Ituri rain forest. The Democratic Republic of Congo. A bar, makeshift furniture and a rundown pool table. A lot of effort has gone into making the worn bar cheerful. A stack of plastic washtubs rests in the corner. An old car battery powers the audio system, a covered birdcage sits conspicuously in the corner of the room .” ( [19] ) These stage directions establish the immediate location of the play: a small mining town in the Ituri rain forest. But they also emphasize that the owner of the bar/brothel, who is about to be introduced as “ Mama Nadi, early forties, an attractive woman with an arrogant stride and majestic air ,” has recycled and repurposed items beyond their original functions. ( [20] ) She has put “a lot of effort” into curating these objects in a way that produces pleasure for her and her customers. The cultural biographies of the “ makeshift furniture ,” “ washtubs ,” and “ car battery ” have changed with time and with a new owner, and their positioning in this space speaks to Mama Nadi’s larger given circumstances as well as the ways that she uses objects to create her own space within those circumstances. Before Nottage mentions the Kalashnikov, she notes that Christian is drinking a Fanta soda. ( [21] ) Like the Kalashnikov, Fanta has a collective cultural meaning in “first world” material culture. While it would be difficult to impossible to track each individual audience member’s knowledge, recognition, and response to these objects in the script, Fanta’s massive American marketing campaign in the early 2000s offers clues to the audience’s possible associations. The 2001 Fanta television commercial, featuring the tropically themed female group of four, the Fantanas, and their catchy, Latinx-inspired, double-entendre jingle “Fanta, Don’t You Wanna” branded the soda as a fun and sexy party drink, associated with the Global South, where it was already incredibly popular. ( [22] ) At first glance, Christian’s choice to order a soda in a bar, specifically a Fanta, may evoke such cultural associations with fun and pleasure. The cultural biography of Fanta can serve to connect the image of the smiling African salesman character to the “first world” audience and help us understand the relationship between our material culture and the characters’. Because Fanta is specific, its biography is easier to trace as a first example. ( [23] ) The first question that Kopytoff would ask about a bottle of Fanta is, “Where does the thing come from and who made it?” A quick Google search can tell me that “Fanta is a brand of fruit-flavored carbonated drinks created by The Coca-Cola Company and marketed globally.” ( [24] ) However, Kopytoff’s question forces one to search deeper for the unseen labor and processes which created the beverage and brought it to Christian’s hands in Mama Nadi’s bar. Fanta’s presence in this space is evidence of globalization. The Coca-Cola Company is an American corporation, headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, which works with local bottling partners all over the world. ( [25] ) In Africa, at the time that the play was written, the largest partner was SABMiller, a British brewing company based in London. ( [26] ) The bottling and brewing plants would be in African countries such as South Africa, Kenya, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, Namibia, Comoros, Mayotte, Swaziland, Botswana and Zambia — but not the Democratic Republic of Congo. ( [27] ) In the DRC, the Coca-Cola bottling company is the Barlima Brewery, founded by Belgian businessmen during colonial occupation and owned, since 1986, by the Dutch Heineken Corporation. ( [28] ) The list of Coca-Cola products bottled at Barlima does not include Fanta, nor is it listed as being distributed in the DRC. Thus, the Fanta was made by African workers in plants owned by the Dutch, in partnership with an American company, and brought to Mama Nadi’s bar by the black market. ( [29] ) Like the exchange of the Kalashnikov rifles outside of conventional forces, Mama Nadi’s business exists outside of the standard market. She is simultaneously an avid capitalist and a disruptor of capitalist markets, defying simple or clean categories. By asking one simple question of a stage direction on the first page of the script, this methodology has yielded valuable information on the given circumstances of the play and the post-colonial, racial, and capitalist power dynamics of which the characters find themselves. Material Culture as Survival A strictly materialist reading of these circumstances related to Fanta would highlight the role that these systems play in oppressing characters like Mama Nadi. For example, the dialogue of the first scene explains that the movement of goods such as Fanta is difficult due to rebel checkpoints and taxes. A few lines after discussing the joys of his soda, Christian exclaims the quote from earlier about the Kalashnikov and pockets that need filling: “Toll, tax, tariff. They invent reasons to lighten your load.” ([30]) The material objects cannot be separated from the larger given circumstances of the piece. For example, Mama pours herself a Primus beer while Christian drinks his Fanta. Primus beer is brewed in the same Barlima Brewry which partners with Coca-Cola and is owned by the Dutch Heineken Group. Unlike Fanta, which does not distribute in the DRC, Primus has exclusivity deals with bars all over the country, and Heineken pays roughly one million dollars to the rebels to pass their checkpoints so that the beer can be distributed. ([31]) The connections between Heineken and the armed conflict in the DRC has yet to be explored in its entirety. Olivier van Beemen’s explosive book Heineken in Africa: A Multinational Unleashed exposes the company’s ties to corruption, sexual violence, human rights violations, and even genocide in the 1990s. ([32]) A material culture reading acknowledges these systems of oppression, but also asks what the object means for the characters themselves, thus centering them in the narrative, and not the multinational corporations. Here, for example, Primus beer is a significant portion of Mama’s revenue. When Mr. Harari discusses the interlocking oppressions of coltan mining and armed “two-bit militias battling for the keys to hell,” Mama responds to these factors by declaring, “True, chérie, but someone must provide them with beer and distractions.” ( [33] ) Primus is such a large part of Mama’s business that the parrot she keeps in the bar ends the play by squawking, “Mama! Primus! Mama! Primus!” ( [34] ) For Mama, her bar is more than a business, it is survival for her and the girls in her employment as prostitutes. Mama’s bar is established as a safe zone in the first scene when Christian brings his niece Sophie to work there: “I told my family I’d find a place for her . . . And here at least I know she’ll be safe. Fed.” ( [35] ) This fact is stated again in the second act when Mama asserts, “My girls, Emilene, Mazima, Josephine, ask them, they’d rather be here, than back out there in their villages where they are taken without regard. They’re safer with me than in their own homes.” ( [36] ) She describes how the interlocking oppressions which connect natural resources, multinational corporations, beer, and armed conflict also protect her: beer makes the soldiers happy and they protect her business. “Who would protect my business if [the Commander] turned on me?” she says. ( [37] ) This is emphasized when Mr. Harari exclaims to Mama, “Just, be careful, where will I drink if anything happens to you?” ( [38] ) The line emphasizes the fact that her bar is the only one in the area. By selling beer in the rainforest, she meets supply and demand for pleasure in their bleak circumstances. In this way, her business is useful to forces that would otherwise destroy her and the women she protects. Her usefulness, and therefore her financial and physical security, is symbiotically tied to Primus beer. A reading which only focuses on the means by which Primus is produced, distributed, and tied to rebel groups misses the complex material circumstances which tie it to the characters’ survival. Kopytoff asserts that a “cultural biography” of an object must consider the perspective by which one assesses an object. ( [39] ) Does one read the value of Primus beer based on how much Heineken profits from it, how much rebels profit from it, or how much Mama profits from it? The answer is to consider all of them, but to center Mama’s perspective to determine how the object is culturally marked within the world of Nottage’s script. What does her world look like without Fanta or Primus? Thanks to a report by The Economist in 2018, there is little need for speculation. In between 2009 — when Ruined was researched and written — and 2018, Heineken was forced to close two of its breweries in the DRC due to international pressures over their ties to Barlima Brewing Co. and business practices in those regions. The article explains that since 2016, “In western Congo, Angolan beer in cans—less tasty but cheaper than Primus or Tembo—has flooded the market. It is not sold at cost since the smugglers’ main aim is to acquire dollars to trade on the black market in Angola.” ( [40] ) The article also reports that “violence is worsening.” Imagining that this happened while Mama is trying to run her business, she would have to pay more money for beer, which is described as being lower quality. Furthermore, the commercial branding of Primus within the script, and in reality, is of the upmost importance. Kopytoff’s final question asks, “What has been [the object’s] career so far, and what do people consider to be an ideal career for such things? What are the recognized ‘ages’ or periods in the thing’s ‘life,’ and what are the cultural markers for them?” ( [41] ) Both The Economist and Olivier van Beeman discuss how Primus is ingrained in Congolese culture as large sponsors of the music industry, and how Heineken sponsors campus fashion shows at universities, free nights in dance clubs, and music and sporting events. ( [42] ) This gendered meaning of the beer, and its connection to the music industry, is evident in Mama Nadi’s bar where she and Sophie sing songs about beer and about warriors. ( [43] ) In the script, when soldiers enter her bar, they immediately ask for one or two bottles of Primus, and at other times refer to themselves as “warriors” or perform hyper-masculinity. ( [44] ) What would happen if Mama told them that she does not have Primus beer in her stock? Because so much of her survival depends on the happiness of her customers, a negation of the culturally significant pleasure of drinking Primus beer could potentially result in the bar’s value decreasing. Again, the connection between Primus beer, the countries commercial and cultural institutions, and cultural markers for masculinity “sustains the complexity” of the material conditions of the characters’ lives as it also raises the stakes for what would happen if Primus were unavailable to Mama’s bar. The same can be said for mentions of the mineral coltan in the script, which is the one material object that has dominated many discourses in dramaturgy packets. From the first scene, Nottage establishes the importance of this object when Christian says, “All along the road people are talking about how this red dirt is rich with coltan.” ( [45] ) As the scenes progress, the audience is informed of the impact that coltan mining has had on the Congo, and the human rights violations which are connected to the mining and selling of this mineral for electronic devices. In fact, much of the first two scenes is dedicated to explaining this exposition, signaling that this material object is the lynchpin which connects the local economy, the armed conflict, and the sexual violence perpetrated against women. Nottage has positioned the action of the play a few months after coltan had been discovered in the rainforest. Mama says, “Six months ago it was just more black dirt,” ( [46] ) Mr. Harari informs Mama that, “in this damnable age of the mobile phone it's become quite the precious ore...” ( [47] ) Christian establishes that there are large groups of miners coming to the area: “Suddenly everyone has a shovel, and wants to stake a claim since that boastful pygmy dug up his fortune in the reserve. I guarantee there will be twice as many miners here by September.” ( [48] ) This makes Mama Nadi happy, because it means that she will have more customers, however, the character Salima connects the coltan mining to the armed conflict and atrocities, recounting how “fifteen Hema men were shot dead and buried in their own mining pit, in mud so thick it swallow them right into the ground without mercy. He say one man stuff the coltan into his mouth to keep the soldiers from stealing his hard work, and they split his belly open with a machete. ‘It’ll show him for stealing,’ he say, bragging like I should be congratulating him.” ( [49] ) Like Primus, the interlocking oppressions of coltan mining are clear, but so is the fact that Mama’s business depends on it. “Me, I thank God for deep dirty holes like Yaka-yaka,” Mama says of the local mine. ( [50] ) Since Ruined premiered in 2009, dramaturgy packets, study guides, and program notes have addressed the issue of conflict minerals, as they appear in the play, but most fail to address their importance to the characters’ survival. In a way, these dramaturgs have performed the first part of Kopytoff’s methodology on cell phones and other electronic devices that the audience might own, but do not complete the “cultural biography.” For example, Charlie Payne of the Almeida Theatre in London suggests a practical exercise for teachers and students titled “There’s no blood on my mobile!” He instructs his audience to read the context articles he has provided and “Brainstorm the supply chain, or ‘conveyor belt’, of coltan — how does it reach the consumer and what are the consequences of mobile phone consumerism in the West? Now think about this physically. Create six, eightbeat phrases — three relating to the use of coltan and three highlighting its impact in the DRC. Now try playing these all together — a literal conveyer belt from the mines to the consumer.” ( [51] ) Connected to a 2011 production, Berkely Rep Magazine featured a section entitled, “Coltan: From the Congo to you,” reporting that “In the 1990s and early 2000s, coltan emerged as a globally significant commodity essential to the production of digital technology. As world demand for mobile phones, laptops, PlayStations, and digital cameras exploded, tech industries came to increasingly rely on coltan from the Congo, which has an estimated 80% of the world’s reserves.” ( [52] ) A 2011 study guide from Arena Stage cites a United Nations study which reports that, “all parties involved in the conflict have been involved in the mining and sale of coltan. The money rebels and militias receive from these sales helps them buy more weapons and supplies for the war.” ( [53] ) These studies position the audience in relation to the events in the play, but in focusing on making the interlocking oppressions of coltan, cell phones, rebel militias, and sexual violence the sole narrative of the dramaturgy, it centers the victim narrative without adding the nuances of how coltan mining has become a means of survival for women in the DRC. As with Primus beer, the importance of coltan to survival in the DRC was highlighted in the real-world aftermath of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, section 1502, which requited “companies trading on U.S. securities exchanges to determine through supply-chain due diligence whether or not their products contain conflict minerals from DRC or neighboring countries, and report their findings annually to the SEC [Securities Exchange Commission].” ( [54] ) The Washington Post reported that, “In the fall of 2010, two months after the law’s signing, Congo’s government halted mining for six months — even at facilities not controlled by armed groups. The move had tremendous repercussions in a country where, by some estimates, a sixth of the 70 million inhabitants depend on artisanal mining.” ( [55] ) By 2014, the negative effects were felt in the Congo, where out of the nation’s hundreds of mines, only a handful were “tagged” as “conflict free.” ( [56] ) While the law was passed in an effort to curtail the stimulant role of the mining in armed conflicts, a follow up article from 2018 reports that “militias in eastern Congo have only proliferated. Miners are still working in pitiful conditions with little investment into tools and infrastructure. Much evidence points to the reality that minerals coming from mines controlled by militias are still making their way into the global market.” ( [57] ) While Ruined and the aforementioned dramaturgical packets were written without the hindsight of post-Dodd-Frank legislation, Mama Nadi’s lines suggest the immediate importance of the mine to her own survival. When Christian informs her that the violence is intensifying with the disappearance of a white pastor, her first instinctual response is to ask, “What about Yaka-yaka mine? Has the fighting scared off the miners?” ( [58] ) She is more worried about the mine closing than she is about the missing pastor. This is an example of how knowing the material circumstances, and having the hindsight of what happens when those circumstances are changed by external forces, can help contextualize and inform character objectives and value systems. Mama is putting her survival and the survival of the women in her care first in her priorities by caring about the mine’s closure. In “sustaining the complexity” of these objects in the characters’ lives, Nottage withholds the catharsis of an easy solution to the interplay of multinational corporations and violence in “third world” countries. Instead, she chooses to focus on the way that her characters not only survive, but find joy in their circumstances, and this endeavor is closely tied to material objects. Material Culture as Pleasure The importance of objects like Primus and coltan to the immediate survival of the women in the play informs the way that the characters interact with these objects and others which are listed like cigarettes and soap. ( [59] ) However, character interactions with objects are also informed by pleasure as well, and it is important to note that the beer drinking soldiers are not the only characters who derive pleasure from material objects in the script. While the men in the script enjoy a large amount of dominance and power over female pleasure in the context of this play, they do not have a monopoly on it, and they are not able to have full control over it. Unlike the archetypal victims that Mohanty describes, Nottage’s characters share joy and pleasure with male characters and enjoy pleasures of their own. The play’s opening line chooses to focus on Christian’s pleasure as he drinks his soda: “Ah. Cold. The only cold Fanta in twenty-five kilometers. You don’t know how good this tastes.” ( [60] ) The stage directions follow with, “Mama flashes a warm flirtatious smile, then pours herself a Primus beer.” ( [61] ) Knowing the complex relationship between their circumstances, the Fanta, and the Primus, it is worth noting that these characters not only profit from the sale of these objects, but they share in the pleasure of them as well. If a bottle of Fanta, for example, has made its way to Mama Nadi’s bar through a more complicated route, due to the fact that it is not distributed in the DRC, it might be considered something rare or special for the characters – signifying moments that are worth noting to the reader, viewer, in a character analysis by an actor, or in direction of the play. Christian’s line emphasizes the scarcity of Fanta, Mama’s own innovation in finding a way to refrigerate the soda in the middle of the rainforest, and Christian’s sensory enjoyment of the object. Her flirtatiousness is a recognition of Christian’s satisfaction with the Fanta before she pours herself a beverage so that she can share in the same kind of joy. “You sure you don’t want a beer?” Mama asks. “You know me better than that, chérie, I haven’t had a drop of liquor in four years,” Christian replies. The stage directions emphasize that Mama’s next line “It’s cold” is delivered “teasing.” ( [62] ) The objects become part of an improvised language of pleasure, desire, seduction, and satisfaction. This dynamic manifests itself with lipstick a few pages later: MAMA And my lipstick? CHRISTIAN Your lipstick? Aye! Did you ask me for lipstick? MAMA Of course, I did, you idiot!... Leave me alone, you’re too predictable. ( Turns away, dismissive ) CHRISTIAN Where are you going? Hey, hey what are you doing? ( Teasingly ) Chérie, I know you wanted me to forget, so you could yell at me, but you won’t get the pleasure this time. ( Christian taunts her with the lipstick. Mama resists the urge to smile .) MAMA Oh shut up and give it to me. ( He passes her the lipstick.) ( [63] ) Not only do Christian and Mama enjoy the objects individually, but the Fanta, the beer, and the lipstick are incorporated into their dynamic of pleasure. Harkening back to Kopytoff’s final questions, (“What has been [the object’s] career so far, and what do people consider to be an ideal career for such things? What are the recognized ‘ages’ or periods in the thing’s ‘life,’ and what are the cultural markers for them?”), Fanta’s ideal career is to provide such sensory joy. The connection between beverages and flirtation is a common theme in Fanta marketing, when considering the way that the object’s career is culturally marked — or mark eted . ( [64] ) Therefore, its erotic meaning in the encounter between Christian and Mama Nadi is not necessarily contrary to its original meaning; but the raised stakes of the object’s presence in Mama Nadi’s bar signals that this encounter with the two characters is more than a reproduction of a Coca-Cola commercial. Their shared moment over two drinks indicates an early connection between the two, which will ultimately culminate in the controversial romantic ending where the two characters agree to a courtship. This ending was met with distain from critics who believed that the romantic ending undercut the tragedy of sexual violence and war present in the rest of the play, or worse, disrupted its realism. Ben Brantley of The New York Times called the ending “well shaped” and “sentimental,” ultimately deciding that “because of its artistic caution, ‘Ruined’ is likely to reach audiences averse to more adventurous, confrontational theater.” ( [65] ) Brantley’s back-handed compliment implies that Nottage’s ending is not risky enough for the subject of “third world” war. He says, “The play isn’t a form-shattering, soul-jolting shocker like Sarah Kane’s ‘Blasted,’ another and more innovative study in wartime atrocities.” His strong implication is that sentimentality appeals to the lowest common denominator of audiences, who appreciate conventional happy endings. Robert Feldberg of The Herald News asserts that “Nottage succumbs to a desire to project hope and happiness both of which she’s established as extremely unlikely by having Christian playfully woo the reluctant Mama Nadi in a scene set out of an old-fashioned romantic comedy. It’s too trivial, a cuddly ending to an otherwise resonant, deeply felt evening of theatre.” ( [66] ) Jill Dolan, on her blog The Feminist Spectator , critiques the ending similarly by stating “Suddenly, the play becomes a heterosexual romance, in which Mama and her girls are redeemed by the love of a good man.” For Dolan, the heteronormativity of their relationship and the “reintegrating the nuclear family…compromises the rigorous, clear-eyed story Ruined otherwise tells.” ( [67] ) However, something that may seem “conventional” in the context of Western drama (i.e. a romantic ending) takes on new meaning in the circumstances of the play: a Fanta isn’t just a regular soda, and flirting over it is more than a reproduction of commercial images. What does a romantic ending mean in the material context of the characters? To speak directly to Dolan’s point, the circumstances of the play complicate the sexual component of the “heterosexual romance” between Mama Nadi and Christian. Mama reveals in the final scene that she is “ruined,” which means that she has been sexually abused to the point where she can no longer have children. ( [68] ) The specific details of this are left out of the play. It is unclear as to whether this factor limits her ability to have children or her ability to have penetrative sex entirely. The other “ruined” character, Sophie, has been raped with a bayonet — another stark reference to the Kalashnikov — leaving her unable to walk without pain, let alone have intercourse. ( [69] ) Despite the vague implications for Mama’s status as “ruined”, at the very least, it disrupts the “conventional” correlation between heterosexuality and procreation. Mama Nadi and Christian may be a male/female couple, but there is very little that is “normative” about their relationship. The happiness of this ending does not erase the circumstances which complicate it. Nor is it out of place, as these reviews imply. The connection between these two characters has been established since their first page encounter with the Fanta. A reading that centers what the objects mean to the characters suggests that Mama Nadi and Christian’s relationship is “erotic,” but not necessarily sexual — drawing from Audre Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” which cites the erotic as “providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.” ( [70] ) From the beginning of the play, Mama Nadi and Christian are joined by their love of material objects. Christian sells objects, Mama buys them, and this shared passion for things provides them with an improvised language of pleasure, desire, seduction, and satisfaction. As Lorde says, “Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives.” ( [71] ) Throughout the play, Mama Nadi carefully weighs each situation in favor of her own joy and pleasure. For Mama, material objects are extensions of herself. She says, “There must always be a part of you this war can’t touch.” ( [72] ) In this moment, she is talking about a raw diamond that a miner traded to her for four beers and one of her sex workers. Although the audience does not yet know that Mama Nadi is “ruined,” the fact that she equates a material object with the one part of herself that the war cannot touch is significant given the fact that her body has been violated. For Mama, the objects are extensions of her “self” as described by psychologist and material culture theorist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s essay “Why We Need Things.” According to him, the human psyche and sense of identity is vague, and material things help ground people by acting as touchstones. For Csikszentmihalyi, the objects perform: “They do so first by demonstrating the owner’s power, vital erotic energy and place in the social hierarchy.” ( [73] ) For Mama Nadi, the material objects around her represent the power that she has gained within the “interlocking” systems of oppression. She exclaims, “I didn’t come here as Mama Nadi, I found her the same way miners find their wealth in the muck. I stumbled off of that road without two twigs to start a fire. I turned a basket of sweets and soggy biscuits into a business. I don’t give a damn what any of you think. This is my place, Mama Nadi’s.” ( [74] ) Thus, everything in the bar is an extension of herself and plays a role in her self-definition — or re-definition. Therefore, the stage direction in the beginning that says that “a lot of effort” has gone into making the bar look cheerful suggests that pleasure is important for the character as well, and that these objects that she surrounds herself with speak to more than survival. Lorde describes the “erotic” in a similar way; that it is something internal [read: