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Watch Monk in Pieces by Billy Shebar at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2026. Meredith Monk – composer, performer, and interdisciplinary artist – is one of the great artistic pioneers of our time, yet her profound cultural influence is largely unrecognized. With Monk’s music at its center, and featuring interviews with Björk and David Byrne, Monk in Pieces is a mosaic that mirrors the structure of Monk’s own work, and illuminates her wildly original vocabulary of sound and imagery. As a female artist in the male-dominated downtown arts scene of the 1960s and ‘70s, Monk had to fight for recognition and resources. Early reviews in The New York Times were vicious and sexist: “A disgrace to the name of dancing,” wrote one critic, and “so earnestly strange in a talented little-girl way,” wrote another. Yet as her celebrated contemporary, Philip Glass, says, “she, among all of us, was – and still is – the uniquely gifted one.” In the film’s final chapters, Monk faces mortality. We see her warily entrust her masterpiece, ATLAS, to director Yuval Sharon and singer Joanna Lynn-Jacobs for a new production at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. For 60 years, Monk has directed and performed in all of her music theater works; now she must learn to let go. What will happen to such singular work after she is gone? The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Monk in Pieces Billy Shebar At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2026 Screening Information This film will be screened on May 28, at 6:10 PM, at The Segal Theatre Center RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. Country USA, Germany, France Language English Running Time 95 minutes Year of Release 2025 About The Film Meredith Monk – composer, performer, and interdisciplinary artist – is one of the great artistic pioneers of our time, yet her profound cultural influence is largely unrecognized. With Monk’s music at its center, and featuring interviews with Björk and David Byrne, Monk in Pieces is a mosaic that mirrors the structure of Monk’s own work, and illuminates her wildly original vocabulary of sound and imagery. As a female artist in the male-dominated downtown arts scene of the 1960s and ‘70s, Monk had to fight for recognition and resources. Early reviews in The New York Times were vicious and sexist: “A disgrace to the name of dancing,” wrote one critic, and “so earnestly strange in a talented little-girl way,” wrote another. Yet as her celebrated contemporary, Philip Glass, says, “she, among all of us, was – and still is – the uniquely gifted one.” In the film’s final chapters, Monk faces mortality. We see her warily entrust her masterpiece, ATLAS, to director Yuval Sharon and singer Joanna Lynn-Jacobs for a new production at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. For 60 years, Monk has directed and performed in all of her music theater works; now she must learn to let go. What will happen to such singular work after she is gone? A Zeitgeist Films Release in Association with Kino Lorber About The Artist(s) Billy Shebar is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker known for High Noon on the Waterfront (2022), with John Turturro and Edward Norton, which premiered at the Telluride Film Festival and was broadcast on TCM and HBO; and Dark Matter (2007), starring Meryl Streep, which won the Alfred P. Sloan Prize at Sundance. He collaborated with animator Bill Plympton on The New York Times viral web series Trump Bites (2018-2020) and with animator Yoni Goodman on the three-part crime series Doctor’s Orders (2021). Get in touch with the artist(s) info@110thstreet.com and follow them on social media https://zeitgeistfilms.com/film/monk-in-pieces,https://monkinpieces.com/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2026 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here

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

Watch Overture for KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE by Robert Wilson / Filmmaker Unknown at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2026. This film documents the Overture for KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE: A STORY ABOUT A FAMILY AND SOME PEOPLE CHANGING, performed live by Robert Wilson and the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds at 147 Spring Street, New York City, in April 1972. The production was performed for six hours each day — from 6 to 9 AM and 6 to 9 PM — across seven days between April 24 and 30. The full work, KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE, was subsequently performed as a seven-day, 168-hour event in Shiraz, Iran, and stands as one of the most ambitious durational theater works ever staged. The sizeable cast featured an exceptional range of downtown luminaries, including dance critic and poet Edwin Denby, dancer Andy De Groat, theater critic Stefan Brecht, and Wilson's own grandmother, Alma Hamilton. This preservation print was made directly from the 16mm camera original, which was discovered in Anthology Film Archives' basement alongside a group of empty film cans. Archivists at Anthology and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts — the repository of the Robert Wilson Audio/Visual Collection — were able to salvage the film and identified it as the most extensive extant documentation of the Overture. No soundtrack has surfaced, but the film's majestic images and wild visual inventiveness carry a power that renders dialogue unnecessary. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives and the New York Public Library. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Overture for KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE Robert Wilson / Filmmaker Unknown At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2026 Screening Information This film will be screened on May 29 at 8:45 PM, and June 5 at 6:45 PM, at Anthology Film Archives RSVP Please note that these screenings are ticketed and require prior registration at the Anthology Film Archives website. Country United States Language Silent Running Time 80 minutes Year of Release 1972 About The Film This film documents the Overture for KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE: A STORY ABOUT A FAMILY AND SOME PEOPLE CHANGING, performed live by Robert Wilson and the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds at 147 Spring Street, New York City, in April 1972. The production was performed for six hours each day — from 6 to 9 AM and 6 to 9 PM — across seven days between April 24 and 30. The full work, KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE, was subsequently performed as a seven-day, 168-hour event in Shiraz, Iran, and stands as one of the most ambitious durational theater works ever staged. The sizeable cast featured an exceptional range of downtown luminaries, including dance critic and poet Edwin Denby, dancer Andy De Groat, theater critic Stefan Brecht, and Wilson's own grandmother, Alma Hamilton. This preservation print was made directly from the 16mm camera original, which was discovered in Anthology Film Archives' basement alongside a group of empty film cans. Archivists at Anthology and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts — the repository of the Robert Wilson Audio/Visual Collection — were able to salvage the film and identified it as the most extensive extant documentation of the Overture. No soundtrack has surfaced, but the film's majestic images and wild visual inventiveness carry a power that renders dialogue unnecessary. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives and the New York Public Library. Performed by Robert Wilson and the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds Preserved by Anthology Film Archives and the New York Public Library About The Artist(s) Robert Wilson (October 4, 1941 – July 31, 2025) was an American director, playwright, and visual artist who fundamentally reshaped experimental theater over more than five decades. Born in Waco, Texas, he studied at the University of Texas before moving to New York, where he trained at Brooklyn's Pratt Institute and founded the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, a performance collective that became the incubator for his early landmark works. Wilson's theater — often described as a "theater of imagery" — is distinguished by its radical reimagining of theatrical time and space, its use of exquisitely composed light and movement in place of conventional narrative, and its synthesis of visual art, music, dance, and text into unified stage pictures. His work sits at a radical distance from naturalism: performers move with ritualized, slow precision, language is treated as sound as much as meaning, and the stage itself functions as a living painting. His breakthrough came with Deafman Glance (1970), a six-hour silent opera that electrified Paris audiences and prompted the Surrealist poet Louis Aragon to describe Wilson as the fulfillment of Surrealism's deepest aspirations. Throughout the 1970s Wilson created a series of epic-scale works that redefined theatrical duration, culminating in his collaboration with composer Philip Glass on Einstein on the Beach (1976), a five-hour opera that premiered at the Avignon Festival and later played the Metropolitan Opera. It is widely regarded as one of the defining works of 20th-century performance. Over the following decades Wilson collaborated with an extraordinary range of artists — Tom Waits, William S. Burroughs, Heiner Müller, Lou Reed, Susan Sontag, Laurie Anderson, Willem Dafoe, and Marina Abramovic, among many others — while also directing canonical texts by Shakespeare, Beckett, Wagner, Ibsen, and Ionesco. He staged productions at the world's leading theaters and opera houses, including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Berliner Ensemble, the Thalia Theater Hamburg, La Scala, and the Salzburg Festival. Alongside his theater work, Wilson was a prolific maker of video art. Beginning in 1978 he produced a series of innovative television works including VIDEO 50, DEAFMAN GLANCE, and STATIONS, transposing his theatrical visual language into the moving image. He also created an extensive series of Video Portraits of figures including Lady Gaga, Brad Pitt, and Mikhail Baryshnikov. In 1991 Wilson founded The Watermill Center on Long Island, a "laboratory for performance" housed in a former Western Union research facility on the edge of the Shinnecock Reservation, which continues to host residencies, exhibitions, and productions. His drawings, sculptures, and installations are held in major collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, the Whitney Museum, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Wilson received numerous honors throughout his life, including Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, the Drama Desk Award, Obie Awards, and a 1986 Pulitzer Prize nomination. He died on July 31, 2025, at the age of 83. Get in touch with the artist(s) and follow them on social media Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2026 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here

Watch Museum of the Night by Fermín Eloy Acosta at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2026. At the end of the 1960s, Argentine artist Leandro Katz participated in Theatre of the Ridiculous, an eccentric group linked to New York's queer underground. This film-essay moves between archives, testimonies, and specters of the past that question the present. Photography, film, video, and sound intertwine to approach, if only in brief flashes, that mythical past and raise questions about time, art, sexuality, death, and cinema. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Museum of the Night Fermín Eloy Acosta At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2026 Screening Information This film will be screened on May 30, at 4:00 PM, at The Segal Theatre Center RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. Country Argentina Language Spanish, English Running Time 88 minutes Year of Release 2025 About The Film At the end of the 1960s, Argentine artist Leandro Katz participated in Theatre of the Ridiculous, an eccentric group linked to New York's queer underground. This film-essay moves between archives, testimonies, and specters of the past that question the present. Photography, film, video, and sound intertwine to approach, if only in brief flashes, that mythical past and raise questions about time, art, sexuality, death, and cinema. Fermín Eloy Acosta About The Artist(s) Fermín Eloy Acosta (Argentina, 1990) is a screenwriter, writer, and audiovisual director. He directed the film Implantación (2016), alongside Sol Bolloqui and Lucía Salas. In 2023, he participated in the Berlinale Talent Campus Buenos Aires. He has received the Alec Oxenford Foundation Scholarship and the National Arts Fund Grant. In 2019, he won the Bienal de Arte Joven with the novel Bajo lluvia, relámpago o trueno (2019), which was translated into Portuguese by Editorial Peabirú. In 2024, he won the Hebe Uhart Novel Prize for Las visiones venenosas (2024). Museo de la Noche is his first solo film. Get in touch with the artist(s) fermineloyacosta@gmail.com and follow them on social media @fermin.eloy Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2026 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here

Watch VIDEO 50 + DEAFMAN GLANCE by Robert Wilson at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2026. A double program of two essential early video works by Robert Wilson, screened together. VIDEO 50 (1978, 52 min) VIDEO 50 is an extraordinary video sketchbook — a highly original, visually dramatic, and frequently humorous collection of one hundred abbreviated episodes produced for television. Unfolding as an uninterrupted series of thirty-second vignettes, the work is characterized by deadpan theatricality, symbolist imagery, surrealist juxtapositions, and the repetition of key visual motifs. Indelible images, precisely composed — a man teetering above a waterfall, a floating chair, a winking eye, a parrot against the New York skyline — are accompanied by an architectural sound score that uses spoken phonetic patterns in place of recognizable words. Fusing his surprising visual logic and sense of temporal manipulation, Wilson creates a work of startling wit and poetry. The film anticipates both the aesthetics of music video and the rhythms of contemporary short-form visual media, while remaining entirely its own singular creation. DEAFMAN GLANCE (1981, 27 min) This haunting work for television has been excerpted and adapted from Wilson's five-hour silent opera of the same title, which premiered in Iowa City in 1970 and became an international sensation at its 1971 Paris run. The video tells a stark and stylized story of murder, using time and space, light and movement, and isolated sound in place of spoken words. A somber, menacing woman washes white dishes and a gleaming carving knife, pours milk into a glass, and then slowly attacks two young boys — not a word of dialogue uttered throughout. The ritualistic action moves from a spartan kitchen through the silent halls and stairways of a lonely house, existing in a space between ancient Greek tragedy and contemporary tabloid headline. Terrifying yet not violent, real yet symbolic, the work harbors deep paradox: pacing reduces action to abstraction; morality and mortality remain deliberately ambiguous. Total running time: approximately 85 minutes. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents VIDEO 50 + DEAFMAN GLANCE Robert Wilson At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2026 Screening Information This program will be screened on May 30 at 6:15 PM, and June 4 at 6:45 PM, at Anthology Film Archives RSVP Please note that these screenings are ticketed and require prior registration at the Anthology Film Archives website. Country United States Language English Running Time 85 minutes Year of Release 1978 / 1981 About The Film A double program of two essential early video works by Robert Wilson, screened together. VIDEO 50 (1978, 52 min) VIDEO 50 is an extraordinary video sketchbook — a highly original, visually dramatic, and frequently humorous collection of one hundred abbreviated episodes produced for television. Unfolding as an uninterrupted series of thirty-second vignettes, the work is characterized by deadpan theatricality, symbolist imagery, surrealist juxtapositions, and the repetition of key visual motifs. Indelible images, precisely composed — a man teetering above a waterfall, a floating chair, a winking eye, a parrot against the New York skyline — are accompanied by an architectural sound score that uses spoken phonetic patterns in place of recognizable words. Fusing his surprising visual logic and sense of temporal manipulation, Wilson creates a work of startling wit and poetry. The film anticipates both the aesthetics of music video and the rhythms of contemporary short-form visual media, while remaining entirely its own singular creation. DEAFMAN GLANCE (1981, 27 min) This haunting work for television has been excerpted and adapted from Wilson's five-hour silent opera of the same title, which premiered in Iowa City in 1970 and became an international sensation at its 1971 Paris run. The video tells a stark and stylized story of murder, using time and space, light and movement, and isolated sound in place of spoken words. A somber, menacing woman washes white dishes and a gleaming carving knife, pours milk into a glass, and then slowly attacks two young boys — not a word of dialogue uttered throughout. The ritualistic action moves from a spartan kitchen through the silent halls and stairways of a lonely house, existing in a space between ancient Greek tragedy and contemporary tabloid headline. Terrifying yet not violent, real yet symbolic, the work harbors deep paradox: pacing reduces action to abstraction; morality and mortality remain deliberately ambiguous. Total running time: approximately 85 minutes. Director / Artist: Robert Wilson Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) About The Artist(s) Robert Wilson (October 4, 1941 – July 31, 2025) was an American director, playwright, and visual artist who fundamentally reshaped experimental theater over more than five decades. Born in Waco, Texas, he studied at the University of Texas before moving to New York, where he trained at Brooklyn's Pratt Institute and founded the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, a performance collective that became the incubator for his early landmark works. Wilson's theater — often described as a "theater of imagery" — is distinguished by its radical reimagining of theatrical time and space, its use of exquisitely composed light and movement in place of conventional narrative, and its synthesis of visual art, music, dance, and text into unified stage pictures. His work sits at a radical distance from naturalism: performers move with ritualized, slow precision, language is treated as sound as much as meaning, and the stage itself functions as a living painting. His breakthrough came with Deafman Glance (1970), a six-hour silent opera that electrified Paris audiences and prompted the Surrealist poet Louis Aragon to describe Wilson as the fulfillment of Surrealism's deepest aspirations. Throughout the 1970s Wilson created a series of epic-scale works that redefined theatrical duration, culminating in his collaboration with composer Philip Glass on Einstein on the Beach (1976), a five-hour opera that premiered at the Avignon Festival and later played the Metropolitan Opera. It is widely regarded as one of the defining works of 20th-century performance. Over the following decades Wilson collaborated with an extraordinary range of artists — Tom Waits, William S. Burroughs, Heiner Müller, Lou Reed, Susan Sontag, Laurie Anderson, Willem Dafoe, and Marina Abramovic, among many others — while also directing canonical texts by Shakespeare, Beckett, Wagner, Ibsen, and Ionesco. He staged productions at the world's leading theaters and opera houses, including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Berliner Ensemble, the Thalia Theater Hamburg, La Scala, and the Salzburg Festival. Alongside his theater work, Wilson was a prolific maker of video art. Beginning in 1978 he produced a series of innovative television works including VIDEO 50, DEAFMAN GLANCE, and STATIONS, transposing his theatrical visual language into the moving image. He also created an extensive series of Video Portraits of figures including Lady Gaga, Brad Pitt, and Mikhail Baryshnikov. In 1991 Wilson founded The Watermill Center on Long Island, a "laboratory for performance" housed in a former Western Union research facility on the edge of the Shinnecock Reservation, which continues to host residencies, exhibitions, and productions. His drawings, sculptures, and installations are held in major collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, the Whitney Museum, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Wilson received numerous honors throughout his life, including Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, the Drama Desk Award, Obie Awards, and a 1986 Pulitzer Prize nomination. He died on July 31, 2025, at the age of 83. Get in touch with the artist(s) and follow them on social media Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2026 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here

