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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

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

George Potter Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 26 2 Visit Journal Homepage Alternative Transnationals: Naomi Wallace and Cross-Cultural Performances George Potter By Published on May 29, 2014 Download Article as PDF In summer 2002, the paths of war crisscrossed American public discourse. The war in Afghanistan had continued for over half a year, and the Bush Administration was beginning to lay the groundwork of lies and misinformation that would form the justification for invading Iraq. Meanwhile, Naomi Wallace led a group of six playwrights, along with Kia Corthron, Tony Kushner, Robert O’Hara, Lisa Schlesinger, and Betty Shamieh into occupied Palestine to meet with theater artists there and learn about the conditions under which Palestinian artists and people worked and lived during the Second Intifada. The following year, American Theatre published a series of responses from the playwrights, remarkable in the different ways in which they constructed the narratives of their contacts with occupied Palestine. Tony Kushner, for one, filtered the experience through an analysis of his Jewish American identity, with considerable attention to the copy of Gershom Scholem’s letters that he carried with him, concluding, “Because I went with a diverse group of people, I saw things I might have missed, and because I am a Jew I think I saw things others didn’t see.”1 Similarly, in a comparison of human rights abuses against Palestinians and his own African American experience, Robert O’Hara wrote the word “I” fifty-one times in responding to the conditions of Palestinians.2 And Palestinian American Betty Shamieh created parallel narratives between her own life growing up in America and the life she didn’t feel she would be strong enough to endure had her parents stayed in Ramallah.3 This is not to say that any of these are invalid responses. Personal responses to traumatic conditions are greatly varied in form and substance. However, they are a stark contrast to the closing narrative in the article, that by Naomi Wallace. She is the only one of the writers to use an Arabic word, referencing the debka, a traditional dance; the only one to draw from the literary heritage of Palestine, quoting now-deceased poet Mahmoud Darwish; and one of only two, alongside Lisa Schlesinger, to quote someone that the group encountered, providing the words of a twelve-year-old girl who told Wallace, “Yes, I throw stones at tanks. But I would rather play . . . When I grow up, I want to be a doctor.” Perhaps this is why Wallace wrote not only of her reaction as an American, but her obligation as an American: To visit the Occupied Territories, the West Bank and Gaza as theatre writers is not simply an exercise in forging links between ourselves and the Palestinians. Rather, it is to realize that we, as Americans, are, on an intensely intimate level, already fused, through the overt involvement of our government, with the history of these people . . . We are not, I thank the gods, only ourselves and our own personal experience. We are also what happens to one another.4 There is much to commend such a statement, both in its departure from the inward focused statements of Wallace’s fellow travelers—and the inward focused writing of much American theater—and in her commitment to making Americans aware of their role in perpetuating the occupation, and all of its itinerant conditions, of Palestine. Additionally, the idea that “We are also what happens to one another” would also seem like a modus operandi for the playwright, whose oeuvre stretches not just from performances around the world, but also to the American-Mexican border to the wars in Iraq and Palestine and to the struggle of union organizers. As such, Wallace’s work, particularly The Fever Chart: Three Visions of the Middle East—and the ideas that support it—serves as a strong example of what it means to be a meaningfully transnational artist. This analysis will thus begin with an examination of the deployment of the term “transnational,” as well as an exploration of how this concept is deployed in explorations of contemporary theater productions. This transnational frame will then illuminate how Wallace’s practice of theater moves beyond notions of international economic movement toward an argument for an intimate understanding of a diverse range of lives, and a personal contact—both in artistic and activist engagements—between those lives. In its most basic sense, the term “transnational” is not the subject of much debate. As Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden write, “the transnational can be understood as the global forces that link people or institutions across nations. Key to transnationalism is the recognition of the decline of national sovereignty as a regulatory force in global coexistence.”5 While this would imply that one aspect of transnationalism is the various multinational systems of economic, political, and communicative arrangements that make up the contemporary era, John Carlos Rowe also notes that the concept of transnationalism has come to include “a critical view of historically specific late modern or postmodern practices of globalizing production, marketing, distribution, and consumption for neocolonial ends.”6 Thus, the transnational consists of both the multinational influences on contemporary life and the multinational resistances to those influences. In the realm of the arts, much early scholarship on transnationalism came from the field of film studies, which existed at the intersection of both the economic and political debates over influences of transnationalism. As Ezra and Rowden write, “Cinema has from its inception been transnational, circulating more or less freely across borders and utilizing international personnel. This practice has continued from the era of Chaplin, Hitchcock, and Fritz Lang up to contemporary directors like Ang Lee, Mira Nair, and Alfonso Cuarón.”7 However, in the modern era, this movement of capital and labor has been expedited and expanded, and alongside it has developed an alternative cinema—by artists such as Ken Loach, Zhangke Zia, and Jafar Panahi—that explore the political, economic, and cultural impacts of such movements. Theater, however, as an embodied art form, does not transport with the expediency of a DVD, and discussions of transnationalism have taken on a different shape in theater studies, focusing more on the latter question of representational concerns. To the extent that structural elements have been discussed, they have tended to focus on international lines of influence on contemporary artists. The collection Not the Other Avant-Garde, for example, argues for a decentering of the avant-garde outside of the European experience, claiming that “the first- and second-wave avant-gardes (pre- and post-World War II) were always already a transnational phenomenon, and that the performative gestures of these avant-gardes were culturally hybrid forms that emanated simultaneously from a wide diversity of sources rather than from a European center.”8 In the same collection, Marvin Carlson advocates for the necessity of understanding the indigenous influence on Middle Eastern theater, rather than merely looking for European influences.9 All of this is, undoubtedly, important scholarship. However, none of it asks what it means to think across borders, rather than to merely be influenced by multiple traditions. There is, then, very little attempt to use theater, as Yan Haiping argues for in her discussion of Asian theater, to explore how “globalization dictated by capital can be traced and contextualized through the various social formations of the human lives that it changes and interconnects and how those specific social beings actively inhabit the present global change that not only conditions their functions but also threatens to overdetermine the very constitution of their existence and signification.”10 While there is some theater work that attempts to do this, the nature of live performance, and the economics of performance, often do not allow critiques of transnational economics to function transnationally. Thus, when the Young Vic staged Clare Bayley’s The Container, a play about refugees attempting to smuggle themselves into Britain, the performance occurred inside a shipping container on a street in London. However, while this content presented a critique of those abandoned by the international flow of capital, in form, the work still presented a British writer, theater, and cast discussing issues of British concern in front of a predominantly British audience.11 Meanwhile, many works that travel internationally with international casts often replicate the economic paradigms that The Container interrogates. Thus, most critical discussions of the transnational content of theater have tended to merely use the term as a means of discussing cross-border content. In this context, Sara L. Warner has discussed Suzan-Lori Parks’ Venus as a transnational work because it deals with the cross-border transport—both past and present, alive and dead—of Saartjie Baartman’s (“The Hottentot Venus”) body.12 Similarly, Jerry Wasserman writes of the Canadian play Ali and Ali and the aXes of Evil as “transnational agitprop” because of the diasporic nature of the stars and its engagement with the American influence on Canadian culture.13 These works, of course, contain transnational content, as well as critiques of transnational exploitation, but there is nothing particularly transnational about their form or the audiences that they perform before, although Ali and Ali did at least go on the road, with a variable script. In the end, though, if critiques of local political and economic policies are to significantly involve the effects of those policies on distant peoples, there must be some way for theater to meaningfully contact the people discussed. This challenge returns this discussion to Naomi Wallace, an artist whose work has attempted to overcome physical and mental borders. Years before the previously discussed trip to Palestine, she crafted what remains her most famous play, In the Heart of America, the story of a white American and a Palestinian American soldier during the first Gulf War, which touches on issues of race, class, and sexuality not often mixed on American stages, where Palestinian bodies are rarely present in any form. However, this play remains within the bounds of those works discussed above that exist as transnational merely in their content. More recently, her play Twenty-One Positions, a Cartographic Dream of the Middle East involved working with Jewish and Palestinian artists to construct “a kind of Brechtian musical about the illegal Wall,” as Wallace explains it, thereby moving toward a more transnational process to match the content of the work.14 However, it is in a work between the two of these, the lesser known The Fever Chart, that Wallace has embodied the idea of critical transnationality in artistic production. In terms of content, The Fever Chart represents a true attempt to think across the fault lines of occupation in the Middle East. Consisting of three “visions,” the work has two short plays about Palestinian-Israeli relations, and one monologue by an Iraqi man about the devastation in his country. Thus, like In the Heart of America, it is a rare American work that juxtaposes Palestinian and Iraqi conditions of occupation. In fact, in this way its ideology—though not its representations of Israelis—stands much closer to theater found in the Arab world than North America, where Palestinian and Iraqi issues have historically been severed from one another. Perhaps this is why it is one of the few plays about the “war on terror” to have been performed in both Cairo and New York, as well as London. As such, the work, and the artist, who splits her time between America and Britain, and traveled to Egypt for the Cairo production, exemplifies the idea of a personalized transnational critique that knows the spaces in which those forgotten by occupation and globalization exist, and the production history of The Fever Chart demonstrates the challenges of trying to communicate such knowledge. One of the visions in The Fever Chart, “Between This Breath and You,” tells the seemingly impossible story of an Israeli woman that has been given the lungs of a Palestinian youth killed by an Israeli soldier. However, though Wallace’s play speaks to a seemingly impossible coming together of her characters, the play was based on an actual event, as Nehad Selaiha noted in her review of the Cairo performance. In fact, The Guardian, whose story on the event was projected between segments of the Cairo production, quoted the Arab family involved as stating “that peace and a desire to alleviate the suffering of others was uppermost in their minds. But looking exhausted and still stunned by the twin demands of Ahmed's death and the Israeli embrace, they also speak of their decision as an act of resistance.”15 [caption id="attachment_1128" align="alignleft" width="606"] Figure 1., Mourid (Basil Daoud) Sami (Hassan Kreidly), and Tanya (Amina Khalil) in Between this Breath and You at the AUC. Courtesy of Frank Bradley.[/caption] In Wallace’s play, however, the seemingly impossible moves to another level, when the father (Mourid) of the dead boy (Ahmed) meets the woman (Tanya) who has his son’s lungs inside her in the waiting room of a clinic in West Jerusalem. There, Mourid mysteriously unravels details of Ahmed’s life beside what he knows of Tanya’s life, asking her, “How often do you stay behind to lock up? To play with the stethoscope? To talk with a patient after hours, pretending you can be of service?”16 Mourid then explains that Israeli soldiers had made his son clean dirt from their tanks with a broom because children had been throwing dirt. Then, they shot him in the back of the head and the pelvis, saying Ahmed had been carrying a gun.17 There are many ways to write about the occupation of Palestine, and many plays have been written on the violence inherent in occupation. Few have shaped as intimate a metaphor as having an Israeli living through the air drawn through the lungs of a Palestinian killed by the Israeli military; few are willing to write that an Israeli lives through drawing breath from a Palestinian. Even fewer would have such a character look into the eyes of the father of him who gives her breath to live. However, this intimacy, the speaking of the child’s death, is broken when Mourid tries to explain to Tanya that his son’s lungs were transplanted inside of her, an idea that Tanya works hard to reject. Thus, Mourid explains to her the situation in detail: The donor organs had to be transplanted within six hours after being removed. While you were under general anesthesia, the surgeon made an incision across your chest, beneath the breast area and removed your lungs. Then the surgeon placed the new lungs into your empty chest cavity and connected the pulmonary artery of the new lungs into your vessels and airway. Drainage tubes were inserted to drain air, fluid and blood out of your chest for several days to allow the lungs to reexpand. With oxygen. Sweet, cold oxygen. And here you are, beautiful Tanya. (Beat) My son is inside you.18 Initially, Tanya responds to this story with outright denial, and, as Mourid continues to insist that it is Ahmed’s lungs inside Tanya, she turns to revulsion, spitting on him, and later telling him, “Had your son’s lungs been inside me, I am sure, absolutely sure, that I would have rejected them.”19 Finally, she attempts to disgust Mourid, declaring, “When I laugh, your son laughs. When I sing, your son sings . . . But that would also mean your son was present last night . . . I picked a stranger up after work. A sweet, eager young man. He fucked me so hard I thought he’d break me in half,” continuing on after Mourid tries to interrupt her, “Don’t worry. Things went smoothly. Your son gave me good air when I sucked cock. Good Jewish cock.”20 In this way, Tanya attempts to invert the intimacy expressed by Mourid, using the fact of Ahmed’s lungs not to show the closeness of their lives, but to try to sicken and repel Mourid. Just as the bullet from the Israeli soldier took the beauty of Ahmed’s life to try to stop Palestinian resistance, so too does Tanya try to use the beauty of the gift she was given to try to end Mourid’s words. In the end, though, just as the Israeli state has not been able to expel all the Palestinian bodies from its system, no matter how many have been killed, Tanya learns that she must also depend on Mourid to learn to breathe again after an asthma attack: [MOURID:] You must slow your breath down. Let it gather its force again. Like this. (Mourid breathes in a long, slow breath.) As though the air has become fluid and you are drinking it in. (Mourid breathes in again, demonstrating.) TANYA: I can’t. (Beat) I can’t. . . . TANYA: Mourid Kamal. Why do you want to help me? MOURID: Because you are. My son. (TANYA looks at Mourid. Mourid raises his head slightly; Tanya copies him. It is clear that he is leading this breathing lesson.)21 The remarkable aspect of the work is that Wallace understands at once the power dynamic in play in the Israeli occupation of Palestine,22 but, at the same time, that on either side of that dynamic are human beings intimately related to one another, at the most intrinsic of levels. Thus, while Tanya is dependent on Mourid in order to draw breaths, it is her choice—and for five years, she lived without any awareness of him. Mourid understands what is necessary for him and Tanya to live peacefully together, but Tanya alone is the one responsible for choosing to overcome her biases, to set her structured power aside, and to choose to allow Mourid to help her to breathe, to live.23 And until she chooses to risk her own self, she has no hope of healing herself. This sort of intimacy between the occupier and the occupied is at the heart of all the other visions within The Fever Chart. In “Retreating World,” an older piece from Wallace repackaged in the triptych, an Iraqi man delivers a monologue that weaves his love of books, his hobby of raising pigeons, and the devastation that war and sanctions—the play is set in 2000—have left behind in his nation. Thus, early on, his advice on raising pigeons dovetails into the state of Iraq after nearly a decade of sanctions: “Never name a pigeon after a member of your family or a dear friend. (Beat) For two reasons: pigeons have short lives—and when a pigeon named after an uncle dies, this can be disconcerting. And second: these times are dangerous for pigeons—they can be caught and eaten.”24 This style of mixing the intimacy of books and birds from his personal life, with the violence unleashed on an entire nation continues throughout the play, such as when Ali begins to speak of the Gulf War, saying, We hid in bunkers for most of those weeks. Cursing Saddam when our captain was out. Cursing the Brits and the Yanks the rest of the time. And I missed my birds. But birds were prohibited in the bunkers. Prohibited. Prohibited by the laws of nations as were the fuel-air explosive bombs, the napalm—Shhh!—the cluster and antipersonnel weapons. Prohibited, as were the BLU-82 bombs, a fifteen-thousand-pound device—Shut up!—capable of incinerating every living thing, flying or grounded, within hundreds of yards . . . And me, I missed my birds. The way they looked at me, their eyes little pieces of peace sailing my way.25 Similarly, after Ali eats part of one of his books, he declares, Books can also, in extreme times, be used as sustenance. But such eating makes for a parched throat. Many mornings I wake and I am thirsty. I turn on the taps but there is no running water. A once-modern city of three million people, with no running water for years now. The toilets are dry because we have no sanitation. Sewage pools in the street. When we wish to relieve ourselves, we squat beside the dogs. At night, we turn on the lights to read the books we have forgotten we have sold, but there is no electricity.26 [caption id="attachment_1127" align="alignnone" width="606"] Figure 2., Waleed Hamad as Ali in The Retreating World at the AUC. Courtesy of Frank Bradley.[/caption] What these passages reveal is how deep into the intimate corners of individual lives political and economic devastation can reach. The last section particularly underscores this idea, as Baghdad had once been one of the major centers of Middle Eastern arts and culture, with a remarkably high literacy rate, before the wars with the United States began.27 And though the sanctions regime and wars have weakened the Iraqi educational system, UNICEF still estimated total adult literacy between 2003 and 2008 at 74 percent.28 Thus, being forced to eat a book in a culture that values literature so much, and for a man who loves books so profoundly, becomes a stark marker of the degree to which Iraqi society, down to the most personal levels, had been undercut by the sanctions during the nineties. For Ali, the violence and devastation, and not the artifacts of a life he had once known, have become the normative structures. Perhaps this makes sense, as he continues to explain that when his unit of soldiers tried to surrender to the Americans in 1991, the U.S. unit fired an anti-tank missile at a single man, a friend of the narrator: “Out of hundreds, thousands in that week, a handful of us survived. I lived. Funny. That I am still here. The dead are dead. The living, we are the ghosts. We no longer say good-bye to one another. With the pencils we do not have we write our names so the future will know we were here. So that the past will know we are coming.”29 As Ali moves into the heart of his trauma, even the memories of the books and birds from better days disappear from his monologue, replaced only by violence and loss, by the devastation that has steadily pushed all other beauties out of his life, by the death of the man he had earlier described by saying, “If love is in pieces, then he was a piece of love.”30 A piece of love, turned to pieces of human devastation by the violence of war. Too often, discussions of war violence are separated from a direct understanding of what that violence entails. The number of bodies are given in an abstract frame, one that does not see the inability to feed or educate one’s children any longer, the inability to bring a glass of water to an ailing parent, the inability to walk down the road beside one’s lover, the inability to love. In “The Retreating World,” Wallace brings such personal details painfully close to her audience, staging the destruction brought by large weapons on the smallest, most private level. And the play also ends in a moment of intimacy, when Ali picks up a bucket and holds it up for the audience, declaring, “These are the bones of those who have died, from the avenue of palms, from the land of dates. I have come here to give them to you for safekeeping. (Beat) Catch them. If you can.”31 As he lifts the bucket out over the audience, they are not met with bones of dead Iraqis, but “hundreds of white feathers.”32 Thus, instead of fully horrifying an audience that helped construct Iraqi suffering, he, like Mourid, provides a gift of beauty, a moment to breathe and hope together, to know that the space between the lives of the oppressor and the oppressed is thinner than the space between feathers falling from the sky. And this also holds true in the third, and most dreamlike, vision in The Fever Chart, “A State of Innocence.” This final, though typically first performed, vision tells the story of an Israeli soldier and a Palestinian woman meeting in a zoo in Rafah, a city in the Gaza Strip, alongside the architect of the zoo. As with “Between This Breath and You,” “A State of Innocence” tells the story of a meeting between two intimately related people from either side of the Israeli occupation. And, once again, it begins with tension between the two parties, brought by their preconceptions of one another: YUVAL (Threatening): [ . . . ] Are you a terrorist? UM HISHAM (Playfully): Paletinorist. Terrestinian. Palerrorist. I was born in the country of Terrorist. I commit terrible acts of Palestinianism. I eat liberty from a bowl on the Wall. Fanatic. Security. Democracy. YUVAL: Don’t get playful with me. You want to throw me in the sea. UM HISHAM: I just might. But I can’t get to the sea. Seventeen and a half checkpoints keep me from it.33 [caption id="attachment_1126" align="alignnone" width="606"] Figure 3., Yuval (Ahmed Omar) crawling to Hisham (Amira Gabr) in A State of Innocence at the AUC. Courtesy of Frank Bradley.][/caption] Set in the middle of the Second Intifada, the play begins with the tension between the people on either side of the occupation, tensions that cause a young soldier to believe that even a middle-aged mother is a threat to him because she is Palestinian. However, the structure of occupied violence returns when Um Hisham explains to Yuval how she knows who he is, telling him that soldiers in his unit beat her husband because they could not find weapons in Um Hisham’s house. Yuval stopped the beating, and, to thank him, Um Hisham made him a cup of tea. However, as he put the cup of tea to his lips, a single bullet from a sniper pierced his head. When he dropped to his knees, he looked to Um Hisham and said, “Hold me,” which she did, telling him in the zoo, “Three minutes. It took you three minutes to die. Everything I have despised, for decades—the uniform, the power, the brutality, the inhumanity—and I held it in my arms. I held you, Yuval. (Beat) But it should have been your mother. We should hold our own children when they die.”34 Um Hisham continues to explain that because Yuval died in her house, the Israeli military bulldozed the house and arrested her husband, and that the zoo they are in is the one that lives on in their minds, where she can visit Yuval as she visits her daughter. This dream-like aspect was underscored in the Egyptian production, which used a minimalist set, with only a few stairs and wooden latticework behind the characters to emphasize the unreal world they were in, as well as the openness of the possibilities before them in such a space. In this way, “A State of Innocence” also explores the closeness between the occupier and the occupied, and how their lives, and deaths, are inextricably linked to one another and are even tied together after death. And, as with the other plays, it provides an image of the oppressed providing comfort to the oppressor, showing humanity in spite of the occupation; in this play, though, the Israeli soldier had also shown a moment of compassion to Um Hisham, a moment that would cost him his life, as crossing the borders of political divide, sadly, too often does. However, as Wallace writes, it is only in those moments of crossing, in the creative transgressions, in the most intimate forms of transnational community that a better world can be imagined, that that vision can exist, in the mind, on stage, or in life. The inverse of this is an idea that Wallace understands when she states, “What could be more intimate or personal than the fact that we get up in the morning, kiss our loved ones, go to work, come home, pay our taxes—and those taxes from our daily labor are used to kill you and you and you, and I never saw your face nor knew your name.”35 If the violence of occupation is formed from the product of our daily lives, the resistance to such violence needs to take an equally personal form. Unfortunately, writing such visions comes with its own cost as well. As Wallace has revealed about attempts to stage her collaborative work Twenty-One Positions, a Cartographic Dream of the Middle East, “before Lisa, Abed [the co-writers], and I had set foot in the Guthrie Theatre, the dramaturg there accused us of writing in a way that supported terrorism.” According to Wallace, “The conversation about Israel and Palestine is the most censored conversation in the U.S. today. And it’s not an easy conversation to have in Britain either.”36 Furthermore, The Jewish Chronicle, writing of the British production of The Fever Chart, ended with the note that “plays about this conflict have to deliver more than a depiction of mutual suffering.”37 And, as with the Guthrie’s decision to forego a production of Twenty-One Positions, most non-academic theaters avoid Wallace’s work, just as the American press largely chooses to ignore the few productions of her work that are mounted. However, it is not in the West alone that this conversation has met challenges. When The Fever Chart was first performed at the American University in Cairo, as Wallace and director Frank Bradley took the stage for the post-show QA, four of the actors in the play came to the front of the stage and rejected the play for, as they saw it, equating the oppressor with the oppressed and creating lives in a vacuum, finally stating “no coexistence without preceding existence.”38 Interestingly, the critical responses to the performance took a decidedly different tone. Joseph Fahim stated, “The four actors’ statement and the criticism Wallace was bombarded with reflects an intolerance for any work that portrays the ‘enemy’ in a non-barbaric light. The Israeli characters never appear sympathetic, and that’s one of the very few dramatic flaws of the play. Wallace doesn’t offer any kind of resolution, or ‘reconciliation,’ for her characters, which renders the actors’ statement all the more puzzling.”39 Meanwhile, Nehad Selaiha noted, “That some of the audience found it hard to swallow such a message is, perhaps, understandable and could be predicted. One wonders if there ever will come a time when such brave plays would be properly appreciated . . . They [Wallace, Bradley, and the AUC] gave me a taste of real political theatre as I understand it: challenging, disorienting and thought provoking.”40 It would also seem strange that, given the AUC’s upper-class demographic, the students did not have a problem with their university training the heirs to Egypt’s political and economic elite who remain complicit in the occupation. Ironically, though, equating the roles of occupier and occupied is how the one published Western critical response to Wallace’s play positions the work. In the article, “Enough! Women Playwrights Confront the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” Amelia Howe Kritzer surveys female responses to Israeli occupation in the wake of the controversy over Caryl Churchill’s play Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza, and positions The Fever Chart as an alternative to “the tone of anger and impatience common to other plays about the conflict.”41 For Kritzer, the majority of plays about Palestine create a “pattern of emphasizing the viewpoint and experience of one side [that] limits their potential for bridging the deep divisions between Palestinians and Israelis,” while Wallace’s work “feature[s] a trio of characters, a choice that undermines the either/or pattern of the binary opposition between Palestinian and Israeli positions.”42 While I agree that Wallace’s work contains an uncommonly humanistic approach to the issue, assuming that Wallace does not take sides requires Kritzer to consistently erase Arab subject positions in her analysis. Thus, she does not note the disproportionate number of dead Palestinians versus dead Israelis, including two Palestinian children, in Wallace’s play, an imbalance that mirrors the actual occupation. Additionally, by focusing on Palestine and ignoring the Iraqi segment, Kritzer avoids Wallace’s implication of the structural and American-funded nature of violence and occupation in the Middle East, an erasure amplified by her consistent references to “conflict,” rather than the more accurate and specific terms “occupation,” “apartheid,” and “settler-colonialism.”43 Finally, she writes of British and American productions of Wallace’s work, ignoring that it played in Cairo before New York and ignoring the different resonances in the productions. In this way, she creates an argument for a “balanced” understanding of the “conflict” that obscures the reality of Wallace’s writing, how it has been performed, and Palestinian life under occupation. Instead of replicating similar rhetorical choices, The Fever Chart always maintains a clear structure of understanding the difference between occupier and occupied, while, at the same time, showing the intimate connections between human beings on either side of that line. True, this may be hard for many to view, but, at the same time, it is impossible to end oppressive political and economic structures without understanding that the ideological failures that create them are human. Just as suffering should not be disembodied, neither should the structures that create oppression. They are equally human, and must be understood as such. And this humanity must be understood in dialogues that move across borders both ideologically and physically. At one point in “Between This Breath and You,” Mourid tells Tanya, “Did you know, Tanya—may I call you Tanya?—that wind has no sound? What makes the sound are the things it touches—branch, cliff, roof. All that rushing is the contact between one thing and another. Without that meeting point between two worlds, the harshest wind is silent.”44 So too are abstract forms of political resistance, those that do not understand the intimate details of the lives they mean to help, equally voiceless. True, in the contact that creates voice, there is friction, and there are moments of tension. However, in the silencings of the Guthrie, of state and public censorship, of those who would not see those whom they oppose (or, in some cases, support) as human, there is also no chance for progress, for a better means of living together. It is only when transnational humanism risks the pain of intimacy and the burns of friction that it will have a voice, a hope, and a possibility for a better world. ------------ George Potter is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Valparaiso University. His research focuses on visual culture and national narratives in Jordan. A United States Fulbright grant and a Taft Dissertation Fellowship from the University of Cincinnati funded his study of theater about the “war on terror” in Cairo, London, and New York. His research and translations have appeared in a number of journals and edited collections, including Arizona Quarterly and Proteus: A Journal of Ideas ------------ [1] Kia Corthron, et. al., “On the Road to Palestine,” American Theatre (July/August 2003), 31. [2] Ibid. [3] Ibid., 71. [4] Ibid. [5] Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden, eds., Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006), 2. [6] Qtd. in James M. Harding and John Rouse, eds., Not the Other Avant-Garde: The Transnational Foundation of Avant-Garde Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 31. [7] Ezra and Rowden, Transnational Cinema, 2. [8] Harding and Rouse, Not the Other Avant-Garde, 15. [9] Marvin Carlson, “Avant Garde Drama in the Middle East,” in ibid., 125-44. [10]Yan Haiping. “Other Transnationals: An Introductory Essay,” Modern Drama 48, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 226. [11] Stephen Moss, “The Container’s Captive Audience,” The Guardian 7 July 2009. [12] Sara L. Warner, “Suzan-Lori Parks’s Drama of Disinternment: A Transnational Exploration of Venus,” Theatre Journal 60, no. 2 (May 2008):181. [13] Jerry Wasserman, “Bombing (on) the Border: Ali and Ali and the aXes of Evil as Transnational Agitprop,” Modern Drama 51, no.1 (Spring 2008): 126-44. [14] Naomi Wallace, “On Writing as Transgression,” American Theatre (January 2008), 100. [15] Qtd. in Nehad Selaiha. “Politics Centre-Stage,” Al-Ahram Weekly (20 Mar. 2008), http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2008/889/cu2.htm (accessed 5 May 2010). [16] Naomi Wallace, The Fever Chart: Three Visions of the Middle East (New York: TCG, 2009), 37. [17] Ibid. [18] Ibid., 45. [19] Ibid., 46. [20] Ibid., 50. [21] Ibid., 52-3. [22] A brief and accessible overview of the conditions in occupied Palestine can be found in the film Occupation 101 (Dir. Omeish, Abdallah, and Sufyan Omeish, DVD, YouTube, and Vimeo). [23] Similarly, Ali Abunimah has noted that economic exploitation was built into the Oslo process, which allows Israel to control Palestinian imports and exports and divert development into international industrial zones that export the profit. See Ali Abunimah, “Economic Exploitation of Palestinians Flourishes under Occupation,” Al-Jazeera English 13 September 2012, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/09/20129128052624254.html, (accessed 8 February 2014). [24] Wallace, Fever, 58. [25] Ibid., 61. [26] Ibid., 64. [27] “In 1989, school enrollment in Iraq was higher than the average rate for all developing countries.” (PBS. “Iraq—Truth and Lies in Baghdad. Facts and Stats,” Frontline World (November 2002), http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/iraq/facts.html, (accessed 3 September 2010). [28] Ibid. [29] Wallace, Fever, 66. [30] Ibid., 62. [31] Ibid., 67. [32] Ibid., 68. [33] Ibid., 9. [34] Ibid., 23. [35] Wallace, “On Writing,” 102. [36] The production would eventually be staged at Fordham University, instead of the Guthrie. Qtd. in Claire MacDonald, “Intimate Histories,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Arts 28, no. 3 (2006): 100. [37] John Nathan. “Review: The Fever Chart,” Rev., The Fever Chart, 18 March 2010, The Jewish Chronicle Online, http://www.thejc.com/arts/theatre-reviews/29596/review-the-fever-chart, (accessed 5 May 2010). [38] Frank Bradley, dir. The Fever Chart, writ. Naomi Wallace, perf. Falaki Theatre, American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt, 17 March 2008, Undistributed DVD. Also Personal Interview, 26 October 2008. [39] Joseph Fahim, “Visions of War, Loss and Humanity,” The Daily News Egypt (17 March 2008), http://www.dailystaregypt.