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Meredith Conti Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 1 Visit Journal Homepage Community Circles and Love Triangles: Gun Violence and Belonging in Oklahoma! and West Side Story Meredith Conti By Published on November 26, 2023 Download Article as PDF As the national tour of Daniel Fish’s critically acclaimed Oklahoma! crisscrossed the United States in 2022, company members found themselves in unfamiliar territory. Instead of the stunned silences and standing ovations that typified the production’s reception at Broadway’s Circle in the Square Theatre, the national tour’s audiences offered an unexpectedly prickly bouquet of responses, including walkouts, boos, taunts, “thumbs down” gestures, refund demands, social media rants, and in one case, “vomiting in the balcony.” ( [1] ) Of course, Oklahoma! had its share of detractors since the production’s pre-Broadway days at St. Ann’s Warehouse, just as the national tour’s hostile reception was neither comprehensive or invariable; still, in cities across the country, the revival inspired tonally different audience responses to its New York City run. In a 2023 HowlRound article, Jud Fry actor Christopher Barrow suggests some likely triggers in Fish’s Oklahoma! for the tour’s audiences, including its aesthetic boldness, its identity-conscious casting, and its refusal to treat its source material as canonical, precious, and unchanging. ( [2] ) (It is worth noting, too, that the production’s original deep thrust staging was flattened to fit the US’s network of proscenium theatres). While I, like many non-coastal Americans, bristle at generalized depictions of our theatregoers as less open-minded or equipped to handle experimental or challenging performances, I do suspect that Bannow missed a potential trigger for heartland audiences: the revival takes direct aim at the nation’s ever-hungry gun culture and those who continually nourish it through word and action. ( [3] ) A buoyant, nostalgic, and unproblematically patriotic musical Fish’s Oklahoma! is not. But was Oklahoma! ever? The theatre of post-Newtown America (or post-UVA, post-Pulse Nightclub, post-Las Vegas, post-Tops Market….) has yet to fully reckon with a discomfiting, perhaps inconvenient reality: the industry and its artists have long been active, direct participants in the country’s gun culture. Indeed, many of the theatre’s cumulative products, from anti-gun docudramas and Annie Get Your Gun revivals to vaudevillian William Tell tricks and Wild West Show battle reenactments, are not just embodied responses to gun culture, they are gun culture. While the term itself has become something of a partisan battleground, “gun culture” is an omnipresent, self-reinforcing system of beliefs, values, and feelings about firearms and their usage, as well as the behavioral actions and socioeconomic, cultural, and political transactions that inspire or sustain them. Gun cultures exist anywhere guns circulate, and therefore “gun culture” as a term lacks specificity until contextualized by the society in which it functions. In what follows, I treat the phrase “US-American gun culture” as neither neutral nor strictly pejorative or celebratory, though I favor Pamela Haag’s assertion that gun companies have long exerted a behemothic and tactical influence on how Americans regard guns. ( [4] ) Despite the relative youth of the nation’s gun culture, it is a maddeningly complex, enduring, and variform organism. It whispers in myths; it shouts at the gun range. It operates simultaneously on the personal and institutional levels and engages manifold publics. It is animated by patrolling border militias and simulated gunfights at the OK Corral, and it is embodied by gun control activists and the twelve-year-old girl cradling her first shotgun in the glow of the Christmas tree. It meticulously sutures guns to American identity, and American life to guns. And whether or not we like it, the theatre regularly supplies the thread. Onstage gunplay not only disturbs audiences by surrogating actual gun violence or reenacting trauma, however; it also delights, astounds, amuses, and disarms. Nowhere is this capacious narrative and affective flexibility more apparent than in the American musical canon, where firearms serve a startling variety of functions while sliding easily along spectrums of genre, style, and tone. They are the go-to props of musicals set or staged in wartime, symbolic of hostile environments, courageous heroes, and desperate aggressors. They are the accoutrement of comedy and the drivers of tragedy. And, of course, they persist as ambivalent, malleable, and unpredictable indexers of political schisms, social inequities, and the empire-building violence required by Western patriarchy, colonization, and capitalism. As a vehicle for propelling questions of US-American gun culture(s) into the popular consciousness, the musical is a uniquely equipped performance form. Mounted to the notes of soaring harmonies, transported on the limbs of undulating, often virtuosic bodies, or underscored by elaborate landscapes and soundscapes, gun narratives intensify, stretch, transmute, and become unsettled in the musical medium. Despite their thematic and aesthetic heterogeneity, however, American gun musicals tend to press guns into service as potent indicators of belonging or marginality—often by distinguishing natural or paradigmatic Americanness through authoritative gun use or by harnessing guns as tools that induct characters into or expulse them from meaningful relationships, identity groups, or communities. ( [5] ) Indeed, with few exceptions, a gun musical’s firearms help compose, fortify, alter, and/or destroy human connections, be they romantic couples, love triangles, family units, friend circles, or communities organized by place, politics, religion, race, and other social or material conditions. To trace the guns in Hamilton (2015), for example, is to see guns violently regulate American identity/ies. ( [6] ) The mainspring of 2000’s The Wild Party ’s climactic gunfire, to cite another, is a love triangle that materializes and dematerializes in a single evening. And while The Wild Party is fictional and Hamilton fictional ized , intimate partner and intra/inter-community gun violence in the US is real, persistent, and documented. According to the John Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, over half of all intimate partner homicides in the US are committed with firearms, and “a woman is five times more likely to be murdered when her abuser has access to a gun.” ( [7] ) In addition, the Deputy Police Commissioner of Buffalo, New York argued in 2021 that an “overwhelming number of shootings and murders in Buffalo stem from revenge, retaliation and escalating beefs,” many of them now fueled by social media. ( [8] ) American gun violence carves up communities along and across categories of identity and culture: Black Americans are ten times more likely to die by gun homicide than white Americans;( [9] ) 4.5 million US women alive today report being threatened with a gun;( [10] ) firearms were used in 73% of trans American homicides between 2017 and 2021;( [11] ) current or former members of the US military make up a disproportionately high number of gun suicides;( [12] ) and “gun deaths recently surpassed car accidents as the leading cause of death for American children,” making the US an “extreme outlier” in gun fatalities in minors. ( [13] ) Still the country’s gun culture continues to thrive, buoyed by a formidable supply of ideologies, narratives, factoids, slogans, and figureheads that operate both within and far beyond gun-positive spaces. Germane to this essay is the recurring deployment of gun industry propaganda that reinforces an insider/outsider binary of American life. This includes mythic depictions of gun ownership that imply gun-handling is an endower of true, unassailable Americanness, and that personal firearms enable US-Americans to safeguard their loved ones and communities from external threats (despite data that concludes that guns in homes increase the risk of gun injury and death). ( [14] ) In this essay, I analyze how guns and the people who carry them shape and reshape two of the American musical’s classic human groupings: the community circle and the love triangle. I engage in close readings of two Golden Age musicals, Oklahoma! (1943) and West Side Story (1957), as well as their recent, gun-heavy Broadway revivals, in order to illuminate how firearms arbitrate or exacerbate race- and class-based conflicts within the depicted communities and “solve” the musicals’ imbalanced love triangles¾either facilitating a community-sustaining union or preventing a community-conjoining union from occurring. Indeed, in assessing these musicals and their twenty-first-century revivals as gun musicals, distinctive patterns in the gendering, racializing, and classing of American guns and gun violence become evident. These patterns, not surprisingly, are directly tethered to and expressive of the gun cultures and the wider sociopolitical landscapes in which the productions were created. As I argue, the original musicals reified conventional notions of the appropriate US-American gun handler as the white, Christian, cishet man, presenting their gun possessions as uncomplicated, necessary, and intuitive within the plays’ white supremacist patriarchies. The revivals, however, attempt to adapt the musicals’ guns to the country’s hyper-violent present, both by amplifying the gun’s role in catalyzing domestic and community violence and inculcating more participants into gun culture systems, including through the increased representation of skillful women, Black, and Latine gun handlers. In manifesting this provocative transferring of power, the revivals variously challenge and fortify the mythic triangulation of firearms, white masculinity, and Americanness. Shotgun Weddings and Handgun Honeymoons: The Guns of Oklahoma! (1943) and West Side Story (1957) Oklahoma! premiered on Broadway two years before World War II’s Allies and Axis powers laid down their arms. West Side Story ’s Broadway opening occurred one day after the Little Rock Nine, surrounded by heavily armed National Guardsmen, integrated Arkansas’s Central High School. While mapping both musicals onto a timeline of US gun events is a useful task, it is more meaningful to determine how Golden Age gun musicals reflected and upheld prevailing firearm discourses and representations. Following a brief primer on the material and metaphorical contours of midcentury America’s gun culture, I will assess Oklahoma! and West Side Story ’s guns—and, more importantly, gun handlers—as chief arbitrators of belonging or marginality within the musicals’ imagined communities. By the 1940s and 50s, US-American gun culture bore only a partial resemblance to its nineteenth-century predecessor(s). As homegrown demand for firearms dried up following the American Civil War, the US gun industry attempted to stem the tide by pursuing foreign military contracts, especially in Europe, and by popularizing civilian gun ownership and use in North America. Late-1800s ads from Winchester, Ithaca Gun Company, and other manufacturers increasingly appealed to modern women and family men, recommending shooting sports—hunting, target shooting, and trapshooting—as healthful, safe, character building, suitable for women and children, and implicitly American (despite the sports’ much longer history in Europe). ( [15] ) Meanwhile, the newly founded National Rifle Association (NRA) promoted the creation of rifle clubs, training courses, and competitive shooting matches with an eye toward advancing marksmanship in the general public and, by extension, deepening the country’s reserve of skilled shooters. ( [16] ) In the twentieth century’s early decades, increasing numbers of white middle-class women took up shooting sports, while gun manufacturers and conservative commentators intensified their use of fear-based rhetoric to present personal gun ownership as the effective defense against home invasions and violent assaults. The latter exploited white Americans’ anxieties around race, immigration, and the specter of “urban crime” and reified whiteness as a prerequisite for proper gun ownership in the United States. Such rhetoric persisted through the mid-twentieth century as the civil rights movement re-enlivened debates about which Americans had (or should have) uncontestable gun rights. Some civil rights leaders, for example, proclaimed the right to bear arms as essential both to protecting Black communities from violent white mobs and to fully enfranchising African Americans as US citizens. As historian Nicholas Johnson notes, Rosa Parks, T.R.M. Howard, Daisy Bates, and other Black activists whose families were terrorized by firebombs and burning crosses “embraced private [armed] self-defense and political nonviolence without any sense of contradiction.” ( [17] ) As a weary but victorious America emerged from two World Wars, flush with good-guys-with-guns narratives, the gun industry endeavored to amend US history by inserting firearms at every page turn. According to Haag, midcentury ads “retroactively fetishized” guns and boasted “[c]asual assertions…that Americans had ‘always’ loved guns, or that they had a ‘timeless’ tradition of gun fluency, a ‘priceless tradition’ in firearms, or had ‘long known how to shoot,’ with ‘every boy’ trained as a marksman.” ( [18] ) Of especial importance in this historical re-envisioning was the mythologizing of the Wild West. Colt’s ads “rehabilitated the cowboy” into a “steely-eyed” and courageous icon of white American masculinity, while Winchester marketed its Model 1873 rifle as The Gun that Won the West. ( [19] ) Mythic depictions of the American West swept through 1940s and 50s popular culture like wildfire. Taking a page from the dime novels, frontier melodramas, and Wild West Shows of the nineteenth century, midcentury movies, magazines, and television series invited American audiences to visit an Old West of unparalleled danger, bravery, and beauty, with expert gun handling serving as the coin of the realm. ( [20] ) It was within this gun culture that Oklahoma! and West Side Story ’s original productions operated. In an essay illogically asserting that politics are “absent” in American theatre, political theorist and theatre writer Benjamin Barber concedes that “on second inspection” the dual love plots in Oklahoma! “emerge as emblems of a powerful social context”: No less than Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle , whose social context is a struggle between goatherds and vintners over the right to use a contested valley, Oklahoma! puts the question of whether the territory can unite as a state around a common civic faith and a common political identity, or will be allowed to fracture and disintegrate along the fissures opened up by the competition of its economic factions. ( [21] ) These adversarial populations—farmers and cowmen, settlers and nomads—coalesce (if only outwardly) as the Indian and Oklahoman territories become one state. ( [22] ) As Bruce Kirle explains, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! “historicizes the isolationist/ interventionist conflict that preceded and shadowed America’s participation in World War II” and argues for unity in the face of a common enemy: the spread of fascism. ( [23] ) Yet national belonging in Oklahoma! is determined not just politically or geographically, but also socioeconomically and racially, as Andrea Most and Warren Hoffman have ably illustrated. ( [24] ) Furthermore, the musical’s male characters employ violence (or the threat of violence) as a way of formalizing the community’s boundaries, with firearms often accelerating the admissions process or keeping outsiders at bay. Indeed, the firearm’s vital role in US settler colonialism is plainly wrought in the musical. Though the original libretto contains no staged or referenced gun deaths, it also notably contains no Indigenous characters, suggesting that the settlers’ rifles have already succeeded in ejecting Native communities from their lands (“Oklahoma” comes from the Chocktaw “okla humma,” meaning “Red People”) and denying their identities as US-Americans. ( [25] ) Because Rodgers and Hammerstein “erased [the] indigenous complexity” of the musical’s source material, Lynn Riggs’s 1930 play Green Grow the Lilacs , and whitewashed its frontier community, Oklahoma! ’s guns persist as the designated material and symbolic deliverers of Manifest Destiny. ( [26] ) In more recent productions—at DC’s Arena Stage (2010), the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (2018), and Broadway’s Circle in the Square (2019)—multiracial casts reconstitute Oklahoma! ’s typically homogeneous community, “unsettl[ing] preconceptions of the frontier as white,” as Donatella Galella argues. ( [27] ) However, in Oklahoma! ’s first Broadway run guns appeared predominantly in the hands of white men, though some scholars read farmhand Jud Fry’s sexual savagery as representative of a stereotyped class- and race-based Otherness that “cannot be whitened.” ( [28] ) (Curly’s description of Jud as “bullet-colored, growly man,” indicating, perhaps, a tanned, dirty laborer’s bronzy skin tone, nevertheless leaves open the possibility that Jud is not white). ( [29] ) The only woman to touch a gun is Aunt Eller, Oklahoma! ’s no-nonsense matriarch; in the spontaneous brawl between farmers and cowboys at the top of Act Two, Aunt Eller “ grabs a gun from some man’s holster and fires it, ” putting an abrupt halt to the fighting. She then points the gun at groups of men, coercing them to rejoin the singing. They do. Within Oklahoma! ’s strict gender binary, Aunt Eller is unique. “She is an uncommonly public woman who mediates between male and female culture,” notes musicologist Susan C. Cook, but “[h]er public power comes at a cost; widowed, she is a desexualized crone, who stands apart from the other women[.]” ( [30] ) Gun handling, then, is a mark of Aunt Eller’s singularity. If Oklahoma! ’s guns exclusively belong to white men, what do they signal about the men’s belonging within the musical’s real and aspirational American communities? Two scenes offer clues: cowboy Curly McClain and antisocial farmhand Jud Fry’s private meeting in Act One, and Act Two’s box social. In the first, Curly and Jud converge in Jud’s lodgings, the farm’s defunct smokehouse, where Curly goads Jud into imagining killing himself (the better to live on in the memories of his mourners). On the smokehouse’s walls, Rodgers and Hammerstein specify, hang the accoutrements of manual farm labor and images of nearly naked women. Below them sit limited furnishings: a “grimy” and unmade bed, a spittoon, and a table and chairs. ( [31] ) Within this hypermasculine space, a remote and decommissioned site of work that now hosts the community pariah, each of Jud and Curly’s gun acts—for they are acts in the theatrical sense—exteriorize the men’s identical objectives: to triumph over their competitor, win Laurey and her farmland, and through these conjoined possessions achieve a level of community integration and security that presently evades them both. The acts escalate in intensity as the scene progresses. Jud seizes his pistol as Curly approaches the smokehouse and begins to methodically clean it; following a spate of Curly’s insults, Jud “reflex[ively]” pulls its trigger and blasts a bullet into the ceiling; Curly demonstrates his shooting skill by firing a bullet through knothole in the smokehouse wall. Due to their solitude and emotional intimacy, Jud and Curly’s forced displays of heteronormative frontier masculinity reverberate with both violent and homoerotic potential. But rather than the smokehouse containing the men’s armed antagonism, the guns audibly broadcast it, drawing Aunt Eller, Ali Hakim, and several others to their spot. “’S all right!” Aunt Eller assures those who have gathered. “Nobody hurt, just a pair of fools swapping’ noises.” ( [32] ) The box social is a community-sanctioned pageant of territorial masculinity masquerading as a charity auction. Like the display behaviors of male peacocks and harbor seals, Oklahoma! ’s men flaunt their authority, capital, and sexual devotion, but unlike the female peacocks and harbor seals in the market for a mate, the eligible women whose lunch hampers (and selves) are up for auction lack the agency to choose or refuse bidders. “ Oklahoma! thus embodies what Erin Addison calls an ‘American secular ideology’ of individualism and freedom for men and romance/marriage for women,” offers Cook. ( [33] ) Within this frontier thunderdome of cishet male competition, guns are enlisted as valuable commodities and tools of intimidation. In negotiations as part of the box social’s transactional politics are Oklahoma!’ s two love triangles. Curly and Jud are in pursuit of Laurey, who understands she must choose a man to help manage the farm she has inherited. The flirtatious Ado Annie, meanwhile, is torn between sweet but featherbrained cowboy Will Parker and the “Persian peddler / Lothario” Ali Hakim, the latter of whom is an ethnoracial outsider “typically played broadly and theatrically—for laughs—via the conventions of vaudeville,” writes Kirle. ( [34] ) Given that Ali’s interest in Ado Annie is carnal rather than marital, Will and Ali’s battle over Ado Annie’s hamper is an asymmetrical affair. Its lopsidedness is also engendered by violence, as Ado Annie’s father Carnes forces Ali to participate at gunpoint, prodding the peddler in the back with the tip of his gun to ratchet up the bidding. Though Will loses the hamper to Ali, he “gets” Ado Annie by satisfying Carnes’s demand that his daughter’s husband-to-be be financially solvent. Later, Ali marries the universally irritating Gertie Cummings in a shotgun wedding, consequently abandoning his nomadic lifestyle and assimilating into the territory folks’ white Christian community, his amorous ways and his Otherness curbed by the promise of gun violence. In Oklahoma! , the fathers’ firearms orchestrate unions that are advantageous for the community’s survival but not necessarily for marital harmony. Sung by the musical’s bachelors with Ali singing lead, Act One’s “It’s a Scandal! It’s a Outrage!” lampoons the men’s “entrapment” by armed fathers and their supposedly eager daughters: MEN: It’s gotten’ so you cain’t have any fun! Every daughter has a father with a gun! It’s a scandal, it’s a outrage! How a gal gets a husband today!( [35] ) Winning Laurey’s hamper (and presumably her hand in marriage) also requires considerable capital. In an effort to best Jud—who eventually bids “all I got in the world,” two years of savings from farm work—Curly sells off the vital assets of a cowboy: first his saddle, then his horse, and finally his gun. As the coup de grâce of the men’s acrimonious bidding, Curly drawing his gun is read first as a physical threat, frightening the crowd and inspiring Jud to retreat. For Scott McMillin, Curly’s capacity with a gun appeals to Laurey because it keeps Jud’s violence in check: “The cowboy-hero handles a gun so well that even the hired hand has to worry about him—that is one of the hero’s desirable attributes.” ( [36] ) Even after his gun sells, Curly secures Laurey’s hamper, her hand, and newfound respectability as a chosen caretaker of colonized Oklahoman land. Of the three guns in Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents, and Stephen Sondheim’s West Side Story , the famed musical that transports Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to a hot and claustrophobic Manhattan neighborhood in the 1950s, two tellingly belong to law enforcement officials. Lieutenant Schrank and Officer Krupke are white supremacist authority figures who enforce an inequitable set of rules for rival street gangs, the Puerto Rican Sharks and the (traditionally) white ethnic Jets. The officers never draw their guns, at least according to the Broadway libretto. Schrank is a plainclothes cop whose weapon is presumably concealed by his suit jacket; Krupke’s sidearm, however, is always a visible part of his police uniform, indexing his simultaneous, conflated roles as neighborhood protector and aggressor. The third gun, and the only one that discharges within the course of the musical, is extracted from its apartment hiding place in Act Two, Scene One by Chino, a young Shark desperate to avenge the death of the gang’s leader, Bernardo. Chino unwraps the gun, which the stage directions specify has been stored in a cloth “the same color as BERNARDO’s shirt,” and jams it into his pocket before exiting, affiliating West Side Story ’s sole civilian firearm with two Puerto Rican immigrant men. ( [37] ) At the musical’s climax Chino finds his target, former Jet member Tony, and fatally shoots him as he runs into the arms of his lover Maria, Bernardo’s sister and Chino’s intended wife. As “CHINO stands very still, bewildered by the gun limp in his hand,” the lovers sing fragments of “Somewhere,” the musical’s utopic ballad of freedom and inclusion, before Tony succumbs to his gunshot wound. In the action that follows, Maria silently beckons for Chino’s gun and then turns it on Sharks and Jets alike, who at the report of the gunshot have amassed in a “ritual assembly” around Tony’s body. “How many bullets are left, Chino? Enough for you? And you? All of you? WE ALL KILLED HIM; and my brother and Riff. I, too. I CAN KILL NOW BECAUSE I HATE NOW. How many can I kill, Chino? How many – and still have one bullet left for me?” Unable to pull the trigger, Maria throws the gun away and collapses on the ground, sobbing. In the musical’s final moments, Tony’s body is carried away by Jet and Shark boys, a procession forms, and Maria follows in its wake, “lift[ing] her head proudly and triumphantly.” The neighborhood’s adults, including Schrank and Krupke, remain onstage, “bowed, alone, useless” as the curtain falls. ( [38] ) The importance of this gun, as a material node in which the musical’s themes of racialized violence, urban youth culture, and generational discord seem to converge, has largely gone unacknowledged in the existing literature, likely because the gun is introduced relatively late in the play, after Bernardo and Jet leader Riff die by knife-wounds in the gangs’ late-night rumble. However, even in the pre-van Hove world of West Side Story , a world that Brian Herrera describes as “characterized by the constant threat of incipient violence,” guns are conspicuous. ( [39] ) Consider the Jets’ first conversation about rumbling with the Sharks. Riff suggests that the Sharks “might ask for bottles or knives or zip guns,” inspiring a worried “Zip guns…Gee!” from Baby John, the youngest of the group. ( [40] ) Guns are named again at the gangs’ war council, not by Riff or Bernardo but by Tony, who attempts to mitigate mounting tensions by urging the leaders to agree to a fair fight, sans weapons. “Bottles, knives, guns! What a coop full of chickens!” he baits. ( [41] ) In both conversations, the Jets are depicted as reluctant to arm themselves with guns as a way of holding their turf: “I wanna hold it like we always held it, with skin!” Riff assures his gang in Act One. ( [42] ) And yet, in Jerome Robbins’ choreography the Jets habitually map onto their bodies gestures of guns and gun violence. Jets wannabe Anybodys responds to A-Rab’s insults about her appearance by shooting him with her finger, prompting Baby John to ask about the maiming power of zip guns. No one answers. Similarly in “Cool,” a frenetic dance in which the Jets attempt to regulate their volatile, pre-rumble energies, A-Rab shapes his hand into a gun, pantomimes firing it, and shouts “pow!,” a close mirroring of Anybodys’ finger shot. In a choreographic replication of cycles of violence, A-Rab is now no longer the victim but the shooter. Ying Zhu and Daniel Belgrad note in their study of dance in West Side Story ’s 1961 film adaptation that “Over the course of the dance, this [gun] gesture is not eliminated, but is disciplined and integrated into the emotional fabric of coolness, so that Action, at the dance’s end, can control it and use it.” ( [43] ) The Jets’ pretend gunplay, Zhu and Belgrad argue, can be situated within the musical’s larger motif of subversive “play [as] the bodily assertion of vitality in the face of adult regulation.” ( [44] ) Of course, this simulated battleground of finger pistols and vocalized “pows” —itself a reflection of popular mid-century children’s games pitting cops against