Danielle Rosvally Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 2 Visit Journal Homepage Burning it Down: Theatre Fires, Collective Trauma Memory, and the TikTok Ban Danielle Rosvally By Published on June 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF Real Time Fires As a researcher of the nineteenth century, I am no stranger to the destruction of collective memory vis-à-vis archival failure. Theatre fires are an omnipresent force in dialogues about every aspect of nineteenth century performance history knowledge, particularly speculative thought about what we do not know. Consider, for instance, the Iroquois Theatre fire of 1903—the second deadliest single building fire in US history (second only to 9/11). (2) Jane Barnette has explored this historic event through spectator testimonials. (3) Barnette proceeds with caution because, as she argues, the spectator experience, and particularly performed spectator experience, is innately biased. This nuance is reinforced through Jewel Spangler’s exploration of the 1811 Richmond Theatre Fire—when it occurred, it was America’s deadliest urban disaster—in which Spangler reminds the reader that curation of the archive is a communal act of editorial significance. (4) Who is left out of the story is as important as who is kept in. Whose story is told, and how, is continually shaped and re-shaped by the things that are kept: the journals that were deemed important enough to pass down through history, the images that were created and saved and who they depict, and the generations of choices that archivists both formal and informal made about what should take up precious space in physical holdings say as much about the event these holdings document as their contents do. This question of space is greatly nuanced in the digital era as information becomes easier to store in smaller footprints. The question of performance, too, has experienced similar shifts as platforms for theatre and performance have become greatly diversified. While analog theatre spaces continue to host precious and precarious repositories of information, robust archives of performance also exist in the digital realm via many platforms including social media. (5) As I watch congressional proceedings and national conversation surrounding the threatening potential of a TikTok ban in the United States throughout 2023 and into 2024, I cannot help but feel an uncanny similarity between historical theatre fires and the impending potential destruction of a massive repository of performance. What have we lost to the ashes that we might not even know is gone, and what (then) might we lose if history repeats itself? The difference, of course, is that I watch this slow burn in real time; the possibility of a day when I open my phone to find a pile of burnt charcoal in place of the familiar stylized TikTok icon does not seem so far away. I have often longed for a time machine to access unburnt relics of the past, and I feel as though I am being offered just such an opportunity with TikTok. To those of us paying attention, there is the possibility of packing a fireproof safe with a few pieces of content for safekeeping should a ban occur. What is at stake if TikTok, like the Iroquois or the Richmond Theatre, burns to the ground? What would happen if the United States experienced the same ban that has already been enacted in India or Hong Kong? Users from these regions describe how, overnight, their access to the platform and even their own back videos, was completely gone. (6) Too many theatre historians and performance scholars dismiss TikTok as a frivolous platform for Gen Z to make viral dance videos, participate in trends, and review products. (7) This dismissiveness plays right into the current political narrative being pushed by those who actively seek to annihilate the TikTok repository. But there is more to this app than the surface-level reading of its detractors. TikTok is a keystone to contemporary culture-making and a critical artifact of life in the COVID-19 era. (8) Losing TikTok to government action would not simply be a shame for Millennials and Gen-Z micro-influencers, who would no longer have their virtual playground, but would in fact be a significant blow to the preservation of pandemic-era collective trauma memory. Historians are well aware of the wide-ranging impact of a loss like this in myriad ways such as: further marginalizing already-minoritized voices; allowing mass re-writing of historical information and erasing individual trauma from national memory; and pointedly glorifying certain groups while villainize others. At present, TikTok is poised to combat these threats, but only if it can persist as a repository of theatrical information. The Looming Threat As I consider the proverbial contents of my fireproof safe, let us examine the spark that threatens to engulf this collection. For the past several years, TikTok has been at the center of debates in the United States regarding data security. On August 6, 2020, President Donald Trump attempted to use executive power via Executive Order (EO) 13942 to create a ban specifically targeting TikTok citing threats to national security. The arguments he made boiled down to a perceived threat caused by Chinese ownership of TikTok’s parent company (ByteDance) and provenance of data collected via the app. (9) After multiple court cases which ruled in favor of TikTok, President Joe Biden signed further EOs that repealed and replaced Trump’s and pledged to create better policy for regulating sensitive user data across diverse platforms. (10) Since then, TikTok has been a topic of conversations centered in the idea of security risks. In December of 2022, Biden signed a bill that prohibited the app on government devices. (11) On March 7, 2023, the Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology Act or the RESTRICT Act (S. 686) was introduced to the senate as a bipartisan bill aimed to ban foreign technologies from operating in the US if they pose a risk to national security. (12) While TikTok is not named explicitly in the bill, it is fairly transparent what is being targeted. On April 14, 2023, the Montana State Legislature passed Senate Bill 419, “An Act Banning TikTok in Montana,” becoming the first US state to ban TikTok. (13) SB419 was signed by Montana State Governor Greg Gianforte on May 17, 2023. (14) The bill was set to go into effect on January 1, 2024 but then TikTok sued the state in an effort to block it (an effort which was ultimately successful as a court ruled on November 30th 2023 that this was a violation of the first amendment). (15) On March 13, 2024, the United States’s House of Representatives passed HR 7521 a bill called the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” which would, effectively, ban TikTok in the United States. (16) This bill was later tied to an essential foreign aid package (House Resolution 815), unanimously passed in the House on April 19, passed in the Senate on April 23, and was signed into law by President Biden on April 24. (17) I argue these conversations center around “the idea” of security risks rather than their actuality because all publicly available information in early 2024 indicates that TikTok poses no greater threat to an individual user’s data than any other social media app in common use. In March 2023, the Internet Governance Project, an organization based out of Georgia Tech’s School of Public Policy whose mission is to perform independent analysis of global internet governance, posted a study done by Milton L. Mueller and Karim Farhat which found, among other things, “The data collected by the TikTok app is very similar to the data collected by its peer competitors. This data can only be of espionage value if it comes from users who are intimately connected to national security functions and use the app in ways that expose sensitive information. These risks arise from the use of any social media app, not just TikTok. They can easily be mitigated without banning the app.” (18) I will return to the specific motivations behind targeting TikTok in spite of the evidence below. In considering this ban, I turn to the wisdom of Stephen King who—in the face of book bans—encourages kids to go to the library, “get a copy of what has been banned. Read it carefully and discover what it is your elders don't want you to know. In many cases you'll finish the banned book in question wondering what all the fuss was about. In others, however, you will find vital information about the human condition.” (19) While the information currently available to the public does not point to a TikTok-specific security risk, it does indicate something more sinister about a greater worldview. The consumer tendency to diminish the platform leans into this harmful rhetoric. As Stephen King urges, let us go to the proverbial library by way of a primer on what TikTok is and how it works. TikTok is a social media app where users create, share, view, reshare, and comment on short-form videos. TikTok built on the popularity of Vine, another short-form video-sharing app that lived a brief but formidable life from 2012-2017. Notably: Vine videos were capped at 10 seconds. (20) 2019 saw TikTok begin to flourish in the United States—growth that would continue in the pandemic years to come. (21) It was the “most-downloaded app of 2020” when users were stuck in their homes with no way to connect in real time. (22) Instead, clearly, they connected on TikTok. And, since TikTok archives even as it offers a platform for performance, this makes TikTok the most robust and egalitarian archive of pandemic-era life in current existence. I pause here briefly to consider my use of the term “archive” for this collection. In 2003, Diana Taylor introduced the terms “archive” and “repertoire” to refer to two very different but intertwined systems of knowledge preservation. The “archive,” to Taylor, represents a gathering of materials collected through objects—memories mediated by recording technologies. “‘Archival’ memory exists as documents, maps, literary texts, letters, archaeological remains, bones, videos, films, CDs, all those items supposedly resistance to change.” (23) The “repertoire” is a collection of embodied knowledge, “performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing, in short all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge.” (24) In her 2010 meditation on her prior work on Archive and Repertoire, Taylor added that: Digital technologies constitute yet another system of transmission that is rapidly complicating western systems of knowledge, raising new issues around presence, temporality, space, embodiment, sociability, and memory (usually associated with the repertoire) and those of copyright, authority, history, and preservation (linked to the archive). Digital databases seemingly combine the access to vast reservoirs of materials we normally associate with archives with the ephemerality of the ‘live.’ (25) Taylor has never conceived of the “archive” and “repertoire” as a binary (not in 2003 when she first introduced these paradigms, nor 2010 when she revised them to include the digital); rather Taylor has always argued that these three things “overlap and work together and mutually construct each other.” (26) To Taylor, the digital will never replace the archive since they require each other vis-à-vis this mutuality. Social media platforms have always enabled a form of performance; the putting-on of an avatar self to encounter the world in certain ways makes performance via social media innately entwined with social media use. (27) Theatre companies over the years have taken this invitation more literally and created full performance pieces over social media. (28) The pandemic ushered in a new wave of this phenomena: as we became isolated, we sought connection via digital art. Sarah Bay-Cheng asks “If we have seen the performance and the documentation, can we readily distinguish between the two? What if we have not seen the original performance, but we have seen detailed recordings? ... How do I delineate the performance I attended from the digital records I have collected, especially those that are personal to me in my mobile phone?” (29) Digital media blurs these boundaries and presents the opportunity for a broadened definition of memory spaces. (30) When considering TikTok’s applications to the pandemic-era audience and user base in light of the app’s pandemic-era popularity, part of this usage pattern lies in TikTok’s multiple facets as a platform. In addition to providing a viewing space, TikTok has a native editing client which allows users to turn their smartphones into recording suites: they can record, edit, upload, and shape videos all from the app itself. This reduces access barriers and effectively allows anyone with a smartphone to single-handedly become a content creator. (31) TikTok is also incredibly good at creating audiences by connecting users with niche interests. The app’s proprietary algorithm shows users content it believes they will like based on their interactions with other content. Unlike legacy social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter, TikTok’s user experience is largely driven by a rotating “for you page” (FYP) that greets users when they open the app. The FYP is a constant scroll of videos that the algorithm has discovered for the user. The more a user interacts with TikTok, the better the algorithm becomes at predicting a user’s interest and providing them with things relevant to these interests. Because of the strength of the algorithm, TikTok enables niche audiences to find each other (a feature, Trevor Boffone and I have argued, which amplifies the voices tend most to be marginalized from mainstream archives, namely: queer, POC, and femme voices). (32) This aspect of TikTok’s usage, along with its prominence as a repository of pandemic-era performance, makes TikTok a vital tool to understanding and remembering life during the COVID-19 Pandemic. TikTok and Collective Trauma Memory Like a theatre, TikTok enables community building and content on TikTok exists in robust multi-modal conversations. Cremation of this theatrical repository would also incinerate these community ties because, unlike an analog theatre, TikTok’s communities are connected almost exclusively via the app and its features. In essence: as a theatrical repository, TikTok enacts collective memory. Collective memory is the idea that memories are not individual experiences, but rather connected to a greater whole. In his 1925 meditation On Collective Memory, Maurice Halbwachs proposes that all memories are collective memories. Even individual memories, that is: something that one individual person remembers in a room by themselves, is connected to a bigger picture. It is impossible to remember, argues Halbwachs, without creating some kind of discourse or connecting with some other perspective of the memory and this makes memory collective. (33) Considering TikTok, this description perfectly encapsulates how the app functions. TikTok allows users to respond to each other directly on posts using various frameworks. There are, for instance, more traditional means such as comments (i.e. simple text responses). But TikTok has one-upped the comment by giving creators the option to either respond in old-school text, or to compose a video response in which the comment will be visible at the top of the screen for whatever duration the creator chooses to set (see Figure 1; Creator @theanissagarza Responds to a Comment with a Video ). (34) Additionally, creators have the option to “stitch” on to other videos (to take another creator’s video and append their own content to the end), or “duet” a video (to have another creator’s video playing in half the screen while they record something going on in the other half). Duet videos allow creators to discourse across time and space—to hear and react in the fractured time-space of the internet but nonetheless more directly than legacy platforms have previously enabled whether the duet shows togetherness (as in Figure 2 where dancers are moving synchronously together to do Bob Fosse’s iconic choreography to “Rich Man’s Frug” from Sweet Charity ), or conversation (as in Figure 3 where two singers are enabled to sing in duet even amidst 2020 lockdowns ). (35) In this way, TikTok facilitates not just community-building, but also citational practices since original creators are, by default, identified in stitch and duel videos, as well as para-textual commentary. Sometimes, a call to duet will so wildly circulate on TikTok that it inspires its own sub-movements (called a “trend”). The Rich Man’s Frug became one such trend. In noticing a dominating presence of white dancers putting out Rich Man’s Frug videos, user @djouliet made her own call to action with the sound and choreography—mimicking the trend’s original creator @markstephen60 by doing the dance in her kitchen but calling out “come on, Black girls, let’s go” to invite other femme Black dancers to duet her. User @itsjust_lydia took up the call (see Figure 4; Black Dancers Claim Space with the “Rich Man’s Frug” ). (36) This is one example of how TikTok enabled creators who did not see themselves represented in a certain conversation to take control of the narrative and add their voices to a growing archive. While such interaction paradigms differ from those enacted in more traditional theatrical performance spaces, performance scholarship is already equipped to deal with them. Pascale Aebischer calls such interactions “ platea -based engagement” (referencing the medieval paradigms of locus as the mode of performance where a performer is quietly in a world of their own behind the proscenium arch and the platea as the mode of performance that invites the audience to comment on or engage with the performance in the here and now). (37) Valerie Fazel has argued how Aebischer’s notion of platea -based engagement might be used to more deeply understand marginal commentary on digital performance, especially on YouTube. (38) TikTok is a new generation of platform, but some of its uses are common with its ancestors. As a collective model of platea -based engagement, TikTok’s opus represents a communal construction of memory, and (specifically) pandemic-era memory. But “communal” does not necessarily mean “collapsed.” Because of TikTok’s strength at allowing creators to find other members of their own communities, the platform is unique in its ability to enable vibrant individualism. In her work on theatrical production during the shelter-in-place era, Dani Snyder-Young recognized a melting pot-esque treatment of audiences by performers and platforms. (39) Not a single pandemic-era performance examined by Snyder-Young’s research team displayed exceptionalism when dealing with its audience, but rather treated them as an amalgam and erased nuance. This is not what TikTok does. Because the algorithm is so good at connecting content and audience, TikTok content creators are encouraged to “let their freak flag fly,” and they will be connected with others who enjoy even incredibly niche content. This aspect of the platform effectively democratizes the archive and allows voices that Spangler notes are not frequently preserved in disaster narratives guaranteed spaces in the story. In Spangler’s words: “The archives themselves, and what they contain, are shaped by the understandings, needs, and desires of the powerful. To be sure, we can search out sources that purport to allow the disempowered to speak, or seem less influenced by elite perspectives, yet we have to be aware that so long as the archive is still the well from which professional historians primarily draw, the problem of power will always be with us.” (40) Because of the ways in which the pandemic had an undue impact on communities of color, this is an important ethical element of preserving pandemic-era memory. (41) While TikTok’s user demographics broken down by race are not currently available, a 2021 study done by Pew Research Center speaks to a degree of diversity in TikTok users. (42) According to this study, 31% of Hispanic US adults polled self-identified as TikTok users, 30% of Black US adults polled self-identified as TikTok users, and 18% of white US adults polled self-identified as TikTok users. Accordingly, TikTok’s ability to highlight and encourage individuality is both unique and necessary and underscores the stakes of taking this repository seriously. The COVID-19 pandemic was a moment of global collective trauma, and it is no coincidence that TikTok’s rise to prominence paralleled this. The work of scholars like Dena Al-Adeeb, Noe Montez, and Belarie Zatzman have explored the ways populations who have experienced collective trauma have created collective memory. (43) Past theories of collective memory have located it as a nexus of projects generally connected with nationalization. In an analog world, this makes complete sense. But there are two extraordinary forces at play with collective trauma memory in regard to COVID-19 and TikTok. First: the global nature of the pandemic. Second: the fact that TikTok overcomes geographic boundaries by way of its accessibility and international presence. TikTok connects content creators over broad swathes of the world. Not only is TikTok accessible from a technological standpoint, but language barriers do not stand in the way of the several visually oriented genres that make TikTok’s bread and butter: dance challenges, culinary videos, cosplay trends, lip synch. Because of this, TikTok’s oeuvre is what Astrid Erll would call a study of “transcultural memory,” or a mnemonic device which transcends the containers of a single culture or incident and instead reaches a global community. (44) Erll coins the term “traveling memory” to encompass a sense of “the incessant wandering of carriers, media, contents, forms, and practices of memory, their continual ‘travels’ and ongoing transformations through time and space, across social, linguistic and political borders.” (45) TikTok serves as the medium for such traveling memory, and the destruction of the TikTok archive would mean an end to these proverbial transformations. It would mean not just a collective forgetting of the specifics the archive held, but also the destruction of the transformative possibilities that time and space could give to eccentric short-form videos containing incidents from day-to-day life and the creative reimaginings of collective trauma. Terri Tomsky devised the notion of “traveling trauma,” which is trauma which is able to move upon similar pathways as commerce in a digital world; either via analog or digital means. (46) To Tomsky, trauma can be viewed in similar ways that Edward Said views the notion of “theory” and “traveling theory”: it can be interpreted and re-interpreted by the communities who receive it globally. (47) Tomsky also created the idea of a “trauma economy” wherein trauma can be viewed under similar terms as production and capital: when the market is flooded with it, it becomes less valuable or holds less meaning. (48) I can think of few times in history when global trauma was as fungible on an international market than during the COVID-19 pandemic and assorted lockdowns. During this time, global isolation flooded the trauma market and human contact was a critical missing feature in our daily lives. So, while trauma was, perhaps, less meaningful (according to Tomsky’s paradigm) because of its prevalence, connection was more meaningful because of its lack. This market was part of TikTok’s recipe for success. Sarah Bey-Cheng has made the case that “the digital image is … not only a marker of memory… such images may now serve primarily as a kind of social connection.” (49) Boffone further argues that the pandemic-driven need drove massive global audiences to bond over “silly” dances, or share what life in lockdown was like via TikTok. (50) Tina Kendall highlights this function of TikTok in pandemic life, after all it offered “a means of working… performative play.” (51) In addition, Kendall argues, TikTok thrives off of the bingeability of its content— the never-ending scroll allowing a locked-down user endless access to more. (52) Thus TikTok provided a valuable commodity to a hungry market: the commodity of connection. Networking and community creation were a key part of TikTok’s marketing of itself in its early years and (as previously discussed) the app is exceptionally good at this task. (53) The marriage of market need with ready commodity availability is certainly one reason why the pandemic saw an uptick in TikTok usage, and in April 2020 the app crested 2 billion downloads which was the “best quarter for any app ever.” (54) In the United States at least, it is safe to say that TikTok is a commodity of the pandemic. If archival memory is political, and collective memory even more so, so is social forgetting. Francis X. Blouin Jr. and William Rosenberg emphasize this: “resistance to remembering is an equally powerful determinant of its moral, political, and social uses, especially if this resistance is abetted by the archives.” (55) Litigious action to try and exterminate the memorial cache that is TikTok threatens the collective memory of this trauma-driven time. There is, of course, a time and place for forgetting. Marita Sturken argues that forgetting is a necessary part of memory formation, and that “to remember everything would amount to being overwhelmed by memory…. Yet the forgetting of the past in a culture is highly organized and strategic.” (56) The politicization of this particular act of cultural forgetting entwines TikTok in the mire of racism that is linked with the pandemic in general. COVID-19, in its early days, was characterized by Donald Trump and far right followers as a “Chinese virus,” and this language has been called out as a root of xenophobia and anti-Asian racism during the pandemic era. (57) It cannot be ignored that the anti-TikTok legislation is flavored with the same type of xenophobia and anti-Chinese sentiment. Returning to an earlier thread: if the issue was about data security, as politicians contend that it is, then why not pass reasonable laws to govern that? Why target a single app? In Montana, the April 2023 attempt to make Senate Bill 419 apply to any “social media applications that send data to foreign adversaries” and shift the language of the bill from addressing threats posed by “the People’s Republic of China” to instead address “foreign adversaries” was rejected. (58) In her very first TikTok ( Figure 5: AOC’s First TikTok: A Statement on the TikTok Ban ), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez discusses these issues and the notion that proposed legislation has been put forth, purportedly, to combat a national security risk. (59) Ocasio-Cortez notes that such risks are, historically, presented to Congress via classified briefing when they are first identified and no such briefing had been provided regarding TikTok and Chinese data infiltration. The racism in anti-TikTok rhetoric became even more clear via the various congressional hearings regarding the app. On March 23, 2023, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew was called to testify before congress regarding the app’s usage of data, and the company’s relationship to the Chinese government. (60) The word “communist” appears in transcripts of that testimony 97 times. The phrase “Chinese communist party” appears 51 times, the most frequently-repeated three-word phrase in the testimony. (61) On January 31, 2023, Chew was again called to congress (this time along with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and X CEO Linda Yaccarino) to testify in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding the impact of social media on children. (62) During this hearing, all three CEOs were asked detailed questions about child protections on their platforms but Chew (notably the only one of these businesspeople who is not white) was the only CEO asked about his nationality and relationship to China. Senate Republicans Ted Cruz, John Cornyn, and Tom Cotton repeatedly hammered Chew about this relationship, Cotton going so far as to pester Chew about his citizenship through multiple questions as Chew continued to emphasize “I’m Singaporean.” (63) Accordingly, the undercurrents of xenophobia ring strong in the US attempt to institutionalize a massive act of forgetting. Despite allegations of national security threats via the app, the IGT report finds no evidence of a threat via TikTok to the US and, moreover, finds that, “Banning TikTok would impose unfair harms on millions of innocent American users of the app, who have established equity in their creations and followers. It would expropriate investors and eliminate hundreds of US jobs. … The attack on TikTok is really a kind of proxy war waged by a specific political faction in the US.” (64) It is once again time to remember Stephen King. Since the undertones of Anti-Asia(n) racism are now clear in anti-TikTok rhetoric, it is important that we take a closer look at what, exactly, this rhetoric is trying to make us forget. Let us go back to the library and check out some more banned books. Social Media, Social Memory Screens have an important place in the institutionalization of social memory. Sturken cites psychological research that “people often misremember the moment when they first heard of a national catastrophe by reimagining themselves in front of a television set. This particular mechanism of remembering, whereby we imagine our bodies in a spatial location, is also a means by which we situation our bodies in the nation.” (65) In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, this notion of re-envisioning the catastrophe in front of the screen was a process rather than a single moment. While the announcement of preliminary lockdowns certainly caused a wave of psychic shock, it was as the pandemic drew on for years that the true extent of collective trauma would begin to unreel itself. In 2024, we are still unpacking the effects of this trauma. Destroying TikTok’s repository of memory before history has been able to take full account of what is happening thus has destructive potential of unknown capacity. In trying to contend with what social media networks mean to the idea of collective memory, Andrew Hoskins argues that mediated memory can be viewed as a kind of “memory ecology” with each part of memory functioning like a part of a bio-organism. So, what happens when you amputate the leg of memory? Alison Landsberg’s theory of “prosthetic memory” addresses how mediated moments of history that an individual did not personally witness can be appended to a person’s memory like a prosthetic limb might be appended to a person’s body. Prosthetic memory, to Landsberg, is a memory that is “adopted as the result of a person's experience with a mass cultural technology of memory that dramatizes or recreates a history he or she did not live.” (66) While Landsberg’s theory might seem to answer my above query, unlike Landsberg’s prosthetic memories the TikTok archive of our shared pandemic time relates a history we all lived. It is not that dramatizing the pandemic in real-though-not-linear time introduces us to what pandemic living was like, but rather connects and connected us to aspects of this experience that were either very similar to or very different from our own. In this case, the mediated memory allows us to more fully engage with the collective trauma of pandemic living, and better understand how we (as humans living in the world) coped. As a case study, let us consider Stephen Sondheim. On November 26, 2021, Sondheim died at the age of 91. At this time, vaccines were available, but mask mandates were still enacted in states like New York. No at-home treatments were yet available for COVID-19. While Broadway had re-opened in September of 2021, audiences were still required to mask. The day of Sondheim’s death, TikTok user Jonny Perl posted a simple video of himself at a piano playing the opening notes of Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park with George” (the opening number of his musical by the same name; see Figure 6: Jonny Perl at the Piano ). (67) Sondheim had a special relationship with this show. A piece about how artists relate to their work and legacies, Sunday in the Park with George contains lyrics that Sondheim would later use as the titles for two books of collected lyrics and autobiographic stories: Finishing the Hat and Look, I Made a Hat . (68) Accordingly, the selection of this music to accompany a short-form video memorial for its composer is fitting. Over the next few weeks and months, other TikTok creators used Perl’s sound to form their own memorial videos. Tyler Joseph Ellis, for instance, filmed a montage of himself visiting George Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” at the Art Institute of Chicago ( Figure 7 ). (69) User Sam Black choreographed a short dance piece to Perl’s sound ( Figure 8 ). (70) Other users dueted Perl with the spoken text that an audience would usually hear when this music was played in the theatre ( Figure 9 ). (71) Another user used Perl’s music to underscore a process video of themselves making a Sondheim-themed mask ( Figure 10 ). (72) Individually, these videos serve as touching tributes to a master of American musical theatre. As a conglomeration, they create a communal statement of memory in dialogue with each other. They allowed Sondheim fans to grieve in real time, though geographically distant from each other still in dialogue together. At a time when large gatherings entailed no small amount of risk, this connection created community. Sturken uses the term “technology of memory” to encompass not just the things that help memory (physical mnemonics such as objects, images, memorials, etc.), but also the body. The immune system, she argues, is a subset biological system of memory since it remembers the viruses it has previously encountered. (73) Sturken discusses this in regard to HIV and the AIDS epidemic, a period of history that has been widely compared to COVID-19 not the least because the leading national expect on both diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, was the chief American voice during both healthcare crises. As I have contended throughout this essay, TikTok is a crucial technology of memory for the cultural memory of the COVID-19 pandemic, a virus which is notoriously immune-evasive and tricky for our bodies to fight. This novel coronavirus is something science is working every day to uncover more about, to explain more about how the body does or does not remember encounters with it, and how and why long COVID manifests. The systemic forgetting of a TikTok ban would enable not just the destruction of a specific archive of embodied performance, but also can be seen as none other than a metaphorical blow to the social collective along the very same lines. Forgetting what the pandemic was like at its height is a matter of national security—a matter of protecting those most vulnerable in our society. It is an act of violence to forget how we coped with social distancing, the zany things we did to find connection, and the silly skits we made to try and take ourselves somewhere else. The pandemic is still too fresh for there to be a national memorial or act of institutionalized memory commemorating those lost. (74) TikTok is the closest we have to such a thing. Destroying this repository is baldly political, boldly detrimental, and would constitute an egregious act of erasure. Theatre history scholars would do well to remember how such acts have impacted our work over time, and how burning it down has created hierarchies of remembering in archival footprints. Theatre fires erase massive repositories of information from archival memory that can only be reconstructed through careful piecemeal work that has the high possibility of omitting critical under-represented stories. In the same way, TikTok enables remembering things we cannot afford to forget. Historians and scholars must pay even closer attention to its fate unless we tacitly approve such erasures from collective memory. Editor Note: All videos in this essay are available as a YouTube playlist here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJ7A05JBnG_BgJdsklZt9mYtyFFVmNI9V&si=PipeRqsVDapSvMaQ This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References The author would like to thank Trevor Boffone for his feedback on early drafts of this essay This data can be found on the webpage of the National Fire Protection Agency, the NFPA: “Deadliest Single Building/Complex Fires and Explosions in the US | NFPA,” National Fire Protection Agency, accessed May 6, 2024, https://www.nfpa.org/education-and-research/research/nfpa-research/fire-statistical-reports/catastrophic-multiple-death-fires/deadliest-single-building-or-complex-fires-and-explosions-in-the-us . Jane Barnette, “The Matinee Audience in Peril: The Syndicate’s Mr. Bluebeard and the Iroquois Theatre Fire,” Theatre Symposium: A Journal of the Southeastern Theatre Conference 20 (2012 2012): 23–29. Jewel L. Spangler, “Slavery’s Archive, Slavery’s Memory: Telling the Story of Gilbert Hunt, Hero of the Richmond Theatre Fire of 1811,” Journal of the Early Republic 39, no. 4 (2019): 677–708, https://doi.org/10.1353/jer.2019.0086 ; The fire killed over 70 people including the Governor of Virginia. For more information on the fire specifically, see: Meredith Henne Baker, The Richmond Theater Fire: Early America’s First Great Disaster (LSU Press, 2012). Many scholars over the years have argued about this, but the most pertinent argument to this article can be found in: Trevor Boffone, “TikTok Is Theatre, Theatre Is TikTok,” Theatre History Studies 41 (2022): 41–48. An in-depth examination of this was done by Planet Money: “Nervous TikTok,” Planet Money, accessed January 3, 2024, https://www.npr.org/2021/01/13/956558906/nervous-tiktok . Trevor Boffone, “‘It’s Just TikTok,’” Conceptions Review, September 13, 2022, https://conceptionsreview.com/its-just-tiktok/ . For more on TikTok’s power to generate culture, see: Trevor Boffone, “The D’Amelio Effect TikTok, Charli D’Amelio, and the Construction of Whiteness,” in TikTok Cultures in the United States , ed. Trevor Boffone (New York: Routledge, 2022), 18. Federal Register. “Addressing the Threat Posed by TikTok, and Taking Additional Steps To Address the National Emergency With Respect to the Information and Communications Technology and Services Supply Chain,” August 11, 2020. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/08/11/2020-17699/addressing-the-threat-posed-by-tiktok-and-taking-additional-steps-to-address-the-national-emergency . Bobby Allyn, “U.S. Judge Halts Trump’s TikTok Ban, The 2nd Court To Fully Block The Action,” NPR , December 7, 2020, sec. Technology, https://www.npr.org/2020/12/07/944039053/u-s-judge-halts-trumps-tiktok-ban-the-2nd-court-to-fully-block-the-action ; The White House, “FACT SHEET: Executive Order Protecting Americans’ Sensitive Data from Foreign Adversaries,” The White House, June 9, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/06/09/fact-sheet-executive-order-protecting-americans-sensitive-data-from-foreign-adversaries/ . David Ingram, “Biden Signs TikTok Ban for Government Devices amid Security Concerns,” NBC News, December 30, 2022, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/tiktok-ban-biden-government-college-state-federal-security-privacy-rcna63724 . Mark R. Warner, “S.686 - 118th Congress (2023-2024): RESTRICT Act,” legislation, March 7, 2023, 03/07/2023, http://www.congress.gov/ . “An Act Banning TikTok in Montana,” SB 419 § (2023), https://leg.mt.gov/bills/2023/billhtml/SB0419.htm . Ayana Archie, “Montana Becomes the First State to Ban TikTok,” NPR , May 18, 2023, sec. Politics, https://www.npr.org/2023/05/18/1176805559/montana-tiktok-ban . David McCabe and Sapna Maheshwari, “TikTok Sues Montana, Calling State Ban Unconstitutional,” The New York Times , May 22, 2023, sec. Technology, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/22/technology/tiktok-montana-ban-lawsuit.html ; “ACLU and EFF Applaud Ruling Halting Montana TikTok Ban,” American Civil Liberties Union (blog), accessed December 21, 2023, https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-and-eff-applaud-ruling-halting-montana-tiktok-ban . Mike Gallagher, “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act,” Pub. L. No. HR 7521 (2024), https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/Protecting%20Americans%20From%20Foriegn%20Adversary%20Controlled%20Applications_3.5.24.pdf . Cathy McMorris Rodgers, “Making Emergency Supplemental Appropriations for the Fiscal Year Ending September 30, 2024, and for Other Purposes,” H.R. 815 § (2024), https://www.congress.gov/118/bills/hr815/BILLS-118hr815enr.pdf . Milton L. Mueller and Karim Farhat, “TikTok and US National Security” (Internet Governance Project, March 1, 2023), 26, https://www.internetgovernance.org/wp-content/uploads/TikTok-and-US-national-security-3-1.pdf . Stephen King, “The Book-Banners: Adventure in Censorship Is Stranger than Fiction,” The Bangor Daily News , March 20, 1992. TikTok videos recorded in the app are capped at three minutes and must be a minimum of fifteen seconds. One can, however, upload a video not recorded in the app that can be up to ten minutes long. Trevor Boffone, Renegades (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 1–3; Trevor Boffone, “The Rise of TikTok in US Culture,” in TikTok Cultures in the United States , by Trevor Boffone (New York: Taylor & Francis Group, 2022), 5; Boffone, “TikTok Is Theatre, Theatre Is TikTok,” 42. Jing Zeng, Crystal Abidin, and Mike S. Schäfer, “Research Perspectives on TikTok and Its Legacy Apps,” International Journal of Communication 15 (2021): 3161–72. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 19. Taylor, 20. Diana Taylor, “Save As... Knowledge and Transmission in the Age of Digital Technologies,” Imagining America 7 (2010): 3. Taylor, 3. For more on this, see: Danielle Rosvally, “The Haunted Network: Shakespeare’s Digital Ghost,” in The Shakespeare User , by Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017). A few salient examples are Such Tweet Sorrow (a 2010 collaboration between the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Mudlark Production Company which told the story of Romeo and Juliet via Twitter) and A Midsummer Night’s Dreaming (2013, Royal Shakespeare Company) which used the now-defunct Google+ to perform a digital version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream . Sarah Bay-Cheng, “Pixelated Memories: Performance, Media, and Digital Technology,” Contemporary Theatre Review 27, no. 3 (2017): 330. In another forthcoming essay, I propose the term “meso-archive” for these liminal spaces. For the purposes of this paper since I am not explicitly discussing the intricacies of storage and retrieval, I will use the term “archive” to reference TikTok’s collection of performance. Statistically, this is a large swathe of the US population. As of November 2023, 92% of US adults have at least one smartphone and the rate of smartphone ownership does not vary substantially by race or ethnicity. “How Many Americans Own a Smartphone? 2024 | ConsumerAffairs®,” November 1, 2023, https://www.consumeraffairs.com/cell_phones/how-many-americans-own-a-smartphone.html . Trevor Boffone and Danielle Rosvally, “Yassified Shakespeare: The Case for TikTok as Applied Theatre,” in Applied Theatre and Gender Justice , ed. Lisa Brenner and Evelyn Cruz (New York: Routledge, Forthcoming); Spangler also notes this omission of marginalized voices in her examination of how the voices of enslaved peoples are often lost from narratives about the Richmond Theatre Fire and archives in general: Spangler, “Slavery’s Archive, Slavery’s Memory.” Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory , trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 53. @theanissagarza. "Pandemic Theatre!!," TikTok, February 4, 2022. https://www.tiktok.com/@theanissagarza/video/7060995383224421678 . @oneinkimillion. "Love This Song and Show," TikTok, October 6, 2020. https://www.tiktok.com/@oneinkimillion/video/6880674673688841477 . Unfortunately, since @djouliet has since made her original video private, I cannot tell how many others did but I have seen several examples including: @itsjust_lydia. "Come on Black Girls - Let’s Get into That Fosse!," TikTok, April 30, 2021. https://www.tiktok.com/@itsjust_lydia/video/6957074188783914245 ; @mahoganymommy. "I’m Rusty, but I Gave It a Shot," TikTok, April 24, 2021. https://www.tiktok.com/@mahoganymommy/video/6954766488880336133 Pascale Aebischer, Shakespeare, Spectatorship and the Technologies of Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 13–28. Valerie M. Fazel, “‘A Vulgar Comment Will Be Made of It’ YouTube and Robert Weimann’s Platea,” in Shakespeare’s Audiences , by Peter Kirwan and Matthew Pangallo (Abingdon, UK: Milton: Taylor & Francis Group, 2021), 183–97. Dani Snyder-Young, “We’re All in This Together: Digital Performances and Socially Distanced Spectatorship,” Theatre Journal 74, no. 1 (March 2022): 1–15. Spangler, “Slavery’s Archive, Slavery’s Memory,” 677. J. Nadine Gracia, “COVID-19’s Disproportionate Impact on Communities of Color Spotlights the Nation’s Systemic Inequities,” Journal of Public Health Management and Practice 26, no. 6 (December 2020): 518, https://doi.org/10.1097/PHH.0000000000001212 . “Who Uses TikTok, Nextdoor,” Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech, accessed January 11, 2024, https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/chart/who-uses-tiktok-nextdoor/ . To name a few: Dena Al-Adeeb, “Trauma, Collective Memory, Creative and Performative Embodied Practices as Sites of Resistance,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 12, no. 2 (2016): 268–74; Noe Montez, Memory, Transitional Justice, And Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017); Belarie Zatzman, “Applied Theatre Encounters at Canada’s National Holocaust Monument,” Canadian Theatre Review 181 (2020 Winter 2020): 1, https://doi.org/10.3138/ctr.181.003 . Though, of course, TikTok has subcultures which emerge geographically, as well as regional nuance to its status as culture. TikTok is not viewed or treated the same way in every part of the world. For more on TikTok as regional culture, see the many wonderful projects affiliated with the TikTok culture research network: https://tiktokcultures.com/ Astrid Erll, “Travelling Memory,” Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011): 11. Terri Tomsky, “From Sarajevo to 9/11: Travelling Memory and the Trauma Economy,” Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011): 50. Tomsky, 51. Tomsky, 53. Bay-Cheng, “Pixelated Memories: Performance, Media, and Digital Technology,” 327. Boffone, “The Rise of TikTok in US Culture,” 5. Tina Kendall, “From Binge-Watching to Binge-Scrolling: TikTok and the Rhythms of #LockdownLife ,” Film Quarterly 75, no. 1 (September 1, 2021): 43, https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2021.75.1.41 . Kendall, 42. Milovan Savic, “From Musical.Ly to TikTok: Social Construction of 2020’s Most Downloaded Short-Video App,” International Journal of Communication 15 (2021): 3173–94. Craig Chapple, “TikTok Crosses 2 Billion Downloads After Best Quarter For Any App Ever,” accessed April 14, 2023, https://sensortower.com/blog/tiktok-downloads-2-billion . Francis X. Jr. Blouin and William G. Rosenberg, Processing the Past: Contesting Authority in History and the Archives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 110. Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 7. Katie Rogers, Lara Jakes, and Ana Swanson, “Trump Defends Using ‘Chinese Virus’ Label, Ignoring Growing Criticism,” The New York Times , March 18, 2020, sec. U.S., https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/us/politics/china-virus.html . Blair Miller, “Montana House Advances TikTok Ban, Rejects Amendment to Make It Apply More Broadly,” Daily Montanan , April 14, 2023, https://dailymontanan.com/2023/04/13/montana-house-advances-tiktok-ban-rejects-amendment-to-make-it-apply-more-broadly/ ; Jameson Walker, “Amendment to Senate Bill No. 419,” accessed June 5, 2023, https://leg.mt.gov/bills/2023/AmdHtmH/SB0419.002.002.pdf . @aocinthehouse. "Some Thoughts on TikTok," TikTok, March 24, 2023. https://www.tiktok.com/@aocinthehouse/video/7214318917135830318 . The full hearing can be seen here: “Full Committee Hearing: ‘TikTok: How Congress Can Safeguard American Data Privacy and Protect Children from Online Harms,’” House Committee on Energy and Commerce, accessed May 31, 2023, https://energycommerce.house.gov/events/energycommerce.house.gov . Justin Hendrix, “Transcript: TikTok CEO Testifies to Congress | TechPolicy.Press ,” Tech Policy Press, March 24, 2023, https://techpolicy.press/transcript-tiktok-ceo-testifies-to-congress . A full transcript of this hearing can be found here: Hugh Allen, “Senate Hearing with CEOs of Meta, TikTok, X, Snap and Discord About Child Safety 1/31/24 Transcript,” Rev Blog, accessed February 29, 2024, https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/senate-hearing-with-ceos-of-meta-tiktok-x-snap-and-discord-about-child-safety-1-31-24-transcript . For a video of this incident, see: ‘I’m Singaporean!’: TikTok CEO Fires Back at GOP Senator Pressing Him about Possible Ties to China | CNN Politics , 2024, https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2024/02/02/tom-cotton-shou-zi-chew-singaporean-tiktok-testimony-vpx.cnn . Mueller and Farhat, “TikTok and US National Security,” 26. Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering , 26. Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 28. @jonny.perl. "Original Sound," TikTok, November 26, 2021. https://www.tiktok.com/@jonny.perl/video/7035053268883590405 . Stephen Sondheim, Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes (New York: Knopf, 2010); Stephen Sondheim, Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981-2011) with Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes and Miscellany (New York: Knopf, 2011). @tylerjosephellis. "May His Memory Be a Blessing. Forever," TikTok, November 29, 2021. https://www.tiktok.com/@tylerjosephellis/video/7036160901216570630 . @samtheboynextdoor. "Sam Black," TikTok, December 14, 2021. https://www.tiktok.com/@samtheboynextdoor/video/7041666130166942981 . @ward027. "#duet with Jonny.Perl," TikTok, November 27, 2021. https://www.tiktok.com/@ward027/video/7035420095564270895 . @thebadjujudesign. "Sometimes People Leave You, Halfway through the Woods," TikTok, November 27, 2021. https://www.tiktok.com/@thebadjujudesign/video/7035113597479030062 . Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering , 12. Though several local memorials have been built, and there is at least one effort to create a national memorial: “Home,” COVID-19 Memorial Monument, accessed March 7, 2024, https://covidmemorialmonument.org/ . Footnotes About The Author(s) Danielle Rosvally is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at the University at Buffalo. Her forthcoming monograph ( Theatres of Value: Buying and Selling Shakespeare in Nineteenth-Century New York City , State University of New York Press, 2024) considers the commodification and economization of Shakespeare’s work in America’s nineteenth century. Danielle's interest in the digital has fueled past work on database methodologies in humanist text, social media, and the personification of Shakespeare by performers/users. Her next project, Yassified Shakespeare (co-authored with Trevor Boffone; @yassifiedshax on TikTok), is a multimedia exploration of how iterations of Shakespearean performance and Shakespeare’s cultural capital critically intersect with drag and drag aesthetics. Her work has been seen in Theatre Topics, The Early Modern Studies Journal, Studies in Musical Theater, Shakespeare Bulletin, and Fight Master Magazine. She is the co-editor of Early Modern Liveness (Bloomsbury 2023), and the forthcoming special issue of Shakespeare dedicated to contingency titled "Inessential Shakespeares: Contingency, Necessity, and Marginalization in Early Modern Drama." Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction America Happened to Me: Immigration, Acculturation, and Crafting Empathy in Rags Burning it Down: Theatre Fires, Collective Trauma Memory, and the TikTok Ban “A Caribbean Soul in Exile”: Post-Colonial Experiences of a Jamaican Actor Archiving a Life in Theatre: The Legacy of Michael Feingold Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspapers in New York Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre Another Day's Begun: Thornton Wilder's Our Town in the 21st Century Appropriate Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month MáM Scene Partners Oh, Mary! Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Becca Levy and Jared Rubin Sprowls 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 Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship Becca Levy and Jared Rubin Sprowls By Published on May 16, 2023 Download Article as PDF What began as a peer-reviewed research paper naturally grew into a dramaturgical adaptation of chevruta , a centuries old Rabbinic approach to interpreting Jewish texts. The style of this paper mimics our process of multiple voices in conversation. In chevruta , dialogue is necessary as one voice can’t capture the depth of a text; we can only approach understanding through discussion and interpretation. Through this lens, we push against prioritizing finality (a deadline, production, or publication) which dictates a linear process. Rather, we hold space to return again, offering a process that spans a lifetime as both the people and art deepen and unfold. We share authorship below, identifying the writer above each section. Though our names signify what we initially wrote, through revision, our voices continue to overlap, always in conversation. As we consider how this lens is valuable for new work development, both Jewish and non-Jewish, we invite you to engage in our reflection of Fringe Sects’ script development as a fellow chevruta partner: our voice, your voice, and the text. JARED In March 2020, I was finally ready to write my “Jewish play” based on a Buzzfeed article a friend sent to me a year prior: “Finding Kink in God: Inside The World Of Brooklyn Dominatrixes And Their Orthodox Jewish Clients.” [1] This article complicated the stereotype of Jewish sexuality I saw being portrayed on stage and screen: Jews as less sexual and less desirable. Expanding what a Jewish “man,” “woman,” or “relationship” looked like felt important to my own understanding of Jewish queerness and an inquiry I could share with my community. COVID interrupted that plan as Jewish sexuality onstage was no longer an urgent exploration, instead it was the last thing on my mind. What we thought would be a few weeks of mandated isolation became months. As Passover approached, I felt detached from my Jewish identity without the ability to invite friends over for Seder. The holiday traditions, rooted in community, didn’t feel the same with only me and my two roommates skimming through the Haggadah. In August 2021, I moved to Tempe, Arizona to pursue an MFA in Dramatic Writing. Fear of isolation continued, and I wondered what I’d do for the upcoming High Holidays. Rosh Hashanah felt like an opportunity for a new chapter in the desert, but I wondered if anyone would be there to join me. BECCA That’s where our Research Methods course comes in; it was my first semester of grad school as well, beginning the MFA program in Theatre for Youth and Community at ASU. I had also just moved to Tempe from Chicago, and much to my delight and surprise the old song “Wherever you go there’s always someone Jewish” [2] proved to be true. I overheard Jared talking about Jewish dominatrixes and had to learn more. JARED As I discussed revisions to my research question, I vividly remember Becca leaning over to join the conversation. Another Jewish woman to discuss Jewish womanhood and femininity? Baruch Hashem! On that day, I was paired with Clara, whose Hebrew necklace had sparked conversation a class prior. Marissa would soon ask what we were doing for Rosh Hashanah. She too had overheard the musings of Jewish study and wanted to join. We had all worried that we’d be the only Jew in the program and were relieved to have found each other so quickly. BECCA Jared and I requested to be paired for the final round of peer review. What was scheduled to be a brief meeting about our papers over coffee became a multi-hour conversation relating our artistry to our values and our values to our Judaism. We intuitively worked as chevruta: a non-hierarchical dyadic practice of Jewish text study rooted in traditional methods going back centuries. A chevruta partnership is a meaningful and holy relationship through which we understand text, and our relationship to text, more fully. The word chevruta comes from the Hebrew root chet, vet, reish, chaver , meaning “friend,” emphasizing that this relationship is between more than peers or colleagues. In fact, it’s not just a relationship between two voices, but three: two people and the text. Scholarly discourse around Fringe Sects was a catalyst for our partnership, while genuine friendship became central to our ongoing collaboration. Jared was researching about Jewish gender and sexuality while more deeply connecting with Jewish ways of being through his writing. JARED Where do the stereotypes, roles, and ideas of Jewish women come from? Who perpetuates them within our community and how does that differ from what we see in the media? BECCA In my initial notes, I wrote about the importance of discoveries, using this play to reveal Jewish challenges and provide space for healing while weaving the Jewish with the universal– JARED Questions and themes that simultaneously drew me into Becca’s research. BECCA What is the relationship between creativity, identity, and values in Jewish artmaking spaces? Grad school was the opportunity to further explore our embodied knowledge through research and practice. JARED Research and practice exist over coffee as much as they exist in conferences and classrooms. I got to know Becca through her research, and I better understood her research by getting to know Becca. BECCA We spent the next semester together in a graduate Dramaturgy Workshop course. One of our first readings was from Geoffrey Proehl’s Towards a Dramaturgical Sensibility ; I sent Jared a text, “Ok so I finally started the reading this morning and tbh I think a dramaturgical sensibility is just simply how Jews read Torah” [3] [4] . I quickly recognized in Proehl’s description of dramaturgical practice a kinship with Jewish ways of thinking, conversing, and analyzing. JARED “Isn’t there a Jewish thing about rehearing the Torah and the purpose of that? Helping me connect dramaturgy and Judaism again” [5] , I texted Becca as we continued to quip that “dramaturgy is Jewish.” It became our special segment in class where we reflected on how teachings from Jewish synagogue, camp, and school prepared us to analyze text as dramaturgs. Later that semester, I assembled a team for a staged reading of Fringe Sects at ASU: Marissa as director, Becca as dramaturg, and Clara, Matt (the only other Jew in our MFA program) and Sam (a non-Jewish MFA peer) as actors. The energy of the rehearsal room was immediately alive – BECCA Is the milk a reference to milk and honey? JARED I hadn’t even thought of that. BECCA What about the Binding of Isaac? JARED That sounds like BDSM. BECCA Our playful yet serious conversations around script development were contagious, or perhaps Jared had just gathered the perfect group for this week-long rehearsal process. We were more than Jewish artists chosen for a Jewish play; we were friends. In our first few months of grad school, we had already spent High Holidays, birthdays, and Chanukah together, discussed art that was important to us, and reflected on the ways our Judaism connected us even when it manifested differently. In fact, the different shades of Judaism were what we celebrated most: the variety of latke recipes, family and community traditions, or the way we pronounced “bimah.” Questioning, connecting, and respecting the multitude of text interpretations based on our diverse lived experiences were the foundation upon which the script could develop so significantly in such a short amount of time. Reflecting upon the process, it is clear that this ensemble intuitively worked from a place of shared values. JARED It was interpretive. It was direct. It was Jewish. BECCA Jared and I always bring these values into our creative practice. Through this process we affirmed that we practice those values creatively in specifically Jewish ways. Text Messages between Jared and Becca during Fringe Sects development. JARED Although I had been in a new work development space with other Jewish artists, I had never felt that a room was guided by a Jewish way of reading text in the way this process was. Sam’s active participation proved that anyone can engage with text in this way. Not only did this way of working benefit the script, but it was life-giving. I was no longer an isolated writer but an artist in the community. BECCA Going deeper into the etymology of chevruta, the Hebrew chaver (friend) derives from the Aramaic, chibor , meaning “to bind together.” In this process, chevruta partners’ understanding of text becomes bound together in discussion, creating something entirely new with what is on the page. Below is an example of a text study where a peer and I engaged with the very first Torah portion. The first translation you’ll read is a more standard version and the second is a collaborative translation discovered in shared study. While working with the text, I was drawn to the word “ ruach ” which translates to “wind” or “spirit” and my partner noticed “ pnei ” which can mean “surface” or “face.” We excitedly investigated more translations and read the text anew. Together, we uncovered a translation that neither of us would have found on our own. Hebrew words with multiple meanings are illustrated below in corresponding colors. I invite you to notice what is the same, what is different, and how these changes influence your understanding of the text. When God created heaven and earth, the earth was chaos and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God fluttering over the surface of the waters. (Genesis 1:1-2) When The Universe began to create sky and land, the land was without form and void. Behold darkness over the face of the abyss and the spirit of Creation floating over the face of the waters. (Genesis 1:1-2) [6] Stereotypical depictions of dramaturgy seem so isolating– an image of a lonely scholar with their head in their laptop or a book comes to mind; it’s not so different from the rabbi locked in their study or b’nai mitzvah student up in their room, practicing their Torah portion alone. But these are all misrepresentations of reality. To be Jewish is to congregate. To make theatre is to congregate. In the process of working together we bond with one another and the work binds to the point where it’s sometimes hard to know where one person’s idea ends and another’s begins. Jared and I intuitively did this work with our research papers, with everything we read in Dramaturgy Workshop, and with our collaboration on Fringe Sects . JARED Below is a visual representation of our chevruta-inspired conversations analyzing a paragraph from the opening monologue of the play, Rabbi Moshe’s Rosh Hashanah sermon, which we’ve retroactively formatted in the style of rabbinic commentary of Talmud. Visual representation of chevruta-inspired conversation between Becca and Jared on Fringe Sects script text. BECCA Rabbi Adina Allen writes, “Like the parchment wound around the Torah handles, our reading of this story is not circular, but spiral. We move along the same axis, but drop in and down, unearthing new meanings in the cracks of our old stories” [7] . This concept of time provides repetition while acknowledging that with repetition comes a new depth of experience in the present. During our collaboration on Fringe Sects , Jared and I trusted each other to continue to drop in and down in the reading and re-reading, writing, and re-writing, talking and re-talking of the script. We built trust and a shared language through cultural understanding, shared values, and unearthing new meanings while the script developed. The play is set during The Ten Days of Awe, the time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, when we’re tasked with Tshuvah. Tshuvah means to “return:” to return to right relationship with one another, the world around us, and ourselves. We return to something old or familiar – an ancient practice, text, or question. We seek to find something new, not in hopes of the perfect answer or action, but to embrace the multiplicity of interpretations and meaning-making as part of the process. JARED Even in the process of writing this article, we return again. Remembering text messages we forgot we had sent, making notes for our next stage of development. BECCA (I still want Jared to add the shehecheyanu into that scene). JARED (I will). BECCA These conversations ground us because there’s always something new to uncover. JARED If chevruta is three voices, our process contains even more: playwright, dramaturg, director, cast, characters, script, research, prayer, Torah, and Talmud. If Jewish text, ancient and unchanging, contains such multitudes, we must listen to all possibilities as a new work finds its voice. To give a script agency is to understand that it will never actually be finished… BECCA …but it is always where it’s supposed to be. JARED Jewish values tell us that we too are not finished and that growth is a lifelong process. BECCA As the spiral continues to deepen, may we delight in moments of synchronicity and express gratitude for moments of divergence. JARED & BECCA As this article concludes, we invite you to bring yourself into our chevruta practice. In doing so you join us in community and together we begin again. References [1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/hannahfrishberg/dominatrixes-orthodox-jewish-haredi-kink-bdsm-brooklyn [2] Milder, Rabbi Larry. “Wherever You Go There’s Always Someone Jewish.” [3] Levy, Becca. Text message to Jared Sprowls. 23 Jan. 2022. [4] Proehl, Goeffrey. Towards a Dramaturgical Sensibility: Landscape and Journey . Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008. [5] Sprowls, Jared. Text message to Becca Levy. 30 Jan. 2022. [6] This text study and my learnings on chevruta come from Becca’s time with the Jewish Studio Project . She has been participating in the Jewish Studio Process, a Jewish art-making and text study practice, with them since May 2020 and is currently part of their Creative Facilitator Training Cohort. [7] Allen, Rabbi Adina. “The Kernel of the Yet-to-Come.” My Jewish Learning , 21 Oct. 2022, https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-kernel-of-the-yet-to-come/amp/ . Footnotes About The Author(s) BECCA LEVY is an arts educator and theatre artist who facilitates educational programs and theatrical productions that center community, celebrate culture, and foster creativity for people of all ages. Becca worked as a teaching artist, arts program manager, and stage manager in Chicago after earning her BFA in Stage Management from Western Michigan University. Currently studying for an MFA in Theatre for Youth and Community at Arizona State University, her praxis explores the relationship between creativity and values, drawing from many years of work and play in Jewish arts programming and theatre teaching artistry. www.beccaglevy.com JARED RUBIN SPROWLS is a Chicago-based playwright currently in Tempe, Arizona pursuing an MFA in Dramatic Writing at Arizona State University. His work has been produced Off-Broadway through the Araca Project, as well as at Northwestern University and the Skokie Theatre. He is a 2018 O’Neill NPC Semi-finalist and has been a part of Available Light’s Next Stage Initiative, the New Coordinates’ Writers’ Room 6.0, and Jackalope Theatre’s Playwrights Lab. He is a project-based staff member with Crossroads Antiracism Organizing and Training. He holds a B.A. with Honors in Theatre from Northwestern University. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Sarah Alice Campbell 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 “La conjura de Xinum” and Language Revitalization: Understanding Maya Agency through Theatre Sarah Alice Campbell By Published on May 23, 2020 Download Article as PDF Jan Cohen-Cruz argues in Local Acts: Community-Based Performance in the United States that the criticism of conventional theatre is ineffective at assessing the scope, intent, and success of community-based performances. She writes, “expecting virtuosity, we miss the pleasures offered by commitment and risk. We are used to formal, distanced aesthetics and may underappreciate art driven by a personal connection to the material and a need to communicate.” [1] In this article I argue that this is precisely the phenomenon that has occurred in the criticism surrounding community-based Yucatec Maya theatre in Mexico. Evidence of such criticism can be found in the work of Carmen Castillo Rocha on theatre in the state of Yucatán. In explaining the relevance of theatre in Maya communities compared to the importance of other forms of performance within festivals and rituals in those same communities, she writes el teatro entre las comunidades mayas, en el mejor de los casos, queda como un fenómeno marginal cuyo origen fue el contacto con la cultura dominante; y en el peor de los casos aparece como un intento occidental de convertir la vida ritual de los mayas en un espectáculo para los ojos occidentales.Theatre among Maya communities, in the best of cases, remains a marginal phenomenon whose origin was contact with the dominant culture; and in the worst of cases appears as an occidental attempt to convert the ritual life of the Maya into a spectacle for occidental eyes. [2] I take issue with Castillo Rocha’s statements above in three respects: first, she argues that Maya theatre is a marginal phenomenon compared to festival and ritual; second, she insists that in the best-case scenario, theatre in the peninsula owes its existence to western or dominant cultures; and finally, she implies that theatre in Maya communities is intended for western eyes. I explore Castillo Rocha’s statement more below, but I introduce it here to argue that Maya theatre in the Yucatán peninsula has been viewed as marginal because of the way that it has been mediated in scholarship, not because it is inherently marginal within the community that created it. In this article, I argue for the necessity of studying Maya language theatre in the Yucatán peninsula as an art world. [3] This approach reveals the ways in which the multiplicity of discourses regarding Maya identity and the outside alliances that intersect with individuals and organizations that produce theatre have had an effect upon the valuing of theatre in some Maya areas but not in others. [4] This recognition is critical for understanding why Maya language theatre in the peninsula has been dismissed as marginal when compared to Mayan language theatre in the Mexican state of Chiapas, for example. I do this by first reviewing the relevant literature on the art world and artwriting, I explore the literature regarding contemporary Maya theatre in the Yucatán peninsula and Chiapas, and I end with a short exploration of the community-based performance in Tihosuco, Quintana Roo, Mexico, called “La conjura de Xinum,” (The Plot of Xinum) as an act of artwriting. Through this discussion, I argue the play “La conjura de Xinum” should not be dismissed as merely a marginal act by a community theatre group in rural Mexico; rather, I maintain it reveals the agency of Maya artists in advocating for language and cultural revitalization. An in-depth overview of Maya identity is not possible in an essay of this scope, but a brief review is necessary to contribute to a deeper understanding of Maya theatre in the Yucatán peninsula. The Maya peoples are comprised of a number of interrelated yet distinct linguistic and cultural groups. They have been grouped together under the name “Maya” by both academics and Maya peoples themselves as an act of resistance. The Maya civilization spanned a large portion of Mesoamerica (present-day Mexico and into the countries of Belize, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador). Colonization and independence movements in these countries had a profound effect upon the Maya peoples and their resistance strategies and contributed to shaping distinct practices within linguistic and cultural groups. [5] While Maya people continue to live throughout Mesoamerica, in this essay, I am focusing on the Maya in Mexico, and even more specifically, within the states of Chiapas, Yucatán, and Quintana Roo. Yucatán and Quintana Roo are two of the three states which comprise the Yucatán peninsula, Campeche, the third, will not be explicitly addressed in this article. [6] Yucatec Maya people are the ethno-linguistic group who live in the Yucatán peninsula. In Quintana Roo, Maya is by far the preferred term to use for an Indigenous person from the area, whereas in the state of Yucatán, mestiza/o is the preferred term. I use the term Yucatec Maya theatre to refer to theatre created by Maya people in the Yucatán peninsula. While most of these plays are presented in the Yucatec Maya language, some use Spanish as well. On Art Worlds and Artwriting My approach for this study of Maya theatre is based on a recognition that the creation, production, and distribution of art, both in its original form and how it is mediated through writing and other modes of criticism, is a collective activity; and further, that the discourses around the work of art itself allow for artwork to gain value in new markets. Howard Becker and David Carrier have theorized these issues through the concepts of “art worlds” and “artwriting,” respectively. [7] Becker describes an art world as “an established network of cooperative links among participants.” [8] Amongst these participants are the artists, the people who interact with the art during and after its production, as well as the critics and scholars who write about the work. Becker refutes the idea that an artist creates their work independently, arguing that the systems within what he calls the art world affect the way that the art is produced, received, and written about. [9] Thus, the study of Maya language theatre, including this article, is an integral part of the art world of Maya language theatre. Becker describes this further in his chapter on aesthetics in his book Art Worlds : Aestheticians study the premises and arguments people use to justify classifying things and activities as “beautiful,” “artistic,” “art,” “not art,” “good art,” “bad art,” and so on. They construct systems with which to make and justify both the classifications and specific instances of their application. Critics apply aesthetic systems to specific art works and arrive at judgments of their worth and explications of what gives them that worth. Those judgements provide reputations for works and artists. [10] Becker, through his concept of art worlds, argues that criticism about art is not outside of the artwork but creates value for a particular work of art or artist. Instead of relying on established aesthetic systems to critique the work of community-based artists, we should heed Cohen-Cruz’s call to look to the totality of the community-based endeavor, considering the context around the work itself in order to understand “what critical approach is appropriate.” [11] In order to better understand how the “cooperative links” comprising the art world affect the work of art itself, it is first necessary to understand who is involved in the process and how the work of art or artist has been mediated in writing or other forms of criticism. [12] David Carrier argues through his concept of artwriting that art can gain or lose value culturally and materially based on how it is mediated in various discourses that interpret the art. [13] George Marcus uses Carrier’s notion of artwriting in his book on the anthropological study of the art world, The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology . He notes, “objects (or performances) only accumulate cultural value to the extent that they are inscribed in ‘histories.’” He continues, neither the early debates about the avant-garde and modernism nor more recent framings of artistic activity in postmodern terms are external commentaries. They are neither part of a scholarly framework to be settled nor outside the production of art in which the boundaries between the “discipline” and its “object” are distinct. Rather such debates comprise much of artwriting itself; they are quintessentially enabling art to have a “history.” And history, or the narrative of art history, is central to the evaluation of paintings and other objects, whose importance is established by their place in a privileged story of culture and civilization. [14] Thus, it is the discourses accumulating around art that create a history of it. I am not advocating that art without history lacks intrinsic value, but rather that art can be mediated in such a way as to allow for the possibility of acquiring a material or new cultural value within a different society or economy. George Marcus highlights the influence of artwriting on the market: Imagine, for example, a painter such as Frida Kahlo, who is reevaluated after her death, in contrast to the previously more celebrated Diego Rivera. Her paintings, valued at $30,000 ten years ago, are now worth over $1 million. Her work—which emphasizes gender, informality, and the body—becomes significant in the light of current theoretical trends. And, although Rivera’s work is far more concerned with the Mexican state, as soon as Kahlo became important outside Mexico, her work acquired national value exceeding Rivera’s. [15] Although Marcus here refers to visual arts, one can extend this concept to an understanding of theatre and performance. As I explore below, Maya theatre in the state of Chiapas has been represented in criticism as internationally relevant. The influence of participating scholars and institutions have lent credibility to the theatre in Chiapas and as a result, it has acquired value outside of the original context of production. By comparison, Maya theatre in the Yucatán peninsula has not had the same level of attention and, as a result, it is generally described in scholarship as a local phenomenon of little consequence when compared with other performance forms. Director of “La conjura de Xinum,” Marco Poot Cahun, is keenly aware of the value of academic writing to his work, as he wants people outside of the peninsula to know about what he and his company are doing. He wants people to know about the Caste War of Yucatán (1847-1901) and the continual struggle that Maya people in the peninsula face—poverty, inability to access lands that were once their own, discrimination, and appropriation by the tourism industry. [16] In interviews I conducted during fieldwork, both Marco and his brother and co-collaborator Manuel Poot Cahun acknowledged that academic writing has value for their work in language and cultural revitalization. [17] As reflected in the above review of the literature on art worlds, the discourses around a work of art are implicated in the study of that artwork. In the following section, I review literature on theatre in Chiapas and the Yucatán peninsula in order to explore how Maya theatre in the Yucatán peninsula has been made to seem marginal when compared to Maya theatre in Chiapas. The Art World of Maya Theatre in Chiapas Contemporary Indigenous theatre in Mexico often features international collaborators and Maya theatre in Chiapas is no exception. This international component is indicative of how pan-Indigenous organizing has traversed the borders of nations to involve collaborations with international partners, especially non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that seek to protect against human rights abuses. [18] Pan-Indigenous organizing has also occurred on a national level in Mexico through a series of workshops and programs aimed at Indigenous revitalization beginning in the 1980s. These programs had a profound impact on the production of Indigenous language texts in Mexico. [19] It is within this context that Maya theatre collectives emerged in the state of Chiapas. Maya theatre in Chiapas is largely represented by two theatre groups: Lo’il Maxil (part of the collective Sna Jtz’ibajom ) and La FOMMA. Both collectives work out of San Cristóbal de las Casas, a popular tourist destination in the state. The work of these two companies has been described by and associated with anthropologist Robert Laughlin as well as the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, based at New York University. In this section, I briefly review these two theatre groups and the reason why they have become almost emblematic of Maya theatre in Mexico. The civil association, Sna Jtz’ibajom (House of the Writer), began through the efforts of former local members of the Harvard Chiapas Project in coordination with anthropologist Laughlin. Laughlin helped the group secure funds from Cultural Survival, an NGO, based in the United States with a mission of “advocat[ing] for Indigenous Peoples’ rights and support[ing] Indigenous communities’ self-determination, cultures and political resilience.” [20] Cultural Survival granted $3,000 of seed money for the establishment of the writers collective, Sna Jtz’ibajom, in 1982. [21] Laughlin’s approach has been as an active collaborator since the beginning. Early on, Laughlin insisted upon the use of puppets in the production of plays by Lo’il Maxil, a hallmark of the group’s work. [22] After deciding to use puppets for the productions, Laughlin brought in Amy Trompetter of the Bread and Puppet Theater and Ralph Lee, founder and artistic director of the Mettawee River Theatre Company. The presence of both Trompetter and Lee in Chiapas has served to reposition the work of these Maya artists in Chiapas as internationally, interculturally, and cross-culturally significant in the discipline of theatre. Further, because of the influence of Laughlin, and his post at the Smithsonian Institute, the work of Sna Jtz’ibajom and Lo’il Maxil has always been seen as important outside of Chiapas. Underiner describes it as such, “thus, from the beginning, Lo’il Maxil’s work, celebrated everywhere as “Mayan theatre,” has been in fact a highly collaborative effort by artists and researchers trained in very different traditions.” [23] The civil association La FOMMA (Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya/Strength of the Maya Women) was started by two former members of Sna Jtz’ibajom, Isabel Juárez Espinosa (Tzeltal) and Petrona de la Cruz Cruz (Tzotzil). [24] [24] Underiner describes the extent of the international reputation that La FOMMA has acquired: La FOMMA’s reputation both in Mexico and internationally has grown, facilitated by their contacts with U.S. supporters, who have coordinated their participation in women’s playwriting symposia and arranged performances and speaking engagements in university settings, usually in conjunction with programs on indigenous political and cultural movements. [25] The influence of these scholars and institutions have allowed the theatre to acquire value outside of the original context of production. In discussing value here I am not speaking to aesthetic value or inherent value, as that can and should really only be decided by those who are creating the work and by those for whom the work is intended. I am discussing value in terms of the stake that it provides to Indigenous organizing; increasing exposure internationally can provide tangible results within home communities. The idea of appealing to governing bodies larger than the state is a characteristic feature of Indigenous organizing. Ronald Niezen notes that one of the hallmarks of international Indigenous organizing is the avoidance of state mechanisms for grievances and moving to address these grievances on an international level. He notes that this “represent[s] a new use of the international bodies of states to overcome the domestic abuses of the states themselves.” [26] Just as these grievances can be delivered to international bodies in hopes of having them addressed at the level of the state, an international reputation for artists can provide results in terms of funding and recognition of cultural significance within the state. In comparing the international exposure in Chiapas with that in the Yucatán peninsula, Maya theatre in the Yucatán peninsula has not had the same level of attention. The Art World of Maya Theatre in the Yucatán Peninsula Tamara Underiner and Donald Frischmann have been actively writing about Maya areas of Mexico since the 1990s and they often highlight continuities between Yucatec Maya theatre and the theatre of other Mayan language communities. [27] Their work has been influential in developing the field of Yucatec Maya theatre and performance scholarship in the US. Three trends are particularly noteworthy to highlight regarding their work: both focus on theatre in the state of Yucatán, except in the case of the recently published anthology U suut t’aan ; second, the authors focus predominantly on those individuals who have been working in the literary revitalization movement in the Peninsula; third, both focus on historical and cultural elements in performance. [28] Their contributions have paved the way for this particular research project, which shifts the focus to the theatre produced outside of the literary revitalization movement within the state of Quintana Roo. [29] Building on their analyses of cultural and historical elements within performance, I turn my attention specifically to how the Maya language is used in performance. Anthropologist Carmen Castillo Rocha has also written on theatre in the Yucatán. I cited her discussion above regarding the marginality of theatre in Maya communities. I do not believe it was Castillo Rocha’s intention to dismiss Maya theatre outright as not important, but rather to argue that performance forms occurring within festivals and rituals have deep historical continuity, whereas theatre does not. [30] I would like to spend a moment exploring her statement, however, because it reveals a number of misconceptions about community-based Maya theatre. In comparing festivals to theatrical activities, Castillo Rocha claims that theatre is marginal. I argue that theatre is an important platform for cultural and linguistic expression in Maya communities in the peninsula. Castillo Rocha argues that Maya theatre owes its origin to Western influence. Western influence is certainly present in the structure of many of the plays but that does not mean that they are not Maya plays. [31] This statement discounts the agency of these theatre artists, even when working with someone from the west or dominant culture to shape the work of theatre to their own worldview. Additionally, productions in Maya communities are not always performed for “occidental eyes” as she suggests. [32] The audiences for productions of “La conjura de Xinum,” for example, are overwhelmingly composed of members of the local community or Maya people from surrounding communities. An understanding of why and how the Maya language is being used in the work of Maya theatre artists is critical for appreciating the ways artists are engaging with the discourses of language and cultural revitalization in the peninsula. Current scholarship on Yucatec Maya language theatre has not focused on the language itself in performance, leaving an incomplete picture of how the work is significant within the community as well as on the international stage. In the next section, I put forth a brief example of artwriting that provides a view of how language is used within the play “La conjura de Xinum,” centering the performances as a tool for social change, specifically the revitalization of the Yucatec Maya language. “La conjura de Xinum” as a tool for social change In this section, I advance a brief sample of artwriting through an analysis of productions of the play “La conjura de Xinum.” I argue that “La conjura de Xinum” enacts a scenario of rebellion in order to highlight the contemporary conditions of Indigenous peoples in the peninsula. [33] Diana Taylor’s concept of scenario is useful in this study as it reveals the appeal of the historic event of the Caste War for contemporary Maya artists. Taylor’s scenario provides a framework for viewing the performances of “La conjura de Xinum” as part of a larger set of similar performances of conquest, revolution, and resistance in the Maya world. These performances, notes Taylor, make use of “paradigms that structure social environments, behaviors, and potential outcomes.” [34] The Caste War was a nineteenth century war fought in the peninsula between factions of Maya rebels (and their criollo allies) and the elite of Yucatán. The usefulness of the Caste War as subject matter for a performance hoping to inspire social change might be called into question, as it ultimately ended in defeat for the rebels. Though this particular Caste War was ultimately unsuccessful, actor Manuel Poot Cahun notes that he wants to start a “second Caste War,” using Indigenous intelligence versus weapons. [35] His work in Maya language revitalization through the arts is one way that he is doing this. Despite the outcome of the Caste War, the strength and durability of the scenario of rebellion contributes to its repeatability and makes it useful because, as Diana Taylor remarks of the concept of the scenario, it is a “remarkably coherent paradig[m] of seemingly unchanging attitudes and values.” [36] The Maya language is central to an understanding of how the actors are performing their identity onstage in the play “La conjura de Xinum” and I argue that the actors achieve this through their positioning of the Maya language in opposition to Spanish. I analyze how the actors position the two languages through a study of verisimilitude. Verisimilitude, or likeness to “real life,” considers how characters select from their repertoire of languages based on their social setting. [37] I begin with a brief summary of the play and performance contexts, a description of the events of the Caste War of Yucatán as depicted in the play, and finally an analysis of language vis-à-vis verisimilitude. “La conjura de Xinum” “La conjura de Xinum” was written by Carlos Chan Espinosa, director of the Museo de la guerra de castas (Caste War Museum) in Tihosuco, Quintana Roo from 1994-2019. [38] Marco Poot Cahun has edited and further refined the play after he took over as director in 2010. [39] The play is structured as a series of narrations interspersed with five short scenes that are largely improvised in performance. Though the dialogue within these individual scenes varies in performance, the actors follow the scenario as outlined in the text. The title of the play, “La conjura de Xinum,” or “The Plot of Xinum,” comes from the historical title given to the early events of the Caste War, which make up the plot of the play. Figure 1– from L to R: Alfredo Pool Poot, Manuel Poot Cahun, and Marco Poot Cahun. Photo by the author. The play features three main characters, the three early leaders of the Caste War: Manuel Antonio Ay, played by Marco, Cecilio Chi, played by Alfredo Pool Poot, and Jacinto Pat, played by Manuel. The narration, which opens the play, quickly covers 500 years of colonization, oppressive land and labor policies, and a famous 1761 revolt by the Maya leader, Jacinto Canek. These events are framed as causes of the Caste War of the Yucatán in 1847. After the opening narration, the first scene features the leaders Chi, Pat, and Ay discussing the oppressive circumstances in which they find themselves. The second scene depicts Chi writing a letter to Ay regarding specific plans for the rebellion. In the third scene, a messenger delivers the letter to Ay. The fourth scene depicts Ay and fellow residents of Chichimilá at a cantina in the house of Antonio Rajón, where Rajón discovers Chi’s letter in Ay’s possession. In the fifth scene Rajón tells Eulogio Rosado, the commandant in Valladolid, about the letter. Rosado then sends soldiers to capture Ay. Ay is interrogated and finally put to death by firing squad. The play has been performed regularly in the area, especially in the towns of Tihosuco and Tepich, since at least 2002, usually in association with the annual commemoration of the start of the Caste War, which falls in the last week of July. I first saw the play in 2015 and saw three more performances over the following two years. All four performances were staged outside in public spaces in the center of the towns. These public spaces play a significant role in everyday life and are frequented by residents often. Residents of Tepich made up the majority of the audience members for the Tepich performances, whereas the performances in Tihosuco included local audiences as well as those from surrounding communities, some from as far away as Pisté, in the neighboring state of Yucatán, and Orange Walk, Belize. Interpretation of the Caste War within the Play The play “La conjura de Xinum” is based upon the novella of the same title written by Ermilo Abreu Gómez. In an interview, Marco mentioned that the text was used as a resource by the playwright Chan Espinosa. Abreu Gómez was a Yucatecan by birth and is known predominantly for Canek based upon the Jacinto Canek rebellion of 1761. While Abreu Gómez’s work has been considered by many to be overall sympathetic to the Maya cause, it still represents, according to Paul Worley, a means of control over the Maya in terms of who is allowed to tell their stories. He notes that Abreu Gómez’s La conjura de Xinum , “revises the literature on events in the peninsula’s history while denouncing the exploitation and abuse visited on the Maya from the conquest down through the twentieth century, and Abreu Gómez highlights his role as an indigenista cultural broker in his attempts to represent the subaltern voice of the Indio storyteller.” [41] While Chan Espinosa used the work as a source for the play, its subsequent reformation into dramatic form means that “La conjura de Xinum,” the play, represents a shift from what Worley calls the “discourse of the Indio” to an activation of “cultural control,” wherein Maya artists write from their own perspective. [42] Just as Abreu Gómez’s La conjura de Xinum highlights a source of the conflict within the Caste War as ethnic or racial in origin, so too does the play version with which it shares a title. We can see this through the use of humor which pokes fun at the Spaniards in the play, as well as through physical gestures of the soldier characters, who are portrayed as dullards who have difficulty capturing Manuel Antonio Ay. The capturing of Ay is always an audience favorite. The soldiers are directed by Rosado to go and search for Ay. If anyone in the audience is not part of the community, this individual will typically be selected first. Thus, although they are marking difference (often racial difference, especially when white American students are present) they are also signaling to the audience that the Spaniards are unable to perform their mission satisfactorily. The search continues and finally on the third visit to the crowd, they find Ay and bring him to Rosado. This moment of highlighting outsider presence, whether racial in origin or not, is key to understanding how the actors are creatively using the play to comment upon social conditions. For Marco, however, the importance of this production of “La conjura de Xinum” is to teach audiences about the causes of the Caste War. [43] Verisimilitude Language use, despite its imprecision as a characteristic of identity, has been a category used to classify one as Indigenous from the colonial period to the present. Thus, it is a natural place to begin an exploration of the play “La conjura de Xinum.” In his book on language play in theatre, Marvin Carlson discusses what he calls the “purest” form of heteroglossia: the copresence of two languages on stage. He remarks: Often verisimilitude is the major structural motivation for such linguistic mixing, but no cultural activity, and certainly not language, is devoid of associations and values, and so beyond the rather simple and straightforward concern of verisimilitude, theatrical heteroglossia almost always involves a wide variety of social and cultural issues. [44] As Carlson suggests, verisimilitude is merely the beginning of an exploration of language use in a play, a fundamental consideration for understanding the “wide variety of social and cultural issues” that exist in a given instance of heteroglossia. [45] What Carlson calls verisimilitude operates on a basic level: just as in real life, some characters in the play speak only Maya, some only Spanish, some a combination of both. Verisimilitude thus corresponds to reality: in this case, both historical and contemporary. The languages spoken by the characters in each of these performances for the most part mirrors the language choice of their historical counterparts, where such language choice diverges from verisimilitude is a key place for investigation. For the majority of the characters in the play little fluctuation occurs in language spoken amongst the various performances. The soldiers, the judge, and Eulogio Rosado only speak in Spanish; and Jacinto Pat and Cecilio Chi only speak in Maya. The script that I received was entirely in Spanish, however, some actors use Maya in performance, depending on the character they play. When Spanish is used it almost exclusively matches the text in the script, whereas when the actors replace the Spanish text with Maya, they rarely follow the Spanish via a direct translation but instead incorporate a virtuosic display of conversation in Maya – as one might hear offstage in everyday interactions. The decision to change languages for individual characters in “La conjura de Xinum” is significant as it represents contemporary attitudes regarding language use that do not necessarily reflect the historical situation being portrayed. The clearest example of this is in scene five, where a judge interrogates Manuel Antonio Ay after he is captured. To understand the way language use differs from historical accounts it is first necessary to briefly review the history of Maya language use after the conquest. The onslaught of the attempted destruction of the Maya language and writing system began, of course, with the conquest. Diego de Landa, famous for his auto de fé at Maní, preserved selective aspects of the language and culture through his Relaciones de las cosas de Yucatán . [46] Spaniards as well as children of the Maya elite carried out the gradual change from glyphic writing to alphabetic throughout the early years of the conquest. [47] However, by the late colonial period, Maya, in both written and spoken forms, was used even amongst those who were not considered to be Indigenous. Mark Lentz notes that local government officials “in majority Maya-speaking pueblos absolutely needed to speak the Indigenous language in order to carry out their daily tasks effectively. Many showed an ability to read and write in Maya.” [48] Using records from court cases throughout the late colonial period, Lentz discusses how individuals in rural communities, Indigenous or not, typically relied on Maya in their everyday lives. Some were even monolingual speakers of Maya. Lentz, in particular, highlights the use of Maya among local officials like the juez español . He notes that “ jueces españoles were the officials most immersed in Maya society and thus the likeliest to speak, read, and write Maya.” [49] In other words, Maya was used by non-Indigenous Yucatecans both for and outside of official duties. Lentz’s findings become particularly striking if we consider them alongside the interrogation scene in “La conjura de Xinum.” In this scene, a judge asks several questions to Ay in Spanish. Ay, in turn, responds only in Maya. The judge repeats his questions multiple times, occasionally slamming his hands on the table, as he grows more and more impatient. Knowing what we now know about the tendency of local officials to know Maya, it is likely that the historical judge would have understood and possibly been able to speak Maya. Therefore, the actor’s choice to use Spanish as the language of interrogation in the scene is an important divergence from historical accounts. It is critical to note that by highlighting this moment, I am not indicating that there is something wrong with diverging from historical accounts in the portrayal of this scene. Rather, I am advocating for an approach that considers this an exercise of agency by the actors in actively engaging with history and shaping it to fit present attitudes and anxieties regarding language loss. The choice to have the actor playing the judge speak Spanish instead of Maya creates the opportunity for the actor playing Ay to highlight the act of speaking in Maya as a statement of resistance. This aligns with the priorities of Marco and Manuel in their work within language and cultural revitalization – speaking Maya is a way to combat erasure. While the Yucatec Maya language is not in immediate danger of extinction, the number of native speakers is dwindling as English is often the focus in schools due to the influence of the tourism in the peninsula. [50] Thus, by engaging with this well-known episode in history and pitting the two languages against one another, the actors have successfully mapped contemporary attitudes of language use onto a past event. Conclusion: Community-Based Theatre and the Scenario of Rebellion Diana Taylor’s notion of the scenario is a useful descriptive framework for understanding how “La conjura de Xinum” re-activates the cultural memory of rebellion in the town of Tihosuco each year. I use Taylor’s concept of scenario, a theatrical or performative formulaic structure that references pre-existing cultural memories and meanings, to argue that the performance of “La conjura de Xinum” has larger ramifications than might be initially thought were we to follow Castillo Rocha’s conclusion about Maya theatre’s marginality. [51] Taylor writes, “instead of privileging texts and narratives , we could also look to scenarios as meaning-making paradigms that structure social environments, behaviors, and potential outcomes.” [52] In Taylor’s formation “the scenario makes visible what is already there,” including “ghosts, images, and stereotypes.” [53] The play “La conjura de Xinum” can be viewed as a scenario of rebellion as it dramatizes the events of the Caste War of Yucatán. For some, this performance is radical. Others believe that the government has co-opted this scenario and that its performance every year is no longer radical, but rather a showpiece to demonstrate that the Maya are a willing part of Mexico’s pluricultural nation. Even though the actors recognize the historical and contemporary injustices in Maya communities, they believe that the elected officials and other dignitaries who attend the Caste War festival don’t take their concerns seriously. [54] Although the productions of “La conjura de Xinum” are funded by the government, the invited officials don’t often stay to watch the play, which is always the final event in the evening’s schedule. This leaves an audience comprised almost entirely of community members. The actors have a stage where they can voice their concerns but the politician’s and elected official’s exit before the start of the performance speaks volumes of their symbolic (lack of) attention to the issues the community faces. Despite the fact that the invited officials do not always stay to watch the play, their appearance at the Caste War festival is critical. Taylor notes that “the scenario places spectators within its frame, implicating us in its ethics and politics.” [55] It is clear here, that the political officials “watching” the event, whether they actually stay for the performance or not, are akin to the Spaniards in the play – Antonio Rajón, the soldiers, Eulogio Rosado, and the cantinero . Thus, the performance of “La conjura de Xinum” is not just a play performed as part of the Caste War festival, it is part of the larger scenario of recent Indigenous cultural and language revitalization movements–where Indigenous people fight to be heard in a neoliberal multicultural nation. The performance of this scenario of rebellion thus has a part for all to play: for state officials, who participate as oppressors; for actors and local audience members, who participate as the rebels; and academics, like myself, who participate as well-intentioned documentarians, but nonetheless possess an, often unstated, privilege in writing about Indigenous peoples. Year after year this scenario is reified in the Caste War festivities. Director Marco and actor Manuel believe that their work is making a difference in the community despite the lack of real government support. They often view the government officials in an adversarial manner, but still ultimately believe that “La conjura de Xinum” has a positive effect in their community by encouraging young people to speak Maya and to learn more about their history. Manuel is especially inspired by the Caste War and views his linguistic and cultural revival efforts as a “second Caste War.” [56] Charles Hale poses the question at issue for many Indigenous peoples in the Americas: “Under what conditions can Indigenous movements occupy the limited spaces opened by neoliberal multiculturalism, redirecting them toward their own radical, even utopian political alternatives?” [57] Juan Castillo Cocom argues that disconnecting from this system, by refusing to perform scenarios of rebellion as well as the stereotype of the rebellious “ indio ” is the only way that Maya people will be taken seriously in the political climate of neoliberal Mexico. [58] For others, performing within the system but using their own language to subvert the multicultural game is the best option. Whatever the standpoint, the performance of Maya identity through language and culture is an important phenomenon and is critical for understanding how neoliberal Mexico interacts with its Indigenous citizens and the way in which those same citizens fight back or decide to disconnect altogether. By viewing the alliances and connections that ultimately shape the reception of a work of community-based performance like “La conjura de Xinum,” I argue that Maya theatre is not just an inconsequential phenomenon. Theatre is used by Maya artists as a tool for voicing dissent, anger, and highlighting injustice. Maya theatre is not marginal; it is a vital force for social change. References [1] Jan Cohen-Cruz, Local Acts: Community-Based Performance in the United States , (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 109. [2] Carmen Castillo Rocha, “El Teatro Regional en Tierras Mayas,” (PhD diss., Unviersität Hamburg, 2007), 86. [3] In common parlance, and even in academic contexts, the terms Maya and Mayan are frequently confused. In this article, I subscribe to the use of the terms most clearly elucidated by Quetzil Castañeda in the field guide for the Maya language, “Ko’ox Tsikbal Maya T’aan.” See Castañeda, “Ko’ox Tsikbal Maya T’aan,” (Field guide, Open School for Ethnography and Anthropology, 2014), 10-12. Castañeda notes that Mayan is not used to refer to a group of people, but rather a language family, the Mayan language family, which contains around 30-some different languages spoken in Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras, and Belize. Within the family of Mayan languages there is one particular language called Maya. While scholars might refer to it as Yucatec Maya, speakers of the language rarely do—to them it is more likely maayat’aan or simply maaya . In addition to the name of the language as spoken in the Yucatán peninsula, Maya can be used as an adjective—Maya culture, Maya traditions, Maya theatre, but Mayan languages (unless you are referring to the specific language of the Yucatán, in which case it would be the Maya language). Maya is a mass noun so it does not need to pluralized. To call the Maya of the Yucatán “Mayans” is not just incorrect in terms of cultural practice, but as Castañeda notes, would be like referring to native English speakers as “Germanics,” because “the language that these persons speak are part of the Germanic branch” of languages. (Castañeda, “Ko’ox Tsikbal,” 11); See Howard Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). [4] See Stuart A. Day, Outside Theater: Alliances that Shape Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2017). [5] See Matthew Restall, “Maya Ethnogenesis,” The Journal of Latin American Anthropology 9, no. 1 (2004). Translation by author. [6] I am not addressing Campeche in this article because I have not completed fieldwork there and thus my knowledge of the specific circumstances with regard to community-based theatre is limited. [7] See Becker, Art Worlds ; See David Carrier, Artwriting (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987). [8] Becker, Art Worlds , 35. [9] Becker, Art Worlds , 35. [10] Becker, Art Worlds , 131. [11 Cohen-Cruz, Local Acts , 111; 113. [12] Becker, Art Worlds , 34-35. [13] Carrier, Artwriting . [14] George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers, eds., The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 27. Within the passage Marcus cites three works by Arthur Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); “Critical Reflections,” Artform 28 (September 1989): 132-133; and “The State of the Art World: The Nineties Begin,” Nation (July 9): 65-68. [15] Marcus and Myers, The Traffic in Culture, 28. [16] The Caste War of Yucatán (1847-1901) was a rebellion against the government based in Mérida, Yucatán by a majority Maya peasant force. Although the war was not explicitly racial in origin, its interpretation in academic writing in the 1960s and 1970s certainly provides that impression. Today, scholars mostly agree that class rather than race or ethnicity had more to do with the reasons for the revolt. See Victoria Bricker, Indian Christ, Indian King: The Historical Substrate of Maya Myth and Ritual (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); Don E. Dumond, The Machete and the Cross: Campesino Rebellion in Yucatán (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997); Wolfgang Gabbert, “Violence and Ethnicity in the Caste War of Yucatán,” (presentation, Latin American Studies Association Annual Conference, Miami, FL, March 16-18, 2000); Wolfgang Gabbert, “Of Friends and Foes: The Caste War and Ethnicity in Yucatán,” The Journal of Latin American Anthropology 9, no.1 (2004); Reed, Nelson. The Caste War of Yucatán . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964; Restall, “Maya Ethnogenesis;” Terry Rugeley, Rebellion Now and Forever: Mayas, Hispanics, and the Caste War Violence in Yucatán , 1800- 1880 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). [17] Marco Poot Cahun, Personal Interview, 8 October 2017; Manuel Poot Cahun, Personal Interview, 29 July 2016. [18] See Ronald Niezen, The Origins of Indigenism: Human Rights and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). [19] See Alicia Salinas, “‘Tu táan yich in kaajal’ [On The Face of My People]: Contemporary Maya-Spanish Bilingual Literature and Cultural Production from the Yucatan Peninsula,” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 2018) and Carlos Montemayor and Donald Frischmann, U túumben k’aayilo’ob x-ya’axche’: Antología de escritores mayas contemporáneos de la península de Yucatán (Mérida: Instituto Cultural de Yucatán, 2010). [20] Cultural Survival, “Mission.” “About Cultural Survival.” See https://www.culturalsurvival.org/about. [21] Robert Laughlin and Sna Jtz’ibajom, Monkey Business Theatre , (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 2-3. [22] Laughlin, Monkey Business Theatre , 3. [23] Tamara Underiner, T heatre in Mayan Mexico: Death Defying Acts , (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 51. [24] Underiner, Theatre in Mayan Mexico , 54. [25] Underiner, Theatre in Mayan Mexico, 57. [26] Niezen, The Origins of Indigenism ,16. [27] Although there are several theatre scholars writing in Spanish on Maya theatre in the state of Yucatán (See Carmen Castillo Rocha, “El Teatro Regional en Tierras Mayas,” (PhD diss., Unviersität Hamburg, 2007); Fernando Muñoz Castillo, Teatro maya peninsular: precolombino y evangelizador (Mérida, 2000); René Acuña, Farsas y representaciones escenicas de los mayas antiguos (Ciudad de México: Universidad Nacional Aútonoma de México, 1978); and Jennifer Lynn Cassels, “La Utopía en Tierras Mayas: El Teatro Comunitario Maya Yucateco 1982-2002.” (MA thesis, Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, 2004) Frischmann and Underiner are two that have helped the work to gain a larger audience in the US. [28] I am intentionally leaving the work of the Laboratorio de Teatro Campesino e Indígena (LTCI) out of consideration here despite the fact that they have an international reputation as the company did not originate in the peninsula, but rather in the state of Tabasco. Underiner in Theatre in Mayan Mexico , writes that “almost everyone I spoke with expressed concern over the community participating as ‘extras’ in the spectacle, with the maestros having the central performing parts” (98). This, in addition to Maya rituals being staged out of context and fetishized for a tourist audience (93-99), leaves the company’s work outside of the scope of this particular view of community theatre in the Maya language. A more mild critique of the work of LTCI appears in Carmen Castillo Rocha, “The ‘Laboratorio de Teatro Campesino e Indígena’ and the Construction of a Good Life in Ticopó, Yucatán, Mexico,” Intercom: Revista Brasileira de Ciências da Comunicação 39, no. 2, (May-August, 2016): 131-144; Donald Frischmann and Wildernain Villegas Carrillo, U Suut T’aan: U t’aan maaya ajts’íibo’ob tu lu’umil Quintana Roo (Chetumal: Plumas Negras Editorial, 2016). [29] This is an important consideration because it tends to leave out those who are working at the community level but aren’t publishing their work. [30] Castillo Rocha, “El Teatro Regional,” 85. [31] See Donald Frischmann, “Contemporary Mayan Theatre: The Recovery and (Re)Interpretation of History,” in Imperialism and Theatre: Essays on World Theatre, Drama and Performance , ed. J. Ellen Gainor (New York: Routledge, 1995), 71-84; and Carlos Montemayor and Donald Frischmann, U túumben k’aayilo’ob x-ya’axche’: Antología de escritores mayas contemporáneos de la península de Yucatán (Mérida: Instituto Cultural de Yucatán, 2010), 48-54. [32] Castillo Rocha, “El Teatro Regional,” 86. [33] See Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). [34] Taylor, Archive and the Repertoire , 28. [35] Manuel Poot Cahun, Personal Interview, 29 July 2016. [36] Taylor, Archive and the Repertoire , 31. [37] See Marvin Carlson, Speaking in Tongues: Languages at Play in the Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009). [38] The Caste War Museum is a community museum based in Tihosuco, Quintana Roo that opened in 1993. See http://www.museogc.com/Museo/Museo-Museum.html. [39] Marco Poot Cahun, Personal Interview, 8 October 2017. [40] Marco and Manuel have been involved with the play since 2010 and I found production photos dating back to 2002 in the museum archives. I found another photo that seemed to show the three Maya leaders from the year 2000, but I can’t be sure that this was from the play “La conjura de Xinum.” Doña Antonia, who works at the museum told me that the play had been in production since she could remember, starting a year or two after the opening of the museum in 1993. Don Carlos did not state an exact year either, saying it had been at least ten years, but said that the play was developed for the annual commemoration and that it was first performed after the museum opened in 1993. [41] Paul Worley, Telling and Being Told: Storytelling and Cultural Control in Contemporary Yucatec Maya Literatures (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013), 78. [42] Worley, Telling and Being Told , 17; Here Worley is referencing Guillermo Bonfil Batalla’s concept of “cultural control.” See Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, “Lo propio y lo ajeno,” in La cultura popular, ed. Adolfo Colombres (México: Dirección de Culturas Populares, Premia editora de libros, 1984), 79-86. [43] Marco Poot Cahun, Personal Interview, 8 October 2017. [44] Carlson, Speaking in Tongues , 14. [45] Carlson, Speaking in Tongues, 14. [46] Published in a commonly available English translation by William Gates, trans., Yucatán Before and After the Conquest by Friar Diego de Landa (New York: Dover, 1978). [47] Victoria Bricker, “Linguistic Continuities and Discontinuities in the Maya Area,” in Pluralizing Ethnography , eds. John M. Watanabe and Edward F. Fischer (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2004), 71-3. [48] Mark Lentz, “Castas, Creoles, and the Rise of a Maya Lingua Franca in Eighteenth-Century Yucatan,” Hispanic American Historical Review 97, no. 1 (2017): 48. [49] Lentz, “Castas, Creoles,” 49. [50] Lentz, “Castas, Creoles,” 56-7. [51] Taylor, Archive and the Repertoire , 13. [52] Taylor, Archive and the Repertoire , 28. [53] Taylor, Archive and the Repertoire , 28. [54] Alfredo Pool Poot, Personal Interview, 8 September 2017. [55] Taylor, Archive and the Repertoire , 23. [56] Manuel Poot Cahun, Personal Interview, 29 July 2017. [57] Charles R. Hale, “Neoliberal Multiculturalism: The Remaking of Cultural Rights and Racial Dominance in Central America,” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 28, no. 1 (2005): 11. [58] Juan Castillo Cocom, Personal Interview, 10 October 2017. Footnotes About The Author(s) Sarah Alice Campbell is an Assistant Professor of Theatre History, Literature, and Criticism in the University of Idaho’s Theatre Arts Department. She received her Ph.D. in Theatre and Drama with a minor in Folklore and a Ph.D. Certificate in Latin American and Caribbean Studies from Indiana University in 2018. 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.