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=12524 (accessed 5 May 2010). [40] Selaiha, “Politics Centre-Stage.” [41] Amelia Howe Kritzer, “Enough! Women Playwrights Confront the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” Theatre Journal 62, no. 4 (December 2010): 624. [42] Ibid. [43] Part 2, Article 7, of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (2002) defines apartheid as inhumane acts of a character similar to crimes against humanity “committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.” Even a cursory knowledge of the Israeli occupation would make clear that this is a more appropriate term than “conflict,” which implies a balanced struggle. See “Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court,” United Nations, 2002, http://legal.un.org/icc/statute/romefra.htm (accessed 7 August 2013). [44] Wallace, Fever, 34. ----------- The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 26, Number 2 (Spring 2014) Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Guest Editor: Cheryl Black (University of Missouri) With the ATDS Editorial Board: Noreen C. Barnes (Virginia Commonwealth University), Nicole Berkin (CUNY Graduate Center), Johan Callens (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Jonathan Chambers (Bowling Green State University), Dorothy Chansky (Texas Tech University), James Fisher (University of North Carolina at Greensboro), Anne Fletcher (Southern Illinois University), Felicia Londré (University of Missouri-Kansas City), Kim Marra (University of Iowa ), Judith A. Sebesta (The College for All Texans Foundation), Jonathan Shandell (Arcadia University), LaRonika Thomas (University of Maryland), Harvey Young (Northwestern University) Managing Editor: Ugoran Prasad Editorial Assistant: Andrew Goldberg Circulation Manager: Janet Werther Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue The Border that Beckons and Mocks: Conrad, Failure, and Irony in O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon Alternative Transnationals: Naomi Wallace and Cross-Cultural Performances Transgenero Performance: Gender and Transformation in Fronteras Desviadas/Deviant Borders Crossing Genre, Age and Gender: Judith Anderson as Hamlet YoungGiftedandFat: Performing Transweight Identities Hot Pursuit: Researching Across the Theatre/Film Border Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Gabrielle Randle Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 3 Visit Journal Homepage In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement. La Donna L. Forsgren. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 200. Gabrielle Randle By Published on May 13, 2019 Download Article as PDF In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement. La Donna L. Forsgren. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 200. A crucial contribution to the historiography of the Black Arts Movement, La Donna L. Forsgren’s In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement makes the original argument that black women dramatists played an invaluable role in the movement (1965-76). Forsgren employs a black feminist historiography with a ferocity that is both innovative and rigorous in an effort to revive a history that has been overlooked, misconstrued, and at worst erased. Each of the four chapters focuses on a single dramatist: Barbara Ann Teer, Martie Evans-Charles, Sonia Sanchez, and J.e. Franklin. In Search of Our Warrior Mothers is primarily a recuperative undertaking. As such, Forsgren’s methodology “foregrounds the sociopolitical factors that have led to the marginalization of black women’s culture and literary tradition” (3). In an effort to shed light on how and why black women dramatists were systematically excluded from the archives of the movement, Forsgren conducted oral histories to supplement the scant archives of her subjects. Her argument is made as much in the absences and gaps in memory and material as it is in the presence of tangible artifacts. In the first chapter, Forsgren claims Barbara Ann Teer as an unrecognized theorist of the Black Arts Movement. Forsgren focuses on Teer’s ritual performance theories, critical essays, ritualistic revival performance techniques, and the early work of the National Black Theatre (NBT), which Teer founded in 1968. In a departure from a typical literature review, Forsgren models a critique of historical and critical erasure that she continues in each subsequent chapter. In addition to highlighting existing literature on Barbara Ann Teer (there is one book-length biography on her life and work), Forsgren illuminates epistemological gaps. Forsgren suggests that Teer’s work is undervalued and as a result unpublished and in turn undervalued—a self-contained system of historical erasure. For the most part, the chapter is concerned with historicizing Teer as a theorist of the Black Arts Movement and concretizing her legacy as a pioneer in black theatre. Forsgren finds Teer’s theoretical origins in her theory of acting, “Five Cycles of Evolution.” Since Teer died in 2006, Forsgren conducted interviews with Barbara “Sade” Lythcott, Teer’s daughter and the current president of the NBT. Lythcott’s contextualization of her mother’s work serves to historicize Teer’s lasting impact on black performance beyond the Black Arts Movement. In chapter two, “‘We Black Women’: Martie Evans-Charles and the Spirits of Black Womanhood,” Forsgren argues that Evans-Charles and her deep commitment to portraying black women as “emblems of black history and culture” (37) were crucial to the success of the historic New Layette Theatre. Unlike Teer, whose work was not widely circulated, Evans-Charles was popular with critics and audiences of her time but largely forgotten after the Black Arts Movement. Forsgren is particularly interested in the subjecthood of black women in Evans-Charles’s dramas including Where We At , Black Cycle , Job Security , Jamimma , Asante , and Friends . Forsgren, in a methodological move that is both an orientation toward historical events and an ethical imperative, relies on Evans-Charles’s own critical writings, unpublished program notes, archival interviews, and interviews with her daughter and peers to rewrite Evans-Charles back into her rightful place in the narrative of the Black Arts Movement. If In Search of Our Warrior Mothers is a text about recovery, recuperation, and reclamation, then Sonia Sanchez, who is one of the few women often associated with the Black Arts Movement, is an unlikely candidate of study for the next chapter. Sanchez’s prolific work as a poet is typically connected to the movement, but as Forsgren expertly lays out, Sanchez’s plays also deserve to be revisited and explored. In this chapter, the author finds an easy stride. Perhaps because Forsgren was able to spend much time with Sanchez—and with her relatively complete archive of work—this chapter feels more like a traditional theatre history project. Though the extensive and exhaustive close readings of Sanchez’s plays are an impressive contribution to the field, there is less urgency in the underlying argument here. Forsgren is shoring up a place in history for an already iconic figure. In contrast, for Teer, Evans-Charles, and Franklin, I had the sense as a reader that she was fighting on their behalf against the forces of oblivion. Forsgren concludes the body text with perhaps her most important and timely intervention: chapter four, “‘Bring Your Wounded Hearts’: J.e. Franklin and the Art of Liberation,” explores the life and continuing work of the most prolific and successful black woman dramatist of the Black Arts Movement and also its most overlooked and understudied. Franklin’s place in the history of American theatre is invaluable, and Forsgren’s contribution succeeds on two levels. First, as the author attempts with all four subjects, she claims Franklin as part of an intellectual tradition. Departing from the other three chapters, Forsgren draws a direct line from Franklin to the origins of black feminist drama by highlighting the feminist stance in much of Franklin’s Black Power-oriented work. In doing so, she begins to map a genealogy of thought and influence that moves beyond the Black Arts Movement. Second, Forsgren highlights the divergences from the politics of the Black Arts Movement that previously ensured Franklin’s erasure from “neat” histories of an apparently monolithic movement. While black male playwrights of the movement often focused on ideas of “Revolution,” Forsgren argues that Franklin’s work centers “black women’s experiential knowledge and use[s] catharsis to foster liberation and community” (108). In Search of Our Warrior Mothers is a vital addition to the field of American theatre history. The loss of Ntozake Shange last year reminds us that the toll of life for our warrior mothers is taxing and that we must honor their legacies by gleaning their indispensable knowledge while we can. With that in mind, Forsgren’s methodological commitment to oral history and archival accountability feels bigger than a historiographical impulse; it feels like a war cry. References Footnotes About The Author(s) GABRIELLE RANDLE Northwestern University Editorial Board for Special Issue: David Bisaha Meredith Conti Leah Lowe Inga Meier Robert Vorlicky Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction: Embodied Arts Collective Choreography for Weathering Black Experience: Janelle Monáe and The Memphis "Tightrope" Dance Unruly Reproductions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville "Must Be Heavyset": Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance. Stephanie Nohelani Teves. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018; Pp. 220. Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre. Cindy Rosenthal. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017; Pp. 198. In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement. La Donna L. Forsgren. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 200. Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina. Noe Montez. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017; Pp. 239 + xi. Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical. Kevin Winkler. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018; Pp. 368. Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past. Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter, eds. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018; Pp. 399. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Cheryl Black Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 28 2 Visit Journal Homepage The New Humor in the Progressive Era Cheryl Black By Published on May 25, 2016 Download Article as PDF The New Humor in the Progressive Era: Americanization and the Vaudeville Comedian . By Rick DesRochers. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Pp. 187. Rick DesRochers’s exploration of vaudeville comedians and comediennes during vaudeville’s heyday is richly contextualized within a particular sociocultural moment, a crucial moment of rapid change in the history of the United States, when new technologies hurled the nation into the modern age, and a wave of immigration, primarily from Southern and Eastern Europe, alarmed native-born Americans with roots in Northern and Western Europe. It was a time when future President Woodrow Wilson warned Americans that “the countries of the south of Europe were disburdening themselves of the more sordid and hapless elements of their population” (quoted by DesRochers, xiii). It is also an era that seems profoundly familiar to our present moment. DesRochers looks critically at this nominally “progressive” era (circa 1880s-1920s) and the concerted efforts of primarily white, middle class Protestant reformers, who instituted a plethora of educational and social programs to solve the “problems” of the new immigrant and urban poor through assimilation/“Americanization.” Along with political and religious practices that the native population found Un-American, the new immigrants popularized a “New Humor,” first identified as such by vaudeville historian Albert McLean Jr., who defined it as “a humor that was more excited, more aggressive, and less sympathetic than that to which the middle classes of the nineteenth century had been accustomed” (quoted by DesRochers, 30). This new, satirical humor was attributed at the time to the “great influx of Latins and Slavs” who dared to laugh at, rather than with, the dominant culture (xiv). DesRochers’s purpose is to illustrate how this new and subversive sense of humor, which would be particularly, and gleefully, manifest in vaudeville, disrupted the Progressive agenda of assimilation. In addition to undermining the aforementioned attempts to “Americanize” a new generation of immigrants from “unfavorable” (3) foreign cultures, DesRochers argues, the new humor in vaudeville contributed to the making of a new America by blurring artistic distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, as well as blurring distinctions between cultural identities based on race, religion, gender, age, and class. The new humor confronted sensitive, volatile issues and situations head on and challenged authority on every level. It shocked the middle class bourgeoisie but ultimately, for its most talented practitioners, found a large and appreciative audience. DesRochers organizes the study in five chapters and an epilogue. His first two chapters provide an overview of the socio-historical context and explicate the nature and origins of the “New Humor.” Chapters Three and Four analyze three major and overlapping genres of vaudeville comic acts, each subverting the cultural status quo in its own way: ethnic acts challenged the stability of racial identity, family acts challenged patriarchal authority, and school acts challenged the educational system. A fifth chapter on female performers explores how they subverted conventional gender expectations by being wild, unruly, sexual, and most of all, funny. As one critic remarked of May Elinore: “she is one of those marvels Heaven seldom sends us – a truly funny woman who doesn’t mind making herself look ugly or ridiculous in order to make her audience laugh” (quoted by DesRochers, 71). The range of performers profiled include those who became legendary, like Buster Keaton, the Marx brothers, and Marie Dressler, those who are known to vaudeville aficionados, including Weber and Fields, Eva Tanguay and May Irwin, and those who are virtually unknown, like the Elinore sisters. The performance of ethnic and racial identities permeates all three genres; the Marx brothers, who were first generation Eastern European Jews, performed German, Irish, and Italian identities, among others. Weber and Fields lampooned German and Jewish identities in their “Double Dutch” act. May Irwin won fame as a “coon shouter” crossing both gender and racial identities with her imitation of African American male singers. Eva Tanguay created a sensation as the Sambo girl in an act that included her signature song, “I don’t care” (“what people may think of me”). Cringe-worthy terms like coons, micks, wops, and krauts appear in the titles of ethnic acts. Although the degree to which such performances may have sustained, rather than challenged, racist attitudes, is a vexing question, DesRochers argues that “no vaudevillian, whether in blackface, yellow face, or any of the myriad ethnic disguises ever entirely disappeared behind those masks, making it clear that ethnicity was performed and not to be taken literally” (55-56). For me, the absurd and self-aware ethnic impersonations of the Marx brothers, as described herein, seem to have more subversive potential than others. For example, in a scene in which a Russian-accented Groucho, threatened with a coconut pie by an Italian-accented Chico, drops character (and accent) to say to the audience: “There’s my argument. Restrict immigration” (1). This book links vaudeville, both aesthetically and ideologically, to modernism through its challenges to aesthetic and cultural as well as moral, categories, its speed and vitality, its irreverence and irony, and its self awareness. In his epilogue, DesRochers also highlights contemporary correspondence between Progressive era “New Humorists” and “current new humorists” Dave Chappell, Assif Mandvi, Key and Peele, Tina Fey, Larry David, and Sarah Silverman, arguing that their humor still responds to cultural shifts by “confronting and satirizing these irrational anxieties caused by the decline of Anglo-Christian hegemony in the United States” (141-42). In sum, The New Humor in the Progressive Era vividly illuminates a critical era in America’s social and cultural history that might also shed light on our own. DesRochers writes in clear, accessible prose, and this book will be of interest to those interested in America’s social and cultural history, as well as specialists in theatre history and popular entertainment. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Cheryl Black University of Missouri Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction: Performance as Alternate Form of Inquiry in the Age of STEM Playing Sick: Training Actors for High Fidelity Simulated Patient Encounters Setting the Stage for Science Communication: Improvisation in an Undergraduate Life Science Curriculum iDream: Addressing the Gender Imbalance in STEM through Research-Informed Theatre for Social Change Moonwalking with Laurie Anderson: The Implicit Feminism of 'The End of the Moon' This In-Between Life: Disability, Trans-Corporeality, and Radioactive Half-Life in D.W. Gregory’s Radium Girls Blue-Collar Broadway The New Humor in the Progressive Era Stages of Engagement Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Benjamin Gillespie 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 Life is Drag: Documenting Spectacle as Resistance An Interview with Rachel Rampleman Benjamin Gillespie By Published on July 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF Video still of Amygdala Performing “From the Air” (Laurie Anderson), at SoMad® , NYC, April 2025. Photo: Rachel Rampleman. Since 2019, Rachel Rampleman has dedicated herself to Life is Drag ( https://lifeisdrag.com/ ), an expansive archival project capturing the artistry and impact of drag performers across the U.S. The largest drag archive in the country, Life is Drag is both a celebration and a form of resistance, documenting performances and personal narratives of innovative figures in alt-drag and neo-burlesque, largely centered in New York City. Through photography, video portraits, and live performance documentation, Rampleman highlights performers’ individuality while tracing broader cultural shifts in gender performance and queer artistry. At a time when drag and LGBTQ+ expression face increasing political scrutiny, Rampleman sees Life is Drag as an essential historical record. “Drag is art,” she argues. Rampleman sees it as a synthesis of multiple art forms. Beyond aesthetics, drag represents community, transformation, and radical self-expression. By showcasing a diverse array of performers across backgrounds, cultures, and ages, she ensures greater visibility for drag artists, especially in regions where queer and nonbinary identities are under threat. Rampleman has built her career documenting the subversive intersections of gender, artifice, and performance, particularly through drag. The project began in her Brooklyn studio with visual and drag artist Untitled Queen, later expanding to New England and the Midwest. Residencies in New York City at The Cell Theatre, SoMad, Bushwig, and Satellite Art Club, as well as projects in Portsmouth, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, have led to over 370 portraits featuring more than 200 performers. From gritty dives to grand theaters, her work captures the ephemeral beauty of live drag while preserving its legacy. Beyond Life is Drag , Rampleman’s career is defined by showcasing groundbreaking figures. From Girls Girls Girls , the world’s first all-female Mötley Crüe tribute band, to American bodybuilder and powerlifter Tazzie Colomb , her work consistently interrogates gender and spectacle. In this interview, we discuss the origins of Life is Drag , its evolution, and the stakes of drag performance today. In April 2025, Rampleman received a request to add her drag archive to the Library of Congress’s LGBTQ+ collection, a major development for the project. This interview was conducted July 11, 2024. It has been edited for clarity and brevity. Azizzy & Pissy Mattress from the Haus of Absorption at the Kelly-Strayhorn Theater, Pittsburgh, June, 2022. Photos: Rachel Rampleman. Benjamin Gillespie: Life is Drag is such an ambitious and unique project. How did it come about? Rachel Rampleman: Funnily enough, I didn’t have much exposure to drag before this project. I’m from Cincinnati, and I wasn’t attending drag shows or brunches when I lived in Ohio. My interests were more in experimental art, music, and theatre, and I often traveled to New York to see digital art at Postmasters Gallery, and performances by artists like John Zorn or the Wooster Group. Before Life is Drag , I had been working with an all-female Mötley Crüe tribute band, documenting their performances. I was fascinated by the juxtaposition—women singing misogynistic songs originally performed by heavily made-up men with big hair. I also worked with female bodybuilders, exploring themes of gender performance in different ways. Then, a friend introduced me to a producer of Bushwig , who invited me to create a video lookbook for a fashion line. That’s when I first engaged with Brooklyn’s art drag scene. My happy places are museums and cultural centers. I love being challenged to think or feel in new ways. But nothing had ever moved me like Bushwig did. When I attended for the first time, I had tears streaming down my face. The energy, creativity, the sheer vitality in the room—it was unlike anything I had ever experienced. It was beyond inspiring and overwhelming in the most wonderful possible way. BG: When was your first Bushwig? RR: In 2017. That’s when I realized that no one was properly documenting these incredible performances. It felt like a travesty that they were just disappearing, lost to time and the ephemerality of live performance. Some artists had friends taking pictures or filming clips on their phones, but there wasn’t a real archive. That realization coincided with an invitation to do a survey exhibition in Cincinnati , my hometown. I had a budget, a large venue—the Weston Art Gallery across from the Contemporary Arts Center—and plenty of space. I saw it as my opportunity to bring all my interests together through drag. That was in 2019. I had been introduced to Untitled Queen, who is basically the art drag matriarch of Brooklyn . She’s incredibly smart, politically attuned, and creative and talented in every capacity one can be. She went to art school and works full-time at BRIC, an arts and media institution in Downtown Brooklyn. We connected, had a long night in my Bushwick studio, and talked about art for hours. After our conversation, she created a piece called Untitled (Clarinet) which addresses the difficulty of being an artist in New York City and the compromises it requires, featuring Joni Mitchell’s song “For Free,” and I filmed it. Video stills of Untitled Queen Performing “Untitled (Clarinet)” in Brooklyn, March 2019. Photo: Rachel Rampleman. At the time, I didn’t really know what I was doing. I’m pretty DIY. I never formally studied filmmaking or video production, so I didn’t even have proper lighting. I relied on daylight streaming through my factory windows. The natural lighting wasn’t great which was unfortunate, but her performance was phenomenal. And I tried to create a visually interesting background, using a silver mylar curtain which was a prototype for what later became a large installation in the Cincinnati show. BG: You also wanted to work with drag kings, right? RR: Yes. I had been following Aeon Andreas (they/them) who performs as God Complex (he/him) since their earliest performances at BEEF—the monthly all drag king show that was at Bizarre in Bushwick, and their artistic evolution has been one of the most drastic and mind-blowing I’ve ever seen. I got to work with Aeon channeling Ziggy Stardust for my Ohio show “Oh, You Pretty Things” when they performed three different dance interpretations to Bowie’s music in my studio. I was very pleased with how all these videos turned out, and I got to present them on 65-inch, 4K screens as part of a larger exhibition featuring over 100 screens of various sizes with the drag portraits on the largest monitors. And over the course of preparing for that show, I was introduced to the Cincinnati art drag scene. There’s a group called Odd Presents, led by Stixen Stones , who’s something like Cincinnati’s own art drag matriarch. BG: This sounds like installation art. And you do have a background in the visual arts, right? RR: Yes. I studied photography and electronic media at the University of Cincinnati’s Design, Art, Architecture & Planning program and later earned an MFA from New York University in 2006. BG: What drew you from visual arts into performance documentation? RR: I’ve always been fascinated by performance art, but I’ve never felt inclined to perform myself. And when I studied with RoseLee Goldberg at NYU—the scholar who literally wrote the book on performance art and founded the Performa Biennial —I was struck by how ephemeral performance is. Many historic performances exist only as a handful of photographs, with no real way to capture the full experience. With drag, I saw an extraordinary level of artistry—the painting, sculpting, sound, and movement—all coming together as a form of total art, a Gesamtkunstwerk. And many performances I saw were highly political, timely, and felt important. I knew they deserved better documentation. I’m meticulous and a bit of a control freak, so I didn’t want to simply record live shows with unpredictable lighting and composition. Unlike photographers who document drag performances at clubs, I wanted to invite performers into a controlled studio setting where I could carefully frame and light each piece. Esther, the Bipedal Entity! Performing “Esther (Museum)” at SoMad® , NYC, April 2025. Photo: Rachel Rampleman. BG: How do you typically approach working with performers? RR: Ideally, I meet with them beforehand to discuss their drag, but that’s not always possible, especially during residencies outside of New York. When I did a residency at 3S Artspace in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for example, I worked with artists from Boston and the surrounding areas, but time was limited so there wasn’t a chance to have pre-production meetings and so on. In the best cases, like my first collaboration with Untitled Queen, we have at least some conversation before filming. BG: How many drag artists have you worked with so far? RR: More than two-hundred. If time allows and they’re interested, I try to film more than one number per session. I also try to schedule friends or frequent collaborators together. That way, they’re more comfortable and there’s a fun vibe. Klondyke & Cuntyham from the Haus of Quench at The Cell, NYC, February 2023. Photos: Rachel Rampleman. BG: How did you come up with the title Life is Drag ? RR: It comes from RuPaul’s famous quote “We’re all born naked and the rest is drag.” I absolutely believe that. Getting dressed—whether it’s a three-piece suit, jeans and a t-shirt, or a sequined gown and a feathered boa—it’s all a form of drag. “Drag” as most people understand it is just more intentional, and usually a bit more exaggerated or extreme. BG: RuPaul’s Drag Race has brought drag into the mainstream. Have you noticed changes in the drag scene in New York and beyond? RR: I’d say it’s exploded—both in the number of performers and in the range of styles. There’s even a series in Brooklyn produced by Untitled Queen called “ Brooklyn’s Next Art Drag Star ” at the bar C’mon Everybody , where each round has a different artistic theme—photography, video, sound—and performers compete to make it to the final round. The fact that there are enough emerging drag artists to sustain that kind of competition is amazing. Similarly, in Cincinnati, I’ve seen massive growth. A few years ago, a performer named Clarity Amrein started “ Smoke and Queers ” , a showcase for queer-identifying artists to experiment with drag, burlesque, and other hybrid performances. It started small, but now there are dozens of artists participating, with performers coming in from all over the Tri-State area. BG: You make an important connection between drag and performance art. While pageant drag has a specific history, art drag seems to align more with performance art—playing with identity, engaging with space and audience, manipulating the body as a canvas. Delusiona Grandeur from Smoke and Queers at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, March 2022. Photo: Rachel Rampleman. RR: Absolutely. And art drag tends overall to be much more experimental and existential—more like Happenings of the 1960s and 70s, or the Theatre of the Absurd. Part of my process includes interviewing performers about their drag practice —why they do it, what it means to them, how they see their drag persona versus their everyday self. If time allows, I like to film these interviews alongside performances. Drag is a deeply personal, yet highly performative art form, and hearing each artist’s perspective adds another layer to the project. I’ve mentioned performers like Stixen Stones, who had evangelical parents that forced them into conversion therapy. Or Thee Paris L’Hommie , a trans queen from a religious background whose family disowned her. Many people simply won’t accept it. But I think a lot of people’s understanding and appreciation of drag has changed—and is continuing to change—for the better. Or at least it was, until recently… BG : How did the pandemic impact the project? RR : Ironically, the pandemic was my most productive period because performers couldn’t work. People who made their living performing suddenly had no stage, no income. I got to collaborate with so many incredible artists and the project really gained momentum in 2020 and 2021. At that time, interviewees were saying, “I can’t pay my rent. I’m terrified.” Now that fear has shifted. We’ve emerged from the pandemic, but people are afraid of extreme right-wing legislation, especially in places like Tennessee and Kentucky. I was listening to The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC this morning, and they were discussing Project 2025. It’s just insane. BG: It’s such a difficult time politically. But drag, as an art form, is inherently political—even when the performers themselves aren’t overtly political. RR: Exactly. Drag is always political—and too often politicized. Drag plays with gender presentation, which defies mainstream, binary ideas about gender. By exaggerating or subverting gender roles, drag highlights that gender is a performance, not a fixed truth. BG: Just by existing, it challenges norms around gender and sexuality. That’s part of its excitement— and its danger. RR: Yes, and that’s why it has always been seen by some as threatening. (top) K. James and Miss Malice of Switch n’ Play at The Cell, NYC, December 2020; (bottom) installation shot of Life is Drag: More is Better and Never Too Much at 3S Artspace, Portsmouth, 2021. Photos: Rachel Rampleman. BG : In the past, there have been critiques of traditional drag, of female impersonation by male artists. Some argue it mocks women rather than celebrates them. Feminist critiques have challenged drag’s historical role for example because of its association with men, but I think that’s evolving. From a theater history perspective, gender-bending performances have always been part of the stage, and today there’s growing respect for drag as an art form. And we’re seeing more representation of nonbinary and trans performers. I know the Switch n’ Play group well. I’ve seen a number of their shows and the documentary . I know you’ve worked with them before. How do you connect with new performers for your project? RR : The performers I work with are mostly in their mid-20s to early-30s, and I usually find them through Instagram. It helps to connect with a community’s drag mother or father—once they’re involved, their “children” often follow. That’s worked well with Untitled Queen and the Brooklyn drag scene. At this point, I’ve documented many of New York’s top performers, including Miss Malice and K. James of Switch n’ Play. When I invite someone and send them a link to the archive, they recognize names like Miss Malice or Untitled and want to be involved. Recruiting outside New York can be trickier. My first residency was in early 2020 at 3S Artspace in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Luckily, the project manager Bunny Wonderland had performed as a drag artist for 12 years and helped me connect with performers within a 200-mile radius. And in Ohio, where I’m from , it felt more organic. New York’s drag scene is vast—not just by borough but by neighborhood. Brooklyn’s drag epicenter is Bushwick and Ridgewood, with key venues like C’mon Everybody, Purgatory, 3 Dollar Bill, and All Night Skate. I see shows at those spaces pretty regularly. Littlefield is also big, especially for Switch n’ Play. Manhattan has venues, but I rarely find myself there, except for Hell’s Kitchen with its cluster of bars showcasing more traditional drag. There’s a difference between traditional drag at bars and more experimental drag in performance and art spaces—audiences expect different things. BG : Where is all this material going? RR : I have a Vimeo Pro account where I upload videos and embed them on Icompendium, a minimalist, artist-run site. I also use Flickr for stills and behind-the-scenes shots. With hundreds of professionally shot videos, storage is a challenge. The goal is to create a living archive—a public history of what’s happening now. Someone like Stixen Stones in rural Ohio might find inspiration, while someone like my mom, who would never attend a live drag show (aside from one I’ve produced), might see a performance and realize, “Oh, that’s drag? That’s actually fun!” It’s also an educational tool, not just for universities but for anyone curious about drag beyond RuPaul’s Drag Race . Members of Odd Presents and Smoke and Queers at Wave Pool Gallery, Cincinnati, 2022 (photo: Kellie Coleman). (top, left to right) Tara Newone, Vanta Black, Calamity Addams, Stixen Stones, Kiara Chimera, Montana Ba Nana; (bottom) Clinica Deprecious and Manuka Honey Stix). Photo: Kellie Coleman. BG : Speaking of Drag Race , its format—lip sync challenges, for example—reflects a specific type of drag. Would you say lip syncing is central to most of the performers you document? RR : Yes, in large part. It’s actually been an issue for me recently. Last week, Vimeo flagged 76 of my videos for copyright infringement because of the music. A bot issued the takedown notices, giving me 48 hours to prove I had the rights to the songs. If you checked my website after that, 20% of the videos wouldn’t play. It’s something I have to figure out as the project continues to grow. BG: What do you hope to include in each artist portrait? RR: The goal is to capture the essence of the person at a particular moment in their life, creating a time capsule. Artists, especially those in drag, are constantly evolving, and it’s fascinating to see how their art changes over time. Even if you interview someone a year apart, their approach could be completely different. Some drag performers, like those I worked with years ago, have stopped, but for every performer who leaves, two or three new ones emerge. Younger generations are much more open to questioning gender and exploring its fluidity. Drag helps many performers, especially AFAB [assigned female at birth] individuals discover their trans identity. It’s an ongoing process of self-exploration within the community. For me, this project is about inspiring people to explore their identities, regardless of whether they identify as queer or not. Watching drag can encourage self-refection, and can also push its audience to try out being authentic and unique in a world that often forces and rewards conformity. Many performers say that drag gave them the courage to understand and express their true selves - and in some cases, saved their lives. BG: The project also challenges traditional notions of drag. Many people still associate drag with female impersonation, but drag is a broad spectrum that can and should include everyone. It seems there’s a lot more blending of genres and definitions today. How do you see this reflected in the mission of Life is Drag ? RR: Drag as a term is being redefined to be more inclusive. It’s no longer about simply crossing binary gender boundaries but about fluidity, transformation, and permission to experiment. People shouldn’t be boxed in by traditional conceptions of what drag should or shouldn’t be. To quote Brooklyn performer Klondyke, “Maybe today you are wearing a redder shade of lipstick. If you call it drag, who am I to tell you it's not?” Klondyke performance documentation installed at Satellite Art Show, Brooklyn, 2024. Photo: Rachel Rampleman. I’ve had the privilege of working with truly singular individuals like neo-burlesque performance artist Darlinda Just Darlinda and alt/art drag performer Esther, the Bipedal Entity! , who are central to this project. I’ve seen their work evolve, especially during the pandemic, where Darlinda’s performances focused on themes of concealment and revelation. It’s empowering to document their transformations. At the moment, I’m an artist in residence at SoMad® , a femme and queer-led art space in NYC that serves as a platform for emerging artists to experiment, collaborate, and challenge conventions. I’m excited to again document favorites like Esther and Untitled, as well as to work for the first time with other visionaries and luminaries, icons and powerhouses of the NYC drag and burlesque community—artists who have profoundly inspired so many, locally and globally. I’m honored to get to finally work with Divina GranSparkle from Switch ‘n Play, as well as with Miss Bushwig 2023 and community activist extraordinaire Julie J , founder of the marathon drag benefit Stand Up NYC , which has raised over $125,000 since 2023 for organizations serving, uplifting and protecting trans youth across the country like Advocates for Trans Equality, Black Trans Femmes in the Arts, the Hetrick-Martin Institute, and many others. At SoMad® this year, BFF in Omaha in 2026, and hopefully working internationally beyond that, the goal is to showcase these performers not just for their brilliant and joy-inspiring drag, but as multi-dimensional artists who create and connect beyond the stage. My goal is to honor, conserve, and amplify these unique artistic and activist voices, and to share them with the world, ensuring that the impact of drag as an art form continues to grow. Anne J. Tifah at The Cell, NYC, June 2023. Photos: Rachel Rampleman. References Footnotes About The Author(s) BENJAMIN GILLESPIE (PhD) is Doctoral Lecturer in Communication, Gender Studies, and Theatre at Baruch College, City University of New York. His essays and reviews have been published in such journals as Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, Theatre Survey, Theatre Topics, Performance Research, PAJ, Theatre Research in Canada , and a wide range of scholarly anthologies. He is currently editing two volumes: Split Britches: Fifty Years On and Late Stage: Theatrical Perspectives on Age and Aging , both to be published by the University of Michigan Press. He is Co-Editor of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre . Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue 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.