robbers, cowboys against Indians—fails to prevent real gun violence from materializing. As Herrera, David Román, Alberto Sandoval-Sanchez, and Frances Negrón-Muntaner have all forcefully argued, West Side Story ’s message of racial tolerance comes at an ironic cost: the perpetuation of Latine stereotypes and the faulty association of urban US-American crime to rising rates of immigration. ( [45] ) In the original lyrics to “America,” Shark girl Anita paints an unseemly picture of her native island, depicting Puerto Rico’s inhabitants as disease-ridden, oversexed, poor, and prone to unrestrained bursts of gun violence: “Always the hurricanes blowing, / Always the population growing, / And the money owing, / And the babies crying, / And the bullets flying.” ( [46] ) The fact that the only gun that takes a life in West Side Story is owned by one Shark and fired by another is neither inconsequential nor unrelated to Bernardo and Chino’s Puerto-Ricanness and their shared status as racialized outsiders who, if Anita’s lyrical tirade is at all based on reality, brought the problems of their homeland with them. The lie Anita tells Tony after being sexually assaulted at Doc’s store—that Chino has fatally shot Maria—is not only plausible, given Chino’s armed state; it also accords with the feud’s escalating violence and anticipates the ballistic trauma to come. In contrast to the white police officers’ holstered weapons, Bernardo’s gun was unsecured in the home and becomes uncontainable on the streets. With Maria’s seizure of the gun, its relationship to the Latine community is solidified. Though she is clearly unaccustomed to handling the gun, its scriptive thingness immediately instructs her how to channel what the libretto terms her “savage” rage. ( [47] ) America Reloaded: Gun-Centric Revivals of Oklahoma! (2019) and West Side Story (2020) In the midst of its direct transfer from St. Ann’s Warehouse to Broadway’s Circle in the Square Theatre, Daniel Fish’s revival of Oklahoma! grabbed headings in early 2019 by announcing it would be Broadway’s first “Gun Neutral” production. For every visible gun onstage, Oklahoma! ’s producers donated to “organizations working to destroy illegal guns” as well as to those providing arts and STEM programming to communities disproportionately impacted by US-American gun violence. Speaking on the production’s partnership with the non-partisan Gun Neutral Initiative, lead producer Eva Price remarked: “[j]ust because a particular story calls for the presence of a particular weapon, that doesn’t mean that we have to remain complacent in America’s gun-violence epidemic. Helping to destroy firearms that shouldn’t be in circulation is both a privilege and a responsibility.” ( [48] ) Implicit in this gun neutral pledge is an acknowledgement that even prop firearms cannot claim neutrality in 2019 (if indeed they ever could). Furthermore, monetary pledges concede that gun cultures and politics are inextricably bound up in economic transactions and therefore tend to capacitate the financially privileged. Much like carbon offsetting, a gun neutral pledge operates from an assumption that even simulated gunplay has the potential to cause harm; it attempts to mitigate possible negative effects, even as it admits the perceived inevitability of theatrical and mediatized guns in popular culture. Shortly after the news went viral, the National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action characterized the production’s move as “‘smack[ing] of antigun political pandering.’” ( [49] ) There is much to attend to in Fish’s Oklahoma! and Belgian auteur Ivo van Hove’s revival of West Side Story (not the least of which are van Hove’s casting of a sexual predator in the role of Bernardo and staging of Anita’s assault as a penetrative rape). ( [50] ) But rather than comprehensively review the productions or summarize their critical receptions—the latter no small task, given the strikingly polarized opinions of Fish’s and van Hove’s work—I wish to compare the productions’ transformative treatments of guns with those advanced by their source productions. ( [51] ) Historically, the guns of Oklahoma! and West Side Story have operated as connotatively ambiguous objects until they are lifted into service by their handlers. That is, Curly, Jud, and Carnes’s guns are expected accessories for “territory folks” that become threatening with use. Fish and van Hove’s guns, by contrast, persistently and independently menace, from the racks of guns hanging on Oklahoma! ’s auditorium walls, always in view and materially and spatially inculcating theatregoers into the production’s culture of guns, to the pistol tattoo above Chino’s hip, a symbol of his early indoctrination into a gun-saturated world (he is now forever “armed”) and a foreshadowing of West Side Story ’s tragic climax. The revivals’ guns not only consummate the violent impulses of their operators, they engender personal and systemic violence. Of Fish’s Oklahoma! Soraya Nadia McDonald asserts, “social order is enforced and maintained by guns,” a description easily transferrable to van Hove’s New York. ( [52] ) In a conspicuous extension of the original musicals’ gun narratives, the revivals’ community circles and love triangles are contoured or irrevocably broken by armed characters and gun violence. Fish and van Hove take different tacks in mining and reframing their source material. Fish retains Hammerstein’s book almost in its entirety, embedding his major interventions interstitially or via bespoke stagings of scenes and songs. In its most dramatic departure from the libretto, Fish’s Oklahoma! reconceptualizes Jud’s killing as a deliberate gun death. On Curly and Laurey’s wedding day, Jud kisses the bride and presents the couple with a gift: his gun, and an opportunity to end his life. It is an earnest plea with a subtle “gotcha” undertone, for if granted, Jud’s slaughter will forever haunt their wedding day memories. Curly, with Laurey’s wordless blessing, accepts Jud’s offer and shoots him. Husband and wife are sprayed by blood as Jud crumples to the ground. ( [53] ) By replacing Jud’s accidental stabbing with the close-range gunning down of an unarmed man (however consensual the victim), Fish renders the impromptu trial that exonerates Curly of criminal culpability distressingly perfunctory. Curly’s acquittal, writes The Atlantic ’s Todd S. Purdum, “feels less like justice and more like rough complicity in vigilantism.” ( [54] ) West Side Story ’s single, fatal gunshot remains as scripted, though van Hove’s fixation on US-American gun violence is manifest throughout the production. Moreover, with a compressed run-time of 105 minutes and no intermission, the revival hastens toward Tony’s gun death without West Side Story ’s customary flashes of levity: “I Feel Pretty” has been cut and “Gee, Officer Krupke” refashioned. Though Fish began developing Oklahoma! in 2007 at Bard College, its 2019 Broadway iteration and the 2020 West Side Story revival hum with unmistakable nowness, dialoguing directly with US-American gun politics in the Trumpian age. Both stories are set in an unspecified present and feature multiracial casts, with gender expansive ( West Side Story ) and disabled actors ( Oklahoma! ) further diversifying the depicted communities. ( [55] ) Fish’s reimagined frontier boasts an interracial love triangle (Rebecca Naomi Jones’s Laurey, Damon Daunno’s Curly, and Patrick Vaill’s Jud) and a Black federal marshal (Anthony Cason as Cord Elam), the latter’s powerlessness during the murder trial suggestive not just of the community’s fervor to exonerate Curly but the precariousness of Cord’s endowed authority, even when armed. The antagonistic outsider Jud Fry is no longer a brutish farmhand, but a brooding, wiry, plaid-and-hoodie-wearing blonde, “a repository of loneliness and disconnection” who seeks community belonging and validation through Laurey. ( [56] ) Developed by Vaill and Fish over years of collaboration, this Jud oozes a despondent vulnerability that adheres his villainous acts¾including sexually assaulting Laurey and attempting to kill Curly with a switchblade masquerading as a kaleidoscope¾to his ‘victimization’ by an insular, cliquish community. “[It is t]he act of someone who feels pushed into a corner,” Vaill claims of Jud’s foiled murder plot. “This is someone who feels he does not have control, which is scary.” Of Jud’s role as the story’s villain, Vaill is quick to qualify: “He’s cast as the villain …. At the end of the day, he’s guilty of being in love with someone that people don’t think he should be in love with.” ( [57] ) Fish and Vaill’s apologist approach to Jud sets the character, and his assisted gun suicide, adrift in murky cultural waters. “Sympathy for the Incel?” wonders Catherine M. Young from the title of her HowlRound essay on Oklahoma!. In it, Young records a handful of the disparate public responses: Journalist Alison Stewart couldn’t tell if Jud was more like a fragile, vulnerable “Kurt Cobain type” or a school shooter. Sarah Holdren and Elisabeth Vincentelli both describe him as an incel, the involuntarily celibate men who resent (and occasionally kill) women who won’t sleep with them. Frank Rich was enthralled by Jud’s anguish. Such ambiguity has political implications. ( [58] ) Ambiguities there may be, but for Fish and Vaill, Jud is a distinctly American product: a seething, unstable concoction of “virulent misogyny,” toxic (white) masculinity, and lone-wolf reclusiveness that finds affirmation through the nation’s gun culture. ( [59] ) But here another troubling narrative metastases. If Jud represents “the role of the outsider that the community can create,” as Fish indicates (emphasis added), then the blame for Jud’s ostracism lies not with him, but with those charged with nurturing and binding communities together: the play’s women. ( [60] ) In van Hove’s New York, the Jets encompasses white and Black “native” Americans who together rail against the immigrant Puerto Rican Sharks, transforming the Jets’ racial animus from blatant white supremacism to a sort of qualified nativism with irreconcilable outcomes. “Mr. van Hove’s casting misrepresents the real solidarities that form at the margins of U.S. citizenship,” notes writer and translator Carina del Valle Schorske of the blended Jets. “‘Inclusion’ here is code for willful colorblindness.” ( [61] ) The gang’s new composition enables van Hove to broach stereotypes of African American gun use , as well as more fully confront the injustices of race-based police brutality. Baby John’s fear of the zip-gun’s ballistic power, for example, is now voiced by a Black teenager (Matthew Johnson). Later, after a brief squabble with the Jets, Officer Krupke (Danny Wolohan) draws his weapon and aggressively pushes it into the temple of one of its Black members, prompting several Jets to draw their smartphones and film the altercation. Krupke backs off, but the event propels the gang into a revamped rendition of “Gee, Officer Krupke.” Once a vaudevillian take-down of domineering and inept authority figures, the song is now a humorless “indictment of the carceral state,” with white and Black Jets striking ‘don’t shoot’ poses in front of “a bleak video montage of young men being humiliated and abused by the police.” ( [62] ) Branded “harrowing” by Los Angeles Times ’s Charles McNulty, an “overreach” by Newsday ’s Rafer Guzmán, and “pandering” by The New Yorker’s Alexandra Schwartz, “Gee, Officer Krupke” (with choreography by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker) functions as an embodied condemnation of systemic racism, police violence, and the prison-industrial complex—and one of the revival’s most overt bids for political relevance. ( [63] ) Audiences consume the productions’ gun acts via unmediated and mediated witnessing. Van Hove’s imagistic theatre routinely includes the use of video to bring the “characters closer to the audience” and “create subjective worlds on stage,” the director himself explains. ( [64] ) In West Side Story, the characters’ smartphones, pre-filmed footage, and live video from handheld cameras¾all projected onto a mammoth, stage-spanning screen¾together constitute an omnipresent surveillance apparatus that is in turns covert and intrusive. At intervals, the films decelerate into slow motion as the stage action unfolds at regular speed, a techno-theatrical “time warp” (to use Sarah Taylor Ellis’s term) that often prolongs the audience’s encounter with violence, as in Tony (Isaac Powell) fleeing from the rumble in a blood-soaked shirt. ( [65] ) Of one on-location shot that moves through a dead-end street, Schwartz remarks, “The camera advances in a slow dolly shot, producing the weightless, gliding momentum of a first-person shooter game.” ( [66] ) Indeed, the footage collectively documents a story of interchangeable hunters and prey. Cameras invade enclosed spaces—several interiors are pocketed behind the projection screen, including Doc’s store—and capture private and imagined interactions. ( [67] ) In one of the video design’s most unsettling interventions, Tony’s mental picture of Maria’s gun death fills the screen, her head blasted open by Chino’s close-range shot. Tony’s own death, however, is left unmediated. Chino approaches, fires his pistol, and Tony’s body registers the bullet’s impact; no extreme closeups linger on his bloodied torso or Chino’s inscrutable expression. Fish’s Oklahoma! employs live video and projections far more sparingly, notably when handheld video cameras penetrate the cramped environs of Jud’s smokehouse. At first, Jud and Curly’s tête-à-tête is plunged into total darkness, a drastic shift from the “aggressive brightness” employed elsewhere in the production’s lighting design. ( [68] ) The blackout, which amplifies the dramaturgical work of the scene’s soundscape, is later softened by live video tightly trained on Jud’s face—tormented, longing for connection—projected onto the stage’s backdrop. The scene vacillates in tone between a hushed, erotic intimacy (the men, faces mere inches from each other, whisper their lines into handheld microphones) and the unrelenting menace of cyberbullying, as Curly’s disembodied voice calmly extols the virtues of suicide. ( [69] ) Notes Ben Brantley of the smokehouse scene, “the lines of sex and violence…blu[r] in this gun-toting universe[.]” ( [70] ) When, after singing “Pore Jud Is Daid” and still blanketed by darkness, the men fire their guns at a knothole, the loud reports startle and unnerve. Sound and sight decoupled, the invisible weapons index their presence sonically. Though only men suffer gun deaths in Oklahoma! and West Side Story , the stories’ women together absorb much of the gun-related violence and trauma. Armed men (fathers, law enforcers, lovers, and stalkers) perambulate the playing space in Oklahoma! , pistols holstered and rifles clutched under armpits; Aunt Eller, by contrast, is accoutered with a wooden spoon for stirring cornbread. But if we simply track Oklahoma! ’s guns as they pass through men’s hands, we risk losing sight of Jones’s Laurey and Ali Stroker’s Ado Annie, outspoken women of intelligence and agency who must nevertheless navigate the complexities of a materially and psychically hostile landscape. Ado Annie’s life choices are under near-constant monitoring by her armed father, while landowning woman of color Laurey “resolute[ly] refus[es] to be thought of as someone’s possession” even as she’s caught in the crosshairs of rival suitors. ( [71] ) The production’s dream ballet and wedding scene lay bare Laurey’s conscious negotiations with Oklahoma! ’s gun culture¾and the men that drive it. In choreographer John Heginbotham’s postmodern dream ballet, Laurey’s avatar (Gabrielle Hamilton) moves with within a growing minefield of cowboy boots that are dropped one by one from the rafters. “[T]he sound they make as they hit the stage is as explosive as . . . gunshots,” pronounced The New Yorker ’s Sarah Larson in her 2018 review of the Off-Broadway production. ( [72] ) Less abstract is Laurey’s endorsing of Jud’s murder/suicide. In an extended moment of silent contemplation, Laurey spatially maps her inner conflict. She leaves Curly’s side to peer searchingly into Jud’s face, and then slowly returns to Curly. ( [73] ) We can only speculate on why Laurey sanctions “prairie justice,” Jud’s violent and permanent excision from the community, but as a Black woman and a survivor of sexual assault and stalking, Laurey is all too aware of how violence operates at the margins. ( [74] ) West Side Story ’s gun culture is likewise androcentric and hierarchical, but the women exhibit manifest signs of inculcation. Whereas Jerome Robbins’ choreography restricted the use of gun gestures to his male dancers and Anybodys, De Keersmaeker democratizes the movement by setting it onto the Sharks girls’ bodies in “America.” The aggressive gesture¾fingers shaped into a gun, straight arm tracing an arc from low to high like a protractor¾runs counter the women’s buoyant lyrics (“I like to be in America! / O.K. by me in America! / Everything free in America”). Violence continues to reach West Side Story ’s Black, white, and brown women in ways unprescribed by Robbins, Laurents, Sondheim, and Bernstein, including Anita’s attempted gang rape, Maria’s graphic head wound, and the rain-soaked rumble, where several feminine-presenting Jets and Sharks fight. ( [75] ) One need only witness the distraught Maria’s actions after Tony’s shooting to comprehend how versant the women are in West Side Story ’s microcosmic culture of violence. Silently, Maria (Shereen Pimentel) gestures for Chino’s gun. Unlike Marias past, who handle the gun with trepidation and difficulty, Pimentel’s Maria racks the handgun’s slide with speed and skill, advancing the next round of ammunition as she asks, “How do you fire this gun, Chino? Just by pulling this little trigger?” It’s a rhetorical question. She is well-acquainted with guns, even if this is the first she’s handled, and the Jets and Sharks take her threats seriously. The gun changes hands several more times: a Jet gently disarms Maria as she faces the audience and holds the pistol to her head; later, she reclaims the gun and passes it to Anita. In entrusting the gun to Anita, Maria effectively bars Jets and Sharks alike from accessing it, effectively removing the weapon from circulation¾at least temporarily. Guns are instruments of revolution and disruption, but they are also instruments of a sort of brutal petrification, of holding in abeyance those who might act counterculturally and preventing new, transformative associations from solidifying. The Golden Age Oklahoma! and West Side Story ’s firearms police the perimeters of homogenous human groups, simultaneously restricting access into and thwarting departures from them. In reinforcing the community circle’s curved boundaries and transforming a love triangle with three vertices into a straight line with two points, guns and their handlers are bold, convenient catalysts for the American musical’s conservative endings. They help the boy get the girl; forestall any integrative or conciliatory pacts between rival street gangs; and fortify the settler-colonialist claims on stolen lands. In their twenty-first-century adaptations of Oklahoma! and West Side Story, Fish and van Hove present guns as the most responsive, convenient deliverers of modern violence, but their contemporary anti-gun, pro-diversity messages strain uncomfortably beneath the musicals’ constrictive Golden Age fabric, fabric that engages firearms in ways that unequivocally benefit white heteronormative America. After seeing Fish’s reimagined Oklahoma! , Johnny Oleksinksi of the right-leaning New York Post sardonically declared: “everything you cherish about this classic has been taken out behind the bar and shot, replace by an auteur’s bag of tricks and a thesis on gun control and westward expansion. Here, the West was won by a culture of violence and toxic masculinity— what fun! ” ( [76] ) In all his rhetorical outrage, Oleksinski fails to recognize that Oklahoma! has always told this story. What he is detecting, however, are the heightened political stakes of the contemporary gun musical. Staged in the midst of partisan debates over Second Amendment gun rights and alarming rates of US gun injuries and deaths, the majority of twenty-first-century gun musicals, including Fish’s Oklahoma! and van Hove’s West Side Story , proceed from three assumptions. First, they regard gun violence as a public health crisis in the United States. Second, they implicate all Americans as active perpetrators or passive abettors in the country’s gun violence epidemic. Third, rather than depict gun handling as a prime signifier of national belonging, they suggest that merely persisting within the country’s omnipresent gun culture is a uniquely American act. Oleksinski’s “auteur” jab is likewise somewhat founded. In their searing critiques of US-American gun violence and its impact on disenfranchised communities, Daniel Fish and Ivo van Hove undertake crucial (if imperfect) work. And yet, as progressive white men of privilege, they perhaps cannot help but ventriloquize rather than possess the perspectives voiced by frontline populations. References 1. Christopher Bannow, “Surviving in the States: Audience Rejection on the Road with Oklahoma!,” 3 April 2023, https://howlround.com/surviving-states-audience-rejection-road-oklahoma . 2. Ibid. 3. According to musical theatre scholar Bryan M. Vandevender, the touring production featured less visible guns in its scene design than its Broadway counterpart. 4. See Pamela Haag’s analysis of gun companies’ influential tactics in The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture (New York: Basic Books, 2016). 5. As I theorize, a “gun musical” focalizes firearms—and their provocative meaning-making—as essential objects in the musical’s dramaturgy and physical world. Put another way, just as a perfect Aristotelian plot would unravel with the removal of any scene, a gun musical could not function without their signature weaponry and the human conditions they engender. 6. For a fuller examination of Hamilton’s guns, which contextualizes the production’s weaponless Tony Awards performance, see my article “‘What if This Bullet is My Legacy?’: The Guns of Hamilton,” Studies in Musical Theatre 12, no. 2 (June 2018): 251-56. 7. Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, “Domestic Violence and Firearms,” https://efsgv.org/learn/type-of-gun-violence/domestic-violence-and-firearms/ . 8. Kimberly King, “Gun Violence Crisis: With Revenge and Retaliation on the Rise, How Police Are Responding,” 17 February 2021, https://wlos.com/news/local/gun-violence-crisis-with-revenge- retaliation-on-the-rise-how-asheville-police-are-responding. 9. Marissa Edmund, “Gun Violence Disproportionately and Overwhelmingly Hurts Communities of Color,” Center for American Progress, 30 June 2022, https://www.americanprogress.org/article/gun- violence-disproportionately-and-overwhelmingly-hurts-communities-of-color/. 10. Ibid. 11. Nicole Moeder, “Number of Trans Homicides Doubled over 4 Years, with Gun Killings Fueling Increase: Advocates,” ABC News, 12 October 2022, https://abcnews.go.com/US/homicide-rate-trans- people-doubled-gun-killings-fueling/story?id=91348274. 12. Eugenio Weigend Vargas and Marissa Edmund, “Gun Suicides Among Former and Current Military Members,” Center for American Progress, 3 March 2022, https://www.americanprogress.org/article/gun- suicides-among-former-and-current-military-members/. 13. Robert Gebeloff, Danielle Ivory, Bill Marsh, Allison McCann, and Albert Sun, “Childhood’s Greatest Danger: The Data on Kids and Gun Violence,” New York Times, 14 December 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/12/14/magazine/gun-violence-children-data-statistics.html . 14. Beth Duff-Brown, “Californians Living with Handgun Owners More Than Twice as Likely to Die by Homicide, Study Finds,” 4 April 2022, https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2022/04/handguns- homicide-risk.html#:~:text=%E2%80%9CDespite%20widespread%20perceptions%20that%20a,of%20health%20p olicy%20at%20the 15. For histories of the gun industry’s attempt to domesticate US firearms through white women consumers, see Laura Browder, Her Best Shot: Women and Guns in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Meredith Conti, “Hired Guns: Whiteness, Womanhood, and Progressive-era Shooting Promoters,” Theatre Journal 73, no. 4 (Dec. 2021): 511-532; and Andrea L. Smalley, “‘Our Lady Sportsmen’: Gender, Class, and Conservation in Sport Hunting Magazines, 1873–1920,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 4, no. 4 (October 2005): 355–80. 16. The NRA was founded in 1871 in New York. 17. Nicholas Johnson, Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms (New York: Prometheus Books, 2014), 13. While magistrates and legislators banned or significantly curtailed Black and Indigenous gun ownership from the colonial period onward, marginalized communities of color had their own traditions of arms that variously conformed to and resolutely rejected governmental interference. 18. Haag, The Gunning of America, 357 and 356. 19. Ibid, 354. 20. Ibid. 21. Benjamin Barber, “Oklahoma! — How Political Is Broadway?” Salmagundi 137/138 (2003): 3-11, 9. 22. To be more specific, the Oklahoma Enabling Act of 1906 permitted “the Oklahoma Territory and the Indian Territory to enter the union under a single-state constitution.” Michael Schulman, “Two Broadway Shows Dismantle the American Myth,” The New Yorker, April 16, 2019. 23. Bruce Kirle, “Reconciliation, Resolution, and the Political Role of ‘Oklahoma!’ in American Consciousness,” Theatre Journal 55, no 2 (May 2003): 251-274, 251. 24. See Andrea Most, Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004) and Warren Hoffman, The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2014). 25. As Warren Hoffman notes, the show’s refrain, in which the company repeatedly chants “Oklahoma!,” can ironically be translated to them shouting “Red People!” Hoffman, The Great White Way, 66. 26. Donatella Galella, America in the Round: Capital, Race, and Nation at Washington DC’s Arena Stage (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2019), 202. 27. Galella, America in the Round, 197. Galella describes three modes of understanding multiracial Oklahoma! casts that both producers and spectators could adopt: multiracial-conscious, whitened, and postracial (200). 28. Kirle, “Reconciliation, Resolution, and the Political Role of ‘Oklahoma!,’” 262. 29. The Theatre Guild Presents Oklahoma!: A Musical Play Based on the Play ‘Green Grow the Lilacs’ by Lynn Riggs, music by Richard Rodgers, book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein (New York: Williamson Music, 1943). 30. Susan C. Cook, “Pretty like the Girl: Gender, Race and Oklahoma!” Contemporary Theatre Review 19, no. 1 (2009), 35-47, 43. 31. Rodgers and Hammerstein, Oklahoma!. 32. Rodgers and Hammerstein, Oklahoma!. 33. Cook, “Pretty like the Girl,” 37. 34. Kirle, “Reconciliation, Resolution, and the Political Role of ‘Oklahoma!,’” 251-274, 259 and 261. 35. Rodgers and Hammerstein, Oklahoma! 36. Scott McMillin, The Musical as Drama: A Study of the Principles and Conventions Behind Musical Shows from Kern to Sondheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 27. 37. West Side Story Libretto / Vocal Book, based on a conception of Jerome Robbins, book by Arthur Laurents, music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim (New York: Musical Theatre International, 1960), 86. 38. West Side Story Libretto / Vocal Book, 119-120. 39. Brian Eugenio Herrera, “Compiling West Side Story’s Parahistories, 1949-2009,” Theatre Journal 64 (2012), 231-247: 236. 40. West Side Story Libretto / Vocal Book, 6. 41. West Side Story Libretto / Vocal Book, 56. 42. West Side Story Libretto / Vocal Book, 7. 43. Zhu and Belgrad, “This Cockeyed City,” 86. 44. Ibid, 90. 45. Herrera, “Compiling West Side Story’s Parahistories, 1949-2009” and Latin Numbers: Playing Latino in Twentieth-Century U.S. Popular Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015); David Román, “Comment — Theatre Journals,” Theatre Journal 54, no. 3 (Oct. 2002), https://www.jstor.org/stable/25069090 ; David Román, Paula Court, and Richard Termine, Performance in America: Contemporary U.S. Culture in the Performing Arts (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Alberto Sandoval-Sanchez, José, Can You See? Latinos on and off Broadway (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999); and Frances Negrón-Muntaner, “Feeling Pretty: West Side Story and Puerto Rican Identity Discourses,” Social Text 63, vol. 18, no. 2 (2000), 83-106. 