psychological and spiritual] and not physical. Although she and Csikszentmihalyi are writing from different disciplines, and are separated by age, gender, race, and nationality, both write about the erotic, and Lorde uses material objects to describe what happens inside her “self”: During World War II, we bought sealed plastic packets of white, uncolored margarine, with a tiny, intense pellet of yellow coloring perched like a topaz just inside the clear skin of the bag. We would leave the margarine out for a while to soften, and then we would pinch the little pellet to break it inside the bag, releasing the rich yellowness into the soft pale mass of margarine. . . I find the erotic such a kernel within myself. When released from its intense and constrained pellet, it flows through and colors my life with a kind of energy that heightens and sensitizes and strengthens all my experience. ( [75] ) Thus, she, like Mama Nadi equates a material object with her own internal vital energy. Mama’s raw diamond can be taken away, but no one can take away what it represents: the fact that she has not only survived being “ruined” but has also prospered, thrived, and found joy. Decolonizing Efforts in American Theatre As American theatre, in both academia and the industry, commits itself to anti-racism and decolonization practices, let us not forget Patricia Hill Collins’s foundational text “The Politics of Black Feminist Thought,” in which she pays homage to the long tradition of resisting negative images of Black women and moving towards self-definition as independence, self-determination, self-reliance, and survival. ( [76] ) A material culture theory reading of Ruined yields significant information on the character’s material circumstances, interlocking oppressions, survival tactics, and pleasures. Each of these forces is connected to the other, and material objects are deeply interwoven into these dynamics. However, discussions of survival and pleasure are often left out of Western assessments of “third world” women, including those surrounding works of theatre like Ruined , as shown by dramaturgical and critical academic archives. In doing so, these conversations run the risk of reinforcing victim archetypes as discussed by Mohanty’s work, which can be potentially counter-productive to anti-racist and anti-colonial efforts. Material culture theory is a methodology that can be applied to both scholarly and practical theatrical projects and evidences the ways that scholarly methods are useful and relevant to the production process. In this case, material culture theory can be used not only for the props list, but also for the places where material objects intersect with scenic dressing, costuming, practical lighting instruments, sound effect and music choices, and, of course, directing and acting choices. What kind of objects decorate the set described in the opening stage directions? Where do they come from and who made them? What do they mean to the characters? What are the characters wearing and how did those clothes come into their possession? What kind of lights did Mama Nadi use to make her bar look “cheerful”? What would be available to her? How would sound be distorted if the equipment was powered by a car battery that was also powering the lights? These are many questions that designers already ask themselves based on the design processes. These are already the kinds of conversations that take place at production meetings. Material culture theory can help ensure that the answers to these questions are culturally specific, accurate, and precise. This is especially true when engaging with marginalized groups who are often omitted from or misrepresented written archives. What story do the objects tell? How do people in these groups use objects in everyday life towards self-definition? The importance of self-definition is also articulated by Mohanty’s work on decolonizing images of the “third world” woman in white, Western feminist hegemonies, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s book Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, which critiques the role of the Western imagination in the formation of the Other. Smith says, “I say that because like many other writers I would argue that 'we', indigenous peoples, people 'of color', the Other, however we are named, have a presence in the Western imagination, in its fiber and texture, in its sense of itself, in its language, in its silences and shadows, its margins and intersections.” ( [77] ) While Mohanty’s work is primarily a critique against academic constructions of the “third world,” Smith’s is an indictment of Western imagination for the role that it played in justifying the imperial exploitation of the “third world,” indigenous people, and people of the African diaspora for centuries. In the case of Ruined , and other theatrical representations of Black women, particularly those who live in what is considered the “third world,” material culture theory avoids the assumptions that are made in the Western imagination — and the historical baggage that comes with it – and allows one to study how the characters use material objects to define themselves. Both are vital decolonizing processes for the portrayal, or “re-presentation”, as Mohanty calls it, of Black, “third world” women on the American stage. References 1. Lynn Nottage, Ruined (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2009), 5. 2. Nottage, Ruined , 5. 3. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham: Duke University Press, 200), 338. 4. Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes,” 345. 5. Nottage, Ruined , xi. 6. Nottage, Ruined , xi. 7. The Kalashnikov, like the designation between the “first”, “second,” and “third world”, is a product of the Cold War, and most-often culturally associated, by Americans, with conflicts that arose as results of those international tensions and their global aftermath. 8. C. J.,Chivers, The Gun . (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 9. 9. The Combahee River Collective, "A Black Feminist Statement."Women's Studies Quarterly 42, no. 3/4 (2014): 271-80, 271. 10. Nicole Rosky, “Lynn Nottage's CLYDE'S Tops List of Most-Produced Play of the Season,” Broadwayworld.com , September 23, 2022. https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Lynn-Nottage-CLYDES-Tops-List-of-Most-Produced-Play-of-the-Season-20220923. 11. American Theatre Editors, “Offscript: Most-Produced WithLynn Nottage & Lauren Gunderson,” American Theatre, September 27, 2022. https://www.americantheatre.org/2022/09/27/offscript-most-produced-with-lynn-nottage-lauren-gunderson/. 12. Celia Lury, Consumer Culture . 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 9. 13. Lury, Consumer Culture, 9. 14. Lury, Consumer Culture, 21-22. 15. Nottage, Ruined, xi. 16. Mohanty, 339. 17. Jeff Paden, “Hybridity of form and political potentiality in Ruined,” in A Critical Companion to Lynn Nottage (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2016),145-159. 18. Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 66. 19. Nottage, Ruined, 5. 20. Nottage, Ruined, 5. 21. Nottage, Ruined , 5. 22. Fanta was marketed globally before it was marketed in the US due to fears that it would compete too heavily with Coca-Cola. After enjoying some popularity in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Fanta—along with other sodas—lost popularity to its sister orange soda brand Minute Maid as consumers became more interested in heathy foods and drinks. Fanta had been a bigger market item globally, especially in Africa and South America. Because of the orange soda’s popularity in Latin America,The Journal Record reported in 2001 that Fanta was being reintroduced in American markets through “Hispanic-heavy test markets in Texas, Arizona and Southern California. Sales jumped from 24.4 million cases in 2000 to 42.2 million last year, according to Beverage Digest. The jump was due to the rollout in test markets.” In 2002, the iconic Fantanas commercial was released nationally in a huge campaign,which was revived in 2004, 2006, and so on. The Fantanas became very culturally recognizable in the US, and were even featured in satires on MadTV and Family Guy. It is possible that collective memory of this marketing campaign would be accessible to “first world” audiences of Ruined in the 2010s. Admin, “Remember Fanta?: Business World,”The Journal Record, March 6, 2002, Accessed October 26, 2023,https://journalrecord.com/2002/03/06/remember-fanta-business-world/. 23. Washtubs and batteries are a bit vague. If this happens while doing a material culture reading of a play, especiallyone which takes place in a “third world” country, I recommend doing as much research as possible. In the event thatresearch fails, and a“first world” theatre maker must fill in the “gaps”, so-to-speak with their imaginations, it isimportant to remember the aforementioned “baggage” regarding Western imaginations of “third world” locationsand peoples. 24. “Fanta,” Wikipedia.org . Accessed October 30, 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanta. 25. "The Coca-Cola System,” Coca-Cola Journey, “Our Company,” Accessed October 30, 2018.https://www.coca-colacompany.com/our-company/the-coca-cola-system. 26. “Coca-Cola Beverages Africa Begins Operations,” Coca-Cola Journey, “Press Releases,” Accessed October 30,2018. https://www.coca-colacompany.com/press-center/press-releases/coca-cola-beverages-africa-begins-operations. 27. https://www.coca-colacompany.com/press-center/press-releases/coca-cola-beverages-africa-begins-operations. 28. Maik Dünnbier, “Big Alcohol and The War In Congo,” in Alcohol Industry, Corporate Consumption Complex, Obstacle To Development, Sustainable Development , November 2013. Accessed October 30, 2018. http://iogt.org/blog/2013/11/09/heineken-and-the-war-in-congo/. 29. One aspect of the play, which is interesting considering the fact that Nottage writes for a first-world audience, isthe fact that there are no representatives of the first-world that ever appear onstage. Mama and Christian mention a white pastor missionary, a Belgian shopkeeper in Bunia, and Mama talks about “blue helmets”, UN peacekeeping forces in the final scene. The only physical presence of the first-world comes in the form of imported goods or the cultural remnants of the Belgian colonization, in the form of the French language and racial divide between blacks and whites. There are several possible reasons as to why Nottage has made the choice to keep the more fortunate first-world population out of her story, but the most powerful statement that arises from their absence is, of course, their absence. Nottage makes a point that there is little to no intervention from the outside world, and there is a sense of abandonment throughout the play. 30. Nottage, Ruined, 10. 31.“How Heineken beer survives in Congo Brewers are rare colonial-era holdouts in a notorious trouble spot.” The Economist. April 21, 2018. Accessed December 13, 2018. https://www.economist.com/business/2018/04/21/how-heineken-beer-survives-in-congo. 32. Olivier van Beemen, Heineken in Africa: A Multinational Unleashed, (United Kingdom: C Hurst & Company Publishers Limited, 2021). 33. Nottage, Ruined, 28. 34. Nottage, Ruined, 102. 35. Nottage, Ruined , 15. 36. Nottage, Ruined, 86. 37. Nottage, Ruined , 85. 38. Nottage, Ruined, 28. 39. Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things,”68. 40. https://www.economist.com/business/2018/04/21/how-heineken-beer-survives-in-congo . 41. Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things,” 67. 42. Van Beeman, 59. 43. Nottage, Ruined, 181-124. 44. Nottage, Ruined, 28, 42, 81. 45. Nottage, Ruined, 13. 46. Nottage, Ruined , 25. 47. Nottage, Ruined, 25. 48. Nottage, Ruined , 13. 49. Nottage, Ruined , 31. 50. Nottage, Ruined, 41. 51. Charlie Payne, “Ruined Study Guide.” London: Almeida Projects, 2010. Accessed October 2018, https://www.nightwoodtheatre.net/uploads/RUINED,_STUDY_GUIDE.pdf. 52. Rachel Steinburg, “Web of Violence Untangling ‘Africa’s World War,’” The Berkeley Rep Magazine 5, no. 1 (2010-2011), 23. Accessed October 2018, https://www.berkeleyrep.org/season/1011/pdf/program-ru.pdf. 53. Julia DePalma, “Arena’s Page Study Guide.” Arena Stage. 2011, 4. Accessed October 2018. https://www.arenastage.org/globalassets/education/school-programs/study-guide--ruined.pdf. 54. Mvemba Phezo Dizolele, “Dodd-Frank 1502 and the Congo Crisis,” Center for Strategic and InternationalStudies, August 22, 2017. Accessed December 13, 2018. https://www.csis.org/analysis/dodd-frank-1502-and-congo-crisis. 55. Sudarsan Raghavan, “How a well-intentioned U.S. law left Congolese miners jobless,”The Washington Post, November 30, 2014. Accessed December 13, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/how-a-well-intentioned-us-law-left-congolese-miners-jobless/2014/11/30/14b5924e-69d3-11e4-9fb4-a622dae742a2_story.html?utm_term=.edaa0dfda37e. 56. Adalbert Murhi Mubalama, one of the ministers of mines, told The Washington Post, “As of October [2014], there were only 11 mines out of more than 900 here in South Kivu where minerals were “tagged” as conflict-free.”Raghavan, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/how-a-well-intentioned-us-law-left-congolese-miners-jobless/2014/11/30/14b5924e-69d3-11e4-9fb4-a622dae742a2_story.html?utm_term=.edaa0dfda37e. 57. Laura Kasinof, “An ugly truth behind ‘ethical consumerism’”The Washington Post. April 19, 2018. AccessedDecember 13, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/04/19/conflict-free/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.6ea84da645e7. 58. Nottage, Ruined, 40. 59. Nottage, Ruined, 5. 60. Nottage, Ruined, 5-6. 61. The interconnectedness of Fanta, Primus, the armed conflict, the movement of goods intensifies Mama and Christian’s brief moment of flirtation over the cold soda, followed by the pouring of beer. Dünnbier, http://iogt.org/blog/2013/11/09/heineken-and-the-war-in-congo/and 62. Nottage, Ruined, 6. 63. Nottage, Ruined , 6-7. 64. Fanta’s advertising campaign in the early 2000s featured a group of flirtatious women called the Fantanas who would sing a song called “Wanta Fanta” and seduce men into drinking the soda in various tropical scenarios. 65. Ben Brantley, “War’s Terrors, Through a Brothel Window,”The New York Times, February 11, 2009. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/11/theater/reviews/11bran.html. 66. Paden, 145. 67. Jill Dolan, “Ruined, by Lynn Nottage.” The Feminist Spectator, March 13, 2009. Nov 4, 2018. http://feministspectator.princeton.edu/2009/03/16/ruined-by-lynn-nottage/. 68. Nottage, Ruined , 12. 69. Nottage, Ruined , 13. 70. Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic” in Sister Outsider (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1984), 56. 71. Nottage, Ruined, 57. 72. Nottage, Ruined , 53. 73. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “Why We Need Things,” In History from Things: Essays on Material Culture . Ed. Lubar, Steven D, and W. D Kingery, (SmithsonianInstitution Press, 1993), 23. 74. Nottage, Ruined , 86. 75. Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” 57. 76. She cites Maria Stewart writing in 1833. Patricia Hill Collins, “The Politics of Black Feminist Thought” and “Distinguishing Features of Black Feminist Thought,” in Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd editions (New York: Routledge, 2000 [1990]), 1. 77. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 2012), 14. Footnotes [1] Lynn Nottage, Ruined (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2009), 5. [2] Nottage, Ruined , 5. [3] Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham: Duke University Press, 200) , 338. [4] Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes,” 345. [5] Nottage, Ruined , xi. [6] Nottage, Ruined, xi. [7] The Kalashnikov, like the designation between the “first”, “second,” and “third world”, is a product of the Cold War, and most-often culturally associated, by Americans, with conflicts that arose as results of those international tensions and their global aftermath. [8] C. J., Chivers, The Gun . (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 9. [9] The Combahee River Collective, "A Black Feminist Statement." Women's Studies Quarterly 42, no. 3/4 (2014): 271-80, 271. [10] Nicole Rosky, “Lynn Nottage's CLYDE'S Tops List of Most-Produced Play of the Season,” Broadwayworld.com , September 23, 2022. https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/Lynn-Nottage-CLYDES-Tops-List-of-Most-Produced-Play-of-the-Season-20220923 . [11] American Theatre Editors, “Offscript: Most-Produced With Lynn Nottage & Lauren Gunderson,” American Theatre, September 27, 2022. https://www.americantheatre.org/2022/09/27/offscript-most-produced-with-lynn-nottage-lauren-gunderson/ . [12] Celia Lury, Consumer Culture . 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 9. [13] Lury, Consumer Culture , 9. [14] Lury, Consumer Culture , 21-22. [15] Nottage, Ruined , xi. [16] Mohanty, 339. [17] Jeff Paden, “Hybridity of form and political potentiality in Ruined,” in A Critical Companion to Lynn Nottage (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2016), 145-159. [18] Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 66. [19] Nottage, Ruined , 5. [20] Nottage, Ruined , 5. [21] Nottage, Ruined , 5. [22] Fanta was marketed globally before it was marketed in the US due to fears that it would compete too heavily with Coca-Cola. After enjoying some popularity in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Fanta—along with other sodas—lost popularity to its sister orange soda brand Minute Maid as consumers became more interested in heathy foods and drinks. Fanta had been a bigger market item globally, especially in Africa and South America. Because of the orange soda’s popularity in Latin America, The Journal Record reported in 2001 that Fanta was being reintroduced in American markets through “Hispanic-heavy test markets in Texas, Arizona and Southern California. Sales jumped from 24.4 million cases in 2000 to 42.2 million last year, according to Beverage Digest. The jump was due to the rollout in test markets.” In 2002, the iconic Fantanas commercial was released nationally in a huge campaign, which was revived in 2004, 2006, and so on. The Fantanas became very culturally recognizable in the US, and were even featured in satires on MadTV and Family Guy . It is possible that collective memory of this marketing campaign would be accessible to “first world” audiences of Ruined in the 2010s. Admin, “Remember Fanta?: Business World ,” The Journal Record , March 6, 2002, Accessed October 26, 2023, https://journalrecord.com/2002/03/06/remember-fanta-business-world/ . [23] Washtubs and batteries are a bit vague. If this happens while doing a material culture reading of a play, especially one which takes place in a “third world” country, I recommend doing as much research as possible. In the event that research fails, and a “first world” theatre maker must fill in the “gaps”, so-to-speak with their imaginations, it is important to remember the aforementioned “baggage” regarding Western imaginations of “third world” locations and peoples. [24] “Fanta,” Wikipedia.org . Accessed October 30, 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanta . [25] “The Coca-Cola System,” Coca-Cola Journey, “Our Company,” Accessed October 30, 2018. https://www.coca-colacompany.com/our-company/the-coca-cola-system . [26] “Coca-Cola Beverages Africa Begins Operations,” Coca-Cola Journey, “Press Releases,” Accessed October 30, 2018. https://www.coca-colacompany.com/press-center/press-releases/coca-cola-beverages-africa-begins-operations . [27] https://www.coca-colacompany.com/press-center/press-releases/coca-cola-beverages-africa-begins-operations . [28] Maik Dünnbier, “Big Alcohol and The War In Congo,” in Alcohol Industry, Corporate Consumption Complex, Obstacle To Development, Sustainable Development , November 2013. Accessed October 30, 2018. http://iogt.org/blog/2013/11/09/heineken-and-the-war-in-congo/ . [29] One aspect of the play, which is interesting considering the fact that Nottage writes for a first-world audience, is the fact that there are no representatives of the first-world that ever appear onstage. Mama and Christian mention a white pastor missionary, a Belgian shopkeeper in Bunia, and Mama talks about “blue helmets”, UN peacekeeping forces in the final scene. The only physical presence of the first-world comes in the form of imported goods or the cultural remnants of the Belgian colonization, in the form of the French language and racial divide between blacks and whites. There are several possible reasons as to why Nottage has made the choice to keep the more fortunate first-world population out of her story, but the most powerful statement that arises from their absence is, of course, their absence. Nottage makes a point that there is little to no intervention from the outside world, and there is a sense of abandonment throughout the play. [30] Nottage, Ruined , 10. [31] “How Heineken beer survives in Congo Brewers are rare colonial-era holdouts in a notorious trouble spot.” The Economist . April 21, 2018. Accessed December 13, 2018. https://www.economist.com/business/2018/04/21/how-heineken-beer-survives-in-congo . [32] Olivier van Beemen, Heineken in Africa: A Multinational Unleashed, (United Kingdom: C Hurst & Company Publishers Limited, 2021). [33] Nottage, Ruined , 28. [34] Nottage, Ruined , 102. [35] Nottage, Ruined , 15. [36] Nottage, Ruined , 86. [37] Nottage, Ruined , 85. [38] Nottage, Ruined , 28. [39] Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things,” 68. [40] https://www.economist.com/business/2018/04/21/how-heineken-beer-survives-in-congo . [41] Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things,” 67. [42] Van Beeman, 59. [43] Nottage, Ruined , 181-124. [44] Nottage, Ruined , 28, 42, 81. [45] Nottage, Ruined , 13. [46] Nottage, Ruined , 25. [47] Nottage, Ruined , 25. [48] Nottage, Ruined , 13. [49] Nottage, Ruined , 31. [50] Nottage, Ruined , 41. [51] Charlie Payne, “ Ruined Study Guide.” London: Almeida Projects, 2010. Accessed October 2018, https://www.nightwoodtheatre.net/uploads/RUINED,_STUDY_GUIDE.pdf . [52] Rachel Steinburg, “Web of Violence Untangling ‘Africa’s World War,’” The Berkeley Rep Magazine 5, no. 1 (2010-2011), 23. Accessed October 2018, https://www.berkeleyrep.org/season/1011/pdf/program-ru.pdf . [53] Julia DePalma, “Arena’s Page Study Guide.” Arena Stage. 2011, 4. Accessed October 2018. https://www.arenastage.org/globalassets/education/school-programs/study-guide--ruined.pdf . [54] Mvemba Phezo Dizolele, “Dodd-Frank 1502 and the Congo Crisis,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, August 22, 2017. Accessed December 13, 2018. https://www.csis.org/analysis/dodd-frank-1502-and-congo-crisis . [55] Sudarsan Raghavan, “How a well-intentioned U.S. law left Congolese miners jobless,” The Washington Post , November 30, 2014. Accessed December 13, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/how-a-well-intentioned-us-law-left-congolese-miners-jobless/2014/11/30/14b5924e-69d3-11e4-9fb4-a622dae742a2_story.html?utm_term=.edaa0dfda37e . [56] Adalbert Murhi Mubalama, one of the ministers of mines, told The Washington Post , “As of October [2014], there were only 11 mines out of more than 900 here in South Kivu where minerals were “tagged” as conflict-free.” Raghavan, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/how-a-well-intentioned-us-law-left-congolese-miners-jobless/2014/11/30/14b5924e-69d3-11e4-9fb4-a622dae742a2_story.html?utm_term=.edaa0dfda37e . [57] Laura Kasinof, “An ugly truth behind ‘ethical consumerism’” The Washington Post . April 19, 2018. Accessed December 13, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/04/19/conflict-free/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.6ea84da645e7 . [58] Nottage, Ruined , 40. [59] Nottage, Ruined , 5. [60] Nottage, Ruined , 5-6. [61] The interconnectedness of Fanta, Primus, the armed conflict, the movement of goods intensifies Mama and Christian’s brief moment of flirtation over the cold soda, followed by the pouring of beer. Dünnbier, http://iogt.org/blog/2013/11/09/heineken-and-the-war-in-congo/ and Nottage, Ruined, 6. [62] Nottage, Ruined , 6. [63] Nottage, Ruined , 6-7. [64] Fanta’s advertising campaign in the early 2000s featured a group of flirtatious women called the Fantanas who would sing a song called “Wanta Fanta” and seduce men into drinking the soda in various tropical scenarios. [65] Ben Brantley, “War’s Terrors, Through a Brothel Window,” The New York Times , February 11, 2009. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/11/theater/reviews/11bran.html . [66] Paden, 145. [67] Jill Dolan, “Ruined, by Lynn Nottage.” The Feminist Spectator , March 13, 2009. Nov 4, 2018. http://feministspectator.princeton.edu/2009/03/16/ruined-by-lynn-nottage/ . [68] Nottage, Ruined , 12. [69] Nottage, Ruined , 13. [70] Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic” in Sister Outsider (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1984), 56. [71] Nottage, Ruined , 57 [72] Nottage, Ruined , 53. [73] Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “Why We Need Things,” In History from Things: Essays on Material Culture . Ed. Lubar, Steven D, and W. D Kingery, ( Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 23. [74] Nottage, Ruined , 86. [75] Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” 57. [76] She cites Maria Stewart writing in 1833. Patricia Hill Collins, “The Politics of Black Feminist Thought” and “Distinguishing Features of Black Feminist Thought,” Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment , 2nd editions (New York: Routledge, 2000 [1990]), 1. [77] Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 2012), 14. About The Author(s) Christen Mandracchia is an Assistant Professor and Production Manager in West Chester University’s Department of Theatre and Dance. She earned her doctorate in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research emphasizes material histories of theatrical labor, with a special emphasis on theatre professionals who venture into non-theatrical fields. Areas of research also include theatre architecture, queer theatre history, and musical 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. 