Jorge Huerta Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 28 1 Visit Journal Homepage Reflections: Fifty Years of Chicano/Latino Theatre Jorge Huerta By Published on March 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF Much has happened in the field of Chicano theatre studies, both as praxis and theory since 1965 when the Teatro Campesino (Farmworkers’ Theater) was founded as the cultural arm of the farm workers’ union in California. The original aesthetic of the Teatro was commedia dell’arte-like sketches, termed “actos” by Luis Valdez. The Chicano theatre groups that followed in the footsteps of the Campesino collectively created their own actos exposing the many problems that plagued their communities. Paralleling the Chicanos’ theatrical rumblings from California to the Midwest were the Cuban, Puerto Rican and other Latinos on the East Coast, expressing their realities in the streets and on stages from the boroughs of Manhattan to Florida. There was some interaction between the politically-charged “Nuyoricans” and the equally politicized Chicanos but initially, the three major groups had distinct agendas. I was a high school drama teacher when I first witnessed the Teatro Campesino in 1968, an event that changed my life. I realized that I knew nothing about the history of Chicano or Mexican theatre and determined to pursue a doctorate in theatre in order to research the field. I began my graduate studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1970 and discovered that the majority of articles and a handful of dissertations I located focused on the early Spanish religious folk theater of the Southwest; plays and performances that had been “discovered” in the 1930s by anthropologists rather than theatre scholars. There were articles and reviews about the then five-year old Teatro Campesino but little else. Not a single book, no plays in print and no anthologies of plays had been published. There was much archival work to be done. With my Ph.D. in hand (apparently the first Chicano to earn a doctorate in Dramatic Art) I joined the faculty of the Theatre Department at the University of California, San Diego in the fall of 1975 as a young assistant professor, eager to change the face(s) of the American theatre. Literally. I was very fortunate to have a supportive faculty and administration over the years as I witnessed the many changes in the field of Theatre Studies and used my academic affiliation to gain the attention and respect of the field. I had no idea what Life had in store for me and the communities of Chicanas, Chicanos, Mexicans, and other so-called minorities eager to see their realities portrayed on stages across the land. At the close of the 1970s Time Magazine declared that the 1980s would be “The Decade of the Hispanic,” a prediction that never came to pass. What did happen, however, was an influx of foundation, state, local and federal dollars, however limited, designed to enhance the growth and development of what was being called “Hispanic Theatre.” The 1980s and ‘90s saw a proliferation of projects aimed at enhancing the financial and aesthetic development of Hispanic theatre in mainstream regional theatres as well as in Chicano and Hispanic theatre companies. The era of professionalization had arrived and with it we saw Latinas and Latinos entering graduate programs in all aspects of theatre. Alongside the enhancement of the production of plays came the development of scholarship focused on the theatre and performance(es) by Chicana (read female), Chicano, and other Spanish-surnamed people living in the US. I called this incursion into theatre and performance studies departments “infiltration” which it was and which continues to resonate Also emerging were young scholars, the second generation of graduate students in theatre and performance whose focus was on all aspects of the Latina and Latino experience. The roster of young scholars began to grow and today we have scholars at all levels teaching in departments of theatre, performance studies and related disciplines in high schools, colleges and universities from coast-to-coast. The field has grown to such an extent that one cannot teach all of the plays that have been published by or about Latina/os in a year-long course. The scholarly books about Latino theater are still too few; there is much to be discussed and written about in terms of the breadth and scope of the scholarship as well as the myriad number of anthologies of plays that have been published. Further, every scholarly journal has published articles about Latina/o theatre including the one in your hand but we need more. The careful reader will note that I’ve gone from referring to “Chicano,” to “Hispanic” to the more common designation today, Latina/Latino because that is the demographic of most Latina/o theatre groups: a pan-American roster that includes Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and etc. These Latino theatre companies are bringing a diverse community of artists and audiences into their theatres, all interested in our common goals as citizens and “dreamers.” Enhancing this goal the Latino Theatre Commons was founded in 2014 as national coalition of Latino theatre companies, artists, scholars and allies under the auspices of Arts Emerson at Emerson College, Boston. The LTC has participated in the organization and fund-raising of a historic month-long national festival of Latino Theatre companies produced by the Los Angeles Theater Center in 2014; a “Carnaval, Festival of New Works” at DePaul University in Chicago in 2015 and several regional convenings. Further, I am thrilled that the scholars have been integral contributors to these events and gatherings documenting the events, people and teatros in Café Onda and the HowlRound website as well as other refereed publications. As evidenced in the many initiatives emanating from regional alliances across the country and the Latino Theatre Commons, it is clear that Latino theatre artists and scholars are continuing to challenge their audiences and students in ways that were unheard of in the 1960s. The times have changed, the technology has changed but the people remain people and I believe the playwrights and theatre companies are still attempting to determine who they are not only in this society but as members of the international communities in struggle. As the players become more and more diverse in their own legacies: African, Asian, indigenous and yes, European, they will seek new ways to define themselves. Judging from everything that is happening at the local, regional and national levels; in the academies as well as in the communities, I believe the future of Latina/o theater is in very good hands. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Jorge Huerta is Chancellor’s Associate Professor of Theatre Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. He is a professional director and a leading authority on contemporary Chicana/o and US Latina/o theatre. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Comment New Directions in Dramatic and Theatrical Theory: The Emerging Discipline of Performance Philosophy Changes, Constants, Constraints: African American Theatre History Scholarship Reflections: Fifty Years of Chicano/Latino Theatre Strangers Onstage: Asia, America, Theatre, and Performance Transgressive Engagements: The Here and Now of Queer Theatre Scholarship Thinking about Temporality and Theatre Musical Theatre Studies “Re-righting” Finland’s Winter War: Robert E. Sherwood’s There Shall Be No Night[s] Star Struck!: The Phenomenological Affect of Celebrity on Broadway Performing Anti-slavery American Tragedian Murder Most Queer The Captive Stage Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Michael Osinski Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 2 Visit Journal Homepage How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Michael Osinski By Published on May 1, 2023 Download Article as PDF September 3, 2017. It’s the day Twin Peaks: The Return reached its gut-wrenching conclusion and seared a hole in my heart and my brain. I’d seen my fair share of David Lynch’s work before. I knew how impossible it can be to explain the narratives and describe the visuals. Lynch himself has resisted attaching words to his work, stating “A film should stand on its own. It’s absurd if a filmmaker needs to say what a film means in words.”[i] I still haven’t found the words to describe the feeling I had watching that finale, but at that moment, I knew I had to make a piece of theatre that recreated that feeling for others. Almost exactly two years later, I presented Red Lodge, Montana [ii], co-created with an ensemble of performers and Twin Peaks enthusiasts, at the 2019 Philadelphia Fringe Festival. Billed as an unapologetic love letter to David Lynch, the production felt like a live-action nightmare where audience members traveled through the abandoned locker room of an old South Philly high school. One reviewer called it “a bizarro fusion of indolence, violence, nudity, sex, and dance.”[iii] I’m proud of the work we did. I also know that co-creating, directing, and producing a site-specific theatre piece in a found space took its toll on me (and my bank account). So in the interest of preserving the mental and physical health of other creative artists out there, I’m sharing some of the lessons I learned from the experience. (Unfortunately none of these lessons involve fundraising. That remains a mystery to me.) Lesson 1: Start with structure. Contrary to popular belief, theatre artists don’t really create something from nothing. There has to be a spark, an impetus, a burning question. And if you want to stay organized and foster greater creativity, you need scaffolding. You need Anne Bogart and Tina Landau’s third “basic building block for devised work” – structure.[iv] This may seem antithetical to Lynch’s aesthetic. As a director he insists “the only way we make heads or tails of [life] is through intuition” and believes “there’s an ocean of consciousness inside each of us…an ocean of solutions.”[v] But how do you communicate that to a team full of artists who aren’t swimming in your own personal ocean? Saying that I wanted to create an homage to David Lynch helped, but it didn’t provide enough of a framework. Especially if we wanted to create more than just a carbon copy of what he’s already made. So I asked my team to generate a list of “ingredients.” We watched Lynch’s film and television work and took note of all the elements that recur throughout his oeuvre. This established our scaffolding and gave us a checklist to return to as we made the piece. Do we have a few excruciatingly slow and drawn-out conversations? Check. Are we featuring music and costuming from a bygone era (usually the 1950s)? Check. Have we staged any moments of terrifying yet unexplained imagery? You tell me. (See Figure 1.) Figure 1: (l-r) Terrill Braswell, Amanda Schoonover, Geremy Webne-Behrman, and Megan Edelman in RED LODGE, MONTANA . Scenery by Dylan FitzSimons. Lighting by Sydney Norris. Sound by Daniel Ison. Stage Management by Eleanor Safer. Photo by Emilie Krause (Glass Canary Photography). I also brought back my “hybrid method” for inventing characters. I start almost every devising process by looking at a canonical text, because it gives us a narrative model to draw from. In this case I chose Bus Stop by William Inge. When the time came to build characters, I asked each actor to select 1 character from Bus Stop and 1 character from Lynch’s work and form a hybrid character from the two. They would list specific traits and circumstances of each character interchangeably – using a questionnaire I’ve borrowed from The Viewpoints Book [vi] – and mold their character around these attributes. These profiles provided the foundation for composition work, where each cast member created a short movement-filled piece to introduce us to their character. The pieces then fueled a series of structured improvisations with preset given circumstances and objectives. Many of these improvs turned into scripted scenes, but even the ones that didn’t make it to the final script helped to establish the mythology for our fictionalized town of Red Lodge. I wasn’t the only one who found this structure useful. Performer and co-creator Kelly McCaughan told me that “limiting what can happen within an improv helped flesh out something specific each time. And being able to pitch our ideas within that structured prompt created a really collaborative room.”[vii] Lesson 2: Stay flexible. Found spaces always sound like a cool idea, until you have to stage a show in one. When I first met with the representative from Bok Building in South Philadelphia, she showed me an old dusty room FILLED with rows and rows of lockers and benches. Talk about creativity coming from limitations! My brain instantly filled with images of actors hiding inside lockers for dramatic reveals, scampering in between the rows to frighten audience members, and even climbing atop the lockers to act out scenes above the audience’s heads. (See Figure 2.) Figure 2: The former girls’ locker room at Bok in South Philadelphia in early 2019. Photo by Michael Osinski. The next time I saw the space, almost all the lockers had been inexplicably removed. (See Figure 3.) Figure 3: The same former girls’ locker room at Bok in South Philadelphia in summer 2019. Photo by Michael Osinski. A big empty room felt less like limitless possibility and more like a huge hindrance to me. How could I create the same locations and effects without constructing a set? I had to adjust. I itemized the physical attributes and environmental effects I needed for each scene and figured out how to use the existing architecture to achieve it. For instance, we had originally envisioned one drug-fueled scene taking place on a rooftop. We were going to create a small plywood supported staging area across the tops of several banks of lockers. But without those lockers, I had no way of achieving this. I knew the scene needed some height, and it couldn’t take place in a room with doors and walls. The space had to feel liminal or transitory. Suddenly our rooftop scene became a stairwell scene. (See Figure 4.) Figure 4: (l-r) Amanda Schoonover and Kelly McCaughan in RED LODGE, MONTANA . Scenery by Dylan FitzSimons. Lighting by Sydney Norris. Sound by Daniel Ison. Stage Management by Eleanor Safer. Photo by Emilie Krause (Glass Canary Photography). We had also staged a rather intimate and claustrophobic scene involving full nudity and demonic possession. (It is David Lynch, after all.) But how do you make an audience feel trapped in a big empty room? I decided to stage this scene in the room’s entryway, with only 3 instruments lighting the space, and the EXIT sign and double doors in full view. It allowed the audience to crowd around a small area, and it created a terrifying moment when one of the characters pounded on the doors to escape. (See Figure 5.) Figure 5: (l-r) Josh Hitchens and Geremy Webne-Behrman in RED LODGE, MONTANA . Scenery by Dylan FitzSimons. Lighting by Sydney Norris. Sound by Daniel Ison. Stage Management by Eleanor Safer. Photo by Emilie Krause (Glass Canary Photography). Performer and co-creator Amanda Schoonover remembers another adjustment we made: “David Lynch often has characters that simply disappear from a scene, and we were stumped about how to make that happen without the magic of film. Once we got into the space, we discovered there were all these pillars that actors could hide behind, so with a little lighting trick, they could simply appear or disappear. It was always satisfying to hear the audience gasp when an actor seemed to appear out of thin air.”[viii] Staying flexible ultimately saved the production. If I had forced my original staging on the found space, it would have been disastrous. In true David Lynch fashion, I had to listen to what the walls were telling me. Lesson 3: Stand in your audience’s shoes. No instruction manual exists for understanding David Lynch’s work. But when you’re leading three dozen audience members through a promenade style fringe piece in a dark echoey room, you gotta make a few signs. The work itself should terrify the audience, not the possibility of running face-first into a concrete pillar. You can’t throw your audience into your deep ocean without a flotation device – you have to take care of them. I put more focus on logistics than I ever have for a piece I’ve made – at times I felt more like an engineer than an artist. Yet I didn’t want to mar the phenomenological experience of walking through a Lynch-inspired nightmare. How could I physically guide audience members in a way that kept them tuned into the show and still blended with our existing aesthetic (i.e. without turning on a bunch of harsh overhead fluorescents)? The answer was threefold. To map out a clear path, we did what any college dorm resident would do – we strung up holiday lights. It sounds silly, but it really has become human instinct to “follow the light.” Every time one scene ended, a new strand of lights would turn on and direct audience members to a different section of the room. Did we rely on a super clumsy system of turning on and off power strips throughout the room to make this happen? We sure did. (See Lesson 2: Stay flexible.) Because at the end of the day, no theatrical experience – no matter how thrilling – is worth risking a lawsuit. Even my years as a tour guide at college did not prepare me for how difficult it is to herd a group of people through a dimly lit medium-sized room. To keep people on the path and position them for maximum visibility, we employed “docents.” We asked two of our artist friends to dress up as two peripheral yet enigmatic Twin Peaks characters – The Giant and Lil[ix] – and communicate with gestures to physically (and mysteriously) walk the audience through the nightmare. Finally, to give our audience some narrative guidance, we filmed a series of short teaser videos[x] that introduced the characters and acted as a prologue. We released the videos weekly leading up to the opening performance to build anticipation and to guide our audience without providing too many answers. The world we’d created made total sense to us, and we wanted people to be weirded out, but we also wanted them to care about what (and whom) they were watching. Lesson 4: Trust your gut and your collaborators. There’s no such thing as a doubt-free creative process. I think we asked ourselves “Is this any good?”, and “Will anyone like this?”, and of course “Will this make any sense?” countless times. In a weird way, though, embracing the work of an artist like David Lynch gave us some freedom. He never worries about whether his work will transmit a singular message to the audience. He’s just translating the ideas inside his head to the screen. When Lynch made Blue Velvet , the ideas came to him “in fragments…it was red lips, green lawns, and the song – Bobby Vinton’s version of ‘ Blue Velvet .’ The next thing was an ear lying in a field. And that was it.”[xi] He didn’t question what it all meant. He trusted his intuition. I wondered, can we apply this attitude or approach to other work? Can we free ourselves of this burden when we’re creating something with more verisimilitude? We are making art after all, and art is neither good nor bad. It exists for others to appreciate, critique, reject, embrace, dissect. As much as we may have fretted over the narrative logic of our piece, we made something that made sense to us. We created art for others to interpret. And as long as we’re taking care of our audience and being socially responsible in our storytelling, why should we fret so much over how others will interpret the work? I can’t say that I’ve succeeded at this yet. I still find myself fretting. But I’d like to think there’s an answer here somewhere. As theatre artists we can choose to embrace or deny the increased digitization of our world. If we embrace it, we risk losing the immediacy of a live in-person experience. If we deny it, we ignore our future audiences. I propose we strive for something in the middle. I believe creating a site-specific film-inspired theatrical experience like Red Lodge, Montana accomplishes this. I also know crafting experiences like this can be difficult. I hope these lessons encourage you, inspire you, and prevent you from making too many mistakes…or at least from drowning in your own creative ocean. References [i] David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity (New York: TarcherPerigree, 2016), 19.[ii] https://www.findtheantidote.org/red-lodge-montana [iii] Kathryn Osenlund. “ RED LODGE, MONTANA (The Antidote): 2019 Fringe review.” Phindie. http://phindie.com/20057-20057-red-lodge-montana-the-antidote-2019-fringe-review/ (accessed October 21, 2022). [iv] Anne Bogart and Tina Landau, The Viewpoints Book: A Practical Guide to Viewpoints and Composition (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2005), 154. [v] Lynch, 45. [vi] Bogart and Landau, 129. [vii] Kelly McCaughan, e-mail message to author, March 8, 2023. [viii] Amanda Schoonover, e-mail message to author, March 8, 2023. [ix] https://tinyurl.com/yckx4hfe [x] https://vimeo.com/showcase/6242247 [xi] Lynch, 23. [xii] https://www.michael-osinski.com/ [xiii] https://open.spotify.com/show/6aWe8gTL3tFH2b6Fwve6ul?si=5827da219b474b70 [xiv] https://www.youtube.com/@thisonegoesto11podcast Footnotes About The Author(s) MICHEAL OSINSKI [xii] (he/him) directs theatre because he likes solving puzzles. He manages his self-producing collective The Antidote, and he was co-founder and Producing Artistic Director of Flashpoint Theatre Company in Philadelphia. He received his MFA in Directing from The Theatre School at DePaul University in Chicago, and he was a Drama League Directing Fellow in 2014. He is currently the Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance at St. Lawrence University, where he will devise another show in Fall 2023, and he produces and co-hosts a music podcast called This One Goes to 11 (on Spotify[xiii] and YouTube[xiv]). Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue 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.