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 18, Fall, 2023 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Poetry on Stage: Games, Words, Crickets..., Directed by Silviu Purcărete By Ion M. Tomuș Published: November 26, 2023 Download Article as PDF The poetry recital in the Romanian performing arts landscape holds a special position which needs to be described in its general coordinates. First, before 1990 and the fall of the Iron Curtain, most poetry recitals given by Romanian actors were part of the job description of those with certain visibility. The poetry recital thus became, in most cases, a job obligation and part of the Communist party's propaganda. Of course, this situation meant that the relationship between the audience and those who recited poetry benefited from a special configuration, deeply marked by the social-cultural particularities of the period between 1947 and 1990. The patriotic poems that had to be recited by the Romanian actors were part of the communist propaganda and had nothing in common with real poetry. Socialist realism was expressed in the field of poetry in topics like outstanding crops, comrades who break new records in industrial production, or ones who work on the homeland’s great construction sites and compete with those around them. There was also the category of patriotic poetry in which the image of the supreme leader of the country and of the Communist party were praised. Moreover, during the last fifteen years of the Communist regime, there was a lot of insistence on the glorification of the presidential couple through poetry, a situation that now, almost 50 years later, seems completely ridiculous. Finally, the last major trend in the recitals of patriotic poetry before 1990 was represented by the reinterpretation of some of the great classical Romanian poets in a special key that served the purposes of propaganda. For example, in the work of Mihai Eminescu (the last great European romantic poet), the same propaganda identified certain elements that could be useful for its purposes, thus an important series of themes was diverted towards these ambitions. After 1990, Romanian society and the national artistic environment found themselves in a situation of total freedom of expression, and the transition was very sudden. The situation was similar in the whole of Eastern Europe and this new freedom was rather difficult for coping with not only for the artists but for the whole society. The world of theatre rightly tried to detach itself from the traumas during the Communist regime and establish a safe distance from the unfortunate clichés of the past, from the procedures and means of stage expression so well established during half a century of Communist propaganda. One of the genres that lost substantial ground, though, was exactly that of poetic recital. Most prominent Romanian actors avoided it because they wanted to evade the association with an outdated way of artistic expression which was for so long diverted from the true purpose of art - that of creating stimulating emotion. Of course, there were exceptions: those who understood the importance of poetry and emotion for the general audience. Several actors did not shy away from publicly reciting true poetry (as they did before 1990), insisting on artistic truth, emotion and value: Lucia Mureșan, Ovidiu Iuliu Moldovan, Ion Caramitru, Valeria Seciu, Ilinca Tomoroveanu, Traian Stănescu, Constantin Chiriac, Mircea Albulescu and others. Even more than others, Constantin Chiriac, from the very beginning of his career, understood the importance of “real” poetry in a society that responds to emotion and truth. Addressing the public through poetry and, thus, serving the community – this is the solid foundation on which he built his career as an actor. It is also crucial to note that he is the author of a doctoral thesis focused precisely on the act of interpreting and reciting poetry. His thesis has become a textbook for the poetry recital technique for students and professionals in the field of performing arts. Games, Words, Crickets... Photo: Dragos Dumitru. At Radu Stanca National Theatre in Sibiu, the theatrical autumn of 2022 was marked by the opening of Games, Words, Crickets… , directed by Silviu Purcărete: a performance of poetry by Constantin Chiriac, with the support of more than a dozen of the company’s actors who performed a series of stage exercises that derived from improvisations led by the director. The text of the performance was based on fragments from a diverse and surprising selection of Romanian and international poets: Carl Sandburg, Nazim Hikmet, Serghei Esenin, William Shakespeare, Paul Verlaine, Mihai Eminescu, Marin Sorescu, Radu Stanca, and others. Silviu Purcărete is a director who has made his audience expect to see in his shows a special dynamic involving usually a group of actors on stage who are driven by the energy and emotion instigated by improvisational exercises. Gulliver's Travels, Faust, Metamorphoses and The Scarlet Princess are just a few of the performances staged by him in Sibiu in which a group of actors acquires the consistency of a real character that is in direct relationship with the central performer (or performers). The performance of the group of actors is usually accompanied by music or is itself a music generator, the stage, thus, becoming a space where Silviu Purcărete creates a functional, extremely colorful, and diverse world—a universe that works according to its own special rules where this collective (but also individualized) character evolves and develops organically in their relationship with the main performer and the particularities of the space on stage and the universe in the script. This is also the general context for Games, Words, Crickets... : At the beginning on stage there are the main elements of a naive and picturesque winter universe. The snowmen melt, the carrot used as a nose falls off, the snowbanks also melt, the birds chirp. Then the white and cold nature transforms, and comes back to life, as a sign of a new beginning. It is with this sign that the show begins because we feel a state of expectation and impatience--an emotion like that in childhood at the reawakening of spring. Gradually the group of actors breaks away from the theme of the end of winter and of the new beginning, and start an exercise of balancing several dozen glasses on top of each other, in a scenic expression of fragility and transparency and, of course, of the joy of building a spectacular foundation marked by these coordinates. Constantin Chiriac, in his first moment on stage, makes use of Carl Sandburg (the story about the king and the shah from The People, Yes ) to start a captatio benevolentiae exercise, based on the textual formula specific to telling stories: “Once upon a time...” In this way, he establishes the dramatic convention, opens the story, and initiates the magic of emotion. The script never aims to tell a story, which is a rarity for Silviu Purcărete, a director who has adapted some of the most important stories from world literature and drama: One Thousand and One Nights, Gulliver's Travels, Pantagruel , etc. This time, more than ever before, he uses the text as a pretext and the main intention is to create emotion. The protagonist of the show, Constantin Chiriac, is configured as an ordinary character in a light-colored costume, who stands out in the chromatics and the special configuration of the stage, as implemented by Dragoș Buhagiar, the set designer. Of course, the commonality of the character reciting poems is an element sought out by the director and well assumed and carried out by the actor. Through this artistic approach, the poetic text is emphasized in all its nuances and labyrinthine, deep, extremely differing substrata, both for the performer and the audience. In addition, the stage direction of the performance is extremely attentive to the means of expression of the character who recites the poems: his banality is not pushed into an existentialist zone, as is the one in which, for example, Ionesco's famous Béranger works. On the contrary, Silviu Purcărete places his actor, Constantin Chiriac, in a detached area, where the great questions raised by the text have a welcomed ludic counterpoint, assumed both by the role itself and by the group of actors on stage, who develop and continue their improvisations in parallel with the poetry in the text. Performing arts professionals know very well the fundamental difficulties related to expressing poetic texts on stage. The enunciation that reaches the audience must be precisely distilled by the performer and a truly interdisciplinary approach to the text is needed. Philology, as a field that is tangential to dramaturgy, is particularly useful in this sense, because it may offer a helpful set of theoretical tools that may help in this whole endeavor. The technique of the poetry recital requires the development of an activity that is, to a great extent, similar to that of a detective: good knowledge of all the nuances of the text and the entire work of the poet (for the best possible selection of texts), and also identification of several cores of the poetic text that will later be used by the performer and passed on to the public. In addition to all this, it is essential to establish a possible dialogue in the text that is spoken on stage, which can then be verbalized and delivered with theatrical means. This is, for example, why conceptual poetry is so difficult to recite on stage. Through the main performer and the group of actors who carry out the improvisation exercises, Games, Words, Crickets establishes a dialogue that works in several ways, all of which are suffused with emotion. First of all, the dialogue between the protagonist and the audience should be mentioned. The foundation on which it is built is the poetry recited by Constantin Chiriac, which does not communicate a precise content of ideas or facts, as the audience is used to when going to the theatre, but focuses on the delivery of emotion from the poetic text. The “sender” (the protagonist) may use means that are sometimes theatrically exaggerated and dissolve the fourth wall of the stage. Theatrical convention and the routines of watching a theatrical performance may make the audience see a character in the protagonist. However, the director's stage reality proposes a concept that uses poetry to convey not ideas and facts, but emotion. The script is not made up of a chain of events that link together to build up dramatic tension and reach a climax, but of successive emotions, which are communicated by the protagonist to the audience through often playful means and the goal is the creation and the stage configuration of a whole universe, with its special rules, in which not only those on the stage but the entire audience take refuge. Furthermore, also regarding the decomposition of the poetic text and the identification of dialogue vectors, it is essential to detail one of the most important moments of the performance: two life-size marionettes, copies of the protagonist, appear on stage, manipulated by the actors. The marionettes become part of the mechanism that configures the dialogue: the performer is in a communicative relationship with these marionettes. Questions are answered; answers generate new questions; the poetic text, loaded with deep philosophical meanings, becomes more and more accessible to the general audience, without its universe of meanings being altered. Moreover, for one of Mihai Eminescu’s poems, approaching the possible dialogue with ludic means on a theatre stage implies a happy adaptation to the horizon of expectations of the contemporary spectator. The world is now fast, communication has changed enormously in the last decades, and identifying new nuances and levels in the process of delivering the poetic text to the public through a (re)configuration of the dialogue may be a useful and rewarding approach. Finally, the two marionettes convey extra theatricality and fit perfectly into the characteristics of Silviu Purcărete's theatrical universe: the apparent grotesqueness of the images is augmented by dialogue, emotion, and playfulness. The music of the show is composed by Vasile Şirli and is a complex of sounds that accompany the stage actions and the emotions transmitted by the protagonist to the audience. The sounds are created spontaneously, on stage, under the gaze of the spectators, and in a close relationship with the text, which emphasizes the playfulness mentioned earlier. Furthermore, when the protagonist and the improvisations of the group of actors are accompanied by recorded music, it joins the general tones of an open and bright space. The playfulness that marks the whole show is accentuated by the set design signed by Dragoș Buhagiar: the space is wide open, referring to the universality of poetry, the colors are bright, so that the lights can provide nuances and brilliance, or even texture to all the images. Games, Words, Crickets... Photo: Dragos Dumitru. The group of actors behind the protagonist (seventeen of them) behaves as a parallel mechanism which associates with the poetic text, enhances its potential, and completes it, or ironizes the actions on stage. Their costumes are also light-colored (shirts and shorts with suspenders)—a reference to a possible eternal childhood associated with playfulness. The games primarily belong to the group of actors. This suggests a character that stands out from the crowd or, on the contrary, a comic-grotesque uniformity caused by the masks they wear at a certain point. In Games, Words, Crickets... , the seventeen who accompany the protagonist on stage have the precise role of increasing the playfulness of the whole artistic endeavor. Finally, one last thing to be emphasized: in an artistic and social context marked by a troubled and complex reality, Silviu Purcărete turns to true poetry in order to create a sensitive and emotional show. He has been known as a creator of poetry on stage through the images and energies of his performances. In Games, Words, Crickets... we have the opportunity to see how he uses a selection from the world's great poetry to enhance his own stage emotion. Image Credits: Article References References About the author(s) Dr. Ion M. Tomuș is a Professor at “Lucian Blaga” University, Sibiu, the Department of Drama and Theatre Studies, where he teaches courses in History of Romanian Theatre, History of Worldwide Theatre, Text and Stage Image and Drama Theory. He is member of the Centre for Advanced Studies in the Field of Performing Arts (Cavas). In 2008 he received his PhD from the National University of Drama and Film, Bucharest, with a doctoral thesis entitled Realist and Naïve Picturesqueness in Vasile Alecsandri’s, I. L. Caragiale’s, and Eugene Ionesco’s Plays and Their Stage Adaptations. In 2013 he finished a postdoctoral study together with the Romanian Academy, focused on the topic of the modern international theatre festival, with case studies on the Edinburgh International Festival, Festival d’Avignon, and Sibiu International Theatre Festival. He has published studies, book reviews, theatre reviews, and essays in prestigious cultural magazines and academic journals in Romania and Europe. Since 2005, he has been co-editor of the annual Text Anthology published by Nemira Publishing House for each edition of the Sibiu International Theatre Festival. Since 2005, Mr. Tomuș is part of the staff at the Sibiu International Theatre Festival (SITF is the third performing arts festival in the world, preceded by the ones in Edinburgh and Avignon). Ion M. Tomuș was Head of the Department of Drama and Theatre Studies, in “Lucian Blaga” University of Sibiu (2011-2019), and now he is the Chair of the PhD School in Theatre and Performing Arts at the same university Since October 2016, Ion M. Tomuș is advising PhD students in the field of Performing Arts at “Lucian Blaga” University of Sibiu. Email: ion.tomus@ulbsibiu.ro European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Report from London (December 2022) Confessions, storytelling and worlds in which the impossible becomes possible. The 77th Avignon Festival, July 5-25, 2023 “Regietheater:” two cases The Grec Festival 2023 The Festival of the Youth Theatre of Piatra Neamt, Romania: A Festival for “Youth without Age” (notes on the occasion of the 34th edition) Report from Germany Poetry on Stage: Games, Words, Crickets..., Directed by Silviu Purcărete Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