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Madeline Pages Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 1 Visit Journal Homepage Theatre of Isolation Madeline Pages By Published on December 9, 2021 Download Article as PDF Conceiving of a theatre of isolation presents the performance scholar with a conundrum akin to a tree falling in a secluded forest. As it is so often distinguished by the presence of the group, of collective and communal exchange, the theatre as an art form seems diametrically opposed to isolation—physical, social, mental, emotional, spiritual. How can theatre relate to the world while maintaining a state of isolation from it? And where does isolation lead if and when it ends? I offer theatre of isolation as a category of performance that engages with these questions and one that implies a tension between the social engagement of theatre, which is often thought of as having a social function, and social isolation. In 2020, theatre artists were living in that tension. I believe their work proved theatre and isolation can coexist. I also believe theatre of isolation is not a temporally bounded category but one we can use to see this coexistence of socially engaged art with isolation in the work of theatre makers from other times. The 1970s in the US was an era of aftermath. American society faced as one (though by disparate means and with differing attitudes) the shock of the Vietnam War as it was witnessed on television, national financial decline, and the continued, violent subjugation of marginalized people. The political struggles of the 1960s, in a sense, continued through the 1970s, prolonged and deepened without relief as one decade spilled into the next. Given this climate, a desire for isolation or at least the expression of that desire in art, strikes me as unsurprising. For this essay, I have chosen to look at three artists, Adrienne Kennedy, Peter Schumann, and Jack Smith, whose theatre from the 1970s is isolated from the dominant culture—white, male, heterosexual, conservative, capitalist—of the time. Isolation of this type may be reflected in physical space, and I pay close attention to both real and imaginary architectures of isolation. However, my analysis is more broadly concerned with social isolation—how it happens, what it looks and feels like, and its effect on artistic expression. The result of this isolation is not necessarily an increased understanding of the self, of one’s identity, but a kind of solace that primes the individual for the monumental task of breaking new ground and resisting oppression. Such a claim is not new. Theatre of isolation can be classified alongside the antisocial and the anti-relational in performance studies, particularly as such terms are debated among scholars of queer studies. [1] However, I wish to distinguish isolation from the antisocial and align my analysis with the asocial as theorized by Summer Kim Lee in “Staying In: Mitski, Ocean Vuong, and Asian American Asociality.” The asocial, according to Lee, complicates and expands the state of antisociality of the subject, as a momentary choice to resist the social in order to “shift and reconstellate one’s relations to . . . the socialities with which one is entangled,” rather than deny or resist relationality completely. [2] “Staying in” is what Lee calls the performance of asociality in which the subject chooses to be alone rather than be out with others. In Lee’s formulation, to have the need and desire for time away from others, from an outside . . . does not hold up a depoliticized fantasy of autonomy. . . . Rather, it points toward the desire to want to relate, to show up for another, but when one is ready, and in ways that alter the horizon of what constitutes the social, and the political projects, collectivities, affiliations, and models of care borne out of it. [3] “Staying in,” then, is a self-reflexive performance of asociality, an enactment of “the ambivalent and rich aspects of solitude” for the purposes of protection and preservation, but also preparation for political and social engagement. Particularly for individuals who identify with a minority group—Lee speaks specifically to the effects for Asian American people—staying in offers “sustained and sustaining ways . . . of moving through a world that is messy, damaging, hurtful, and exhausting.” [4] Staying in appears to be the antidote to the psychic exhaustion caused by the normalization of oppression, but does not preclude political engagement or outward expression, as in forms of public art. Lee further argues that staying in is in fact “enfolded within . . . acts and desires of going out” to participate in “radical, collective, organized action [that has heretofore characterized minoritarian political critique] within the social worlds in which we live.” [5] Such collective actions have been inherited by contemporary culture through glorified histories of the protests and insurgency of the 1960s. From that decade’s legacy emerged a “compulsory sociability,” the belief that “one’s political investments and acts of solidarity must be located in the realm of the social.” [6] As Lee conceives it, staying in as a mode of performance rejects the assumption of compulsory sociability but not the collective pursuit of social justice. [7] Staying in inverts the common conception of the antisocial or isolated individual as outside —outside of the world, disengaged, or perhaps a mere spectator. Instead, the individual staying in is staying inside , and by choice. What defines an “insider” is not, as the prevailing use of term implies, the power of being part of the majority but isolation from the outside world while one remains within it. Furthermore, this kind of social isolation is personal, and consciously undertaken; from it one can derive some agency, defining one’s own terms of engagement. This unconventional inside/outside dichotomy becomes important for what follows. I am, as the three artists I will discuss in depth here are, always keeping an eye on the outside context as I delve into solitary spaces of imagination and creative practice. This outside, on the macro level, is the US in the 1970s. The dominant scholarly narratives of American culture in the 1970s, and particularly those narratives that focus on the theatre of the era, provide contradictory summaries of the artistic landscape: it is sometimes monopolized by the echoes of Tom Wolfe’s 1976 essay on “The Me Decade” and the nihilistic glamour of Andy Warhol, or, conversely, by artists characterized as community-oriented survivors scraping by in the middle of a national financial crisis. Hillary Miller argues that these analyses submerge “very necessary labors of institutionalization . . . in histories of downtown theatre that focus on the 1970s political separatism on the one hand, and myopic investigations of the self and identity on the other.” [8] Marc Robinson prefers to look at the American art world in the 1970s as in transition, in flux and unfixed, a decade of indeterminacy, which is a description that this essay may heighten and, hopefully, expand by offering up a possible explanation for that instability (at least for the artists I hone in on). [9] I argue that the lack of fixity stems from, as this brief summary of seventies historiography suggests, a conflict between the solitary and the collective. Therefore, my own research on the decade is caught somewhere in the middle of the academic fray, seeking to spotlight what Will Kaufman claims are the concerns of the decade’s drama with “social exclusion, isolation, and exhaustion,” while denying any notion that isolation as aesthetic counteracts activism and community solidarity. [10] Adrienne Kennedy, Peter Schumann, and Jack Smith are three markedly different artists, and their individual experiences of social isolation cannot be conflated. Whereas Schumann, as I will discuss in detail later on, isolates himself by choice, Kennedy’s (and Smith’s, to a certain extent) isolation begins as the result of exclusion. What I believe these artists have in common (other than being contemporaries) is that the theatre of isolation mirrors the social isolation of the artist, which I will argue further in what follows. All three have received, and continue to receive, no shortage of attention, making them familiar to many readers. This allows me to focus on my point of contact: the theme and aesthetics of isolation within their theatre. I adopt Lee’s approach to how individual artistic works both reflect, and are aesthetically influenced by, the artist’s state of isolation, physical or otherwise, from the social world. In the sense that all three were working in the American Northeast in the 1970s, the scope of this essay is narrow and reveals my own blind spots as a scholar. This essay is not intended to be an encompassing study. It wants conversation: conversation with Lee and other queer theorists and historians, with other artists, and with present and future performance and criticism. I address this essay to future works in particular, in the hopes that the category of theatre of isolation will be a useful tool for the theatre of the present. “I always just could very easily become a character in the movies or in a book.”[11] Adrienne Kennedy seems to stand alone in scholarship. On the surface she may be an odd choice for this essay, given that she appears to be very much a part of the scene in the seventies. She was involved with the playwrights’ coalitions New York Theatre Strategy (NYTS) and the Women’s Theatre Council (WTC) and her plays were performed at major downtown theatre hubs like The Public and La Mama. However, she continues to be treated at least from a historical perspective as constantly new and emerging, or else already dead and being revived, in spite of the actual trajectory of her career as a playwright. Though already the winner of an Obie, in the late 1970s she was, as alluded to by Miller, still a new artist to the likes of Joe Papp, who produced the premiere of A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White in his New York Shakespeare Festival in 1976. Stephen J. Bottoms, on the other hand, chooses to mention only the revivals of her work, which seems to devalue the new plays she wrote in the seventies. In overviews of women playwrights and feminist theatre, such as Brenda Murphy’s essay for The Cambridge History of American Women’s Literature , Kennedy is little more than a footnote: her name introduces the “explosion of playwriting in the 1970s that accompanied the second-wave feminist movement,” but none of her plays are mentioned. [12] Then there are the places Kennedy is not named at all: in James Smethurst’s 2005 book on the Black Arts Movement (BAM) in the 1960s and 1970s, for example, Jack Kerouac’s name pops up five times and Kennedy’s does not appear once. She is rarely counted among members of the BAM, though she was in conversation with the movement’s leading artists. At the same time, her race and gender have contributed to her elision from other histories of New York theatre in the 1960s and 1970s. [13] Kennedy’s resistance to grouping, her lack of “group-ness,” at a time when groups, collectives, and movements appear to be the central critical-historical focus, may in part explain the scholarly tendency to read her plays as self-contained or autobiographical. Kimberly W. Benston, for example, writes that “autobiography . . . is the very signature of Adrienne Kennedy’s impossible though endless quest for a clarifying and stabilizing source.” [14] Kennedy is thus placed in a room of her own, unsurprising for a writer whose introspective style of drama abounds with isolated rooms, frames, and other physical spaces as recurring metaphors. [15] Thus, Kennedy’s particular theatre of isolation is characterized by the isolation chamber of the imagination, i.e. the funnyhouse. Beginning with Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964), Kennedy devises the “funnyhouse” as a psychological isolation chamber where characters that look and sound very much like their author grappling with the mystery of the self. In Funnyhouse , the self is subsequently broken up into multiple, “ideal selves,” from Patrice Lumumba to Jesus. In her later works, the “funnyhouse” is given different names (the sleep deprivation chamber, for example), yet its structure persists as indicative of the same interior: that of the writer’s mind. Luckily, we have snippets of the writer’s mind for comparison: that is, Kennedy’s prose texts, such as People Who Led to My Plays , which give context to the sense of isolation in plays like Funnyhouse . There is a potential danger, however, in reading Kennedy as self-contained if it means downplaying the influence of outside sources. As suggested by the epigraph to this section, as well as the subject matter of People Who Led to My Plays , the books, movies, and other media Kennedy consumed are inseparable from her imagination and the spaces in her plays. Particularly in her plays from the 1970s, Kennedy is mining the American media, and showing onstage the complex relationship between the media and Black people. An Evening with Dead Essex (1973), for example, was the result of an obsession in the early 1970s with the way news reports depicted Mark Essex, the Black nationalist who killed nine people in two attacks in New Orleans in December 1972 and January 1973. “I feel like Mark Essex,” she told Paul K. Bryant-Jackson and Lois More Overbeck in a 1990 interview, carrying her own “tremendous rage against American society.” On the one hand, as an African American she was forced to be bicultural, to read white culture as fluently as Black, despite being violently written out of that culture. Benston remarks, “Much like her heroines, Kennedy’s work seems driven by a search for an incandescent touchstone of self-reference, some primal image, story, or scene, that would heal the self’s constitution as wound or lack, its entrapment in dramas scripted from elsewhere.” [16] On the other hand, Kennedy says, “I think that as a black person in America, you almost have to force yourself on society.” [17] Kennedy’s books and movies, and even the true story of Essex, are the “dramas scripted from elsewhere,” and Benston interprets them as a trap of false identity. But it is perhaps this sense of falseness, when Kennedy wrestles with it in her plays, which is most illuminating of how the outside world operates against her and other Black people, particularly women. In A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White , the Kennedy funnyhouse transforms into the silver screen of Golden Age Hollywood cinema, more enthralling to Kennedy and exclusive of her conception of self than any other “drama scripted from elsewhere.” In the play’s opening speech the audience is told that Clara plays “a bit role,” standing outside the frame and the action between characters representing cinema stars Marlon Brando, Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, Jean Peters, Montgomery Clift, and Shelley Winters. [18] Even when Clara steps into the scene, her “lines” are read by one of these white Hollywood icons and she is separated from both the movie world and her own life as her diary entries, recounting her family’s history and present relationships, are read aloud and subsumed within their reenactment of famous films. The black and white movie scenes are juxtaposed with scenes of Clara’s parents and husband, who “all look like [black and white] photographs” she keeps of them. The play is always attempting to fit these two spaces, the screen and picture frame, together, but regularly fails. For example, the hospital bedroom of Clara’s brother, in which she and her mother discuss her happiness or lack thereof, is at odds with the bedroom in which the characters of Marlon Brando and Jean Peters perform the teach-me-to-read scene from the film Viva Zapata , the one in “constant twilight” while Brando and Peters “star in dazzling wedding night light.” [19] The simultaneity of these contrasting scenes heightens the disconnection between Clara’s life and that of the movies, as well as between mother and daughter in their conversation, as mother insists that her pregnant daughter is unhappy without a settled domestic life while daughter cites her professional successes as a playwright as cause for great happiness. It is significant that when Clara speaks, she is almost always talking about herself as a playwright. This choice leads easily to a feminist interpretation of the play as dramatization of the difficulties of being a woman—read mother and sexual object—and an artist at once. It is twice as difficult for a Black woman, with the models of womanhood forced upon her by white culture. As Deborah R. Geis argues, “Tension between immersion and angry confrontation of the Hollywood world experienced by Clara in this play embodies the ambivalent spectatorial status of the African American woman whose subjectivity risks being undermined by her identification with an exclusionary cultural apparatus.” [20] The struggle for self-definition with these slippery models, which promise “fulfillment and female power” [21] but fail to address its limitations, then becomes a central concern of the play. I’m not entirely convinced, however, that it is Clara who is experiencing the tension Geis describes. As Clara says, her image as spectator comes not from her but from her husband Eddie: “Eddie says . . . that my diaries make me a spectator watching my life like watching a black and white movie.” [22] For Clara, writing is both her dream and her way of understanding her reality. Through writing she copes with family traumas such as her brother’s hospitalization, her parents’ divorce, her own divorce, and a miscarriage, on top of daily experiences of a racist and segregated society. Her life as such does not fit into the movie scenes—she cannot watch herself there. Instead, she must write her life in, and direct the stars from the wings in how to insert the language of her life into their filmography. The cohesion Clara and Winters achieve in the final moments of the play suggests that such a writing is possible to an extent. It is successful, however, only in the sense that each woman’s end is equally evocative of a desperate situation. In these last moments, Clara and Winters speak simultaneously of the possibility of Clara’s brother’s death. Then, when it is revealed that her brother will not die, Clara describes almost falling down the front steps of the hospital, her crying mother in her arms, in a scene of family sorrow-tinged relief (her brother will live but paralyzed and with brain damage). Simultaneously, Winters drowns as at the end of the film A Place in the Sun . Both Clara and Winters, in their separate worlds, are drowning. Clara’s writing and orchestration of the film stars and Kennedy’s writing of Clara are also united, in their exemplification of what Margo Natalie Crawford calls “black public interiority.” Black public interiority, a similar contradiction to my theatre of isolation that Crawford explains, caught the BAM between viewing introversion as elitism and “constantly performing ways in which the personal could be collective and inner mental space could be shared as people deconditioned their minds together.” [23] As a playwright in the 1970s, Kennedy was accused of such elitist introversion and yet her plays so powerfully publicize, in the act of performance, inner mental space. She engaged with the BAM principles and with white culture though neither of them would have her. In both cases she appears superficially as a spectator, as Eddie calls Clara, when in truth she was inside it all, constructing a funnyhouse to contain and showcase the complexities of that insider state. “[Art] needs to be EVERYWHERE because it is the INSIDE of the WORLD.”[24] It is difficult to argue that any period in the history of Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theatre is asocial in Lee’s sense, a respite from direct engagement, when their reputation is so closely linked to political protest and other forms of activism. The 1970s, however, saw a break in the company and, perhaps, a moment of redefining what it means for the Theatre’s art to be “ inside of the world.” In 1970, Schumann moved from New York City to the small town of Plainfield, Vermont and, as company founder and linchpin, essentially reconstituted Bread and Puppet as a solo project. Schumann had become increasingly critical of the audiences and politics of the city where his company’s homemade bread and giant carnivalesque puppets had commanded street actions of the Resistance Movement of the 1960s. [25] “We the Schumanns,” he wrote at the time, “are ready for a bigger slower style of motion, air breathing and vegetable growing included.” [26] Many of his collaborators, all but two of whom he left behind in New York, perceived the move as “copping out.” In their eyes, Schumann was abandoning the collective spirit that had defined Bread and Puppet since 1961 in order to join the well-to-do intellectuals and resort entrepreneurs migrating to Vermont for a taste of the majority white wilderness. [27] But as an artist Schumann had “outgrown the addressive-moralistic mode” that defined his street theatre of the 1960s. [28] At Cate Farm, the location of the Goddard College artist’s residency Schumann had secured in Vermont, he could develop a new, personal style. The Bread and Puppet Theatre of the Vermont days, as I will argue, exhibits an isolation through disillusionment—the disillusionment Schumann had with the forms of political activism that consumed him in the 1960s. Schumann’s move to rural Vermont would have a profound influence on his work up to the present day. As an out-of-towner and an immigrant to the US, Schumann was unlikely to find communion in Plainfield. The Cate Farm period can be defined by distance from the audience, from coherent narrative and authorial power, and from the crowd . Lee notes that isolation “dynamically affords one the time and space needed to evade forms of sociability that late liberalism and subsequent formations of political resistance demand.” [29] The isolation Schumann experienced afforded him the time and space to reevaluate his performance practices, which in the early Vermont days he tailored to his new circumstances. When there was an audience, it was made up of small-town Vermonters and students, and some of the Goddard performance experiments he conducted with student volunteers had no audience at all. This was a far cry from the socially, racially, and generationally diverse crowds in the streets of New York, an audience who Schumann saw as ideal for political theatre. [30] For the Plainfield audience, Schumann eschewed direct address and adopted the more traditional staging of the elevated proscenium, restoring a physical distance between audience and performance. He no longer saw the need for the conscious, aggressive alienation of the audience that characterized his New York street agitations. He wasn’t making theatre for his audience anymore but for himself and alienation could be achieved simply by embracing the isolated place he already inhabited as an immigrant to rural America. The first of the proscenium performances at Cate Farm were the five Grey Lady Cantatas ( Grey Lady Cantatas II-VI, 1970–1975). In these Cantatas , Schumann had a new preoccupation, which is encapsulated in the image of the Grey Lady puppet crying a crystal tear in Grey Lady Cantata II (1971): an individual—or The Individual—as the central subject in a story of suffering. Grey Lady Cantata II consists of a series of tableaus featuring an increasingly isolated Grey Lady figure, whose life is made barren by the removal of all other people and objects until finally she dies. The Grey Lady, as well as most of the other performers, are large-scale puppets that completely obscure their human puppeteers. The few human performers, in turn, imitate the cold puppets, with grey-painted faces and the stiffness of automatons. The grotesque and opulent style of the puppets, the puppet-like acting style of the humans, and the use of marionette-type mechanization for removing props and changing scenery de-emphasize the presence and power of human authors or performers and prevent the audience from fully identifying with the suffering being. Furthermore, Schumann wrote no dialogue which might have humanized the Grey Lady puppet or provided some authorial insight. “The story is definitely the audiences’ job, not ours,” wrote Schumann: “We have no free delivery of interpretations, librettos, symbols, special philosophies. We have a physical fitness apparatus of colors and other wonders of perception. Audience does the sport, the skis and knapsacks of theatre.” [31] Grey Ladies (the name given to American Red Cross volunteers who provided non-medical care, particularly during World War II) and other references to war might easily be connected with the many works of Schumann’s that were explicitly anti-Vietnam War. However, as Schumann explains, that’s a story for the audience to write. Stefan Brecht, a prolific chronicler of Bread and Puppet’s history, speculates that the obscurity of Grey Lady Cantata II was a device ensuring the “privacy” Schumann had desired when he left New York. [32] Although Schumann’s work had always attempted to preclude audience identification and pacification, the plight of the Grey Lady strikes a more introspective, unprecedented note than other of his works—and seems to reflect the artist’s own state of mind. [33] In the evolution of Schumann’s theatre, Cate Farm was a period of transition between the agitprop street theatre and the contemplative, moralistic tone and style that would distinguish his work from the late 1970s on. After moving again in 1974, this time to Dopp Farm in the even more rural Vermont town of Glover, Schumann would actually return to much of what characterized his earliest works: the movement of parades, marches, and circuses; “gigantic language” and spectacle; and, most importantly, subject matter that responded in the form of direct address to global politics. While at Goddard College, however, Schumann seemed to abandon his social activism for a time in favor of introspection. Schumann’s preference for The Individual as subject connects to what Brecht describes as presentation of a representation, without exhortation, a quiet succession of images without a transparent director’s note. However, Grey Lady Cantata II presents the extreme of individuality as source for great suffering and suggests the individual’s need for the collective. The crowd was still Schumann’s purported enemy and the perceived enemy of all individual thought and artistic freedom, but such a production suggests that he harbored a desire to embrace relation and collectivity if for no other reason than that it was a necessary tool in the fight for the good of society. Schumann was clearly troubled by the tension between denouncing the crowd and identifying individuality as sickening and deadly. He hungered for some other way, some middle ground. When he moved to Glover, he disbanded the Vermont Bread and Puppet that had formed around him in Plainfield and also turned away from the obscuring style of the Grey Lady Cantatas. It seems that what Schumann took away from his early years in Vermont and the intense isolation in the work of that period was the energy to reenter the fight for good in earnest. The early Dopp Farm period began with a series of morality plays, but shortly thereafter the enormous Domestic Resurrection Circuses—arguably the most iconic performances in the company’s history—blossomed. The influence of Scott Nearing, the philosopher of capitalist secessionism and “living the good life” who inspired the American back-to-the-land movement of the late 1960s (and who happened to be Schumann’s relative by marriage), in the Circuses and other post- Grey Lady works is evident. Schumann’s work in the late 1970s cried out for the “decent life” to abide by what he understood as the values of good and addressed a “universal” neighborhood as audience-recipients. The fact that Schumann’s morally didactic theatre emerges after the reserved Grey Lady Cantatas recalls Lee’s definition of asociality as a means of taking stock of political projects and perhaps altering one’s plan of engagement. In a 1994 interview with John Bell for Theater magazine, Schumann acknowledged the dangers of the ecological romanticism that attracts many people to isolated green places like his farm in Vermont: the evils of capitalism had to take thematic precedence, he said, though he lamented that this world is not a place in which his work could be focused on the idyllic setting. [34] At the time of the interview it had been almost twenty five years since Schumann moved to Vermont, and in the intervening decades, he had eschewed the aesthetics of solitude and suffering in productions like Grey Lady Cantata II for community-oriented spectacles imbued with his utopian ideals. There is irony in fighting mass systems of oppression from such a place of solitude atop a misty green mountain, but from Schumann’s perspective, he was back in the mud. “I want to be uncommercial film personified.”