46. West Side Story Libretto / Vocal Book, 43. 47. Robin Bernstein, “Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race,” Social Text 24, no. 7 (2009), 67-94. 48. Greg Evans, “‘Oklahoma!’ to be Broadway’s First ‘Gun Neutral’ Production: Lauded Musical Joins Hollywood Initiative: Sundance, Deadline, January 28, 2019, https://deadline.com/2019/01/oklahoma- broadway-musical-gun-neutral-sundance-daniel-fish-1202543741/. 49. Qtd. in Charles Passy, “‘Oklahoma!’ Takes Aim at Gun Issue,” Wall Street Journal, March 5, 2019. 50. Susan Bennett and Sonia Massai have edited the first essay collection on van Hove’s work entitled Ivo van Hove: From Shakespeare to David Bowie (London: Methuen Drama, 2018). For coverage of the protests of Amar Ramasar’s casting, see Julia Jacobs, “‘West Side Story’ Stalemate: Bernardo’s Staying. So Are Protestors,” New York Times, February 19, 2020, and Adrian Horton, “‘We can’t stand by this any more’: Inside the West Side Story Premiere Protest,” The Guardian, February 21, 2020. 51. An inventory of West Side Story’s reviews was created by Playbill’s Dan Meyer on February 20, 2020. http://www.playbill.com/article/read-reviews-for-the-west-side-story-revival-on-broadway . 52. Soraya Nadia McDonald, “The Unbearable Whiteness of Oklahoma!” The Undefeated, September 16, 2019. https://theundefeated.com/features/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-oklahoma-on-broadway/ . 53. A cleverly installed blood cannon delivers the graphic stage effect. 54. Todd S. Purdue, “Culture: Oklahoma! Gets a Dark, Brilliant Remake,” The Atlantic, April 8, 2019. 55. Of van Hove’s “austere aesthetic” Helen Shaw wryly observes: “he automatically modernizes everything he touches, from Shakespeare to O’Neill.” Helen Shaw, “In the New West Side Story, When You’re Onstage You’re Onscreen All the Way,” New York Magazine/vulture.com, February 20, 2020. https://www.vulture.com/2020/02/theater-review-a-new-west-side-story-onscreen-all-the-way.html . 56. Tim Teeman, “‘Oklahoma!’ on Broadway: Creator and Cast Reveal How to Reimagine a Classic,” The Daily Beast, thedailybeast.com , April 15, 2019. https://www.thedailybeast.com/oklahoma-on-broadway-creator-and-cast-reveal-how-to-reimagine-a-classic . 57. Laura Collins-Hughes, “For 13 Years, He has Humanized the Villain of Oklahoma!,” New York Times, January 20, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/20/theater/patrick-vaill-oklahoma-broadway.html . 58. Catherine M. Young, “Sympathy for the Incel? On Oklahoma! and Jud Fry in the #MeToo Era.” Howlround.com , June 26, 2019. https://howlround.com/sympathy-incel . 59. McDonald, “The Unbearable Whiteness of Oklahoma!” Bryan M. Vandevender queered Vaill’s portrayal of Jud in a compelling paper delivered at the 2022 Mid-America Theatre Conference. 60. Qtd. in Teeman, “Oklahoma! on Broadway.” 61. Carina de Valle Schorske, “Opinion: Let ‘West Side Story’ and Its Stereotypes Die,” New York Times, February 24, 2020. 62. Alexandra Schwartz, “Theatre: A Grim Take on ‘West Side Story,’” The New Yorker, February 21, 2020. 63. Charles McNulty, “Review: ‘West Side Story’ Blasts Back to Broadway – Kinetic, Bloody and Modern to the Core,” Los Angeles Times, February 20, 2020; Schwartz, “A Grim Take”; and Rafer Guzmán, “Review: ‘West Side Story’ on Broadway Gets a Dark Update, Loses Some of its Cool,’ Newsday, February 21, 2020. 64. “Susan Bennett and Sonia Massai, “Ivo van Hove: An Introduction,” in Ivo van Hove: From Shakespeare to David Bowie, edited by Susan Bennett and Sonia Massai (London: Methuen, 2018), 1-16, 7. 65. See Sarah Taylor Ellis‘s Doing the Time Warp: Queer Temporalities and Musical Theatre (London: Methuen Drama, 2022). 66. Schwartz, “A Grim Take.” 67. Jan Versweyveld designed West Side Story’s sets and lights, and Luke Hall designed the video; Laura Jellinek designed Oklahoma!’s set and Joshua Thorson designed projections. 68. McDonald, “The Unbearable Whiteness of Oklahoma!.” Scott Zielinksi was the production’s lighting designer. 69. “When the camera turns and shows us both Daunno’s and Vaill’s profiles,” notes Sara Holdren, “stretched out huge across a wall where a black-and-white vista of fields and ranch houses is painted, we get a nasty jolt: Here is the country inside of these men, and here are their brutalities laying the foundations for the country.” Sara Holdren, “Theatre Review: An Oklahoma! Where the Storm Clouds Loom Above the Plain,” New York Magazine/Vulture.com, October 8, 2018. 70. Ben Brantley, “Review: A Smashing ‘Oklahoma!’ Is Reborn in the Land of Id,” New York Times, April 7, 2019. 71. Teeman, “‘Oklahoma!’ on Broadway.” 72. Sarah Larson, ”Daniel Fish’s Dark Take on ’Oklahoma!’” Ariel Nereson analyzed the choreographic work of the re-envisioned dream ballet in a 2022 Mid-America Theatre Conference presentation. 73. Laurey is effectively muzzled by Hammerstein’s book, which provides no dialogue during Curly and Jud’s struggle and Jud’s accidental stabbing. 74. Jesse Green and Ben Brantley, “Review: There’s a Dark Golden Haze in This Reclaimed ‘Oklahoma!,’ New York Times, October 7, 2018. Green and Brantley’s joint review is responding to the 2018 Off- Broadway production. 75. Of watching Anita’s attempted gang-rape (and its replication on the enormous projection screen) as a Puerto Rican woman, Carina del Valle Schorske surmises, “[Mr. van Hove] may not feel the oppressive repetitions of the history of violence against brown women bearing down on his body. But for many of us, it’s the umpteenth time we’ve seen Anita assaulted for dramatic effect, each time under the guise of greater authenticity.” De Valle Schorske, “Opinion: Let ‘West Side Story’ and Its Stereotypes Die.” 76. Johnny Oleksinski, “‘Oklahoma!’ Review: Anti-gun Revival of Classic Shot to Hell,” New York Post, April 7, 2019. Footnotes (1) Christopher Bannow, “Surviving in the States: Audience Rejection on the Road with Oklahoma!,” 3 April 2023, https://howlround.com/surviving-states-audience-rejection-road-oklahoma . (2) Ibid. (3) According to musical theatre scholar Bryan M. Vandevender, the touring production featured less visible guns in its scene design than its Broadway counterpart. (4) See Pamela Haag’s analysis of gun companies’ influential tactics in The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture (New York: Basic Books, 2016). (5) As I theorize, a “gun musical” focalizes firearms—and their provocative meaning-making—as essential objects in the musical’s dramaturgy and physical world. Put another way, just as a perfect Aristotelian plot would unravel with the removal of any scene, a gun musical could not function without their signature weaponry and the human conditions they engender. (6) For a fuller examination of Hamilton’s guns, which contextualizes the production’s weaponless Tony Awards performance, see my article “‘What if This Bullet is My Legacy?’: The Guns of Hamilton,” Studies in Musical Theatre 12, no. 2 (June 2018): 251-56. (7) Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, “Domestic Violence and Firearms,” https://efsgv.org/learn/type-of-gun-violence/domestic-violence-and-firearms/ . (8) Kimberly King, “Gun Violence Crisis: With Revenge and Retaliation on the Rise, How Police Are Responding,” 17 February 2021, https://wlos.com/news/local/gun-violence-crisis-with-revenge- retaliation-on-the-rise-how-asheville-police-are-responding. (9) Marissa Edmund, “Gun Violence Disproportionately and Overwhelmingly Hurts Communities of Color,” Center for American Progress, 30 June 2022, https://www.americanprogress.org/article/gun- violence-disproportionately-and-overwhelmingly-hurts-communities-of-color/. (10) Ibid. (11) Nicole Moeder, “Number of Trans Homicides Doubled over 4 Years, with Gun Killings Fueling Increase: Advocates,” ABC News, 12 October 2022, https://abcnews.go.com/US/homicide-rate-trans- people-doubled-gun-killings-fueling/story?id=91348274. (12) Eugenio Weigend Vargas and Marissa Edmund, “Gun Suicides Among Former and Current Military Members,” Center for American Progress, 3 March 2022, https://www.americanprogress.org/article/gun- suicides-among-former-and-current-military-members/. (13) Robert Gebeloff, Danielle Ivory, Bill Marsh, Allison McCann, and Albert Sun, “Childhood’s Greatest Danger: The Data on Kids and Gun Violence,” New York Times, 14 December 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/12/14/magazine/gun-violence-children-data-statistics.html . (14) Beth Duff-Brown, “Californians Living with Handgun Owners More Than Twice as Likely to Die by Homicide, Study Finds,” 4 April 2022, https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2022/04/handguns- homicide- risk.html#:~:text=%E2%80%9CDespite%20widespread%20perceptions%20that%20a,of%20health%20p olicy%20at%20the (15) For histories of the gun industry’s attempt to domesticate US firearms through white women consumers, see Laura Browder, Her Best Shot: Women and Guns in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Meredith Conti, “Hired Guns: Whiteness, Womanhood, and Progressive-era Shooting Promoters,” Theatre Journal 73, no. 4 (Dec. 2021): 511-532; and Andrea L. Smalley, “‘Our Lady Sportsmen’: Gender, Class, and Conservation in Sport Hunting Magazines, 1873–1920,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 4, no. 4 (October 2005): 355–80. (16) The NRA was founded in 1871 in New York. (17) Nicholas Johnson, Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms (New York: Prometheus Books, 2014), 13. While magistrates and legislators banned or significantly curtailed Black and Indigenous gun ownership from the colonial period onward, marginalized communities of color had their own traditions of arms that variously conformed to and resolutely rejected governmental interference. (18) Haag, The Gunning of America, 357 and 356. (19) Ibid 354. (20) Ibid. (21) Benjamin Barber, “Oklahoma! — How Political Is Broadway?” Salmagundi 137/138 (2003): 3-11, 9. (22) To be more specific, the Oklahoma Enabling Act of 1906 permitted “the Oklahoma Territory and the Indian Territory to enter the union under a single-state constitution.” Michael Schulman, “Two Broadway Shows Dismantle the American Myth,” The New Yorker, April 16, 2019. (23) Bruce Kirle, “Reconciliation, Resolution, and the Political Role of ‘Oklahoma!’ in American Consciousness,” Theatre Journal 55, no 2 (May 2003): 251-274, 251. (24) See Andrea Most, Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004) and Warren Hoffman, The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2014). (25) As Warren Hoffman notes, the show’s refrain, in which the company repeatedly chants “Oklahoma!,” can ironically be translated to them shouting “Red People!” Hoffman, The Great White Way, 66. (26) Donatella Galella, America in the Round: Capital, Race, and Nation at Washington DC’s Arena Stage (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2019), 202. (27) Galella, America in the Round, 197. Galella describes three modes of understanding multiracial Oklahoma! casts that both producers and spectators could adopt: multiracial-conscious, whitened, and postracial (200). (28) Kirle, “Reconciliation, Resolution, and the Political Role of ‘Oklahoma!,’” 262. (29) The Theatre Guild Presents Oklahoma!: A Musical Play Based on the Play ‘Green Grow the Lilacs’ by Lynn Riggs, music by Richard Rodgers, book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein (New York: Williamson Music, 1943). (30) Susan C. Cook, “Pretty like the Girl: Gender, Race and Oklahoma!” Contemporary Theatre Review 19, no. 1 (2009), 35-47, 43. (31) Rodgers and Hammerstein, Oklahoma!. (32) Rodgers and Hammerstein, Oklahoma!. (33) Cook, “Pretty like the Girl,” 37. (34) Kirle, “Reconciliation, Resolution, and the Political Role of ‘Oklahoma!,’” 251-274, 259 and 261. (35) Rodgers and Hammerstein, Oklahoma! (36) Scott McMillin, The Musical as Drama: A Study of the Principles and Conventions Behind Musical Shows from Kern to Sondheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 27. (37) West Side Story Libretto / Vocal Book, based on a conception of Jerome Robbins, book by Arthur Laurents, music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim (New York: Musical Theatre International, 1960), 86. (38) West Side Story Libretto / Vocal Book, 119-120. (39) Brian Eugenio Herrera, “Compiling West Side Story’s Parahistories, 1949-2009,” Theatre Journal 64 (2012), 231-247: 236. (40) West Side Story Libretto / Vocal Book, 6. (41) West Side Story Libretto / Vocal Book, 56. (42) West Side Story Libretto / Vocal Book, 7. (43) Zhu and Belgrad, “This Cockeyed City,” 86. (44) Ibid 90. (45) Herrera, “Compiling West Side Story’s Parahistories, 1949-2009” and Latin Numbers: Playing Latino in Twentieth-Century U.S. Popular Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015); David Román, “Comment — Theatre Journals,” Theatre Journal 54, no. 3 (Oct. 2002), https://www.jstor.org/stable/25069090 ; David Román, Paula Court, and Richard Termine, Performance in America: Contemporary U.S. Culture in the Performing Arts (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Alberto Sandoval-Sanchez, José, Can You See? Latinos on and off Broadway (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999); and Frances Negrón-Muntaner, “Feeling Pretty: West Side Story and Puerto Rican Identity Discourses,” Social Text 63, vol. 18, no. 2 (2000), 83-106. (46) West Side Story Libretto / Vocal Book, 43. (47) Robin Bernstein, “Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race,” Social Text 24, no. 7 (2009), 67-94. (48) Greg Evans, “‘Oklahoma!’ to be Broadway’s First ‘Gun Neutral’ Production: Lauded Musical Joins Hollywood Initiative: Sundance, Deadline, January 28, 2019, https://deadline.com/2019/01/oklahoma- broadway-musical-gun-neutral-sundance-daniel-fish-1202543741/. (49) Qtd. in Charles Passy, “‘Oklahoma!’ Takes Aim at Gun Issue,” Wall Street Journal, March 5, 2019. (50) Susan Bennett and Sonia Massai have edited the first essay collection on van Hove’s work entitled Ivo van Hove: From Shakespeare to David Bowie (London: Methuen Drama, 2018). For coverage of the protests of Amar Ramasar’s casting, see Julia Jacobs, “‘West Side Story’ Stalemate: Bernardo’s Staying. So Are Protestors,” New York Times, February 19, 2020, and Adrian Horton, “‘We can’t stand by this any more’: Inside the West Side Story Premiere Protest,” The Guardian, February 21, 2020. (51) An inventory of West Side Story’s reviews was created by Playbill’s Dan Meyer on February 20, 2020. http://www.playbill.com/article/read-reviews-for-the-west-side-story-revival-on-broadway . (52) Soraya Nadia McDonald, “The Unbearable Whiteness of Oklahoma!” The Undefeated, September 16, 2019. https://theundefeated.com/features/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-oklahoma-on-broadway/ . (53) A cleverly installed blood cannon delivers the graphic stage effect. (54) Todd S. Purdue, “Culture: Oklahoma! Gets a Dark, Brilliant Remake,” The Atlantic, April 8, 2019. (55) Of van Hove’s “austere aesthetic” Helen Shaw wryly observes: “he automatically modernizes everything he touches, from Shakespeare to O’Neill.” Helen Shaw, “In the New West Side Story, When You’re Onstage You’re Onscreen All the Way,” New York Magazine/vulture.com, February 20, 2020. https://www.vulture.com/2020/02/theater-review-a-new-west-side-story-onscreen-all-the-way.html . (56) Tim Teeman, “‘Oklahoma!’ on Broadway: Creator and Cast Reveal How to Reimagine a Classic,” The Daily Beast, thedailybeast.com , April 15, 2019. https://www.thedailybeast.com/oklahoma-on-broadway- creator-and-cast-reveal-how-to-reimagine-a-classic. (57) Laura Collins-Hughes, “For 13 Years, He has Humanized the Villain of Oklahoma!,” New York Times, January 20, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/20/theater/patrick-vaill-oklahoma-broadway.html . (58) Catherine M. Young, “Sympathy for the Incel? On Oklahoma! and Jud Fry in the #MeToo Era.” Howlround.com , June 26, 2019. https://howlround.com/sympathy-incel . (59) McDonald, “The Unbearable Whiteness of Oklahoma!” Bryan M. Vandevender queered Vaill’s portrayal of Jud in a compelling paper delivered at the 2022 Mid-America Theatre Conference. (60) Qtd. in Teeman, “Oklahoma! on Broadway.” (61) Carina de Valle Schorske, “Opinion: Let ‘West Side Story’ and Its Stereotypes Die,” New York Times, February 24, 2020. (62) Alexandra Schwartz, “Theatre: A Grim Take on ‘West Side Story,’” The New Yorker, February 21, 2020. (63) Charles McNulty, “Review: ‘West Side Story’ Blasts Back to Broadway – Kinetic, Bloody and Modern to the Core,” Los Angeles Times, February 20, 2020; Schwartz, “A Grim Take”; and Rafer Guzmán, “Review: ‘West Side Story’ on Broadway Gets a Dark Update, Loses Some of its Cool,’ Newsday, February 21, 2020. (64) “Susan Bennett and Sonia Massai, “Ivo van Hove: An Introduction,” in Ivo van Hove: From Shakespeare to David Bowie, edited by Susan Bennett and Sonia Massai (London: Methuen, 2018), 1-16, 7. (65) See Sarah Taylor Ellis‘s Doing the Time Warp: Queer Temporalities and Musical Theatre (London: Methuen Drama, 2022). (66) Schwartz, “A Grim Take.” (67) Jan Versweyveld designed West Side Story’s sets and lights, and Luke Hall designed the video; Laura Jellinek designed Oklahoma!’s set and Joshua Thorson designed projections. (68) McDonald, “The Unbearable Whiteness of Oklahoma!.” Scott Zielinksi was the production’s lighting designer. (69) “When the camera turns and shows us both Daunno’s and Vaill’s profiles,” notes Sara Holdren, “stretched out huge across a wall where a black-and-white vista of fields and ranch houses is painted, we get a nasty jolt: Here is the country inside of these men, and here are their brutalities laying the foundations for the country.” Sara Holdren, “Theatre Review: An Oklahoma! Where the Storm Clouds Loom Above the Plain,” New York Magazine/Vulture.com, October 8, 2018. (70) Ben Brantley, “Review: A Smashing ‘Oklahoma!’ Is Reborn in the Land of Id,” New York Times, April 7, 2019. (71) Teeman, “‘Oklahoma!’ on Broadway.” (72) Sarah Larson, ”Daniel Fish’s Dark Take on ’Oklahoma!’” Ariel Nereson analyzed the choreographic work of the re-envisioned dream ballet in a 2022 Mid-America Theatre Conference presentation. (73) Laurey is effectively muzzled by Hammerstein’s book, which provides no dialogue during Curly and Jud’s struggle and Jud’s accidental stabbing. (74) Jesse Green and Ben Brantley, “Review: There’s a Dark Golden Haze in This Reclaimed ‘Oklahoma!,’ New York Times, October 7, 2018. Green and Brantley’s joint review is responding to the 2018 Off- Broadway production. (75) Of watching Anita’s attempted gang-rape (and its replication on the enormous projection screen) as a Puerto Rican woman, Carina del Valle Schorske surmises, “[Mr. van Hove] may not feel the oppressive repetitions of the history of violence against brown women bearing down on his body. But for many of us, it’s the umpteenth time we’ve seen Anita assaulted for dramatic effect, each time under the guise of greater authenticity.” De Valle Schorske, “Opinion: Let ‘West Side Story’ and Its Stereotypes Die.” (76) Johnny Oleksinski, “‘Oklahoma!’ Review: Anti-gun Revival of Classic Shot to Hell,” New York Post, April 7, 2019. About The Author(s) Meredith Conti is Associate Professor of Theatre at the University at Buffalo, SUNY (UB) and a historian of nineteenth-century theatre and popular culture in the United States and Britain. Her research variously explores the intersections of theatre and medicine; nineteenth- and early twentieth-century popular entertainment forms (including world fairs, vaudeville, Wild West shows, and fancy shooting exhibitions); gender and race in the Victorian period; and guns and gun violence in 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 Community Circles and Love Triangles: Gun Violence and Belonging in Oklahoma! and West Side Story Decommissioning the School-to-Prison Pipeline: Anna Deavere Smith’s Notes from the Field and Dominique Morisseau’s Pipeline More than a Props List: Redefining Material Culture as Survival and Pleasure in Lynn Nottage’s Ruined The Politics of Trance: Victoria Woodhull and the Radical Reform of Platform Mediumship Beyond Text: Theater and Performance in Print After 1900 Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theatre Made Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era Performance in the Zócalo: Constructing History, Race, and Identity in Mexico's Central Square from the Colonial Era to the Present Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Lisa Jackson-Schebetta Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 2 Visit Journal Homepage Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine Lisa Jackson-Schebetta By Published on May 14, 2017 Download Article as PDF ! Widget Didn’t Load Check your internet and refresh this page. If that doesn’t work, contact us. In fall 1680, the newly appointed viceroy of New Spain, Tomás de la Cerda, the Marqués de la Laguna and Conde de Paredes, made his entrance into Mexico City, passing through two triumphal arches, one municipal and one ecclesiastic. In New Spain, as in Europe, viceregal arches depicted mythical, iconic and emblematic figures and stories. Through the arches, the city and church of Mexico City (standing in for New Spain) communicated to the incoming ruler their hopes for his governance, while extolling the qualities he presumably already possessed. The two arches under which Laguna passed are perhaps the most written about of all arches in New Spain, as much for their criollo designers as for their content. Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, intellectual luminary of Mexico City, designed the municipal arch. Rather than adhere to the conventional European custom of using classical mythology and symbolic iconography, he populated his arch with images of past Mexica rulers, and a single, powerful, indigenous god, Huitzilopochtli, patron of Tenochtitlan. [1] Rising literary talent Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz designed the ecclesiastic arch. In contrast to Sigüenza y Góngora, she opted to utilize the motif of Neptune. Sor Juana made local references, as well: the unfinished cathedral and the flooding that plagued the city. The arches have been well examined, at times together and often alone, across the fields of history, literature, and cultural studies, including within discourses of the Latin American Baroque and developing criollo consciousness.[2] They have also been situated within the larger mise en scène of the preceding months’ viceregal re-enactment of the trajectory of Hernán Cortéz from Veracruz.[3] Despite both arches’ multiple references to water, however, and both Mexico City’s and Tenochtitlan’s long and complicated relationship to the lacustrine environs of the basin of Mexico, the arches have yet to be examined in relation to the conflicted, and ongoing Desagüe (drainage) project in the northeast quadrant of the basin of Mexico, a massive project which the viceroy likely made an obligatory tour of in the first days of his reign. In this article, I examine the two arches not as performing (nor as a performance of) imperialism, anti-imperialism, Baroque communication, or criolloismo, a priori. Rather, I situate the arches within both the human and the natural history of the city and its basin (or, rather, the basin and its city), in an attempt to both follow and build upon charges laid out by Dipesh Chakrabarty in relation to the Anthropocene. Chakrabarty argues that to think of the human as geological we must “scale up our imagination.”[4] In order to respond to the Anthropocene’s collapse of human and geological chronologies, we must, as historians, work against what Chakrabarty characterizes as the “conscious tendency” of “philosophers and students of history” to (falsely) “separate” human history from natural history.[5] I build on Chakrabarty’s examination of the Anthropocene by situating the 1680 viceregal arches volumetrically, through a focus on water and its contingent subterranean environs, rather than on the earth’s surface and its atmosphere (Chakrabarty’s focus). My application of the volumetric is adapted from Mark Anderson’s work on contemporary Mexico City.[6] There are two larger conversations that I hope this article engages. First, I ask how the Anthropocene can move performance history towards a merging of human and natural history.[7] How does the Anthropocene re-orient the ways in which a performance historian conceptualizes evidence and interprets the meaning-making (and history-producing) processes of images, actions, and human-built structures in relation to histories of water and land? Simultaneously, I hope to demonstrate how performance histories situated within the geographical and temporal margins of established discourses of the Anthropocene might offer means through which to scale up our imagination of the Anthropocene itself. Volumetric Methodology and the Anthropocene In “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Dipesh Chakrabarty writes that the Anthropocene has repositioned humans. Humans are no longer biological actors (beings that effect their natural environs through, for example, agriculture, pollution, urbanization) but, rather, geological agents, beings whose actions irrevocably change the earth. For historians, Chakrabarty argues, the Anthropocene offers a number of challenges. Historians must imagine (and contend with) deep time: both a future in which humans may become extinct and a deep past in which the human appears as but one quite recent species. While Chakrabarty centers his attentions on the implications of the Anthropocene for the historical imagination (and the merging of deep time with modern time), his provocations focus on the surface of the earth and its atmosphere.[8] Though the planet’s waters and stratigraphy may be understood as implicitly included in Chakrabarty’s analysis, he does not explicitly engage with either, enacting, arguably, a certain human-centered analysis of history even as he attempts to destabilize such analyses. That is, human life is largely lived on the terranean level of the earth. When humans in cities travel underground and/or explore the deep sea, it is through human-made apparatuses, dependent on air that circulates through human lungs. Geological history, in contrast, must move through sedimentary layers and along with currents of ocean, river, lake. Mark Anderson, in his study of contemporary Mexico City, critiques “the ‘flattening’ effects of modern planning, which may have originated in European cartographic traditions but which continue to feature prominently in data based and satellite representations of the world such as Google Earth.” [9] Anderson extends his argument to dismantle the “notion of the ecological footprint as a conceptual tool.” The “footprint,” he holds, despite its utility, is born of and beholden to the flatness and flattening enacted by geopolitics. Its emphasis, intended or not, on surface-centric engagement “both exposes and reproduces [ . . . ] cartographic territorializations, showing that cities are not contained by their cartographic borders, but still flattening them into schematic representations that fail to evoke the full volume of urban ecologies.”[10] While a volumetric perspective, inclusive of water as well as the subterranean, addresses a gap in Chakrabarty’s “Four Theses” for historians, Nigel Clark cautions that the volumetric is not simply a matter of moving up to the clouds or down to the magma. Rather, Clark calls for bringing “politics into an intensive engagement with the planet’s own dynamics: its process of sedimentation and mobilization, its layering and folding, its periodicities and singularities.”[11] In this, Clark and Chakrabarty share a contention: a collapse of human history and geological history, a charge Anderson prioritizes in his analysis of the subterranean transport systems and waterways of contemporary Mexico City. Anderson issues a challenge to the urban historian and planner alike to think in geological depth, as much as geographical surface, in order to enable “one to imagine a livable, sustainable future” in opposition to certain neoliberal, environmental, and Anthropocene-based narratives of an unavoidable apocalypse of ever increasing ecological degradation in Mexico City.