Jordan Schildcrout Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 28 1 Visit Journal Homepage Transgressive Engagements: The Here and Now of Queer Theatre Scholarship Jordan Schildcrout By Published on March 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF I consider it a sign of the vibrancy of queer theatre scholarship that publications over the past few years contain a greater variety of subjects, methodologies, and theoretical perspectives than ever before. I would hope for no less from a field that celebrates transgression, categorical slippage, intersectionality, and the inability to follow a single “straight and narrow” path. At the most recent ATHE Conference , I attended a panel where scholars—many of them involved in the creation of the LGBTQ Focus Group 20 years earlier—spoke about the field’s early years, when pursing queer theatre scholarship could endanger one’s career and reputation. Since the emergence of seminal works such as “We Can Always Call Them Bulgarians” (1987) by Kaier Curtin and The Feminist Spectator as Critic (1988) by Jill Dolan, much has changed for LGBTQ people in America. Even though such work now has a more esteemed position in the academy, new queer theatre scholarship at its best continues to be bold—and maybe even a little dangerous. I still remember the thrill of being a college student and, on a trip to New York City, purchasing Curtin’s book on “the emergence of lesbians and gay men on the American stage” from a gay bookstore. Along with books like John Clum’s Acting Gay (1992), it allowed me to understand a history of the representation of my own cultural identity. Later, as a graduate student, I acquired theoretical frameworks for comprehending various relationships between gender, sexuality, performance, and society from books by scholars like Dolan , Sue-Ellen Case , Judith Butler , and Peggy Phelan . I remain drawn to scholarship that creates insightful readings of plays and performances, grounded in historical context and activated by original theoretical perspectives. So my bookshelf has been happily full of late, with a number of excellent volumes published over the past five years that enrich the field of queer theatre and performance scholarship. One key goal continues to be the preservation and illumination of what might be deemed the heyday of queer theatre from the 1960s through the 1980s. Kate Davy’s Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers (2011) is an excellent historical analysis of the seminal dyke theatre, the WOW Café, and it now has the perfect companion in the recently released Memories of the Revolution: The First Ten Years of the WOW Café Theater , edited by Holly Hughes, Carmelita Tropicana, and Jill Dolan. Robert Schanke, whose previous books include excellent anthologies of queer theatre history co-edited with Kim Marra, also celebrates the life and work of a pioneer in Queer Theatre and the Legacy of Cal Yeomans (2011). The revolutionary fervor of that era can feel distant as LGBTQ cultural and political goals seem to move toward the mainstream and the “normal.” In opposition to that trend, Sara Warner’s Acts of Gaiety: LGBT Performance and the Politics of Pleasure (2012) focuses on anti-normative plays and performances, celebrating the gleefully subversive. The interrogation of homonormativity, which informs my my own study of “ negative representations ,” is a major strain in queer theatre scholarship, evident most recently in Jacob Juntunen’s Mainstream AIDS Theatre, the Media, and Gay Civil Rights: Making the Radical Palatable (2016). While anti-normativity leads some queer scholars to look primarily at alternative systems of theatrical production, others dive into the mainstream, offering queer readings of popular culture. Broadway plays and musicals have been rich subjects for scholars like D.A. Miller , David Savran , and David Roman , and now Stacy Wolf has made a significant addition to the field with Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical (2011). Brian Eugenio Herrera, in Latin Numbers: Playing Latino in Twentieth-Century U.S. Popular Performance (2015), brings a critically astute and refreshingly queer perspective to his examination of mainstream cultural representations. José Esteban Muñoz, whose passing was a great loss to our community, helped bring greater interdisciplinarity and intersectionality to performance scholarship . It’s heartening that these goals are pursued by an increasing number of scholars, including Ramón Rivera-Servera, author of Performing Queer Latinidad: Dance, Sexuality, Politics (2012) and co-editor with E. Patrick Johnson of important contributions to black and Latino/a queer performance scholarship: solo/black/woman: scripts, interviews, and essays (2013) and the forthcoming Blacktino Queer Performance (2016). I’m also a fan of James Wilson’s Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies (2011), an impressively researched look at queer performance in the Harlem Renaissance, as well as Marlon M. Bailey’s Butch Queens in Pumps (2013), an ethnography based on Bailey’s own experiences with contemporary African-American ballroom culture in Detroit. If recent journal articles and conference presentations are any indication, then theatre and performance scholarship is trending toward a firmer commitment to exploring the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, class, and other identities. As we cultivate greater diversity in the systems that produce theatre and performance—and in the systems that produce theatre and performance scholars—I look forward to the publication of more books that represent a wide range of perspectives on a variety of different kinds of queer performance, particularly those focusing on trans* artists and representations. With all these exciting books published over the past five years, perhaps the most notable trend is the changing position of books in our culture. The gay bookstore where I bought that copy of “We Can Always Call Them Bulgarians” ? It closed years ago . The Internet has now become a dynamic site for those writing about queer theatre and performance, potentially engaging with a broader and more diverse readership. I enjoy both new and old media and believe they can intersect in productive ways, which is why I’ve bookmarked Jill Dolan’s blog and have a copy of the published collection of her blog articles, The Feminist Spectator in Action (2013), on my shelf. Now that the Journal of American Drama and Theatre has “gone electric,” I’m looking forward to having another online source for articles and book reviews on queer theatre scholarship. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Jordan Schildcrout is an Associate Professor of Theatre & Performance at Purchase College, SUNY, and the author of Murder Most Queer: The Homicidal Homosexual in the American Theater (University of Michigan Press). 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 Comment New Directions in Dramatic and Theatrical Theory: The Emerging Discipline of Performance Philosophy Changes, Constants, Constraints: African American Theatre History Scholarship Reflections: Fifty Years of Chicano/Latino Theatre Strangers Onstage: Asia, America, Theatre, and Performance Transgressive Engagements: The Here and Now of Queer Theatre Scholarship Thinking about Temporality and Theatre Musical Theatre Studies “Re-righting” Finland’s Winter War: Robert E. Sherwood’s There Shall Be No Night[s] Star Struck!: The Phenomenological Affect of Celebrity on Broadway Performing Anti-slavery American Tragedian Murder Most Queer The Captive Stage Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit by Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. Roll Call: The Roots to Strange Fruit is a visual, sonic opera that weaves together the peculiar institution of slavery from Auction Blocks to Fugitive Slave ads to “Information Wanted” family notices as a reclamation to unearth the journey of Black people on this foreign, stolen, soil. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula Theater, Dance, Film, Performance Art, Spoken Word, Other This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks. About The Film Country United States Language English Running Time 23 minutes Year of Release 2022 Roll Call: The Roots to Strange Fruit is a visual, sonic opera that weaves together the peculiar institution of slavery from Auction Blocks to Fugitive Slave ads to “Information Wanted” family notices as a reclamation to unearth the journey of Black people on this foreign, stolen, soil. Executive Producers National Black Theatre Creative Doula LLC Conceived & Directed by Jonathan McCrory Composer Chaitanya /sangco and Joy Abalon Tamayo of Brick Shop Audio Choreographer Rickey Tripp Director of Photography/ Editor Thomas Wirthensohn Costumes Designer D. Elem Delta Production Manager Belynda M’Baye Sound Engineer Brick Audio Dancer LaWanda Hopkins Narrations by Denise Manning Michael Oloyede Tramell Tillman Marquise Vilsón Kara Young About The Artist(s) Jonathan McCrory is a Tony Award and Emmy Award nominated producer, two time Obie Award-winning, Harlem-based artist who has served as Artistic Director at National Black Theatre since 2012 under the leadership of CEO, Sade Lythcott. As Artistic Director (Creative Duala), he is the creative heart of the institution helping to select, develop and manage acclaimed programs and productions, such as The Peculiar Patriot and Kill Move Paradise. His creative force also helped the theatre expand its reach with the creation of the National Black Theatre of Sweden. As a director, he has helmed numerous productions including Dead and Breathing, HandsUp, and Blacken The Bubble and devised works like Hope Speaks, Evoking Him: Baldwin and Emergence: A Communion (based on adrienne marie brown's book Emergent Strategy). He has been acknowledged as an exceptional leader additionally through Craine’s New York Business 2020 Notable LGBTQ Leaders and Executives and in 2016 he was awarded 40 under 40 Rising Star award from the New York Nonprofit Media. He has been awarded the Emerging Producer Award by the National Black Theatre Festival of Winston Salem, North Carolina and the Torch Bearer Award by theatrical legend Woodie King Jr. He is a founding member of the producing organizations Harlem9, the Movement Theatre Company and national services organizations such as Black Theater Commons and Next Generation National Network. McCrory sits on the National Advisory Committee for Howlround.com and was a member of the original cohort for ArtEquity and Emerge NYC. He is also on the steering committee of the JUBILEE, working to help artists from marginalized communities. In 2019, McCrory was appointed to the nomination committee of the Tony Awards and he was also a member of the nominating committee for the Lucille Lortel Awards. A Washington, DC native, McCrory attended Duke Ellington School of the Arts and earned his BFA from New York University Tisch School of the Arts. To learn more, please visit www.jonathanmccrory.com . Get in touch with the artist(s) jonathan@nationalblacktheatre.org and follow them on social media https://www.jonathanmccrory.com/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou

Segal Talks The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center is proud to announce its new global series, SEGAL TALKS. New York, US, and international theatre artists, curators, researchers and academics will talk daily for one hour with Segal Center’s director, Frank Hentschker, about life and art in the Time of Corona and speak about challenges, sorrows, and hopes for the new Weltzustand— the State of the World. The newly introduced SEGAL TALKS is in English, ad-free and will be live-streaming on howlround.tv, on the Segal Center Facebook page, as well as on the Segal Center YouTube Channel. Each session will be archived on both platforms, HowlRoundand the YouTube Channel, and will raise money for a theatre artist or a company. In collaboration with HowlRound Theatre Commons, based at Emerson College. The Segal Center Play Video Play Video 23:05 The Barbarians by Paul Lazar and Jerry Lieblich | Prelude 2024 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. Play Video Play Video 40:22 Bad Stars by Amanda Horowitz | Prelude 2024 Two brothers writing a Hollywood movie about worms struggle to split apart. Like a worm cut in half, one play becomes two, becomes three, becomes many. Adapted from True West by Sam Shepard. Written & directed by Amanda Horowitz Performed by Brian Mendes, Peter Mills Weiss, Isa Spector Set and costumes by Maggie Fitzpatrick Bathtub painting by Adi Blaustein Rejto Rehearsal asst.: Carolyn Kettig, Hannah Applebaum, Hayley Stahl Special thanks to Jess Barbagallo, Sophia Cleary, Arne Gjelten Play Video Play Video 34:54 Going Beige with Lelie Cuyjet and Karen Kandel | Prelude 2024 Performing artists Leslie Cuyjet and Karen Kandel sit down for the first time to speak about their experiences, forming the start of a collaboration of a potential project. Play Video Play Video 16:03 Ornamentalism by Riven Ratanavanh | PRELUDE 2024 Ornamentalism is a ritual that explores the gendered racialization of the Asian transmasculine body, using tattoo as a way to inscribe personal loss and collective histories onto the skin. Through the duration of this piece the audience is invited to witness the act of transforming the body as an act of adornment, adornment as transformation; and the ways in which the two respond to and rub up against the world. In collaboration with Zhiyu Lu. Play Video Play Video 30:55 New York Theatre Artists for Ukraine: Theatre Without Borders @9:30 pm ET, Hour 12 | 16th April 2022 On April 16 2022, over 3500 viewers from 39 countries tuned in to listen to 12 hours of readings and conversations from 24 New York theatre institutions. Over 100 theatre artists expressed deep sorrow and outrage about the bombing of the Donetsk Drama Theatre in Mariupol, Ukraine where 300 people died while seeking shelter in a space that is sacred to all of us. Theatre Without Borders was the 24th of 24 New York theatre institutions to join us at 9:30 pm ET in Hour 12 of 12 of #NYTheatreArtistsForUkraine. They invited Lebanese violinist Layale Chaker and American playwright-librettist Lisa Schlesinger to perform excerpts and speak about Ruinous Gods: Suites for Sleeping Children—their opera about displaced children. ‘New York Theatre Artists for Ukraine: A 12-hour online marathon of Readings and Conversations with 24 New York Theatre Institutions’ was a Segal Center / GC CUNY Initiative in collaboration with: Abrons Arts Center; Al Límite; Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM); CUNY Stages; Here Arts Center; HowlRound Theatre Commons; La Mama / Yara Arts Group; Mabou Mines / Performance Space New York; Ma-Yi Theater Company; Nuyorican Poets Cafe; Park Avenue Armory; PEN America; PS2; St. Ann's Warehouse; Theatre Without Borders; National Black Theatre; Noor Theatre; The Play Company; The Public Theater; The Shed; Torn Page; Ukrainian Actors of New York; The Watermill Center / Robert Wilson. Producers: Frank Hentschker & Tanvi Shah (Martin E. Segal Theatre Center) Digital Hosts: HowlRound Theatre Commons; Thea Rodgers and Vijay Mathew; NachtKritik, Germany; Esther Slevogt Social Media and Design: The Paper Planes Agency (India) Livestream Operators: Aaditya Rawat, Rachit Khetan, and Tanvi Shah #StopWar Play Video Play Video 29:37 New York Theatre Artists for Ukraine: Ukrainian Actors of NY@9 pm ET, Hour 12 of 12, 16th April 2022 On April 16 2022, over 3500 viewers from 39 countries tuned in to listen to 12 hours of readings and conversations from 24 New York theatre institutions. Over 100 theatre artists expressed deep sorrow and outrage about the bombing of the Donetsk Drama Theatre in Mariupol, Ukraine where 300 people died while seeking shelter in a space that is sacred to all of us. Ukrainian Actors of New York was the 23rd of 24 New York theatre institutions to join us at 9 pm ET in Hour 12 of 12 of #NYTheatreArtistsForUkraine. Ukrainian Actors of New York's Alex Ozerov-Meyer, Sasha K. Odesa, Cynthia Adler, Tjaša Ferme and Tony Naumovski read excerpts from The Paris Review's Conversations to the Tune of Air-Raid Sirens: Odesa Writers on Literature in Wartime by Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminsky to honor and amplify the voices of the brilliant writers of Odesa, Ukraine. ‘New York Theatre Artists for Ukraine: A 12-hour online marathon of Readings and Conversations with 24 New York Theatre Institutions’ was a Segal Center / GC CUNY Initiative in collaboration with: Abrons Arts Center; Al Límite; Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM); CUNY Stages; Here Arts Center; HowlRound Theatre Commons; La Mama / Yara Arts Group; Mabou Mines / Performance Space New York; Ma-Yi Theater Company; Nuyorican Poets Cafe; Park Avenue Armory; PEN America; PS2; St. Ann's Warehouse; Theatre Without Borders; National Black Theatre; Noor Theatre; The Play Company; The Public Theater; The Shed; Torn Page; Ukrainian Actors of New York; The Watermill Center / Robert Wilson. Producers: Frank Hentschker & Tanvi Shah (Martin E. Segal Theatre Center) Digital Hosts: HowlRound Theatre Commons; Thea Rodgers and Vijay Mathew; NachtKritik, Germany; Esther Slevogt Social Media and Design: The Paper Planes Agency (India) Livestream Operators: Aaditya Rawat, Rachit Khetan, and Tanvi Shah #StopWar Play Video Play Video 30:28 New York Theatre Artists for Ukraine: Mabou Mines @8:30 pm ET, Hour 11 of 12 | 16th April 2022 On April 16 2022, over 3500 viewers from 39 countries tuned in to listen to 12 hours of readings and conversations from 24 New York theatre institutions. Over 100 theatre artists expressed deep sorrow and outrage about the bombing of the Donetsk Drama Theatre in Mariupol, Ukraine where 300 people died while seeking shelter in a space that is sacred to all of us. Mabou Mines | Performance Space New York were the 21st and 22nd of 24 New York theatre institutions to join us at 8:30 pm ET in Hour 11 of 12 of #NYTheatreArtistsForUkraine. Mabou Mines represented by Sharon Fogarty and Senior Artistic Associate actress Maude Mitchell read poetry and texts in solidarity with Ukraine, joined by Yulia OK representing relief aid and street theatre organisation Razom For Ukraine. ‘New York Theatre Artists for Ukraine: A 12-hour online marathon of Readings and Conversations with 24 New York Theatre Institutions’ was a Segal Center / GC CUNY Initiative in collaboration with: Abrons Arts Center; Al Límite; Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM); CUNY Stages; Here Arts Center; HowlRound Theatre Commons; La Mama / Yara Arts Group; Mabou Mines / Performance Space New York; Ma-Yi Theater Company; Nuyorican Poets Cafe; Park Avenue Armory; PEN America; PS2; St. Ann's Warehouse; Theatre Without Borders; National Black Theatre; Noor Theatre; The Play Company; The Public Theater; The Shed; Torn Page; Ukrainian Actors of New York; The Watermill Center / Robert Wilson. Producers: Frank Hentschker & Tanvi Shah (Martin E. Segal Theatre Center) Digital Hosts: HowlRound Theatre Commons; Thea Rodgers and Vijay Mathew; NachtKritik, Germany; Esther Slevogt Social Media and Design: The Paper Planes Agency (India) Livestream Operators: Aaditya Rawat, Rachit Khetan, and Tanvi Shah #StopWar Play Video Play Video 29:07 New York Theatre Artists for Ukraine: Noor Theatre @8 pm ET, Hour 11 of 12 | 16th April 2022 On April 16 2022, over 3500 viewers from 39 countries tuned in to listen to 12 hours of readings and conversations from 24 New York theatre institutions. Over 100 theatre artists expressed deep sorrow and outrage about the bombing of the Donetsk Drama Theatre in Mariupol, Ukraine where 300 people died while seeking shelter in a space that is sacred to all of us. Noor Theatre was the 20th of 24 New York theatre institutions to join us at 8 pm ET in Hour 11 of 12 of #NYTheatreArtistsForUkraine. Noor Theatre invited New York MENA/SWANA artists Noelle Ghoussaini and Bazeed to present digital and written pieces in response to global current events, diaspora and displacement. Introduced by Kate Moore Heaney, Artistic Producer at Noor Theatre. ‘New York Theatre Artists for Ukraine: A 12-hour online marathon of Readings and Conversations with 24 New York Theatre Institutions’ was a Segal Center / GC CUNY Initiative in collaboration with: Abrons Arts Center; Al Límite; Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM); CUNY Stages; Here Arts Center; HowlRound Theatre Commons; La Mama / Yara Arts Group; Mabou Mines / Performance Space New York; Ma-Yi Theater Company; Nuyorican Poets Cafe; Park Avenue Armory; PEN America; PS2; St. Ann's Warehouse; Theatre Without Borders; National Black Theatre; Noor Theatre; The Play Company; The Public Theater; The Shed; Torn Page; Ukrainian Actors of New York; The Watermill Center / Robert Wilson. Producers: Frank Hentschker & Tanvi Shah (Martin E. Segal Theatre Center) Digital Hosts: HowlRound Theatre Commons; Thea Rodgers and Vijay Mathew; NachtKritik, Germany; Esther Slevogt Social Media and Design: The Paper Planes Agency (India) Livestream Operators: Aaditya Rawat, Rachit Khetan, and Tanvi Shah #StopWar Play Video Play Video 59:13 New York Theatre Artists for Ukraine: La MaMa & Yara Arts @7 pm ET, Hour 10 of 12 | 16th April 2022 On April 16 2022, over 3500 viewers from 39 countries tuned in to listen to 12 hours of readings and conversations from 24 New York theatre institutions. Over 100 theatre artists expressed deep sorrow and outrage about the bombing of the Donetsk Drama Theatre in Mariupol, Ukraine where 300 people died while seeking shelter in a space that is sacred to all of us. La MaMa & Yara Arts Group were the 18th and 19th of 24 New York theatre institutions to join us at 7 pm ET in Hour 10 of 12 of #NYTheatreArtistsForUkraine. La MaMa invited resident artists Adham Hafez and Sophia Gutchinov from its 60th season to read poetry and texts in solidarity with Ukraine. Artists including ‘Maria from Mariupol’ from the Mariupol theatre community in Ukraine joined Virlana Tkacz to share their perspectives. Introduced by Mia Yoo, Artistic Director of La MaMa and Nicky Paraiso, Director of Programming at La MaMa. Yara Arts Group is a resident company at La MaMa Experimental Theatre in New York. Together with actor Marina Celander, Yara Arts Group artistic leaders Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps read their award-winning translations of poetry by Serhiy Zhadan (Kharkiv, Ukraine) and Katerina Babkina (today a refugee in Poland). ‘New York Theatre Artists for Ukraine: A 12-hour online marathon of Readings and Conversations with 24 New York Theatre Institutions’ was a Segal Center / GC CUNY Initiative in collaboration with: Abrons Arts Center; Al Límite; Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM); CUNY Stages; Here Arts Center; HowlRound Theatre Commons; La Mama / Yara Arts Group; Mabou Mines / Performance Space New York; Ma-Yi Theater Company; Nuyorican Poets Cafe; Park Avenue Armory; PEN America; PS2; St. Ann's Warehouse; Theatre Without Borders; National Black Theatre; Noor Theatre; The Play Company; The Public Theater; The Shed; Torn Page; Ukrainian Actors of New York; The Watermill Center / Robert Wilson. Producers: Frank Hentschker & Tanvi Shah (Martin E. Segal Theatre Center) Digital Hosts: HowlRound Theatre Commons; Thea Rodgers and Vijay Mathew; NachtKritik, Germany; Esther Slevogt Social Media and Design: The Paper Planes Agency (India) Livestream Operators: Aaditya Rawat, Rachit Khetan, and Tanvi Shah #StopWar Load More

Alisa Zhulina Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov Alisa Zhulina By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Figure 1: Catherine Slade as Lolita in Lolita in the Garden. Courtesy of The Cuban Theater Digital Archive. “She is temperamental, changeable and unpredictable, and though she retains the limpidity of childhood, she has also preserved its mystery.” —Simone de Beauvoir, Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome. “It’s not my fault.” — Alizée, “Moi…Lolita.” (1) Introduction On Halloween night in 1958, Vladimir Nabokov opened his front door to discover a schoolgirl trick-or-treating as Lolita.(2) Costumed by her parents, the nine-year-old was holding a tennis racket and a sign that read L-O-L-I-T-A.(3) Nabokov was horrified. Prior to granting Stanley Kubrick the rights to a film adaptation, Nabokov insisted: “It was perfectly all right for me to imagine a twelve-year-old Lolita. She existed only in my head. But to make a real twelve-year-old play such a part would be sinful and immoral, and I would never consent to it.”(4) Cast in the titular role at fourteen, Sue Lyon was fifteen when the film premiered in New York in 1962—still too young to be admitted to the theatre to watch herself on screen. Age was not Nabokov’s only concern. He also worried about how an actor would represent his heroine in performance. After all, popular culture had rendered his Lolita unrecognizable. The figure of the underage siren did not originate with the controversial novel.(5) Yet Lolita gave that myth its most enchanting and enduring name, inspiring several plays, a musical, a ballet, an opera, two films, and countless fashion trends that have little in common with the girl at the heart of the book— “beloved, irretrievable Dolly."(6) Despite Nabokov’s “antitheatrical prejudice,” it is in the theatre that some of the most incisive and moving responses to Nabokov’s novel can be found.(7) This article explores María Irene Fornés’s Lolita in the Garden (1977) and Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive (1997) as dramatic works that challenge the Lolita myth of popular culture and represent girlhood as a tumultuous process of becoming an autonomous agent who embraces youthful desire and resists capitalist and patriarchal objectification. First, I will examine the cultural stereotype of Lolita, which is an amalgam of the fantasies of Humbert Humbert—the seductive narrator of Nabokov’s Lolita —and the distortions of popular culture. Then, I will show why Fornés and Vogel were fascinated by Nabokov’s novel, particularly its theatricality, and how they respond to Lolita and its afterlife by creating adolescent protagonists who are independent, courageous, with minds of their own. To fully appreciate Fornés’s and Vogel’s achievements in this area, it is important to spend some time with Nabokov’s novel and its ideas about theatre and acting. In a way, Fornés and Vogel were able to create their feminist versions of the teenage girl because they were attentive readers of Nabokov’s Lolita . While borrowing many elements of the novel, they amplified the voice that Nabokov silenced. The Challenges of Adapting Lolita to the Stage Nabokov distrusted theatre and embodied performance. Having written several plays, he preferred drama to a “performance-centered” model of theatre, which he associated with the loss of authorial control.(8) Lolita, My Love (1971)—the ill-fated musical by John Barry and Alan Jay Lerner—and Edward Albee’s Lolita (1981) were both excruciating flops. These stage versions attempt to adapt a novel that purposefully silences its heroine, so they end up with a two-dimensional Lolita, whose main dramatic purpose is to be the object of Humbert’s aesthetic appreciation and “foul lust.”(9) Even Nabokov’s own screenplay, which Kubrick could not use because it was “much too unwieldy” and would have taken “seven hours to run,” does not give us a deeper look into the young girl’s mind or character, though it does lift up some of her sass and wit, which the novel only hints at.(10) It is tempting to conclude then that Lolita is simply a book that resists theatrical adaptation. Nabokov has almost nothing positive to say about the art of theatre in Lolita , lumping it together with cinema and associating both with deceit, vulgar commercialism, and sexual exploitation. Clare Quilty, the “clearly guilty” character, for example, is both a hack playwright and pornographer. He first lures Dolly by casting her in his play The Enchanted Hunters and then tries to persuade her to perform in his blue films at Duk Duk Ranch. Despite Nabokov’s mistrust of mimetic theatre, theatre also figures as a space for self-determination and embodied knowledge in Lolita —his adolescent protagonist begins to develop her agency, voice, and defiance of Humbert while performing in theatre at school. Representing Girlhood in the Theatre While girlhood studies have evolved rapidly since the early 1990s, especially through their intersection with performance studies, little attention has been paid to the role that the Lolita myth has played in how girls perform their identities.(11) Fornés’s Lolita in the Garden and Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive are two salient examples of plays inspired by Lolita that spotlight the political and social agency of their female protagonists. While Nabokov’s concern about a real child embodying his female protagonist led him to draw a line between his novel and any kind of adaptation or riff on it in other media, Fornés and Vogel addressed their relationship with visual media head-on by carefully thinking through settings and stagings. In contrast to film, where the camera’s unforgiving demand for realism and close-ups motivates directors to cast underage actors in the role of Lolita, theatre can make do with actors of legal age who can play young. (12) Blanche Baker was twenty-five when Albee’s Lolita opened in New York in 1981, and Caitlin Cohn in her early twenties, when the York Theatre Company debuted a reworked version of the musical Lolita, My Love in New York in 2019.(13) Both performers appeared teen-like on stage. Neither of these conventional adaptations, however, made use of the recent trend that J. Ellen Gainor identifies in her incisive reassessment of Clare Barron’s Dance Nation (2018), namely of adult actors representing adolescence “even as they never try to mask their adulthood.”(14) According to Gainor, this “(re-)enactment of, yet also a distanced perspective on, adolescence may indicate that some broader cultural forces are at play—that we are in a moment of both retrospection and interrogation around girlhood, womanhood, and the relation between them."(15) Indeed, this cultural investigation into the relationship between girlhood and womanhood began during the postwar years (more on this later). Because Nabokov was attached to the idea of medium specificity and saw both theatrical and film adaptations of Lolita in the same light (namely, that they were art works in their own rights, far removed from his novel), he did not recognize the specific temporal potential of theatre to explore female adolescence. In the theatre, we can experience what Matthew Wagner calls “the weighting of the present with the past and the future.”(16) For example, Vogel created the role of Li’l Bit “as a character who is forty-something” who goes back in time to make sense of everything that has happened to her.(17) Fornés’s Lolita in the Garden is a children’s play and the titular role can be performed either by an adult or a child. Catherine Slade and Judy Vargas were double cast. In the production photos, Slade, who was in her twenties, appears more adultlike, while Vargas looks like a child (fig. 1 and fig. 2). If, as Adele Senior argues, “the appearance of children” in performance as “natal, biological and relational beings…demand ethical attention,” then this double-casting reveals Fornés’s awareness of the conditions of a child actor’s labor.(18) The burden of the play’s run does not fall on the shoulders of one child actor. By the time Fornés and Vogel sat down to write their plays, hurricane Lolita had already passed through the globe. Parents had stopped naming their daughters Lolita, so notorious had the novel become, and, in 1959, the citizens of Lolita, Texas, even floated the idea of changing their town’s name. Fornés and Vogel understood that they were dealing not just with Nabokov’s Lolita but with heavily mediatized versions of it (including abysmal attempts at putting the story onto the stage), and so they critically engaged with those transformations. Fornés had started to direct all of the premieres of her plays after 1973, and we can gather a lot of information about the production of Lolita in the Garden from its photos and unpublished script, even though a video recording is not available in the public domain. And, while there have been numerous productions of How I Learned to Drive , including a Broadway premiere in 2022, few directors have followed Vogel’s crucial stage directions that explore the relationship between theatre and other media. In fact, the central scene of How I Learned to Drive presents Vogel’s incisive commentary on the relationship between theatre and photography. It is important to note that Lolita in the Garden and How I Learned to Drive are not adaptations of Lolita in Linda Hutcheon’s definition of the term, namely they do not engage in “an extended intertextual engagement” with Nabokov’s novel.(19) Rather, featuring their own distinct characters and plots, these works respond to Lolita on a deeper level than more conventional adaptations precisely because they do not have to worry about fidelity to the original’s storyline. Each of these plays can be compared to a contrafact , a jazz composition consisting of an original melody superimposed on a recognizable harmonic structure or standard tune.(20) Suzan-Lori Parks once described her Red Letter plays ( In the Blood and Fucking A ) as contrafacts of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter : “Like a contrafact, if you know jazz. You take the chords, and you write your own melody.”(21) While Dolly’s voice is nearly absent from Nabokov’s Lolita , in the plays of Fornés and Vogel, the voice and agency of a young girl take center stage. Both dramatic works contrast the Lolita myth to a different vision of what it means to be a girl—idiosyncratic, defiant, self-determining. Fornés’s Lolita in the Garden is a theatrical attempt to give Nabokov’s heroine back her childhood. Vogel was in part inspired to write How I Learned to Drive as a response to Nabokov, calling her Pulitzer Prize-winning play “ Lolita from Lolita’s point of view.”(22) Both rely on their audiences being “haunted” by the preexisting text of Nabokov’s Lolita and by the cultural script of the Lolita myth.