S T A R R BUSBY presents Working Up A Surrender: A Communal Offering, Part II at the PRELUDE 2024 Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center CUNY. PRELUDE Festival 2024 Working Up A Surrender: A Communal Offering, Part II S T A R R BUSBY 4-4:50 pm Saturday, October 19, 2024 The Segal Theatre RSVP Working Up A Surrender: A Communal Offering is an experience in support of community building and collective liberation that explores the question 'How can we center connection and care in a rapidly changing world?’ A Communal Offering, Part II will provide audience members a space to relax, listen deeply, and recharge. The performance will be followed by a conversation with River Ramirez. Please also join us for Working Up A Surrender: A Communal Offering, Part I on Thursday, October 17, 6-8 pm in the Elebash Recital Hall Lobby. Visitors are invited to arrive at Elebash Lobby at any time from 6-8 pm for this event. Working Up A Surrender: Collective Healing Experiments was first produced at JACK with the support of a NYSCA Grant LOBSTER Nora loves Patti Smith. Nora is Patti Smith. Nora is stoned out of her mind in the Chelsea Hotel. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is her mind. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is an out-of-use portable classroom in the Pacific Northwest, and that classroom is a breeding ground for lobsters. LOBSTER by Kallan Dana directed by Hanna Yurfest produced by Emma Richmond with: Anna Aubry, Chris Erdman, Annie Fang, Coco McNeil, Haley Wong Needy Lover presents an excerpt of LOBSTER , a play about teenagers putting on a production of Patti Smith and Sam Shepard's Cowboy Mouth . THE ARTISTS Needy Lover makes performances that are funny, propulsive, weird, and gut-wrenching (ideally all at the same time). We create theatre out of seemingly diametrically opposed forces: our work is both entertaining and unusual, funny and tragic. Needylover.com Kallan Dana is a writer and performer originally from Portland, Oregon. She has developed and presented work with Clubbed Thumb, The Hearth, The Tank, Bramble Theater Company, Dixon Place, Northwestern University, and Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute. She is a New Georges affiliated artist and co-founder of the artist collaboration group TAG at The Tank. She received her MFA from Northwestern University. Upcoming: RACECAR RACECAR RACECAR with The Hearth/Connelly Theater Upstairs (dir. Sarah Blush), Dec 2024. LOBSTER with The Tank (dir. Hanna Yurfest), April/May 2025. Needylover.com and troveirl.com Hanna Yurfest is a director and producer from Richmond, MA. She co-founded and leads The Tank’s artist group TAG and creates work with her company, Needy Lover. Emma Richmond is a producer and director of performances and events. She has worked with/at HERE, The Tank, The Brick, and Audible, amongst others. She was The Tank’s 2022-23 Producing Fellow, and is a member of the artist group TAG. Her day job is Programs Manager at Clubbed Thumb, and she also makes work with her collective Trove, which she co-founded. www.emma-richmond.com Rooting for You The Barbarians It's the Season Six premiere of 'Sava Swerve's: The Model Detector' and Cameron is on it!!! June, Willa, and (by proximity) Sunny are hosting weekly viewing parties every week until Cameron gets cut, which, fingers crossed, is going to be the freakin' finale! A theatrical playground of a play that serves an entire season of 'so-bad-it's-good' reality TV embedded in the social lives of a friend group working through queerness, adolescence, judgment, and self-actualization. Presenting an excerpt from Rooting for You! with loose staging, experimenting with performance style, timing, and physicality. THE ARTISTS Ashil Lee (he/they) NYC-based actor, playwright, director, and sex educator. Korean-American, trans nonbinary, child of immigrants, bestie to iconic pup Huxley. Described as "a human rollercoaster" and "Pick a lane, buddy!" by that one AI Roast Bot. 2023 Lucille Lortel nominee (Outstanding Ensemble: The Nosebleed ) and Clubbed Thumb Early Career Writers Group Alum. NYU: Tisch. BFA in Acting, Minor in Youth Mental Health. Masters Candidate in Mental Health and Wellness (NYU Steinhardt: 20eventually), with intentions of incorporating mental health consciousness into the theatre industry. www.ashillee.com Phoebe Brooks is a gender non-conforming theater artist interested in establishing a Theatre of Joy for artists and audiences alike. A lifelong New Yorker, Phoebe makes art that spills out beyond theater-going conventions and forges unlikely communities. They love messing around with comedy, heightened text, and gender performance to uncover hidden histories. She's also kind of obsessed with interactivity; particularly about figuring out how to make audience participation less scary for audiences. Phoebe has a BA in Theatre from Northwestern University and an MFA in Theatre Directing from Columbia University's School of the Arts. The Barbarians is a word-drunk satirical play exploring political rhetoric and the power of words on the world. With cartoonish wit and rambunctious edge, it asks: what if the President tried to declare war, but the words didn't work? Written by Jerry Lieblich and directed by Paul Lazar, it will premiere in February 2025 at LaMama. The Barbarians is produced in association with Immediate Medium, and with support from the Venturous Theater Fund of the Tides Foundation. THE ARTISTS Jerry Lieblich (they/them) plays in the borderlands of theater, poetry, and music. Their work experiments with language as a way to explore unexpected textures of consciousness and attention. Plays include Mahinerator (The Tank), The Barbarians (La Mama - upcoming), D Deb Debbie Deborah (Critic’s Pick: NY Times), Ghost Stories (Critic’s Pick: TimeOut NY), and Everything for Dawn (Experiments in Opera). Their poetry has appeared in Foglifter, Second Factory, TAB, Grist, SOLAR, Pomona Valley Review, Cold Mountain Review, and Works and Days. Their poetry collection otherwise, without was a finalist for The National Poetry Series. Jerry has held residencies at MacDowell, MassMoCA, Blue Mountain Center, Millay Arts, and UCROSS, and Yiddishkayt. MFA: Brooklyn College. www.thirdear.nyc Paul Lazar is a founding member, along with Annie-B Parson, of Big Dance Theater. He has co-directed and acted in works for Big Dance since 1991, including commissions from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Old Vic (London), The Walker Art Center, Classic Stage Co., New York Live Arts, The Kitchen, and Japan Society. Paul directed Young Jean Lee’s We’re Gonna Die which was reprised in London featuring David Byrne. Other directing credits include Bodycast with Francis McDormand (BAM), Christina Masciotti’s Social Security (Bushwick Starr), and Major Bang (for The Foundry Theatre) at Saint Ann’s Warehouse. Awards include two Bessies (2010, 2002), the Jacob’s Pillow Creativity Award (2007), and the Prelude Festival’s Frankie Award (2014), as well an Obie Award for Big Dance in 2000. Steve Mellor has appeared on Broadway (Big River ), Off-Broadway (Nixon's Nixon ) and regionally at Arena Stage, Long Wharf Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, Portland Stage and Yale Rep. A longtime collaborator with Mac Wellman, Steve has appeared in Wellman's Harm’s Way, Energumen, Dracula, Cellophane, Terminal Hip (OBIE Award), Sincerity Forever, A Murder of Crows, The Hyacinth Macaw, 7 Blowjobs (Bessie Award), Strange Feet, Bad Penny, Fnu Lnu, Bitter Bierce (OBIE Award), and Muazzez . He also directed Mr. Wellman's 1965 UU. In New York City, he has appeared at the Public Theater, La Mama, Soho Rep, Primary Stages, PS 122, MCC Theater, The Chocolate Factory, and The Flea. His film and television credits include Sleepless in Seattle, Mickey Blue Eyes, Celebrity, NYPD Blue, Law and Order, NY Undercover, and Mozart in the Jungle. Chloe Claudel is an actor and director based in NYC and London. She co-founded the experimental company The Goat Exchange, with which she has developed over a dozen new works of theater and film, including Salome, or the Cult of the Clitoris: a Historical Phallusy in last year's Prelude Festival. She's thrilled to be working with Paul and Jerry on The Barbarians . Anne Gridley is a two time Obie award-winning actor, dramaturg, and artist. As a founding member of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, she has co-created and performed in critically acclaimed works including Life & Times, Poetics: A Ballet Brut, No Dice, Romeo & Juliet, and Burt Turrido . In addition to her work with Nature Theater, Gridley has performed with Jerôme Bel, Caborca, 7 Daughters of Eve, and Big Dance, served as a Dramaturg for the Wooster Group’s production Who’s Your Dada ?, and taught devised theater at Bard College. Her drawings have been shown at H.A.U. Berlin, and Mass Live Arts. B.A. Bard College; M.F.A. Columbia University. Naren Weiss is an actor/writer who has worked onstage (The Public Theater, Second Stage, Kennedy Center, Geffen Playhouse, international), in TV (ABC, NBC, CBS, Comedy Central), and has written plays that have been performed across the globe (India, Singapore, South Africa, U.S.). Upcoming: The Sketchy Eastern European Show at The Players Theatre (Mar. '24). S T A R R busby (they/she/he/we - all pronouns said with respect) is a Black experimental artist who sings, acts, composes, educates, and is committed to the liberation of all people. A recent recipient of a NYSCA grant, S T A R R leads a music project under their name which will release a debut project in 2024 - Working Up A Surrender . She is also the lead singer of dance&b band People's Champs (www.peopleschampsnyc.com ) which released their latest project, Show Up, in the Fall of 2023. S T A R R has also supported and collaborated with artists such as The Gorillaz, Esperanza Spalding, Son Lux, X Ambassadors, Kimbra, Alice Smith, and Quelle Chris. Selected credits: If You Unfolded Us (Sable Elyse Smith, MoMA); Rest Within the Wake (James Allister Sprang, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Featured Soloist); (pray) (Ars Nova and National Black Theatre, A Singer, Composer, and Music Director)*Lucille Lortel Award Winner; The Beautiful Lady (La Mama, Boris); On Sugarland (NYTW, co-composer); Octet (Signature Theatre, Paula) *Drama Desk Award Winner; Mikrokosmos, Sterischer Herbst (Graz), Nottingham Contemporary; The Girl with the Incredible Feeling , Spoleto Festival dei Due Mondi. All music available via Bandcamp and all streaming services. Love, gratitude and ashé to my blessed honorable ancestors, especially MME. linktr.ee/S_T_A_R_R Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2024 See What's on

The Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) is an annual event showcasing films drawn from the world of theatre and performance. The festival presents experimental, emerging, and established theatre artists and filmmakers from around the world to audiences and industry professionals. 2024 Festival See the full lineup of films at this year's festival below. A selection of films will be screened in-person at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center whilst others will be available to watch online May 16th onwards, for a period of three weeks. SEE IN-PERSON SCHEDULE Online, In-Person "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Online Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) Online Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Online / In-Person I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Online, In-Person MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films Online / In-Person ORESTEIA Carolin Mader In-Person SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa Online The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine Online The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula Online Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith Online "talk to us" Kirsten Burger In-Person Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Online GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Online, In-Person Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Online / In-Person Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover In-Person QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Online, In-Person Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler Online The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard Online The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Online next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Online BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon Online / In-Person Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska In-Person Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Online Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre Online, In-Person Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Online / In-Person Red Day Besim Ugzmajli Online Snow White Dr.GoraParasit In-Person The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Online / In-Person WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou Online / In-Person Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong In-Person ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller Online Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter Online Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade Online, In-Person My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville Online / In-Person Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 Online The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski Online / In-Person The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Online / In-Person Wo/我 Jiemin Yang In-Person Screenings at the Segal Center Find it on Google Maps (365 5th Ave, New York) Thursday May 16 6:00 -7:40 PM Queendom by Agniia Galdanova 7:50 – 8:50 PM Maria Klassenberg by Tomasz Śliwiński and Magda Hueckel (World Premiere) RSVP Day 1 Friday May 17 6:00 – 7:00 PM Genocide and Movements by Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos and Luis Carlos de Alencar 7:00 – 8:00 PM Swing & Sway by Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa 8:00 – 9:30 PM Making of Pinocchio by Rosana Cade and Ivor MacAskill RSVP Day 2 Saturday May 18 11:05 AM – 12:05 AM Who is Eugenio Barba by Magdalene Remoundou 12:10 - 2:15 PM Schlingensief: A Voice That Shook the Silence by Frieder Schlaich 2:20 - 3:50 PM ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED by Claudia Muller 4:00 – 5:51 PM Dancing Pina by Florian Heinzen-Ziob RSVP Day 3 Monday May 20 2pm – 3:30 PM Die Kinder der Toten by Kelly Copper & Pavol Liška - Nature Theater of Oklahoma 3:35 – 5:20 PM Viewing of selected short films from the festival lineup Red Day by Besim Ugzmajli (15 Mins), Interstate by Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can (6 Mins), Wo/我 by Jiemin Yang (11 Mins), I AM NOT OK by Gabrielle Lansner (12 Mins), MUSE by Pete O'Hare / Warehouse Films (10 Mins), ORESTEIA by Carolin Mader (6 Min), "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper by Ellen Callaghan (6 Mins), Snow White by Dr.GoraParasit (18 Mins), The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit by Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula (23 Mins) 5:20 – 6:40 PM Chinoiserie Redux by Ping Chong, Kristina Varshavskaya 6:45 – 7:45 PM Revolution 21 by Martyna Peszko (US Premiere) 7:50 – 9:30 PM The Hamlet Syndrome by Elwira Niewiera and Piotr Rosolowski RSVP Day 4 About The Festival The Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) is an annual event showcasing films drawn from the world of theatre and performance. The 2024 festival is co-curated by Frank Hentschker and Tomek Smolarski, and supported by Gaurav Singh Nijjer on digital design. The festival presents experimental, emerging, and established theatre artists and filmmakers from around the world to audiences and industry professionals. From its inaugural edition in 2015 to its present-day hybrid avatar, The Segal Film Festival for Theatre and Performance (FTP) has served as a platform for recorded works that span the length and breadth of the performing arts. Festival Founder and Executive Director of the Martin E. Segal Theater Center, Frank Hentschker shares his inspiration for creating the festival: “Film and digital media are an integral part of theatre and performance. I am surprised that there is not a film festival out there right now focusing on theatre and performance. I thought ‘why not create one’?” In the time before Corona, the Segal Film Festival had evolved into the premier US event for new film and video work focusing on theatre and performance. Its mission was to invite experimental and established theatre makers to present work created for the screen – not filmed archival recordings – to audiences and industry professionals from around the world. Now, after a year and a half of digital and hybrid theatre offerings, the festival must take on a new meaning. The festival has held on to its mission of being a free and open-to-all event accessible to everyone. The 7th edition of the festival was held digitally in March 2022, and featured 80 films from 30 countries. For queries, feedback and any more information get in touch with us at segalfilmfestival@gmail.com Meet The Team Tomek Smolarski Co-Curator Tomek Smolarski is Film and Performing Arts Curator at the Polish Cultural Institute New York, with over 20 years of experience in production of international cultural events and he has extensive knowledge in cultural diplomacy. He initiated and executed projects with partners all over the US such as BAM, MoMA, Film at Lincoln Center, Museum of the Moving Image, Anthology Film Archives, NYU Skirball, Abrons Arts Center, Martin E. Segal Theater Center, La Mama Theater, Joe's Pub, RedCat, Odyssey Theater, Berkley Arts Museum and Pacific Film Archives, Chicago Cultural Center and many others. Gaurav Singh Nijjer Web and Digital Producer Gaurav Singh Nijjer is a theatre-maker, creative technologist and designer whose artistic works explore technology and media in live performance. He is one half of the Indian performing arts collective Kaivalya Plays, and also works as a freelance artist and arts manager with collectives in India and abroad, currently as Digital and Web Producer at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Centre CUNY. He is a former German Chancellor Fellow and a Chevening scholar. He trained at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London. Apart from theatre, Gaurav also works as a freelance marketing, design and creative consultant for diverse organizations. Frank Hentschker Co-Curator Frank Hentschker, who holds a Ph.D. in theatre from the now legendary Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Giessen, Germany, came to the Graduate Center in 2001 as program director for the Graduate Center’s Martin E. Segal Theatre Center and was appointed to the central doctoral faculty in theatre in 2009. Currently executive director and director of programs at the Segal Center, Hentschker has transformed the center into the nation’s leading forum for public programming in international and U.S. theatre and theatre studies; each year, he curates and produces more than forty events—staged readings, lecture-demonstrations, symposia, works-in-progress, and conversations with theatre scholars, theatrical luminaries, and emerging voices in the international, American, and New York theatre scenes. Among the vital events and series he founded at the Segal Center are the World Theatre Performance series; the annual fall PRELUDE festival, which features more than twenty New York–based theatre companies and playwrights; and the PEN World Voices Playwrights Series. Hentschker also led CUNY’s nineteen performing arts centers in founding the CUNY–Performing Arts Consortium (C–PAC), producing the consortium’s first joint festival in 2009. Hentschker edited the MESTC publications Jan Fabre: I Am A Mistake, Seven Works for the Theatre (2009) and New Plays from Spain (2013), and he served as president of the board of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art from 2005 to 2009. Before coming to the Graduate Center, Hentschker founded and directed DISCURS, the largest European student theatre festival existing today; he acted as Hamlet in Heiner Müller’s Hamletmaschine, directed by the playwright; performed in the Robert Wilson play The Forest (music by David Byrne); and worked as an assistant for Robert Wilson for many years. Producer, General Operations Manager Teresa Soraka Next Generation Fellow Nurit Chinn

Christine Mok Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 1 Visit Journal Homepage Chinese Looks Christine Mok By Published on December 11, 2017 Download Article as PDF Chinese Looks: Fashion, Performance, Race . Sean Metzger. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2014; Pp. 300. The 2015 theme for the Metropolitan Museum Costume Institute exhibition and gala in New York was supposed to be “Chinese Whispers: Tales of the East in Art, Film, and Fashion.” Curator Andrew Bolton explained the construct in Women’s Wear Daily as an homage to the “influence of Chinese aesthetics on designers,” acknowledging that, “what often is created is a virtual China, a mixing of…anachronistic styles, which results in [this] pastiche.” With its evocation of seduction in susurration, fairy and folk “Tales,” and the Far East, the announcement met with enough consternation that the exhibit was rebranded “China: Through the Looking Glass.” The curatorial team cites Edward Said in exhibition copy but makes clear that it “neither discount[s] nor discredit[s]” Orientalism, instead proposing “a less politicized and more positivistic examination of Orientalism as a site of infinite and unbridled creativity.” With unabashed commitment to a “virtual China” in the shadow of an economically ascendant China, the exhibition and gala reveal Western style as the anachronistic one. To unravel this pastiche of power, fantasy, race, and fashion, Sean Metzger offers us an erudite guide in Chinese Looks: Fashion, Performance, Race. Chinese Looks provides both the historical underpinnings and theoretical framework to understand the ways that global power and cultural meaning shift along what he calls the “Sino/American interface.” By examining a transnational history of theatre and film through the circulation and consumption of four “looks,” the monograph examines the queue, qipao (or cheongsam), Mao suit, and tuxedo, as racialized and gendered fashions that have come to constitute “Chineseness.” Beginning in the 1870s with yellowface performance and moving through the early 2000s, Metzger mobilizes adornment and attire to index shifting attitudes and policies that have structured US-China relations. His use of the solidus in “Sino/American interface” marks the complex terrain that is both “a boundary and a connection between the world’s current superpowers, a field that enables an articulation of difference as well as a linkage through…mechanisms of global capitalist production” (5). That difference is articulated through race, gender, and sexuality, and in attending to such differences, Metzger offers the book’s greatest theoretical contribution. Rather than focus on skin as the primary analytic of difference, he considers the “skein of race.” Metzger’s mode of critique builds off of Frantz Fanon’s work on dress and evokes Ian Haney Lopez’s racial fabrication to highlight fashion as an embodied practice that complicates both archive and repertoire. Much work on race oscillates between depth and surface, phenotype or blood and biology, asking us to look (only) skin deep or, to follow Joseph Roach, at the deep skin of racialization. To think through the “skein of race,” then, is to reorient racial surface and surface aesthetics toward a methodology that, according to Metzger, provides “a malleable apparatus for thinking about processes of racialization,” and “emphasizes bodily forms and surfaces but without immediate recourse to residual biologisms that have anchored much racial discourse” (12-13). And, “while a garment, like skin, orients the eye toward the body, clothing involves layers of intertwined and overlapping meanings produced through the psychic and material investments that enable everyday activities” (14). Vestments and the wardrobe present both an archive and repertoire that allows us to “think anew about epistemology and ontology of bodily performance, on both stage and screen” (6), such that the creativity that the Met Costume Institute assumes is the province of Western fashion designers, for Metzger, is actually the provenance of agency for Chinese/Americans on stage, screen, and in everyday life. In three sections focusing on the queue, qipao, and Mao suit, with the epigraph on the tuxedo, Metzger provides a cultural history of attire, chronicling skeins of race, gender, and sexuality. Each of the sections is made up of two to three chapters that mark the shifting histories and politics around these Chinese looks. Metzger moves adroitly across time and media, primarily film and theatre, but also photography, law, and literature. Like a good (under)garment, the book is well-structured and the case studies hold their own as single chapters. However, there is immense pleasure in seeing both the warp and weft of a look. The section on qipao, in particular, bares the multilayered skein of race, gender and agency, moving from the political possibilities of a pro-capitalist Chinese/American consciousness in Anna May Wong’s qipao, to the commodification of femininity and coloniality in Suzie Wong’s qipao, to the diasporic nostalgia on display in the panoply of qipao in Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love , indexing life after empire that is stuck in the ice storm of the Cold War . In terms of singular chapters, his analysis of yellowface performance in nineteenth-century American melodrama, based on archival research and deft analysis of plays, is a significant piece of theatre history, a necessary addition to the legacy of racial impersonation on the American stage. It broadens existing work on yellowface by Krysten R. Moon and Robert G. Lee, by focusing on embodiment through the queue in the evolution of Charles Parsloe’s Chinaman. Metzger’s illumination of yellowface’s skein of race is indispensable given the recalcitrance today of this racist performance practice. A welcome addition to theatre and performance studies, film studies, Asian American studies, fashion theory, and gender and sexuality studies, Chinese Looks is poised to provide entrée into future conversations about China’s continued rise in geopolitics, the next chapter in the Sino/American interface. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Christine Mok University of Rhode Island Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue May Irwin American Musical Theater Musical Theatre Books New York's Yiddish Theater Chinese Looks Reclaiming Four Child Actors through Seven Plays in US Theatre, 1794-1800 The Illusion of Work: The Con Artist Plays of the Federal Theatre Project On Bow and Exit Music Legitimate: Jerry Douglas's Tubstrip and the Erotic Theatre of Gay Liberation Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Susan C. W. Abbotson 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 Law and Sexuality in Tennessee Williams’s America Susan C. W. Abbotson By Published on November 6, 2019 Download Article as PDF Law and Sexuality in Tennessee Williams’s America. Jacqueline O’Connor. Lanham, MD: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2016; Pp. 215 + xii. Taking a new historicist approach, Jacqueline O’Connor’s Law and Sexuality examines Tennessee Williams’s representations of sexual transgression in his drama and fiction as connected to issues of legality and social responses toward what was considered deviant. For Williams, sex constitutes the core of a person’s identity, and he clearly wrestled with what could be allowed in public versus what should be kept in private. O’Connor writes well, and her discussion of how this plays out in A Streetcar Named Desire is particularly compelling; it makes one wish she had covered more of his works. Williams, she asserts, does not simply focus on the socially marginalized, but on the legally so, and he refuses to view his characters as sordid, but compassionately recognizes them as troubled. As O’Connor suggests, tongue-in-cheek, Williams was not just interested in “the kindness of strangers” but also “kindness toward the strange” (27), as he wished to “distinguish the morally acceptable from the legally actionable” (30). When Williams began writing, post-war society had brought new sexual freedoms but any non-normative behavior was deemed disgusting and often subject to legal action. O’Connor posits that Williams’s “first-hand observations about the private and public lives of Americans whose sexual identities and practices situated them outside the law, whether male or female, gay or straight, rich or poor” inform all of his writing (2). That Williams was gay is clear, but O’Connor rightly insists that it is important to understand when he was gay. Her concerns are less with Williams’ literary life than his sexual one, which was in conflict with the laws and culture of his time, and how he personally and artistically navigated “tensions between the deviant and the orthodox” (5). This may make the book of greater interest to those engaged in cultural or American studies rather than literary. To establish her thesis regarding the bifurcation of Williams’s response to his own sexuality, O’Connor’s introduction depicts his development within a “complex and contradictory cultural reality” during which gay culture had become highly developed and accessible, and yet deeply transgressive and legally restricted (8). During Williams’s formative period, laws legislating sexual behavior of any kind multiplied, and in these pre-AIDS years “gay culture” was more concerned with the legal ramifications of “pick-ups,” rather than medical ones. In terms of biographical detail, she offers no more than one could glean from John Lahr’s Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh , but she gives a clear picture of what it was like to be gay in mid-century America. Focusing on Williams’s awareness of the “vulnerability of his own illegal body” (2) and the dual stream of attraction and revulsion that his writing–both personal and public–illustrates toward lives perceived by mainstream society as aberrant, she asks that we read his texts, not as narratives of Williams as a self-hating homosexual, but as coded challenges to the draconian sexual rules of law when he wrote. It is here she suggests something new. Using material from personal notebooks and letters, alongside published and draft versions of some of his key dramas and fiction, O’Connor illustrates Williams’s attitude towards social and legal perceptions of “sexual deviance” and the ways his language and situations echo these to expose the inadequacy of these perceptions. O’Connor weaves in legal debates and rulings of the time to make her argument. The study is comprised of an introduction and conclusion, plus four chapters; the first three chapters focus on Williams’ mid-century work (ordered thematically rather than chronologically) and the fourth considers later works’ reception from the 1970s. O’Connor has spent significant time in the archives, and all the expected critics are given voice, including David Savran, John Bak, and John Clum. A non-Williams scholar will find this a useful compendium, however, much of it recycles their views rather than extending them. Her few disagreements arise less from analyzing what William wrote than why he wrote as he did. She argues that we cannot grasp Williams’s work and politics without specific understanding that he was writing in an era when active laws suppressed even the mention of anti-normative sexuality, let alone explicit focus on the acts themselves. The first chapter references Night of the Iguana , but chiefly focuses on Streetcar , while the second chapter on fiction has an even narrower scope, beginning with brief analysis of “Hard Candy,” followed by “One Arm;” the pairing of these last two short works suggests compelling and ultimately sympathetic complexities in the characters of Krupper and Oliver, but what of the trickier Anthony Burns in “Desire and the Black Masseur.” The exclusion of so many relevant plays, such as Summer and Smoke , Camino Real , Suddenly Last Summer, or Sweet Bird of Youth limits the book’s persuasiveness, though the coverage of Streetcar and “One Arm” is enhanced by O’Connor’s discussion of alternate drafts of each text that effectively illustrate key decisions Williams made in their creation and revision. However, both chapters begin to feel repetitive. Judicious editing would have allowed for discussion of more plays and stories to strengthen the book’s thesis regarding the prevalence and impact of these tropes in Williams’s work. The third chapter proceeds similarly. After offering selective insights on how to view the sexuality of Big Daddy and Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , this chapter centers on Battle of Angels and its revision, Orpheus Descending, as complex studies of “law, morality and justice” in Williams’s America (125). Although the chapter is titled “The Fugitive Kind,” and a still from the movie graces the book’s cover, it is not discussed. The final chapter develops O’Connor’s argument that Williams’s 1975 Memoirs and its reception poisoned critics against his later work. This chapter moves into an insightful analysis of Small Craft Warnings , The Mutilation , and The Gnädiges Fräulein as works in which Williams renegotiated his attitudes for a post-Stonewall era. Again, analysis of more works would better bolster her argument that the “neglect of legal and political investigations of the diverse sexualities featured regularly in his drama and fiction” (18). Williams was politically aware has long been established. That he was also committed “to exposing the cultural suspicion and condemnation of sexual desire” (19) sounds valid, but O’Connor’s insistence on the “political urgency” (172) of his texts, and that “his work challenged not just attitudes, but policies” (48), reads a tad overblown. Ultimately, this book provides a valuable history of twentieth-century developments and changes in laws governing sexuality that contributes to American Studies scholarship, and O’Connor illustrates how the language of these laws permeates some of Williams’s writing for stage and fiction. To prove this negotiation was a conscious political act, or that his writing had legal ramifications is harder. However, if we view the fate of Williams’s sexualized characters from the contextualized perspective O’Connor demands, in which a violent outcome does not constitute the judgmental retribution some believe, but rather an outcome undercut by an underlying and often transformative compassion, then the book also offers Williams scholars a lens through which to reconsider his controversial characters. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Susan C. W. Abbotson Rhode Island 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 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.