[12] Anderson argues that waterways and subways testify not only to a sinking city (up to, perhaps, eight inches a year, and over 42 feet in the last 100 years), but also represent intuitive and imaginative (present and potential) ways of relating to implacabilities of environment. The “intense, entangled and” (literal and metaphoric) “fluid geographies” of Anderson’s contemporary Mexico City move through and contextualize the historical site of Mexico City 1680, as well.[13] Anderson reads waterways and subways. I also use waterways and human made constructions, but in tandem with human made images. The spatial and temporal dramaturgy of water and imagery in the 1680 viceregal arches enacts and evokes if not a collapse than a co-ordination of human and natural history. That is, the 1680 viceregal arches are not only imperial display, representative of iterative confrontations and negotiations between human histories. Rather, the arches invite a concurrent inclusion of the subterranean levels of Nahua cosmology as well as the lacustrine environment within/from which the city of Tenochtitlan was forged. The Basin of Mexico before and after Human Settlement (1700-1100 BCE) Viceregal entrances to Mexico City had been taking place since the 1500s to mark, celebrate and ritualistically enact the installment of the Spanish king’s proxy government in the New World.[14] Though arch-bishops likewise received celebratory entries, it was the viceroy that was considered the king’s “living image.”[15] As such, the viceregal entrance was the largest celebration of Mexico City’s many, elaborate festivals. Like viceroys before him, Laguna’s entrance into Mexico City was the culmination of a two to three month long itinerary across the territory of New Spain, from Veracruz through Jalapa, Tlaxcala, Cholula and Huejotzingo. His penultimate entrance took place at Otumba, the site of the decisive battle of Cortéz and the Tlaxcalans against Cuauhetemoc—notably, as Castro reminds us, a battle lost and won, given the environment of Tenochtitlan, via water. Cortéz, Castro writes, secured victory in “an odd naval war at about 2000 meters above sea level.” His “success relied largely on the water expertise of the city’s Indian enemies.” [16] Cortéz’s victory over the Nahua is but one event in a much longer history of the environs that ultimately hosted Tenochtitlan and then Mexico City. The natural history and human histories of the basin of Mexico, in tandem, provide particular insight into the dramaturgy of the 1680 arches. The basin of Mexico is a closed “hydrological watershed” (now artificially drained) of 7000 km. The basin’s lowest plane is a lacustrine environment approximately 2250m above sea level. The basin is surrounded by imposing volcanic ranges on its south, east, and west. Many peaks reach over 4000m; the highest is 5465m. The north of the basin is a series of hills. The entire area “lies in a Transversal Volcanic Axis, a late tertiary formation, 30-70km wide.” As such, “earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tectonic instability” have long been key features of the region.[17] Preceding human settlement, the basin hosted five shallow lakes, of which four existed at a higher elevation than the fifth, Lake Texacoco. Lake Texacoco not only received runoff from the other four lakes but also from the surrounding mountains, as well. In an open system, that runoff and its salt and mineral deposits would have flowed to the ocean. In the closed system, Lake Texacoco held the water, and hence, formed a briny body of water connected to bodies of fresh water. The basin hosted nine major environmental zones, all rich in flora and fauna diversity, including aquatic and subaquatic life.[18] Archaeologists assert that the “hydrological cycle of the basin” followed a seasonal pattern in which rain and snow “percolated into the soil,” to replenish “the aquifers and natural springs, or flowed into the lakes in the central plateau where most of it evaporated.”[19] The first humans settled in the basin between 1700 and 1100 BCE (well before the establishment of Tenochtitlan in 1345 CE and the height of Mexica rule in the 15th century CE). The human population increased until, by the 7th century BCE, the first evidence of human-built dams—attempts to control the unique characteristics of the basin— appeared. As the human population continued to grow in the basin, so did human intervention. Human concerns of fresh drinking water, waste water disposal, agricultural irrigation, and navigable waterways drove construction projects to protect against floods and isolate the salty waters of Lake Texacoco. Because all the lakes were connected, however, such projects involved masterful balancing acts. A dam in one lake necessarily affected another lake as well as the basin’s natural hydrological cycle which, in turn, “exacerbated the impact of drought and flood events,” effectively driving additional human intervention.[20] By the late fifteenth century CE, the population of the basin had likely reached 1.5 million. The region might well have been the “largest and most densely settled area in the world” at the time.[21] The vastness of its two major cities-- Tenochtitlan, the seat of the Mexica empire, together with Tlatelolco, ruled by Tenochtitlan at this time --is all the more impressive for having been forged into land, from whence there was so little. Tenochtitlan, as Mundy writes, had been no less than “reclaimed” from “shallow swamps around an island in Lake Texacoco.” Mundy continues to explain that “controlling the excesses of that environment was a constant battle, one likened to warfare both in representations of the city and in practice.”[22] Basin inhabitants had long navigated and negotiated the challenges of their environment. As the empire grew, Nahua rulers and their people faced the same challenges (fresh water, waste water, navigable waterways), but in an ever expanding scale. As Ezcurra et al point out, though the basin of Mexico was rich in species diversity, that diversity was not sufficiently abundant to sustain such a large human population. Water, necessarily, presented a key challenge and opportunity. Human inhabitants of the basin had learned to farm on land that regularly flooded, garnering sustenance from both the crops of dry farm land and the plants, insects, and small aquatic creatures of the seasonal wetland. The Nahua agricultural system, chinampas, first appeared between 700 and 900 CE.[23]Chinampas were a “succession of raised fields within a network of canals dredged on the lake bed.” The rich sediment of the canals could be spread across the fields, leading to “abundant harvests.”[24] Still, the Mexica could not sustain their city. Records demonstrate the massive import practices of the city at its height: 7000 tons of grain, 5000 tons of beans, 40 tons of dried chilis, 20 tons of cocoa seeds, and many other foodstuffs and goods, as well.[25] The resources, whether trade or, very often, tribute, had to travel through water ways, efficiently and regularly. Simultaneously, the city had to be able to be defended via waterways, and waterways had to be used to launch military offenses. The lives of Mexica rulers and their people, thus, were intimately, and exigently, bound to building and maintaining dams and canals, as well as aqueducts, desalination, and drainage projects. Both Ezcurra et al and Candiani caution that it would be a mistake to “interpret the success of Tenochtitlan and the Aztec empire as resulting from sustainable use of the basin’s natural resources.”[26] The Mexica and other inhabitants of the basin related to water in ways conceptually different from those of the Europeans who would arrive. Mundy explains how the Nahua “understood the surrounding environment to be filled with divine presences that made themselves manifest in the fall of rain and the sweep of the tides.” [27]Still, the Nahua absolutely and forcibly altered their watery world. The 600 years preceding the arrival of the Spanish attests to the most intense period of human construction in the basin. Humans built massive and numerous “dams, causeways, aqueducts, canals, irrigation systems, terraces.”[28] This construction, in conjunction with urban expansion, brought with it deforestation, desiccation, pollution, and overexploitation of the natural environment. Human innovation both succeeded and failed, spectacularly. In the mid 15th century, Mexica rulers built a 16 km dyke made of soil and stone “to prevent floods and protect freshwater from saline water,” which introduced “substantive changes to the lacustrine system.”[29] In the late 15th century Ahuitzotl (a ruler included in Sigüenza y Góngora’s arch) built a massive aqueduct to control waters newly possessed by military force from Coyoacán. The aqueduct collapsed in 1499, “destroying dwellings, places, orchards.”[30] I offer this not to discount the validity of Nahua cosmologies or technology, but to demonstrate against the oft-simplified platitudes that position indigenous peoples as ever in harmony with nature. Living with the lacustrine basin was, for the Nahua, akin to warfare, and just as brutal. For, as the natural history of the basin tells us, the environment was unstable, and, despite human efforts, continued to flood, overflow, and shift. Water, Conquest, Colonization The Spanish took advantage of water (both in terms of indigenous knowledge of water and the cutting off of fresh water from the city) to win Tenochtitlan in August 1521. Though the Spaniards capitalized upon indigenous water expertise, they also feared it, facts that the indigenous elite and non-elite utilized. Almost immediately after the final fall of the city, the indigenous “began to reorganize and repair their water networks.” [31] Some could gain favor by doing so with or for the Spanish. But, just as the Mexica rulers had known, the Spanish saw that control of the water equaled control of the city. The Spanish occupiers utilized indigenous expertise, but were not eager to cede rights to the water. In return, indigenous inhabitants, upon losing access to water infrastructure, sabotaged the system. By 1524, viceregal authorities employed water guards to protect Spanish rule. In the process of colonization, Spaniards imposed ideological, political and cultural rule of their empire by remaking the spatiality of conquered cities to reflect European aesthetics and use. In Tenochtitlan, Spaniards tore down indigenous structures (such as the Mexicas’ sacred temple), and rebuilt their own (the Templo Mayor) on the destroyed sites. They also erected new structures, while simultaneously re-routing main travel ways, re-patterning human dwelling space, and claiming new or repurposed land for European livestock and agriculture. As SilverMoon and Ennis detail, the Nahua altepetl (roughly translated as, but not equivalent to, city-state) of Tenochtitlan carried within its philosophical and geographical structure the political, historiographical, and cosmological convictions of its pre-Colombian inhabitants. Each unit of the altepetl was composed of smaller units (calpolli or tlaxillacalli) which formed “distinct regions or ‘neighborhoods’ consisting of extended kinship groups.” The “spatial organization” of the calpolli “structurally contain[ed]” the history and governance of the calipolli and the altepetl:” a “rotational pattern” reflecting the arrival of each calpolli and according to which “communal tasks and functions” were assigned and carried out for and within the altepetl.[32] The “Nahua cosmos” consists of layers above and below the ground, joined by the terrestrial plane—the altepetl—which, in turn, enables the joining of the earth (tlalticpac) “to the rest of the universe.”[33] The Spaniards destroyed the architecture of Tenochtitlan, but they also rearranged the city, enacting a material erasure of the altepetl and, effectively, Nahua cosmology with it. “The disruption of the continuity of altepetl structure,” write SilverMoon and Ennis, “constitutes one of the most severe and fundamental ruptures wrought by colonialism.”[34] “One might assume,” Mundy writes, “that the rupture of the Conquest and the diminishment of indigenous power in the city would have led to the erosion of technological knowledge, but there is abundant evidence of the continuing role that indigenous experts played in managing the valley’s water system.”[35] Such evidence, as Mundy documents, resided throughout the city, including the Desagüe.[36] Through the 16th century, it became increasingly apparent that the designs of the Spanish for their imperial city could not develop with the Nahuas’ conceptualization, usage, and engineering of water. The Spaniards’ European crops, livestock, city, and bodies needed water to be managed differently: no seasonal flooding, more freshwater, more effective flood protection. Moreover, the tension between indigenous and Spanish management of water had additionally resulted in the lakes “filling with eroded soil and frequently overflowing” the city.[37] Finally, the Spaniards, as Candiani simply and elegantly puts it, dreamed of dry land.[38] Viceregal authorities embarked on an ambitious plan: artificial desiccation of the basin. The Desagüe was begun in 1607. In its first year alone, the project required the labor of over 60,000 indigenous workers to dig tunnels and canals, Construction and labor demands, as Candiani details, rose and fell, peaking again in the decade after the 1629 flood, and again in 1760s and 1790s.[39] The project lasted nearly 200 years, progressing in fits and starts of failure and success. The closed system of the basin was opened, canals were made into roads, and lakes were drained; aqueducts, sewage systems, and dams were built, razed, and rebuilt, each major undertaking a performance of inter-cultural negotiation. At times indigenous or criollo engineers helmed the project; at other times, they were ousted. Spanish (at times drawing on Muslim or Roman technology), German, Dutch, indigenous, and criollo convictions and theories vied for primacy. Urban dwellers and rural inhabitants, as well as municipal and religious leaders, clashed over expectations and needs. And, still, the natural history of the basin, hydrological and stratigraphic, continued to challenge and defeat human needs for fresh water, waste water disposal, dry land, and travel. The Desagüe constituted a major feature of governance for each new viceroy (installed every 6-7 years, generally). Human histories continued to be brokered, and human efforts broken, by the natural, a context through which the viceregal arches of 1680 take on additional meanings. Human Histories brokered by the Hydrological Histories Viceregal arches in Mexico City, though temporary, were imposing structures. The viceregal entrance into Mexico City was the most expensive festival of all the many festivals and events to take place in the capital. Each entrance cost an “average of 23,000 pesos in gold (more than a Native American worker could earn in a lifetime).”[40] The triumphal arches featured as the centerpieces of the event. In 1680, the municipal arch, temporary and free standing in the Plaza Santo Domingo, was over five stories tall, reaching beyond the tallest permanent building in the city. It cost “approximately 2000 pesos in gold” and boasted gilding, bronze statues, and enormous painted canvases.[41] The viceroy halted his progress and heard an aural description of the arch. In the municipal arch, Sigüenza y Góngora presented twelve paintings of Nahua imagery: eleven rulers and Huitzilopochtli, the god who had led the Nahua to Tenochtitlan, and who served as patron of the city, god of war and god of sun. Anna More argues that though Sigüenza y Góngora’s arch clearly spoke the syntax of European statesmanship, he also “[broke with] the convention of spectacle” through his use of “local figures” in order to create both a “bridge” between Spain and New Spain and to affirm creole stewardship of indigenous history.[42] Though Sigüenza y Góngora may well have been crafting a bridge between Spain and new Spain, while asserting certain criollo priorities and prowess, his arch documents not only the collision of human histories, but the collisions of the human with the natural, processes begun before both Spanish and Nahua rule. The Mexica were led to the basin of Mexico by Huitzilopochtli; the god displayed the site of their capital to them, in the southwest area of Lake Texacoco. It is he, then, who might be seen as the fulcrum upon which the most intense period of human intervention into the lacustrine environment of the basin began. Though Sigüenza y Góngora may have intended the figure of Huitzilopochtli as a beginning point of (human, Tenochtitlan, and Mexico City) history, the god nonetheless also represents a transition, a before and after. Also: he is not a god of rain, but of war. By situating the Mexica within a lake, as well as blessing them in war, he representationally connects war with water, a theme repeated throughout the arch’s panels. Acamapichtli, who ruled from 1372 to 1392, and considered the first king of the Mexica, is rendered with reeds in his hands, expanding the city over lakes. His image is followed by Huitzilihuitl, who, Sigüenza y Góngora explained, governed with clemency even as he consolidated massive military victories.[43] Chimalpopocatzin, renowned for aqueduct building, follows. He not only contributed to major hydrological projects, he also sacrificed his life to protect the city and his descendants (its rulers). He is painted breaking open his chest, defending his children. Itzcohuatl, Motecohcuma Ilhuicaminan, Axayacatzin, Ticoctzin each represent territorial expansion for the Mexica empire, and, with it, water projects. Ahuitzotl, as noted above, appears as well. Sigüenza y Góngora renders Ahuitzotl drowning in water surrounding the city. Within the waves are numbers of old men, representing his counselors. Ahuitzotl constructed the ill-fated Acuecuexco aqueduct. Under Ahuitzotl, Tenochtitlan benefited greatly from the Chapultepec aqueduct, which brought fresh river water to the city, but the dry season regularly sapped the resource of its robustness. Ahuitzotl embarked upon building another aqueduct, that would “tap the five springs” near the city of Huitzilopochtli, governed by the city of Coyoacán. Coyoacán’s ruler, Tzutzumatin, as well as Tenochtitlan counselors, warned Ahuitzotl that his plan was ill-fated. He would not be able to control the waters.[44] Ahuitzotl ignored the advice and built the aqueduct in 1499. In 1502 it did indeed devastatingly flood the city. The lesson for the viceroy is to listen to advice with more prudence. Such a lesson could have been interpreted generally. It could also have been flattering to the viceroy: a critique of Ahuitzotl and a compliment to the better judgment of Laguna. Additionally, however, the floods had not stopped. The image resonates with the Desagüe, as well, resurrecting feats of indigenous engineering, capitalized upon and compromised by the Spanish colonists. The final image of the arch presented Motecohcuma Xocoyotzin. He is rendered in imperial grab, rather than in death. In the image, of course, we can read the survivance of pre-Colombia Tenochtitlan, as well as a hoped for amicable relationship between New Spain and the viceroy, first embodied by Motecohcuma’s welcome of Cortéz. Sigüenza y Góngora does not include the death of Motecohcuma, nor the deaths and defeats of his two successors and the resultant fall of Tenochtitlan. Though Motecohcuma is not represented in defeat, defeated he and his city indeed had been: through water. After receiving the presentation of the municipal arch, Laguna swore his intent to govern wisely and received keys to the city. City councilmen accompanied Laguna to the ecclesiastic arch, constructed over the façade of the Cathedral. The arch was seventy-five feet high and forty-four feet wide. It was comprised of eight major paintings, two between the columns, and four on the bases.[45] Again, the viceroy halted to hear the arch’s description. Sor Juana used Neptune to allegorize the viceroy. Historians have noted Sor Juana’s cleverness in playing on the Laguna (lake) of the viceroy’s name by choosing the water-bound Neptune.[46] I would add that, given the lacustrine environment of the basin the allegory of Laguna as Neptune enacts a more violent, and final, transposition of space and time as well. That is, though Sor Juana used Neptune to praise and direct the viceroy, the ecclesiastic arch also effectively transplanted three European figures (Neptune, Laguna, and the King of Spain) from the open waters of the ocean into a closed, and enclosed, water system: that of the basin of Mexico City. In the central painting of the arch, Laguna and his wife are depicted as Neptune and Amphitrite, ensconced in a chariot pulled by four seahorses. Each of the four winds (East, West, North, South) are rendered at the four corners of the canvas, surrounding the viceroy’s watery chariot, not unlike the mountains of hills that contained Mexico City. In the second painting of the arch, Sor Juana depicted the city of Inachus, flooded, and Neptune parting the waters with his trident. Sor Juana explained the image as a plea for the Marqúes to fund the drainage project of frequently flooded Mexico City. The theme is repeated in the next image, wherein Neptune steadies the island of Delos with his trident. Both images, born of mythology, nonetheless directly reference the environment of the city within the basin of Mexico. Neptune continued to appear throughout the images of the arch, accumulating meanings, yet carrying the first three paintings with him. When the presentation of the arch concluded, Laguna swore his allegiance to the Catholic Church. His procession continued into the viceregal palace and its chambers to enact the transfer of power. At some point in the initial days of his rule, Laguna must have toured and contended with the Desagüe, a continuation of the dramaturgy of the arches. Conclusion The given circumstances of the Anthropocene remain contested. The when of its beginning functions as a key fulcrum in debates over its usage. Does it date, as is often put forth, from the Industrial Revolution and its attendant increase in pollution and carbon emissions? Or, would it more appropriately eclipse the Holocene altogether, dating its origin back to the agricultural revolution, a human engineered event facilitated by the Earth’s own warming? In the Americas, European conquest and colonialism wrought profound environmental changes for both natural and human history. In March 2015, Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin asserted 1610 and 1964 as two plausible dates for the beginning of the Anthropocene, the former due to a spike in what could be characterized as a globalization of disease (initially set in motion by the collisions of cultures in the New World in 1492), and the latter due to nuclear weapons fallout.[47] They write, “The arrival of Europeans in the Caribbean in 1492, and subsequent annexing of the Americas, led to the largest human population replacement in the past 13,000 years, the first global trade networks linking Europe, China, Africa and the Americas” and the “mixing of previously separate biotas.” [48] As Crosby described in his well-known The Columbian Exchange, “the fact that Kentucky bluegrass, daisies and dandelions, to name only three out of hundreds, are Old World in origin gives one a hint of the magnitude of the change that began in 1492.”[49] Europeans also brought pigs, sheep, cows, horses, and dogs. As their numbers increased, enormous tracts of land—and animal, plant, and human life—were transformed irrevocably throughout the Americas.[50] The implications of “1492,” for humanity, has been well documented, historicized, and theorized. While I am not discounting the real devastation wrought by European colonialism in the Americas, the Anthropocene demands, as Chakrabarty points out, that we reconsider the primacy of our focus on the colonial project and process. In the basin of Mexico, as elsewhere, the collision of natural and human history predates 1492, and it is the much deeper natural history (tectonic plates, closed water system) that quite explicitly and profoundly shaped, and continues to shape, the human in that geography. Performance and theatre historians must confront the politics of a decentered human, while simultaneously writing the human in collision (aiming towards collapse) with the natural. A certain queasiness ensues, given the quite real inequalities, based on categorizations and locations of humans, of the contemporary world. As we continue to build methodologies, I suggest we bear in mind Mark Anderson’s characterization of the subterranean waterways of Mexico City: evidence of degradation and devastation, but also of innovation and imagination. I also suggest that the Anthropocene itself must be scaled up in our imaginations. Discourses of the Anthropocene prioritize conceptualizations of progress, coalescing around geographically and temporally bound ideas of development, industrialization, and modernization. Definitions of the Anthropocene must contend with massive, global, human interaction with the environment; such interactions are the very foundation of the conceptualization of the term. But by focusing on the primarily western and northern geographical and the post-1700 temporal, orientation of, for example, the Industrial Revolution, we set limits upon the deep history the term calls for, replicating, in effect, certain patterns of priorities that have contributed to the current moment.