(23) “The Lolita Syndrome” The cultural stereotype of Lolita owes its iconography more to Bert Stern’s notorious poster for Kubrick’s film than to Nabokov’s novel. Stern’s photograph features a blonde fourteen-year-old Sue Lyon peeking over red heart-shaped sunglasses (found nowhere in the novel), with a cherry red lollipop between lips of the same hue. The provocative nature of the poster lies not only in its taunting tagline— “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita ?”—but also in the visual interplay between the signifiers for child and adult, a division that James Kincaid notes “has been at least for the past two hundred years heavily eroticized.”(24) This Lolita dominates visual media today as seen in the performances of pop stars like Katy Perry, Lana Del Rey, and Taylor Swift. Yet this cultural icon is far removed from Nabokov’s Dolly— an auburn-haired, freckled, sooty-lashed tomboy, who is a victim of abuse and rape, but who is also, in Kathryn Bond Stockton’s words, “an agent with sexual motives and motions of her own.”(25) The popularity of the Lolita myth was in part a response to the sweeping socioeconomic changes in the situation of men and women after the Second World War. According to Simone de Beauvoir, there is a historical reason for the “Lolita syndrome,” a term she uses for the invention of the “erotic hoyden” through the gamine charm of “Audrey Hepburn, Françoise Arnoul, Marina Vlady, Leslie Caron and Brigitte Bardot,” as well as dramatic characters such as the almost-eighteen-year-old Catherine from Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge (1955). Beauvoir argues that this “Lolita syndrome” emerged at a time when “social differences between the two sexes diminished” and consequently so did eroticism. (26) As Beauvoir notes, because the “adult woman now inhabits the same world as the man,” the attention of filmmakers, who were predominantly men, turn to the “child woman” who “moves in a universe which he cannot enter.”(27) The “age difference re-establishes between them the distance that seems necessary to desire,” so that “a new Eve” is created by fusing the “green fruit” with the “ femme fatale .”(28) In other words, while the growing economic empowerment of women dampens male desire, the girl-child possesses two interconnected features that attract male filmmakers and consumers. Her underaged status makes her an enticing taboo, while her economic dependency makes her accessible and vulnerable. In Lolita , Humbert is Dolly’s legal guardian and pays for her sexual favors. In How I Learned to Drive , Uncle Peck offers Li’l Bit free driving lessons during which he molests her. The mythmaking of Lolita also involves a fantasy of control and dominance: while the Lolita-figure of the popular imagination is “dangerous so long as she remains untamed,” she is open to “the male to domesticate her.”(29) Thus, she is, in many ways, a figure of conventional femininity. In Beauvoir’s reading, while aesthetically Brigitte Bardot might display many features of the “erotic hoyden,” her behavior on and off screen challenges that stereotype through her spontaneity, her freedom, her frank and earthy sexuality, and, most importantly, her refusal to be cast in one definitive type— “nothing can be read in Bardot’s face.”(30) Thus, the phenomenon of Bardot proves, as Tom Maguire argues in reference to HETPALEIS’s Hamilton Complex, that performance can “have efficacy in disrupting a heteronormative adult male gaze."(31) Even as Nabokov’s Lolita appeared during the postwar boom of the mischievous woman-child, its heroine resists the script of heteropatriarchy. Similarly, both Fornés and Vogel explore and ultimately reject the dominant culture’s desire for a compliant young girl molded by the demands of white heteropatriarchy when they give us their stage versions of Lolita—autonomous, queer, and—in Fornés’s case—also non-white. Before delving into my argument ( why these playwrights respond to Lolita and its influence on popular culture and why embodied performance is central to their responses), it is helpful to keep in mind two interconnected facts: the complex way that Nabokov constructs his adolescent protagonist in Lolita and the contradictory role that theatre plays in this construction. Dolly versus Lolita In American Sweethearts , Ilana Nash explains the popularity of the adolescent girl in terms of her being “a non-person constructed as a foil for adult men…who predominately controlled the production and circulation of popular culture during the twentieth century.”(32) This description of twentieth-century American culture at large also captures the oppressive and transactional relationship between Humbert and his stepdaughter. Nabokov’s Lolita poignantly captures the process of the marginalization and coercion of the adolescent girl, while the Lolita myth becomes an example of what Nash calls an “iconic abstraction representing dominant culture’s desires or nightmares.”(33) Both Beauvoir and Nash discuss this “Lolita” of the public imagination as a kind of abstraction. Indeed, the novel itself presents Lolita as such, when Humbert speaks of her as a figment of his imagination— his “own creation, another fanciful Lolita—perhaps, more real than Lolita.”(34) In this way, the novelistic character Lolita and the pop-cultural figure Lolita can be analyzed as commodities in the Marxian sense of the term. A commodity, as Marx argues, is “an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind” and has “value only because abstract human labor is objectified or materialized in it.”(35) While Lolita is the commodity that satisfies the desires of adult men with significant capital in the novel, there also exists a “real girl” in the book who is performing all the sexual and emotional labor. It speaks to the unfortunate success of Humbert’s sly narrative voice that the name that stuck to his stepdaughter is not the one that she calls herself (Dolly) but rather the romantic moniker he chooses for her (“But in my arms she was always Lolita”).(36) In fact, Humbert is the only character in the novel who refers to her as Lolita, namely the figure of his poetic and erotic imagination. Dolly, by contrast, stands for the “real girl” who appears in the novel through glimpses and traces. Thus, when I refer to the main character of Lolita as Dolly, I join critics and scholars who use this name to describe the girl-child that exists outside of Humbert’s fantasies.(37) As Michael Wood suggests, this Dolly “is what a reading finds.”(38) In other words, the reader of Nabokov’s novel must resist Humbert’s seductive voice and solipsistic visions and search for signs of Dolly. “Only Words to Play With” T he combination of exposing the oppression of the adolescent girl while simultaneously revealing glimpses of her vibrant personality is one reason that, despite its disturbing content (“a pedophile’s playbook,” as one commentator dubbed it ), Lolita has found its main defenders among female readers, including Fornés and Vogel.(39) Indeed, girls and women have always been Lolita ’s most devoted readers, often identifying with its female protagonist, even as some worry that their enjoyment of the novel “makes them complicit” in its representation of coercion and violence.(40) To name a few recent examples, Kate Elizabeth Russell, author of the novel My Dark Vanessa (2020), in which an English teacher preys on his underage student by giving her a copy of Nabokov’s Lolita , spent her adolescence on an online message board dedicated to all things Lolita. In this early Internet community, Russell talked to girls of her age obsessed with the book and to older men who lurked in the comments. In Reading Lolita in Tehran , Azar Nafisi relates how her Iranian female students draw parallels between Dolly’s loss of freedom under Humbert’s abusive guardianship and their own lives under a repressive regime. Stockton reads Dolly as a queer, “quintessential not-yet-straight child,” who resists the heteronormative cultural script that Humbert tries to impose on her.(41) And Lena Dunham, the creator and star of the HBO hit show Girls (2012-2017), calls Lolita one of her favorite novels because of “how fully realized a character Lolita is, despite the fact that we are seeing her through the lens of her stalker.”(42) As many defenders of the novel have pointed out, Lolita ’s narrative architecture and moral puzzle reveal “the true nature of sexual crimes by men against girls and women: in patriarchy, they are silenced.”(43) The good reader should notice this silencing of Dolly’s voice, become appalled at Humbert’s actions (even if taken by his rhetoric at the beginning), and—as the fictional editor John Ray implores—hear “a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita” that Humbert’s “singing violin can conjure up.”(44) What all these moralistic readings of Lolita miss is the novel’s critique of the commodification of young girls in the sexual marketplace. It is not just a matter of condemning one fictional character named Humbert Humbert and becoming a better reader with a heightened capacity for empathy and a burning curiosity about the minds of others. When Nabokov writes that, when it comes to the book cover, there is “one subject” which he is “emphatically opposed to: any kind of representation of a little girl,” he reveals that he understands that his novel exists in a marketplace where sex sells.(45) Thus, Nabokov’s Lolita focuses on Humbert’s crime of abusing and silencing Dolly. If Humbert stands for the figure of the artist, Lolita asks us: what should we do with the art of creators who have done horrific, unspeakable acts? A timely question. In order to pose this question, Nabokov shapes his novel around the glimpses and traces of Dolly, who struggles to be heard through Humbert’s domineering voice. It is not Nabokov’s intention to give us a nuanced portrayal of a teenage girl. Rather, we are meant to see through Humbert’s manipulation and miss Dolly in her absence. Given the novel’s focus on the absence of its young heroine, it becomes evident why adapting Lolita has been problematic and why Nabokov worried about the afterlife of his book. Since so little is known about Dolly, works that attempt a standard adaptation of the story, such as Albee’s play and Barry and Lerner’s musical, present a superficial Lolita, who is a cross between the fantasies of Humbert and the distortions of popular culture. If, while reading Nabokov’s novel, we can picture the kind of strong woman Dolly might have become had she survived, stage and film adaptations leave little to the imagination. Moreover, the embodied performance of an actor in the role of Lolita, whether on stage or on screen, risks falling into precisely the kind of commercial objectification and sexualization of the adolescent girl, even if played by an actor of legal age, that Nabokov’s novel explicitly denounces. One need only remember the many provocative magazine covers featuring fifteen-year-old Dominique Swain, promoting the release of Adrian Lyne’s controversial Lolita (1997). Throughout Lolita , Nabokov stresses that its story should only be represented in the textual universe of literature and through the novel’s specific reorganization of events, echoing the Russian Formalist notion of the inseparability of form and content.(46) “Idiot, triple idiot! I could have filmed her! I would have had her now with me, before my eyes, in the projection room of my pain and despair!” Humbert laments at one point.(47) His missed opportunity echoes the warning at the heart of Lolita —to transpose its story into visual media and/or embodied performance is to risk slipping into child pornography. Lolita thus depends on “dismediation,” a fruitful term that Martin Harries has coined to signify the “remediation through negation of another medium . ”(48) Nabokov constructs his novel through the dismediation of cinema, photography, theatre (which he often lumps with cinema), and other media that make possible the visual representation and exploitation of young girls. While attempting to control Lolita from spilling into other media, Nabokov explores the dangerous power of language to seduce his audience and the antidotal potential of language to unveil that rhetorical coercion. Literary scholars are thus more likely to argue that the girl-child in Lolita is just a figment of Nabokov’s imagination and that what the reader is engaged with is not real, but just a text,(49) or as Humbert puts it: “Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!”(50) By contrast, theatre and performance studies scholars view texts (even closet dramas and impossible stage directions) as inherently virtual.(51) However problematic or dangerous a text is, it has the potential to be performed and corporealized in the theatre. A text, as John Muse puts it, has the “capacity to generate virtual violence.”(52) Figure 2: Judy Vargas as Lolita in Lolita in the Garden . Courtesy of The Fales Library & Special Collections. “The Theatre Had Taught Her That Trick” Nabokov maintained a lifelong interest in theatre and was aware of its virtuality. In fact, Lolita predicts the rise of virtual reality and the latter medium’s deep ties to theatre.(53) At its core, Lolita is a theatrical novel that interrogates the relationship between imagination, representation, and action. The reader witnesses Humbert go from daydreaming about Dolly to writing down his fantasy to finally enacting it, and this transition from thought to action is rendered in the novel through theatrical and cinematic metaphors. When Humbert reflects on how he managed to masturbate in Dolly’s presence, “with her legs across [his] lap” on the sofa, but without her (in his view) awareness of his onanistic endeavor, he compares the act to the theatrical performance of a magician, a comparison that moves from theatre to virtual reality to cinema: Absolutely no harm done. The conjurer had poured milk, molasses, foaming champagne into a young lady’s new white purse; and lo, the purse was intact. Thus had I delicately constructed my ignoble, ardent, sinful dream; and still Lolita was safe—and I was safe; What I had madly possessed was not she, but my own creation, another fanciful Lolita—perhaps, more real than Lolita; overlapping, encasing her; floating between me and her, and having no will, no consciousness—indeed, no life of her own.(54) By the end of this attempt at justification, Humbert envisions his stepdaughter as a kind of free-floating, virtual avatar (what today we would call a hologram) that presumably has nothing to do with the girl-child Dolly. He goes on to mix theatrical and cinematic metaphors: “The child knew nothing. I had done nothing to her. And nothing prevented me from repeating a performance that affected her as little as if she were a photographic image rippling upon a screen and I a humble hunchback abusing myself in the dark.”(55) Initially, the pairing of the words “repeating” and “performance” point to a theatrical performance, in which Humbert is an actor who “repeats” the same gestures in the presence of an untouched and unaware Dolly-the-spectator, who does not understand what she is seeing. But as the sentence continues and Humbert describes an adult movie theatre, in which he is watching Dolly on screen, it becomes clear that he has a very different kind of “performance” in mind and that Dolly cannot, in fact, be as unaffected by the proceedings as he wants the reader to believe. For whatever cinematic image to appear on a screen, a real person, in this case—a real child—would have to be filmed. Nabokov’s distrust of theatre and cinema is thus connected to his protective view of child and young adolescent actors. As Nicholas Ridout points out (following the work of Bert O. States), child actors pose a particular problem onstage because the audience often worries whether children can give “properly informed consent” and whether they will be “damaged by their appearance on stage.”(56) Such concerns presume childhood innocence— a social and historical construct that has played a significant role in the preservation of white heteropatriarchy, as Robin Bernstein has argued—and are fairly recent in theatre history.(57) As Kristen Hatch has shown in her study of Shirley Temple, from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s, audiences took “pleasure in children’s performances” because they accepted childhood innocence as “inviolable.”(58) By the mid-twentieth century, this “inviolable innocence” of children gave way to Freud’s theory of sexuality and to the fear that children were “in danger of being corrupted through contact with the world of adults."(59) Indeed, Nabokov himself once admitted: “If I had a little girl I might want to ban the book, too. Certainly I wouldn’t let her read it.”(60) Despite Nabokov’s public pronouncements, his own novel, published during the mid-century cultural shift in views on childhood, challenges the many myths surrounding the abstract concept of childhood, including innocence, ignorance, and lack of agency. Dolly, as we find out, has explored her sexuality before Humbert and, as Stockton notes, is “queer herself, [s]exually schooled by ‘little Lesbians.’”(61) Nabokov’s paternal attitude toward child actors echoes his prohibitive position in regard to transposing his novel to the stage and to the screen. Although he eventually did allow other artists to adapt Lolita into other media, he considered those works to be artistic creations in their own rights, far removed from his novel. Thus, Nabokov thought Kubrick’s Lolita was excellent but “only a blurred skimpy glimpse of the marvelous picture [he] imagined.”(62) And just like the novel’s depictions of childhood are more complex than Nabokov’s public statements on the matter, so are the novel’s representations of popular culture more astute and realistic than Nabokov’s own expectations. In Lolita , popular culture has already invaded almost every aspect of the characters’ lives in post-war America. There is no going back. Visual media dominate. Humbert is not only an artist but also an adman who earns his living writing perfume advertisements.(63) Dolly is “to whom ads were dedicated: the ideal consumer, the subject and object of every foul poster.”(64) Humbert reminds her of “some crooner or actor chap” on whom she “has a crush.”(65) He describes himself at one point as “a great big handsome hunk of movieland manhood” and Charlotte, Dolly’s mother, as “a weak solution of Marlene Dietrich.”(66) Hollywood’s reach is everywhere in the novel as is its underbelly—the pornographic industry. The characters exist in a world of commodity fetishism where the “definite social relation between” people “assumes, here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things.”(67) Theatre is not immune to this type of commercialization and alienation. Upon closer examination, however, Nabokov’s attitude toward embodied performance in Lolita turns out to be deeply ambivalent. It is Dolly’s foray into acting, while rehearsing for Quilty’s play The Enchanted Hunters , that eventually leads to her escape. During one of her early attempts to stand up for herself, Humbert remarks: “It was the first time, I think, she spoke spontaneously of her pre-Humbertian childhood; perhaps, the theatre had taught her that trick.”(68) “M imetic imagination,” as Maria Tatar notes, “is less about copying and representing than about making contact and participating”—exactly the kinds of activities a student would embrace in the theatre.(69) The theatre, as I have suggested earlier, has also provided fertile ground for feminist responses to Nabokov’s Lolita. Fornés and Vogel represent different visions of girlhood on stage by contrasting it to the Lolita myth of popular culture, the heteropatriarchal fantasy of the adolescent girl, which is influenced by Humbert’s solipsistic view of Dolly. And the tensions between imagination and action explored in Lolita are amplified on the stage. Fornés Gives Lolita Back Her Voice In the late spring and early summer of 1977, Fornés directed her “ theatre piece with music for children and adults,” Lolita in the Garden , with music by Richard Weinstock and with Catherine Slade and Judy Vargas in the title role at Intar 53 Theatre in New York.(70) This unpublished play features no Humbert character, spotlighting instead Lolita as a little girl. Fornés would represent child abuse in her later play The Conduct of Life (1985), in which a thirty-three-year-old lieutenant kidnaps, terrorizes, and repeatedly rapes a twelve-year-old girl named Nena. In Lolita in the Garden , the focus is on a girl-child before anything bad happens to her. Significantly, she is described as being eleven years old in Fornés’s script (Humbert meets Dolly when she is twelve). Fornés must have read Nabokov’s Lolita with great attention, as she borrows many elements from Lolita —the lyrical name, the fairytale leitmotifs, and the garden imagery—but repurposes them, like in a contrafact, for her own melody, one that reclaims her heroine’s autonomy.(71) The production toured New York in two versions, an English and Spanish one, thereby disposing of Humbert’s exoticizing tendency to call Dolly his “Carmencita”(72) and making Fornés’s fairytale accessible to Spanish-speaking children.(73) Moreover, by casting a young Brown and a young Black girl (Vargas and Slade respectively) in the title role, Fornés challenged the cultural myth of Lolita as “an expression of whiteness.”(74) As the Pulitzer Prize-winning fashion critic Robin Givhan explains, “Lolita” has always meant a very specific kind of femininity— “nubile” and white.(75) According to Givhan, Lolita “was not written within the context of what it meant to be a young black girl” because the “culture does not see black girls as having a fragile, dangerously irresistible beauty.”(76) Instead, the culture marginalizes and “oversexualize[s] black bodies.”(77) By contrast, Fornés centers the young girl of color as the main heroine of her fairytale as both vulnerable and learning to stand up for herself. The garden of the play’s title refers not only to the Garden of Eden, where innocence and temptation co-exist, but also to Charlotte’s garden where Humbert first lays eyes on Dolly. Moreover, the garden is an important metaphor for Dolly’s inner world, which Humbert admits remains inaccessible to him: “I simply did not know a thing about my darling’s mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate—dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions.”(78) It is this inner world of the child that Fornés’s theatre piece explores. And it is appropriate that music plays a crucial role in recovering the young girl’s voice. Toward the end of the novel, Humbert recalls an earlier episode, “soon after her disappearance,” when he looked down from a mountain and heard the “musical vibration” of children at play.(79) He realizes there and then that “the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from [his] side, but the absence of her voice from the concord.”(80) In Lolita in the Garden , the songs of children can now be heard loud and clear. Fornés not only gives Lolita back her childhood by writing a children’s piece in which she is the main speaking character, but also teaches her young spectators the importance of self-determinacy at a time when their parents and pedagogues are telling them what to do. The submission to parental authority is, of course, a necessary part of a child’s development, but it is also the same mechanism by which an abuser might manipulate a child (as Humbert does his stepdaughter). Fornés’s Lolita in the Garden is thus a lesson in how to think for oneself. And theatrical mimesis is a crucial step in this lesson. Set in a magical forest, populated by a talking tree, a flexible flower, and a poet-bear, the play begins with a fairy godmother named Hard granting three wishes to an eleven-year-old girl named Lolita, telling her that she can do whatever she wants and that she does not have to follow anyone’s orders. As Lolita puts it, “I want to do what I want. And I want no one to tell me what to do. And I don’t want to have to do what other people want.”(81) She also tries to stretch the definition of “three wishes,” asking Hard for “a magic prince in silver with rubies and diamonds,” “a white wedding dress so [she] can marry the prince,” and “three girlfriends who are very nice to [her] and don’t take [her] boyfriends away.”(82) But Hard reminds her that she has already used up all her three wishes when she asked for complete autonomy and rejects her desires for romantic clichés. Doing whatever she wants and not listening to anyone’s advice turns out to be a more difficult task than Fornés’s Lolita initially imagined. She learns many things the hard way—that gorging on an unlimited supply of candies, for example, makes her “feel sick and fat.”(83) And as Lolita continues to roam and play in the forest, she begins to want for someone to tell her what to do. In this way, according to Norma Ford, Lolita in the Garden is “an allegory for the responsibility that true freedom demands of us.”(84) It is difficult to gauge how aware the children in the audience were of Nabokov’s Lolita , but the adults in attendance would have picked up on the allusion. As Fornés’s Lolita learns the lesson about how to be a self-determining agent, she does so in a world marked by violence toward women. Echoes of Nabokov’s Lolita can still be heard and conjure up a sense of menace in Fornés’s contrafact, giving it a Brothers Grimm aesthetic. While Nabokov’s Lolita borrows fairytale elements from Alice in Wonderland , The Little Mermaid , and Sleeping Beauty among many others, to hint at how enchantment takes place on the level of language (the inattentive reader might fall under Humbert’s spell), Fornés restores all these magical elements in a fairytale written for children with a female adolescent at its center. When Bear asks Fornés’s Lolita “what” she is, she responds: “A child. I’m a girl.” “Ahhhh. What’s that?” asks the scared Bear. “A human being,” says Lolita.(85) This is a simple exchange but one that reminds us how invisible the humanity of young girls has been throughout the twentieth century. As Nash elucidates, the teen girl suffers a “double enforcement of oppressive representation:” “her femininity makes her more sexually objectified than teen boys in the same narratives, while her youth makes her more ignorant and diminished than grown women.”(86) By contrast, Fornés’s inclusive musical fairytale for the theatre represents the autonomy of the female adolescent by giving her back her voice and her childhood and by reminding the audience of the diversity of girls who can be the main character. Vogel’s Lolita Drives Away from the Dead-End Road Given that Vogel has mentioned on several occasions that How I Learned to Drive was in part inspired by Lolita , it is surprising how little attention has been paid to the connections between the two works aside from the occasional nod to Vogel’s interest in Nabokov’s novel. Vogel develops her own storyline and characters, so the relationship between the novel and the play may seem at first superficial. From Lolita Vogel borrows the car setting, the road motif, the subjects of pedophilia and incest, and the mixture of comedy and pathos. How I Learned to Drive follows the relationship between Li’l Bit and her aunt’s husband, Uncle Peck, from her pre-adolescent years all the way through adulthood. “I hope people are seeing the resonances,” Vogel stated in an interview with Charlie Rose, referring to the echoes between How I Learned to Drive and Lolita .(87) Vogel first read Lolita in high school and kept revisiting it during her student days at Cornell, where there had always been “a huge Nabokov presence,” as “he’d been on the faculty.”(88) While How I Learned to Drive stands on its own, there is another level to this play as a response to Nabokov’s Lolita and to the popular culture that has usurped Lolita into its apparatus of sexualizing children. First, How I Learned to Drive adopts a similar moral and temporal framework. Like Nabokov, Vogel seduces her audience by giving them a charming pedophile, one who might initially gain some of their sympathy, and by manipulating the chronology of the events in order to reveal the problem of succumbing to her seduction. Contrary to Nabokov’s modernist attachment to medium specificity, Vogel’s meticulous stage directions offer directors a roadmap for taking on the contemporary mediatized environment and for exploring theatre’s power in it. As a feminist, Vogel was unnerved by the fact that she felt sympathy for Humbert. Indeed, Vogel’s “relatively benign depiction” of Peck has garnered much attention.(89) Like Nabokov’s Lolita, How I Learned to Drive , in Vogel’s words, “dramatizes the gifts we receive from the people who hurt us.”(90) Like Humbert, Peck falls in love, and that love makes a moral demand on him. If Humbert’s gift to Dolly is “to make her live in the minds of later generations” by writing the manuscript that the reader allegedly holds, then Peck’s gift to Li’l Bit, while less artistic, is more life affirming.(91) By teaching Li’l Bit how to drive like a man (“with confidence—with aggression”(92), Peck not only saves her life, but also empowers her to “reject him and destroy him.”(93) Whether you feel (negative) empathy for Peck or not is ultimately a subjective experience. When How I Learned to Drive premiered in 1997 at the Vineyard Theatre, some critics praised its moral complexity, while others criticized Vogel for not villainizing Peck (David Morse).(94) But How I Learned to Drive is no melodrama. As Joanna Mansbridge has ably argued, Vogel’s play explores “the culture that created Peck.”(95) Significantly, Vogel makes Lil’ Bit the main narrator of How I Learned to Drive , explaining in an interview that, while she “wanted to explore the sadness of her Humbert Humbert in Peck, she didn’t want her Lolita to go down the same dead-end road.”(96) While Nabokov’s “pale, pregnant, beloved, irretrievable Dolly” dies in Gray Star, Alaska, Vogel’s Li’l Bit drives off toward an uncertain but hopeful future.(97) Referencing Cathy Caruth’s work on the delayed temporality of trauma, Ann Pellegrini argues that Vogel’s memory play reenacts “the belatedness of trauma” and the “revision” of memory through Li’l Bit’s use of “piecemeal” narration.(98) Li’l Bit goes back in time and revises the events of the past in order to gain control of them, transcend victimhood, and allow herself to heal. Graley Herren reads these “dramaturgical manipulations” of Li’l Bit as her “coping mechanism.”(99) But Li’l Bit’s narration has another function, beyond that of therapy, which align her with Humbert’s sly handling of words and his use of “retrospective verisimilitude.”(100) The play’s use of nonchronological narration forces the audience to consider at what point the relationship between the two characters becomes uncomfortable and painful for them to watch. As Vogel explains: If you look at the structure of my play, all I’m doing is asking how do you feel about this? We see a girl of seventeen and an older man in a car seat. You think you know how you feel about this relationship? Alright, fine. Now, let’s go back a year earlier. Do you still think you know what you feel about this situation? … The play is a reverse syllogism. It constantly pulls the rug out from under our emotional responses by going back earlier and earlier in time. [101] In this way, How I Learned to Drive is not simply “a drama about an individual family,” but “a way of looking on a microscopic level at how this culture sexualizes children.”(102) When How I Learned to Drive premiered in 1997, the sexualization of children in the media was at the forefront of legal and moral debates. The early nineties saw the scandal of Amy Elizabeth Fisher, branded by the media as “Long Island Lolita,” who, at the age of seventeen, shot and wounded her secret lover’s wife. The murder of six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey took over the news cycle in late December of 1996. Beauty contest photos and videos of the little girl with bleached blonde hair and in full makeup, striking provocative poses, dominated TV screens. As Vogel reminds us, “JonBenét Ramsey was not a fluke.”(103) American consumer culture had been profiting from the sexualization of young girls for a long time, as the Calvin Klein jean ads, featuring fifteen-year-old Brooke Shields from the early 1980s, attest to. It is this mediatized environment (which had also co-opted Nabokov’s Lolita ) that Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive takes on. Vogel’s original script suggests “the notion of slides and projections, which were not used in the New York production of the play.”(104) Nor were any slides or projections employed in the Broadway premiere in the spring of 2022, which featured the original leads—Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse—and where changes in mood and in action were evoked through lighting and the reassembling of set pieces. In my discussion of the play, I look carefully at Vogel’s stage directions, arguing that her version engages in a critical intervention with visual media and that directors miss an important opportunity when they disregard them.(105) In what follows, I analyze Vogel’s stage directions by imagining what a potential production that heeded them could accomplish aesthetically and ethically. Vogel employs dismediation in the theatre—through the negation of pin-up photography—to confront mass culture’s sexualization of young girls. In a culture still dominated by gender violence, misogyny, and mass-produced images of stereotypical femininity, Vogel carves out a space of subversion, resistance, and escape (however temporary) where Li’l Bit can come into her own and write her story. It bears stressing that the role of Li’l Bit “was originally written as a character who is forty-something.”(106) Mary-Louise Parker was thirty-three when she debuted the role at the Vineyard Theatre. Thus, instead of a child actor posing for erotic photos, we witness an adult woman revisiting her past, as she looks back at the girl that she once was. If, as Paul Auslander suggests, “mediatization is a vehicle of the general code in a way that live performance is not (or is no longer),” then How I Learned to Drive acknowledges that both Li’l Bit’s coming of age and its own ontology as a theatrical work take place in a culture where mediatized representations predominate.(107) For example, during the driving lesson, when Peck instills in Li’l Bit the importance of driving aggressively, Vogel’s stage directions indicate that “ it would be nice to have slides of erotic photographs of women and cars ,” including one of “ Li’l Bit with a Bel Air .”