[35] Wading through secondary source material on Smith, I feel acutely the struggle to understand the introverted Jack Smith and to interpret his enigmatic theatre. With little surviving film documentation of Smith’s performances to go on, the archive of Smith’s theatre feels like a load of conflicting gossip and indecisive speculation. John Matturri and Rachel Joseph both describe the material elements of Smith’s performances—the “homeless objects” or “glittering junk”—as emblematic of the inherent impossibility of fixity. Smith’s orientalist aesthetic (“Egyptiana”), remarked on by Michael Moon, Marc Siegal, and Juan Suárez and compared by Dominic Johnson with Sun Ra’s “intergalactic esoterica,” is either camp or an authentic belief based in Maria Montez monotheism. [36] Matturri recalls Smith’s “generous acceptance . . . of collaborative input” and the audience’s “relaxed receptive attention” at performances in spite of their length, frequent interruptions, and arbitrary conclusion, which are at odds with the stories (which I will discuss further on) about Smith’s verbal abuse of spectators. [37] These and other writings on Smith seem to depict a different version of the artist. However, it is José Esteban Muñoz’s formulation of the artist as “the exemplary figure of the queer utopian artist and thinker who seeks solitariness yet calls for a queer collectivity” that seems the truest, and his conception of Smith’s theatre as utopian stands as a direct challenge to the inclusion of Smith in an anti-relationist archive of gay male artists. [38] Muñoz acknowledges two sides of Smith, the solitary and the collective, that are so often kept apart, yet are very clearly both present in his oeuvre. Smith’s infamous filmography of the 1960s captures the crazed, queer collective and Susan Sontag called Flaming Creatures “a lovely specimen of . . . ‘pop art,’” lumping Smith in with a whole art movement addressing the American culture of the day. [39] The theatrical performances he began in the 1970s, many of which were one man shows, represent the other, solitary side of Smith. These intensely lonely performances of the 1970s are Smith’s theatre of isolation, but even as they capture Smith’s increasing personal and creative isolation, at their heart is the anti-capitalist utopia Smith dreamed of for all people like him. [40] Smith spoke distastefully and fearfully in interviews of the archive (specifically, the Anthology Film Archives) as the “vault.” The vault was unyielding, petrifying, and antithetical to Smith’s preferred venue in the 1970s: his own apartment. In 1970, Smith announced that he would open his living space in downtown Manhattan to audiences for free shows. J. Hoberman described the “Plaster Foundation” (as Smith’s home performance venue was called) as squalid, with a gaping hole in its ceiling and an accumulation of junk and debris on the floor, to which Smith lovingly tended in the performance series “Plaster Foundation of Atlantis.” Over the rubble Smith hung fairy lights, placed cardboard palm trees, and constructed an artificial lagoon complete with a waterfall. In other words, he built Atlantis, which mythic paradise featured prominently in his imaginative writings and performances, out of a dilapidated East Village apartment. The Plaster Foundation was both the precursor to and the absolute antithesis of Andy Warhol’s Factory, which promised consumerist glamor where the Foundation spat on it. Warhol may have been an “insider” in the eyes of the broader public, but Smith was tuned in to the ugly truths of the system that produced it and he dug into them on his stage. Smith’s style of performance crumbles like the ceiling of his apartment and is as inhospitable to the audience as a junkyard. Performances were held late at night and often began hours after their expected start time. Much of what audiences watched, which may or may not have been part of the intended performance, was the arrangement of the set and other anti-theatrical antics such as Smith pretending to vacuum up the mountains of cement and plaster for hours on end. The action was frequently interrupted by further fussing with sets and costumes and the script was liable to be spontaneously rewritten by Smith mid-speech. Some Plaster Foundation visitors like Richard Foreman read this as evidence that Smith’s imagination and editorial eye were always one step ahead of the audience. The fussing and adjusting was performance, striving for and failing at perfection in front of the audience. In such performances as The Secret of Rented Island (1976) (of which only a slideshow and audio recording remains), an adaptation/queering of Ibsen’s Ghosts , Smith carries the script in his hand as he interacts with a supporting cast of costume pieces and stuffed animals each representing an alternating set of characters. Script and inanimate actors, which “moved in and out of and were often simultaneously both within and outside of various roles,” [41] disrupt the interchange of character and performance, thereby exposing Smith as himself, alone and potentially vulnerable. The irony of Smith inviting audiences into his home was that he seemed to want nothing more than to be left alone. If no one showed up to his place for a performance, those who knew him have said Smith would go on without an audience. These may have been the greatest performances he ever gave, as he was purportedly paranoid and plagued by anxiety in the presence of others—and by their mere existence in his psychic universe. He was known to abuse audiences, calling them “sofa-roosting cabbages,” and sometimes he failed to show up for a performance in the hopes that the audience would leave him alone. [42] He was both pathologically afraid of others’ criticism and persecution and assured of their duplicity: his living space featured a “hate wall,” upon which he “scrawled animosities towards friends and supporters.” Performances like What’s Underground About Marshmallows? featured nefarious figures inspired by Smith’s personal enemies, such as film critic Jonas Mekas. Smith viewed Mekas, among others, as a capitalist vampire whose motivations were antithetical to Smith’s own mission to construct an uncommercial utopia, and he believed that it was because of his foes that he was forced to “live in squalor all day long, playing hide-and-seek with others.” [43] Dominic Johnson sees in the first-hand accounts of Smith’s performance space echoes of Anthony Vidler’s critical writings on the “architectural uncanny” that “conspicuously renders architectures to be no longer homely.” Furthermore, “in Smith’s domestic performances . . . the nostalgic associations that lived spaces may garner are pitted against the threatening or subversive oppositional structures that often encroach upon them. The set of processes by which architectures become strange are deployed as a neat proxy . . . for the ways in which they approximate other social and cultural tendencies towards estrangement.” [44] Johnson identifies sexual difference as one of these so-called “social and cultural tendencies towards estrangement,” thereby comparing Smith’s space to the estrangement he experienced as a queer person in a heteronormative society. I agree with Johnson’s comparison and see the uncanny space also as definitive for Smith’s particular theatre of isolation. In contrast to the worlds in his films, which were built by way of the accumulation of writhing bodies, the transition to these home performances in the 1970s shifts settings to a one-man island. Even surrounded by audience members, it is difficult to imagine how anyone else could have authentically reached Smith’s Atlantis. The only extant and complete reconstruction of a Smith performance that I know of is a recording of Ron Vawter’s ROY COHN/JACK SMITH , as performed at The Kitchen in New York in 1993. In the production, Vawter parrots the voice of the real Jack Smith, coming through a neon yellow earbud connecting tape-deck to Vawter’s ear, as he recites the lines from Marshmallows, which premiered in the last year of the queer 1970s: 1981, the year the first positive cases of AIDS were reported in the US. Smith ominously foreshadowed the next decade of queer history and both his and Vawter’s deaths due to complications of AIDS, with the line “they love dead queers here.” [45] Wearing him in performance like an ill-fitting shirt, Vawter pulls Smith out of the closet and refashions him as a tragic hero of the queer underground. In fact, Vawter described his portrayal of Smith as “homosexual ‘closet’-performance,” and when one considers Smith’s relationship in regard to performance space, the invocation of the closet seems apt. [46] In a sense, Smith’s theatrical performances of the 1970s were staged within his own personal closet-space, but rather than being a hiding place, it becomes legible to other queer people like Vawter. In Marshmallows , Smith says the “worst of all” is that nobody thinks he is acting. The solution is to “go back into the vault.” [47] However, Smith could not hide from Vawter and his reading of Marshmallows as an overtly political, liberatory performance. Smith’s films were far more successful, at least in terms of making him a known entity, than his solo theatrical performances. His move to a more solitary artistic medium and to the role of “lone lunatic” is perhaps what led to Smith’s failure in the society of the straight and normal . The theatrical performances are, in my opinion, his most radical attempts at what Muñoz identifies as escape through “refusal of a dominant order and its systematic violence,” precisely because they were so much a product of Smith’s personal cosmology. [48] Not only did he play himself, but he enacted his personal brand of queer utopia. His performance of self was so convincing to him that living in the real world became untenable. The failure to transform the real world into one’s fantasy, argues Muñoz, is the typical plight of the queer utopian. However, something of that desire lives on in Vawter’s performance and casts Smith as an icon of collective queer world-makers. Conclusion Jack Smith, the anxiety-riddled queer filmmaker-turned-performer, tried to build utopia in the trash heap of capitalist society. Peter Schumann, an immigrant who got his start in agitprop avant-garde performance, took his puppets out into rural America when the social and political pressures of the New York art scene became too great. Adrienne Kennedy, a Black woman playwright in the overwhelmingly white commercial theatre, gave audiences rare glimpses into a fractured mind simultaneously inside and excluded from society. I have described the theatre of these three artists, in terms of its aesthetic as well as the process of its creation, as a product and a reflection of social isolation of the mind and/or body—and particularly the mind and/or body of the artist. I have tried to demonstrate, however, by tracing the trajectory of each theatre maker beyond their theatre of the 1970s, that this isolation was not an escape route but a troubled state of being at the heart of the social and political issues of the decade and a means of reinscribing one’s relationship to the collective. The plays and performances that I have examined operate on the artistic insights of the individuated while speaking to the issues of the collective. Theatre of isolation is not theatre that speaks only to itself. Categorizing such diverse works as A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White , Grey Lady Cantata II , or What’s Underground About Marshmallows? as theatre of isolation allows scholars to question how these works go beyond isolation and how they might draw individuals together and, as Lee says, “alter the horizon of what constitutes the social.” [49] For the theatre of Kennedy, Schumann, and Smith, the 1970s was an era of isolation, but what happens at the end of, or after, an era? One could turn to these three artists again, and examine Kennedy’s Sleep Deprivation Chamber , Schumann’s Domestic Resurrection Circuses, or Smith’s tragic death and status as queer icon for a few examples of going out, again. “After” is the topic for a different essay and for another time. [50] However, thinking about theatre of isolation in the past is unavoidably connected to thinking about isolation in the present. When theatre artists who have been working in isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic no longer need to do so, how we will think about what has been created during this time and how “after” art will be changed by it are questions that are sure to consume the historian. Beyond theorizing the screen or Zoom as a medium—or perhaps as a way to fold those elements in with other considerations—we might look at today’s theatre of isolation as not merely constitutive of social distance. How have perspectives on society and community been changed? By making aesthetic connections to antecedents like Kennedy, Schumann, and Smith, we might find examples of where theatre might go from here. References [1] I’m thinking especially of Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam, Robert L. Caserio, José Esteban Muñoz, and Tim Dean, all of whom participated in a panel on the “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory” at the 2005 MLA Annual Convention, as well as scholars, like Tavia Nyong’o, who have written about punk aesthetics through the lens of queer studies. [2] Summer Kim Lee. “Staying In: Mitski, Ocean Vuong, and Asian American Asociality,” Social Text 37, no. 1 (1 March 2019): 27. [3] Ibid., 31. [4] Ibid., 28. [5] Ibid., 31-32. [6] Ibid., 30. [7] Ibid., 33. [8] Hillary Miller, Drop Dead: Performance in Crisis, 1970s New York (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2016), 15. [9] From a lecture in Robinson’s course “American Performance in the 1970s,” at Yale University. [10] Will Kaufman, American Culture in the 1970s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 72. [11] Paul K. Bryant-Jackson and Lois More Overbeck, “Adrienne Kennedy: An Interview.” Edited by the authors in Intersecting Boundaries: The Theatre of Adrienne Kennedy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 9. [12] Brenda Murphy, “American Women Playwrights.” In Dale M. Bauer, ed., The Cambridge History of American Women’s Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press , 2012). Perhaps unsurprisingly, Barbara Ann Teer and the other “warrior mothers” of the Black Arts Movement are not even named, though their work has been reclaimed in other recent scholarship. See La Donna L. Forsgren, In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press: 2018). [13] I have not been able to track down concrete sources, but Kennedy’s exclusion from BAM scholarship could be connected to her lack of interest in the movement’s organizing structures, or to her work not being considered (by BAM members) to reflect the movement’s values. In the Forward to The Alexander Plays , Alisa Solomon writes, “During the 1960s and 1970s, many within the activist African American community insisted that [didactic, militant plays about race were] what their playwrights should have been writing. In those years Kennedy was criticized by activists for not working hard enough in the movement. . . . They objected to her characters, who were confused about their identity and place in the world, and who did not proclaim an uncomplicated pride in being black” (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1992, xii). Claudia Barnett cites Solomon, as well as scholars who argue against the use of a feminist label for Kennedy’s works, in support of her argument that Kennedy defies expectations and stereotypes connected to Blackness and/or womanhood. See Claudia Barnett, “‘This Fundamental Challenge to Identity’: Reproduction and Representation in the Drama of Adrienne Kennedy” Theatre Journal 48, no.2 (1996): 141–155. [14] Kimberly W. Benston, “Locating Adrienne Kennedy Prefacing the Subject.” In Paul K. Bryant-Jackson and Lois More Overbeck, eds., Intersecting Boundaries: The Theatre of Adrienne Kennedy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 115. [15] bell hooks makes an explicit connection between Kennedy and Virginia Woolf, reading Kennedy’s prose as a celebration of women’s confessional writing akin to A Room of One’s Own . See bell hooks, “Critical Reflections: Adrienne Kennedy, the Writer, the Work.” In Paul K. Bryant-Jackson and Lois More Overbeck, eds., Intersecting Boundaries: The Theatre of Adrienne Kennedy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 180. [16] Benston, “Locating Adrienne Kennedy,” 115. [17] Bryant-Jackson and Overbeck, “Adrienne Kennedy: An Interview,” 7. [18] Quotations from A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White come from: Adrienne Kennedy, Adrienne Kennedy in One Act (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). 81. [19] Ibid., 92. [20] Deborah R. Geis, “‘A Spectator Watching My Life’: Adrienne Kennedy’s A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White .” In In Paul K. Bryant-Jackson and Lois More Overbeck, eds., Intersecting Boundaries: The Theatre of Adrienne Kennedy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 171. [21] Ibid., 173. [22] Kennedy, Adrienne Kennedy in One Act , 99. [23] Margo Natalie Crawford, Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First Century Aesthetics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 169. [24] From “The WHY CHEAP ART? Manifesto,” Bread & Puppet, Glover, VT, 1984. [25] Silvia D. Spitta,“Revisiting the Sixties and Refusing Trash: Preamble to and Interview with Peter Schumann of Bread and Puppet Theater,” boundary 2 36, no. 1 (1 February 2009): 110. [26] Here, Schumann presumably uses the royal first-person plural, as he did not initially relocate his family. But the plural “Schumanns” could also be read as his referring to his whole “company” with his own name. Quote from Bread and Rosebuds by Peter Schumann, 25 April 1970. In Stefan Brecht, Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theatre, vol. 2 (London: Methuen, 1988), 18. [27] Brecht, Bread and Puppet Theatre , 12. As of 2020, Vermont is 94.3% white—one of the top three whitest states in the country. [28] Brecht, Bread and Puppet Theatre , 15. [29] Lee, “Staying In,” 33. [30] Brecht, Bread and Puppet Theatre , 48. [31] Schumann quotes from an unpublished mss., “possibly an intra-company summation, dated Cate Farm, March 9, ’72.” In Brecht, 175. [32] Brecht, Bread and Puppet Theatre , 180. [33] Spitta, “Revisiting the Sixties,” 116. [34] John Bell, “Uprising of the Beast: An Interview with Peter Schumann,” Theater 25, no. 1 (1 February 1994): 42. [35] From dialogue of Jack Smith’s performance What’s Underground about Marshmallows? . Quotes taken from performance recreation by Ron Vawter, as part of his piece ROY COHN/JACK SMITH, as recorded in: Jill Godmilow, dir., Ron Vawter Performs Jack Smith: What’s Underground About Marshmallows? (1993). [36] Dominic Johnson, “Jack Smith’s Rehearsals for the Destruction of Atlantis: ‘Exotic’ Ritual and Apocalyptic Tone.” Contemporary Theatre Review 19, no. 2 (1 May 2009): 177. [37] John Matturri, “Jack Smith: Notes on Homeless Objects,” Criticism 56, no. 2 (Spring 2014): 281. [38] Judith Halberstam identifies this archive, in her short forum response “The Politics of Negativity in Recent Queer Theory” as including the likes of, “in no particular order, Tennessee Williams, Virginia Woolf, Bette Midler, Andy Warhol, Henry James, Jean Genet, Broadway musicals, Marcel Proust, Alfred Hitchcock, Oscar Wilde, Jack Smith, Judy Garland, and Kiki and Herb.” In PMLA 121, no. 3 (May 2006): 823–4. [39] Quotes from Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation pulled from: Douglas Crimp, “Our Kind of Movie”: The Films of Andy Warhol (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), 132. [40] José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009) , 170. [41] Matturri, “Jack Smith,” 284 [42] From the documentary Jack Smith and The Destruction of Atlantis (2006), directed by Mary Jordan. [43] Godmilow, Ron Vawter Performs , 1993. [44] Johnson, “Jack Smith’s Rehearsals,” 169. [45] Here, I suggest the “queer seventies,” in the U.S., as beginning in 1969, with the Stonewall Riots in New York’s Greenwich Village, and the ending with the first reports of AIDS cases in 1981. [46] Godmilow, Ron Vawter Performs , 1993. [47] Ibid., 1993. [48] Muñoz, Cruising Utopia , 172. [49] Lee, “Staying In,” 31. [50] In addition to Lee’s discussion of what happens “after,” Joshua Chambers-Letson’s recent book After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life (New York University Press, 2018) is dedicated to the question this essay does not answer. Footnotes About The Author(s) Madeline Pages is a dramaturg and MFA Candidate at the former the Yale School of Drama. She is currently partnering with the Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM) to conduct research and performance experiments around the history of astronomy, astrophysics, and human space travel. She is also collaborating on a new opera I AM ALAN TURING , composed by Matthew Suttor and inspired by the life and writings of mathematician Alan Turing. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience: The Tourist as Actor. Jennifer A. Kokai and Tom Robson, eds. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019; Pp. 292. The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy: Gambling, Drama, and the Unexpected. Edwin Wong. Victoria, Canada: Friesen Press, 2019; Pp. 363. Susan Glaspell’s Poetics and Politics of Rebellion. Emeline Jouve. Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2017; Pp. 258. Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry. Soyica Diggs Colbert. New Haven: Yale, 2021; Pp. 273. The Mysterious Murder of Mrs. Shakespeare: Transgressive Performance in Nineteenth-Century New York “What Will Be Changed?”: Maxwell Anderson and the Literary Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti Theatre of Isolation “A Certain Man Had Two [Kids]”: Tragic Parables, “The Prodigal Son,” and Edward Albee's The Goat “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells [Her] Story”: An Intersectional Analysis of the Women of Hamilton Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Christophe Collard 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 Ecologies of Media, Ecologies of Mind: Embodying Authorship Through Mediaturgy Christophe Collard By Published on May 30, 2018 Download Article as PDF Weary of endlessly scavenging for funding, would-be independent filmmaker John Jesurun decided one day in the early 1980s to make films without using a camera and “Let the audience be the camera” instead. [1] Pragmatic par excellence , this new approach effectively launched the career of one of multimedia theatre’s most inventive innovators while generating a body of work characteristically concerned with reconciling the apparently irreconcilable. With his main theme of exploring the rampant technologization of contemporary culture and its effects on consciousness and communication alike, Jesurun’s artistic practice challenges one-dimensional interpretations while simultaneously underscoring the processes that constitute our perception. The artist’s incessant interplay with media of all kinds thereby strikes as the most obvious strategy, with his texts’ pervasive multilingualism a close second. And yet, as Hans-Thies Lehmann once observed, scenography and dramaturgy can only meaningfully meet via the performer’s body . [2] If we borrow Duke Ellington’s favourite phrase describing his music as “beyond categories,” [3] John Jesurun’s theatre aesthetic could accordingly be situated as conceived along a paradigm encompassing transgression, fluidity, and blending to move, indeed, ‘beyond’ conceptions of ‘categories’ and towards what anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Bradd Shore have called an intrinsically ecological inclination. [4] When, moreover, taking into account the insight yielded by intermedia studies that borders between communicative modes are the product of a similar kind of irreducible flux, plurimedial dramaturgies staging such organic inter-relatedness can help us recalibrate the quality of our thinking. For if we focus on the ‘live’ body in a heavily mediatized theatrical space, it becomes clear that the former functions at once as an enabling device and a site of refusal. Operating along a logic of connecting dispersed content, Jesurun’s emphasis on the performer’s presence in the here-and-now as a semiological nexus generates a sense of mediatised imbrication of all of the performative event’s constituents. Or as his long-time compagnon de route Bonnie Marranca has argued in her Ecologies of Theater (1996), an organicist conception of contemporary theatre that “inquire[s] into the relationship of mind and spirit” under the aegis of the performers’ biological ‘liveness.’ [5] Bonnie Marranca is similarly to be credited for coining the concept of ‘mediaturgy’ along a reasoning not so dissimilar from her ecological argument. [6] Indeed, to her, the term allows us to shift our focus on methods of composition in “a new form of dramaturgy,” [7] and so suggests new critical modes of comprehending and writing about it. Thus re-routing connotations from a text-based linear progression of sorts to a media-induced sense of organic simultaneity as organizing principle, one could accordingly argue that “mediaturgy” permits one to highlight tensions between received conceptions of “meaning” and an increasing awareness of the processes that bring them about by foregrounding the media that mediate the ‘content’ we process cognitively. An early illustration of this reasoning is of course found in the work of Jesurun’s illustrious predecessor Richard Foreman (b. 1937), whose Ontological-Hysteric Theater, beginning in 1968, presented audiences with productions lacking a “regular” storyline, but which instead communicated via an idiosyncratic “idiom” best compared to the image of the “mind bath” – a completely multivalent experience. Situated in the grey area between live performance and “live” media, the concept of mediaturgy in effect seeks not a dissolution from drama and its textual overtones, but simply signals a shift from “linguistic language” to “media language” more attuned to our contemporary context of cross-medial communication in networked societies. This article will pick up the ecological lead to present John Jesurun’s mediaturgical and thoroughly inter-relational theatre aesthetic as an impetus to what Bateson calls “an ecology of mind” [8] – i.e. an alternative way of thinking and creating that eschews distinctions in favour of convergence and all the emancipatory potential this implies, both for an updated understanding of the authorship principle as well as for individual signification in today’s cultural context. Then again, already in 1986, Smith, one of the characters in Jesurun’s so-called “Media Trilogy” warned us, spectators, that we all “have to realize that [we are] chained into that machine,” [9] imbricated as it were into what Jesurun himself calls “an ongoing process of detours, pitfalls, and discoveries in interpretation and perception [of] a mediated world.” [10] Five years later, in Blue Heat (1991) he physically separates players from spectators by leaving the stage empty and relocating the action to the venue’s back rooms as displayed by various screens in “real time,” thereby forcing his audience to confront theatre’s fundamental role as signifying interface . After all, if performance no longer takes place in the here and now “live” before an audience, can it still be considered “theatre” in the strictest sense? It is a question that immediately prompts a second one related to the mediation of said “live” content – a query arguably still harder to answer. Which recalls Jesurun’s presumed ecological aesthetic: his is not an approach aiming for answers, but rather for shifting perspectives and re-evaluating possibilities for both artistic creation as for critical thinking from within “the machine.” After all, as the same character Smith from Deep Sleep explains, “Those are the machines and you are coming out of the machines.” [11] Thus there is no outside to our mediated world – a Jesurunian appropriation, if you like, of Derrida’s famous quip that “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte.” [12] On this, mind you, he emits no value judgment, fully aware of the pointlessness in speaking about “purity” or “essential,” unmediated meaning. Technology, as it can hardly be denied these days, forms part and parcel of our cultural landscape and, as confirmed by mediatheorists Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner in Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1993), “technological change ” is nothing if not, indeed “ecological.” [13] Addressing the “ecological” dimension of technological innovation from the prism prompted by Jesurun of perennial inter-medial interplay brings us neatly to this artist’s privileged artistic platform: the theatre, once described by Peter M. Boenisch as a semiotic practice , which incorporates, spatializes and disseminates in sensorial terms (thus: performs ) the contents and cognitive strategies of other media by creating multiple channels, and a multi-media semiotic and sensorial environment. [14] Key to the latter argument is the almost organic multiplication of signifiers and signifying systems that takes place precisely via their interplay in real time. If we additionally take into account its relatively stable – yet not, as we have already seen, entirely unproblematic – basic requirements of an audience and a set duration, we could argue that the theatrical medium represents a heuristic platform to study the associations and reciprocities produced by an interface that facilitates co-presence and reflexivity across physical, technical, and referential boundaries. Via the continuous interplay in a Jesurun-production of multiple media, “live” theatrical presence here effectively incarnates an “overdetermined” hybrid permanently in flux. Twenty five years ago, Patrice Pavis already argued that the live actor creates a sense of clarity, an ontological foothold of sorts, within the semiotic complexity of multi-media theatre productions. [15] A decade later, Philip Auslander placed the performer’s live body on a par with technological media in contemporary theatre’s process of “mediatization,” whereby old and new media come to operate in the mediatic system that is the production. [16] For live “presence” on a multimedia theatre stage remains inextricably interwoven with the relation between “live” and “mediated,” and thus also with what performance scholars Gabriella Giannachi and Nick Kaye have called “processes that expose and utilize the gaps, caesura, and absences inherent to acts of representation.” [17] Their use of “inherent” thereby echoes Jesurun’s ecologically-inspired artistic practice whereby the live actor’s performance is embedded into layered and responsive soundscapes, architectonic designs, as well as mediated sets that draw underscore the actual passages between live, mediated, and recorded channels of address. No oversimplified answers to a complex reality, but a stimulated sense of intimacy with the environment in which we find ourselves immersed. Figure 1. John Jesurun Firefall – Phase 2 (2009). Photo: Paula Court. As Baz Kershaw similarly reminds us in his Theatre Ecology (2007), the term “ecology” references the interrelationships of all the organic and non-organic factors of ecosystems, ranging from the smallest and/or simplest to the greatest and/or most complex. It is also defined as the interrelationships between organisms and their environments, especially when that is understood to imply interdependence between organisms and environments. [18] In White Water (1986), the second installment of his “Media Trilogy” after Deep Sleep (1986), Jesurun sought to connect cutting-edge technology with the primal fear that the same technology today is destroying our sense of spirituality. Precisely by instilling an “ecological” sense of interdependence between film, video, and live actors, his personal brand of authorship foregrounds the reverse perspective that technology, in fact, reflects human attempts at spirituality, a certain longing for the intangible expressed through the tension between humans and machinery – a tension grounded in the ever-present potential of manipulation : I include [physicality] as a natural element. Because film and video can be manipulated and manipulate at the same time I have to treat them with some respect. Film and video have their own physical presence beyond the visual images they may represent. There is a tension there between a live and mediated performer but this is also natural. I want that tension to also exist in a real way in the presentation. When live and mediated images communicate verbally a third reality comes into place as a result. [19] Said “Third Reality” was made more palpable still in Jesurun’s 1990-production Everything That Rises Must Converge where both actors and audience were divided into two groups and separated by a wall nine-feet high and forty-feet wide, which occasionally rotated on its central vertical axis while characters communicated their ostensibly nonsensical multilingual dialogues across the divide through live videos and wireless microphones. For, when no direct physical connection can be established, we trust technology to make meaningful our attempts at meaning-making. [20] However, the reason why in certain circumstances we may decide (consciously or unconsciously) to “trust” technology in a performative setting is squarely attributable to its embodied presence on stage. After all, embodied modes of reception and perception are those that do not require strictly logical analysis for their verification. As the theatre presents tangible living bodies on stage to living bodies in the audience, performers’ and audiences’ embodied receptiveness is thereby stimulated to facilitate affective interpretation. When we moreover take into account the stage’s hypermedial capacity to integrate a sheer endless number of technologies, the embodied dimension stretches towards “ecological” coalitions of mind, body, and technology. It is a perspective which prompted Philip Auslander to conclude that in the theatre there simply can be “no clear-cut ontological distinctions between live forms and mediatized ones.” [21] Today, due to the ever-broadening trend of technologizing the theatre stage, critical discourses tend to consider the “live” body in performance as a cultural and biological biotope – a construction site, as it were, for the assemblage of identity and consisting of multiple foundational layers of what Wolf-Dieter Ernst has called “anthropological ballast.” [22] Via the continuous interplay of multiple media on stage, theatrical presence today has become a sort of semiological hybrid permanently in flux. From this angle, then, John Jesurun’s playing with our perception via a multi-media bombardment of our senses strikes, paradoxically enough given the overabundance of technology, as primarily actor -oriented – especially so given this director’s categorical rejection of improvisation and constant admonitions to “deliver words faster and flatter, faster and flatter.” [23] Indeed, by turning his actors into “de-psychologised talking heads,” [24] he forces his spectators to fill in the blanks. For, with the actor’s body as interface between the spectator and the cybernetic machine of that is the multimedia stage, the very notion of embodiment itself becomes unstable. Once again, to Jesurun, this is something intrinsically positive: As a director, I find that the performers are willing to go as far as the language and technology will take them. And as a writer, I am willing to go as far as the performers and technology will take the language. Regardless of the creative outcome, this is a true sharing of intentions and possibilities . [25] Following Jesurun’s “ecological” authorship, embodied presence on a multimedia stage represents a type of “meaning potential” that can only be accessed via the energy exuded from affecting sender and receiver simultaneously. By means of filmic jump-cuts in the narrative progression, the pulsating pace of a video-clip aesthetic, “super real”/un-theatrical conversation tones, soap-opera cliffhangers, or the generalized presence of pop-cultural references, a Jesurun-piece creates a feeling of familiarity in a thoroughly unsettling environment. The extensive reliance on cutting-edge technology, for one, markedly clashes with a recurrent thematic focus on biological decay and linguistic elusiveness. His, then, is a self-professed logic of “engag[ing] rather than seduc[ing]” audiences. [26] Human perception is a process of constantly decentering and re-centering referential frameworks due to the unflagging stream of new impulses we encounter in everything we undertake. The theatre can thereby play a heuristic role as a self-reflexive platform of signification due to the invitation it extends from performer to spectator to connect via conscious participation in a “live” event. For, if accepted, the cognitive communion that ensues will remind all participants for the event’s entire duration of its disruptive constructedness. [27] In Jesurun’s relatively recent internet-inspired Firefall (2006/2010), old-school metatheatrical devices like self-reference and metalepsis abound, but coupled with reflexive statements on the potentiality evoked by design and the essentialism exuded by philosophy, [28] all aside from a scenography itself hell-bent on dramatizing the merging of media into one, uncannily concordant whole. Or, as the character F. – billed as “try[ing] to find a common ground between the introduction of chaos and the status quo” [29] – puts it, they, the characters in Jesurun’s production, are all constantly being “Re-morphed, re-transmuted into positive, useful objects.” [30] Much earlier in his career, Jesurun implemented the recognisability of television-dramaturgy in Red House (1984) and his “living film serial” Chang in a Void Moon (1982 – ongoing) to help engage his audiences into otherwise formalistically forbidding theatre experiments. In his adaptation Faust/How I Rose (1996) we find another token of this artist’s constant play with recognition and estrangement, mixing catch phrases from well-known advertising slogans, snippets of poetry, and pop song lyrics with aporetic debates on the nature of the universe within a set made up of oversized canvases continually projecting lush and dazzling imagescapes – the sequential fluidity of which moreover contrasts with the abruptness of both the dialogue and the scene switches. All examples, indeed, of an ecological inclination to engage rather than seduce : A lot of things bother some people with my work. “You can’t have this conversation, it means so much and it only lasts two seconds.” But slowly, as you get into the movement of the whole, it’s like watching a plant grow . When you listen to the conversation and the actors are standing there, fine, but once you start switching and add all kinds of conflicting angles, lights – it even focuses more on the words. It sets up conflicting things and makes the audience think, also, about what is actually happening on stage. [31] The very fact that Jesurun addresses the element of scenography as catalyst of meta-reflexive thinking squarely aligns him with Philip Auslander, when he argues that the experience of liveness is not limited to performer-audience interactions but refers to a sense of always being connected to other people, of continuous technologically mediated temporal co-presence with others known and unknown. [32] “Meaning,” it so transpires, is not the result of uncovered content, but of a technologically mediated relational engagement prompted, indeed, by the “co-presence of human bodies.” After all, the tension between technology’s power of affect and the physical presence of actors on stage co-opts the audience’s “motor-equivalence” – i.e. performing a similar act under differing circumstances — to generate a sense of reflexivity that is nothing if not “ecologically” dialectical . [33] Figure 2. John Jesurun Firefall – Phase 2 (2009). Photo: Paula Court. Said “ecologically” dialectical reflexivity, according to Gregory Bateson, bridges fundamental philosophy, technology and bodily presence by the bias of the energy exuded from their interplay, [34] and viscerally experienced as the “temporary” [35] product of an embodied cognitive negotiation between competing/conflicting signals and impulses. John Jesurun himself made a telling statement in this regard, “shocked” as he was to learn that his work at one point was described as ‘interdisciplinary:’ I don’t really see the boundaries between one and the other. It seems natural to me that they should work together. They seem to be part of one another. Creatively they are all interconnected. [36] Key tenets from embodied cognition postulate that consciousness itself is produced through the body-mind interface fuelled by our actions and perceptions, but also by nature, culture, and environmental interactions, rather than by a top-down strategy whereby the mind is directing the body. [37] Furthermore, as recently demonstrated by N. Katherine Hayles in her book How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (2012), the kind of embodied cognition activated by “live” performers in an inter-medial setting – including attentive focus, unconscious perceptions, and nonconscious cognitions – “provides the basis for dynamic interactions with the tools it helps bring into being.” [38] Since such reasoning effectively implies that all “Meaning” is necessarily embodied, it no longer makes any sense to separate man and machine, or to think along such rigid distinctions – which, all things considered, might not be such a bad thing. Contemporary technogenesis, like evolution in general, is not about progress. That is, it offers no guarantees that the dynamic transformations taking place between humans and technics are moving in a positive direction. Rather, contemporary technogenesis is about adaptation , the fit between organisms and their environments, recognizing that both sides of the engagement (humans and technologies) are undergoing coordinated transformations. [39] To Chris Salter, such a reasoning effectively confirms Jesurun’s claim that distinctions are but functional delusions, as the “supposedly modern tension between the humanistic body and the dehumanized machine that has so occupied us [is], in reality, a fiction.” [40] As this brief introduction to Jesurun’s “ecological” aesthetic hopefully has shown, man and machine alike are in a continuous state of becoming, and their interplay on an intermedial theatre stage establishes the latter, with its “ecology of media,” as a generative platform for a new “ecology of mind.” This begs the question whether adopting an ecological perspective to assess our plurimedial cultural context implies that a notion like “authorship” has become redundant. Personally I would argue the exact opposite – provided we follow Jesurun and Marranca’s lead by shifting our focus from clearly demarcated entities to processes of signification. As leading semiotician and media theorist Gunther Kress reminds us in his Literacy in the New Media Age (2003), authorship traditionally depended on “a regulated relation between knowledge and canonical modes of representation” whereas today their power and authority have become relative to a tilt. The answer, to him, therefore “is to insist on the teaching of principles [whereby] the processes and environments of representation are crucial.” [41] In ecologies of media and ecologies of mind like Jesurun’s mediaturgies where man and machine organically interact, authorship is embodied as design. References [1] John Jesurun qtd. in RoseLee Goldberg, “You Are A Camera,” Artforum International January 1989, 74. [2] Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatisches Theater (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren, 2001 [1999]), 423. [3] Duke Ellington qtd. in Michael Cerveris, “Intersection, Crossover and Convergence: Fluidity in Contemporary Arts (A Perspective From the US),” in Trans-Global Readings: Crossing Theatrical Boundaries , ed. Caridad Svich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 15. [4] See Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1987); Bradd Shore, Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture, and the Problem of Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). [5] Bonnie Marranca, Ecologies of Theater ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), xiii. [6] See Marranca, “Mediaturgy: A Conversation with Marianne Weems.” Performance Histories , ed. Bonnie Marranca (New York: PAJ, 2008), 189-206 and “Performance as Design: The Mediaturgy of John Jesurun’s Firefall ,” PAJ 96 (2010): 16-24. [7] Marranca, “Performance as Design,” 19. [8] Bateson 1. [9] John Jesurun, Deep Sleep (1986), in A Media Trilogy: Deep Sleep, White Water, Black Maria (New York: NoPassport Press, 2009), 64, my emphasis. [10] John Jesurun qtd. in Juliette Mapp et. al., “Writing and Performance,” PAJ 34, no.1 (2012): 122. [11] Jesurun, Deep Sleep , 67, my emphasis. [12] Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), 158. [13] Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage, 1993), 18. [14] Peter M. Boenisch,“Aesthetic Art to Aisthetic Act: Theatre, Media, Intermedial Performance,” Intermediality in Theatre and Performance , eds. Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 113. [15] Patrice Pavis, “Theatre and the Media: Specificity and Interference,” Approaching Theatre , eds. André Helbo, J. Dines Johansen, Patrice Pavis, and Anne Ubersfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 22. [16] Phillip Auslander, “Liveness, Mediatization, and Intermedial Performance,” Degrés 101 (2000): e8. [17] Gabriella Giannachi and Nick Kaye, Performing Presence: Between the Live and the Simulated . Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 26, my emphasis. [18] Baz Kershaw, Theatre Ecology: Environments and Performance Events (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 15. [19] John Jesurun qtd. in Caridad Svich,“A Natural Force: John Jesurun in Conversation with Caridad Svich,” Trans-Global Readings: Crossing Theatrical Boundaries , ed. Caridad Svich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 45-6. [20] See also Birgit Walkenhorst, Intermedialität und Wahrnehmung: Untersuchungen zur Regiearbeit von John Jesurun und Robert Lepage (Marburg: Tectum, 2005), 84. [21] Phillip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999), 7. [22] Wolf-Dieter Ernst, Der affective Schauspieler: Die Energetik des postdramatischen Theaters (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2012), 15. [23] John Jesurun qtd. in Donn Russell, Avant-Guardian, 1965-1990: A Theatre Foundation Director’s 25 Years Off-Broadway (Pittsburgh: Dorrance, 1996), 410. [24] Lehmann, Postdramatische Theater , 208. [25] Jesurun qtd. in Mapp et. al. 122, my emphasis. [26] John Jesurun qtd. in Catherine Bush, “Views From the Top: John Jesurun’s Cinematic Theater,” Theatre Crafts 7, no.19 (1985): 48. [27] See also Alice Rayner, “Rude Mechanicals and the Spectres of Marx,” Theatre Journal 54, no.4 (2002): 548. [28] John Jesurun, Firefall , in Shatterhand Massacree and Other Media Texts (New York: PAJ Publications, 2009), 178. [29] Jesurun, Firefall , 167. [30] Jesurun, Firefall , 194. [31] John Jesurun, qtd. in Martin Rentdorff, “I’ll Make Film Without Filming It,” Theater: Ex 1, no.2 (1985): 8, my emphasis. [32] Phillip Auslander, “Digital Liveness: A Historico-Philosophical Perspective,” PAJ 34, no. 3 (2012): 6. [33] See also Mona Sarkis, Blick, Stimme und (k)ein Körper: Der Einsatz elektronischer Medien im Theater und in interaktiven Installationen (Stuttgart: M & P, 1997), 29. [34] Bateson, 11. [35] Giannachi and Kaye, Performing Presence , 236. [36] Jesurun qtd. in Svich, “A Natural Force,” 46. [37] See Nagoya Hirose, “An Ecological Approach to Embodiment and Cognition.” Cognitive Systems Research 3.3 (2002): 289-299. [38] N. Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2012), 87, my emphasis. [39] Hayles, How We Think , 87, my emphasis. [40] Chris Salter, Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010), 276. [41] Gunther Kress, Literacy in the New Media Age (New York: Routledge, 2003), 173, my emphasis. Footnotes About The Author(s) Christophe Collard teaches contemporary performing arts, literature, and critical theory at the Free University of Brussels, Belgium. He is currently working on a book-length study of John Jesurun. 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.

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.

Kristin Moriah 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 Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left Kristin Moriah By Published on May 27, 2018 Download Article as PDF Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left . Malik Gaines. New York: NYU Press, 2017; Pp. 248. It begins with a bold proposition. In Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left , scholar-practitioner Malik Gaines suggests that performance is a radical act and that black performances can amend “dominant discourses that manage representation and constrain the lives they organize” (1). Gaines analyzes this phenomenon “against the archives of three complicit registers, each of which engages a history of radicalism”: blackness; the sixties; and the transnational route between the United States, West Africa, and Europe (2-4). This configuration also permits Gaines to consider the “ties between visuality and power’s organization” (7). Thus, Gaines’s book uses interdisciplinary means to assess a range of stunning black cultural artifacts. Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left adds to the field of black performance studies by providing crucial context for some of the most significant acts of black performance in the mid-twentieth century and by firmly rooting black performance studies within the even broader field of black diasporic studies. In the first chapter, Gaines considers the political nature of jazz singer Nina Simone’s onstage performances in the 1960s. In chapter two, he probes the plays of Efua Sutherland and Ama Ata Aidoo and illustrates the complexities involved in the production of dramatic work meant to express a singular African identity. Gaines then directs his attention towards Günther Kaufmann and finds that the black German actor “problematizes the representation of national identity” on screen (96). In the final chapter, he illustrates the ways black drag queen Sylvester bolstered the Cockettes’ transgressive performances. In each of these contexts, with their strong transnational connective tissue, Gaines finds that black performance troubles hegemonic discourses surrounding race, gender, sexuality, and nationhood. Transnational black performance signifies black diaspora even as it disrupts audience expectations and political rhetoric. The geographic locations that comprise Gaines’s investigation include the United States, Ghana, and West Germany. Individually, these sites represent central nodes in studies of black diasporic cultural circulation, including those that take the current African migration crisis into consideration. Their triangulation here is significant. Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left unites these various strains of black studies and makes strong claims for why they should be brought to the forefront simultaneously. In doing so, Gaines maintains that the interplay between these three sites demonstrates the way the theorization and performance of blackness in the United States acted as a touchstone for black diasporic subjects and white audiences the world over. In order to ground his project within the broader field of performance studies, Gaines responds to Afro-pessimist critiques of Marxian analyses à la Frank Wilderson. Gaines’s investigation of Nina Simone’s radical performance work can be considered alongside other recent contributions to the field of black studies, including Shana Redmond’s Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora . And yet, few critics besides Gaines have attempted to tease out the Brechtian implications of Nina Simone’s stagecraft. While the relationship between African Americans and Ghanaians during the 1960s might be well known, thanks to the work of scholars like Kevin Gaines, the work of Ghanaian playwrights like Efua Sutherland and Ama Ata Aidoo remain relatively unexamined. Furthermore, Gaines investigates the hypervisibility of blackness in West Germany during the late 1960s and early 1970s by way of Afro-German actor Günther Kaufmann’s work with famed director Werner Fassbinder. Gaines’s afterword also takes contemporary Venice into consideration through his critique of the 2015 Venice Biennale and reminder that even in rarefied spaces, performance is always political. The result of these transnational case studies is nothing less than a reframing of the terms by which we understand the 1960s, the Nixon era, and our current political reality. Within this complex schema, the chapter entitled “The Cockettes, Sylvester, and Performance as Life” initially appears to be an outlier. A predominately white performance group who were active in the 1970s, the Cockettes push the boundaries of Gaines’s study regarding both time span and subject matter. But the chapter works precisely because it is excessive. The Cockettes’ inclusion allows Gaines to underscore the temporal excesses of the 1960s as well as the ubiquity of blackness on the American stage, even in its most marginalized outcroppings. The performative interventions of black drag queen Sylvester provide ample food for thought here. Gaines delineates the contrapuntal position of Sylvester against the political nuances of the San Francisco drag scene, with its origins in Brechtian forms of street theatre. Given the growing popularity of television shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race and increasing mainstream interest in drag performance, this chapter is perhaps a much-needed reminder of the black presence in politicized drag work. Gaines brings liminal performances of blackness like Sylvester’s into the critical fold while paying particular attention to the work of black feminist critics. His methodology involves a consciously political citational practice. For instance, Gaines claims that his first chapter contributes to the “emerging field of Nina Simone Studies” (22) and references critics like Daphne Brooks. Saidiyah Hartman’s Lose Your Mother helps to frame the second chapter. Tina Campt’s Other Germans is a notable influence on chapter three. In this way, Gaines’s work provides an essential model for advanced students and scholars in the field. Gaines is especially concerned with how radical black performance challenges the limits of visuality or turns the certainty that often attends visuality on its head. As such, music and the political potential of sound in the abstract to express blackness in radical ways become focal points. He argues that “music has served as a cultural and formal context that supports the kinds of multiplicitous expressions” (193) he sees in 1960s performance. So, for instance, Gaines insists on Nina Simone’s “quadruple consciousness, a dexterous deployment of authorship, presence, and voice that exceeded the prohibitions of race and gender while performing those terms” (23). Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left will appeal to scholars who recognize the impact of sound on performance, or Sound Studies writ large, as well as musicality at its baseline. Malik Gaines’s position as both a practitioner and a scholar lend a unique depth to this study, applying black performance theories and techniques to twentieth-century cultural objects across a transnational framework. His text reveals a striking sensitivity to the subtle frequencies on which black performance operates and is an important addition to the expanding black performance studies canon. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Kristin Moriah Grinnell College 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.