[51] In 1680, Spain and New Spain, including Mexico City, were not marginal within the mise en scène of global power. In terms of industrialization, however, both Spain and the Spanish Americas have been marginalized in relation to Western and Northern Europe and the United States. And, yet, such sites, as I hope I have demonstrated, can prove powerfully effective in moving towards a synthesis of natural and human history. The when of the origin of the Anthropocene is a red herring for our field. Likewise, a focus on the 1700s forward, I suggest, enacts a paralysis of the ways in which the Anthropocene can mobilize us, as historians and citizens. Lisa Jackson-Schebetta is an assistant professor and director of graduate studies in Theatre Arts at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on the hemispheric Americas and Iberian performance and theatre. Her first monograph, Traveler, there is no road: Theatre, the Spanish Civil War and the Decolonial Imagination in the Americas is forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press. She earned her PhD from the University of Washington. [1] I use Mexica, in place of Aztec, following contemporary scholarship. The Mexica are one tribe of the Nahua. I maintain the usage of “Aztec” if in a direct quote. I also use Nahua when appropriate. [2] See, for example, Alejandro Cañeque, The King’s Living Image: The Culture and Politics of Viceregal Power in Colonial Mexico (New York: Routledge, 2004); Francisco de la Maza, La Mitología Clásica en el Arte Colonial de México (Mexico DF: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1968); JR Mulryne, Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly and Margaret Shewing, editors, Europa Triumphans: Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe: Volume II (Aldershot and London: Ashgate and MHRA, 2004); Kathleen Ross, The Baroque Narrative of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Antonio Rubial García, Historia de la Vida Cotidiana en Mexico: Tomo III, La Ciudad Barroca (México DF: El Colegio de México, 2005); Georgina Sabat-Rivers, “El Neptuno de Sor Juana: Fiesta Barroca y Programa Político,” University of Dayton Review 16.2 (Spring, 1983); Michael Schreffler, The Art of Allegiance: Visual Culture and Imperial Power in Baroque New Spain (University Park, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). [3] See Cañeque, The King’s Living Image. [4] Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009), 206. [5] Chakrabarty, 201. [6] Mark Anderson, “The Grounds of Crisis and the Geopolitics of Depth: Mexico City in the Anthropocene” in Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America: Ecocritical Perspectives on Art, Film, and Literature, edited by Mark Anderson and Zelia Bora (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 105. The basin of Mexico continues to be a site in which the meeting of the human and the natural remains both legible and exigent. [7] I write move towards because, though I will situate human history alongside natural history, a total collapse of the two is beyond my discipline: I have but an introductory knowledge of geology. While I will draw upon and mobilize that knowledge, I do so with respect for experts in the sciences. I suspect a complete merging of human and natural history would demand the collaboration of humanists and scientists, not as in one field borrowing from another, but in terms of conceptualization of method, argument, and site. On a related note, I am intentionally eschewing object and thing studies within the humanities. In choosing not to work with, for example, Bill Brown, Nigel Thrift or Jane Bennet, or others, it is not for disregard of their work, but rather as a challenge to myself to be wary of substituting humanist readings of the non-human for natural history. [8] Chakrabarty, for emphasizing geology throughout the essay, demonstrates a preoccupation with the surface referencing, for example, the footprint (198), “accumulation in atmosphere of greenhouse gases” through “burning of fossil fuel and industrialized use of livestock” (198), biodiversity and the Sumatran rhino (210). [9] Anderson, 101-103; 105. [10] Anderson, 105. [11] Nigel Clark, “Geo-politics and the disaster of the Anthropocene,” The Sociological Review 62 (2014), 31. [12] Anderson, 105. [13] Ibid. [14] In 1528, triumphal arches hailed the Audiencia, or governing court. In 1611, arches were incorporated into the viceroy’s welcome. The office of the viceroy was created in 1535. [15] I take this phrase from Cañeque. [16] José Esteban Castro, Water, Power, and Citizenship: Social Struggle in the Basin of Mexico (New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), 45. [17] Exequiel Ezcurra, Marisa Mazari-Hiriart, Irene Pisanty, and Adrián Guillermo Aguilar, The Basin of Mexico: Critical Environmental Issues and Sustainability (New York, NY: United Nations University Press, 1999), 10. [18] Ezcurra, 11-12. [19] Castro, 43. [20] Ibid. [21] Ezcurra, 34. [22] Barbara E. Mundy, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015), 210. [23] Castro, 44. [24] Ezcurra, 7. [25] Ezcurra, 34. [26] Ibid. The idea recurs throughout Candiani’s book, as well. Its first explicit mention appears on page xxvi. Vera S. Candiani, Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental Transformation in Colonial Mexico City (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014). [27] Mundy, 210. [28] Castro, 44. [29] Ibid. [30] Castro 45. [31] Castro 47. [32] SilverMoon and Michael Ennis, “The View of the Empire from the Altepetl: Nahua Historical and Global Imagination,” in Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Racial and Religious Difference in the Renaissance Empires (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 153. [33] SilverMoon and Ennis, 155. I intentionally use present tense, here, as such cosmologies continue to survive in indigenous communities. [34] SilverMoon and Ennis, 153. [35] Mundy, 199. [36] We might situate such survivals alongside those already well documented in performance and theatre studies, particularly in regards to religious performance and mock combat. See Max Harris, Aztecs, Moors, and Christians: Festivals of Reconquest in Mexico and Spain (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000); James Lockhart, The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1992); Louise M. Burkhart, Barry D. Sell, and Miguel Leon-Portilla, Nahuatl Theatre Volume 1: Life and Death in Colonial Mexico (University of Oklahoma Press, 2004); Louise Burkhart, ed, Aztecs on Stage: Religious Theatre in Colonial Mexico (Norman OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011). [37] Vera S. Candiani, “The Desagüe Reconsidered: Environmental Dimensions of Class Conflict in Colonial Mexico,” Hispanic American Historical Review 92, no 1 (2014), 6. [38] See Candiani, Dreaming of Dry Land. [39] Candiani, “The Desagüe Reconsidered,” 15. [40] Linda Curcio-Nagy, “Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the 1680 Viceregal Entry of the Marquis de la Laguna into Mexico City” Europa Triumphans: Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe: Volume II, edited by J.R. Mulryne, Helen Watanbe-O’Kelly, and Margaret Shewring (Hampshire, England: MHRA and Ashgate, 2004), 353. [41] Curcio-Nagy, “Sor Juana” 353. [42] Anna More, Baroque Sovereignty: Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and the Creole Archive of Colonial Mexico (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 114-115. As Cañeque and others point out, though the use of Nahua imagery in such a public, diplomatic ceremony was indeed unheralded, the arch’s aesthetic and literary frame placed the figures firmly within European convention. Mixing of European and indigenous figures was not completely anathema in New Spain. The 1680 pageant of Querétaro, which Sigüenza y Góngora published a description of, included large parade figures of indigenous gods and the King of Spain. Indigenous arches, too, mixed imagery. In 1593, for example, Curcio -Nagy notes that an indigenous arch at the Chapel of Saint Joseph “depicted the Nahua eagle on a cactus being ridden by Saint Francis.” Chapel decorations included “pre-Conquest scenes and the ancient rulers of Tenochtitlan.” Linda A. Curcio-Nagy, The Great Festivals of Mexico City: Performing Power and Identity (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004), 173, n19. [43] My summaries of the paintings are drawn from Sigüenza y Góngora’s published description of his work. See Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, Teatro de Virtudes Políticas que constituyen a un principio. . . Mexico: Por la Biuda de Bernardo Calderon, 1680. Reprinted in Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, Obras Históricas, edited by Jose Rojas Garciduenas, (Mexico DF: Editorial Porrua, 1960), 229-361.. [44] Mundy, 64. [45] Curcio-Nagy, “Sor Juana” 366. [46] See Curcio-Nagy, “Sor Juana,” and Sabat-Rivers, for example. The depiction of Laguna as Neptune was repeated in 1683, with the arrival of the new archbishop and his entry into Mexico City. See Maza, 121-134. [47] Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene,” Nature vol. 519 (March 2015), 171. [48] Lewis and Maslin, 174. [49] Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1972), 73. Chakrabarty, in “Four Theses,” critiques Crosby. [50] See, for example, Elinor G.K. Melville, A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). [51] Wendt makes a similar case: “studies of the historical evolution of the Anthropocene can offer a new interpretation of the histories of Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires, as long as it avoids falling into conventional narratives of industrialization and modernization.” Helge Wendt, “Epilogue: The Iberian Way into the Anthropocene” in The Globalization of Knowledge in the Iberian Colonial World, edited by Helge Wendt (Berlin: Max Planck Institute Open Access Edition, 2016), 298. “Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine" by Lisa Jackson-Schebetta ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 29, Number 2 (Spring 2017) ©2017 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Curtis Russell Editorial Assistant: Christine Snyder Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: “Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy in the AnthropoScene” by Theresa J. May “Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene" by Shelby Brewster “Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine” by Lisa Jackson-Schebetta “The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti's Marrathon" by Milton Loayza “Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity" by Clara Jean Wilch www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director ©2017 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Acting in the Academy The Theatre of David Henry Hwang Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines Directing Shakespeare in America Writing, Acting, and Directing Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti's Marrathon Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene Tú eres mi otro yo - Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy & the AnthropoScene Introduction to American Theatre and Performance in the Anthropocene Epoch Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Ira S. Murfin Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 2 Visit Journal Homepage Dropping the Needle on the Record: Intermedial Contingency and Spalding Gray's Early Talk Performances Ira S. Murfin By Published on May 30, 2018 Download Article as PDF Spalding Gray’s autobiographical monologues exemplified the affective immediacy of virtuosic first-person storytelling during the 1980s and 1990s, and helped establish a distinct theatrical genre of autobiographical performance. Even though they were most frequently encountered in their film or video adaptations, Gray’s performances suggested the apparent authenticity with which an authorial voice speaking directly to an audience, free of technological or even representational apparatus, can be imbued. Although he was a key figure among a cohort of downtown solo performers in New York who were gaining widespread media exposure at the time, Gray’s reputation eventually reached beyond even the mainstream marketing of the avant-garde. [1] Retroactively recast in the popular imagination as simply an author and actor, without the avant-garde asterisk, Gray went on to play the role of quintessential New York theatre world hyphenate as a mainstream character actor, offbeat celebrity raconteur, and hip comic memoirist. However, despite the traditional literary and theatrical associations attached to Gray’s monologue genre, which I include in the category of extemporaneous live works that I call “talk performance,” I find that it was entwined with media forms and formats at its very roots. [2] Gray’s earliest talk performances were dependent on media technologies not only for composition and circulation, but they also made use of the physical presence of media to generate the performances in the moment and, counterintuitively, to resist the pull of mediation. My argument developed from research in Gray’s professional archive, in particular audio and video documentation of his works at various points in their processes of development. [3] These resources provide evidence that media presences occasioned and influenced Gray’s talk performance practice from the start, and that as Gray shifted the media relationships that generated his performances and the media venues within which they circulated, the nature of the performances themselves changed as well. In order to understand the processes of media interaction that defined Gray’s work over time, and to connect those processes to other, seemingly remote, media phenomena, I draw on theories and terminology related to media from several fields. In particular, I have found more recent scholarship on the problems and possibilities of performance and other cross-media relationships in the context of the cultural saturation with digital and internet technologies surprisingly applicable to Gray’s integration of analogue and print media formats within his extemporaneous performances. The term I use to describe the dependence of Gray’s performances on his live interactions with fixed media sources, “intermedial contingency,” recycles Fluxus artist Dick Higgins’s 1965 “intermedia,” which he coined to speak productively about work that belongs to no single established art category, but emerges at points of overlap between existing categories. [4] I find that this usage is also informed by the way the term has more recently been taken up in theatre and performance scholarship concerned with digital media and performance. In the 2006 collection Intermediality in Theatre and Performance , editors Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt ground their understanding of theatrical intermediality in the “presence of other media within theatre productions,” writing that “…intermediality is associated with the blurring of generic boundaries … and a self-conscious reflexivity that displays the devices of performance.” [5] Kattenbelt later writes that theatre offers a “performative situation” (a term he attributes to Umberto Eco) “… in which the other media are not just recordings on their own, but at the same time and above all theatrical signs.” [6] Similarly, in their 2012 book Multimedia Performance , Rosemary Klich and Edward Scheer define intermedial performance in terms of the interaction between media components: “Intermedial theatre subsumes media, uniting both live and mediated elements within the frame of performance … In intermedial performance, the realms of the live and the mediated develop reciprocity and are framed as complementary and symbiotic elements of the performance whole.” [7] I argue that Gray’s extemporaneity was triggered by, responsive to, and dependent upon his interaction with another media presence on stage, both procedurally for himself as a performer and as a means of making the spontaneity and variability of his performances legible to his audiences. This argument depends on recent media theory to explain how new media have impacted the communication ecology through the concepts of remediation and mediatization. The former, closely associated with the work of Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, describes the processes by which media reproduce, obscure, and define one another, while the latter identifies communicative structures’ saturation and constitution by media and processes of mediation even before other media enter the picture. [8] Further, I draw on terminology developed by linguistic anthropologists Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs to generically describe the processes by which the meanings of verbal performances are actively produced through the interaction between a performance and its circumstance — “contextualization,” in their terms. They then label the process by which a performance can be prepared for removal to another, more stable, context in order to be studied, replicated, circulated and, tellingly, read as text, while still remaining reasonably intact and coherent, as a process of “entextualization.” [9] This article recuperates early performances of Gray’s that have not circulated widely in order to offer an account of the development of his signature autobiographical monologues that turns out to be quite different from the one supported by his late-career and posthumous reputation as a masterful, if troubled, comic raconteur. I track Gray’s monologue format from its beginnings as an element of Three Places in Rhode Island , the trilogy of performances that became the foundational work of the renowned experimental theatre company The Wooster Group (TWG). I then turn to the generative strategies he used in two pivotal, though not widely known, early pieces, India and After (America) (1979) and The Great Crossing (1980), to show that they were developed in relation to the physical presence of fixed media objects, specifically non-dramatic texts and technologies for audio playback, with which Gray interacted and to which he responded extemporaneously in performance. In this, I build on theatre scholar Teemu Paavolainen’s argument for labeling onstage objects as such, rather than as “props” or “sets,” in order to free them from the inert and purely representational connotations the theatrical terms have accrued, and instead to emphasize the material presence and practical functions of the objects in question. [10] As physical mechanisms for accessing linear, unchanging content, Gray’s media objects differentiate themselves from and subject themselves to the instability of live performance. Rather than memorizing and reciting a composed text as in traditional theatrical performance, in which the actor becomes the playback mechanism, Gray emphasized the contingency of his live presence through his spontaneous interactions with media objects that stored, and from which he could retrieve, the fixed content of his performances. Gray structured his performances through these acts of retrieval: playing and stopping the record, reading (or listening to another performer read) a text that he brought onstage. In this way he kept his performances always contingent upon the occasion and demonstrably different from the media objects to which he related. Gray’s eventual celebrity was based on his apparent virtuosity as a storyteller, but his earliest experiments with extemporaneous talk were rooted in the intermedial contingency described above. While his explicitly intermedial works emphasized the shifting and negotiated nature of his live performances, the better known adaptations of his later monologues to film and book formats were made possible by their increasingly streamlined, repeatable, and narratively unified source performances. Over time, Gray’s monologues became less procedurally tied to the occasion of performance by excising their reliance upon his interactions with external media. Though he eventually gained a significant measure of fame and professional success for these entertaining and influential later works, this article looks at Gray’s original approach in his early talk performances. Though he newly generated and (re)constructed his performances for his audience each night in such a way that his “personal history would disappear on a breath,” I found that media played a surprising role in that process. [11] It would be difficult to overstate the importance of the film version of Swimming to Cambodia , directed by Jonathan Demme in 1987, to a popular understanding of Gray and his performance practice. The monologue was the direct result of a small role Gray played in the 1984 Roland Joffé film The Killing Fields , about the American bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War and the subsequent genocide perpetrated there by the Khmer Rouge. The film used Thailand as a stand-in for Cambodia, and Gray’s monologue centered on his experiences there while making the film and, in the original version, the aftermath of those experiences once filming had concluded. Gray initially presented Swimming to Cambodia in two parts, which premiered in early 1984, and required audiences to see the entire work over the course of two nights. The first part portrayed Gray’s awakening, during the shoot, to American military imperialism, and suggested an uneasy corollary between the war in Southeast Asia and adventure-seeking Western artists returning to the region to make a film about that war. However, the second part presented a more complex and less morally satisfying picture of Gray’s struggle to integrate his new political awareness into his life at home. It focused on the tension he felt between his newfound social conscience, which urged him toward a life of service advocating for the Cambodian refugee community, and his professional ambitions to take advantage of the career opportunities his first major film role offered and move toward the comfortable life he imagined a Hollywood career could provide. The two-part version of the monologue ultimately ended with Gray in LA, driving between auditions, while still wrestling with his indecision about whether he should return to the East Coast and devote himself to humanitarian work, or accept that the situation of humanity is beyond repair, that there was nothing he could do about it, and so might as well stay in Hollywood to enjoy the decadent end of civilization as best he could. [12] Three years later, Jonathan Demme’s 85-minute film adaptation of the live monologue offered a much more streamlined version, focusing almost exclusively on Gray’s political and personal awakening in the first half of the original. This more narratively unified, less ambiguous revision circulated widely and established the elements of Gray’s signature style for a new mass audience, including other artists who took up the autobiographical monologue form. These include the personal disclosure found in documentary theatre pieces and staged memoirs ranging from David Hare’s Via Dolorosa (1998) to Elaine Stritch at Liberty (2001), which have collectively come to be known in more traditional theatre circles as “one-person shows,” the self-reflexive reportage heard on public radio programs such as This American Life , the extemporaneous delivery of The Moth and other live storytelling shows, and especially the wholesale uptake of Gray’s table, microphone, water glass, and notebook in the theatrical monologues of his most apparent stylistic progeny, the monologist Mike Daisey, not to mention the surprisingly robust roster of solo performances about Gray that have emerged since his death. [13] Even Gray’s own subsequent monologues adhered closely to the template of Demme’s Swimming to Cambodia film, maintaining a stable authorial voice, satisfyingly coherent narratives, and trim running times in line with the movie, making them more easily available to publication and film adaptations. [14] Figure 1. Gray in the film version of Swimming to Cambodia , dir. Jonathan Demme, Cinecom Pictures, 1987. In contrast, Gray’s use of fixed media objects to emphasize the contingency of live performance and trigger extemporaneous fragmentation in some of his earliest works designated and emphasized the performance event as something other than either authored text or recorded media. Gray was developing a means of generating a performance through live, real time interactions between himself and the onstage media object – a record player, a book, or a personal journal in the cases discussed below. Each unique performance iteration relied upon Gray interacting with, and responding to, the object and its inscribed or recorded contents by reading a fragment of text aloud or dropping the turntable’s needle on the record, for example, and then building on his own personal associations with that bit of content as he encountered it. In time, this process would consolidate into a genre of autobiographical solo performances that has become associated with the very impulses Gray’s early performances seemed to criticize or sublimate: privileging the recalled past over present experience, constructing an apparently authentic authorial voice, and shaping memory into linear narrative. I argue that in making use of the difference between what he was doing onstage and the recorded or inscribed objects with which he interacted, Gray was dealing with the media environment in which his work developed by both introducing and holding off the possibility of the mediated circulation to which it would eventually succumb. His later monologues, while still showcasing his newly polished virtuosic extemporaneity, were able to scrub the material presence of media from his performances in order to arrive at a more set and settled product, primed for media adaptation. The more media interference in the work, in other words, the more tied to the original idiosyncratic performance event it would be. And the more seamlessly extemporaneous, the more available to media reproduction and circulation the work became. The eventual availability of Gray’s talk performances for adaptation to other media fundamentally relies upon a process by which the situational dependence that defined the early performances discussed here and that knit them to their occasion could be removed from the performance situation with enough contextual material intact to make his monologue legible both in terms of the narrative content it sought to deliver, and in terms of its origins in live performance. Linguistic anthropologists Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs, seeking to self-reflexively examine how ethnographic researchers like themselves approach cross-cultural verbal performances (storytelling and other forms of marked public address), articulated a taxonomy to define the stages of this process. Bauman and Briggs identify performance as a negotiated and relational process that provides a situationally dependent “special interpretive frame within which the act of speaking is to be understood.” [15] They refer to the process by which a talk performance and its situational support structure can be understood in terms of their mutually constitutive interrelationship as a process of “contextualization,” that is the active integration of the ongoing participatory exchange between audience and performer with the linguistic content of the performance. In order to subject performances to analysis and comparative study, though, and by extension in the case of Gray, in order to enable circulation and the accrual of value within a wider political economy, Bauman and Briggs contend that the contextualized performance must be decontextualized, or made portable, and then recontextualized elsewhere under more stable conditions controlled by the researcher, the book publisher, the film producer, etc. They refer to the process that prepares a talk performance, which they call discourse, for re- and de-contextualization as, simply, entextualization: “the process of rendering discourse extractable, of making a stretch of linguistic production into a unit – a text – that can be lifted out of its interactional setting.” [16] They argue that this extraction becomes the first step in a process that transforms a fundamentally responsive and changeable contextualized performance into a fixed, authoritative text, decentered from the occasion of its original utterance, and recentered in a standardized, replicable, and circulatable format. “Control over decentering and recentering is … one of the processes by which texts are endowed with authority, which in turn places formal and functional constraints on how they may be further recentered: An authoritative text, by definition, is one that is maximally protected from compromising transformation.” [17] Certainly this could be a description of Gray’s transition from intermedial talk performer, dialogically generating and sequencing his performances in front of a new audience each night, to the authorial figure he became, for whom spoken words and authored text became more or less interchangeable methods of delivering set content across multiple media platforms. This meant that he moved, in the course of his career, from his initial experiments with what media theorists J. David Bolter and Richard Grusin have called “hypermediacy,” in which a medium draws attention to itself in order to distinguish its processes of mediation from other media, to an ultimately successful example of what they term “transparent immediacy,” or the apparent disappearance of a medium through its own total integration within another medium. Both are examples, situated at either end of a spectrum, of the now inevitable processes of entwinement between and across media that Bolter and Grusin labeled “remediation.” [18] This capacity for media to distinguish themselves and disappear within, against, and in relation to one another is a product of a more total cultural mediatization , which media scholar Andreas Hepp identifies as the sustained and ongoing environmental presence of media and processes of mediation that structures cultural formations, logics, and interactions even in absence of any specific instance of mediation. Hepp writes: While mediation is suited to describing the general characteristics of any process of media communication, mediatization describes and theorizes something rather different, something that is based on the mediation of media communication: mediatization seeks to capture the nature of the interrelationship between historical changes in media communication and other transformational processes. [19] Hence the presence of media became a structuring logic in Gray’s work even before the possibility of the work’s mediation had been introduced, while media presences also functioned as the force in resistance to which his iconoclastic performance format initially defined itself. By meeting Gray at an early and foundational moment, this article positions him quite differently than do understandings of his persona and his career primarily based on the media adaptations of his later performances that circulated widely following the film adaptation of Swimming to Cambodia . Scholarly considerations of Gray’s career tend to either focus approvingly on him as a deceptively strategic performer who used the persona of a self-involved neurotic to uncover “universal” truths about the human condition, or else they critique what the authors see as Gray’s narcissistic privileging of his own experience in contrast to his shallow or facile treatment of the complex dynamics of