(108) Accustomed to screens, the audience’s attention might be split between the images on the slides and the two actors onstage. Yet this set-up aptly reflects the mediatized culture in which young girls grow up. During the photo shoot, which is the central scene of the play, the Playboy aesthetic predominates at the start. Peck takes pictures of the “ nervous but curious thirteen-year-old ” Li’l Bit with a Leica camera, while “ something like Roy Orbison ” plays in the background.(109) Yet even as Peck objectifies Li’l Bit, she pushes back and he, along with the audience, begins to see her in a different light, as a unique, irreplaceable, singular human being. In other words, she resists becoming a commodity. As Peck instructs his niece on how to move her body and what poses to strike, Vogel’s directions recommend that there “ be a slide montage of actual shots of the actor playing Li’l Bit—interspersed with other models à la Playboy, Calvin Klein and Victoriana/ Lewis Carroll’s Alice Liddell .”(110) Unlike Nabokov’s Lolita , How I Learned to Drive does not posit that it is “immune from contamination by, and ontologically different from mediatized forms.”(111) Rather, by recognizing that theatre is a medium among other media and by privileging some mediatized forms over others, Vogel can influence which images of Li’l Bit are aesthetically and ethically effective and which ones are not. When Peck asks Li’l Bit to “arch [her] back” and “throw [her] head back,” the audience sees a “Playboy model in this pose,” and not the actor playing Li’l Bit. Likewise, when Peck asks Li’l Bit to put her hand on her cheek and move her hair back, “[ a ] nother classic Playboy or Vargas ” appears.(112) Evidently, Playboy and Vargas have shaped Peck’s imagination and how he views Li’l Bit. But Li’l Bit does not remain an object of this mass-produced fantasy: she resists it, becoming, to borrow Pellegrini’s turn of phrase, an “active, unruly subject of desire.”(113) When Peck calls Li’l Bit “beautiful,” she looks back at him “ a bit defiantly ” and reminds him that “Aunt Mary is beautiful.”(114) And Li’l Bit rejects Peck’s idea of creating a portfolio of her photos and sending them to Playboy when she turns eighteen. She refuses to become another commodity on the sexual marketplace. Most importantly, interspersed among all the pin-ups are the aleatory photos of Li’l Bit that Peck takes during the shoot in real time. For example, after Peck says “I love you” to Li’l Bit, the directions read: “ Li’l Bit opens her eyes; she is startled. Peck captures the shot. On the screen we see right through her .”(115) There are thus two kinds of images being contrasted in this pivotal scene. There are the sexualized pin-up photos of “aesthetic consumerism,” to which Susan Sontag claims “everyone is now addicted,” and the photos of Li’l Bit that reveal what Roland Barthes calls in Camera Lucida , “ the impossible science of the unique being .”(116) By giving space and time to both kinds of images onstage and by projecting them alongside two unique human beings as they navigate their transgressive relationship, Vogel paradoxically achieves more artistic control over the representations of her characters and the meaning of her play than Nabokov did when he tried to prohibit any visual representation and embodiment of his heroine. And while Vogel dismediates pin-up photography, she allows for photos, in which we see the mature actor playing a teenage Li’l Bit, to supplement the performance of her two actors. Not only is thirteen-year-old Li’l Bit’s wish that her erotic photos never see the light of day respected, but also the photos that we do see projected onstage—that of an older actor performing the memory of the teenage version of her character—serve as a reminder of the passage of time. In this scene, theatre and photography are engaged not so much in competition as in a symbiotic relationship that shines light on Li’l Bit’s mortality. Indeed, as Barthes points out, photography and theatre have much in common, “by way of a singular intermediary”— “by way of Death.”(117) The “first actors,” Barthes reminds us, “separated themselves from the community by playing the role of the Dead: to make oneself up was to designate oneself as a body simultaneously living and dead.”(118) According to Barthes, there are, thus, two kinds of punctums . There is the “unexpected flash” of detail that “sometimes crosses” the field of a photograph.(119) And then there is “Time, the lacerating emphasis of the noeme (‘that-has-been’), its pure representation.”(120) It is this punctum , as a trace of time and a reminder of mortality, that is amplified in the palimpsest photo shoot scene. In a way, these projected photos of the older actor posing as a teenager also function as “surrogation,” which Joseph Roach describes as the “three-sided relationship of memory, performance, and substitution.”(121) Although there are no roles for child actors in Drive , Vogel “strongly recommend[s] casting a young woman who is ‘of legal age,’ that is, twenty-one to twenty-five years old who can look as close to eleven as possible” for the role of the Teenage Greek Chorus.(122) “If the actor is too young,” Vogel explains, “the audience may feel uncomfortable.”(123) The youthful appearance and the young-sounding voice of the Teenage Greek Chorus are necessary for the scene in which the first episode of molestation occurs. In 1962, when Peck holds eleven-year-old Li’l Bit in his lap and shows her how to drive for the first time, the thirty- or forty-something-year-old actor playing Li’l Bit performs the physical actions, while the Teenage Greek Chorus speaks all the lines, standing “apart on stage.”(124) After Peck and the Teenage Greek Chorus exit, Li’l Bit faces the audience and says: “That day was the last day I lived in my body.”(125) This separation of body and voice represents, in David Savran’s words, “the radical alienation from self that results from having been molested.”(126) In this way, Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive creatively employs exactly what Nabokov’s Lolita displays anxiety about—embodied performance—in order to both stage Li’l Bit’s sexual trauma and help her transcend it. Conclusion In the fall of 1959, almost a year after the infamous Halloween episode, Nabokov visited Paris where he witnessed yet another Lolita cosplay. This time it was the twenty-nine-year-old wife of French author Alain Robbe-Grillet—Catherine—who “had dressed herself à la gamine.”(127)Nabokov was not horrified. He was delighted by the “petite, pretty wife, a young actress” who “continued [her] performance the next day” when the two writers met again for lunch.(128) Both men found it hilarious when, after serving everyone else alcohol, the waiter asked Catherine if she would like a Coca-Cola.(129) Reminiscing about this “very funny” episode, Nabokov assumed that the young woman was “pretending to be Lolita” in his “honor.”(130) Perhaps. Or, there might have been something else at play. The Robbe-Grillets were in a consensual sadomasochistic relationship, in which Catherine was the submissive. She enjoyed being “mistaken for a teenager” and being “refused admission to a film for 18.”(131) In any event, Nabokov clearly did not have a problem with age play between consenting adults, even if it involved elements borrowed and repurposed from his novel. On some level, he must have known that, just as Dolly runs away from Humbert and Quilty, so too would his Lolita escape his authorial control. What he opposed was that Lolita contribute to the kind of commodification of young girls that his novel both documents and resists. Despite Nabokov’s admonition, throughout the years, book covers for Lolita have gotten more risqué. And the name of his beloved nymphet has become associated with exactly the kind of exploitation his novel condemns, such as Jeffrey Epstein’s infamous Lolita Express plane. Amid all the misreadings and misappropriations of Nabokov’s Lolita , Fornés and Vogel have stood out as the novel’s most conscientious readers. Their theatrical responses challenge the pervasive Lolita myth of popular culture, explore the relationship between girlhood and womanhood, and present their audiences with alternative versions of the adolescent girl. Fornés’s non-white Lolita is curious, brave, and autonomous. Vogel’s Li’l Bit is witty, resilient, and not defined by her sexual trauma. Many of these characteristics can already be detected in Nabokov’s Dolly, whose fictional fate is that of the deceased muse who will “live in the minds of later generations” in the manuscript written by “HH.”(132) The artist in Nabokov’s literary universe is almost exclusively male.(133) Unless, of course, she is Vivian Darkbloom— the anagram of the author’s own name. By contrast, the protagonists of Fornés and Vogel are unmistakably artistic, writing and making sense of their pasts, presents, and futures. They give us an unforgettable portrait of the artist as a young girl. Still, Fornés and Vogel share Nabokov’s anxiety about representing youthful desire on stage. Although both playwrights show adolescence to be a time of chaos and confusion instead of “an idyll of childhood,” they are aware of the danger of their female protagonists becoming mere “objects of male desire” and capitalist consumption.(134) Reception, after all, is challenging to control. Fornés circumvents the issue by placing her heroine (who can be played by an adult or a child) into the protective environment of a theatre play for children, from which Humbert Humbert has been expelled. The erotic awakening of her Lolita is relatively tame. Vogel assigns an adult to play Li’l Bit at different stages of her life and relies on a childlike voice of another adult to communicate her protagonist’s youngest age. In the twenty-first century, however, there has been “a growing interest in children as both performers and performance makers of experimental work.”(135) Many of these performances are meant to make audiences deeply unconformable and to encourage them to think about the adult-child dynamic (136) The performance of girlhood in the theatre will always be ridden with anxieties and risks. Silencing girls, however, is no longer an ethically viable option. In their Lolita -inspired plays, Fornés and Vogel found several ways that embodied performance could channel the agency of girls during the messy, painful, exhilarating experience of growing up. There are still more to discover. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Simone de Beauvoir, Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome (1959), trans. Bernard Fretchman (London: First Four Square Edition, 1962), 20. Alizée, “Moi…Lolita” [“Me… Lolita”], Gourmandises (2000). Produced by Polydor. I’d like to thank Gwendolyn Alker for bringing my attention to Fornés’s unpublished script for Lolita in the Garden and for helping me locate a copy. Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 373-74. Quoted in Graham Vickers, Chasing Lolita: How Popular Culture Corrupted Nabokov’s Little Girl All Over Again (Chicago: Chicago Review Press , 2008), 131. Take, for example, Frank Wedekind’s Lulu, who is about fifteen years of age. See S. E. Jackson, “Whose Lulu Is It Anyway? Performing through Dramaturgies of Excess,” Theatre Journal 72, no. 1 (2020): 21-7. Vladimir Nabokov, “On a Book Entitled Lolita ,” in The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated , edited with preface, introduction, and notes by Alfred Appel, Jr. (New York: Vintage, 1991), 311-16, quote on 316. For more on Gothic Lolita fashion, see Michelle Liu Carriger, “‘Maiden’s Armor’: Global Gothic Lolita Fashion Communities and Technologies of Girly Counteridentity,” Theatre Survey 60, no. 1 (2019): 122-46. The article points out that, while the Japanese “lolita practitioners eschew all connections to Lolita , Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel,” it is possible to “consider the coincidence of the name as an example of what Anan calls ‘imaginative reconfiguration’” (131). Jonas A. Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). Siggy Frank, Nabokov’s Theatrical Imagination (New York: Cambridge University, 2012), 47. See also Vladimir Nabokov, “Playwriting,” in The Man from the USSR and Other Plays with Two Essays on the Drama , introductions and translations by Dmitri Nabokov (San Diego: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1984), 315-22. Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 283. Vladimir Nabokov, Foreword to Lolita: A Screenplay (New York: Vintage, 1997), x-xi. For a survey on the recent scholarship exploring the intersections of girlhood studies and performance studies, see the special issue of Theatre Survey edited by Marlis Schweitzer. Marlis Schweitzer, “From the Editor,” Theatre Survey 60, no. 1 (2019): 1-5. Kubrick cast Sue Lyon when she was fourteen. And Dominique Swain was fifteen at the start of filming for Adrian Lyne’s Lolita (1997). Both films had to change many elements of the novel. As Louis Menand puts it, “you cannot film this story accurately and stay out of prison.” See Louis Menand, “Just Like a Woman: Adrian Lyne’s Lolita Stops Way Short of Pedophilic Perversity,” Slate , August 5, 1998, available at https://slate.com/culture/1998/08/just-like-a-woman.html . For more on the York Theatre Company’s production, see Alisa Zhulina “Teaching Lolita in the Department of Drama,” in Teaching Nabokov’s Lolita in the #MeToo Era , ed. Elena Rakhimova-Sommers (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021), 73-91, at 80-81. When the musical was first tried out in Philadelphia in 1971, Annette Ferra was fifteen. When it was tried out again in Boston, she was replaced by thirteen-year-old Denise Nickerson. Both failed to gain audiences and were heavily criticized by the public and the critics. The age of the performers might have had something to do with the commercial failure. The seventies, after all, witnessed second-wave feminism, which brought attention to issues of sexuality and legal equality. J. Ellen Gainor, “ Dance Nation and Its Representational Challenges,” Modern Drama 63, no. 2 (2020): 173-96, quote on 178. Gainor, “ Dance Nation ,” 178. Matthew Wagner, Shakespeare, Theatre, and Time (New York: Routledge, 2012), 13. Paula Vogel, How I Learned Drive (1997), in The Mammary Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1998), 1-92, quote on 6. Adele Senior, “Beginners On Stage: Arendt, Natality and the Appearance of Children in Contemporary Performance,” Theatre Research International 41, no. 1 (2016): 70-84, quote on 81. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006), 8. Barry Kernfeld, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz , 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). Suzan-Lori Parks, “On What Inspired the Red Letter Plays,” available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdaEk3FMRxI . Paula Vogel, interview by Charlie Rose, Charlie Rose , June 19, 1997, available at https://charlierose.com/videos/5709 . Here I am thinking of Marvin Carlson’s definition of “haunting” as it relates to the text: “Indeed, in the relationship between the preexisting dramatic text and its enactment onstage we can already speak of one kind of ‘haunting’ that lies close to the structure of the theatrical experience, in which the physical embodiment of an action that is witnessed in the theatre is an important sense haunted by a preexisting text…” Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 16. James R. Kincaid, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), 6. Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham, N.C.: 2009), 120. Beauvoir, Brigitte Bardot , 8. “Love can resist familiarity; eroticism cannot.” Ibid., 14. Beauvoir elaborates: “In an age when woman drives a car and speculates on the stock exchange, an age in which she unceremoniously displays her nudity on public beaches, any attempt to revive the vamp and her mystery was out of the question” (10). Ibid. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 8 and 34. According to Beauvoir, Bardot’s performance on screen “assert[s] that one is man’s fellow and equal” and “recognize[s] that between the woman and him there is mutual desire and pleasure” (30). Thus, there is an important difference between the reception of Bardot in France and America. Beauvoir elaborates: “In France, there is still a great deal of emphasis, officially, on women’s dependence upon men. The Americans, who are actually far from having achieved sexual equality in all spheres, but who grant it theoretically, have seen nothing scandalous in the emancipation symbolized by BB. But it is, more than anything else, her frankness that disturbs most of the public and that delights the Americans” (58). Tom Maguire, “Watching Girls Watching: HETPALEIS’s Hamilton Complex ,” Diversity, Representation, and Culture in TYA (ASSITEJ: Cape Town, South Africa, 2021), 46-57. Online. Ilana Nash, American Sweethearts: Teenage Girls in Twentieth-Century Popular Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 3. This collective imagination has been challenged in the twenty-first century with the emergence of plays centered around girlhood by dramatists like Clare Barron, Sarah DeLappe, Julia Jarcho, Ruby Rae Spiegel, and others. See Zhulina, “Teaching Lolita ,” 84. Nash, American Sweethearts , 2. Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 62. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy , vol.1 (1867), trans. Ben Fowkes, with introduction by Ernest Mandel (New York: Penguin, 1990), 125 and 129. Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 9. This is even true of the author of Lolita himself. Both Nabokov and his wife, Véra, referred to the female protagonist as Lolita no doubt because of how famous that name had become. See, for example, Julian W. Connolly, “Who Was Dolly Haze?” A Reader’s Guide to Nabokov’s Lolita (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2009), 53-66 and Elizabeth Sweeney, “Lolita I Presume; On a Character Entitled ‘Lolita.’” Miranda 3 (2010): 1-12. Interestingly, in Nabokov’s screenplay, the female protagonist is called exclusively “Lolita” by everyone. This could be because, in an audiovisual genre like film, referring to the character by different names would be confusing for the audience. I prefer to use the name “Dolly” because this is how the heroine signs her first name (first in a letter from camp and then in her last letter to Humbert). Michael Wood, The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994), 117. Laura Lippman, “Watching the Detective,” Lolita in the Afterlife: On Beauty, Risk, and Reckoning with the Most Indelible and Shocking Novel of the Twentieth Century , ed. Jenny Minton Quigley (New York: Vintage, 2021), 69-81, quote on 80. Sarah Herbold, “‘Dolorès Disparue’: Reading Misogyny in Lolita ,” Approaches to Teaching Nabokov’s Lolita , ed. Zoran Kuzmanovich and Galya Diment (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2008), 134-40, quote on 134. Stockton, The Queer Child , 121. Lena Dunham, “My 10 Favorite Books: Lena Dunham,” New York Times , January 8, 2016, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/08/t-magazine/lena-dunham-book-list.html . Andre Dubus III, “ Lolita , Chamonix, France, 2018,” in Lolita in the Afterlife: On Beauty, Risk, and Reckoning with the Most Indelible and Shocking Novel of the Twentieth Century , ed. Jenny Minton Quigley (New York: Vintage, 2021), 119-34, quote on 132. Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 5. Vladimir Nabokov , Selected Letters, 1940-1977 , ed. Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew Joseph Bruccoli (New York: Harcourt, 1989), 250. For more on Russian Formalism, see Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, eds., Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays , 2nd ed., trans. and intro Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, with a new intro Gary Saul Morson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2012). Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 231. Martin Harries, “Theater After Film, or Dismediation,” ELH 83, no. 2 (2016): 345-62, quote on 351. Harries discusses dismediation in the context of postwar theatre, which he argues shaped itself through “the dismediation of cinema” by scrutinizing the cinematic spectator, critiquing “mass culture as an unprecedented tool for the production of docile subjects,” and exposing the interpellation of the cinematic apparatus (351) and (354-58). “ Lolita is an incantation, but its conjuring never moves from word to flesh; the brilliance and tragedy of language is that it is only language and therefore useless.” Eric Naiman, Nabokov, Perversely (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 44. Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 32. The tension between text and its corporealization through performance is “at the center of contemporary theatre theory.” See Gerald Rabkin, “Is There a Text on This Stage?: Theatre/Authorship/Interpretation,” Performing Arts Journal 9, no. 2/3 (1985): 142-59, quote on 143. See also Daniel Sack, Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage (New York: Routledge, 2017). John H. Muse, “Virtual Theatre, Virtual Spectatorship: On Jonathan Ball’s Clockfire ,” Theater 48, no. 1 (2018): 79-90, quote on 85. The earliest use of the phrase “virtual reality” can be found in Antonin Artaud’s The Theater and Its Double , trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 49. Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 62. Ibid. Nicholas Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 100. For example, as Robin Bernstein has argued, in the context of American racial projects, the performance of childhood innocence became a “crucial but naturalized element of contests over race and rights.” Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood and Race from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University, 2011), 2. Kristen Hatch, Shirley Temple and the Performance of Girlhood (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014), 16. Compare this to the position of colonial Calvinists who thought that children were “ inherently sinful and sexual” and that they had to be taught to reign in their “damnable impulses.” Bernstein, Racial Innocence , 4. Hatch, Shirley Temple and the Performance of Girlhood , 16 and 9. Stacy Schiff, “Véra and Lo,” in Lolita in the Afterlife: On Beauty, Risk, and Reckoning with the Most Indelible and Shocking Novel of the Twentieth Century , ed. Jenny Minton Quigley (New York: Vintage, 2021), 15-31, quote on 28. Schiff is careful to point out, however, that Nabokov said this during a book party in London when he and his publisher feared prosecution. In addition, throughout his life, Nabokov said many contradictory things about the novel and whether children should read it. Stockton, The Queer Child , 121. For the quoted material, see Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita , 133. Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions [1973] (New York: Vintage, 1990), 140. When speculating about how Kubrick’s film would turn out, Nabokov said: “It may turn out to be a lovely morning mist as perceived through mosquito netting, or it may turn out to be the swerves of a scenic drive as felt by the horizontal passenger of an ambulance” (14). Nabokov did not expect Kubrick’s adaptation to be faithful to his original. For an excellent analysis of Humbert as such an ad man, see Jacob Emery, “Humbert Humbert as Mad Man: Art and Advertising in Lolita ,” Studies in the Novel 51, no. 4 (2019): 546-68. Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 148. Ibid., 43. Ibid., 39 and 37. Marx, Capital , vol. 1, 165. Ibid., 219. Maria Tatar, Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009), 13. María Irene Fornés, Lolita in the Garden materials, box 6, folder 7. The Fales Library, New York, NY. Fornés was familiar with Nabokov’s Lolita . Her partner, Susan Sontag, introduced Nabokov in 1964 at his reading at the 92nd Street Y. Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 242 and 280. Elisa De La Roche, Teatro Hispano!: Three Major New York Companies (New York: Garland, 1995), 39. Robin Givhan, “Fashion’s Lolita : Fragile, Subversive, and a Paean to White Femininity,” Lolita in the Afterlife: On Beauty, Risk, and Reckoning with the Most Indelible and Shocking Novel of the Twentieth Century , ed. Jenny Minton Quigley (New York: Vintage, 2021), 146-51, quote on 150. Givhan, “Fashion’s Lolita ,” 146. Givhan elaborates further: “Lolita was never a part of me mostly because she was not portrayed as black or brown—like me. She was pale with knobby knees and rosebud lips. She was a character as disconnected from me as Snow White” (149-50). Ibid., 150. Ibid. Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 284. Ibid., 308. Ibid. María Irene Fornés, Lolita in the Garden , 3 . Unpublished script courtesy of Katie Gamelli. Fornés, Lolita in the Garden , 4. Ibid., 12. Norma Ford, Notes , Cuban Theater Digital Archive, available at http://ctda.library.miami.edu/writtenwork/1610 . Fornés, Lolita in the Garden , 20. Nash, American Sweethearts, 3. Vogel, Interview with Charlie Rose. Andrea Simakis, “Playwright Paula Vogel Aimed to Write a Reverse Lolita with How I Learned to Drive ,” Cleveland , May 10, 2017, available at https://www.cleveland.com/onstage/2017/03/playwright_paula_vogel_aimed_t.html . Vogel also includes a passage from Lolita in her play Hot ’n’ Throbbing (1995/2000). Graley Herren, “Narrating, Witnessing, and Healing Trauma in Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive ,” Modern Drama 53, no. 1 (2010): 103-14, quote on 103. Vogel, interview by Holmberg. In her review of Mark Brokaw’s production at the Vineyard Theatre, Jill Dolan writes that How I Learned to Drive is about “how our growth is built on loss.” Jill Dolan, review of How I Learned to Drive , Theatre Journal 50, no.1 (1998): 127-28, quote on 128. Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 309. Vogel, Drive , 50. Vogel, interview by Holmberg. Joanna Mansbridge, Paula Vogel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 123-45, especially 144-45. Ibid., 145. Simakis, “Playwright Paula Vogel.” Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 316. Ann Pellegrini, “Staging Sexual Injury: How I Learned to Drive ,” Critical Theory and Performance , rev. and enlarged ed., ed. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 413-31, quote on 416 and 415. Herren, “Narrating, Witnessing,” 108. Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 71. Vogel, interview by Holmberg. Ibid. Ibid. Paula Vogel, “Notes on the New York Production,” How I Learned to Drive (New York: Dramatists Play Service Inc., 1998), 7. Here I am inspired by Marvin Carlson’s idea that theater practitioners “have long developed their work with an intuitive understanding” of “the concept of supplement,” privileging neither performance nor the written text. This particular “text-performance dynamic” encourages “an adjustment of perception in both directions.” Marvin Carlson, “Theatrical Performance: Illustration, Translation, Fulfillment, or Supplement?” Theatre Journal 37, no.1 (1985): 5-11, quote on 11. Vogel, How I Learned to Drive , 6. Paul Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture , 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008), 5. Vogel, How I Learned to Drive , 46. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 62. Auslander, Liveness, 5. Vogel, How I Learned to Drive , 63. Pellegrini, “Staging Sexual Injury,” 422. Vogel, How I Learned to Drive , 63. Ibid., 66. Susan Sontag, On Photography (1970, (New York: Anchor Books, 1990), 24. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill & Wang, 2010), 71. Barthes, Camera Lucida , 31. Ibid. Ibid., 96 Ibid. Joseph R. Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University, 1996), 2. Vogel, How I Learned to Drive , 4. Ibid. Compare this to Jennifer Haley, author of The Nether (2013), who recommends that a “prepubescent girl” play the nine-year-old Iris. Citing Bert O. States, Haley explains that the “child actor takes the audience out of the play,” so that the “audience is assured nothing awful will be enacted upon the child.” Presumably this happens because, taken out of the play, the audience knows that there are laws in place that would protect the child actor. Jennifer Haley, The Nether (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2015), 74. Vogel, How I Learned to Drive , 88. Ibid., 90. David Savran, “Driving Ms. Vogel,” American Theatre 15, no. 8 (1998): 16-19 and 96-106, quote on 17. Nabokov, Strong Opinions , 224. Ibid., 224. Ibid. Ibid. David Sexton, “Newlight on Dark Secrets,” The Standard , April 5, 2012, available at https://www.standard.co.uk/showbiz/celebrity-news/newlight-on-dark-secrets-7383257.html . Nabokov, Annotated Lolita , 306. See Alisa Zhulina, “Queen Sacrifice: The Feminine Figure of Power and Nabokov’s Strategy of Loss,” in Nabokov’s Women: The Silent Sisterhood of Textual Nomads , ed. Elena Rakhimova-Sommers ( Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017), 19-36. Maguire, “Watching Girls Watching,” online. Senior, “Beginners on Stage,” 21. For a survey of such recent works see Senior, “Beginners on Stage,” 71-72. For example, the Swiss theatre director Milo Rau cast children and teenagers between the ages of eight and thirteen in his Five Easy Pieces (2016) to enact the story of Belgian serial killer Marc Dutroux, who raped, tortured, and killed children and young girls. Bibliography Alizée, “Moi…Lolita” [“Me… Lolita”]. Gourmandises. London: Polydor Records, 2000. Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and Its Double . Translated by Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Press, 1958. Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture . 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2008. Barish, Jonas A. The Antitheatrical Prejudice . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography . New York: Hill & Wang, 2010. Beauvoir, Simone de. Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome (1959). Translated by Bernard Fretchman. London: First Square Edition, 1962. Bernstein, Robin. Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood and Race from Slavery to Civil Rights . New York: New York University, 2011. Boyd, Brian. Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Carlson, Marvin. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. ---. “Theatrical Performance: Illustration, Translation, Fulfillment, or Supplement?” Theatre Journal 37, no.1 (1985): 5-11. Carriger, Michelle Liu. “‘Maiden’s Armor’: Global Gothic Lolita Fashion Communities and Technologies of Girly Counteridentity,” Theatre Survey 60, no. 1 (2019): 122-46. Connolly, Julian W. “Who Was Dolly Haze?” In A Reader’s Guide to Nabokov’s Lolita , 53-66. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2009. Dolan, Jill. Review of How I Learned to Drive . Theatre Journal 50, no.1 (1998): 127-28. Dubus, Andre III. “ Lolita , Chamonix, France, 2018.” In Lolita in the Afterlife: On Beauty, Risk, and Reckoning with the Most Indelible and Shocking Novel of the Twentieth Century , edited by Jenny Minton Quigley, 119-34. New York: Vintage, 2021. Dunham, Lena. “My 10 Favorite Books: Lena Dunham.” New York Times , January 8, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/08/t-magazine/lena-dunham-book-list.html . Emery, Jacob. “Humbert Humbert as Mad Man: Art and Advertising in Lolita ,” Studies in the Novel 51, no. 4 (2019): 546-68. Ford, Norma. Notes . Cuban Theater Digital Archive. https://ctda.library.miami.edu/writtenwork/1610 . Fornés, María Irene. Lolita in the Garden. Unpublished script courtesy of Katie Gamelli. --. Lolita in the Garden materials. Box 6, folder 7. The Fales Library, New York, NY. Frank, Siggy. Nabokov’s Theatrical Imagination . New York: Cambridge University, 2012. Gainor, Ellen J. “ Dance Nation and Its Representational Challenges,” Modern Drama 63, no. 2 (2020): 173-96. Givhan, Robin. “Fashion’s Lolita : Fragile, Subversive, and a Paean to White Femininity.” In Lolita in the Afterlife: On Beauty, Risk, and Reckoning with the Most Indelible and Shocking Novel of the Twentieth Century , edited by Jenny Minton Quigley, 146-51. New York: Vintage, 2021. Haley, Jennifer. The Nether . Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015. Harries, Martin. “Theater After Film, or Dismediation.” ELH 83, no. 2 (2016): 345-62. Hatch, Kristen. Shirley Temple and the Performance of Girlhood . New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014. Herbold, Sarah. “‘Dolorès Disparue’: Reading Misogyny in Lolita .” In Approaches to Teaching Nabokov’s Lolita , edited by Zoran Kuzmanovich and Galya Diment, 134-40. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2008. Herren, Graley. “Narrating, Witnessing, and Healing Trauma in Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive .” Modern Drama 53, no. 1 (2010): 103-14. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation . Hoboken: CRC Press, 2006. Jackson, S. E. “Whose Lulu Is It Anyway? Performing through Dramaturgies of Excess,” Theatre Journal 72, no. 1 (2020): 21-7. Kernfeld, Barry, ed. The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz . 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Kincaid, James R. Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture . New York: Routledge, 1992. Lemon, Lee T and Marion J. Reis, eds. Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays . 2nd ed. Translated by and introduction by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. With a new introduction by Gary Saul Morson. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2012. Lippman, Laura. “Watching the Detective.” In Lolita in the Afterlife: On Beauty, Risk, and Reckoning with the Most Indelible and Shocking Novel of the Twentieth Century , edited by Jenny Minton Quigley, 69-81. New York: Vintage, 2021. Maguire, Tom. “Watching Girls Watching: HETPALEIS’s Hamilton Complex .” Diversity, Representation, and Culture in TYA. ASSITEJ: Cape Town, South Africa, 2021. 46-57. Mansbridge, Joanna. Paula Vogel. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy , vol.1 (1867). Translated by Ben Fowkes. Introduction by Ernest Mandel. New York: Penguin, 1990. Menand, Louis. “Just Like a Woman.” Slate, August 5, 1998. http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/television/1998/08/just_like_a_woman.html . Muse, John H. “Virtual Theatre, Virtual Spectatorship: On Jonathan Ball’s Clockfire .” Theater 48, no. 1 (2018): 79-90. Nabokov, Vladimir. The Annotated Lolita . Revised and updated edition. Edited by Alfred Appel Jr. New York: Vintage International, 1991. ---. Lolita: A Screenplay . New York: Vintage, 1997. ---. “Playwriting.” In The Man from the USSR and Other Plays with Two Essays on the Drama , introductions and translations by Dmitri Nabokov, 315-22. San Diego: Bruccoli Clark, 1984. ---. Selected Letters, 1940-1977 . Edited by Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew Joseph Bruccoli. San Diego: Harcourt, 1989. ---. Strong Opinions (1973). New York: Vintage, 1990. Naiman, Eric. Nabokov, Perversely . Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 2010. Nash, Ilana. American Sweethearts: Teenage Girls in Twentieth-Century Popular Culture . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Parks, Suzan-Lori. “On What Inspired the Red Letter Plays.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdaEk3FMRxI . Pellegrini, Ann. “Staging Sexual Injury: How I Learned to Drive .” In Critical Theory and Performance , revised and enlarged edition, edited by Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach, 413-31. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007. Rabkin, Gerald. “Is There a Text on This Stage?: Theatre/Authorship/Interpretation.” Performing Arts Journal 9, no. 2/3 (1985): 142-59. Ridout, Nicholas. Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Roach, Joseph R. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance . New York: Columbia University, 1996. Roche, Elisa de la. Teatro Hispano!: Three Major New York Companies . New York: Garland, 1995. Sack, Daniel. Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage . New York: Routledge, 2017. Savran, David. “Driving Ms. Vogel.” American Theatre 15, no. 8 (1998): 16-19 and 96-106. Senior, Adele. “Beginners On Stage: Arendt, Natality and the Appearance of Children in Contemporary Performance.” Theatre Research International 41, no. 1 (2016): 70-84. Sexton, David. “Newlight on Dark Secrets.” The Standard , April 5, 2012. https://www.standard.co.uk/showbiz/celebrity-news/newlight-on-dark-secrets-7383257.html . Schiff, Stacy. “Véra and Lo.” In Lolita in the Afterlife: On Beauty, Risk, and Reckoning with the Most Indelible and Shocking Novel of the Twentieth Century , edited by Jenny Minton Quigley, 15-31. New York: Vintage, 2021. Schweitzer, Marlis. “From the Editor.” Theatre Survey 60, no. 1 (2019): 1-5. Simakis, Andrea. “Playwright Paula Vogel Aimed to Write a Reverse Lolita with How I Learned to Drive .” Cleveland , May 10, 2017. https://www.cleveland.com/onstage/2017/03/playwright_paula_vogel_aimed_t.html Sontag, Susan. On Photography (1977). New York: Anchor Books, 1990. Stockton, Kathryn Bond. The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century . Durham, NC: 2009. Sweeney, Elizabeth. “Lolita, I Presume; On a Character Entitled ‘Lolita’.” Miranda 3 (2010): 1- 12. Tatar, Maria. Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood . New York: W.W. Norton, 2009. Vickers, Graham. Chasing Lolita: How Popular Culture Corrupted Nabokov’s Little Girl All Over Again. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2008. Vogel, Paula. How I Learned to Drive. Revised Edition. New York: Dramatists Play Service Inc., 1998. ---. How I Learned to Drive (1997). In The Mammary Plays , 1-92. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1998. ---. Interview by Arthur Holmberg. “Through the Eyes of Lolita.” American Repertory Theater, November 17, 2009. https://americanrepertorytheater.org/media/through-the-eyes-of-lolita/ . ---. Interview by Charlie Rose. Charlie Rose , June 19, 1997. https://charlierose.com/videos/5709 . Wagner, Matthew. Shakespeare, Theatre, and Time. New York: Routledge, 2012. Wood, Michael. The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction . London: Chatto & Windus, 1994. Zhulina, Alisa. “Queen Sacrifice: The Feminine Figure of Power and Nabokov’s Strategy of Loss.” In Nabokov’s Women: The Silent Sisterhood of Textual Nomads , edited by Elena Rakhimova-Sommers , 19-36. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017. ---. “Teaching Lolita in the Department of Drama.” In Teaching Nabokov’s Lolita in the #MeToo Era, edited by Elena Rakhimova-Sommers, 73-91. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021. Footnotes About The Author(s) ALISA ZHULINA is an Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies in the Department of Drama at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts. She is the author of Theater of Capital: Modern Drama and Economic Life (Northwestern University Press, 2024). Her articles and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in MLN , Modern Drama , Modernism/modernity , Theatre Journal , Theatre Survey , Performance Research , and several edited volumes. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Sebastián Eddowes-Vargas Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Sebastián Eddowes-Vargas By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF PRECARIOUS FORMS. PERFORMING UTOPIA IN THE NEOLIBERAL AMERICAS. Candice Amich. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 232. Discussions about our current society must wrestle with neoliberalism and its impacts: from the existence of billionaires to the defunding of public services, from deregulations of capital to restrictions for migrants, neoliberalism’s consequences are present everywhere and shape the economies of this century in the Americas. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas , by Candice Amich, makes an important contribution to multiple conversations and fields by centering utopic performance art, poetry, and installations from the Global South. In Precarious Forms , an accessible interdisciplinary book, Amich frames neoliberalism as the centering of entrepreneurial activities, which require free markets, free trade and strong property rights. To achieve this capitalist imperative, she critiques in her introduction that the state must not provide social services, assuming that human needs would be better fulfilled by private action. But Amich argues that what actually characterizes neoliberalism is the “accumulation by dispossession (…) without regard to social costs” (4). This dispossession of human needs prioritizes individualism over collectivity, sustained by a “perceptual regime that disciplines time and space” (4). To resist neoliberal regimes, she analyzes “corporeal and textual performances that not only despair for the world as it is, but also dream other visions of the world as it could be” (155). This book explores the utopic impulses of several artists that respond to and resist the action of neoliberalism, understanding the violence it inflicts across bodies and societies in the Americas and then imagining spaces outside or beyond that dispossession. The art pieces Amich discusses not only imagine different presents or futures but also aim to create and experience utopic possibilities in the here and now. They are united through the notion of the precarious , understood as “a response to neoliberalism’s flexible modes of accumulation, (…) neither certain nor secure in its attachment to form, privileging precarious life over capital.” (19) The book centers on the work of artists like Dionne Brand (Canada), Coco Fusco (Cuba-USA), Regina José Galindo (Guatemala), Ana Mendieta (Cuba), Cecilia Vicuña (Chile), and Raúl Zurita (Chile), each one the focus of a chapter in which Amich presents their oeuvre . The book’s emphasis on Chile and Cuba is intentional since both are key sites for the deployment of neoliberalism: the first because of the coup d’etat of Augusto Pinochet and the development of a neoliberal constitution before the administrations of Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the USA; and the second because of the conflicts with the United States after the fall of the Soviet Union, as well as its internal crisis. By choosing central zones of neoliberal impact, Amich effectively achieves a hemispheric scope, connecting processes across the Americas. Tracing transnational connections enables the book to understand contemporary processes, including those that cross borders and generate exchanges between different countries and locations. (It is impossible to analyze phenomena without following these relations.) Thus, Amich succeeds in presenting a complex and comprehensive portrait of neoliberal action and its violences, as well as vivid case studies of creative resistance and collective imagining of new worlds that endow human life with dignity. From the Washington Consensus to the dictatorship of Pinochet, from the maquiladoras (factories in México owned by foreign corporations) along the US-México border to the Cuban exile, Precarious Forms follows the consequences of neoliberal policy and how it impacts citizens across the continent. One strength of this volume is that Amich does not only document violence. Whereas many approaches to neoliberal action can disempower those affected by it, by presenting people only as victims, Amich centers strategies of effective resistance and worldmaking by Latin American and Latine artists. Fusing the methods of Performance Studies and Latin/e American Studies, the book’s six central chapters analyze poetry, video, performance, and installations. This wide range offers the reader a broad, multifaceted understanding of the utopic potential and action of art. While each chapter offers insightful readings of systemic and lived contexts. Amich proposes that creative interventions can reveal what is hidden: for instance, readers learn how Dolores from 10 to 22 by Coco Fusco and Ricardo Dominguez exposes the violence in the maquiladoras . Utopic performance, she demonstrates, can turn individuals into a temporary community of people, operating together against the individualism of the times, as Comunidad by Regina José Galindo epitomizes. Art can restitute, or perform restitution of, ties with the land of a displaced, exiled body, as the Esculturas Rupestres of Ana Mendieta proposes. Or it can offer a voice to the dead in the words of Raúl Zurita, moving across his poems published in the book INRI . Amich’s multidisciplinary focus—and the wide scope of each artwork she examines—finds connections in diverse experiences and pieces. As the book develops, we grasp how economic, political, and social processes cannot be thought of without tracing transnational connections. Likewise, the book explores how these artists’ and thinkers’ “precarious visions” act in constant conversation with each other. Through these strategies, Amich presents art as a vehicle for transformation. Precarious Forms provides a relevant contribution to the analysis of contemporary creators in Latin/e America. It offers solid and rigorous approaches to analyzing artists working in different media across the continent while tracing transnational connections among them. Its interdisciplinarity strongly contributes to several fields, including American Studies, Spanish, Literature, Gender Studies, and Performance Studies. Its significance is also derived from how it deals with urgent and contemporary public issues and economic violence. The book effectively questions practices that frame art and scholarship in very limited ways, instead of developing expansive categories and cross-sectional lenses. Conceptually, Amich links the precarity of lives with the precarity of artistic forms: fertilizing the soil for the emergence of art pieces and collective practices that create utopias in the middle of dark times. Rooted in a truly hemispheric analysis, Precarious Forms: Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas should be read closely and discussed across fields and art forms as we make sense of the times in which we are living. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) SEBASTIÁN EDDOWES-VARGAS (he/they) is a Peruvian theater artist and scholar, author of "La Muerte Danza" (with Espalda de Bogo), "Nunca Estaremos en Broadway" (with Rodrigo Yllaric), "Fronteiras" (with Colectivo Âmbar) "Hasta Que Choque El Hueso" (with Mario Zanatta), "Debut" (with Caro Black Tam), "Una Historia de (Poli)Amor," "Can The Peruvian Speak?", among others. His academic and artistic work has been presented in Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Peru, UK and USA, receiving several awards. Currently, they are a DFA candidate at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, with the dissertation "Post-National Dramaturgies of the Américas, or, The Nation Fails", and a Lecturer at Boston 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 Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Isaiah Matthew Wooden Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 2 Visit Journal Homepage A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement Isaiah Matthew Wooden By Published on April 28, 2021 Download Article as PDF The 1978 documentary Black Theater: The Making of a Movement opens with a striking performance by the legendary artist-activist-duo Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee that reveals the stakes of the project and the revolutionary Black artistic movements it archives. [1] Viewers first encounter Dee’s radiant face and honey-toned voice. With her eyes fixed squarely on the camera, the esteemed actress launches into a poem whose opening line offers a powerful rebuke of the notion that Black art is in any way imitative or derivative. “Black poetry is not what Shakespeare begot,” Dee recites percussively. [2] Davis quickly responds to her initiating call, adding “Nor, is it one with Tennyson.” [3] For a minute or so thereafter, the pair trade lines that remind viewers that Black art “sets up its own condition” and, indeed, “defies tradition.” [4] The performance culminates with Davis and Dee inviting viewers to join them in celebrating all that is distinct and compelling about Black art. The scene offers an evocative overture to a film that, by casting a resplendent spotlight on some of the key figures and movements that collectively revolutionized Black art in the twentieth century, distinguishes itself as a major milestone in African American theatre and performance history. Produced and directed by Woodie King, Jr., the founder of the New Federal Theatre, Black Theater: The Making of a Movement has been screened countless times since its late-70s premiere, and the academic database and video publisher Alexander Street has made it available to stream through its website. [5] For those who study and teach African American dramatic literature and theatre history, the film remains an indispensable resource for the sheer number of Black theatrical luminaries it brings together to meditate on the vital importance of Black art in the ongoing struggle for Black liberation. As the promotional description that accompanies it asserts, the film “is a veritable video encyclopedia of the leading figures, institutions, and events of a movement that transformed the American stage.” [6] In addition to Davis and Dee, the documentary features, among other theatrical innovators, Amiri Baraka, Roscoe Lee Browne, Ed Bullins, Vinnette Carroll, Robert Hooks, James Earl Jones, Lloyd Richards, Ntozake Shange, Barbara Ann Teer, Glynn Turman, and Douglas Turner Ward commenting on the rich contributions of enterprises and initiatives such as the Black Theatre Alliance, the Group Theatre Workshop, the New Lafayette Theatre, the Negro Ensemble Company, and the Urban Arts School. The film offers viewers much more than an abundance of star power or a standard accounting of the organizations and institutions that helped shape the new theatre movements that the Civil Rights activism of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s engendered. It overflows with insights about the tremendous significance and influence of the arts—theatre, especially—in Black social, cultural, and political life. Revisiting the film in the wake of the growing calls to fundamentally upend and overhaul the systems and structures reinforcing racism, antiblackness, and white supremacy in the arts reveals just how deeply relevant and resonant many of the conversations it catalogs remain. Its subjects convey with profound clarity their visions for a Black theatre that is at once revolutionary, heterogenous, and deeply attuned to the experiences of Black people. In drawing attention to a few of its more potent threads and themes in what follows, I hope to situate the current demands for change within a longer history of struggle to rework the American theatre. I also aim to explore how heeding some of the vital lessons the documentary provides might further enrich and embolden efforts to imagine, plot, and build artistic practices, strategies, principles, and conditions that are both transformative and sustainable. The documentary launches with well-known figures including Dee, Davis, playwright Owen Dodson, and director Lloyd Richards paying homage to some of the artists who they credit with making their work in the theatre possible. They give particular praise to change agents like Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes, and Paul Robeson for breaking barriers and expanding possibilities for the Black theatrical imagination. Two key points emerge from these backward glances. The first is the idea that Black theatre has always been deeply connected to and rooted in community. Davis explains how Black artists in New York City responded to the bigotry and discrimination of commercial and mainstream theatres by bringing together people from their own mostly segregated neighborhoods to mount performances. In doing so, they extended a tradition that dates back to the early national period, as theatre historian Marvin McAllister outlines in his study on the “entertainments” of impresario William Brown. [7] However, as Richards observes, the little headway that Black artists did begin to make on and off Broadway in the 1940s and ’50s was quickly undermined by the racist and repressive forces of McCarthyism. Richards, reflecting on the widespread efforts to terrorize Black artists during the period, offers the second key point I want to underscore. Black theatre, he insists, is fundamentally a theatre of protest. “The theatre has been for Black people a way of protesting the circumstances within which we attempt to exist in this country,” Richards remarks. [8] An abundance of evidence in the corpus of African American dramatic literature bears out this declaration. As Daphne Brooks points out in her evocative reading of William Wells Brown’s The Escape, or a Leap for Freedom , the first play published by a Black person in the United States, African Americans have long mobilized the power of theatre and performance to forge both discursive and embodied insurgency. [9] Throughout the remainder of the documentary, King grants some of the Black arts leaders who helped heighten the fervor for a radical Black consciousness, aesthetic, and politic that intensified during the catalytic Black Power era an opportunity to elaborate on their motivations for pursuing new theatrical paradigms. The deep commitment so many of these artists had to centering experimentation in their work resounds across these conversations. Vinnette Carroll, who was both the first Black woman to stage a show on Broadway and to garner a Tony Award nomination for her direction, notes that she founded the Urban Arts Corps in 1967, in part, to create a space for Black artists to train and develop new material that might not otherwise receive nurturing or support. “It’s also a place where some writers and musicians can come and try out things and not be afraid to fail,” Carroll explains. [10] Barbara Ann Teer, who, along with actor-activist Robert Hooks co-founded the Group Theatre Workshop in 1962 and, in 1968, established the National Black Theatre in Harlem, expresses a similar sentiment. Teer recalls how she and her early collaborators at the National Black Theatre spent nearly two years collectively devising artistic processes and practices that at once “fitted the sensibilities of Black people” and demonstrated “the richness and greatness and power inherent in the form and feeling of Black life/style.” [11] To that end, they experimented with drums, rhythms, chants, and energy, all in an effort to create a theatre that was unequivocally and unapologetically Black. [12] Not every Black artist of the era committed to renouncing any and all things associated with the theatrical traditions of Europe. For example, the Group Theatre Workshop, which mounted an off-Broadway staging of Douglas Turner Ward’s Happy Ending in 1965, paved the way for the founding of the Negro Ensemble Company in 1967. While the Negro Ensemble Company would quickly fortify its reputation as a launching ground for Black artistry and talent (including a production of Errol Hill’s Man Better Man in the 1968-69 season), it did not shy away from engaging with white interlocutors and collaborators. The first work the company produced was Song of the Lusitanian Bogey by German playwright Peter Weiss, in fact. “When the decision about Song of the Lusitanian Bogey was announced I knew I would get flack,” Turner Ward recalls. [13] “But no matter. The fact, in this instance, was that authorship had no significance. The play was ‘authored’ by the real historical situation itself. Peter was merely a conduit. More significantly, the material was going to be authored by an all-Black creative team, giving it life,” he goes on to say. [14] The production proved an auspicious springboard for the company, establishing it as a formidable presence on the New York arts scene and a model that others might adopt and follow. Certainly, as James Earl Jones recollects in the documentary, many Black artists maintained profound ambivalence about what their social and artistic responsibility should be to the various movements brewing around them. Jones recalls that during the successful off-Broadway run of Jean Genet’s The Blacks , a fierce debate erupted amongst his fellow company members about what actions they should take to advance the struggle for rights, freedom, and justice. “Half of us thought it was our responsibility, our social and artistic responsibility, to go up to picket… [The] other half preferred to, as Roscoe Lee Browne would say, stick to our vocational guidance, stick to our work.” [15] While Jones notes that he sided with Browne, he also confesses that he found great value in the dissension, as it not only served to build a greater sense of ensemble amongst the company, but it also empowered each performer to clarify for themselves what form they wanted their activism to take. As the film shifts focus to the future of Black theatre in its final section, a more subtle line of conversation begins to emerge about the perils and politics of arts funding. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the drastic economic changes that occurred throughout the 1970s, the interviewees voice a palpable unease about money and resources. It surfaces in the appeal that Carroll makes for wealthy Black people to consider financially supporting the arts: “I’d like to see more Black producers doing all sorts of things in the theatre, and that Black people would invest in us because we certainly have a group of Black people now with the money to invest in the theatre,” she asserts. [16] In the wake of Nixon’s election to the U.S. presidency, many of the grant-giving institutions that had been instrumental in launching ventures like the Urban Arts Corps, the Negro Ensemble Company, and the New Lafayette Theatre (the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, among them) decided that it was too risky to continue to support Black cultural institutions and withdrew their financial backing. This left many of these organizations without the resources they needed to stay afloat. Bullins, who after a brief stint as the Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party became the playwright-in-residence at the New Lafayette Theatre, explains: When Nixon came in the late 60s…he so frightened the philanthropic community that they cut back on just about all Black arts activities…So, all that money just about disappeared. And, we were working with a company of fifteen actors and all the support personnel with quite a yearly budget. And so, we couldn’t operate on the level that we had been operating on.[17] The documentary’s various discussions about funding underline just how potentially detrimental an overreliance on the goodwill and philanthropy of foundations and corporations can be to building a truly sustainable theatre. This is an important caution to take note of, especially amid calls to celebrate the commitments that institutions like the Ford and Mellon Foundations have made in recent months to granting millions of dollars to Black arts and cultural organizations. [18] These foundations have proven time and again that they are undependable. And, although they might provide some relief in the short term, the inconsistency of their funding often produces deleterious effects for Black art that are much longer-lasting. While the film’s chronological structure might suggest a progressive, teleological narrative, Black Theater: The Making of a Movement closes by exploring many of the questions and ideas that remain unaddressed or unresolved for Black theatremakers. The conclusion of the film sends an urgent call to Black artists to continue to find ways to bring the artform to Black communities and to harness its power to embolden radical change. Each of the figures featured in the documentary played a significant role in expanding possibilities for what the American theatre could be. Revisiting the film reaffirms just how solid the foundations they laid remain. It also provides an occasion for contemporary scholars and students of Black theatre to contemplate further how to capitalize on some of the “new stirrings” that have emerged in efforts to reimagine and remake the theatre—and the world—anew. [19] References [1] Black Theater: The Making of a Movement , directed by Woodie King, Jr. (1978; San Francisco: California Newsreel), https://video.alexanderstreet.com/watch/black-theater-the-making-of-a-movement?source=suggestion . All subsequent references are to this version of the film. [2] Black Theater . [3] Black Theater . [4] Black Theater . [5] The New Federal Theatre notably celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2020. [6] See Black Theater . [7] See Marvin McAllister, White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Colour: William Brown’s African and American Theater (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). [8] Black Theater . [9] See Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). [10] Black Theater . [11] Black Theater . [12] La Donna L. Forsgren’s In Search of Our Warrior Mothers provides a wealth of evidence of some of the other ways this commitment to experimentation manifested for Teer and her Black Arts Movement contemporaries. See La Donna L. Forsgren, In Search of Our Warrior Mothers (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018). [13] Douglas Turner Ward, “Foreword,” in Classic Plays from the Negro Ensemble Company , ed. Paul Carter Harrison and Gus Edwards (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburg Press, 1995), xiii. [14] Ward, “Foreword.” [15] Black Theater . [16] Black Theater . [17] Black Theater . [18] See, for example, the announcements about the Ford Foundation’s “American Cultural Treasures” initiative and the Mellon Foundation’s sponsorship of “The Black Seed.” [19] See W. E. B. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” in Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present , ed. Angelyn Mitchell (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994). Footnotes About The Author(s) ISAIAH MATTHEW WOODEN is a director-dramaturg, critic, and assistant professor of Theater Arts at Brandeis University. A scholar of African American art, drama, and performance, he has contributed articles and essays to The Black Scholar , Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism , Modern Drama , PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art , Theatre Journal , and Theatre Topics, among other scholarly and popular publications. Wooden is the co-editor of Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration (Northwestern UP 2020) and is currently at work on a monograph that explores the interplay of race and time in post-civil rights Black expressive culture. Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf ISNN 2376-4236 Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to "Milestones in Black Theatre" Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration. Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

The New Black Fest will present four excerpts from new and provocative plays that interrogate issues around immigration and green card marriages, toxic patriarchy and climate change, truth and transparency as well as a new play inspired by the absentee black character Donald Muller from the play Doubt. The four excerpts will be followed by a conversation on the topic of resistance and survival through intimacy, community and knowledge-seeking. PRELUDE Festival 2023 READING + PANEL The New Black Fest Kemiyondo Coutinho, Dennis Allen II, Hayley Spivey, and Keith Josef Adkins Theater English 90 minutes (includes panel discussion) 3:00PM EST Thursday, October 12, 2023 Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All The New Black Fest will present four excerpts from new and provocative plays that interrogate issues around immigration and green card marriages, toxic patriarchy and climate change, truth and transparency as well as a new play inspired by the absentee black character Donald Muller from the play Doubt . The four excerpts will be followed by a conversation on the topic of resistance and survival through intimacy, community and knowledge-seeking. The post-reading panel features Kelley Giord, Kemiyondo Coutinho, Hayley Spivey , Dennis Allen II, and Keith Josef Adkins and is moderated by Robyne Walker Murphy. Content / Trigger Description: Language, Discussions of race, gender, sexuality Kemiyondo Coutinho (Playwright) is a multi-hyphenated writer, director and actor hailing from Uganda but who self identifies as an African nomad. Her theatrical debut, "Jabulile!", offered a heartfelt portrayal of Swazi women and transcended borders, captivating audiences worldwide in Swaziland, South Africa, Uganda, Canada, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Portland. Kemiyondo's poignant play, "Kawuna...you’re it," shed light on the lives of HIV-positive women in Uganda, earning recognition with a reading in New York by Hybrid Theater Works. It was further celebrated at the National Arts Festival in South Africa and headlined the 2015 Gates Foundation World AIDS Day Celebration. Notably, Kemiyondo is a recipient of Forbes Africa's esteemed 30 under 30 award, and remains grounded in her commitment to storytelling that bridges hard-hitting themes with witty comedic commentary, all aimed at making audiences feel seen. She is also the inaugural recipient of John Singleton's Filmmaker's Fellowship, Kevin Hart's Laugh Out Loud Filmmaking Fellowship, and the proud recipient of the Shadow & Act Rising Star Award. Furthermore, she has earned a place among OKAYAfrica's 100 Women of Africa To Watch. Currently, Kemiyondo contributes her creative talents as a writer and Co-executive producer on Season 3 of Starz's acclaimed series, "P-VALLEY". Dennis A. Allen II (Playwright/Director) is a multi-hyphenate in the world of theatre. As a playwright, his play The Mud is Thicker in Mississippi won the 35th annual Off Off Broadway Samuel French Festival. He is the recipient of Atlantic Theater Company’s inaugural Launch Commission, Clubbed Thumb’s Early-Career Writer’s Group, and National Black Theatre’s “I Am Soul” Playwright Residency. Allen has directed and developed new plays by NSangou Njikam, Aziza Barnes, Tanya Everett, a.k. payne, Craig "Mums" Grant and many more. He also served as the National Playwriting Program Vice Chair for the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival region 1. An adjunct professor at LaGuardia Community College, Montclair State University, The New School and is the Co-Program Director for the MFA Playwriting program at Brooklyn College. Dennis received his MFA from Brooklyn College's Playwriting program. Hayley Spivey (Playwright) is a Brooklyn based playwright, dramaturg and actor from Atlanta, Georgia. She received a B.F.A in Theatre Arts from Boston University. In Boston, Hayley worked as a Junior Dramaturg for Company One Theatre as well as freelancing at companies such as SpeakEasy Stage Company and Artists’ Theater of Boston. Currently, she is writing her own stories while working with other writers to foster excitement for their own development. Keith Josef Adkins (Playwright/Artistic Director) is a playwright, screenwriter and artistic director. His Great Migration play, The West End, had its world premiere at Cincinnati Playhouse and was a finalist for the 2022 Steinberg-ATCA New Play Award. Keith's other plays include The People Before the Park, Safe House, Pitbulls, the Last Saint on Sugar Hill, among others. He’s the recipient of the Helen Merrill Playwriting Award, Samuel French's Award for Impact and Activism in the Theater Community as well as National Black Theater's Teer Spirit Award. He is the artistic director of The New Black Fest, a 13-year-old theater organization committed to fostering insurgent voices from the African Diaspora. The New Black Fest was in residence at the Lark Play Development Center for six years and has commissioned three social justice anthologies, including Facing Our Truth and Hands Up -- both published by Samuel French/Concord Theatrical. Keith and The New Black Fest was also commissioned by the Apollo Theater to develop work for their new Victoria Theater. Some of his TV writing credits include P-Valley, Outer Banks, The Good Fight. He's also developed TV projects with JJ Abrams, Don Cheadle/Steven Soderbergh. website > thenewblackfest.org - IG> @newblackfestival - Kemiyondo Coutinho IG > @kemi_yondo - Dennis Allen IG > @daallen2 - Hayley Spivey IG > @hay_lyly Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