DeRon S. Williams Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 2 Visit Journal Homepage Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches DeRon S. Williams By Published on January 28, 2019 Download Article as PDF Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches. Edited by Sharrell D. Luckett with Tia M. Shaffer. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017; Pp. 233. Sharrell D. Luckett and Tia M. Shaffer’s Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches is an exceptional addition to the field as it turns the spotlight on “Black/African ritual, processes, and methodologies to acting” (1). Rather than focusing on situating black performers in traditional acting methodologies, Luckett and Shaffer engage performance pedagogy that goes beyond the Euro-American canon through a series of ten essays, which provide a wide array of viewpoints on actor training grounded in Afrocentrism. They conclude with thoughtful commentary from notable practitioners who present insights on working with performers of color and/or performance texts/modes rooted in black culture. In the introduction, Luckett and Shaffer grapple with the origins of theatre and performance practices. They acknowledge that most U.S. acting programs operate from the perspective that theatre started with the Greeks; however, they point to evidence suggesting that many humans on the continent of Africa participated in theatrically driven rituals earlier. They then emphasize the book’s overall purpose, which is to: “1) honor and rightfully identify Blacks as central co-creators of acting and directing theory by filling the perceived void of Black acting theorists, 2) uplift, honor, and provide culturally relevant frameworks for Black people who are pursuing careers in acting, 3) provide diverse methodologies for actors and teachers of all races and cultures to utilize, and 4) provide diverse methodologies for actors and practitioners’ labor in social justice issues and activism” (2). Luckett and Shaffer subsequently chart the book’s overall structure of “Offerings” instead of chapters, as they feel “this term is more appropriate to our alignment with Black/African customs and culture, as the notion of giving is innately in the ‘fiber of our being’” (5). The first section of the book, “Methods of Social Activism,” concentrates on approaches that motivate societal change with and in largely black/African American communities with primary emphasis on women and at-risk/underserved youth. Luckett and Shaffer begin by sharing their experiences working with the Freddie Hendricks Youth Ensemble of Atlanta and the “Hendricks Method.” This approach manifests social activism and engages spirituality, devising, and hyper-ego, a concept that encourages fearlessness and “getting someone to believe they are ‘the shit’” (31). Offering two, authored by Cristal Chanelle Truscott, outlines “SoulWork,” which uses neo-spiritual or a cappella musicals as “an aesthetic tool for creating space and experience” (39). Individuals looking to establish ensembles or create communal performances would find Truscott’s approach highly useful, as it “shifts actors’ focus away from ‘me’ to ‘ours’ and rescues the audience relationship from ‘them’ to ‘all of us’” (39). Rhodessa Jones’s essay traces her work with the Medea Project, a teaching methodology that focuses on empowering incarcerated women of color. Through an arts-based approach to reducing recidivism, the Project “utilizes self-exploration techniques on an ensemble comprised of inmates, as well as community and professional actresses who stage material derived from the prisoners’ own stories” (51). Similarly, Lisa Biggs introduces readers to “Art Saves Lives,” an improvisational practice cemented in black feminism. Although she does not discuss processes or techniques, Biggs does highlight how the actress-playwright-teacher Rebecca Rice “practiced improvisation as sacred play to affirm Black women’s right to respect and to a future” (73). While the work of social activism is necessary, the offerings included in the second section, “Methods of Intervention,” target the core issue of most acting programs by emphasizing the necessity to locate plays in a cultural context in the rehearsal room. Justin Emeka’s essay is a real standout in the volume because it considers casting actors of color in classic white plays, concentrating heavily on the works of William Shakespeare. He lays out examples of how many people ignore race and its relation to the classics, and he contends that acknowledging race can augment audiences’ understandings of productions. Of all the essays in the volume, Tawnya Pettiford-Wates’s is the most enlightening, suggesting that traditional acting classrooms have alienated actors of color in their development and training. In recapping her personal training experience in Stanislavski, Chekhov, and Grotowski, Pettiford-Wates explains how this Eurocentric pedagogy has prepared her physical body but disenfranchised her spirit and soul as a black actor. For example, traditional analysis failed to connect her to the culturally steeped characters in for colored girls…. Considering this, she presents a series of useful exercises she calls Ritual Performance Drama “as an alternative methodology that directly addresses the specific needs of the black performing artist in studying the dramatic form and developing into self-actualized and empowered creative artists” (108). The work of Chinesha D. Sibley concentrates on Afrocentric approaches to directing new theatrical works where the playwright’s voice remains dominant while also honoring the interconnections between the playwright, actor, and director. She explains interconnectivity through the process of recalling culturally specific experiences and “embracing the physical and psychological traits of a people” (132) within the text and performance. “Methods of Cultural Plurality,” the final section of full essays, explores how individuals can be co-constructors of theatrical performances using techniques rooted in an Afrocentric perspective. Unlike most of the other offerings, Daniel Banks provides concrete exercises that readers can follow to develop stories and performances. Additionally, he examines Hip Hop as a globalized art form of social justice and provides a pedagogical framework through his work with the Hip Hop Theatre Initiative. Kadogo Mojo’s work is both an Afro-centric and trans-global directing methodology, linking the performance stylings of black Americans and the aboriginal people of Australia. The process formerly known as Kadogo Mojo combines “anthropology, dance, poetry, music, theatre, travel and cultural encounters” (169). Although Mojo’s essay is interesting, it simply chronicles her inspirational working modes. The section’s final offering authored by Kashi Johnson and Daphnie Sicre discusses the difficulties black students face on predominately white campuses and the ways in which they have cultivated the students’ “interest in creating an inclusive, productive pedagogical space” to develop performance techniques that “engage and empower Black students” (184). Like Banks, Johnson and Sicre bring together the traditions of Theatre of the Oppressed with the cultural aspects of Hip Hop theatre. Luckett and Shaffer conclude the book with short writings from distinguished black directors, including Tommie “Tonea” Stewart, Paul Carter Harrison, Tim Bond, Walter Dallas, Judyie Al-Bilali, Sheldon Epps, and Talvin Wilks. This unique group of practitioners offers insights on working with Afrocentric plays; personal experiences navigating the American theatre; and rituals, processes, and methods rooted in an African sensibility. An introduction to acting methodologies rooted in Afrocentrism, Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches samples multiple approaches and foregrounds a necessary pedagogical and theoretical framework for academics and practitioners. The inclusion of additional acting exercises would have made the book even more user-friendly within acting classrooms. Still, just like the prevalence of Eurocentric acting methods, the offerings in this book can—and should—be explored by individuals from all backgrounds and cultures, especially those marginalized groups such as Latinx people who have experienced similar structural oppressions in American theatre training. The text is ultimately an excellent resource to better enfranchise performers of color, particularly those who work at Predominantly White Institutions. DeRon S. Williams Eastern Connecticut State University The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 2 (Winter 2019) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, & the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams Introduction: Reflections on the Tragic in Contemporary American Drama and Theatre Rewriting Greek Tragedy / Confronting History in Contemporary American Drama: David Rabe’s The Orphan (1973) and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003) Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy "Take Caroline Away”: Catastrophe, Change, and the Tragic Agency of Nonperformance in Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change The Poetics of the Tragic in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home: Activism and the Advertising of a "Lesbian Suicide Musical" Black Performance and Pedagogy Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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

Jonathan Chambers Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 27 2 Visit Journal Homepage Introduction (JADT 27.2, 2015) Jonathan Chambers By Published on April 23, 2015 Download Article as PDF In its almost 30-year history, the American Theatre and Drama Society (ATDS) has championed the study of theatre and drama in the United States, in all its wide-ranging traditions, numerous histories, and myriad forms. The organization has, along the way, sought to interrogate the constantly shifting notion of what constitutes “America,” both as a place and an idea. Running parallel to the efforts of ATDS has been the Journal of American Drama and Theatre (JADT), itself nearing its 30 year anniversary. As does ATDS, JADT offers a forum for scholars interested in the American theatre, writ large, to exchange ideas, to push the field forward, and to explore and challenge received notions of “America,” “drama,” and “theatre.” Given their corresponding missions, it should come as no surprise that the names comprising the list of authors who have published in JADT is very similar to those found on the membership roll of ATDS, and that the organization and journal have shared in numerous fruitful partnerships. This annual special issue of JADT, guest edited by a member of ATDS, is just one of those many collaborations that have long-defined that symbiotic relationship. The call inviting submissions for this particular special issue encouraged authors to use as a point of departure Joseph Campbell’s expansive conception of myth, considering specifically the history and continued presence of myth in theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas. Authors were asked to explore how myth—functioning mystically, cosmologically, sociologically, pedagogically, or in some way other way – shaped American theatrical expression, drama, and performance; and, in turn, how theatrical expression, drama, and performance shaped our conceptions of our universe and ourselves. In composing the call, I sought to draw in pieces that would address the idea of “myth” broadly construed. Thus, while I would have gladly welcomed considerations of ancient Greek or Roman myth within the context of historical or contemporary America (a subject I personally find fascinating), I was more keenly interested in exploring the ways in which myth was and is built into “America,” and how theatre, drama, and performance have participated/continue to participate in that process. The four pieces in this issue engage in that type of thoroughgoing investigation in intriguing ways. In the first, “The Best Actor for the Role, or the Mythos of Casting in American Popular Performance,” Brian Eugenio Herrera reviews multiple conversations about casting, finds a pattern within them, and terms that pattern the “Mythos of Casting.” In turning a spotlight on this aspect of theatrical production that has typically escaped careful examination, Herrera offers a number of thought-provoking observations regarding not only the mythical qualities that drive the casting process in most professional and academic contexts, but also the entire theatre making enterprise. In the two pieces that follow – “Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men” by Kee-Yoon Nahm, and “Capable Hands: The Myth of American Independence in D. W. Gregory’s The Good Daughter” by Bradley Stephenson – the focus shifts to myths at play in contemporary, American theatre pieces. In the former, Nahm challenges conventional notions of what constitutes realism. Offering rich analyses of two new pieces by emerging playwrights in the field of experimental or avant-garde theatre – Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate and Young Jean Lee’s Straight White Men – Nahm persuasively argues that, despite claims to the contrary and as is evidenced by these pieces, realism has the potential to generate political power and, in so doing, disrupt the traditionally perceived link between realism and whiteness. In the latter essay, Stephenson argues that Gregory’s play disrupts and contests contemporary and historical ways of viewing disabled people as “less than,” “fragile,” or “incapable.” The Good Daughter, thus, represents disabled characters differently than persistent cultural depictions. In the final piece, “Rooting Out Historical Mythologies; or, William Dunlap’s A Trip to Niagara and its Sophisticated Nineteenth Century Audience,” Samuel T. Shanks grants Dunlap – a frequently ignored American dramatist who deserves more attention given the quality and quantity of his work – his much-needed due. But beyond this specific focus on Dunlap, Shanks challenges the community of American theatre scholars to think more deeply and critically about the historiographic biases, assumptions, and mythologies the frequently structure and shape its investigations of the theatrical past. Taken together, then, the four pieces collected here powerfully demonstrate the continued force that myths have on American theatre and on our critical considerations of it. This issue is the product of many hours of labor on the part of a number of people. First and foremost, I had the good fortune of working with an extraordinarily sharp and responsible editorial board, drawn from the membership of ATDS. Consisting of Amy Brady (Kean University), James Cherry (Wabash College), James Fisher, (University of North Carolina, Greensboro), Fonzie Geary (Lyon College), Megan Sanborn Jones (Brigham Young University), Jennifer Kokai (Weber State University), Ilka Saal (University of Erfurt), and Lisa Jackson-Schebetta (University of Pittsburgh), the board helped shape the call, offered thoughtful and thorough responses to submissions, and gladly lent a hand to the process whenever called upon. Thanks as well to Cheryl Black, President of ATDS, and Dorothy Chansky, Vice President, for their support of this special issue from the start, as well as their willingness to share their expertise. ATDS has the very good fortune of working with an outstanding team in the offices of JADT, including co-editors Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson, and managing editor Phoebe Rumsey. And extra loud “shout out” goes to Phoebe for her generosity and cheerful spirit while shepherding this issue from start to finish, making sure that all involved stayed on track. My final word of thanks goes to the four authors whose works are presented in this issue. I hope in reading their pieces you are challenged, as I have been, to think more deeply about the myths that structure our social, political, aesthetic, disciplinary, and personal lives. Jonathan Chambers Guest Editor Bowling Green State University References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction (JADT 27.2, 2015) The Best Actor for the Role, or the Mythos of Casting in American Popular Performance Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men Capable Hands: The Myth of American Independence in D.W. Gregory's The Good Daughter Rooting Out Historical Mythologies; William Dunlap’s A Trip to Niagara and its Sophisticated Nineteenth Century Audience. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Bennet Schaber Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 1 Visit Journal Homepage “An Art for Which There Is as Yet No Name.” Mobile Color, Artistic Composites, Temporal Objects Bennet Schaber By Published on November 16, 2022 Download Article as PDF “[T]o reduce everything to terms of motion, to see everything passing into everything else by almost insensible gradations, to refuse to accept any firm line of demarcation… this running over of every art into every other art… in all the arts the principle of motion prevails over the principle of repose.”—Irving Babbitt, The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts[1] “Repose is the property of dead things; with the living it is only a passing accident.”—Hiram Kelly Moderwell, The Theatre of Today [2] “What is a life that is in need of being constantly resuscitated?”—Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time[3] In 1934, Robert Edmond Jones (1887-1954), celebrated stage designer and director, went to Hollywood. There he joined his friend, colleague and former Harvard classmate, producer Kenneth Macgowan, at RKO. At Harvard the two had both been students in George Pierce Baker’s famed English 47 playwriting workshop and later, in New York along with Eugene O’Neill, another Baker alumnus, formed the ‘triumvirate’ of Experimental Theatre Inc., producing over twenty plays in three seasons (1923-6) at the Provincetown Playhouse and Greenwich Village Theatre. These included two landmarks of the new movement in the North American theatre, O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1924) with Paul Robeson and Desire Under the Elms (1924) with Walter Huston, the latter designed and directed by Jones. Both plays would become motion pictures. Jones, like other practitioners of “the new stagecraft,” was celebrated for his use of color in costuming, stage architecture and lighting, and was so part of a “talent pool” courted not only by Broadway, but by the burgeoning retail industry and, of course, Hollywood. He was, then, one of the principals of what in 1928 the Saturday Evening Post called “The New Age of Color.”[4] Jones had come West to serve as “color designer,” a newly created position, for an experiment that turned out to be the first non-animated, three-color, Technicolor film, the Academy-Award winning short, La Cucaracha (Pioneer/RKO 1934) (Fig. 1). For Jones it was, if words are to be believed, a dream come true. “Color has come to stay in pictures,” he wrote in Vanity Fair earlier in the year. “When this issue reaches the press I shall be in Hollywood where I hope to put some of my dreams into color—or properly speaking into Technicolor, for that is the name of the process in which I am interested.”[5] Fig. 1, La Cucaracha (Pioneer/RKO, 1934). Frame grab. A year later, Jones returned to the pages of Vanity Fair , this time to discuss his work as “artistic director” for Pioneer/RKO’s Becky Sharp (1935), the first feature-length Technicolor film, directed by Rouben Mamoulian and, like La Cucaracha, produced by Macgowan (Fig. 2).[6] Fig. 2, Becky Sharp (Pioneer/RKO, 1935). Frame grab. He enthused about the “advent of color in pictures” and situated it not only within the history of film—“images began to move… then they began to speak… now they are taking on all the colors of life…”—but within a world history at once aesthetic and speculative. Technicolor becomes for him a metonymy for technology itself, capable of reaching back to Homer and faithfully reproducing “the wine-dark sea, the rosy-fingered dawn,” but also presaging a future in which images “will step off the screen and appear before you in the round” and that will, finally, “make every human being on this earth immediately present to every other being.” Technicolor signaled a past, revivified in all of its chromatic intensity, and a future, anticipated in its full, living, even utopian dimensions. And he added, “I cannot say why this should be so. But it is the way things seem to be moving.”[7] Vividness and presence, movement and time: Color, or rather, Technicolor, was redolent with and suggestive of all of these. Indeed, color was suggestion itself. In Jones’s words, “it affects us emotionally; it means something to us.” Thus, he adduced an entire chromatic semiotics both natural and cultural: “Light bright colors make us feel gay. Dark sombre colors make us feel sad. We see red; we get the blues; we become purple with rage; green with envy… red and green make us think of Christmas….” In fact, this semiotics of color, bound to a strict but not inflexible set of rules and guidelines, would quickly transform into industrial standards for color films.[8] But if color required these kinds of formal, limiting and organizing procedures, it was because in it there was something else; and that something else, to Jones’s mind at least, would require “artists who will explore the infinite potentialities of the new medium.” That excess element, in order to be expressed, required an analogy that, in the long run, may have been no analogy at all: music. Beautiful color is pleasing to our eyes just as beautiful sound is pleasing to our ears. But, more than this, beautiful color, properly arranged and composed on the screen and flowing from sequence to sequence just as music flows from movement to movement, stirs our minds and emotions in the same way that music does. Color on the screen—mobile color, flowing color—is really a kind of visual music. Or rather, it is an art for which there is as yet no name.[9] Like music, “arranged and composed,” color, mobile and flowing, was a form of flux in excess of any informal patchwork or formal taxonomy of significations. Although immanent to its medium or support, it took on an independence of movement and vibration; and although an optical element of the film narrative, it transcended the order of representation of the fable. Clearly, it could “enhance the action of the drama” or become “an organic part of it….” But in principle, it was irreducible to the technical, regular and inexorable procession of the film machine or to the formal rhythms and progressions of the drama. A color of a dress? Of course. Of the sky? Yes. A metaphor? An association? Certainly. But also something simultaneously more material and more abstract, mobile, flowing. Perhaps this is why it had “no name.” Color, therefore, introduced, or re-introduced, a certain tension into the film that became even more apparent after the premiere of Becky Sharp . Color, like sound before it, re-asserted the cinema as what Rudolf Arnheim would call “an artistic composite,” with its variety of perceptual and formal registers always potentially at war with one another and themselves.[10] Forces of indeterminacy consistently threatened narrative and more general aesthetic coherence, technical feats of astonishment could overwhelm artistic restraint, perceptual and sensory independences could work below or above principles of integration, even the repetitive cycles of reels and frames were potentially at odds with the forward momentum of lengths of film. In short, there was a friction between what might be called avant-garde tendencies and conventional norms; and Jones’s work in theatre design was rooted in both camps. Color semiotics was one thing, mobile color was another. In addition, La Cucaracha and Becky Sharp were “demonstration” films, prototypes for the new three-color Technicolor process. And their need to highlight the process of color itself accentuated these tensions. The demonstration, meant to suggest a certain aesthetic and industrial teleology, in Jones’s words, “the way things seem to be moving,” also suggested its potential opposite, a kind of corrosive, vibrational undoing of that forward momentum. Reviewing the premiere at Radio City Music Hall for the New York Times , Andre Sennwald put his finger on many of these fundamental tensions while echoing Jones’s rhetoric. Although Becky Sharp ’s faults were “too numerous to earn it distinction as a screen drama,” as “an experiment it is a momentous event, and it may be that in a few years it will be regarded as equal in importance of the first talking pictures.” He added: This is not the coloration of natural life, but a vividly pigmented dream world of the artistic imagination. … [T]he most glaring technical fault is the poor definition in the long shots, which convert faces into blurred masses…. [T]here is also a tendency to provoke an after-image when the scene shifts abruptly to a quieter color combination…. At the moment it is impossible to view Becky Sharp without crowding the imagination so completely with color that the photoplay as a whole is almost meaningless. … The real secret of the film resides not in the general feeling of dissatisfaction which the spectator suffers when he leaves the Music Hall, but in the active excitement which he experiences during its scenes.[11] In short, the film’s “excessive demands on the eye” undermined “the film as a whole.” Blurred masses, after-images, active excitement, crowded imagination and the corrosion of meaning rendered nothing but dissatisfaction where conventional aesthetic norms and expectations were concerned. To rectify these alleged “faults” required “accustoming the eye” to color just as “we were obliged to accustom the ear to the first talkies.” What was at stake then, were both forms of perceptual acquaintance and aesthetic integration; the eye and the ear would require re-attunement before they could be made once again to harmonize. Thus, Sennwald took Jones’s vocabulary of dreams, aesthetic teleologies and visual music and gave them a specificity that Jones’s own rhetoric itself seemed to lack. Sound and color did not supplement a lack in the silent, monochrome image. They revivified and exacerbated an old and created and put into motion a new set of tensions, if not quite a new art or an art for which there was as yet no name. Inscribed, silently, in the demonstration were a set of avant-garde aspirations more fusional than integrative, psychologically or physiologically jarring rather than aesthetically pacifying. The sum of the film was exceeded by its parts; and these parts themselves bled through or overflowed into forms of indistinction that gave rise to, not integration, but a fusing of more… parts. Were there really after-images floating in the indeterminate spaces of cuts? Were human figures actually transforming into blurred blocs of pigment? Was this what Jones meant by mobile color? In fact, “mobile color” really did name something, and Jones once knew it, even if by 1935 he had perhaps forgotten. “Mobile color,” Stark Young, playwright and critic, wrote in 1922 in Theatre Arts Magazine , “is a new art and we have no images of speech for it…. But we sit before it with no sense of strangeness, though there may be some novelty. Like all true things in art it is recognizable. We realize its closeness to our dreams.”[12] Here again was the sublime feeling of inexpressibility; and here again were “dreams into color,” and not just in our heads. A year earlier, Young’s co-editor at Theatre Arts Magazine had also written with excitement about “mobile color,” Thomas Wilfred’s experiments with lumia , moving color projections. In the Theatre of Tomorrow , Kenneth Macgowan, Jones’s friend, colleague and the future producer of La Cucaracha and Becky Sharp at Pioneer/RKO, celebrated Wilfred’s clavilux , a console to create moving light projections and a new, luminous, environmental art, as a harbinger of a future, multi-media theatre (fig. 3). Fig. 3, Thomas Wilfred at the Clavilux Jr. (1930). Thomas Wilfred Papers (MS 1375). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. Macgowan explained: In a laboratory on Long Island, Thomas Wilfrid [sic], a naturalized Dane, who is a machinist and a musician as well as artist, has perfected a “color organ” or “claviluse” [sic] which creates upon a plaster screen the most extraordinary, beautiful and moving progression of absolute shapes and colors. Upon a surface stained by light, develop, evolve and pass the most lovely and thrilling of bright shapes produced apparently by prisms and crystals…. Floating in three-dimensional space… they seem to turn inside-out into a fourth. The final effect is utterly apart from the theatre as we know it. It is more of some mystic philosophy of shapes and numbers, come to life, a religion of pure form sprung out of the void.