power and representation in his monologues. The two most sustained studies of Gray’s work occupy these poles, with William W. Demastes’s posthumous celebration of Gray’s work, Spalding Gray’s America (2008), evincing the former, and Michael Peterson’s earlier Straight White Male: Performance Art Monologues (1997) consolidating the latter attitude around Gray as one of the chief representatives of monologic solo performance in the 1980s and 1990s. The cross-media adaptations of his monologues to film, video, and text, and the new performances that followed those media adaptations came to rely on a spectacularized sense of Gray’s masterful skills as storyteller. Peterson commented that “the table, notebook, and water glass of most of Spalding Gray’s performances … constitute[s] and legitimate[s] the presence of the solo performer in a manner more subtle than but perhaps as effective as more obvious design elements. Such physical elements of the monologic apparatus can emphasize the heroic aspect of the performance…” [20] This presentation of his work as heroically authoritative authenticated the assumption that it had been strategically planned out, highly structured, and probably fully written out in advance of his performance, an assumption that became more and more true over time. According to the alternate narrative I emphasize here, however, Gray actually first employed carefully arranged circumstances to newly generate his material in an ever-shifting performative present to which he subjected himself, rather than controlled. As he took more ownership of the media he used to structure his performances, he began to strip away the depersonalized intervening media that kept those performances anchored to the present in favor of material more closely enmeshed with the content of his monologues. In the examples discussed below, for instance, he moved from using random dictionary entries to structure India and After to a linear reading of his own travel diary in The Great Crossing . I argue that this would ultimately lead to the ostensibly immediate form for which he became known, in which no external media presence was apparent, while also leading him away from the extemporaneous contingency his early use of media sources enabled. The implications of the apparent paradox that the recontextualization of his performances in other media depended on the removal of contextualizing media from the performances themselves would eventually come to a pivotal head for Gray in the middle of a performance of his little-known monologue, The Great Crossing . The Wooster Group and Three Places in Rhode Island Gray came to his performance work via Richard Schechner’s influential experimental theatre company, The Performance Group (TPG), which he joined in 1971 along with his on-again-off-again partner Elizabeth LeCompte. LeCompte quickly became Schechner’s assistant director and was frequently put in charge of rehearsals in his absence. Taking advantage of the access to TPG’s theatre, The Performing Garage, granted by such an absence , LeCompte and Gray formed a small sub-cadre of TPG members and began experimenting with structured improvisations. These improvisations came to obliquely focus on Gray’s childhood memories and associations, which LeCompte as director shaped into an impressionistic, mostly movement-based performance called Sakonnet Point (1975), after a place where Gray’s family spent their summers in his home state of Rhode Island. This formed the first of a trio of works they would go on to make together over the next four years, all based in Gray’s memory and personal history, which came to be known as Three Places in Rhode Island , or the Rhode Island Trilogy . These performances are now understood as the inaugural work of what became The Wooster Group, the successor to TPG, which continues its work in The Performing Garage under LeCompte’s direction and is often considered the most influential contemporary experimental theatre company in the U.S. [21] The shared origins, and surprising similarities, of what became Gray’s and LeCompte’s signature styles can be identified in two structuring forces that emerged in TWG’s early work. The first was the use of physical objects and furniture, the table in particular, as structural through lines with scriptive powers of their own around which performances could be built and connected to one another. [22] The second shared strategy involved integrating external fixed media presences — written text, recorded audio, or video — into performances as dramatic content and intermedial counterbalance to theatre as a live and ephemeral medium. As early in the Trilogy as the imagistic, mostly wordless Sakonnet Point , the physical objects Gray and LeCompte introduced substituted for the usual textual foundation upon which performances are built. The process of creation involved the company responding improvisationally to objects Gray found in the garbage or in The Performing Garage , and the work grew out of the material possibilities and limitations which that space and those objects introduced, without a script or pre-conceived form. The set pieces and found objects became the raw material out of which the performance was built through the associational responses of Gray and his fellow performers. Actions and objects and the relationship between them were woven together into a structure that drew on individual identity and memory, but represented no reality but the present and no people but those in the room. [23] Gray and LeCompte made similar use of live citation in the present of material imprinted in the past for the second segment of the Trilogy, Rumstick Road (1977), which was built around audio Gray had recorded of interviews he had conducted with members of his family about his mother’s suicide a decade earlier. The historical anecdotes and documentary materials that made up Rumstick Road were not dramatically unified or psychologically resolved within the frame of the performance. Instead, they were “gone through,” as one might go through old letters or photographs, generating a fragmented and entirely new experience for audience and performers. The recordings of Gray’s past interviews with his family members took the place of a dramatic text, on the basis of which Gray and his colleagues transmuted personal associations into performed actions developed over the course of their rehearsal process, treating the recordings as “found” material often in spite of its personal significance for Gray. Having gained some distance on his personal material through mediation, Gray was able to privilege his role as a responsive performer. In 1978’s Nayatt School , recorded material was again onstage, but even more distant from Gray’s present than the familial tapes of Rumstick Road . In this case, the performance employed an LP recording of the original New York production of T.S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party , which Gray used to illustrate and notate his own history with the play. In particular, he associated the play’s main character, Celia Coplestone, who suffers a psychological crisis, seeks salvation in religion, and ultimately martyrs herself, with his mentally ill, religious mother and her suicide. Though ostensibly autobiographical, his material relationship to the play in the piece was equally temporal and kinesthetic. It was to the recording, and even more to the physical record, that he related. Gray responded in the moment to chance intersections with the fixed object as he dropped the needle at different points on the record, commenting dialogically while the snippets played for the audience. After introducing the record itself as a physical object, he reviewed Elliot’s background and biography and his own history with the play, which he had once performed in a Catholic convent in upstate New York, while spinning off childhood memories of his mother whose connection to the play was not initially clear. Skipping around to different scenes on the record, he summarized what had happened, what was happening, and what was going to happen in the play, while also isolating idiosyncratic aspects of the recording: the sound of laughter, the inflection of certain lines’ delivery, the play’s subtly surreal cyclical construction, declaring that “the more I listen to it, the more it starts to break down in terms of meaning.” [24] Figure 2. Spalding Gray in The Wooster Group’s Nayatt School (1978). Directed by Elizabeth LeCompte. Photo: © Clem Fiori. Courtesy of The Wooster Group. As Gray began to work out his relationship to onstage recorded media, he also relied upon offstage media capture and playback for the development of his approach, and on media metaphors in order to conceptualize and articulate what he was trying to do. In a 1997 conversation with Richard Schechner, he recalled his first attempts at monologuing in rehearsal, “Elizabeth LeCompte would tape them, transcribe them, and say, ‘Here let’s do it again like this.’ And that’s when I began to realize that what I was speaking was text, and could be used as a text.” [25] A February 1978 recording provides a glimpse into his performance technique emerging in rehearsal through improvisational interactions with the record, interspersed with dialogic interactions with LeCompte. Gray grew frustrated with trying to listen to, summarize, and speak over the record all at once, and bristled at LeCompte’s suggestion that he should be able to respond immediately to each drop of the needle. He compared the difficulty in finding something generative every time he dropped the needle to the well-honed skills jazz improvisation requires: “…jazz musicians do that and they play all night before they get warm, we’re talking about a very short space of time, that’s the problem….” [26] However, by the time they were performing the piece on tour in Amsterdam that fall, Gray had become capable of skipping through the record with alacrity and coordinating his summary with bits of information about his own life, weaving together a unique performance at the intersection of the recorded and the live. [27] Despite his own use of jazz improvisation as a musical corollary for what he was attempting, it is perhaps more relevant to note that at the same time in 1978 as Gray was stopping and starting a turntable to play snippets of The Cocktail Party in Soho, early hip-hop artists dozens of blocks north in the Bronx were similarly using turntables to cue up and repeat break beats at house parties and block parties, creating contingent, responsive, unchoreographed performances out of the material intersection between DJ, vinyl albums, and audience. [28] Whether the source was a dance record or modernist drama, the live events in both cases emerged from the interaction between the fixed media object and the responsive, improvisatory present of performance. India and After (America) Eventually, the mediated separation between past experiences and the performative present that Gray had developed in the Trilogy made it possible for him to detach a new set of independent talk performances from the larger theatrical apparatus of TWG, substituting a dialogic relationship with media for LeCompte’s direction and the TWG company. He later told theatre scholar David Savran: “…the monologues never would have come into being had not the Group been my first supportive audience, at the table, in Nayatt. And then it was a matter of shrinking the table down to a desk.” [29] In the post-Wooster Group solo performances he began presenting in the spring of 1979, Gray established the working process he would employ some version of for the rest of his career: reliance on memory rather than memorization, and on the conditions of the present moment to call up the past. Building on the use of pre-recorded audio in Rumstick Road and Nayatt School , his early talk pieces extended the fixed media presence to include onstage texts to which he could respond extemporaneously in performance, often using those sources to prompt or sequence a unique arrangement of narrative units. In particular, two of the most idiosyncratic of these early independent works, India and After (America) (1979) and The Great Crossing (1980), integrally relied upon the physical co-presence of pre-existing text within the piece. These texts – journal entries, newspaper articles, book passages, dictionary definitions – served to structure the everyday content of Gray’s experiences from outside of his authorial position, and to present each performance as a unique, collaborative experience shared by Gray and his audience. In February of 1976, LeCompte and Gray had traveled to India as actors in the Performance Group’s production of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children . Traveling with LeCompte and on his own in India after the tour had ended, Gray had a very hard time psychologically, succumbing to self-doubt, anxiety, and an unquenchable longing for idealized experiences. [30] What he called his “lost will” would continue for more than a year after his return to America, manifesting in various illnesses and depressive episodes. Gray responded by seeking out a range of therapies and self-improvement strategies, both in New York and on a cross-country retreat to Santa Cruz. He also made some impulsive and risky choices, including signing up to perform in pornographic films for a time, and refusing to give his name to the police after walking out on a check at a Las Vegas steakhouse, which landed him in jail for a week. Three years later, he returned to that year for one of his first post-Wooster Group performances, which he came to call India and After (America) . Dealing for the first time with his recent life rather than his childhood and young adult years, Gray turned again to external media as a way to both fragment and knit together his still-fresh memories in performance. The presence of fixed media served to distinguish the action of remembering and relating his recent experiences from a textually stabilized recounting of the same events. Though Gray’s talk performance, in his own estimation and in popular reception, would eventually come to seem merely an entertaining way to deliver autobiographical material, there is much evidence that Gray was initially at least as concerned with the performance event as a delimited site where a performance could be constructed and disseminated all at once as he was with spinning a good yarn. In an early notebook entry he wrote of his idea for what he was then calling “Speaking Memory”: “I want to put myself in a meditative non rehearsal state and try to allow the presence of the audience to influence the quality and subject matter of my memory… set up a space for myself and be there[,] work out a memory structure in which I begin with one memory….” [31] Gray began relating the memories that would become India and After in much the way he had imagined “Speaking Memory.” At home in his loft with only a few others present and the tape recorder running, he began with one memory, of the plane from New York to Amsterdam on the way to India. [32] However, he found himself dissatisfied with what turned out to be a mostly linear account of such recent experiences and he became interested in resisting the drift toward narrative unity. He told Savran some years later that it was the fidelity of his account that he wanted to try to interrupt: “I was too close to the material. It came out like a travelogue. I didn’t know how to fragment it by chance. All the other pieces had been fragmented by memory.” [33] He cast around for a structural device that would help create the distance he felt he needed between his psychological source material and the instance of performance, as the “found” recordings in Rumstick Road and Nayatt School had done . The solution he hit on was to employ a de-personalized intervening text to structure the piece from outside of his authorial consciousness. His first attempt at introducing an external fixed element against which the action of remembering and telling could be defined came that summer of 1979, while he was in residence at Connecticut College. Gray performed his new, then untitled, work about his travels in India as an in-progress presentation for students at the college. He identified the genesis of the piece as a period when he was traveling in Kashmir after the end of The Performance Group’s tour of Mother Courage . In later performances, he would refer to this as the critical moment when he “lost his will.” He explained, I found myself in Kashmir with only one book and that was, by accident, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse , which I had read before. And this book, because I was in an isolated mountain village, I was able to give a lot of concentration to it automatically. There was no work, there was a relationship suddenly with Virginia Woolf, which saved me from some of this terrific culture shock and somehow touched me down with some of my own culture and past. So what I’ve done is that I’ve cut out some sections from this book and I’m going to experiment with reading them in and out of my talk, so that there will also be some readings from passages of that book. [34] Gray’s intention seems to have been to use Woolf’s book much as he had the recording of The Cocktail Party in Nayatt School , as a source of mediated cultural fragments through which he could explain his own experience. In this case, Woolf’s introspective, quasi-autobiographical novel, focused on parental relationships and problems of memory and perception, was to create a parallel mental plane that Gray could treat as a kind of home base as he recounted the foreign-seeming settings and circumstances through which he traveled. However, in the end, To the Lighthouse does not appear to have offered Gray the structural counterpoint he was after. His use of the passages dropped away after he read just two selections early on, leaving him to complete the narrative in the same linear fashion he had previously. In this telling, Gray found himself increasingly alienated by his foreign surroundings in India during the tour and unable to make sense of his experiences as he continued to travel afterward. Eventually he found himself far off the usual tourist path in Ladakh, at the Tibetan border, where he was troubled to find that he felt so anxious and conflicted in the midst of what seemed to him an entirely harmonious culture. At this point Gray fled, apparently toward the comfortingly familiar angst of the West, but he found that his indecision, disorientation, and profound sense of alienation only persisted once back in familiar surroundings. To the Lighthouse turned out to be too enmeshed with the piece’s narrative content to mimic the strange displacement he experienced both at home and abroad. Gray instead cast around for a structuring device that would remain outside of the work, aesthetically and thematically indifferent, and would act upon his telling to constrain its structure and estrange its contents in a way that would actually reflect the seeming randomness of the experiences themselves. The reconfigured final template for India and After , which he would continue performing for a number of years , included a second onstage performer (usually Meghan Ellenberger) who read prompt words and their definitions at random from a large dictionary and then arbitrarily assigned time limits to Gray’s anecdotes. In response to each word, Gray would call up some part of an incident from his time in India and the year after, and try to tell it before Ellenberger rang a bell indicating the end of his allotted time, whether he had finished the story or not. Figure 3. Screenshot of Gray and Meghan Ellenberger in a 1980 archival video documenting India and After (America) in performance. A far cry from both the iconic staging and the media aesthetics of the 1987 Swimming to Cambodia film. VHS, Spalding Gray Papers, GRS071, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. [35] Drawing on an extensive, though still limited, palate of anecdotes, not all of which he got to every night, Gray’s associations could be direct or oblique. Some connections seemed obvious, like a memory of disciples of the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh at his ashram in India rushing to the spot where his chair had just been in response to the word “unseat,” or “co-signer” triggering the story of LeCompte bonding him out of the Las Vegas jail. Other responses were humorously counterintuitive; in one performance, “Protestantism” triggered an explicit story from a pornographic film shoot. At times Gray even resisted storytelling in favor of literal-minded enactment: the word “dumb,” with the definition “without speech,” prompted him to stammer and then go silent for a full minute, an action with no apparent relation to the past. Some of his associations and memories proved more poetic than personal: “ivory white” caused him to recall a Hindu religious story about the god Krishna revealing his divinity to his mother; “mitten” made him think of Kashmiri shepherds he had met who claimed they had never heard of New York or even Delhi, while on another night this same story was called up by the word “triangulate.” [36] Reflecting the dictionary’s rigid order and stability in the face of its non-linear uses, Gray actually told the snippets of his stories in more or less the same way every time, down to the phrasing of individual sentences. But the structure of the performance broke up the sequence and flow of the narrative, creating odd juxtapositions and points of entry, cutting off or starting stories at what would ordinarily be a mid-point, and often altogether eliding narrative segments that might otherwise be of import. This structure served to highlight the act of remembering in order to materialize the performative instance as distinct from the narrative content of the memories themselves. The usual understanding of this approach, affirmed by Gray and his observers both, is that the fragmentation produced by the random structure reflected the fragmentation of his psychological breakdown. [37] However, Gray had also inadvertently hit on a way to complicate the Westerner-transformed-by-travel-in-the-non-Western-world narrative that the linear telling invited. By procedurally scrambling the sequence of events he also scrambled the too-easy causal or metaphorical links by which he otherwise connected his mental disturbance to his travels in India, or even one incident to the next. By giving up structural control, Gray was able to displace the task of making sense of his experiences from an all-knowing authorial position onto a shared process in the performative present. And by privileging his idiosyncratic telling over an imperative to accurately communicate what happened, Gray thwarted the narrative expectations of both literary and dramatic form. This foregrounded the mental labor involved in extemporaneously calling up narrative fragments rather than assuming the authorial responsibility to curate and organize the work in advance. Though Gray still drew on personal memory, structurally India and After more closely mirrored burgeoning experiments with sampling and other media collage techniques occurring elsewhere at that same time, including The Wooster Group’s continued intermedial experimentation in Gray’s absence. Rather than obscuring his presence in the live performance, though, Gray’s use of the logic of recorded media to structure the piece emphasized what he was doing in the moment: responding, relating, strategically recounting. Ironically, it was the use of these contingent intermedial strategies that made this work particularly unavailable to the kind of wholesale mediatization that would be key in popularizing his later performances. The Great Crossing While Gray used apparently neutral external media to distinguish the recalled past from the moment of performance in India and After (America) , he employed a more personal textual source in order to deal with an even more immediate past in his little-known monologue The Great Crossing (1980). In its earliest versions, much of the performance consisted of verbatim readings from his private journal, detailing a trip across the country he took with his new girlfriend Renee in order to tour his monologues on the West Coast. This was in fact the very tour on which he began performing The Great Crossing , so the journal entries were just weeks old. At the same time, he also used public textual detritus collected along the way (newspaper articles, a new age magazine) to approximate the physical and cultural environments he passed through. And in at least some instances, he brought the piece’s narrative up to the very moment of performance, as if challenging himself to do away entirely with the traditional division between authoring the work and presenting it publicly. Like nearly all of Gray’s work, The Great Crossing depended on some deliberate separation of his past experience from his telling in the present. But no other work brought the two into such close, even overlapping, proximity. As he read his travel diary, he verbally footnoted what he had written, explaining and commenting on his ostensibly private thoughts. In this way, the raw material of his daily jottings were structured by his extemporaneous comments on that material in the moment of performance, a hybrid perhaps of the “found” personal media in Rumstick Road and the intermedial improvisation with The Cocktail Party in Nayatt School. As archival recordings of his West Coast tour suggest, Gray was caught between two creative strategies and what they might mean for his artistic future. The more narratively coherent strategy he found himself moving toward held the promise of positioning his still-new talk performance format, which was just beginning to gain traction on tour outside of New York City, into something repeatable and commodifiable that could serve his popularity and provide financial support. The strategy of media contingency generating extemporaneous discovery in performance that that he had been using meant that on some level he was re-making the work each night, keeping him nimbly responsive and present in the moment, but deliberately leaving no trace. Gray prefaced the reading from his diary with a straightforward reading of a different, very public source text: two newspaper articles he had encountered on his trip. The first described a shift in nuclear policy under President Carter from a strategy of mutually assured destruction to the capability for sustained, low-level nuclear war to act as a deterrent throughout an engagement. This was followed immediately by an article about a woman in Phoenix who had seen the face of Jesus in a tortilla. Gray delivered both in the same calm and measured tone, as if setting a baseline for the presence of performed text in the piece, no matter the source. After the newspaper readings had introduced the disparate and seemingly random sources he would draw on, Gray began his own story by emphasizing the incidental composition of his performance, explaining that, “It could start anywhere, but I’m choosing June 24 th at Schiphol Airport, a place of great anxiety for me…” He then launched into three stories of fraught departures from Amsterdam – the first cribbed from India and After and the most recent immediately preceding his “Great Crossing” in late June of 1980.