Leche Hervida is a Solo Performance created in 2023. The work involves meticulous detail around all objects floor to ceiling. The foam floor is first laid below the meticulously constructed lighting rig by the artist. All of the objects in the work are created by IV Castellanos. The wearables are deconstructed during the production of this performance. PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE Leche Hervida IV Castellanos Dance, Performance Art English. Spanish, Quechua 20mins 2:30PM EST Friday, October 13, 2023 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All Leche Hervida is a Solo Performance created in 2023. The work involves meticulous detail around all objects floor to ceiling. The foam floor is first laid below the meticulously constructed lighting rig by the artist. All of the objects in the work are created by IV Castellanos. The wearables are deconstructed during the production of this performance. Content / Trigger Description: The performance goes to complete darkness at one point. Abstract Performance Artist and Sculptor. I create solo, collaborative and group task vignette performances. The objects in my performances are all constructed/deconstructed by myself and/or the collaborator/s I am working with. In addition, I create stand alone sculptures not meant to be activated by performances. I am a Three Spirit Queer Trans* Bolivian-Indige / American. www.ivcastellanos.com Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

NILE HARRIS, ALEX TATARSKY, ANH VO + ETHAN PHILBRICK presents Precarious Luxuries: improvisations, performance, and planning for the unplanned at the PRELUDE 2024 Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center CUNY. PRELUDE Festival 2024 Precarious Luxuries: improvisations, performance, and planning for the unplanned NILE HARRIS, ALEX TATARSKY, ANH VO + ETHAN PHILBRICK 4:30-6:00 pm Thursday, October 17, 2024 Proshansky Auditorium RSVP Three artists, one microphone, and a large room; the idea and practice of improvisation; making somethings out of nothings; finding ways out of no way; “yes and…”; “no but…”; everything for everyone. For this event, the artist and writer Ethan Philbrick gathers three artists who work in an expanded field of performance—Nile Harris, Alex Tatarsky, and Anh Vo—to improvise and discuss the stakes and strategies of their improvisational practices. Harris, Tatarsky, and Vo, while each working in different modes and in relation to different social exigencies, all turn to improvisational techniques as part of a broader commitment to the unknown and the unpredictable. While improvisation can sometimes be understood as the activity of a heroically volitional individual, Harris, Tatarsky, and Vo improvise so as to expose politically fraught dependencies and entanglements. Each artist will improvise for ten minutes before coming together for a conversation about improvisation with Philbrick. Precarious Luxuries is a keynote event of ASAP/15 and is presented in partnership with Prelude. LOBSTER Nora loves Patti Smith. Nora is Patti Smith. Nora is stoned out of her mind in the Chelsea Hotel. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is her mind. Actually, the Chelsea Hotel is an out-of-use portable classroom in the Pacific Northwest, and that classroom is a breeding ground for lobsters. LOBSTER by Kallan Dana directed by Hanna Yurfest produced by Emma Richmond with: Anna Aubry, Chris Erdman, Annie Fang, Coco McNeil, Haley Wong Needy Lover presents an excerpt of LOBSTER , a play about teenagers putting on a production of Patti Smith and Sam Shepard's Cowboy Mouth . THE ARTISTS Needy Lover makes performances that are funny, propulsive, weird, and gut-wrenching (ideally all at the same time). We create theatre out of seemingly diametrically opposed forces: our work is both entertaining and unusual, funny and tragic. Needylover.com Kallan Dana is a writer and performer originally from Portland, Oregon. She has developed and presented work with Clubbed Thumb, The Hearth, The Tank, Bramble Theater Company, Dixon Place, Northwestern University, and Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute. She is a New Georges affiliated artist and co-founder of the artist collaboration group TAG at The Tank. She received her MFA from Northwestern University. Upcoming: RACECAR RACECAR RACECAR with The Hearth/Connelly Theater Upstairs (dir. Sarah Blush), Dec 2024. LOBSTER with The Tank (dir. Hanna Yurfest), April/May 2025. Needylover.com and troveirl.com Hanna Yurfest is a director and producer from Richmond, MA. She co-founded and leads The Tank’s artist group TAG and creates work with her company, Needy Lover. Emma Richmond is a producer and director of performances and events. She has worked with/at HERE, The Tank, The Brick, and Audible, amongst others. She was The Tank’s 2022-23 Producing Fellow, and is a member of the artist group TAG. Her day job is Programs Manager at Clubbed Thumb, and she also makes work with her collective Trove, which she co-founded. www.emma-richmond.com Rooting for You The Barbarians It's the Season Six premiere of 'Sava Swerve's: The Model Detector' and Cameron is on it!!! June, Willa, and (by proximity) Sunny are hosting weekly viewing parties every week until Cameron gets cut, which, fingers crossed, is going to be the freakin' finale! A theatrical playground of a play that serves an entire season of 'so-bad-it's-good' reality TV embedded in the social lives of a friend group working through queerness, adolescence, judgment, and self-actualization. Presenting an excerpt from Rooting for You! with loose staging, experimenting with performance style, timing, and physicality. THE ARTISTS Ashil Lee (he/they) NYC-based actor, playwright, director, and sex educator. Korean-American, trans nonbinary, child of immigrants, bestie to iconic pup Huxley. Described as "a human rollercoaster" and "Pick a lane, buddy!" by that one AI Roast Bot. 2023 Lucille Lortel nominee (Outstanding Ensemble: The Nosebleed ) and Clubbed Thumb Early Career Writers Group Alum. NYU: Tisch. BFA in Acting, Minor in Youth Mental Health. Masters Candidate in Mental Health and Wellness (NYU Steinhardt: 20eventually), with intentions of incorporating mental health consciousness into the theatre industry. www.ashillee.com Phoebe Brooks is a gender non-conforming theater artist interested in establishing a Theatre of Joy for artists and audiences alike. A lifelong New Yorker, Phoebe makes art that spills out beyond theater-going conventions and forges unlikely communities. They love messing around with comedy, heightened text, and gender performance to uncover hidden histories. She's also kind of obsessed with interactivity; particularly about figuring out how to make audience participation less scary for audiences. Phoebe has a BA in Theatre from Northwestern University and an MFA in Theatre Directing from Columbia University's School of the Arts. The Barbarians is a word-drunk satirical play exploring political rhetoric and the power of words on the world. With cartoonish wit and rambunctious edge, it asks: what if the President tried to declare war, but the words didn't work? Written by Jerry Lieblich and directed by Paul Lazar, it will premiere in February 2025 at LaMama. The Barbarians is produced in association with Immediate Medium, and with support from the Venturous Theater Fund of the Tides Foundation. THE ARTISTS Jerry Lieblich (they/them) plays in the borderlands of theater, poetry, and music. Their work experiments with language as a way to explore unexpected textures of consciousness and attention. Plays include Mahinerator (The Tank), The Barbarians (La Mama - upcoming), D Deb Debbie Deborah (Critic’s Pick: NY Times), Ghost Stories (Critic’s Pick: TimeOut NY), and Everything for Dawn (Experiments in Opera). Their poetry has appeared in Foglifter, Second Factory, TAB, Grist, SOLAR, Pomona Valley Review, Cold Mountain Review, and Works and Days. Their poetry collection otherwise, without was a finalist for The National Poetry Series. Jerry has held residencies at MacDowell, MassMoCA, Blue Mountain Center, Millay Arts, and UCROSS, and Yiddishkayt. MFA: Brooklyn College. www.thirdear.nyc Paul Lazar is a founding member, along with Annie-B Parson, of Big Dance Theater. He has co-directed and acted in works for Big Dance since 1991, including commissions from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Old Vic (London), The Walker Art Center, Classic Stage Co., New York Live Arts, The Kitchen, and Japan Society. Paul directed Young Jean Lee’s We’re Gonna Die which was reprised in London featuring David Byrne. Other directing credits include Bodycast with Francis McDormand (BAM), Christina Masciotti’s Social Security (Bushwick Starr), and Major Bang (for The Foundry Theatre) at Saint Ann’s Warehouse. Awards include two Bessies (2010, 2002), the Jacob’s Pillow Creativity Award (2007), and the Prelude Festival’s Frankie Award (2014), as well an Obie Award for Big Dance in 2000. Steve Mellor has appeared on Broadway (Big River ), Off-Broadway (Nixon's Nixon ) and regionally at Arena Stage, Long Wharf Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, Portland Stage and Yale Rep. A longtime collaborator with Mac Wellman, Steve has appeared in Wellman's Harm’s Way, Energumen, Dracula, Cellophane, Terminal Hip (OBIE Award), Sincerity Forever, A Murder of Crows, The Hyacinth Macaw, 7 Blowjobs (Bessie Award), Strange Feet, Bad Penny, Fnu Lnu, Bitter Bierce (OBIE Award), and Muazzez . He also directed Mr. Wellman's 1965 UU. In New York City, he has appeared at the Public Theater, La Mama, Soho Rep, Primary Stages, PS 122, MCC Theater, The Chocolate Factory, and The Flea. His film and television credits include Sleepless in Seattle, Mickey Blue Eyes, Celebrity, NYPD Blue, Law and Order, NY Undercover, and Mozart in the Jungle. Chloe Claudel is an actor and director based in NYC and London. She co-founded the experimental company The Goat Exchange, with which she has developed over a dozen new works of theater and film, including Salome, or the Cult of the Clitoris: a Historical Phallusy in last year's Prelude Festival. She's thrilled to be working with Paul and Jerry on The Barbarians . Anne Gridley is a two time Obie award-winning actor, dramaturg, and artist. As a founding member of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, she has co-created and performed in critically acclaimed works including Life & Times, Poetics: A Ballet Brut, No Dice, Romeo & Juliet, and Burt Turrido . In addition to her work with Nature Theater, Gridley has performed with Jerôme Bel, Caborca, 7 Daughters of Eve, and Big Dance, served as a Dramaturg for the Wooster Group’s production Who’s Your Dada ?, and taught devised theater at Bard College. Her drawings have been shown at H.A.U. Berlin, and Mass Live Arts. B.A. Bard College; M.F.A. Columbia University. Naren Weiss is an actor/writer who has worked onstage (The Public Theater, Second Stage, Kennedy Center, Geffen Playhouse, international), in TV (ABC, NBC, CBS, Comedy Central), and has written plays that have been performed across the globe (India, Singapore, South Africa, U.S.). Upcoming: The Sketchy Eastern European Show at The Players Theatre (Mar. '24). Nile Harris (he/him) is a performer and director of live works of art. He has done a few things and hopes to do a few more, God willing. Alex Tatarsky (they/them) makes live performances in the unfortunate in-between zone of dance, theater, performance art, and comedy—drawing on traditions from vaudeville to futurist poetry. Their practice embraces the figure of the bouffon, a European clown type said to live in the swamps at the edge of the kingdom, who was not only allowed to mock the king’s power but rewarded for it. Tatarsky’s original solo pieces have been presented at a wide array of venues including La MaMa, MoMA PS1, The Kitchen, Judson Memorial Church, Playwrights Horizons, and Abrons Arts Center, as well as comedy clubs, bars, basements, and trash heaps. As curatorial fellow at the Poetry Project, they organized a series on the poetics and politics of rot. Along with collaborator Ming Lin, they form one half of Shanzhai Lyric and its fictional office Canal Street Research Association. Tatarsky experienced fleeting fame as Andy Kaufman’s daughter and used to perform as a mound of dirt. Anh Vo (they/them) is a Vietnamese choreographer and writer working primarily in New York City, with a second base in Hanoi. Their practice fleshes out the body as a vessel for apparitional forces. Their work is situated in the unlikely lineage convergences between Downtown New York experimental dance, queer and feminist performance art, and Vietnamese folk ritual practices. Vo is indebted to Miguel Gutierrez’s unapologetic queerness and amorphous excess, Moriah Evan’s speculative commitment to the depth of interiority, Tehching Hsieh’s existential sense of time, and Ngoc Dai’s guttural sonic landscape of postwar Vietnam. Their formal training is in Performance Studies, studying with esteemed theorists and practitioners at Brown University (BA) and New York University (MA). Described by the New York Times as “risky, erotic, enigmatic and boldly humorous,” their choreographic work has received critical recognition for its research-driven and boundaries-pushing formal investigation. Significant fellowships and grants include Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, NYSCA/NYFA Interdisciplinary Artist Fellowship, Dance/NYC Disability Dance Artistry Fellowship, USArtist International grant, Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art, Brooklyn Arts Council grants, and FCA Emergency Grants. Ethan Philbrick (he/him) is a cellist, performance artist, and writer. He holds a PhD in performance studies from New York University and has taught performance theory and practice at Pratt Institute, Muhlenberg College, New York University, Wesleyan College, Yale University, and The New School. He is currently performance curator-in-residence at The Poetry Project. In 2023, Philbrick published Group Works: Art, Politics, and Collective Ambivalence with Fordham University Press. He is part of the musical-theatrical project DAYS and has presented solo and collaborative performances at The Kitchen, NYU Skirball, Wesleyan Center for the Arts, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and Grey Art Museum. His musical performances have been called “overwhelmingly beautiful” and “extremely strange” in The Nation and his writing has been characterized as “rich and fascinating” in e-flux. Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2024 See What's on

Watch Moi-même by Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. In 1968 Paris, Lee Breuer, along with future members of the legendary downtown experimental theater company, Mabou Mines, shot an unscripted, silent satire following a thirteen-year-old boy named Kevin (Kevin Mathewson) attempting to make a film against the backdrop of the May student uprising. Abandoned as unfinished, the project was resurrected by Breuer’s son, filmmaker Mojo Lorwin, who began restoring and re-imagining the unfinished film in the last year of his father’s life Moi-même features a cameo by Jean-Luc Godard, footage of the student protesters outside the Sorbonne, and early performances from several of the original members of Mabou Mines including Ruth Maleczech, David Warrilow, and Fred Neumann, also known for their interpretations of Samuel Beckett’s work. Faced with hours of unedited silent film (Breuer’s original intention had been to dub the film later), Lorwin spent three years writing a script, editing the picture, and working with a number of voice actors, musicians, and sound professionals to create a feature film out of the raw footage. A collaboration between father and son across half a century, Moi-même is both a lost 60s arthouse film and a new experimental film in its own right, which uses the original footage to tell a story about the political and artistic legacy of the 60s in our time and to explore the meaning of abandoned projects.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Moi-même At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at Anthology Film Archives (32 Second Avenue, NY 10003) on Saturday May 17th at 3pm. It will be followed by a Q&A with Mojo Lorwin and Kevin Mathewson, moderated by Frank Hentschker. RSVP Please note this film has a ticketed entry and is being screened at Anthology Film Archive. Click on the button above to visit the AFA website to reserve your seats. Country USA, France Language English, French Running Time 65 minutes Year of Release 1968/2024 About The Film In 1968 Paris, Lee Breuer, along with future members of the legendary downtown experimental theater company, Mabou Mines, shot an unscripted, silent satire following a thirteen-year-old boy named Kevin (Kevin Mathewson) attempting to make a film against the backdrop of the May student uprising. Abandoned as unfinished, the project was resurrected by Breuer’s son, filmmaker Mojo Lorwin, who began restoring and re-imagining the unfinished film in the last year of his father’s life Moi-même features a cameo by Jean-Luc Godard, footage of the student protesters outside the Sorbonne, and early performances from several of the original members of Mabou Mines including Ruth Maleczech, David Warrilow, and Fred Neumann, also known for their interpretations of Samuel Beckett’s work. Faced with hours of unedited silent film (Breuer’s original intention had been to dub the film later), Lorwin spent three years writing a script, editing the picture, and working with a number of voice actors, musicians, and sound professionals to create a feature film out of the raw footage. A collaboration between father and son across half a century, Moi-même is both a lost 60s arthouse film and a new experimental film in its own right, which uses the original footage to tell a story about the political and artistic legacy of the 60s in our time and to explore the meaning of abandoned projects. About The Artist(s) Lee Breuer (1937-2021) was an experimental theater writer and director and co-founder of the company Mabou Mines. His most acclaimed works include "The Shaggy Dog Animation"(1978), "The Gospel at Colonus" (1983), "Peter and Wendy" (1996), and "Mabou Mines DollHouse" (2004). Mojo Lorwin (1984-) is a filmmaker, film professor, and former political organizer. His 2019 short Summer in the City is a dream logic black comic exploration of climate change which won the “Best Brooklyn Project” award at the Brooklyn Film Festival in 2020. Get in touch with the artist(s) mojolorwin@gmail.com and follow them on social media moimememovie.com, https://www.instagram.com/mojolorwin/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 21, 2025 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Radu Afrim and his House Between the Blocks by Călin Ciobotari Published: December 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF House Between the Blocks (Târgu Mureș National Theatre Romania, Tompa Miklós Company) The adventure of Romanian director Radu Afrim's travels in the not-so-distant past, an adventure frequently equivalent to a self-referential discourse, has already been employed in a set of performances, of which, of course, the top of the list remains The Retro Bird… , created, yes, also in Târgu Mureș, a city that seems to offer the director the type of mental state necessary to return to subjects that are never definitively closed. Very intimate, personal, and signed with a special tenderness, such performances obviously occupy top places in Afrim's creation due to the intense way in which they contain their creator. The House Between the Blocks is one of these works written not only for the audience, but also for himself... The house between the blocks, a kind of island with volatile temporal relevance (it is no longer in the calendars, but in history, so its existence is assured forever, as one of the characters demonstrates), resembles a "coffin" at the bottom of a grave whose walls are the blocks that surround it. Through the window covered and uncovered, successively, by curtains, as through an incision into the Real made from inside the Unreal, we see a fragment of the concrete grandeur of socialism and we hear the children of the workers playing in the yard that once belonged to the house. Interestingly, communism always remains on an outside; everyone who enters the family Both's house seems to "take off" their shoes when they get here. Tender-ridiculous, a decrepit aristocracy seems to want to symbolically oppose the great mutations of the real. The interior is vast, ironically imperial, a "palace" room in which Mother Both, the "friend" of Empress Sisi, lives her century. The green Viennese terracotta stove, the stained glass in the window openings on the back door, the 1875 ceramic service, furniture whose shapes evoke a submerged world, all of this clearly defies the 1980s, but coexists, willingly or by necessity, with the radio, the bottle, the worn Persian carpets, the poverty, and the cold. The result is a dizzying mix of illusionary luxury and crude modesty, but also a strong air of retro-(un)reality. This is where the Both women live (Mother Karola and her two daughters, the old ladies, Ida and Etelka), together with the child brought by the waters, the orphan Misi. They live from "art", as the sisters have made a profession out of painting works reproduced on post stamps. Their art does not imitate the real, but imitates imitations of imitations of the real, as if the real reaches them at third or fourth hand. Individually, the paintings are true definitions of kitsch, but together, in the high paneling inside the house between the blocks, they have the air of distant, enigmatic, misunderstood aesthetics... The connection with the present is made especially through two characters: Misi, the orphan from the 1980s, who today arrived for a few hours in the town of the Both sisters, suddenly remembering all this thanks to the muffin-like smell of the paint colors from the cemetery shop. The second connection is through the character Pythia, the neighbor who sees the future; her predictions (the unbearable heat of a future December 1989 – the Romanian Revolution, the time when democracy will be threatened, paradoxically, by the fact that everyone has the right to vote, the Americans, the Russians and their wars etc.) are also a refuge in the future for a woman traumatized by the past. As usual, Afrim composes picturesque, but problematic, vulnerable characters, capable of provoking laughter, but also of making us think: besides Misi, two other children, Rocco, the boy conceived on August 23, and Adam, the gossipy child, then the forester Cornel, the small entrepreneur Csongor, organizer of the not very profitable film club in the Both sisters' house, the gynecologist's daughter, who came here to prepare for admission to Art School, in Cluj etc. They all seem attracted by something indefinable, something rare and very precious that the dinosaur mouth of the bulldozer threatens with definitive destruction. The relationship with reality of all the characters is so ambiguous that more than once you have the feeling that the stage is invaded by children who are playing art, life, communism, history. The tone is set by the fascinating character of the mother, a doll-like being cut out of Marquez's century of solitude, hyperlucid, and cynically observing, as if from inside a trance, the world and its transformations. The old woman mixes temporalities, mixes truths with fictions, becoming a spokesperson for the imaginary, but also for values that seem to belong only to the past: love, beauty, poetics. From her imperial bed, herself a museum of her own uniqueness, she revisits her erotic correspondence through her personal biographer, Misi, who will write a book about the love in the blank spaces between the words. The mother is also responsible for the entry of the ghostly into the scene: the soldier Kázmér, her first and great love, breaks away from the old woman's dreams and becomes concrete. Afrim keeps him in sight, integrating him into several memorable images such as the one in which, perched at the head of the sleeping old woman, he melancholy caresses strands of her long hair. In the end, he will lead her to the cemetery of heroes, accompanied by the echoes of dogs barking in the darkness of the golden age. But the ghostly also comes from the future, or rather, from the debates about the future of some characters who, from this point of view, feel Chekhovian. More than once, the sisters make you think of Three Sisters , especially in sequences like the one in which Ida, Etelka, and Pythia (who will turn out to be born of the same father as Etelka), together with a "Vershinin" from the Forest Department, talk about “what will be someday”. They do it in a way that berates the eternal reduction of people queueing in communism, and valorizes, instead, what these people think, what they dream, what they idealize. The video sometimes emphasizes escapes into the realm of the ideal, as when the block across the street is suddenly replaced by a plunge into a painting (a seascape à la Aivazovsky) and with a ship sweeping the scene. When you are ready to believe that the show is primarily about the life of the Hungarian community in Transylvania in the 1980s, in communism, Afrim imposes a dramatic turn, shifting the emphasis onto the concept of family and the nebulae behind the family. The importance of the biographer Misi grows exponentially, he himself getting caught in parallel biographies from which answers to identity questions are successively revealed. The blood family is doubled by a community family, then, symbolically, by a generally human one (with circumstantial references to Adam and Eve). Paradoxically, in this world of still life paintings from which human beings are missing, no one seems truly alone. Neither the ghosts that cross Eternity, nor the Hungarian Romanians in late-stage communism. The show is dedicated to the director's first graphics teacher, a detail that Afrim wants to emphasize at the end of the show, opening a new perspective on the House Between the Blocks : one related to art, regardless of its quality or scope, as a form of resistance not only to ideology, but also to the daily misfortunes of existence. For decades, the two sisters sacrifice their lives dedicating themselves to colors, discussions about how to draw bears or mountains too high to be the Carpathians. What they do is, in equal measure, small and grand, even if only through that sense of meaning that, at least for a while, their lives acquire. From their repetitive, mass-produced paintings, meant to beautify the canteen of the rolling mill or whatever other living space of working-class people, art, in its most minor definition, can hope to save the world. The remembrance that the sisters hope for is not just about remaining in someone's dreams, as they believe, but is also possible through traces of this kind left by colors (the 50 nuances of the gray color) on a canvas. Just as Afrim's first art teacher remains in memory through this show dedicated to her... The depth of the relationship between the director and the Hungarian troupe from Târgu Mureș has been written about repeatedly. It has materialized, over time, in collaborations that have led to landmark performances not only for Afrim, but for Romanian theater in general, like Tihna [The Composure] Castingul dracului [The Devil's Casting], Beție [Drunks], Pasărea retro… [The Retro Bird…], Grand Hotel... and so on. Diverse, versatile, playful, it's the kind of troupe that successfully fulfills the ambitions of characters that are as complicated as they are seductive. Where elsewhere could a Karola Both like the one from Târgu Mureș have been born, for example, in the amazing travesty of Csaba László's, an "Erendira" without anything caricatured, haloed by a very particular poetry of decrepitude, a bridge between multiple planes, generating humor and nostalgia, of egoism, but also of real superiority in relation to the world in which she lives her end. Erzsébet Fülöp, the performer of Ida, the older sister, confidently steers a woman's persona in whom she shows us resignation, hope, care, aging, but also dignity; she is supported by Katalin Berekméri, a strong element of the female-family triangle, then delightful in the character's transition to a new path, that of self-change, and overwhelming in her collapse in the last part of the show. László Rózsa skillfully alternates the many perspectives from which we see Misi, from the always available character from whom sensitivity emerges, to the narrator in whom deep emotions of encounters with the past reside, from the son upset by the parents' meeting, to the teenager who discovers love. László Zsolt Bartha presents us with Csongor, a mixture of harmless perversity and bankrupt entrepreneurship, but also an emissary of new times in which Bruce Lee films, Video, and a certain way of being will build careers. They are complemented by Gábor Viola (the virile and good-natured forester Cornel), Balázs Varga (the dead soldier, resurrected by the dreams of his youth's lover), Dorottya Nagy (the enigmatic and warm Pythia), Szabó Fruzsina (the gynecologist's daughter, the latter an amazing extratextual character, so well-defined that we almost look for him in the cast of the show), Nóra Szabadi (the red-haired Pentecostal woman), Botond Kóvacs (her husband with slow sperm), Bea Fülöp (Etelka's former classmate, the one who illicitly sells paint), Szabolcs Csíki (the aquatic child). You look at them all during the curtain call and feel grateful for the pure theater they offered you. On another note, perhaps the time has come to take Afrim seriously as a playwright. We have done so in the past, but always subordinating the playright to the director, refusing the absolute autonomy of the text and the status of "disposable play" that his scripts have assumed. I had access to the text a few hours before the performance. Afrim does this especially when he knows that for four hours we will depend on subtitles. Well, the reading was thrilling, the literary qualities of the dramaturgical material being, at least in my opinion, remarkable. A piece of dramatic literature of the highest quality, far above what, in general, contemporary Romanian playwriting produces. The situation is quite strange because it brings the theatrical ball back into the court of ... the director. What is certain, however, is that we can no longer talk about this dramaturgy without including in our debates, in our analyses and histories... the playwright Radu Afrim. Târgu Mureș National Theatre, "Tompa Miklós" Company - House between blocks , written and directed by Radu Afrim. Set designer: Anna Kupás. Costume designer: Orsolya Moldovan. Choreographer: Blanche Macaveiu. Stage manger: Lehel Rigmányi. Assistant director: Bea Fülöp. Video design: Samu Trucza. Prompter: Katalin Tóth. Translated by: László Sándor. Sound: Radu Afrim. Sound design: Vince Oláh. Lighting design: Radu Afrim, István Adám. Cast: László Rózsa, Erzsébet Fülöp, Katalin Berekméri, Balázs Varga, Csaba László, Lászlo Zsolt Bartha, Gábor Viola, Dorottya Nagy, Szabó Fruzsina, Nóra Szabadi, Botond Kóvacs, Bea Fülöp, Szabolcs Csíki. View date: 13th April, 2025 Image Credits: Article References References About the author(s) Călin Ciobotari is a theatre critic, Professor PhD and doctoral supervisor at the Faculty of Theatre of the “George Enescu” National Universtiy of Arts Iași, Romania. He is an associate professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and Social Political Sciences at the “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University Iași, Romania. He is member of the Romanian Theatre Union and of the Romanian Writers' Union, he is the author of over twenty books and about a thousand articles (journalism, studies, theatre reviews etc.). He is the editor-in-chief of the literary magazine “Dacia literară”, producer and presenter of the tv broadcast “Scena” (Apollonia TV Iași). In 2019 and in 2022 he was awarded the UNITER Prize for Theatre Criticism. In 2020, 2022, 2023 and 2024 he was director/ curator of the National Theatre Festival. The widely circulated author's volumes include Chekhov's Marginals (2016), The Stage Director and the Text. Reading Practices (2017), Hamlet in the Cherry Orchard (2018), Reciting Gorky. A Theatre on the Edge (2021), A History of Kissing in Theatre (2022), Letters to Hamlet (2023), The Dramaturgies of the Alcoho . Landmarks from o Fluid History of Theatre. Within the Theatre Doctoral School, of which he has been director since 2020, he develops the research directions of Aesthetics, Drama Theory and Theory of Performance Arts. calinciobotari@yahoo.com European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Theatre in Poland, Fall 2025 Editor's Statement - European Stages Volume 21 Robert Wilson’s Moby Dick at Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf, Summer 2025 Dramas of Separation at Festival d’Avignon 19th Edition Polyphonies of the Present: The Pulse of the Almada Festival Summer 2025 in London, England The Tragic Ideal of Eternal Youth: Folk Myth on the Modern Stage International Theatre Festival of Sibiu 32nd Edition Review of Samuel Barber’s Vanessa by Ópera do Castelo Radu Afrim and his House Between the Blocks Report from Berlin Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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

David Levine invites Matthew Gasda, author of "Dimes Square" and director of the Brooklyn Center for Theater Research, to discuss what's under the radar of Under the Radar. PRELUDE Festival 2023 ARTIST TALK The Other Downtown: David Levine, Matthew Gasda David Levine, Matthew Gasda Discussion English 1 hour 5:30PM EST Thursday, October 12, 2023 Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All David Levine invites Matthew Gasda, author of "Dimes Square" and director of the Brooklyn Center for Theater Research, to discuss what's under the radar of Under the Radar. David Levine is an OBIE and Guggenheim-award winning theater director and visual artist. His work has been covered by Frieze, Artforum, The New York Times , and his writing has appeared in n+1, Theater , and Parkett . He is Professor of the Practice of Performance, Theater and Media at Harvard University, and the author, with Shonni Enelow, of A Discourse on Method , published by 53rd State Press. His holographic film, Dissolution , will debut at the Museum of the Moving Image in late October. He is also the author of Re-Public , a 2005 manifesto for the artistic, fiscal, and operational overhaul of the Public Theater, commissioned by the journal Theater . Content / Trigger Description: www.davidlevine.art Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

By Daniel Gerould, Marvin Carlson | A collection of dramas from French theatre director and playwright René-Charles Guilbert de Pixerécourt. < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the TCG Bookstore or Amazon.com. You can also get in touch with us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu Pixérécourt: Four Melodramas Daniel Gerould, Marvin Carlson Download PDF Translated and Edited by Daniel Gerould and Marvin Carlson This volume contains four of Pixérécourt's most important melodramas: The Ruins of Babylon, or Jafar and Zaida; The Dog of Montargis, or The Forest of Bondy; Christopher Columbus, or the Discovery of the New World; and Alice, or The Scottish Gravediggers. Also included is Charles Nodier 's introduction to the 1843 Collected Edition of Pixérécourt's plays and two theoretical essays by the playwright, "Melodrama," and "Final Reflections on Melodrama." “Pixérécourt furnished the Theatre of Marvels with its most stunning effects, and brought the classic situations of fairground comedy up-to-date. He determined the structure of a popular theatre which was to last through the 19th century… Pixérécourt determined that scenery, music, dance, lighting and the very movements of his actors should no longer be left to chance but made integral parts of his plays.” -Hannah Winter, The Theatre of Marvels Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