[13] In Huntington, Long Island, Macgowan had attended the same, private clavilux demonstration about which Young wrote the next year. Present too were Theatre Arts Magazine ’s founder, Sheldon Cheney, photographer Francis Bruguière, and designer Hermann Rosse. Rosse, who also experimented with moving color projections, would go on to win an Oscar for artistic direction for the 1930 two-color, Technicolor musical revue, King of Jazz (Universal). Jones, who contributed texts and images to the Theatre Arts Magazine beginning with its inaugural issue, may have also attended the event. But if he was not present, he would have known and read of it and certainly attended later exhibitions. The rhetoric he later deployed à propos of Technicolor clearly echoed the rhetoric surrounding Wilfred’s lumia . Although now a rather forgotten art form, Wilfred’s invention and the performances he gave with it were a vibrant and relevant component of both the avant-garde art world and the popular culture of the twenties.[14] Painters, patrons and musicians all found mobile color provocative and intriguing, an “art of the future,” as Katherine Dreier described it to Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz, Leopold Stokowski and Marcel Duchamp.[15] Sheldon Cheney, the experimental theatre’s leading theorist and exponent in the USA, devoted an entire chapter of his A Primer of Modern Art (1924) to it; and his descriptions, and a series of photographs by Bruguière, amounted to both a verbal and visual essay on its significance and potential futures. Like Young and Macgowan, Cheney too found himself struggling to find an adequate or satisfactory vocabulary with which to describe and take account of this distinctly modern art. And like Young, he recognized immediately a potential contradiction between its hybrid origins and its ambitions toward abstraction. According to Cheney: It is too soon to build up a particularized theory for the art of mobile color; but this much must be said at the outset: it must be, like music, an abstract art. It will have a formal beauty of its own sort, distinctive, shaped by the limitations and possibilities of its medium, colored lights. But it will not ever (let us hope) get mixed up with the aim of representing nature. It would then—awful thought—become a sort of super-colored movie. As in music, where only the cheapest novelties of composition try definitely to imitate the sounds of nature, so in this new art there will be no effort to suggest objective reality.[16] Once again, the encounter with mobile color leads, with a kind of inevitability, to music and the cinema. And Wilfred’s own lexicon encouraged both these intermedial flights and their accompanying anxieties. The Clavilux, according to its creator, was a kind of “color organ,” and each light “composition” was an “ opus .” Thus, despite his best efforts, Wilfred could never guarantee that mobile color would be understood as a strictly, unadulterated visual experience. Its condition as a motile, chromatic, temporal and ephemeral experience underscored its status as an object and phenomenon of flux. Cheney was himself forced to illustrate his essay on the lumia with static, black-and-white photographs, as if mobile color presented not only a foil to linguistic representation but to the visual as well (fig. 4). Fig. 4, Sheldon Cheney, A Primer of Modern Art (1924). Photos by Francis Bruguière. And he concluded his essay not with words or a photograph, but with a reproduction of a painting by Georgia O’Keeffe: Music—Black, Blue and Green (fig. 5). Fig. 5, Georgia O’Keefe, Blue and Green Music (1919/1921). The Art Institute of Chicago. Thomas Wilfred, from Lumia Opus 162. Courtesy of A.J. Epstein. Photo © Clavilux.org Fig. 5a, Georgia O’Keefe, Blue and Green Music (1919/1921). The Art Institute of Chicago. Thomas Wilfred, from Lumia Opus 162. Courtesy of A.J. Epstein. Photo © Clavilux.org Music? Painting? Movie? An art with no name and, more troubling still, an art with no proper image. It was, as Macgowan had pointed out, continually developing, evolving, and passing. But perhaps the very difficulty of representing mobile color was in fact the indication of its most sublime possibilities. What exactly would be wrong with "a sort of super-colored movie?” And was that what Jones and Macgowan had gotten up to in the decade since Cheney’s book? Awful thought indeed. Trying to come to grips with mobile color brought Cheney not to the promised land of medium specificity, abstraction, non-objectivity or aesthetic autonomy. Rather, despite himself, he was drawn along, like Macgowan, Young, and Jones, toward the other arts, in this case, painting, music and the movies. Mobile color highlighted and exacerbated two conflictual but finally inseparable narratives about modern art. Claims about abstraction, about the emancipation of the arts from figuration and their deliverance into their own, particular and distinct media and vocations, invariably found themselves accompanied by claims of hybridity, immixture and confusion.[17] Thus, while critics like Babbitt, Cheney, Arnheim and, most famously, Clement Greenberg (despite their crucial differences) could all broker the legitimacy of modern art on the aesthetic limits first outlined by Lessing’s Laokoon (and to which they invariably referred), another faction (to which Jones and Macgowan belonged) could seek the same legitimacy in the sensuous overflowing of those limits manifest in Walter Pater’s rather paradoxical notion of the Anderstreben , through which the arts “lend each other new forces.”[18] Music, and especially the notion of visual music, could stand in for both tendencies. On the one hand, music was an abstraction. In it everything—perception, sensation, figuration—could be reduced to mathematics: duration, rhythm, interval, vibration. It was its own content. On the other hand, as a metaphor, it drew to it all the other arts and their allied perceptual forms. Music was the source of synesthetic experiences. Like color, it was an experience of “flow” into which memory and anticipation were soldered together. Emotion and diffusion: Cheney was honest enough to acknowledge at least that much: “It is a question whether absolute abstraction is not a will-o’-the-wisp, whether in any work of art (even musical?) the associative processes of memory and recognition are not indissolubly bound up, at least faintly, with aesthetic enjoyment.”[19] Visual music, then, confirmed the nagging suspicion that every attempt to draw the limits of, or the borders between, the various arts seemed to lead to their increasing “confusion,” as Irving Babbitt vehemently complained. No doubt the theatre and the cinema, composites by their very nature and history, were the most susceptible to these contradictions. Like Babbitt and Lessing before him, Rudolf Arnheim was not particularly a fan of aesthetic hybrids, but he saw clearly where Cheney’s, Stark’s and Macgowan’s arguments led: “[E]ven the theatre has been accused now and then of basically being a hybrid…. [A]bsolute theatre, the kind of performance that is sheer stage action… has remained sterile whenever it was attempted and must remain so unless it be stylized to the point of becoming dance or so enriched visually as to become film.”[20] Mobile color accentuated this condition. To think of it as theatre or drama was quite simply to watch theatre disappear into color or music… or cinema. Thus, it brought home the essentially composite nature of theatre itself. The entire spectrum of the arts was the condition of its sense. If Technicolor, at least in Jones’s sense of it, bore the trace of mobile color, that was because it indicated these same compositional tensions at work in the cinema. Sennwald had seen it first-hand. Mobile color could transform figuration into moving blocs of pigment. Chromatic flux, “flowing color,” provoked afterimages that signaled the spectators’ physiological and subjective, and thus ontologically obscure, contribution to the film, what Sergei Eisenstein had called “the brink of cinema,” “fusing stage and audience in a developing pattern” that seemed to lack a proper place.[21] At play then was a dual tendency: towards abstraction and high art, towards aesthetic fusions and the vernacular. This was how nameless arts were born. There was another tension at play in mobile color and this one perhaps brings us to the crux of the matter. On the one hand, the lumia were theatrical, that is they constituted both an art of vision and of volume. In Wilfred’s own words, they were “a three-dimensional drama in space.”[22] This distinguished the lumia from all previous versions of color music, from Pythagoras to Castel, Rimington to Scriabin.[23] And in fact, the inaugural demonstration to the Theatre Arts group brought out, as Cheney explicitly noticed, lumia as spatial art: “the effect of space instead of screen is achieved through the use of a background that is a modification of the stage-dome or cupola-horizon, in place of the flat wall.”[24] What Cheney was describing was the cyclorama that was revolutionizing the lighting effects of the modern theatre in the teens and twenties. A solid, domed, curvilinear background, usually constructed of plaster, the cyclorama enabled sophisticated light and color effects and obviated the need for painted backdrops. With it, the new stagecraft could give up traditional forms of mimesis and dedicate Itself to experiments in image generation. The cyclorama turned the theatre into a continuous field of projections. Plays like those produced by Jones, Macgowan, and O’Neill, could unfold rhythmically in a light that made prior dramatic unities suddenly indistinct if not indiscernible.[25] “Lighting is my music,” the German theatre designer, Ottamar Starke, said. And with the new experiences of theatrical light and space, the new, experimental, theatre became something closer to the flux of rhythmic progression than anything like Aristotelian mimetic dramaturgy. Plays became more episodic, putting momentum and suggestion in place of representation. Stage pictures were no longer produced before a static, painted, representational background.[26] Instead, they unfolded in the animated interplay between moving bodies and mobile light. “Let the stage, by means of its lights, be as alive as the drama itself,” proclaimed Hiram Kelly Moderwell in 1914.[27] “A new theatre and a new art,” wrote Macgowan about the designs of Rosse and Jones, “in which story, action, color, music, pantomime and voice would be fused.”[28] Actors emerged as living presences from their own projected shadows and images (fig. 6). Fig. 6, Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1920), w/ Charles Gilpin performing before the cyclorama (Kuppelhorizont) constructed by George Cram Cook, scene design by Cleon Throckmorton. Provincetown Playhouse, NY (Wikimedia Commons). “The lights and shadows on a human body reveal to our eyes that the body is ‘plastic’—that is, a flexible body of three dimensions,” Moderwell insisted.[29] The future imagined by Jones in which images “will step off the screen and appear before you in the round,” had already happened. Had he forgotten that too? On the other hand, if the lumia resembled theatrical events or proto-happenings, they also constituted a set of distinct compositions, each one an “ opus .” They were thus repeatable, recorded, technical objects the status of which was simultaneously virtual and material, images that required a support in a medium of inscription, like a film. Thus, for each lumia opus there corresponded a “color record,” a glass disc that could be “played” and manipulated on Wilfred’s clavilux (fig. 7). Fig. 7a, Thomas Wilfred, Color Records designed for the Clavilux Junior. Courtesy of A.J. Epstein. Photos © Clavilux.org Fig. 7b, Thomas Wilfred, Color Records designed for the Clavilux Junior. Courtesy of A.J. Epstein. Photos © Clavilux.org Fig. 7c, Thomas Wilfred, Color Records designed for the Clavilux Junior. Courtesy of A.J. Epstein. Photos © Clavilux.org Fig. 7d, Thomas Wilfred, Color Records designed for the Clavilux Junior. Courtesy of A.J. Epstein. Photos © Clavilux.org This is why the analogies with music both made sense and fell short. It was not music as such that was at stake, but recorded music, phonography, with which the lumia perhaps were best compared. A chromo-graphy that was both a semiotic structure and the simultaneous possibility, through recorded repetition, of its technical deconstruction, like but not quite identical to either a modernist painting or a super-colored movie. A lumia opus was a temporal object but not necessarily a narrative or even a conventionally musical one.[30] What it promised, and this cannot be overemphasized, was not meaning as such, a text or a discursive semiotics, but a sensuous experience of color vision in and as time: developing, evolving, passing, repeating. And its inventor was having as difficult a time as anyone finding the means to express what was fundamentally a sensory, mnemo-technical phenomenon. In Wilfred’s own words, the “physical basis” of lumia was: “The composition, recording and performance of a silent visual sequence in form, color and motion, projected on a flat white screen by means of a light-generating instrument controlled from a keyboard.”[31] Composition, instrument, keyboard, all suggested music. Recording, light, sequence, screen, all suggested cinema. Performance linked the two arts, but also suggested the theatricality that had mesmerized the editors of Theatre Arts Magazine . “The lumia artist conceives his idea,” Wilfred wrote, “as a three-dimensional drama unfolding in infinite space.” Mobile color was, like the theatre, like the cinema, a composite art. But it was also a recorded art; and the experience it promised—of emergence, expectation, disappearance and repetition—was bound up with its technical condition: not the time of seeing, but time’s entrance into, and emergence as, the visible. This is why it slipped through Cheney’s hands even as he tried—and failed—to represent it. Its ontology and locus were obscure, like a song or picture you can’t get out of your head (or ear, or eye). Modern art’s afterimage. “The mind of audiences alone can see the created thing as a unity,” wrote drama critic and future film producer, Ralph Block, of motion projections. “It never appears as such on the screen.”[32] And he added, à propos of the cinema proper and as if anticipating Jones’s own hesitations regarding color semiotics: For the camera, movement must be living, warm, vital, and flowing rather than set and defined in an alphabet of traditional interpretation. Like Bergsonian time, it must seek to renew and recreate itself out of the crest of each present moment. It is in this sense that it resembles music.[33] Thinking, in 1935, of Technicolor as “mobile color,” as “flow” and “movement” in search of its proper name, and finally as “visual music,” Jones was reviving and reanimating the lumia experiments and discourses from the previous two decades and, a bit surreptitiously, asserting their continued influence and relevance. He had clearly not forgotten—or at least was not conscious of having not forgotten—his experiences of Wilfred’s invention. He was in fact deploying its memory as the very form through which to mediate his passage from the experimental theatre of the twenties to the experimental, color cinema of the thirties. Visual music was the distributed middle term of a barely suppressed analogy between avant-garde experiments become super-colored movies, and super-colored movies become ecstatic avant-garde events. But what’s more, the cinematic future he was projecting was the perfect image of his theatrical past. Technicolor was revealing his previous life in the theatre as a dream, in some form at least, already come true. Technicolor as technics, a regime of suggestions, associations, memories and anticipations, with all of its futural momentum, was drawing him backward into a composite past. That past too had been inflected by its dreams. What was its future supposed to have been? Was its trace the imagined future of “every human being on this earth immediately present to every other being?” What kind of presence, exactly, were we being asked to imagine? The comparison or analogy of mobile color to music was reminiscent, in fact, of the ways in which the cinema tout court had been phrased as a kind of visual music. “In form and structure, expression by the motion-camera is more like music than anything else,” wrote Block in The Century Magazine . “It streams before the eye as music streams before the ear; it is in a constant state of becoming.”[34] Indeed, as early as 1921 the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY, was collecting photoplays to be analyzed and taught in a curriculum devoted to film scoring. By 1923 Rouben Mamoulian, future director of Becky Sharp , was there, directing the American Opera Company on the Eastman theatre’s stage.[35] But if a film could be scored, was it not because it was, at least in principle, already a form of music: composed, measured, recorded? The film itself, like mobile color, like Wilfred’s color records, was already a visual music, and the so-called “abstract” or “musical” films of Eggeling, Richter, Ruttman, et al . only highlighted what was the case, again, at least in principle, of every film.[36] Thus, color was a kind of addition that, as Jones asserted, simultaneously pushed the cinema forward into a future of ever-increasingly animated or animatic simulacra, and backward towards its halting, uncertain and inchoate origins. It was as if it had always already been a medium of sound and color, and precisely because the technical inscription, the recording, of each of these independent registers of perceptual flux guaranteed their integration (or disintegration), their articulation (or disarticulation) in a singular, technical object or performance. According to Bernard Stiegler, “A film, like a melody, is essentially a flux: it consists of its unity in and as flow…. Cinema can include sound because film, as a photographic recording technique capable of representing movement, is itself a temporal object susceptible to the phenomenological analysis proper to this kind of object.”[37] The discontinuities and fusions, those afterimages and blocs of pigment that Sennwald remarked of Becky Sharp , were not in reality “faults.” They were in fact a kind of contribution to the phenomenology of film as a temporal object. What Jones’s Technicolor experiment demonstrated was that discontinuity and fusion were the technical preconditions for continuity and integration, not their undoing. Technicolor was indicative of the fragility of cinematic continuity and by extension the continuity of the spectatorial consciousness that resonated with it. Experiences of this sort, ecstatic but also critical and analytical, were precious. Every subsequent film experiment with the relation of image to sound, form to color, has confirmed it.[38] The more Cheney and the dramatists, Wilfred and the lumiastes, Jones and the colorists, Macgowan and the cineastes sought out their independent aesthetic identities, the more they encountered the opposite. Continuity required composition. Composition really did mean composites. Block had put his finger on it: the “constant state of becoming” that the cinematic or phonographic or lumia object was, could only find its “unity” in the synthetic becoming of the “mind” with which it resonated. And there might be an infinity of modes of com-positing the two. Like Bergsonian time, again as Block had phrased it, every repetition was both a renewal and the production of the new—an innovation and an opening. Temporal objects were not only the accumulative recordings of what was or had been, they were also futural and anticipatory, “the way things seem to be moving,” as Jones would write in 1935. The theatre and the cinema, the two worlds astride of which Jones found himself in 1934 and 1935, were both increasingly composite arts; and theorists of both had been discovering as much for at least twenty years. During the period between roughly 1910 and 1930, a group of texts devoted to the ‘new’ or ‘advanced’ theatre in Europe and North America and another to the emerging ‘art’ of the cinema converged around a specific cluster of what might be called motifs or themes. These themes, both camps acknowledged, had perhaps as much if not more to do with ideals than with realities; that is, what was at stake was a certain idea of the theatre or of the cinema, and so a certain idea of art in general. Although some of these texts, in examining the ontology of their respective arts, sought to distinguish or disengage themselves from the other, they in general explored their manifest and increasing overlappings and interpenetrations, and not just with one another, but with the entire spectrum of the contemporary arts. For example, Hiram Kelly Moderwell, writing in 1914, could claim that “from an institution of one art the theatre has become, in the space of less than ten years, an institution of all the arts.” The theatre was, in his account, “a series of pictures… a series of architectural designs… rhythmic spectacle… a kaleidoscope of color… a collection of blending sounds.”[39] The next year, William Morgan Hannon and Vachel Lindsay would make nearly identical claims about the cinema. In The Photodrama, Its Place Among the Fine Arts (1915), Hannon explained, “The photodrama is a complex—nay, a truly composite art.”[40] As much as it might distinguish itself from the others, it more importantly included them within its own expansive and dynamic field. Lindsay too, in The Art of the Motion Picture (1915), famously took an intermedial approach to cinema, characterizing it, as his chapter titles indicated, as “sculpture in motion,” or “painting in motion,” or even “architecture in motion.”[41] However, it was Victor Oscar Freeburg who recognized the most direct and compelling link between film and music that would soon characterize the rhetoric of Wilfred’s lumia and Jones’s mobile color. From 1915-1920, Freeburg taught at Columbia University, establishing what would become film studies as a legitimate part of the university curriculum. Freeburg’s The Art of Photoplay Making (1918) stressed the pictorial condition of film; indeed, “pictorial beauty” would serve him as a fundamental criterion of judgment with respect to the new art form. However, for Freeburg, the essence of film was recorded motion. “The essential feature of the motion picture is, of course, that it actually records and transmits visible motion.” He continued: And the photoplay as such is a single composition of these pictorial motions. The cinema composer is the artist who conceives these motions originally, relates them mentally to each other in some definite unity, prescribes and directs their production, and finally unites the cinematographed records into a film, and if the principles of pictorial composition have been applied in the making, this film will reveal pictorial beauty when projected on the screen.[42] If film was indeed a composite art, Freeburg now determined that its author was a “cinema composer.” If the filmmaker was, then, quite properly a composer, that was because a film, as motion, was a temporal object, a continuous but ephemeral art that was also a recording. Like music, a melody, for example, film was not only in flux but of flux. But its status as a recording made of that flux a permanent inscription, an image. In this respect the film was identical to the phonograph record in the grooves of which one could “see,” even “touch,” the image of sound. Freeburg thus anticipated, at least in theory, the color records that would form the material medium of Thomas Wilfred’s visual music. But he had also begun to divine the principles through which Jones’s dream of visual music could come true. The analogy between the phonograph record and the film was multiple and overdetermined, but it is clear that although it enabled Freeburg to consider film as an analog to music and painting, a composed and inscribed visual music, it crucially allowed him to think of film as a kind of writing and its study or analysis as a kind of reading. As early as 1915, he imagined that, perhaps someday, home viewing would become film’s proper sphere, with spectatorial sensitivity and sophistication cultivated through repeated scansions of superior films, in the manner of re-reading great books or listening to classical music on a phonograph. “It may be,” he speculated, “that the motion picture machine will take its place in our homes along with the phonograph.”[43] Freeburg was thereby promoting a modernist Arnoldianism that would add the best that has been filmed and recorded to “the best that has been thought and said.”[44] Today we can see exactly the ways in which his efforts bore fruit. The promise of the phonograph record was not so much the recording of a singular, unique, musical event, but that it could be listened to a second time, and again, repeatedly. One could learn not only to “appreciate” what was inscribed on the disc, but could learn to analyze, as it were, an experience that was its own emergence as such. Call it phono-grammatology. And one could, Freeburg surmised, do the same with a film. Indeed, temporal objects like films, like recorded discs, demanded nothing less. How else could these experiences be made critically accessible to the people who would otherwise simply undergo them as an experience of sense and sensation? Here was a humanist intuition that the human was fundamentally mediated, if not exactly constituted, by the technics that made it present to itself: books, records, films. Wasn’t the claim to them universal? Although he was in no real position to develop his insights in any full, philosophical way, Freeburg did notice clearly some of the consequences and implications of regarding film as both compositional and as recorded. As recorded temporal object, as mnemotechnics, a film was paradoxically both ephemeral and permanent, and in at least two ways. First, although the film was identical to itself qua object from one repetition to the next, it was rather more open and differential as a repeated experience. The spectator was changed with each viewing, so that spectatorial time was developmental and implied a kind of development of the film-object itself. The name for this relationship was “criticism,” as it might be undertaken by “specialists” or “a general public.”[45] Second, composition and recording also implied forms of com-possibility. “In the future, it may be that any given photoplay will be re-filmed over and over again until something like perfection results.”[46] A film was therefore a rather unstable, contingent object. Its fundamental openness implied not only perfectibility, whatever exactly that would be, but critical intervention in the object itself, on the order of say a mash-up, or mixtape or montage. This was the temporal object as the material of its own subversion. If none of this was happening—and it wasn’t, according to Freeburg—that was because commercial modes of exhibition were denying audiences the repeated, open experiences of difference that were the promise of the film. “A play is flashed upon the screen, fades away, and dies with that performance. It lives again somewhere… but not for us. We cannot read it. Nor can we find it again or see it at will.”[47] The mark of Freeburg’s genius was that he was able to discern in the technics of inscription the common element that linked together phonograph, cinematograph and the photoplay text as typescript, as writing. And he brought to bear on these technics a set of criteria drawn from art history and designed precisely to moderate the aleatory dissonances these technics constituted in the multiple dimensions of sound, image and symbolic language, as well as their potential, intermedial crossings. Film, Freeburg divined, was a temporal object, which was why it had to be thought fundamentally as a recording. Although his criteria tended toward the classical if not the conventional, his theory anticipated the modernist experiments with recorded discs by Moholy-Nagy, Duchamp and Wilfred.[48] The latter’s work, if the testimonies of Cheney, Stark, Macgowan and Jones are any indication, supplied for the advocates of the new theatre the occasion to think through the phenomenology of the recorded, temporal object, in the way Freeburg had for film. It is therefore no wonder that the encounter with mobile color invariably led to evocations of music or movies or both. Thus, it could provide the bridge from the living stage to the living color of the cinema. In the cinema, Jones asserted, echoing both Freeburg and Wilfred, color is precisely composed, mobile and flowing, and recorded. Analogy was destiny. In 1941 Jones, who had returned to the theatre after his brief flirtation with Hollywood, published The Dramatic Imagination , a collection of essays that would help solidify his reputation and legacy as a major figure of the 20th-century theatre. The book’s first essay, “A New Kind of Theatre,” however, is primarily a meditation on the cinema. One might have expected him to at least recall his own experiences in Hollywood as a color designer or artistic director. He never mentions them. Instead, he considers film art within what he takes to be the century’s overarching, aesthetic ambition: to create forms adequate to the exploration of subjective life. He cites James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and John Dos Passos, among others, as examples. Contemporary playwrights too, he asserts, are fully engaged in this project, exploring, he writes in his characteristic rhetoric, “the land of dreams.” “They attempt to express directly to the audience the unspoken thoughts of their characters, to show us not only the patterns of their conscious behavior but the pattern of their subconscious lives.”