[38]. Back in New York, Gray and his girlfriend Renee set off on a cross-country trip. As their journey began, Gray introduced the other, more personal, textual source around which the performance would be structured – his diary entries from the road. He explained the conceptual motivation for this in terms of building in a space between a past actor who had experienced the things described, but had no control over their presentation, and the present performer who could narrate and comment upon, but would not be held responsible for, that past actor’s deeds: [39] The thing that I’ve been working from is this diary here, now the idea was that I was trying to find at least two of the – at least two Spalding Grays – and trick him, the perverse Spalding Gray who is here in front of you tonight would trick the private Spalding Gray who kept a diary not thinking he was going to read it but thought that he would speak openly about the situation and therefore be able to censor things … [40] (Gray, “ The Great Crossing ; S.F …”) Figure 4. Gray’s journal entries for July 12-13, 1980. The passages he read onstage during The Great Crossing can be found starting on July 9th and running through the month of July, 1980. He did not always confine his reading to his own writing, he sometimes also read the information printed in the journal itself, such as “New Moon, Orangemen’s Day” on the 12 th . Journal: 1980, Spalding Gray Papers, C35.4, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. The diary represented both the most immediate record of these past experiences and the earliest impulse toward transforming them into narrative material. Rather than the random needle drops of Nayatt School or the rules-based structure of India and After , here Gray was moving in a linear fashion with pre-determined material, relying on his own impulses to determine when he would switch registers from text to extemporaneous talk. When he felt the impulse to reflect or comment, he would stop and verbally footnote what he read in the moment, before returning to the structured text. As there is no video document of The Great Crossing available, I cannot say if that switch was visible, but it was certainly audible in the shift from his perfunctory, seemingly disinterested delivery of the diary entries, undifferentiated from his reading of the newspaper articles and other found texts, to the enlivened, engaged commentary that reflected the voice, by turns ironic, curious, and anxious, which would come to be identified with Gray’s onstage persona. Paradoxically, it was Gray’s inscribed past consciousness that he posited as uncontrollably confessional, and his extemporaneous presence as a performer that could stabilize and edit what the journal’s text revealed. Here the media presence served mostly to distinguish his “private” past self from the “perverse” self in the present who commented upon the past self’s actions, bonding him in his physical presence more to the performance event than the often problematic adventures the diary revealed. Indeed, the entries proved truly personal: petty, ponderous, emotional, graphically sexual, and mundane. The journal showed Gray to be motivated, and hindered, by both selfishness and self-consciousness, and to be much more immediately concerned with his own creature comforts and internal monologue than his later ironic travelogues would usually suggest, preoccupied as they were with the unusual characters he met along the way. It became clear that Gray was wrestling with his form, wondering if he could continue performing monologues in the way he had been over the previous year or so, as contingent intermedial procedures, or if he would eventually have to commit to a more conventional dramatic literary model. The contradiction between the ambition and economic necessity to reach a larger engaged audience and the personal and creative impetus to process his experiences almost as they occurred, came to a head in an apparently authentic moment of mid-performance crisis on the Seattle stop of his tour. Caught between his extemporaneous impulses and the apparent pressure to present something entertaining and replicable, he stumbled over the very premise of his monologue format, and where he should take it next, telling his audience: You can only tell the same stories so many times; I can’t stand it anymore. Tonight’s stories are all new, I haven’t dealt with them at all, I feel they are best at their freshest, and I am really at the point where I really don’t know what to do with that problem, since I am in the position where I am trying to make a living from doing what I do and I think I can’t do it. Because it means setting them, and making them into routines and acting and being a stand-up comedian or what have you. [41] In this moment of crisis, he saw clearly that in beginning to make his talk performances more available to repetition and wider circulation, he was also letting go of some of the extemporaneity and discovery that keeping his performances anchored in the present had enabled. The loss that Gray recognized was the slipping away of an idiosyncratic format that resisted easy distinctions between inscription and enaction. Without a media presence to intervene in the flow of his narrative and differentiate Gray in the present from Gray in the past, Gray himself became more like one of his media sources as a performer, capable of starting at the beginning and playing through to the end in more or less the same way every time. While Gray’s crisis during the Seattle performance was a petulant complaint about having to dramatically reenact an experience no longer personally useful to him, it was also an expression of deep frustration that the unique character of his talk pieces as contingent, situational, intermedial, emergent phenomena might be lost in the course of his creative and professional development. In light of his eventual success, it is easy to dismiss this early dilemma as an independent artist merely anxious about “selling out,” but focusing on this early work also complicates the status he acquired in subsequent years as a popular storyteller situated within established genres: part comic raconteur, part literary author. Since his death in 2004, publication and archival projects have only further cemented his literary status; meanwhile, the genre of autobiographical monologue the mass media adaptations of his performances helped establish is now so common it no longer registers as procedurally or conceptually audacious by any measure. [42] The Great Crossing did not go forward in its original form following the West Coast performances and Gray’s crisis in Seattle. [43] Instead, a new, more replicable approach emerged in its aftermath. Gray premiered a new monologue at Dance Theatre Workshop in New York later that year called Nobody Wanted to Sit Behind a Desk , which re-configured the events of The Great Crossing as unbroken past tense narration, without the presence of the diary entries. [44] This transition from the ephemeral, contingent, and intermedial format of The Great Crossing to the set narrative of Nobody Wanted to Sit Behind a Desk , which was eventually published in Gray’s first monologue collection, best represents the change in Gray’s approach from the extemporaneously generated, conceptual and situational early performances to the replicable and circulatable, recognizably dramatic form that his monologues would ultimately take. [45] Later versions of the monologue presented an even more tightly controlled narrative, with elements added to the physical setting that came very close to what would become the official-looking set of Swimming to Cambodia : his habitual table and chair, with a map hung behind it, and a pointer on his desk. That monologue would follow a few years after this one, enabled by a mainstream film role and leading to opportunities for publication and film adaptations. Even later on, text and other external media still remained an occasional part of his monologues. Nobody Wanted to Sit Behind a Desk retained the twin newspaper articles that opened the piece and even continued to add printed media found on the trip — a placemat from a steak house in South Dakota, a news clipping about end times survivalists in Oregon, an article from the new age Good Times newspaper about UFOs on Mount Shasta. [46] Early versions of Swimming to Cambodia , too, ended with an extended reading from a stack of philosophical books Gray had turned to for guidance after a difficult return from Thailand. [47] But the intermedial contingency that had initially defined his talk performance practice no longer obtained. Although he was able to preserve the spectacularity of his skills as an extemporaneous performer across media, his performances were no longer tethered to the collective present of the performance event. Despite the wide circulation that Gray’s mediated work in film, video, and text enabled, the possibilities it had originally presented for a formally, procedurally, and conceptually daring alternative to the familiar tropes of literary and dramatic narrative and authorship were sidelined in favor of the artistic success and formal influence he ultimately achieved. References [1] During the 1980s, Gray was often associated with a number of iconic artists also making solo performances in downtown Manhattan, many of them crossing paths at the venue PS 122, including Laurie Anderson, Holly Hughes, Karen Finley, and Eric Bogosian. All were known for using the minimal material of their bodies and voices (and, in Anderson’s case, even more pronounced live interactions with media technologies than Gray’s) to create work that could be aesthetically challenging and politically provocative, but that also became quite popular and circulated widely on tour, in publications, and as audio and video recordings or broadcasts. [2] I use the term “talk performance” as a critical category by which I identify uses of extemporaneous talk as a material and a process, rather than simply a tool to convey narrative content. By framing talk, and not artistic discipline, as the defining aspect of Gray’s performances in my broader, ongoing research, I connect them to the performance work of other artists from different disciplinary backgrounds who I identify with the category by their use of extemporaneous talk as a central part of their practices, in particular the poet David Antin and the dance artist and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer. [3] My research was enabled by a Dissertation Research Fellowship I received from the Harry Ransom Center (HRC) at the University of Texas at Austin, where Gray’s archive is held, and benefitted from the aid of the Theatre and Performance Curator, Helen Baer, during my initial visit to the HRC, and later Eric Colleary on a follow-up visit, both generously responding to several inquiries. [4] In his 1965 essay (reprinted in 2001 with a further commentary he added in 1981 and an appendix by his daughter, the art historian Hannah Higgins), Higgins proposed that intermedia does not just mean the inclusion of more than one media, but that something new emerges between existing categories, with its own set of rules. For Higgins, it is not enough to merely remove a disciplinary element that appears particularly stultifying, like a play’s script, because the unscripted play will just default to imitating a scripted one in the absence of further disruption. Another element must be introduced to ensure the intermedial object or event remains in-between. Dick Higgins and Hannah Higgins, “Intermedia,” Leonardo 34, no. 1 (February 1, 2001): 49–54. [5] Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt, eds., Intermediality in Theatre and Performance (New York: Rodopi, 2006), 11. [6] Chiel Kattenbelt, “Theatre as the Art of the Performer and the Stage Of Intermediality,” Chapple and Kattenbelt, 37. [7] Rosemary Klich and Edward Scheer, Multimedia Performance, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 71. [8] J. David Bolter and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media , (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999); Andreas Hepp, Cultures of Mediatization, trans . Keith Tribe (Malden, MA: Polity, 2012.) [9] Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs, “Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life,” Annual Review of Anthropology , no. 19 (1990): 59-88. [10] In his study of performer-object interaction, Theatre/Ecology/Cognition , Paavolainen uses the broad term “object,” rather than the more specialized terms “props” or “set,” to speak about non-human or animal presences in theatrical performance. This leaves open questions of agency in the interactions between onstage performers and objects, which he sees as mutually constitutive through the object’s “affordances” (a term he borrows from psychologist James J. Gibson,) or intended interfaces, on the one hand, and the actions of the performer on the other. Teemu Paavolainen, Theatre/Ecology/Cognition: Theorizing Performer-Object Interaction in Grotowski, Kantor, and Meyerhold. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 13-16. [11] Spalding Gray, Sex and Death to the Age 14 . (New York: Vintage, 1986), xii. [12] Spalding Gray, “ Swimming to Cambodia ; Part 1; 1/31/84,” audiocassette, Spalding Gray Papers, C4766, Harry Ransom Center. [13] These include Blues for a Gray Sun (Nilaja Sun, 2004) , A Spalding Gray Matter (Michael Brandt, 2005), Swimming to Spalding (Lian Amaris, 2009), and Who Killed Spalding Gray? (Daniel MacIvor, 2017) to cite only examples that include his name in their titles. [14] All four of the monologues Gray made after Swimming to Cambodia were published in mass-market editions intended for literary consumption, not theatrical production: Monster in a Box (1992), Gray’s Anatomy (1993), It’s a Slippery Slope (1997), and Morning, Noon and Night (2000). Two of these were also adapted to film themselves: Monster in a Box (1992) was directed by Nick Broomfield, and Gray’s Anatomy (1997) by Steven Soderbergh. [15] Bauman and Briggs, 73. [16] Bauman and Briggs, 73, original emphasis. [17] Bauman and Briggs, 77. [18] Bolter and Grusin, 54. [19] Hepp, 38, original emphasis. [20] Michael Peterson, Straight White Male: Performance Art Monologues (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), 5. [21] David Savran, Breaking the Rules: The Wooster Group (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1988), 3-5. [22] Gray’s table, which, along with his habitual notebook, water glass, and flannel shirt, defined his post-Wooster Group performances, persists to this day in TWG’s work as a long, forward-facing table, often installed at the same level as the floor of the stage, where actors sit when not “acting” and from which text is often read aloud. [23] Savran, Breaking the Rules , 57-59. [24] Spalding Gray, “BSE II Oct. 23 (Mickery 1978); Intro and Celia (Mickery 1978); Nayatt Oct. 1978,” audiocassette, Spalding Gray Papers, C5155, Harry Ransom Center. [25] Richard Schechner, “My Art in Life: Interviewing Spalding Gray,” TDR: The Drama Review 46, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 162. [26] Spalding Gray, “Intro CP – Spalding’s Improv Feb. 8 ‘78; Nayatt; Cocktail Party II; Nayatt 1978,” audiocassette, Spalding Gray Papers, C5198 Harry Ransom Center. [27] Gray, “BSE II Oct. 23 (Mickery 1978); Intro and Celia (Mickery 1978); Nayatt Oct. 1978.” [28] In his history of hip-hop, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, Jeff Chang offers an account of DJ Kool Herc discovering this method through audience observation at rent parties in the Bronx in the mid-1970s. Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (New York: St. Martins Press, 2005), 77-85. [29] Savran, Breaking the Rule, 106. [30] He would, in fact, become particularly associated with what he eventually termed, in Swimming to Cambodia, his search for the “perfect moment” while traveling. A version of this search is described in preliminary terms in this work, along with the crippling indecision and self-doubt that accompanied it. [31] Spalding Gray, Journal: 1978-1979, Spalding Gray Papers, Series I, Subseries C: Notebooks, 1964-2003, undated, C35.1, Harry Ransom Center. [32] Spalding Gray, “India and After,” audiocassette, Spalding Gray Papers, C4927, Harry Ransom Center. [33] Savran, Breaking the Rules , 73. [34] Spalding Gray, “ India and After (Ct. College)” 1979, audiocassette, Spalding Gray Papers, C4929, Harry Ransom Center. [35] My thanks to Kathleen Russo, Gray’s widow, for permission to use images of items in the Spalding Gray collection at the HRC on behalf of Gray’s estate. [36] Gray, “ India and After ,” 1980. [37] Gray told Savran that he sought out the new structure because the linear telling “didn’t work the way my mind was working at the time I was going through it.” And Savran said the final format “puts the spectator in a position similar to that of the monologue’s distressed subject.” Savran, 73. Similarly, William Demastes wrote that India and After “duplicated on stage what was going on in Gray’s head during his breakdown in India and after.” Spalding Gray’s America (Milwaukee: Limelight Editions, 2008), 69. [38] Spalding Gray, “ The Great Crossing ; S.F.; Last Performance; September 13,” 1980, audiocassette, Spalding Gray Papers, C5007, Harry Ransom Center. [39] In many ways this anticipates an argument that David P. Terry would make about the split between the past actor and the confessional performer in Gray’s much later monologues. “Once Blind, Now Seeing: Problematics of Confessional Performance,” Text and Performance Quarterly , 26, no. 3 (July 2006): 209–28. [40] Gray, “ The Great Crossing ; S.F.; Last Performance; September 13.” [41] Gray, “ The Great Crossing ; S.F.; Last Performance; September 13.” [42] It is tempting to wonder if the crisis in Seattle about the necessity of setting his monologues in order to succeed professionally might provide some insight into whether pressures to continue producing and performing monologues even after the process was no longer useful to him could have contributed to Gray’s suicide in 2004, especially given his ongoing obsession with his mother’s suicide and his anxiety about replicating it himself. However, I hesitate to see Gray’s death in fatalistic terms despite the theme of suicide that ran through his life. For one, I think it is a stretch to imagine that because Gray talked about fear of suicide as a topic in 1977, or balked publically at professional pressures in 1980, that his despair and evident decision to take his own life in 2004 was somehow inevitable, or that his personal and professional successes in the intervening years are somehow rendered irrelevant. But also, as neurologist Oliver Sacks suggested in his 2015 New Yorker article about his evaluations of Gray before his death, the various circumstances of Gray’s life and death — the long shadow cast by his mother’s suicide, his reliance on his monologues as quasi-therapeutic processes, and the head injury he suffered in a car accident that made it difficult to write or perform and contributed to a debilitating depression in the last few years of his life — seem too intertwined with one another to draw out any conclusive causal links. (“The Catastrophe: Spalding Gray’s Brain Injury,” The New Yorker, 27 April, 2015.) Instead, I am interested in continuing to track Gray’s posthumous circulation as a media phenomenon. I argue that Gray’s estate has tended to frame Gray’s legacy in literary terms, instigating several posthumous publishing projects, including an edited volume of his journals and what exists of his unfinished last monologue, Life Interrupted . ( The Journals of Spalding Gray [New York: Knopf, 2011]; Life Interrupted: The Unfinished Monologue [New York: Crown, 2005].) On the other hand, as mentioned earlier, performing artists influenced and impacted by Gray’s work have created an entire genre of autobiographical solo performances that make use of his physical setting and his stylistic approach, as well as a more idiosyncratic, small but significant subgenre of performance works that deal explicitly with Gray’s life, death, and work as their main topic. (See note 13.) [43] My understanding of the transition from The Great Crossing to Nobody Wanted to Sit Behind a Desk is based on my archival research at the Harry Ransom Center, where Gray’s papers are held. However, in his survey of alternative theatre, Beyond the Boundaries , theatre scholar Theodore Shank makes a brief reference to this same work being performed in San Francisco under the title Points of Interest (America) . I have not seen other evidence that Gray used that title, which would suggest an interesting serialized relationship with India and After (America) , but it is possible he used it at some point before or after he was calling it The Great Crossing. Theodore Shank, Beyond the Boundaries: American Alternative Theatre (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 178. [44] Spalding Gray, “ Nobody Wanted to Sit Behind a Desk ; DTW 11/22/80,” audiocassette, Spalding Gray Papers, C5093, Harry Ransom Center. [45] Gray, Sex and Death… , 117-149. [46] Spalding Gray, “ Nobody Wanted To Sit Behind A Desk ,” 1982, Betamax, Spalding Gray Papers, GRS103-104, Harry Ransom Center. [47] Spalding Gray, “ Swimming to Cambodia ; Part 1; 1/31/84,” audiocassette, Spalding Gray Papers, C4766, Harry Ransom Center. Footnotes About The Author(s) Ira S. Murfin is a Chicago-based independent scholar, artist, and arts programmer. His research investigates the relationship between extemporaneity, artistic discipline, and media technologies in late 20th Century artistic vanguards. In his creative practice he primarily works with talk as a performance material. His article “Talking Text and Writing Extemporaneity: Aligning David Antin’s talk performance and editorial practices” will be published in Performance Research issue 23.2 in May 2018. More information can be found at www.IraSMurfin.com Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Stages of Struggle and Celebration: A Production History of Black Theatre in Texas Immersions in Cultural Difference: Tourism, War, Performance Stage for Action: U.S. Social Activist Theatre in the 1940s Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America: The Legacy of Alan Schneider as Beckett’s American Director The Contemporary American Monologue: Performance and Politics Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left Introduction: Mediations of Authorship in American Postdramatic Mediaturgies Kaldor and Dorsen's "desktop performances" and the (Live) Coauthorship Paradox Ecologies of Media, Ecologies of Mind: Embodying Authorship Through Mediaturgy Dropping the Needle on the Record: Intermedial Contingency and Spalding Gray's Early Talk Performances #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS: Weaponizing Performance of Identity from the Digital to the Physical Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 1 Visit Journal Homepage Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism By Published on November 8, 2018 Download Article as PDF Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism. Kirsty Johnston. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 240. Kirsty Johnson’s Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism is an invaluable resource. Having previously written Stage Turns: Canadian Disability Theatre, Johnston offers in her latest book an impressive range of approaches to disability theatre scholarship. Beginning with disability theorist Tobin Sieber’s assertion that modern art is preoccupied with twisted bodies, Johnston asks what considerations might emerge when framing disability as a key feature of modern drama. Her provocation ranges from critiques of twentieth and twenty-first century drama featuring themes of disability to contemporary performances created by artists with disabilities. In order to achieve this breadth, Johnson divides the book into two parts. The first section lays the groundwork for the critique ahead, providing a well-structured and accessible overview of disability studies aimed at a wide readership. Chapter one contextualizes disability theatre as a social project that simultaneously constructs and critiques popular representations of disability. As examples, Johnston points to the American-based groups Phamaly and DisAbility Project, the British companies Extant Theatre Company and Graeae Theatre Company, and the Australian Back to Back. Johnston uses this overview to inform her work in the second chapter, “Critical Embodiment and Casting.” Here, she queries the ethics of actor training and casting practices specific to disability theatre. While noting that different bodies require different material considerations, Johnston observes that contemporary performance practices often assume a normative body, rendering the rehearsal process inaccessible to performers with disabilities. Additionally, disabled characters are often portrayed by able-bodied actors, furthering exclusion while engaging in uncritical representations of disability. Chapter three, “Staging Inclusion,” argues for a reconfiguration of normative production practices in order to accommodate a wider range of bodies and abilities. Johnston closes this section of the book with an examination of Graeae Theatre Company’s productions of Federico García Lorca’s Bloodwedding and Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera, as well as Theatre Workshop Scotland’s production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. Through these case studies, Johnston demonstrates the prevalence of characters with disabilities within twentieth and twenty-first century dramatic literature, and how careful attention to these representations can prompt fruitful readings of familiar scripts. Johnston refutes critics’ claims that configure disability as added layers to understanding modern drama. Rather, she suggests that these layers are “important features of the text that have been there all along” (106). While the first section offers readers a clear, single-authored, scholarly argument, the second section, “Critical Perspectives,” deviates from this form, featuring two critical essays, an interview, and a script. This sharp shift in structure might make readers crave more connective tissue, yet the multifaceted nature of the section exemplifies how Johnston’s critical considerations might be taken up by scholars and applied to modern drama. “Critical Perspectives” opens with “‘Every Man His Specialty’: Beckett, Disability, and Dependence.” Written by Michael Davidson, author of Concerto for the Left Hand, this chapter employs disability theorist Lennard Davis’s concept of dismodernism to show that Beckett’s inclusion of disability serves to position the modern subject as disabled. Ann M. Fox’s chapter is a standout of the volume, generously offering an alternative perspective of The Glass Menagerie through a disability studies lens. Fox persuasively argues that an understanding of disability history, when applied to production practice, highlights the material conditions of disability that inform Laura’s actions in Tennessee Williams’s play. This reading suggests how future productions might position Laura as an empowered individual when presenting the audience with a nuanced critique of disability. One successful strand of Johnston’s investigation is her attention to disability theatre companies, particularly Graeae Theatre Company. Taking the form of an interview with the company’s artistic director, Jenny Sealy, chapter seven provides a probing profile of the company. Here, Johnston asks Sealy a range of questions about the company’s mission, training methods, and production practices, focusing on Blood Wedding and Threepenny Opera. Although the introduction to the interview format requires an adjustment in reading style that is largely unmarked, the chapter effectively integrates previous material, providing examples of how theoretical inquiry shapes production practice. Drawing on earlier discussions of The Glass Menagerie, the final chapter is comprised entirely of the script of Shattering the Glass Menagerie, a play that Terry Galloway, M. Shane Grant, Ben Gunter, and Carrie Sandahl first performed in 2003. The performance toggles between discussions by Sandahl and Galloway (playing themselves) and performances of scenes from The Glass Menagerie, bringing critique to bear in live performance. Curiously, the book ends with the script, not a formal conclusion. Perhaps this is strategic in that Johnston resists presenting disability theatre as a monolith, instead taking a multi-vocal, multi-genre approach to the subject that honors its contested and relatively new status as a field within theatre and performance studies. Furthermore, the arc Johnston builds throughout the book serves as a primer for future disability scholarship. Indeed, Johnston’s strength as a scholar lies in her consistent focus on grounding theories of disability in rigorously-researched theatrical practice. The wide range of resources provided in the text, including a robust collection of endnotes, positions Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism as a foundational text for scholars and artists from performance, history, literature, and disability studies. Alexis Riley University of Texas at Austin The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 1 (Fall 2018) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2018 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting The Late Work of Sam Shepard Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism “Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something”: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the