Jeanne Klein Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 1 Visit Journal Homepage Reclaiming Four Child Actors through Seven Plays in US Theatre, 1794-1800 Jeanne Klein By Published on December 12, 2017 Download Article as PDF I’ve done my duty, and I’ve done no more. Tom Thumb [1] Despite the burgeoning of childhood studies since the early 1990s, few theatre historians have investigated the considerable achievements of child actors in early US theatre. As Shauna Vey argues, child actors should be re-conceptualized as wholly competent professionals capable of exercising their agency and rights. [2] Back in 1806, fifteen-year-old John Howard Payne asserted their dramatic competencies by publishing “an accurate list” of admired British and Irish “infant prodigies” in his own magazine. [3] Little did he know that well over thirty child performers had already graced US public stages since 1752 when Lewis Hallam involved his three children and one niece in what became the monopolistic Old American Company (OAC). In this essay, I reclaim four child actors who performed extensively from ages six to twelve from 1794 to 1798 when new permanent theatres were built in several major cities. [4] Miss Mary Harding and Miss M. Solomon (I’ll call her Margaret) originated or popularized substantive child characters, and Master Samuel Stockwell and Miss Harriet Sully also reenacted these classic roles. As US-born or newly naturalized citizens, these four actors were especially cherished in a nascent nation founded on moral virtues, democratic rights, and civic responsibilities. To illuminate their debuts, early careers, theatrical competencies, and subsequent lives, I offer four different case studies that exemplify how these and other child actors entered and left the profession. Throughout, I document which child actors earned substantial roles at major companies in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston, Charleston, Norfolk, and Richmond and later discuss how actor-managers adopted age-appropriate casting as a traditional acting convention before the nineteenth century. Most importantly, given that primary and secondary theatre history sources are remarkably silent on the achievements of child actors, I argue that these four actors in particular and several more introduced here should be recognized and valued for establishing acting, singing, and dancing as viable and respected child professions before the nineteenth century, similar to the extraordinary Billy Elliots of today. Given the lack of child-written records and scant accounts of their acting competencies, I examine the inherent challenges involved in their performances of pivotal child characters in seven British plays that premiered in the US during the auspicious 1794-96 seasons as follows: The Boy and Girl in The Children in the Wood ; the Page in The Purse ; Edward in Every One Has His Fault ; the title role in Tom Thumb ; Juliana and Narcisso in The Prisoner ; the titled Boy in The Adopted Child ; and, Little Pickle in The Spoiled Child . Significantly, these seven plays premiered most often in Philadelphia, the temporary US capital until 1800, suggesting that two actor-managers introduced these works to spotlight child characters as palpable representations of young citizens. Moreover, frequent productions of these particular plays further indicated the extensive popularity of child embodiments on stages along the eastern seaboard. As Jeffrey Richards proffers, the nine characters in these British dramas serve as a “fluid set of changeable signs whereby something British becomes American without being, exactly, either one.” [5] Their transnational and socio-economic identities signify transitional shifts toward middle and lower class children caught in familial conflicts within domestic contexts and away from such royal historical figures as the Duke of York in Richard III , Fleance in Macbeth , Prince Edward in The Battle of Hexham , and Gustava in Gustavas Vasa . As Romantic portrayals of late eighteenth-century childhood, the authentic naiveté of these nine varied characters serve to defy stereotypical tropes of childhood innocence through playwrights’ crafted mixtures of pathos and humor. The fact that child actors most often embodied these nine characters, initially in the US capital, implicates them as potential socio-political players on US stages. Given that each text required small-bodied actors to effectuate its Romantic sentiments, these embodiments of divergent childhoods may have assuaged political divisiveness between wealthy Federalists who funded and populated new permanent playhouses and “middling” Republicans who demanded more democratic repertoires. [6] As a result, recurrent performances of these noteworthy plays provided appreciable opportunities for child actors to showcase their acting, singing, and dancing talents as well as any adult stock actor. An examination of the following four actors explains how they attracted and sustained the attentions of actor-managers and critical spectators, thereby fulfilling their professional duties as disciplined actors under the mindful tutelage of their parents and guardians. [7] Four Child Actors Margaret Solomon debuted as a singer at age four in Newport in February 1792, then Boston in October, and resurfaced in Baltimore in June 1793 with her strolling parents, Mr. and Mrs. [Nathan?] Solomon. [8] When the Maryland Journal announced that her mother would present “three interesting Reasons for her Claims on Public Patronage,” perhaps one reason included support of her aspiring daughter. [9] Although the family’s whereabouts remain unknown after November 1793, they reappeared in Newport to perform with Harper’s OAC contingent in May 1794. In October, the family united with Hodgkinson’s OAC forces at Philadelphia’s Southwark Theatre where Margaret first appeared as an Apparition with Mary Harding as Fleance in Macbeth . One month later, these two girls originated the title roles in The Children in the Wood fifteen times through January 1795. [10] In New York, one critic emphasized that “too much praise cannot be bestowed on Miss Harding [the Boy] and Miss Solomon [the Girl], who, in speaking, in singing, and in action surpassed all we could have conceived of children their age.” [11] Another reviewer in Philadelphia elaborated on Margaret’s performance for personating “the little girl with singular propriety and grace. Her manner is easy and natural; her voice strong and articulate, and in her singing remarkably clear.” [12] Over the next three years, each actress would add over twenty roles to her repertoire, including various balletic pantomimes that required agile dancing abilities. Although Harding’s exact birth year, parentage, and citizenship remain a mystery, Dunlap described her as “Mr. Hodgkinson’s ward, a pretty, innocent, black-eyed girl, looking as if she might be destined to a life of purity and happiness.” [13] As a highly regarded actor-manager, John Hodgkinson determined her OAC casting and her $10 a week salary through 1802, as well as critical attention regarding her progress. [14] For instance, when pantomiming little Horatio in Madame Gardie’s Sophia of Brabant , a reviewer noticed that “Her action and expression of countenance were wonderful for one of her years” as a stage novice, and her “great improvement” as Little Pickle further justified his formative expectations. [15] When the Solomon family defected to Thomas Wignell’s Chestnut company in March 1795, Margaret extended her repertoire considerably through June 1796 in both Philadelphia and Baltimore. In June, her younger sister, Miss C. Solomon, made “her first appearance on any stage” as the Boy opposite her sister’s Girl in The Children in the Wood . [16] The family then joined Boston’s Federal Street Theatre where Margaret performed regularly from September 1796 through April 1799. [17] Meanwhile, for the April 1795 performance of The Children in the Wood , the New York Magazine introduced Samuel Stockwell as: A new candidate for public favour, in the person of a boy about six years old, who has taken the part of the little girl , since the departure of Miss Solomons [sic]. This child may really be considered as a phenomenon. He went through the part, though he had never before been on the stage, with surprising ease and propriety. The song of the ‘Waxen Doll,’ was sung with greater strength of voice, and with equal accuracy, as it had been by Miss Solomons; and we doubt not, that after being a little more accustomed to the stage, he will fully compensate us for her loss. [18] “Little Sam,” as he was called in a 1798 prelude that opened the Park Theatre, may have been the son of Constable Samuel Stockwell, initially hired to keep order at the John Street Theatre. [19] Over this small boy’s extensive career with the OAC, he played at least a dozen recorded roles through 1798 and earned a weekly salary of $4, the lowest salary among stock actors. [20] In 1792, Harriet Sully, the youngest of Matthew Sully’s nine children, made her stage debut at age three as her sister’s “tiny foot page” in Robin Hood with West and Bignall’s company in Richmond. [21] At “only five years of age,” she sang an operatic song and probably pantomimed with her siblings in Charleston. [22] After her mother’s death, she traveled with her sister, Charlotte, and her husband, Mr. Chambers, to perform with the OAC and Chestnut companies, as well as Rickett’s Circus. [23] In Boston, she played the Girl to Harding’s Boy in The Children in the Wood where she “appeared miraculously gifted. The sweet melody of her voice, and the justness and vivacity of her acting, were equally objects of wonder and applause.” [24] Although southern cast lists remain incomplete, she performed at least ten known roles through 1798. [25] Seven British Plays The remarkable acting careers of these four children were made possible by the US premieres of seven British plays selected (and usually altered) by actor-managers and orchestral maestros. The Children in the Wood by Thomas Morton, with music by Samuel Arnold and additional songs by Benjamin Carr, initiated the first major vehicle that mandated two short-stature bodies for adults to carry and hug with kisses by kneeling down to their level. [26] Seeing these affectionate moments and watching the older Boy support his tired sister during a thunderstorm in the woods surely affected family audiences. This hour-long afterpiece never failed to delight and, despite having been “hacked out of its novelty” by 1809, its child actors reminded one critic “of those times when the talents of their parents were in a similar way exerted for the public gratification.” [27] From its premiere in 1794 through 1810 alone, this classic play was performed over 130 times in ten cities until the Civil War. [28] Perhaps the fact that Morton was orphaned at age four attracted him not only to adapt but to revise this otherwise tragic story of a popular 1595 Norfolk ballad as a two-act comic opera for the stage. Rather than orphan two children, Morton keeps the parents alive (away in India) and joyfully reunites the family through the fortuitous heroism of Walter, a poor carpenter who kills the children’s would-be murderer, rescues the returning parents from ruffians, and critically wounds the evil, aristocratic, guardian uncle in the bargain. In addition to delivering dialogue within six scenes, this musical also required the Boy to sing one duet with Josephine, Walter’s fiancé, and the “very puny little” Girl to sing three solos (22). Throughout the play’s tension-filled progression, the children’s honest naiveté undercuts the sentimentality of their otherwise tragic oppressions through constant juxtapositions of serious and comic situations. [29] For example, when Walter drops his sword while fighting Oliver, the henchman, the Girl instinctively retrieves it for him. After an offstage pursuit, Walter reenters: Walter: I never knew I had so much pluck in me. Damme, how I laid his timbers. Come forth, my little tremblers, I am your champion. Girl: Have you kill’d Oliver? Walter: Dead as a door-nail. Boy: Go kill him again. Girl: Such a rogue as he cannot be too dead. (29) Likewise, in the final scene when Walter joyfully rediscovers these “poor innocents” (29) reunited with their parents, the Girl simply says, “I’m very hungry” (53). To conclude the children’s emblematic journey, the adult chorus sings, “Have we sav’d this Girl and Boy? . . . Are we out of the wood, sirs?” (56-57). These rhetorical lyrics appear to question whether Federalists and Republicans were able to save the nation’s children, especially during yellow fever epidemics that struck port cities in the 1790s. While dramatizing the triumph of innocence over villainy, seeing two children survive the treacheries of a sinister aristocrat likely affirmed the moral duty of both political parties to ensure children’s welfare at all costs. Moreover, the unlikely heroism of two children and a lowly carpenter may have fortified Republican’s defense of common laborers who were literally and figuratively building the nation’s prosperity. While The Children presented an ordinary carpenter, The Purse by James C. Cross with William Reeve’s music, introduced Will Steady, the Benevolent Tar of the subtitle, who spoke in sailors’ own lingo, thereby assuring its widespread popularity across the eastern seaboard. [30] This one-act afterpiece required the acting and singing services of our four actors as an eight-year-old Page. Considered the first nautical drama, productions also included Gothic scenic elements, having been based on “an incident said to have happened to a page in the service of the late King of Prussia.” [31] From its US premiere in January 1795 through 1815, over 160 performances were staged in major cities and towns. [32] After an eight-year voyage at sea and their escape from an Algerian slaver, Will Steady returns home with Edmund, the Baron’s son who has been presumed dead. Once inside the castle, Will sees a boy sleeping, reads an affecting letter from his distressed mother, and decides to leave one purse of his money in the boy’s pocket to alleviate their poverty. Upon reuniting with his faithful wife, Sally, he learns that she has been cruelly separated from their son who dutifully serves as the Baron’s page at the castle. Meanwhile, the Baron’s wicked steward, Theodore, seeking to hide his embezzlements, accuses the Page of stealing the purse found in his pocket. Pleading for his innocence, the Page “sobs bitterly [and] bursts into a flood of tears” (26). Just before the infuriated Baron banishes him, Will arrives in the nick of time to reveal the truth with Sally and Edmund on his heels. When Sally runs to embrace the Page, Will instantly realizes the boy is his own son and “catches him in his arms” (28). Yet rather than exile the actual thief, the benevolent Page, “a true chip of [his father’s] old block,” urges the Baron to reconsider: “Though Theodore has been bad, my Lord, if you’d forgive him perhaps he’d mend, and love and thank you for it” (29). The Baron agrees, happily reunited with his own son who leads the final chorus with Will and Sally proclaiming “Our dangers [are] o’er” (31-32). Indeed, as spectators well knew, had Will and Edmund not first escaped the actual US dangers of Algerian enslavements by Barbary pirates during this period, they would not have reunited with their families. Beyond this political premise, seeing a child-servant argue for clemency and overcome the dangers of an aristocrat’s misplaced blame may also have encouraged political partisans to practice benevolence toward their fellow citizens. The fact that a common sailor willingly shares his purse with less fortunate others could also have counseled elite spectators to share their privileged wealth more freely with hard-working indentured servants and sea-faring laborers. A New York reviewer praised “this little piece” for its “well-executed” songs, especially those sung by Hodgkinson’s Steady and Harding’s Page that “were encored loudly .” [33] In Boston, one critic found Harding’s Page “delicate and affecting,” believing she “promises future excellence,” while others argued over Hodgkinson’s alterations of his renamed American Tar . [34] In 1796, while Margaret Solomon edified Bostonians in October, Harriet Sully and Fanny L’Estrange competed within two December days across a Philadelphian street. [35] Misses Hogg, Arnold, and Gillespie also delighted audiences, respectively in Norfolk, Charleston, and Philadelphia, and Samuel Stockwell opened the new Park Theatre with his New York rendition in 1798. [36] Every One Has His Fault by Mrs. Elizabeth Inchbald spoke more directly to aristocratic Federalists and Revolutionary War veterans by situating Britain’s and America’s failure to care for the worthy poor as a domestic matter in order to remedy economic inequalities. [37] Against a comic backdrop, this long-running, five-act tragi-comedy provided another cross-dressed opportunity for Harding, Solomon, and Sully to enamor audiences as Edward, a nine- to ten-year-old boy. [38] Its ensemble of domestic characters appealed to US spectators for its “faithful picture of the varied scenery of life” and its “judiciously alternate scenes of pathos and merriment.” [39] True to its title, each character displays his and her personal and social faults within contested marriages. Inchbald’s back story of a wise child, not without his own faults, presses the need for benevolent compassion among unforgiving aristocrats. Lord Norland has disinherited his daughter, Lady Eleanor, for marrying an impoverished Captain Irwin and vows never to pardon her. Nevertheless, eight years ago, he adopted a “half-starved boy,” his own grandchild, who was “forced” upon him by the child’s nurse (39). Before she died, she told Edward he was Norland’s grandchild, but Norland forbids him to speak of his parents. When Mr. Harmony remarks how much the boy is like his mother, Edward vaguely remembers her “kissing me, when she and my father went on board of a ship; and so hard she pressed me–I think I feel it now” (60). After their nine-year banishment in America, Edward’s parents return to London only to find that Captain Irwin’s gentrified friends refuse to lend him money to support his wife and other (offstage) children. Desperate to maintain his social status, Captain Irwin robs his father-in-law at gun point. Upon his capture, Edward reports to Norland that the deranged man’s “poor wife” begs him for mercy; but Norland rejects Edward’s “false conclusion” of equating the virtues of mercy and justice (61-62). To help the man’s wife, Edward exposes his fault by giving Lady Eleanor the retrieved pocketbook of bank-notes he has taken from Norland’s table and divulges his secret as Norland’s grandchild. Upon discovering her own lost child, Lady Eleanor begs her father’s forgiveness; but Norland, still cold-hearted, forces Edward to choose between them. After a moment’s hesitation, Edward takes his grandfather’s hand: “Farewell, my lord, –it almost breaks my heart to part from you; but if I have a choice, I must go with my mother” (76). Only after Harmony has reconciled others’ marital faults does Norland finally forgive his daughter, son-in-law, and grandson with joyful embraces. Having spread polite but contradictory falsehoods regarding each person’s opinions of others, Harmony has succeeded in restoring domestic peace, and “notwithstanding our numerous faults,” he sincerely wishes “that the world may speak well of us all–behind our backs” (88). Overall, this play reminded spectators that everyone has personal faults, regardless of age, class, and politics. Beyond this broad moral, hearing a virtuous child urge a callous aristocrat to practice merciful justice offered politicians a poignant model of striking compassion. Seeing this child give the aristocrat’s money to a distraught woman may have also struck spectators who knew of Revolutionary War officers’ inadequate pensions. By choosing his mother over a grandparent, this child’s decision also verified the strong maternal bonds of Republican motherhood. In New York, after “a young gentleman” attempted Edward in April 1794, Harding’s rendering was deemed “truly charming” in January 1795. [40] Subsequently, Misses Powell, Sully, Solomon, L’Estrange, and Gowen portrayed him, as did Masters Warrell and Shaw through 1798. [41] Upon seeing this “very excellent Comedy” in Baltimore, William Osborn Payne wrote that “Little Miss Hardinge [sic] as Edward played elegantly & astonishingly for so small a Child.” [42] The next child vehicle came from Henry Fielding who dramatized the Arthurian History of Tom Thumb as The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731), a literary satire on heroic dramas. [43] Long after eleven-year-old Adam Hallam introduced this folkloric dwarf to the colonial stage in 1753, Solomon, Stockwell, and Harding each starred in Fielding’s farce and/or Kane O’Hara’s more condensed burletta (1780) from April 1795 through February 1798. [44] As Phyllis Dircks explains, the burletta’s success resulted from O’Hara’s “outrageous exaggeration, the clever use of literary and musical allusion, and unexpected comic bathos.” [45] By 1815, over seventy performances of Tom Thumb the Great had been staged across the north and south. [46] Unlike chapbook versions of this nursery tale, Fielding’s and O’Hara’s plot foregrounds love triangles sparked by tiny Tom’s impending marriage to a full-size princess, aptly named Huncamunca. Having captured Glumdalca, Queen of the Giants, King Arthur welcomes Tom back to court and grants his desire to marry Huncamunca as a reward. Yet Queen Dollalolla loves Tom secretly and conspires with Lord Grizzle to prevent the unimaginable match. This rebellious suitor, already enraged that “Arthur wrongs me [and] cheats me of my Huncamunca!”, readily agrees to stop Tom at all costs (O’Hara, 9). When Tom learns that Huncamunca is promised to Grizzle, he vows to kill him; for “I tell thee, Princess, had I been thy help-mate, We soon had peopled this whole realm with Thumbs”; to which Huncamunca replies, “O fie! I shudder at the gross idea!” (O’Hara, 14; cf. Fielding, 66). Bathetic comedy ensues when, during a climactic battle, Tom kills Grizzle (who has just killed Glumdalca) and declares, “Rebellion’s dead, and now–I’ll go to breakfast” (O’Hara, 19; Fielding, 90). However, as the Ghost of Gaffer Thumb has foretold, Noodle announces that a huge red Cow has devoured the great Tom Thumb; whereupon each thwarted lover kills another for revenge in quick succession, leaving the stage in a ridiculous heap of dead bodies. [47] O’Hara’s burletta adds a happy ending, inspired by The Opera of Operas (1733) by Eliza Haywood and William Hachett, in which Merlin conjures Tom out of the Cow’s mouth and raises the dead. [48] In a final gleeful “vaudeville,” Tom sings another sexually provocative verse: Come my Hunky–come my Pet, Love’s in haste, don’t stay him; Deep we are in Hymen’s debt. And ‘tis high time we pay him. (21) While the sexualized characterization of this lilliputian man-child counters the presumed sexual innocence of child actors, audiences readily accepted the common convention of casting children as Cupids. [49] Rather than remark upon Tom’s sexual innuendos, a Philadelphian critic observed how “Miss Solomon as Tom Thumb excited astonishment at her memory and the ease with which she went through the part,” while Elihu Hubbard Smith found Stockwell’s portrayal “admirable.” [50] Despite Tom’s voracious sexual appetite, girls represented him in breeches opposite older women playing Huncamunca. For instance, Margaret was paired with Mrs. Oldmixon, Miss Willems, and her mother; while Mary and Samuel flirted with Miss Arabella Brett (Mrs. Hodgkinson’s youngest sister), whom Dunlap characterized as “a child in years, but a woman in appearance.” [51] To heighten and widen physical proportions further against a child’s diminutive size, grotesque men often embodied the giant Glumdalca. As one Baltimore reviewer observed, “the large masculine form of [William] Rowson, in female habiliments, his full manly voice, whining out love for the dwarfish conqueror” also provoked considerable laughter. [52] Thus, Tom Thumb’s very character necessitated casting child actors to effectuate the ludicrous humor of this afterpiece to its greatest advantage. From his first entrance when Arthur lifts up this “tiny hero [and] pigmy giant queller” and then “sets him down” (O’Hara, 7) to his preposterous exit from an artificially constructed “Cow’s Mouth” (O’Hara, 20), Tom’s fictional presence as an actual child layered the play’s metaphorical meanings. As a socio-political capstone, O’Hara’s final chorus urged quarrelsome couples to: Let Discord cease, Let all in peace Go home and kiss their spouses. (22) In these ways, stagings of little Tommy Thumb affirmed his place in children’s nurseries as the narrative author of numerous other tales well into the nineteenth century. Watching a small child perform Tom Thumb’s heroic feats may have suggested that, no matter one’s size, each citizen held a moral duty to help solve the nation’s gigantic problems, particularly as refugees fled revolutionary rebellions occurring in France, Saint-Domingue (Haiti), and Ireland. O’Hara’s closing lyrics may have urged both political parties to cease their discordant debates over trade relationships with Britain and Caribbean colonies. If revenge-seeking spouses symbolized wars between Britain and France, then better to maintain US neutrality to ensure domestic peace at home. Having acquired Margaret Solomon, an invaluable child actor, the Chestnut company premiered John Rose’s The Prisoner; or, Female Heroism with Thomas Attwood’s music in May 1795. [53] To counter-balance its sentimental love triangles, this three-act musical romance featured the plucky heroism of the jailor’s children, Juliana and her younger brother, Narcisso, of unspecified ages. Wignell initially paired Margaret with “a young gentleman,” whereby her “astonishing powers never shone more conspicuously than as Juliana .” [54] The latter amateur was later exchanged for Miss Cassandra Gilaspie (or Gillespie), a petite, “little airy” dancer who had already played the Boy to Margaret’s Girl in The Children . [55] One year later, Mary teamed with Samuel in New York, and Miss Hardinge played with Harry Warrell in Philadelphia in 1798. [56] Although performed less than twenty times, primarily in northern cities, this afterpiece allowed child actors to showcase their physical prowess and strengthen their singing skills in three songs. [57] Within an unspecified military context (possibly some Spanish colony), Bernardo has imprisoned Don Marcos for two years for attempting to free “mutinous slaves” (1). Bernardo’s sister, Theresa, begs the jailor’s children to free her beloved Marcos from prison before her brother seeks his death for denying his marriage to Clara, Marcos’s sister. While their besotted French-speaking father, Lewis, preoccupies himself with more wine in a room adjoining the dungeon, the children steal his keys and release Marcos during a physically energetic scene done in pantomime (19). Upon recapturing Marcos and his servant Roberto, Bernardo discovers his beloved Clara and her servant, Nina, disguised as soldiers, and both men agree to exchange their sisters in marriage. In the final jubilant chorus, the two sibling cupids sing the following lyrics: Good humour, peace and glee return, Let each enjoy the rising bliss; And brushing up his ruby lips, Prepare alike to sip and kiss. (27) Watching children free a self-purported abolitionist may have resonated with northern spectators, particularly in Philadelphia and Boston, where slavery had been abolished since the early 1780s, and in New York where free and enslaved African Americans fought for their freedoms with white citizens. The unbridled patriotism of children freeing a wronged prisoner to unite him with his beloved may have affirmed abolitionists’ desires to keep African American families intact. In addition to Juliana’s heroism, seeing two young women disguised as soldiers could also have reminded spectators of women’s heroic roles at various encampments. Like previous lost-and-found-child dramas involving a lowly carpenter, a common sailor, and an impoverished captain, The Adopted Child featured Michael, a selfless fisherman who adopted a shipwrecked boy as his wealthy father, Sir Edmund, lay dying eight years ago. For this two-act musical drama by Samuel Birch and Thomas Attwood, Harding originated the titled child in May 1796, followed by Misses L’Estrange, Arnold, Solomon, Westray, Gillespie, and Sully through 1800. [58] Fifteen years later, this popular afterpiece had enjoyed well over 100 performances. [59] Like The Children and The Purse , this drama establishes its premise inside a Gothic castle where Mr. Record, an old steward, and a “childish” maid prepare for the arrival of Edmund’s suspicious relation to claim this titled estate. When Sir Bertrand and his steward, Le Sage, arrive at Michael’s ferry, Michael rejects their bribed offer to educate his already literate son who learns “Nature’s independence” through a seaman’s honest labors (17). Knowing that the Boy’s “life is fought secretly,” he finally divulges his eight-year-long secret to his wife, Nell, of how he came to adopt the “little boy” by promising not to open his trunk until Edmund’s officially declared death (13). Once Record confirms the baron’s death, Michael unlocks the trunk and reads a paper revealing his adopted son’s lawful claim to the estate. Upon learning that the evil-doers have stolen the Boy, Michael searches the forest and hears his son singing inside a convent, where Clara, Edmund’s daughter, has been “secluded from the hated passion of Sir Bertrand” (9) with her maid and now protects the captured Boy. He then procures Le Sage’s letter from the Boy’s would-be smuggler, dons his coat, and shows the letter to Clara, proving Bertrand’s deceitful plan. Before leaving with Michael in his “diabolical” disguise, the fearless Boy asks, “Where are we going? If you mean to kill me, let me tell my beads [his father’s rosary] first–“; to which Michael answers, “Kill you!–O, No!” (34) as they head for the castle. Upon reading the paper that Michael has accidently dropped, Clara discovers the Boy to be her long-lost brother. Inside the castle’s chapel, she confronts Bertrand with her father’s will on behalf of her brother’s “injur’d innocence” (35) and embraces the Boy, while Michael justifies the trunk’s additional documents delivered by Nell. In the play’s final moments, Record “asserts the right of our new Baron against injury and oppression” (38). With a metaphorical nod to political partisans, Michael reminds Nell: “it is enough for us to reflect that we have done our duty, and bore up so steadily against wind and tide to port, that we shall always find anchorage sure, and shelter from the storm” (38). The final obligatory chorus reinforces his analogical meanings “As loud huzzas unite” with spectators’ applause (38). Losing parents in recurrent shipwrecks forced many surviving orphans to wander port cities until wealthy citizens founded orphanages. Yet as Republicans well knew, common laborers also housed and educated orphans as apprentices in their respective trades. The Boy’s astute dialogue and songs not only substantiated his literacy and religiosity but also forecast his future independence as a virtuous democratic citizen. Finally, The Spoiled Child , a wildly popular, two-act farce by Isaac Bickerstaff, presents the outrageous antics of Little Pickle who wreaks havoc while home from his school holiday. [60] Miss Pickle chastises her widowed brother for failing to severely punish his son. Even after killing her parrot and crippling his father’s mare, Little Pickle always has some virtuous reason to explain his vicious actions and win back Pickle’s heart. When Miss Pickle threatens to leave her fortune to Mr. Tagg, Pickle agrees to her scheme–Little Pickle must be exchanged for Tommy, because his former nurse, Margery, has supposedly “confessed” to switching them at birth (15). Yet after colluding with Margery, Little Pickle reappears back home disguised as Tommy, a returning sailor wearing a carrot-colored wig. He resumes his insults toward his “granne” aunt (22) and plots further revenge with his younger sister, Maria, who agrees to play-act his lover. Upon discovering the young couple, Pickle disclaims Tommy to stop their unthinkable courtship, locks Maria in her room, and then receives his son’s letter of hearty repentance. Meanwhile, Little Pickle overhears Tagg plot his elopement with Miss Pickle to obtain her casket of jewels and surreptitiously sews their clothes together, forcing a farcical rupture when Tagg exits quickly to escape Pickle’s entrance and Miss Pickle leaves to retrieve her jewels. As Pickle conceals himself, Little Pickle returns in the guise of Tagg wearing a long cloak. As he about to take the casket from Miss Pickle, Pickle stops them; whereupon Little Pickle throws off his disguises and again wins his father’s forgiveness for having prevented his aunt’s elopement. However, in a brief Epilogue, Little Pickle confides to amused spectators that “I shall be tempted again to transgress” (36). As Anne Varty aptly deduces, “[Little Pickle’s] behaviour, governed by greed for instant gratification of desires, is a perfect model for the justification of Evangelically inspired notions that children manifested original sin and that their defiant will had to be broken to secure their redemption and their divinely ordered subservience to their parents.” [61] These themes likely resonated among US evangelists who baptized their children during the Second Great Awakening. Even among secularists, Little Pickle’s farcical frolics confirmed the inherent difficulties involved in raising dutiful children as virtuous citizens. In sum, the nine child characters in these seven plays evidenced divergent portraits of childhood that incorporated oppressed innocents, benevolent exemplars, moral philosophers, sexual lilliputians, patriotic heroes, recuperated barons, and scheming tricksters with overlapping traits. As suggested above, these child roles may have impacted adult spectators, based on concurrent socio-political events that affected children’s livelihoods during the 1790s. Above all, these British transplants cultivated emerging ideals of US democracy and greater equity among socio-economic classes with requisite poetic justice. After weathering dark and stormy conflicts, each text ended with calls for unified peace, harmonious love, and merciful justice for those individuals whose human faults earned them forgiveness. Significantly, the true identities of six lost-and-found children were restored and reclaimed by their rightful families, while the other three children united lost-and-found couples with warm embraces and blissful kisses. In turn, these familial themes counseled biological parents and adoptive guardians to protect and nurture US youth against all socio-political odds. To effectuate these sentiments, child actors needed to memorize and articulate pages of dialogue, master eighteen songs in six musical afterpieces, and prove their physical agility with disciplined ease–all before hundreds of spectators in cavernous playhouses. Somewhat patronizing reviews of their performances reveal astonished observers who simply could not believe that children could accomplish such feats. Yet achieve these successes they did, largely because adult actors, former novices themselves, firmly believed in and nurtured their competent capabilities. Cross-Gender and Cross-Age Casting Conventions Tracking the casting conventions used in these plays further explains the circumstances in which child actors earned their opportunities in relation to women. In 1759, when Lewis and Adam Hallam outgrew boys’ roles, their seven-year-old cousin, Nancy Hallam, introduced England’s breeches convention by playing two Shakesperean boys. [62] Thus, as boys’ voices changed upon reaching puberty, boys deferred to girls whose higher voices, and presumably shorter bodies, made them more suitable for particular child parts. With the rare exceptions of Masters Stockwell and Gray who played the Girl with her waxen doll in The Children , boys seldom embodied female characters. [63] For instance, in respective productions of Gustavas Vasa in Baltimore and Boston, Susan Wall and Cordelia Powell portrayed Gustava, the hero’s sister; but in Norfolk, Master Gray was renamed “Austava.” [64] For male servants in O’Keefe’s comic operas, Masters most often performed the Irish messenger in The Poor Soldier , Benin (“a Black”) in The Highland Reel , and Goliah in The Young Quaker until 1796 when Margaret and Mary assumed the latter two roles before Samuel earned Goliah in 1797. [65] Although Master Walsh first embodied the Adopted Child in London, it does not appear that boys assumed his role until 1803, when Master Joseph Harris represented him, ironically under the adoptive care of Mr. and Mrs. Francis. [66] For other boy roles, casting was often determined by the Jordanian demands of Mrs. Thomas Marshall, thereby denying advantages to some children. After twenty-nine-year-old Dorothy Jordan created a sensation in Dublin by making Little Pickle her signature role in 1790, actor-managers treated such “romps” as a virtual line of business solely for more experienced actresses. Charles Durang described Mrs. Marshall as an attractive, very petite, five-foot-tall woman “having a round face, an arch and sprightly expression of features, with sparkling eyes . . . . She possessed a melodious powerful and extensive soprano voice, which she used with skill and musical precision.” [67] Therefore, for the US premiere of Every One Has His Fault in March 1794, she initially adopted Edward at the Chestnut. [68] After Master Warrell played Edward in June for unknown reasons, Durang remarked that “It became necessary to change the performer to Mrs. Francis. Mrs. Marshall subsequently made a great sensation” in this role, because “The beauties of her Edward . . . were dwelt upon . . . as the perfection of the art. The impressiveness of the affecting scene between Lady Eleanor Irvine [sic] and Edward . . . drew tears from the most enlightened audience.” [69] Despite such plaudits for this “peculiarly affecting” scene, “Roscius” chastised the actress for a “defect in her attitude” by not walking “sufficiently erect” in a more dignified manner, perhaps “imputed to her bashfulness in appearing in male habiliments.” [70] After eight-year-old Miss Menage originated the Page in London, Mrs. Marshall donned his apparel for the US premiere of The Purse in Philadelphia in January 1795, one month before Mary introduced him to New Yorkers. [71] In July, Margaret appropriated the part from Mrs. Marshall, having proven her mettle to Wignell. [72] In addition to five other girls and two boys, Harry Warrell also earned this androgynous role in Baltimore in 1798. [73] While child actors sustained these parts, the titled boy of The Spoiled Child literally spoiled casting opportunities for at least three girls. Once again, the indomitable Mrs. Marshall premiered Little Pickle in March 1794 and controlled her “unequaled performances” through 1812 as Mrs. Wilmot. [74] When Margaret finally wrested this prize in June 1796, Mrs. Rowson’s prologue exhorted audiences to “Forget for this night the charming Mrs. Marshall.” [75] Yet Solomon and Eliza Arnold faced another Jordanian competitor in Mrs. Williamson who ruled Little Pickle from her US debut in Boston at age twenty-four in January 1796 through her untimely death in October 1799 under her husband’s management. When the Williamsons left Boston in April 1797, Mrs. Marshall resumed Little Pickle in May, although Margaret held onto Edward and the Page. [76] As for nine-year-old Eliza, she had recently played Little Pickle in Portland under her mother’s tutelage. Here, an observer felt astonished by the powers of “her youth, her beauty, her innocence.” [77] Despite such raptures, manager John Sollee cast Mrs. Williamson as Little Pickle and relegated Eliza to Maria for his northern company. [78] Beginning in August 1797, a contentious “war” erupted at two New York theatres between Sollee at John Street and Wignell at Greenwich Street a few blocks away. [79] Based on Odell’s extant cast lists, it appears that Sollee used Eliza very little, other than for a walk-on in his production of The Battle of Bunker Hill . Previous performances by Wignell’s child actors suggest that Harry Warrell may have played Tom Thumb, and Fanny L’Estrange likely repeated the Adopted Child and the Page. [80] However, Sollee did not cast Eliza in these latter two roles until his retreat back to Charleston. At the end of this bitter New York season, Mrs. Marshall reclaimed Edward to benefit Philadelphia’s yellow fever sufferers, and Miss Hardinge [sic] made her US debut as a page in The Orphan and may have been paired with Harry or Master Warren in The Children . [81] Only when a group of rebellious actors left Sollee to play in Wilmington and a renegade Charleston company was Eliza able to reprise Little Pickle under Mr. Edgar’s management. [82] Unlike Margaret and Eliza, Mary evaded these competitions, given Hodgkinson’s stalwart casting in which she maintained Little Pickle over his wife from March 1795 through 1804. [83] Meanwhile, across southern circuits, Mrs. Ann [Bignall] West held Little Pickle until Mrs. Williamson arrived in Charleston in November 1797. [84] When Mr. and Mrs. Chambers returned from Ireland in July 1799, Alexandre Placide hired them for his Charleston season and cast Harriet as Edward and the Girl in The Children later that winter. [85] In December, after playing Little Pickle in Philadelphia, Mrs. Marshall abruptly left the Chestnut over a casting dispute and assumed the roles Mrs. Chambers had taken after Mrs. Williamson’s death. [86] The following year, Harriet watched Mrs. Marshall play the Adopted Child and Little Pickle in January and February, until Placide cast her in these roles in March, perhaps with Marshall’s coaching. [87] With the exception of these contested roles, only plays calling for male and female siblings guaranteed the casting of child actors over older women, as in the cases of The Children and The Prisoner . In 1798, Stockwell and Miss Hogg played Mrs. Bland’s children in Dunlap’s short-lived production of André ; and, for his more successful adaptation of Kotzebue’s The Stranger , they were accompanied by four-year-old George H. Barrett. [88] In early 1800, Sully and Stockwell initiated Cora’s “infant” boy as a novitiate role for countless child actors in adaptations of Kotzebue’s Pizarro in Peru that never failed to inspire pathos for over six decades. [89] Subsequent Lives and Legacies Based on casting decisions initially made by Hodgkinson and Wignell, these acting conventions explain how and why Harding originated the Boy in The Children and the Adopted Child; while Solomon initiated the Girl in The Children , Juliana in The Prisoner , and revived Tom Thumb, with affirmative support from Stockwell and Sully. After successful portrayals of Edward, the Page, and Little Pickle, child actors added more solo and sibling roles to their repertoires in 1800. In these ways, our four actors established foundational legacies for concomitant and successive child performers into the nineteenth century. Having been tutored assiduously by their parents or guardians as salaried apprentices, they advanced their theatrical careers into adolescence. In early 1799, Mr. Solomon left his family to perform in Charleston, while Mrs. Solomon and her two daughters played in Boston through April and then rejoined Wignell’s company in December through November 1802. [90] In February 1803, Margaret reunited with her father in Charleston where she made her first appearance there as the Adopted Child. [91] She rejoined the Chestnut company in December for performances in Annapolis, Philadelphia, and Baltimore at least through June 1804 when she reprised Tom Thumb. [92] Whether she left the stage thereafter at or after age sixteen, possibly to marry, remains an ongoing mystery. Mary Harding remained in Hodgkinson’s household through mid-August 1802 until she married Mr. G. Marshall. [93] She later joined Placide’s company in Charleston under Hodgkinson’s management. [94] For her first appearance there in February 1804, Carpenter described her as a person who has “that delicate fragility which never fails to interest the male sex. Her face is expressive and strongly marked by the hand of Thalia. She seems to be adept (for her age) in lively comedy, and received and deserved the applause due to good acting.” [95] Sometime after Hodgkinson’s death from yellow fever in September 1805, she returned to the Park where his two daughters, Fanny and Rosina, memorialized him in The Children . [96] After meeting William Clark, a fellow actor, she married him in Charleston in January 1807; and, in June 1809, their daughter, Phoebe, debuted as Cora’s child in Norfolk. [97] In 1811, one month after Phoebe played Gustava at the Richmond Theatre, a disastrous fire erupted there on December 26, but the couple managed to escape through a backstage door and survived this tragedy. [98] Two years later, the family returned to the Park, where Phoebe played the Girl in The Children , and they continued to perform in various cities at least through 1823. [99] After playing numerous supportive boys in New York, Samuel was announced as Mr. Stockwell in 1806, while Fanny Hodgkinson played Tom Thumb. [100] He then joined Mary for two seasons in Charleston and subsequently performed in Providence and Boston. [101] In 1810, he married Catherine Henry in Boston; and their son, Samuel B. Stockwell, played Tom Thumb in 1824, among other child roles, and became a highly regarded scenic and panoramic painter. [102] From November 1799 through July 1800, Harriet Sully performed classic child roles in Charleston and Norfolk and again sang “I Never Will be Married” at age twelve. [103] Ironically, after spending time in Antigua with her sister, she returned to Norfolk in 1801 to live with her Aunt Margaretta Sully West “until she could be married.” [104] After performing there for another season, she announced her retirement from the stage in June 1802 at age fourteen and married Dr. Joseph Porcher three years later. [105] Conclusion Reclaiming the professional achievements of four major child actors validates their crucial significance not only as theatrical exemplars of late eighteenth-century childhood and performance but also as dramatic socio-political participants in US democracy. Despite childist or prejudicial attitudes toward children, child actors should be touted as equally important stars in US theatre. The foundational evidence in these four, necessarily detailed, case studies offers historians a dynamic model for investigating the continuities of successive child actors and other disruptions of age-appropriate casting through US premieres of additional dramas into the nineteenth century. Notably, this microhistory corroborates Dunlap’s claim made in 1832: “By those who have consulted the actor’s calling a good and reputable one, children have been trained to it, and are among the best and worthiest, as artists and members of society.” [106] Based on the theatrical conditions of the 1790s, all stock companies could have been defined as Theatres for Young Audiences, given the work of numerous child performers, local supernumeraries, call-boys, and other young assistants and servants who labored on and off stages for child and adult spectators. As Durang asserted, “The theatre was then a school” and a close-knit “family” where highly respected actresses “cultivated intellect and polished manners” among young members in the green room. [107] Like humble but great Tom Thumbs, child actors had done their duties but ever so much more as significant players who should be remembered in the annals of US theatre as verisimilar justifications for age-appropriate casting today. I extend my deepest gratitude to Heather Nathans for her astute scholarship and Caitlin Donnelly, Head of Public Services at KU’s Spencer Research Library, who generously shared and extended our mutual enthusiasms for Miss M. Solomon. References [1] Henry Fielding, The Tragedy of Tragedies; or, the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great , ed. Darryl P. Domingo (New York: Broadview Press, 2013), 30. [2] Shauna Vey, Childhood and Nineteenth-Century American Theatre: The Work of the Marsh Troupe of Juvenile Actors (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015), 7-9. [3] John Howard Payne, “An Accurate List of the Infant Prodigies. . . .” The Thespian Mirror 1, no. 8 (1806): 61. [4] See also my previous companion essays “An Epoch of Child Spectators in Early US Theatre,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 10, no. 1 (Winter 2017): 21-39; and “Without Distinction of Age: The Pivotal Roles of Child Actors and Their Spectators in Nineteenth-Century Theatre,” The Lion and the Unicorn 36, no. 2 (April 2012): 117-35. [5] Jeffrey H. Richards, Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 11. [6] Heather S. Nathans, Early American Theatre from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson: Into the Hands of the People (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). [7] All cast lists have been compiled from the following sources: George O. Seilhamer, A History of the American Theatre (New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1969; repr. 1888-91), 3 vols.; David Ritchey, comp. and ed. A Guide to the Baltimore Stage in the Eighteenth Century: A History and Day Book Calendar (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982); Eola Willis, The Charleston Stage in the XVIII Century (Columbia, SC: State Company, 1924); Mary Julia Curtis, “The Early Charleston Stage: 1703-1798” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1968); George C. D. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage , vol. 1 and 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1927); Thomas Clark Pollock, The Philadelphia Theatre in the Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1933); Mary Ruth Michael, “A History of the Professional Theatre in Boston from the Beginning to 1815” (PhD diss., Radcliffe College, 1941); Joseph N. Ireland, Records of the New York Stage , vol. 1 (New York: Burt Franklin, 1968; rprt. 1866-67); Martin Staples Shockley, The Richmond Stage 1784-1812 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977); Lucy B. Pilkinton, “Theatre in Norfolk, Virginia, 1788-1812” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1993); Richard P. Sodders, “The Theatre Management of Alexandre Placide in Charleston, 1794-1812,” 2 vols. (PhD diss., Louisiana State University, 1983); J. Max Patrick, Savannah’s Pioneer Theater from Its Origins to 1810 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1953); Charles Durang, History of the Philadelphia Stage between the years 1749 and 1855 (originally in Philadelphia Sunday Dispatch , 1854-1860); Geddeth Smith, The Brief Career of Eliza Poe (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1988); and, George O. Willard, History of the Providence Stage, 1762-1891 (Providence: Rhode Island News Company, 1891). [8] Heather Nathans investigates the Solomon family in Hideous Characters and Beautiful Pagans: Performing Jewish Identity on the Antebellum American Stage (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 89-97, 148-49. Although she cannot verify their Jewish identities with certainty, she speculates that Mr. Solomon may have been among the first Jewish American actors “from the South,” having first performed in Charleston in April 1785. Pilkinton identifies his first name as “Nathan” when he performs with his wife in Norfolk in early 1791, 542. See also O. G. Sonneck, Early Concert-Life in America (1731-1800 ) (Leipzig: Breitkopt and Härtel, 1907), 229, 146 and Early Opera in America (New York: G. Schirmer, 1915), 152. [9] Ritchey, A Guide , 123, 25, in Maryland Journal , 16 July 1793. [10] Seilhamer, A History , 3: 258-60, 105. [11] “Theatrical Register No. 3,” New York Magazine (January 1795): 1. [12] Aurora (20 March 1795), qtd. in Susan L. Porter, With an Air Debonair: Musical Theatre in America, 1785-1815 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 244. [13] William Dunlap, A History of the American Theatre from its Origins to 1832 (1832; repr., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 199. Billy Harbin notes that Harding had been his ward “over a year previously” with no source, in “The Career of John Hodgkinson in the American Theatre” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1970), 151, note 5. If true, Harding could have played boy servants in earlier OAC productions lacking complete cast lists. [14] John Hodgkinson, Narrative of His Connection with the Old American Company (New York: J. Oram, 1797), 15; Dunlap, A History , 277. [15] “Theatrical Register,” New York Magazine 6 no. 1 (January 1795): 1; Daily Advertiser , 13 February 1795, qtd. in Odell, Annals , 1:402. [16] Pollock, The Philadelphia Theatre , 301. [17] Michael, “A History of the Professional Theatre in Boston,” 2:67-117; Dunlap, A History , 146. As an apprentice, “Croaker” also recalled seeing the family perform for two weeks in Greenfield, MA, in the Boston Courier , 12 November 1849, note, 3. [18] “Theatrical Register,” New York Magazine 6, no. 4 (April 1795): 194 (emphasis in original). [19] William Milns, All in a Bustle: or the New House (New York: Literary Printing Office, 1798), 15; William Duncan, The New York Directory and Register (New York: Swords, 1794), 178, 238. [20] Seilhamer, A History , 3:323-24, 393, 395; Odell, Annals , 2:6, 21; Ireland, Records , 1:134; Dunlap, A History , 277. [21] Shockley, The Richmond Stage , 64, 70, 76. [22] Willis, The Charleston Stage , 217. [23] Seilhamer, A History , 3:222-24, 270-71; Pollock, The Philadelphia Theatre , 328; Michael, “A History,” 1:100-01. [24] Federal Orrery , 12 November 1795, qtd. in Michael, “A History,” 1:109. [25] Gaps in children’s performance records here and elsewhere may also be explained by their attendance at schools to learn literacy skills. [26] Susan L. Porter, ed. British Opera in America: Children in the Wood (1795) . . ., vol. 1 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994), xv-xvii (hereafter The Children cited in text from the OAC’s 1795 publication). [27] “Theatrical Register,” New York Magazine 6 no. 1 (January 1795): 1; “Theatrical Register,” The Ramblers’ Magazine (2 January 1809): 89. [28] Porter, British Opera , xv. [29] Barry Sutcliffe, introduction to Plays by George Colman the Younger and Thomas Morton (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 32-36. [30] J. C. Cross, The Purse (London: William Lane, 1794), in Literature Online at www.literature.proquest.com (hereafter cited in text). [31] New York Magazine (Feb 1795). [32] Porter, With an Air Debonair , 413; Richards, Drama, Theatre, and Identity , 284-86. [33] New York Magazine (Feb 1795) (emphasis in original). [34] Federal Orrery (5 November 1795), qtd. in Michael, “A History,” 1:105, 103. [35] Michael, “A History,” 2:83; Pollock, The Philadelphia Theatre , 313-14. [36] Pilkinton, “Theatre in Norfolk,” 495; Smith, The Brief Career of Eliza Poe , 135; Ireland, Records , 1:174. Although Gillespie’s performance as the Page in June 1796 was announced as “Being her last appearance upon any stage” (Pollock, The Philadelphia Theatre , 301), she continued to perform over the next four years with Mrs. West’s company before marrying Thomas C. West in 1800 (Pilkinton, “Theatre in Norfolk,” 478-79). [37] Mrs. Inchbald, ed. Every One Has His Fault , in The British Theatre , vol. 23 (London: Longman, et al., 1808) (hereafter cited in text); Katherine S. Green, “Mr. Harmony and the Events of January 1793: Elizabeth Inchbald’s Every One Has His Fault ,” Theatre Journal 56, no. 1 (2004): 55-58. [38] Seilhamer, A History , 3:119, 347. [39] The Portfolio (21 Feb 1801). [40] Seilhamer, A History , 3:119; New York Magazine (Feb 1795). [41] Michael, “A History,” 2:29, 45, 70, 490; Ritchey, A Guide , 215; Pollock, The Philadelphia Theatre , 349; Shockley, The Richmond Stage , 122. “Master Warrell” could have been James, the eldest of three brothers hired as dancers with their parents; or, more likely, Thomas who played around forty utility boys, including Augustus in Rowson’s Slaves in Algiers , from 1794 to 1798. Thomas was announced as “Master” or “Mr. T. Warrell” irregularly in 1797. Beginning in June 1797, Harry performed Tom Thumb, the Page, and the Boy in The Children and Narcisso with Miss Hardinge [sic], after first appearing as Leo the Lion in a harlequinade two and a half years earlier (Pollock, The Philadelphia Theatre , 235, 366-67; Ritchey, A Guide , 219-20, 227). [42] An Unconscious Autobiography: William Osborn Payne’s Diary and Letters 1796 to 1804 , ed. Thatcher T. P. Luquer (New York: Privately Printed, 1938), 23. [43] Fielding’s potential source is no longer extant; in Fielding, The Tragedy of Tragedies , 97 (hereafter cited in text). [44] Seilhamer, A History , 1:61; Kane O’Hara, Tom Thumb , “A burletta . . . Altered from Henry Fielding,” (London: Barker and Son, 1805), in Literature Online at www.literature.proquest.com (hereafter cited in text). It remains unclear which version, or amalgamation, companies actually produced. Cast lists for the Chestnut’s productions in Philadelphia include Cleora and Mustacha, Huncamunca’s two maids, indicating Fielding’s original (Seilhamer, A History , 3:184; Pollock, The Philadelphia Theatre , 248, 267, 278, 391). O’Hara renames them Frizaletta and Plum and reduces their dialogue to one line each. For subsequent Baltimore performances, Seilhamer indicates O’Hara’s authorship (3:194) but with a cast change for Mustacha (3:200); and, Ritchey specifies Fielding’s “operatical farce” ( A Guide , 298, 315) or “burletta” (218) with his named maids (153, 160, 182, 199, 219). In Boston, Michael specifies O’Hara’s adaptation with Cleora and Mustachia [sic] (“A History,” 2:89). A January 1798 advertisement in New York’s Weekly Museum announces “a musical burletta,” albeit with Fielding’s full title (Odell insert after 1:476). See table inserts (n.p.) in Sonneck, Early Opera , which presume O’Hara’s version with music by Arne and Markordt. [45] Phyllis T. Dircks, The Eighteenth-Century English Burletta (Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, 1999), 99-100. [46] Porter, With an Air Debonair , 493; Willis, The Charleston Stage , 353; Shockley, The Richmond Stage , 185. [47] See drawing in V. C. Clinton-Baddeley, The Burlesque Tradition in the English Theatre after 1660 (London: Methuen, 1952), 60. [48] Fielding, The Tragedy of Tragedies , 145-50. [49] For example, when Harding recited an epilogue as Cupid, the New York Magazine thought “she looked indeed ‘the little God of Love’” (February 1795), an observation probably true for Stockwell’s Cupid in another pantomime (Seilhamer, A History , 3:324). [50] Qtd. in Seilhamer, A History , 3:175; The Diary of Elihu Hubbard Smith , ed. James E. Cronin (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1973), 318. [51] Seilhamer, A History , 3:184, 200; Dunlap, A History , 151; Odell, Annals , 2:10. [52] Maryland Journal , 17 August 1795, qtd. in Ritchey, A Guide , 29. [53] John Rose, The Prisoner (London: Lowndes, 1792), in Eighteenth Century Collections Online at www.galegroup.com (hereafter cited in text). [54] Philadelphia Gazette (n.d.), qtd. in Seilhamer, A History , 3:175. [55] Seilhamer, A History , 3:183, 205-06, 209. [56] Seilhamer, A History , 3:323-24; Pollock, The Philadelphia Theatre , 366. [57] Porter, With an Air Debonair , 480. [58] Samuel Birch, The Adopted Child (Boston: Edes, 1798), in Eighteenth Century Collections Online at www.galegroup.com (hereafter cited in text). To characterize relational appearances between a marriageable sister and her much younger brother, adolescent or married women portrayed Clara, including Miss Broadhurst, Mrs. Hodgkinson, Mrs. Warrell, Mrs. Graupner, Mrs. Placide, and Miss Ellen Westray in Seilhamer, A History , 3:323; Pollock, The Philadelphia Theatre , 333; Curtis, “The Early Charleston Stage,” 398; Michael, “A History,” 2:91, 98, 117; Pilkinton, “Theatre in Norfolk,” 497, 546; Sodders, 2:455. [59] Porter, With an Air Debonair , 428. [60] Isaac Bickerstaff, The Spoiled Child (Dublin: Booksellers, 1792), in Literature Online at www.literature.proquest.com (hereafter cited in text); Porter, With an Air Debonair , 489-90. [61] Anne Varty, Children and Theatre in Victorian Britain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 114. [62] Seilhamer, A History , 1:144; Elizabeth Reitz Mullenix, Wearing the Breeches: Gender on the Antebellum Stage (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 35-38. [63] Shockley, The Richmond Stage , 99. [64] Ritchey, A Guide , 69; Seilhamer, A History , 3:235; Pilkinton, “Theatre in Norfolk,” 481. [65] Seilhamer, A History , 3:327, 395; Michael, “A History,” 2:73, 82. [66] Durang, History of the Philadelphia Stage , 43. Stockwell may have played this boy in December 1798, but Seilhamer, Ireland, and Odell do not provide cast lists. [67] Durang, History of the Philadelphia Stage , 40. Mrs. Marshall’s birth year is unknown. See entry for Lydia Webb in Philip H. Highfill, Kalman A. Burnim, and Edward A. Langhans, A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses . . . in London , vol. 15 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973), 314-17. [68] Pollock, The Philadelphia Theatre , 204. Sixteen-year-old Harriet Grist originated Edward in London, based on Mrs. Inchbald’s recommendation, in James Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Inchbald (London: Bentley, 1833), 1:308. [69] Durang, History of the Philadelphia Stage , 40, 44; Pollock, The Philadelphia Theatre , 217, 224; Ritchey, A Guide , 132; and see note 41. [70] Minerva , 20 February 1796. [71] Seilhamer, A History , 3:172, 183, 110, 115-16; Porter, With an Air Debonair , 480. [72] Seilhamer, A History , 3:193, 199. [73] Seilhamer, A History , 3:290; Ritchey, A Guide , 227. [74] Durang, History of the Philadelphia Stage , 40; Pollock, The Philadelphia Theatre , 204, 206; Odell, Annals , 2:386. [75] Qtd. in Seilhamer, A History , 3:204-05; Ritchey, A Guide , 203. In September 1796, Mr. and Mrs. Marshall were hired by John Williamson as first singers at Boston’s Federal Theatre (Michael, “A History,” 1:138-39). [76] Michael, “A History,” 2:60, 70, 83, 87. [77] Qtd. in Smith, The Brief Career of Eliza Poe , 27. [78] Smith, The Brief Career of Eliza Poe , 33. [79] Odell, Annals , 1:445-70. [80] Ritchey, A Guide , 219; Pollock, The Philadelphia Theatre , 313, 333, 348. [81] Pollock, The Philadelphia Theatre , 356; Ritchey, A Guide , 229. [82] Smith, The Brief Career of Eliza Poe , 39-42, 135. [83] Odell, Annals , 1:385, 424; Sodders, “The Theatre Management of Alexandre Placide,” 2:551. Mary deferred to Mrs. Williamson for one Boston night in July 1797; Michael, “A History,” 2:512. [84] Willis, The Charleston Stage , 206; Shockley, The Richmond Stage , 111; Pilkinton, “Theatre in Norfolk,” 786; Curtis, “The Early Charleston Stage,” 391-93. [85] Pilkinton, “Theatre in Norfolk,” 252, note 43. [86] William Wood, Personal Recollections of the Stage (Philadelphia: Carey Baird, 1855), 60-61; Pollock, The Philadelphia Theatre , 402; Curtis, “The Early Charleston Stage,” 392-93; Sodders, “The Theatre Management of Alexandre Placide,” 1:185-86, 2:551. [87] Following Willis (441-42), Sodders incorrectly identifies “Miss Sully” as thirty-year-old Elizabeth, who had eloped with Middleton Smith five years earlier (Willis, The Charleston Stage , 191), rather than Harriet, for child roles this season (“The Theatre Management of Alexandre Placide,” 2:435, 439, 443, 446, 448, 451, 455), per Pilkinton, “Theatre in Norfolk,” 252. [88] Odell, Annals , 2:18, 43. [89] Sodders, “The Theatre Management of Alexandre Placide,” 1:187-88, 2:448; William Dunlap, Pizarro in Peru (New York: Hopkins, 1800), in Literature Online at www.literature.proquest.com . [90] Sodders, “The Theatre Management of Alexandre Placide,” 1:165-66; Michael, “A History,” 2:101, 105, 106, 109, 111, 114, 115; Durang, History of the Philadelphia Stage , 63, 68, 70. [91] Sodders, “The Theatre Management of Alexandre Placide,” 2:518. [92] Durang, History of the Philadelphia Stage , 73; see Early American playbills, 1750-1812: Guide, Harvard University Library at http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/~hou01711 . [93] Dunlap, A History , 298; Odell, Annals , 2:146. At this point, two Marshall couples create confusions. Patrick incorrectly claims that “Mrs. G. Marshall” played in Savannah in late 1800 when she was still in New York as Miss Harding (Patrick, Savannah’s Pioneer Theater , 38; Odell, Annals , 2:99-106). Lydia Marshall was in Europe during the 1803-04 season (Sodders, “The Theatre Management of Alexandre Placide,” 1:250), not Boston (Michael, “A History,” 1:350, 2:191). She reappeared as Mrs. Wilmot with her second husband in Washington in 1805 ( National Intelligencer , 19 July 1805) and then in Richmond (Shockley, The Richmond Stage , 213). [94] Sodders includes Mrs. G. Marshall in casts beginning in February 1804, but Harbin claims she did not join Hodgkinson until October (“The Career of John Hodgkinson,” 230). [95] Charleston Courier , 12 February 1804, qtd. in Sodders, “The Theatre Management of Alexandre Placide,” 246. [96] Ireland, Records , 1:232. [97] “Marriage and Death Notices from the City-Gazett [sic] and Daily Advertiser,” The South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 30, no. 4 (October 1929): 244; Pilkinton, “Theatre in Norfolk,” 460; Sodders, “The Theatre Management of Alexandre Placide,” 2:730. [98] Shockley, The Richmond Stage , 345, 355, 375. [99] Odell, Annals , 2:413, 424, 435, 438, 441; Ireland, Records , 1:120; Augusta Chronicle (6 February and 2 April 1823). I am unable to verify further accounts of Mary’s life, but see “Great Trial for Adultery, Divorce, &c.,” New York Herald , 24 November 1841; New York Daily Tribune , 11 January 1845; New York Times , 23 January 1862; “Died,” New York Times , 15 June 1870. [100] Odell, Annals , 2:261. [101] Sodders, “The Theatre Management of Alexandre Placide,” 2:626; Willard, History of the Providence Stage, 36; Michael, “A History,” 1:585. [102] Massachusetts Town Clerk Vital and Town Records, Marriages 1800-1849, vol. 2, K-Z, 282; “Green Room Intelligence,” Saturday Evening Post , 4 December 1824; “Letter from ‘Acorn,’” Spirit of the Times , 14 October 1854: 410; Ireland, Records , 1:134, 444. [103] Sodders, “The Theatre Management of Alexandre Placide,” 2:435, 443-55; Pilkinton, “Theatre in Norfolk,” 546; Ritchey, A Guide , 209. [104] Pilkinton, “Theatre in Norfolk,” 546, 550; Norfolk Herald , 25 April 1801, 1315, 1484. [105] Pilkinton, “Theatre in Norfolk,” 547; Willis, The Charleston Stage , 191. [106] Dunlap, A History , 407. [107] Durang, History of the Philadelphia Stage , 60. Durang also describes “two green rooms.” “One green room was used for musical rehearsals, dancing practices, &c., and it was a place where the juvenile members of the corps might indulge their freaks unrestrainedly.” The principal green room was a “polished drawing-room” where “perfect etiquette” was “always preserved” (34). Footnotes About The Author(s) Jeanne Klein (now retired) directed productions for children and taught Theatre for Young Audiences, US Theatre History, and Children and Drama, among other courses, for thirty years at the University of Kansas. Her numerous articles have been published in Youth Theatre Journal , Theatre Topics , Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism , and Journal of Aesthetic Education , among many others. She is currently investigating African American child performers in the 1890s. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. 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