[49] But it is the “motion pictures” that Jones believes constitute the art form most adequate to the representation of subjective reality. “They flow in a swift succession of images, precisely as our thoughts do… They have the rhythm of the thought-stream and the same uncanny ability to move forward or backward in space or time…. They project pure thought, pure dream, pure inner life.” “Some new playwright,” Jones concludes in his typically futural mood, “will presently set a motion-picture screen on the stage above and behind the actors and will reveal simultaneously the two worlds of the Conscious and the Unconscious…. On the stage we shall see the actual characters of the drama; on the screen we shall see their hidden selves.”[50] Visual music has become visual thought, the flow of color assimilated to the flow of images in general. The cycloramic projections of theatrical lighting from which three-dimensional, “plastic” bodies emerged in the twenties, have been replaced by a movie screen before which living actors move, temporarily blind to a truth unfolding behind them but with which they must certainly merge and fuse. Jones never accomplished what he proposed in 1941. We will never know exactly what it might have looked or felt like. Would it have even been in color? But the appearance of hidden selves recalls, in a very poignant way, the Technicolor dream of “the appearance of every human being to every other one.” And suggests that in that previous dream was included the hoped-for presence of each and every human being to themselves. There is thus a therapeutic dimension at work here that is not surprising, given both the psychological armature of Jones’s discourse as well the ways in which color had itself been thought of in therapeutic ways, as chromotherapy, a tradition we can now see that Jones inherited.[51] (fig. 8) Fig. 8, Edwin Babbitt, frontispiece from The Principles of Light and Color (New York: Babbitt & Co., 1878). But as always, Jones’s prediction of a new kind of future cinema-theatre was a barely disguised recollection of the past. In 1922, Jones and Macgowan traveled to Europe on a kind of theatrical fact-finding mission. Attending sixty performances in ten weeks, the two were able to draw conclusions about the current state of the continental stage and compare it to their own experiences in the USA. Their book, Continental Stagecraft (1922)was the result. In a chapter entitled “The Twilight of the Machines,” they praised the increasing irrelevance of stage machinery, of all forms of contraptions, to the advanced theater, and compared the trend with the modern novel. “While Dorothy Richardson, Waldo Frank and James Joyce are taking the machinery out of the novel, the playwrights are making machinery unnecessary for drama.” What Jones and Macgowan have in mind here is a certain identity between the new novel’s direct engagement first with subjectivity, and second with writing itself as the medium through which it emerges as such. The same goes for the new theater, they contend. But here, the encounter is crucially effected through an experience of light. “A new device is lording it in the theater, but it cannot be called a machine. The electric light is not a mechanical thing. It is miraculously animated by something very much like the Life Force, and night by night its living rays are directed to new and unforeseen ends.”[52] What follows from this is the contention that theatrical realism can no longer be considered a mere fidelity to or representation of the actual, but a deep concern with form through which, in a sense, the actual submits itself as material for thought and thus finds itself materially transformed by that thought. The matter of the stage, then, finds itself decomposed and recomposed by the rather more immaterial forces of light and shadow. And this is exactly what Jones was asking from his new kind of theatre, now mediated by his passage through film and Technicolor. The “uncanny ability to move forward or backward in space or time” that he attributes to the cinema, he might also have attributed to the theatre, or the novel, or his considerations and reflections on his own recurring dreams. There is something remarkable about the ability to relive, again and again, nearly identical experiences and to experience them, each time, as new and as open, as generating the ongoing possibilization of life. It is as if Jones is consistently forgetting in order to remember, proposing a dream of the future that was already an accomplishment of the past. But time requires forgetting. If the past did not fundamentally slip away, there would be no place, no occasion for the present. But if there were no memory, no past crystallized or reduced to image or pattern, there could be no anticipation. For what, after all, would we be waiting, anticipating? This is what the phenomenology of the temporal object, its technics, brings into the open. Temporal objects record and thus repeat the emergence of the experience of time as sensation, each one woven into the other. Mobile color was the sublime experience of color as time. Color-technics. Before it was trademarked and subdued—but also, sometimes, explosively renewed—as Technicolor. “What is a life that is in need of being constantly resuscitated?” asked Bernard Stiegler, the philosopher of technical and temporal objects. But he also asked from whence comes the desire to listen to a pop song, or watch a film, again and again… and again. Jones’s career was not a series of re-inventions; it was precisely not that. It was instead a life constantly in need of resuscitation. The pattern is always the same. The announcement of something new, of a dream come to life, that anticipates a future to be achieved, of an art on the brink… of cinema. But that future has already happened. The dream was already in color. So the ground must be cleared, the needle placed back at the record’s edge, the film rewound. And then replayed, but with a difference, each time. This is the shape of consciousness, the pattern of thought and behavior, shaped by temporal objects. The temporality, the melody, the film through which the “already” resuscitates itself as the “not yet.” More importantly—and Jones did not neglect this when he imagined the colors of the Homeric similes—this time precedes us (as archive or history) and extends beyond us (as archive and legacy): “a never-ending stream of images, running incessantly through our minds from the cradle to the grave, and perhaps beyond.”[53] The experience of the emergence of consciousness as time and sensation and ideation thus always harbors a potential emergence into collectives of which consciousness is always already a part.[54] Jones’s experiences with mobile color, including his forgetting of those experiences and their repeated re-emergences, constitute a small chapter in what might be called the historical phenomenology of the technical, temporal object in the 20th century: the grammatization of sense and sensation, the recording of sounds, images and words that played in the theatres, the homes, the automobiles, the elevators, and especially in the heads of people all over the world. These recordings, their deployments of memory and anticipation, helped shape the forms of consciousness of modern men and women; but their status as objects gave those same men and women critical and creative access to those selfsame forms and their always yet-to-be-thought possibilities. Jones dreamed these as multi-media performances; Freeburg as multi-media libraries.[55] The desire of many young people to have these forms back may be more than nostalgia, or perhaps even a nostalgia for the futures and resuscitations these objects of becoming once promised. The apotheoses of mobile color, however, were the extraordinary and even hallucinatory light shows that accompanied the rock and soul concerts at the Filmore, Winterland, Apollo, and the other theatres of the 1960s and 70s. There, fueled by LSD, pot and alcohol, the performers and the audience did find themselves ecstatically on “the brink of cinema,” “fused in a developing pattern” the promise of which may not yet be in default. Bodies really did “step off the screen and appear before you in the round.”[56] Fig. 9, The Grateful Dead, performing before light projections by Heavy Water, Family Dog at the Great Highway, San Francisco, 1970 (Photo Credit: Jim Baldocchi). The pattern of Jones’s life indicates, indeed is symptomatic of, not only the profound effects of technical, temporal objects on the temporal orientation of the organism within the flux of sense and sensation, an orientation that, as Stiegler maintained, could always become a disorientation, but also of the condition and possibility of the critical deconstruction and thus creative re-orientation of those same flows.[57] The experiments with color technics of Wilfred and Jones clearly speak to the latter in profound and poignant ways. And this is why, making sense of what Jones and Wilfred were accomplishing, requires not close readings of the particular films or opuses they produced, but the meta-discourses surrounding them. The aim is to produce partial readings of the three mnemo-technical objects—film, phonograph, lumia —the dispositions and depositions of time and sensation in a technical support of inscription, to which these meta-discourses lent their words. And the stakes remain very high: the inventions and re-inventions of the forms of presence of beings to one another, and to themselves. References [1] Irving Babbitt, The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1910), 214-219. [2] Hiram Kelly Moderwell, The Theatre of Today (New York: Dodd Mead and Company, 1914), 150. [3] Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3. Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 16. [4] Stephen Eskilson, “Color and Consumption,” Design Issues . Vol. 18, No. 2 (2002), 17-29. [5] Robert Edmond Jones, “Dreams into Color,” Vanity Fair , October (1934), 14. [6] The film, which starred Miriam Hopkins, was an adaptation of Langdon Mitchell’s 1899 play, itself an adaptation of Thackeray’s novel, Vanity Fair (1848). [7] Robert Edmond Jones, “A Revolution in the Movies,” Vanity Fair . June (1935), 13. [8] Scott Higgins, “Demonstrating Three-Colour Technicolor: Early Three-Colour Aesthetics and Design,” Film History , Vol. 12, No. 4 (2000), 358-383. [9] Jones, “A Revolution in the Movies,” 13. [10] Rudolf Arnheim, “A New Laocoon: Artistic Composites and the Talking Film,” in Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971[1938]),199-230. [11] Andre Sennwald, “The Screen: The Radio City Hall Presents ‘Becky Sharp,’ the First Full-Length Three-Color Photoplay,” New York Times . June 14 (1935), 27. [12] Stark Young, “The Color Organ,” Theatre Arts Magazine . Vol. 1, No. 1 (1922), 20-21. [13] Kenneth Macgowan, The Theatre of Tomorrow (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921), 122-3. Macgowan’s evocations of the “fourth dimension” and “mystic philosophy” are indications that he had discussed the theoretical bases of the lumia with their inventor. According to Andrew Johnston, Wilfred’s work “was developed out of a desire to achieve an aesthetic experience that was mystical in orientation….” See Johnston’s “The Color of Prometheus, Thomas Wilfred’s Lumia and the Projection of Transcendence,” in Simon Brown et al. eds., Color and the Moving Image (New York: Routledge, 2013), 67-78. [14] Sarah Street and Joshua Yumibe, Chromatic Modernity: Color, Cinema and the Media of the 1920s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 118-120. [15] Keely Orgeman et al ., Lumia. Thomas Wilfred and the Art of Light (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 2017), 24. [16] Sheldon Cheney, A Primer of Modern Art (New York: Tudor Publishing, 1924), 184-185. [17] Noam M. Elcott, “The Cinematic Imaginary and the Photographic Fact: Media as Models for 20th-Century Art,” PhotoResearcher , No. 29 (2018), 7-23. [18] For a powerful account of Lessing and the aesthetic and political stakes of artistic borders, see, W.J.T. Mitchell, “The Politics of Genre: Space and Time in Lessing's Laocoon, ” Representations , No. 6 (Spring, 1984), 98-115. For accounts of Pater and the trespassing of artistic borders, see, Elicia Clements and Lesley J. Higgins eds., Victorian Aesthetic Conditions: Pater Across the Arts (Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave, 2010). Also, Andrew Eastham, “Walter Pater's Acoustic Space: 'The School of Giorgione', Dionysian "Anders-streben," and the Politics of Soundscape,” The Yearbook of English Studies , Vol. 40, Nos. 1-2 (2010), 196-216. [19] Sheldon Cheney, Modern Art and the Theatre (Scarborough-on-Hudson: The Sleepy Hollow Press, 1921), pp. 3-4. [20] Arnheim, 201-2. [21] Sergei Eisenstein, “Through Theatre to Cinema,” in Film Form. Essays in Film Theory (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1949 [1934]), 15. [22] Thomas Wilfred, “Light and the Artist,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , Vol. 7, No. 4 (1947): p. 252. [23] Judith Zilczer, "Color Music: Synaesthesia and Nineteenth-Century Sources for Abstract Art,” Artibus et Historiae , Vol. 8, No. 16 (1987), 101-126. [24] Cheney, A Primer of Modern Art , 186. [25] For an account of the tempos and rhythms common to the new theatre and the contemporary cinema, see John Grierson, “Tempo,” Motion Picture News (1926), quoted in George C. Pratt, Spellbound in Darkness: A History of the Silent Film (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 432–33. [26] On ‘stage pictures’ and their persistence in the theatre and in early cinema, see Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema. Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). [27] Moderwell, 72. [28] Macgowan, 120. [29] Moderwell, 71. [30] The notion of temporal object originates in the early 20th century with the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and the analysis of internal time consciousness. Husserl’s example of a temporal object, that is an object-phenomenon that has to be comprehended in the time of its emergence, was a melody. A melody has to grasped in its unfolding for which each present moment contains both its immediate past (retention) and an anticipation of a future (protention). Bernard Stiegler has demonstrated the ways in which Husserl’s analysis neglects the technics required for the model of consciousness he adumbrates. Stiegler’s example, then, is not the melody as such, but the melody recorded on a disc or on tape. For a clear account of the temporal object as developed by Stiegler, see Matt Bluemink, “Stiegler’s Memory: Tertiary Retention and Temporal Objects,” 3: AM Magazine .com. Thursday, Jan. 23, 2020. [31] Wilfred, 252. [32] Ralph Block, “Motion,” The Freeman , October 27 (1920),157. [33] Ralph Block, “Not Theatre, Not Literature, Not Painting,” The Dial . Vol LXXXII, Jan.-Jun. (1927): 20. [34] Ralph Block, “The Movies versus Motion Pictures,” The Century Magazine , No. 102, October (1921), 892. [35] Tom Milne, Mamoulian (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970),12-13. Mamoulian would also work, like Jones and Macgowan, with Eugene O’Neill, before making the move to Hollywood. [36] Malcolm Cook, “Visual Music in Film, 1921-1924: Richter, Eggeling, Ruttman.” In Music and Modernism. Edited by Charlotte de Mille (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011). See also Akira Mizuta Lippit, Cinema Without Reflection: Jacques Derrida’s Echopoiesis and Narcissism Adrift (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), p. 41: “In cinema, speech echoes already there in the image, even when, presumably, the image is silent…. And the image is already an element of sound.” [37] Stiegler, 12. [38] Deleuze, Gilles, “ Having an Idea in Cinema .” In Eleanor Kaufman and Kevin Jon Heller. Deleuze & Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy and Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 14-22. [39] Moderwell, 17-18. [40] William Morgan Hannon, The Photodrama, Its Place Among the Arts (New Orleans: Ruskin Press, 1915), p. 23. [41] Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (New York: Liveright, 1915). [42] Victor O. Freeburg, The Art of Photoplay Making (New York: Macmillan, 1918),2-3. [43] Freeburg, 6. [44] Peter Decherney, “Inventing Film Study and its Object at Columbia University, 1915-1938,” Film History . Vol. 12, No. 4 (2000), 443-460. [45] Freeburg, 5. [46] Freeburg, 6. [47] Freeburg, 10. [48] To readers familiar with Freeburg’s book, my account may seem somewhat surprising. And it is true that I am concentrating on the early, preliminary observations on film in a text that is quite long. But Freeburg’s remarkable attempt at constructing what amounts to a poetics of the photoplay is dependent—and he knew this—on the technological conditions necessary for forming the judgments that would eventually give rise to that poetics. Thus, his analyses of sensation, emotion and intellection at the cinema, and the deepening of those both independently of one another and as linked in an overall organization of feelings and thoughts, emerge from an attention to a film as the composite, temporal and sensory phenomenon that produces the impression of reality characteristic of these kinds of experiences. In fact, he speculates that that “impression” may, over time, be mistaken for reality in what becomes a “confused memory,” so that in old age one might believe themselves to have had experiences “in reality” that were only ever had at the movies (p. 19). To counter this permanent submersion in and subjugation to the moving image, Freeburg advocates for a kind of film literacy, an attentiveness to the forms of grammatization (the filmic ‘writing’) out of which the film is composed, in order to bring out “beneath the attractive surface… the permanent values of illuminating truth, universal meaning, and unfolding beauty” (p. 25). These are humanist aims, certainly. But they are not the only aims that would logically follow from Freeburg’s essential, early, and in many ways materialist, insight. Indeed, his consistent unwillingness to separate the quasi-independent compositional elements of film from their technical base (from their mnemo-technics) gives rise to many of his crucial observations. [49] Robert Edmond Jones, “A New Kind of Drama,” in The Dramatic Imagination (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1967 [1941]), 16-17. [50] Ibid. 17-19. [51] T. W. Allan Whitfield and Jianne Whelton, “The Arcane Roots of Colour Psychology, Chromotherapy, and Colour Forecasting.” COLOR: research and application . Volume 40, Number 1, February (2015), 99-106. One of the 19th-c. originators of chromotherapy, a kind of theosophical art, was none other than Edwin Babbitt, father of Irving Babbitt, for whom color aesthetics, and his father as well, were anathema. [52] Kenneth Macgowan and Robert Edmond Jones, Continental Stagecraft (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1922), pp. 66-7. [53] Jones 1941, 15. [54] What Stiegler calls, following Gilbert Simondon, “transindividuation.” [55] Anthony Hostetter and Elizabeth Hostetter, “Robert Edmond Jones: Theatre and Motion Pictures, Bridging Reality and Dreams.” Theatre Symposium , Vol. 19 (2011), 26-40. Kevin Brown, “The Dream Medium: Robert Edmond Jones’s Theatre of the Future.” International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media , Vol. 12, No. 1 (2016), 1-10. Steven Marras, “The Photoplay as Emergent Media Form: Victor O. Freeburg and Vachel Lindsay on Photoplay Aesthetics,” Screening the Past , www.screeningthepast.com/2014/12. [56] The phenomenology of these sensory, temporal dynamics extends itself in our own time not only in the ubiquitous retreat of bodies back into screens of all sizes, but to VR and neural mnemo-technical practices as well, some of which perform the kinds of reflexive, critical deconstructions once advocated by Jones, Block, Freeburg, et al. That is, some of these objects (films, installations, etc.) enable us to touch, as it were, the time of our brains. See Mark B. N. Hansen, “From Fixed to Fluid. Material-Mental Images Between Neural Synchronization and Computational Mediation,” in Jacques Khalip and Robert Mitchell, Releasing the Image (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 83-111. [57] On orientation and disorientation in Stiegler, see Patrick Crogan, “Essential Viewing,” Film Philosophy . Vol. 10, No. 2 (2006), 39-54. Footnotes About The Author(s) BENNET SCHABER teaches filmmaking and film theory in the Department of Cinema and Screen Studies at SUNY Oswego, USA, and at the University of Kairouan, Tunisia. He is the editor of Eugene O’Neill’s Photoplays of 1926 ( Eugene O’Neill Review , 40:1, 2019), the author of “Towards a Cinematic O’Neill” ( Eugene O’Neill Review , 42:2, 2021) and “Little Cinemas: Eugene O’Neill as Screenwriter” ( Journal of Screenwriting , 13:1, 2022). Forthcoming essays on theatre critic, film theorist, screenwriter and producer, Ralph Block (1889-1974); and ‘voice’ in silent cinema. bennet.schaber@oswego.edu Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue “An Art for Which There Is as Yet No Name.” Mobile Color, Artistic Composites, Temporal Objects The Anti-Victorianism of Victorian Revivals Tricks, Capers, and Highway Robbery: Philadelphia Self-Enactment upon the Early Jacksonian Stage “The Spirit of the Thing is All”: The Federal Theatre’s Staging of Medieval Drama in the Los Angeles Religious Community The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical; Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity Previous Next Attribution:

Rob Silverman Ascher 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 Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances Rob Silverman Ascher By Published on April 17, 2023 Download Article as PDF The overlap of performance and evangelical Christianity is typically limited to analyzing preachers and passion plays. In Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances , Jill Stevenson extends the language of performance studies to immersive evangelical experiences she refers to as “End-Time Performances.” These performances, including Hell House , Judgement House , and Tribulation Trail , are semi-professional performances that explicitly preach to audiences that a sincere belief in Christ is the way to avoid the apocalypse in the End of Days. The bulk of Stevenson’s analysis, over five chapters and a coda, is built around the question of how a “dramaturgy of threat [produces] the future End of Time” through interactive performance and staging. The first chapter, “The Landscape of the End: Time, Affect, Threat, Absence” functions as both a sourcebook and a roadmap, effectively introducing the lenses through which Stevenson wants her audience to analyze the productions used as evidence. Stevenson provides a crash course of sorts on theological concepts such as pre- and post-millennial dispensationalism, performance studies concepts like affect theory, and the history of non-denominational American evangelical Christianity. This section is sufficiently informative on its own, enmeshing figures like Cyrus Scofield, author of the Scofield Reference Bible, and Jill Dolan, whose seminal writing on utopian performatives informs Stevenson’s analysis of the role of time in End-Time Performances. While Dolan’s utopian performative is a sunny and aspirational future proposed by the 1960s counterculture, Stevenson notes that the ‘utopian performative’ and evangelical Hell House alike ask their audiences to consider, in Dolan’s language, “that beyond this ‘now’ of material oppression…. Lives a future that might be different.” The biggest difference argues Stevenson that an Evangelical future must take place in the afterlife. The core of Stevenson’s book uses three different End-Time Performances and the stand-alone Ark Encounter Museum as case studies. Nearly all of these are performed on or near church property annually. Hell House is the exception, as it has been licensed by churches and theatre groups across the country, including the New York City-based Les Freres Corbusier. That company performed a “sincere staging” of Hell House , following kits published by Pastor Keenan Roberts, leader of New Destiny Christian Center in Colorado. This homegrown ethos is central to the ethnographic work that Stevenson puts at the core of Feeling the Future . Stevenson, who writes in detail about her experiences as an attendee at the End-Time Performances, takes care to note the age ranges and racial makeup of audiences at these performances. Stevenson notes that the majority of End-Time performance attendees are white and between the ages of 18 and 36, with the exception of Tribulation Trail . This piece had an age-diverse audience comprised primarily of Black and Latine attendees, which fits some creative choices. Notably, in Tribulation Trail , a Black performer portrayed Jesus in the portion depicting the slaying of Satan, aligning with the largely-Black congregational makeup at Mt. Vernon Baptist Church, the producers of Tribulation Trail . Many of the performances with predominantly white audiences take on a much more political bent. Attendees are rushed through an apocalyptic landscape besieged by a One World Government with technocratic ideals, installing the Mark of the Beast in the form of microchips. Stevenson keenly observes the political contexts through which she and her fellow audience members receive the dramaturgical information woven into these apocalyptic landscapes. After all, these End-Time Performances are proselytizing tools. Nearly all of them conclude with a moment of prayer and an invitation to their audience to accept Christ as their savior. Some of these calls to action are profoundly intimate and offer their audience members opportunities to speak with a member of the ministry, while others merely warn the audience to keep Christ in their hearts in the face of the coming Rapture. Stevenson slyly juxtaposes the political context and ticket price of a given show with how intense these proselytizing moments are, quietly casting doubt on the theological integrity of various ministries. Stevenson’s central argument on the dramaturgy of threat and futurity asks readers to hold the content of these performances alongside the emphasis on futurity inherent in evangelical Christianity. A message of Christ’s power as a savior immediately follows vivid images of lakes of fire, piles of clothes, and scenes of abortion and grotesque violence. If, she supposes, the audience is given the opportunity to accept Christ as their savior after being inundated with the End of Days and sins of man, they will take scripture less out of sincere belief and more out of panic regarding “impending futurity.” A focus on the inevitability of Christ’s return or some sort of holy deliverance has roots in medieval British theatre, to which Stevenson devotes a section of her first chapter. Statement of belief is not always sufficient, however, as several of the End-Time Performances feature purportedly Christian characters who were not raptured due to a lack of sincerity. The book concludes with a two-part Coda, written in June 2020 and January 2021, analyzing, in brief, the beginning of the COVID epidemic, the 2020 election, and the January 6th insurrection through the lenses Stevenson has set up for these contemporary End-Time Performances. Shockingly, much of the imagery baked into the apocalypse narratives she has been analyzing has since become central to life in 2021, as COVID is treated as a hoax and evangelicals proudly storm the Capitol. Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances is a compelling text for casual readers, not only scholars, as Stevenson’s writing is clear, concise and vivid in description. Yet, it is also valuable as an educational text, shedding light on the dramaturgical integrity of a mode of performance ignored by the theatrical establishment. Stevenson makes a compelling case for End-Time Performance as a uniquely American form of performance, with roots in the York Mystery Plays, aesthetic references to zombie movies, and a clear sense of theological didacticism. Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances applies theological and performance-theoretical frameworks to an underexplored form, leaving its audience of readers with a dense and rewarding dramaturgical text. This work is important for an array of fields, including Theater and Performance Studies, American Studies and Religious Studies. References Footnotes About The Author(s) ROB SILVERMAN ASCHER University of Iowa Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.