I DIGRESS, written and performed by Sauda Aziza Jackson, is a 4 episode, transmedia, performance memoir exploring the weight of inheritance and the recollection of memories and material things once lost to time. Jackson weaves together fifteen personal tales from her childhood with the media and memorabilia that defined her past. Episodes 2 and 3 will be showcased during the performance. By fusing theatrical performance, song, music, and projection design with archival materials, animation, filmmaking, and video art, TEAM I DIGRESS sifts through the weight and consequences of grief by taking us down a hilarious and heartfelt coming of age journey from a young girl in 1980s Chicago, through her adolescence and the death of her mother, to her own discovery of how absence, family narratives, and the legacy of history shape us—making us who we are and who we are not. ​ PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE I DIGRESS: The Intimate Insights of a Childhood Weirdo Sauda Aziza Jackson & April Sweeney Theater, Film, Multimedia, Performance Art English 60 minutes 3:00PM EST Thursday, October 12, 2023 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All I DIGRESS, written and performed by Sauda Aziza Jackson, is a 4 episode, transmedia, performance memoir exploring the weight of inheritance and the recollection of memories and material things once lost to time. Jackson weaves together fifteen personal tales from her childhood with the media and memorabilia that defined her past. Episodes 2 and 3 will be showcased during the performance. By fusing theatrical performance, song, music, and projection design with archival materials, animation, filmmaking, and video art, TEAM I DIGRESS sifts through the weight and consequences of grief by taking us down a hilarious and heartfelt coming of age journey from a young girl in 1980s Chicago, through her adolescence and the death of her mother, to her own discovery of how absence, family narratives, and the legacy of history shape us—making us who we are and who we are not. New York State Council of the Arts, New York City Women's Fund for Media, Music, and Theatre award by the City of New York Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment in association with the New York Foundation of the Arts, Arts at the Palace, and Colgate University Content / Trigger Description: Strong Language. Sauda Aziza Jackson (Writer & Performer) has performed in many theater productions during her twenty plus years in New York City. The Chicago native has had the opportunity to perform in Now is the Time with Little Lord, Iona Flies Away with Tanisha Christie, Expense of Spirit & Limitless Joy with International Wow (Josh Fox), Sponsored by Nobody’s The Arts & Behind the Bullseye and The Making of King Kong by Lisa Clair at Target Margin. This past May she had the opportunity to work with Lisa Clair again in her premier of Willas Authentic Self. Her autobiographical project I DIGRESS started as two stories and a song. It has screened at Hi-Arts Outdoor Film Festival, New York City Independent Theater and Film Festival, and Theater Revolution’s Glass Ceiling Breakers Film Festival winning laurels for best writer. April Sweeney (Director) is an actor, director of theater and film, and Professor of Theater at Colgate University. Her performance work includes collaborations with directors of distinct and diverse methods of performance making, moving between intimate immersive theater, (re)drawing and complicating “classical” heroines, plays in translation, hybrid performance works exploring the language of film and stage simultaneously, devised theater, and improvised film. She has performed in theaters and festivals in Argentina, Bolivia, Belgium, Colombia, Costa Rica, France, Hungary and in theaters across the U.S. As a director she has created intimate chamber works in NYC, an immersive play in Maine, a 4 episode transmedia performance memoir, staged readings for regional theater, large scale new works with college students, created theater with communities in Patagonia and the Bolivian selva, and curated theater engagement projects with Central New York audiences. She is co-translator and co-editor (with Brenda Werth) of the volume, Fauna and Other Plays by Romina Paula, forthcoming with Seagull Press in 2023. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment of the Arts, National Endowment of the Humanities, New York State Council for the Arts, and the NYC Women's Fund for Media, Music, and Theatre award by the City of New York Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment in association with the New York Foundation of the Arts. https://www.idigress.info ; http://aprilsweeney.com Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Jeffrey Ullom Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 26 1 Visit Journal Homepage Playwright as Publicity: Reexamining Jane Martin and the Legacy of the Humana Festival Jeffrey Ullom By Published on March 9, 2014 Download Article as PDF In May 2011, Marc Masterson departed Actors Theatre of Louisville for a similar position as the artistic director of South Coast Repertory Theater in San Diego. Reportedly, he initially offered to remain and assist with the search for a replacement, but his proposal was not accepted as the leadership of the theatre wished to proceed without [ . . . ] [scribd id=211700037 key=key-2mngwhiptfnekrms8lyg mode=scroll height=930 width=600] References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Between Blackface and Bondage: The Incompletely Forgotten Failure of The Underground Railroad's 1879 Midwestern Tour “One Live as Two, Two Live as One”: Bert Williams and the Uprooted Bamboo Tree Playwright as Publicity: Reexamining Jane Martin and the Legacy of the Humana Festival Feminist Periodization as a Structural Component of Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles Waiting for Triumph: Alan Schneider and the American Response to Waiting for Godot Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Stanley Love Performance Group performs excerpts from Meow Love Werk, Hinny selected from choreographer Stanley Love’s vast body of work to honor his life at a memorial celebration in August 2023. “If you dance, you’re a dancer.” – Stanley Love PRELUDE Festival 2023 DANCE Excerpt from Meow Love Werk, Hinny from Love to Love You, Stanley Love: A Memorial Celebration Stanley Love Performance Group Dance English 40-45 minute performance 7:30PM EST Saturday, October 14, 2023 Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All Stanley Love Performance Group performs excerpts from Meow Love Werk, Hinny selected from choreographer Stanley Love’s vast body of work to honor his life at a memorial celebration in August 2023. “If you dance, you’re a dancer.” – Stanley Love The PRELUDE '23 presentation of the Stanley Love Performance Group has been made possible by the generous support of Claire Montgomery, James MacGregor and LOCATION ONE, Linda Wells and the Martha Graham Dance Company. Content / Trigger Description: Language warning for brief use of curse word (shit) Stanley Love Performance Group (SLPG) was created in 1992 with the inaugural performance at DTW’s Fresh Tracks with Adam and Steve and the company’s first full evening in 1993 with Hello Cruel World. SLPG now works, since Love’s death in 2019, in partnership with The Stanley Love Legacy which exists to safeguard, care for and share the artistic works of choreographer Stanley Love. Instagram: @lovestanleylove Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Jackie Rosenfeld and Cade M.Sikora 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 Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Jackie Rosenfeld and Cade M.Sikora By Published on April 28, 2023 Download Article as PDF There is a tremendous amount of grief in the post-COVID world of post-secondary educational theatre regarding missed opportunities and lost time. When we, Professors Jackie Rosenfeld (Playwriting and Pedagogy) and Cade M. Sikora (Scenic Design and Technical Direction), joined the Department of Theatre at Texas AM University-Commerce in the Fall of 2021 we developed a new way for our students to engage in theatre that is epic, flexible, and opens up untold potential to connect to the outside world apart from their scheduled season of shows and regular coursework. The opportunity: workshopping and producing a radio play of Flying in the Face of God [i], a new work and docu-dramatization set aboard the famous Titanic , seemingly ending with the destruction of the ship in real-time. The outcomes: connection to each other, excitement about the production of new works, the creation of an entire extracurricular program called the New Play Development Initiative, and enhancement to the curriculums in our department. *** Sikora: This project did not start as a vehicle for any academic activity or as a radio play. Prior to coming to Texas, I was developing a docu-dramatization of the Titanic disaster as part of my own personal portfolio. The story I wanted to tell is huge. The historical event and the consequences thereof are of interest to me, and I knew early on that I was responding to the historic event as well as pop culture’s depictions of the event. To that end, please note two things about the work: The characters depicted are historical figures. The events depicted are taken from biographic information, survivors’ accounts, implied in survivors’ accounts, or at the very least are possible given the information available. This research-oriented approach to the writing geared the project to an academic environment before that was ever a consideration. Rosenfeld: Before the Fall Semester officially began, Sikora asked if I would be willing to read a draft of a play he was working on; I was. Upon finishing the immense script and sharing my initial response, I asked if I could serve as the dramaturg for this new work. We spent the semester trading drafts and feedback. Sikora was initially resistant to hearing a read-through until he finished the second draft. One afternoon in the last week of the semester, however, I was involved in a meeting with a number of students including two we thought would be particularly strong in some of the roles. When Sikora agreed, I very quickly asked the young men if they were available to read a couple of pages from a new script. Within twenty minutes, a short scene from Flying in the Face of God was read aloud for the first time. Sikora: After this first two-page read-through, I became interested in hearing more of the script. But it was huge and incomplete. I broke the play down into chunks. Instead of the mammoth text, the read-through script was whittled down to tell one of its many plotlines. This allowed us to get through a complete story in a reasonable amount of time, gave the performers an opportunity to see the trajectory of the piece, and allowed me as the playwright an opportunity to really focus on one plot at a time. Rosenfeld: The casting of the play needed to be as simple as possible. There are over 183 speaking roles in the play with many of them being white men middle-aged and older from the United States and abroad. We cast without regard to race, age, or ethnicity, allowing us to engage with a broader range of students. While we assured all the students that accents would not be required, many took it upon themselves to learn the basics of various European dialects. To allow students the opportunity to perform and the playwright to listen, we decided I would read the stage directions. Sikora: At the read-through, students were provided with a very brief biography of the characters they were reading for, and we jumped into the text. They understood that they were not reading the full text but were reading one full story from within the text. In the talkback, the students expressed interest in knowing more. Reading 1/12 of the play and only seeing glimpses of the other 11/12 had whetted their appetites. Rosenfeld: We also created a response form with specific questions for the readers to reflect on in the days after the reading. This was useful for Sikora; it was even more useful for the students. This opportunity to give feedback allowed them to think critically about a work in progress and to begin to understand the value of both their ideas and their participation. Sikora: To continue this process, I had to keep writing the play. By the end of the semester, we held six read-throughs. On any given night, we read one to three new plotlines, each time understanding the story better than the time before. Rosenfeld: Throughout the readings I continued to do dramaturgical work. Relaying all this information to the students as we progressed made it all the more exciting. Both Sikora and I were able to use all our research as teaching opportunities about primary resources and secondary resources. Sikora: There was interest from the student participants in creating some form of production. The solution we landed on was to produce a recording of a staged reading. By using all the tools we had amassed and skills we had honed over the semester of small readings, we could create one reading of the full text. This initiative spoke to a number of wants and needs which were floating around our department: our collective desire to hear what this script sounded like end-to-end, an opportunity to prototype Rosenfeld’s idea for a new play development program, and to provide a sense of closure to what had become a much bigger project than was originally imagined. To prepare for this reading, I combed the script to get a sense of just which stage directions needed to be recorded for a radio play adaptation to be successful. Owing to the precise nature of the storytelling and the huge importance on historicity, certain sections of the original text include absolute paragraphs of stage directions. As the playwright, and knowing that I would be doing the post-production, I attempted to vet out some of these fuller sections. This was also when casting choices were made. Essentially, we expanded on the model we used for the initial read-throughs: Each actor was cast in a small number of lead roles, a comparable number of supporting roles from other plotlines within the story, and any number of tertiary roles with the intention of providing our students with varieties of characters which they could perform and to minimize situations where actors spoke to themselves as different characters. There are still scenes where an actor as a lead character speaks to or around themselves as a secondary or tertiary character, but they were carefully chosen in such a way that the audience would not get confused. Over Labor Day Weekend, 2022, we recorded a final read-through of the text. As the concept of time plays an important role in the script, so too did it play for us as we had no more than three workdays to wade through over 500-pages of text. The first day was largely spent disseminating information about the event, characters, and text so that everyone was on the same page with the production. Days two and three were devoted to reading and recording. We do not have a sound studio capable of recording over a dozen people individually and that was far beyond our intended scope, anyway. We set up an impromptu recording studio on one of our performance spaces, complete with enough microphones that we could pair cast members off to share, a digital soundboard to record, and all of the masking flown in to create as much soundproofing as we could muster. Throughout the recording itself, I took notes in my script of lines or sections which I knew would need to be re-recorded, notes on timing, notes from the sound board operator, and notes on and anything else which I thought would help me in the editing process later. By the numbers, the weekend included: thirteen student performers reading for over 180 characters; one Student Sound Technician; one Prologue, twenty-four scenes, and one Epilogue, spread over 523 pages of dialogue and action; and a 400-slide dramaturgical presentation. Rosenfeld: In addition to the dramaturgical presentation, we spent a bit of time on the first day discussing mic technique. Having spent some time in the audiobook industry, I was able to give basic instructions and tips on placement and pronunciation. These new skills led to four of these students now working as professional voice actors in a curriculum video series with a major university. It became obvious early in the process that recording stage directions as planned proved to be a logistical impossibility. We were already weary of running out of time and while the information was important to understanding the action for the audience it had the contrary effect of slowing down the pacing and energy for the actors. We made the decision to record the stage directions at a later date. Instead Sikora gave important details to the cast as needed to interpret the scenes. This was fortuitous to have the experience later of reading through the play using only the stage directions. It assisted Sikora in fine-tuning some areas as well as understanding his voice as a playwright—particularly toward the end when the stage directions alone had me in tears. As the dramaturg it confirmed for me that the stage directions play a vital role in this play in communicating not just the actions of the play but also the tone, mood, and subtext. Reading a script in this way is an exercise I will use going forward with all of my own plays as well as an exercise in playwriting courses and with new works I dramaturg. The entirety of the Epilogue needed to be recorded after the fact as well. As we neared the end of the play we were more quickly approaching the end of our recording schedule. Adding to the urgency of time was the heightened emotions of the piece which we knew could not be sacrificed for speed. In an effort to bring the piece to a temporary conclusion, as none of the students had experienced the piece fully from beginning to end, Sikora and I briskly and intently read-through to the end in their stead. While the students were disappointed this did not give the cohesion and satisfactory ending preferred with live theatre, it was an opportunity to learn that recorded works have the ability to be altered in post-production. Sikora: Before I could hit the ground on editing, I arranged pick-up recordings with each member of the cast. In these pick-up recordings we re-recorded any lines which were flubbed, any rewrites which occurred after the Labor Day Weekend session, and the Epilogue. Students were brought in separately to complete these recordings in the same makeshift studio setting. To achieve this, I went through my notated copy of the script, compiled an individual document for each cast member listing their pick-up lines in chronological order, and worked with them one line at a time. Many of the actors were able to pick up right where they left off because by this point they were so familiar with the text. Occasionally, and particularly for our newer castmates who were reading the Epilogue for the first time, additional context was required and as Playwright/Director I was able to provide that while we recorded. I also recorded Rosenfeld reading stage directions in much the same way. The post-production process took place in two waves: First, an audio trailer was mixed to demonstrate the quality of work we are able to achieve outside the normal production setting. Second, I set about editing the hours of audio into a ten-and-a-half-hour final product. This mostly involved trimming the recorded dialogue and mixing it with sound effects and diegetic music in Adobe Audition. Everything from lilting period music recorded by a castmate’s father to the gentle patter of the engines to the ominous ticking of the Clock which counts down the Titanic ’s final seconds was mixed into the hours of dialogue. In addition to serving the needs of this project, this part of the process also helped me develop our theatrical sound design and engineering program as I used samples of the recording and mix to illustrate concepts to students in our Sound Design class. Rosenfeld: We released the production in consumable installments over the first week of January 2023. Students were able to share the radio play with their friends and families; the response was delightful. Our fears about the production’s length were put to rest when one listener compared the experience to listening to a limited series podcast and others compared it to an audiobook. The radio play format has a new, eager audience. We held a listening party in the theatre at the end of the month so the students could hear it together. Though not all were able to attend, it was incredibly satisfying as an educator to watch them experience the result of a yearlong endeavor. An unexpected advantage to recording this as a radio play with contemporary technology is that we are able to easily insert changes into the production. This has allowed Sikora not only to record corrections to misspoken lines but to record re-writes as well. This is something we can offer playwrights in the future through NPDI’s workshop series. It also allows us to record additional actors as interest and time allows. As noted, Flying in the Face of God has well over a hundred speaking characters and with the small size of our department that means there are a handful of occasions when an actor plays two different characters within a single scene or conversation. As new students join our program, we are able to insert new voices and create a new dynamic within the same piece without having to record the entire play with the full company. On a larger scale, this project served as a building block and test run of a program designed to prepare our students to work on new plays after they graduate. When Sikora and I decided to turn this workshop reading series into a recorded product, I took the idea to the department head as a trial run of this kind of project using in-house faculty. To that end, the ability to invite working playwrights from the Dallas Metroplex to workshop new plays with our students and provide a recording for both the playwrights and our archive is now possible and the New Play Development Initiative became an official part of the AM-Commerce Department of Theatre. *** Having started this work in 2014, it was never Sikora’s intention that Flying in the Face of God might connect to the current Pandemic, but the confluence of events that led to the production of the works at TAMUC is remarkable on that score. Sikora’s desire to tell a massive story set during the Titanic disaster fed a hunger the students had to participate in telling a theatrical story of that scale. That it is a play about real people who endured a real cataclysm made it relatable to a group of persons living through another great cataclysm. Student Kaden James noted: I felt that the characters were truly living in a once-in-a-lifetime historical event, and with that relation to our everyday life being changed due to the pandemic, I felt that my relation to the characters was on a much more human level, in knowing that they only did what they could do. There was no higher expectation or complaint to what they had done, all for the fact that they were humans in an unknown situation. . . I more related to the direness of their situation than I did to the bleakness of my own. Another student, Kiley Towne, added, “Although they were suffering and scared, the characters always let their hope drive their actions, which was a wonderful lesson for me. We can always hope for a better tomorrow.” The Pandemic stalled our collaborative and individual progress in many ways. So often it seems like we were robbed of the time and opportunities we feel we should have had. While producing Flying in the Face of God , participants came to identify with historic characters whose time also appeared to be running out. They were also able to identify and create with each other in a new, unexpected way. The excitement around this project helped spur the AM-Commerce Department of Theatre’s New Play Development Initiative. This program now includes an annual recorded workshop series, a 24 Hour Theatre Project, and a group of students including playwrights, actors, designers, and technicians who meet weekly to focus on developing new plays. [i] The recording of Flying in the Face of God, including its trailer, is available for a limited time at: https://on.soundcloud.com/VDTRM QR code to Flying in the Face of God References Footnotes About The Author(s) JACKIE ROSENFELD is the Assistant Professor of Playwriting and Theatre Pedagogy at Texas AM Commerce. Her play keepingabreast produced by Blunder Woman Productions is available on Audible. Audible to keepingabreast CADE M. SIKORA is the Assistant Professor of Scenic Design and Technical Direction at Texas AM University-Commerce. Cade Sikora's portfolio 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.

Jasmeene Francois Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Jasmeene Francois By Published on April 8, 2021 Download Article as PDF The Theatre of August Wilson . Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224 . In The Theatre of August Wilson , Alan Nadel critically analyzes the dramatic texts of August Wilson’s cycle of ten plays about African American life in the 20th century in relation to the concept of property rights and the law. In this first comprehensive companion to Wilson’s full cycle, Nadel continues his sustained scholarship and editorial contributions demonstrated in May All Your Fences Have Gates: Essays on the Drama of August Wilson (1994) and August Wilson: Completing the Twentieth Century Cycle (2010). The chapters in his latest study ground Nadel’s argument that “America has always suffered from a profound confusion of human rights and property rights” (2). Beyond presenting an accessible, nuanced study of Wilson’s drama, this volume serves to “underscore… the dimensions of privilege that have transparently enveloped America during what has been called the ‘The American Century’” (2). Nadel argues that throughout American history, law has been an instrument of privilege rather than justice and that the injustices suffered led African Americans to create artistic sites of innovation such as the blues—and Wilson’s theatre. The blues, Nadel claims, provided Wilson an “entry to this history” and serves a “psychic tableau of disrupted dreams and displaced passions…” (2). Nadel begins his valuable analysis with a brief biography of August Wilson (1945-2005), illuminating aspects of Wilson’s life as key to his multifaceted drama. Chapter one, “Becoming August Wilson,” highlights Wilson’s childhood as Fredrick Kittel and his transformation to working playwright; here, Nadel weaves in Wilson’s own words from personal interviews. Interestingly, he focuses on the playwright’s relationships with his parents, his Pittsburgh neighborhood, and his education, connecting these relationships with Wilson’s early career as a writer. Especially notable to Wilson’s artistry is his introduction to and love for the blues. The second part of the biography focuses on Wilson’s career in Minneapolis, his work at the O’Neill Theater Center (with Lloyd Richards) and then on Broadway. In chapter two, “History and/as Performance: The Drama of African American History,” Nadel argues that history is performative and that “History” creates rather than “describes events.” The production of narratives gets deemed factual through the method of performing them. Writing without jargon, he uses the example of a witness to an accident to explain his argument: the witness’s viewpoint is told and recorded and thus becomes part of the historical record. He connects this argument with Wilson’s work with characters such as Troy from Fences who “articulates his own version of history” in Nadel’s reading (19). In a sense, Wilson’s work “engages with history” through characters and by dramatizing the blues (19). The chapters are structured thematically using one or two plays as case study. Chapters three through nine each open with a different play’s production history and plot summary before developing analysis. This structure orients readers who may be curious about the development of specific plays in Wilson’s cycle, as well as those seeking to contextualize the plots. Chapter Three, for example, examines how history and elements of the blues are captured through dramatic structure and characters, using Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom . This chapter in particular considers the entirety of the cycle and its relationship to music. In thinking about the blues, Nadel sees the ten plays as “ten cuts on an album surveying the twentieth century African American blues” (38). Shifting back to Ma Rainy , set in the 1920s, Nadel argues that the play provides an introduction to American history and a decade when blues were central to Black life. Nadel emphasizes that Wilson’s work could be read as musical compositions and orchestrations: thus, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom becomes a “paradigmatic play in Wilson’s canon” (42). Chapter 4 provides a critical analysis of law and property in Gem of the Ocean and Jitney . The chapter considers how Gem of the Ocean , set in the 1910s, begins the Wilson cycle and introduces how capitalism creates the world of Wilson’s plays. Connecting it to Jitney , Wilson’s first piece written for the cycle (set in the 1970s in a black-owned unlicensed taxi service), Nadel examines how characters navigate in that very system where black communities are disenfranchised. Chapter Five examines property in Fences , set in the 1950s, and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone , set in 1911. Nadel focuses on the fence as the “idea of property” (68). He argues that the “act of naming” in Fences enacts “fence building”, connecting with the idea of property within the United States (68). Later chapters continue to consider property and the law as they provide critical companions to specific Wilson plays, including: Two Trains Running , Seven Guitars , King Hedley II and Radio Golf . This compelling volume also includes contributions from scholars Donald E. Pease and Harry Elam Jr. who further critical analysis of Seven Guitars and King Hedley II . An Americanist, Pease’s chapter extends focus on the significance of the blues, giving a brief historical context of the genre, as well as interview material on Wilson’s approach to music. While Nadel examines the dramatic texts, Elam Jr’s chapter considers performance of these texts as theatre. Elam’s chapter analyzes director Bartlett Sher’s production of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone in its 2009 revival on Broadway and Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s staging of Jitney for Broadway premiere in 2017. Elam’s chapter aims to situate these signal performances within the cultural and political context of their times of production, decades after Wilson wrote the plays. These valuable and insightful additions deepen our understanding of Wilson’s contributions to theatre and American history. In The Theatre of August Wilson , Nadel masterfully weaves theory and history with a thorough analysis of Wilson’s dramatic texts. Fittingly, he provides ample analysis of the blues as a storytelling device while the book’s unique lens considers the plays in relation to how law and property are portrayed. The monograph is useful for scholars from varying disciplines and theater practitioners seeking critical analysis of August Wilson’s cycle plays. Beyond connecting plays across the cycle, Nadel also gives specific evidence of how the plays speak to law and property rights, slavery and the forces of capitalism in America, and the incorporation of the blues by Wilson to illuminate the African American experience and creativity through the 20th century. References Footnotes About The Author(s) JASMEENE FRANCOIS Graduate Center, CUNY Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to "Milestones in Black Theatre" Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration. Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

DANCERS 4 PALESTINE + THEATER WORKERS FOR A CEASEFIRE presents Building Cultural Power through Organizing at the PRELUDE 2024 Festival at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center CUNY. PRELUDE Festival 2024 Building Cultural Power through Organizing DANCERS 4 PALESTINE + THEATER WORKERS FOR A CEASEFIRE 3-3:50 pm Thursday, October 17, 2024 Elebash Recital Hall RSVP Organizers from two Palestine solidarity formations in the arts will dialogue about the obstacles and opportunities related to organizing within the arts, specifically as it relates to the current struggle for building solidarity for Palestine today. Topics of discussion will include strategies and tactics, building cultural power, an overview of actions, and provocations for others to develop or join organizing efforts from wherever they are. This event will be livestreamed via Howlround Theatre Commons . Building Cultural Power through Organizing is presented in partnership with ASAP/15: Not a Luxury 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). Theater Workers for a Ceasefire exists to organize U.S.-based theater workers in solidarity with the people of Palestine. We aim to use our bodies and talents in pursuit of a comprehensive ceasefire, which we understand is merely the first step among many in realizing a Free Palestine. Dancers for Palestine (D4P) is an autonomous group of dance workers who organize in solidarity with the global movement for Palestinian liberation. Formed during Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza beginning in 2023, D4P seeks to both cohere and create a dance community which is vocal and active in its support of the Palestinian people. D4P is a local and international endeavor with a core organizing group in NYC and an ever expanding network of dancers and organizers working toward a dance field free from complicity in genocide, imperialism, white supremacy, and all systems of oppression. D4P’s work has included protest and direct action, political education events, art-based fundraising, and campaigns in alignment with the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) and against repressive anti-boycott policies. D4P works alongside with other arts and culture-based groups organizing for Palestine, including Artists Against Apartheid, Theatre Workers for a Ceasefire, and Writers Against the War on Gaza, and aligns strongly with labor organizing movements in the arts. Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2024 See What's on