Reconstruction of Melodrama Pageants and Patriots: Jewish Spectacles as Performances of Belonging Are We “Citizens”? Tony Kushner’s Deweyan Democratic Vision in Angels in America Edward Albee’s Sadomasochistic Ludonarratology in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Bodies and Playwrights Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Konstantinos Blatanis Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 2 Visit Journal Homepage Rewriting Greek Tragedy / Confronting History in Contemporary American Drama: David Rabe’s The Orphan (1973) and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003) Konstantinos Blatanis By Published on January 28, 2019 Download Article as PDF References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, & the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams Introduction: Reflections on the Tragic in Contemporary American Drama and Theatre Rewriting Greek Tragedy / Confronting History in Contemporary American Drama: David Rabe’s The Orphan (1973) and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003) Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy "Take Caroline Away”: Catastrophe, Change, and the Tragic Agency of Nonperformance in Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change The Poetics of the Tragic in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home: Activism and the Advertising of a "Lesbian Suicide Musical" Black Performance and Pedagogy Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Cailyn Sales Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 1 Visit Journal Homepage The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida Cailyn Sales By Published on November 16, 2022 Download Article as PDF Karen Jaime’s love letter to the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, a primarily spoken word venue on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, moves the reader toward an aesthetic practice aside from, but also part of, the Nuyorican identity marker. She marks the café’s history extensively in a single passionate breath, hopping from moment to movement in a stunning analysis of Loisaida, the “Spanglish version of ‘Lower East Side’ by the neighborhood’s then [the 1970s] predominantly Puerto Rican Spanish-speaking residents,” (14) as a physical, mental, and cognitive space of bicultural existence. Thus, she suggests a lowercase n for a ‘nuyorican aesthetic’ that both subscribes to the fundamentals of providing critical and cultural space for Puerto Ricans living in New York, as intended in its founding, yet also expands the framework to include other pejorative subjects interacting within that metaphoric and literal space. By keeping the word “Nuyorican” within the named aesthetic modality and lowercasing the n , Jaime signifies the expansiveness she sets out to express while also preserving respect for the primary function of the term as it relates to and ignited the Nuyorican Poets Cafe’s beginnings. The combination of acknowledging Nuyorican as a specific ethnic identity marker —and former pejorative—while simultaneously exploring the aesthetic’s capabilities to diversify and hold more stories from marginalized communities is emblematic of the entire book. Jaime’s Introduction proposes a nuyorican aesthetic subsumed by “recombination, positionality, gesturality, and orality,” (5) as formed by queer and trans artists who have moved through the Cafe’s history not unnoticed but, rather, buried in the sea of masculinist heteronormative chronicles. It seems pertinent to acknowledge that though this book is introduced as a means of restoring a largely concealed queer history, Jaime is regularly visiting the intersection between racial and sexual identities as a celebration of the Café’s queer artists of color’s aesthetic and artistic journeys. The argument laid out in the introduction is further developed by the book’s following four chapters, which serve as case studies of Jaime’s vision of nuyorican aesthetics. Through a focus on four specific sites of racialized queer and/or trans artists who have lived and breathed the space, Jaime poses how this Nuyorican aesthetic practice supports the Café’s founding principles without reducing the place to a specific ethnic narrative. Persuasively , the book analyzes the founding and obscured queer history of the Nuyorican Poets Café, challenging scholarship that frames the Cafe’s history in a purely heteropatriarchal context. In this, Jaime joins, or rather interjects into, the lively debate between Pedro Pietri and Bob Holman. Yet as she criticizes their debate, she claims that her scholarship “underscores the theorizations, the poetic formulations, the call-and-response interactions, and the histories and argumentation encoded in Nuyorican and nuyorican aesthetics.” (5) Oddly, she neglects to outline that debate. Perhaps she imagines a target audience of specialists who already know the context of their debate, which readers can surmise. Perhaps, the larger stakes she challenges relate to semantics more than historiography. One concept driving her argument of nuyorican aesthetics emphasizes recodification, which reinforces the survival technique of minoritized communities who reclaim terms that intend to demean and further marginalize them. Historically, she explains, the term “Nuyorican” was once used to condemn New Yorkans of Puerto Rican descent for their use of Spanglish, but co-founders Miguel Algarín and Miguel Piñero re-coded it with the Café to evoke shared identity. Recodification is further expressed, and extended in chapter two’s Regie Cabico, expressed by the way he “camps up his racialized ethnicity and his Filipinoness” (72) and in chapter four’s Ellison Glenn via their stage name and persona of “Black Cracker.” Anyone who rejects the efficacy of minoritized subjects reclaiming slurs or words that carry belittling historical connotations may doubt this crucial element of the nuyorican aesthetics Jaime analyzes. Nonetheless, most readers will laugh and recognize the activism of Ellison Glenn as Black Cracker performing their audacious poem about the homophobic and classist policies of the George W. Bush administration. Jaime’s metaphorical imagery in each chapter effectively paints the physical space and atmosphere of the Nuyorican Poets Café, making this book riveting to read. We not only feel like we are in the room but also that we are initiated into the deep connection and love to/of the space that Jaime shares. Despite this pleasurable non-linear narrative—which proudly displays a queeronology (a ‘not straight’ timeline) to intentionally center performance experience and marginalized aesthetics—the organization of this book somewhat obscures the thesis. Ultimately, each separate chapter operates as a love letter to its subject, while the entire volume resembles a museum, curating concealed performance history and genealogies of culture. The Queer Nuyorican has the potential to make readers hopeful for a queer future through its particular connection to the queer past. The book’s chapters, organized by artistic subjects, make for a gratifying read for specialists, as well as more general audiences, allowing for a more queer, and racially diverse, view of the field. Jaime’s intervention in performance scholarship is niche, in ways, yet also models a travelling aesthetic practice. It is easy to see how this book might supplement a course on the Nuyorican Poets Cafe or histories of hip-hop and spoken word, or even cultural diversity in the Americas. Certainly, its discourse on expansive aesthetics as a site of queer of color critique adds significance. Although her rendering of ‘nuyorican aesthetics’ might be read to pigeonhole minoritized subjects into political existence, Karen Jaime nevertheless reminds us how our bodies, and therefore identities, are implicated in performance. The Queer Nuyorican reminds us that when we analyze performance rich sociopolitical histories interact alongside the words, gestures, and bodies of respective artists; thus, the volume advances our grasp of performance’s body politics and Latinx cultural studies. References Footnotes About The Author(s) CAILYN SALES University of Colorado-Boulder Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue “An Art for Which There Is as Yet No Name.” Mobile Color, Artistic Composites, Temporal Objects The Anti-Victorianism of Victorian Revivals Tricks, Capers, and Highway Robbery: Philadelphia Self-Enactment upon the Early Jacksonian Stage “The Spirit of the Thing is All”: The Federal Theatre’s Staging of Medieval Drama in the Los Angeles Religious Community The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical; Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity Previous Next Attribution:

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

Shauna Vey Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 32 1 Visit Journal Homepage Staging Family: Domestic Deceptions of Mid-Nineteenth Century American Actresses Shauna Vey By Published on November 6, 2019 Download Article as PDF Staging Family: Domestic Deceptions of Mid-Nineteenth Century American Actresses. Nan Mullenneaux. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018; Pp. 400. In Staging Family: Domestic Deceptions of Mid-Nineteenth Century American Actresses, Nan Mullenneaux looks at significant figures of American theatre in a new way. From actresses active on the US stage in the mid-nineteenth century, she has selected those whose words remain in published memoirs, press interviews, or private correspondence. A comparison of their extant writings to the known facts of their lives reveals numerous deceptions, both large and small, by the actress-authors. What were they trying to hide? Mullenneaux organizes her interdisciplinary study around themes that emerge in the writings including motherhood, beginning a career, theatre work, family, moral refinement, marriage, mobility, and patriotism. Although each women’s experience is idiosyncratic, their tales coalesce into a fascinating picture of one cohort’s experience of, and reaction to, being a working woman of the American stage between 1830 and 1870. Virtually every aspect of these actresses’ lives put them at odds with nineteenth-century ideals, as the book argues. They worked, conducting business and exercising agency, while an “ideal” woman was dependent and docile. They continually traveled when it was generally accepted that a woman’s proper sphere was the home, and they sought acclaim when motherhood was considered a woman’s highest calling. In other words, their careers and life choices “threatened … the prescriptive gender roles” of the day (292). What Mullenneaux exposes in these proto-feminists is an unwillingness to claim their heterodox identities. Instead, in writings that adopt a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do approach, the actress-authors strove to disguise themselves as non-ambitious, patriotic homebodies. According to their self-reports, as Mullenneaux notes, none of these actresses entered the theatre ambitious for fame. Of course not. Only an urgent calling to rescue destitute fathers (or other kin) forced these dutiful women from the warmth of the hearth to the glow of the footlights. As we read multiple versions of this tale — from Fanny Kemble, Anna Cora Mowatt, Charlotte Cushman, Olive Logan, Mrs. Charles Calvert, Clara Morris, Kitty Blanchard, and others — the constructed nature of the actress persona becomes self-evident. Mullenneaux contrasts this assemblage of female testimony with that of contemporaneous male actors who readily claimed talent and ambition as their motivation. Mullenneaux seals her argument by introducing contradictory facts from the biographies of her female subjects. A particularly compelling instance is the collision between Laura Keene’s personal life and the nine-year legal battle she waged over intellectual property rights to Our American Cousin . Mullenneaux argues that Keene ultimately withdrew the suit for fear that testimony would “unmask her domestic deception” (290). Never having divorced her first husband, Keene had presented their children as orphaned nieces while covertly cohabitating with her business manager. Mullenneaux’s insightful analysis of the barely-averted scandal illuminates a larger history. While the pre-copyright entertainment industry was being modernized by the long-running single-play format, legal restrictions still prevented a woman, even a savvy business manager, from testifying in court. In addition to presenting themselves as ideal mothers and wives, this nineteenth-century cohort needed to appear all-American. Hence, they masked their origins and international travels with an aggressive patriotism that fit the age of nation-building and celebrated refined whiteness. Olive Logan supported the “looming genocide against the Native Americans” (158); Fanny Kemble described the black population of New York as “beyond description, grotesques” (156); and in Egypt, Rose Eytinge contrasted the subjugation of women in that “heathen territory” with the American woman “born and reared in freedom,” blithely glossing over millions of enslaved women in the US (156-7). Mullenneaux allows that “conformity to white supremacist views” may have been sincere, but might also have enacted a strategy for social acceptance (156-8). The book briefly discusses the African Grove actresses and some touring singers, highlighting that few non-white women had opportunities for acting careers in this era; Mullenneaux notes that no members of her cohort evidenced concern over this racial exclusion. By the mid-nineteenth century, actresses were often using photography for publicity and Mullenneaux’s astute analysis of their poses and costuming (and the commonalities among them) enhances the book. Another useful asset is an appendix with short biographies of sixty-five actresses mentioned in the text. The author’s choices of actresses give her work both focus and limitations. The women discussed do not represent a cross-section in any scientific sense, but rather the availability of documentation. Thus, the more verbose ladies-in-print, notably Clara Morris, Rose Eytinge and Olive Logan, dominate the conversation. We cannot guess how representative they were, but Mullenneaux is resourceful in seeking evidence and expands her cohort when she can. Furthermore, while she notes the difference between a memoir published at career’s launch and one written after decades in the public eye, she doesn’t adequately factor their differences into her analysis. The plays written by these actresses are also missed opportunities for additional insights. A closer focus on the women’s’ chronological relation to one another would be useful, and the book index should include entries for patriotism, photography, slavery, and each actress discussed. However, the book’s critical strategy is also its major strength. By examining the actresses’ own verbal and visual choices, Mullenneaux restores to them a degree of the agency they sought to obscure. Their biographies attest to their talent and courage; the accumulated evidence of their deceptions convincingly reveals the absolute and unforgiving nature of the gender-based strictures under which they labored. Each woman seems to have independently reached the same conclusion: violating the code would end career and livelihood. How they maneuvered is appropriate reading for an age when working women still face a constellation of questions about when, where, and if to compromise in order to persevere. Staging Family’s dense, panoramic depiction of the era is a treat for theatre historians and nineteenth-century scholars. The focal actresses are situated within the web of familial and professional interconnections that constituted the period’s theatre industry. Over the course of this book, we repeatedly cross paths with individuals as they might have crossed paths with each other. Ultimately, Mullenneaux paints a latitudinal picture, thoroughly contextualized and packed with detail. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Shauna Vey New York City College of Technology City University of New York Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics Law and Sexuality in Tennessee Williams’s America Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze Staging Family: Domestic Deceptions of Mid-Nineteenth Century American Actresses Excavating American Theatrical History: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors, Appropriate, and An Octoroon Mabou Mines Tries Again: Past, Present, and the Purgatory of Performance Space Rehearsing Bereavement with Laughter: Grief, Humor, and Estrangement Affect in Sarah Ruhl’s Plays of Mourning Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Erin Rachel Kaplan Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 2 Visit Journal Homepage Stage for Action: U.S. Social Activist Theatre in the 1940s Erin Rachel Kaplan By Published on May 27, 2018 Download Article as PDF Stage for Action: U.S. Social Activist Theatre in the 1940s . Chrystyna Dail. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016; Pp. 194. In Stage for Action: U.S. Social Activist Theatre in the 1940s , Chrystyna Dail reveals a significant piece of theatre history and asserts its rightful place in the canon of American drama. Dail begins the book by arguing that the claim often made by theatre historians such as John Gassner that social activist theatre died in the 1930s, only to resurface in the 1960s is a false one. Engaging with Douglas McDermott’s political performance continuum, Dail contends that the group Stage for Action (SFA) created a new kind of socially conscious theatre that served as a propaganda machine for the progressive left, as well as a megaphone for civil rights, workers’ rights, the fight against fascism, and more. For Dail, SFA did more than raise awareness about these issues; it was “diligently involved in theatrical praxis,” demanding and proposing solutions to social justice problems of the day (22). Dail breaks down her historical study of SFA clearly and concisely containing just enough cultural, political, and economic history to contextualize fully the work of SFA. Dail first offers a chronicle of its creation, arguing that SFA became a “reimagining of progressive performance, both during the War and after, and as an underappreciated model for social activist theatre in the United States” (15). Founded by four young women—Perry Miller, Donna Keath, Berilla Kerr, and Peggy Clark—SFA began as a tool to support the War effort in Europe and to bring attention to the “menace of native fascism” (33). In its brief three years, SFA amplified the voices of the some of the most radically anti-racist, anti-fascist, and pro-union thinkers of the era; was one of the earliest racially integrated theatre groups in the US; and became an integral part of Henry A. Wallace’s failed 1948 presidential campaign. Dail argues that what started as a small New York-based volunteer theatre group became the breeding ground for a multitude of progressive causes nationwide. To buttress this argument throughout the book, Dail highlights particular plays within the SFA canon that exemplify the progressive politics of the group. For the second chapter, Dail “explicates the relationship between Stage for Action and labor unions during and following World War II ” (45). Dail argues that Arthur Miller’s That They May Win put SFA in the spotlight. Eleanor Roosevelt discussed the play in her nationally syndicated “My Day” column, and it played to sold-out audiences in New York and around the country. For Dail, Miller’s “missing years” (1945-1946) were spent pouring “himself into revolutionary work and leftist theatrical criticism” (47). He ultimately became the playwright in residence of the SFA. That They May Win existed in multiple versions and called for better military wages, state-sponsored childcare, and the political activism of everyday Americans. Dail also critically analyzes Les Pine and Anita Short’s satirical musical Joseph McGinnical, Cynical Pinnacle, Opus II . Dail claims that “August 1946 through November 1948 saw SFA producing work that substantiated its position as the premier social activist theatre group of the late 1940s” (69). Chapter three examines specific SFA plays that adopted progressive views on racial politics including Charles Polacheck’s Skin Deep . The play was written to advocate for racial equality and address the anti-black violence and race riots making their way across the nation. In addition, Dail includes a detailed analysis of Ben Bengal’s 1946 play All Aboard , which dealt with transportation segregation, as well as Dream Job by Arnold Perl and Talk in Darkness by Malvin Wald. Performed as a part of the Wallace campaign, which fiercely advocated for full civil rights, universal healthcare and childcare, a robust social safety net, federal minimum wage laws, and equality for women in the workplace, among other policies, these SFA productions forced Truman to take up the cause of civil rights (though not as fervently as Wallace did) in order for him to win the 1948 presidential election. In her fourth chapter, Dail looks at yet another project of the SFA—its fight against the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Based on close readings, she argues that Miller wrote The Crucible after Sidney Alexander’s Salem Story , noting that “the plays share the same basic plotline and major characters” (112) and that “too many parallels exist between these two artists for the overlap in their plays to be mere coincidence” (116). Finally, she chronicles the red-baiting that several members of SFA suffered. She observes that “during the decade of 1946-1956 informants ‘named’ 40 percent of Stage for Action membership as Communists or subversives” (139) and that several SFA members were called to testify in front of HUAC. Due to the outcomes of these hearings, some lost their careers and even their lives. In her final chapter, Dail somewhat undercuts her argument that HUAC brought an end to SFA. While the group formally disbanded, several socially activist theatres and productions rose in its place. She offers in-depth readings of the post-SFA plays Open Secret by Robert Adler, who addressed the horrors of the atomic bomb, as well as We Who Are the Weavers by Joseph Shore and Scott Graham Williamson, who strongly critiqued the colonization of Puerto Rico. Dail closes her analysis and argument by making the point that the professionalism and dedication to social justice found in the SFA directly links the workers’ theatres of the 1930s with the companies founded after its disbandment such as the Free Southern Theater and El Teatro Campesino. Stage for Action serves as a fascinating and incredibly well-researched and well-written exploration into an important and oft-forgotten piece of theatre history. Given SFA’s commitment to the notion that “entertainment should have a purpose…and that purpose must be exerted to prevent war, stamp out race hatreds, combat poverty” (151) and more, I cannot think of a more appropriate time to revisit and revive their works. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Erin Rachel Kaplan University of Colorado Boulder Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Stages of Struggle and Celebration: A Production History of Black Theatre in Texas Immersions in Cultural Difference: Tourism, War, Performance Stage for Action: U.S. Social Activist Theatre in the 1940s Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America: The Legacy of Alan Schneider as Beckett’s American Director The Contemporary American Monologue: Performance and Politics Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left Introduction: Mediations of Authorship in American Postdramatic Mediaturgies Kaldor and Dorsen's "desktop performances" and the (Live) Coauthorship Paradox Ecologies of Media, Ecologies of Mind: Embodying Authorship Through Mediaturgy Dropping the Needle on the Record: Intermedial Contingency and Spalding Gray's Early Talk Performances #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS: Weaponizing Performance of Identity from the Digital to the Physical Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Eric M. Glover 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 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented Eric M. Glover By Published on April 29, 2021 Download Article as PDF by Eric M. Glover The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 33, Number 2 (Spring 2021) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2021 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The 1991 Lincoln Center Theater (LCT) production of Langston Hughes (1902-67) and Zora Neale Hurston’s (1891-60) 1931 antimusical The Mule Bone represents a milestone in Black theater history. The 1991 production resurrected a historical collaboration between two major Black artists and it used their work to offer a pointed critique of the 1990s New Jim Crow and US carceral system. In The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity, Raymond Knapp argues that in an antimusical, Black performers direct and turn the form back on itself by ironically reflecting the conventions of the genre.[1] The Black performer in an antimusical simultaneously deals critically with the form as a system of white supremacy while engaging in song and dance. In the brief exploration below, I focus on two episodes in The Mule Bone—the first, a trial set in a Black church, and the second, a song that depicts Black stowaways on train cars. Each suggests how the original 1931 work and its 1991 adaptation make milestone interventions in performing the policing of Black bodies in the Jim Crow and New Jim Crow eras respectively. Hughes and Hurston, like activist Michelle Alexander, had new ways to address problems, such as violence against and surveillance of black bodies, if only readers had paid close attention to their alternatives to practices that would produce the profit-driven prison industrial complex Animated by a staged reading held in 1989 at the Rites and Reason Theatre (RRT),[2] Providence, where playwright and director George Houston Bass[3] laid the groundwork for reimagining the The Mule Bone, Lincoln Center picked up where Rites and Reason left off. Lincoln Center gave the antimusical the presentation that had eluded its authors back in the 1930s in part because of The Theatre Guild’s Theresa Helburn’s conceptual bias against it and in part because of the falling out between Hughes and Hurston during their collaboration on the work. Thus the 1991 production of The Mule Bone becomes significant for premiering a book and a score written, directed, choreographed, and designed largely by a Black creative team. Bass wrote a prologue and an epilogue introducing Hurston as a character, composer Taj Mahal set five of Hughes’s previously published poems to music, director Michael Schultz and choreographer Dianne McIntyre helped performers give characters body and voice, and scenic designer Edward Burbridge and lighting designer Allen Lee Hughes transformed the physical setting of Broadway's Ethel Barrymore Theater into Jim Crow-era Eatonville.[4] Building on the early Black musicals of Eubie Blake, Will Marion Cook, and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Hughes and Hurston levy a critique of Jim Crow in everyday life—a critique thrown into bold relief against what Michelle Alexander calls “the New Jim Crow,” the mass incarceration that builds on the legacy of Jim Crow using custom and law to secure a disproportionate amount of Black people incarcerated through the three-strikes rule for violent-felony convictions and the War on Drugs.[5] Thus, the Lincoln Center production marks a milestone in Black theater because Schultz and McIntyre's interpretation helped to reclaim Hughes and Hurston's places as radical political philosophers. Hughes and Hurston's The Mule Bone, based on Hurston's short story, “The Bone of Contention” (1929), about a political and religious fight between Baptists and Methodists, tells the story of a bromance between two figures in 1924 in Hurston's hometown, Eatonville, in Orange County, Florida. In the short story, Dave, an angler, a Baptist, a hunter, and a local Nimrod, and Jim, a hen thief and a Methodist, do not have a bromance. In the musical Dave and Jim are transformed into a Baptist and a cakewalker and a guitarist and a Methodist, respectively. The events of The Mule Bone unfold around Dave and Jim’s characters. “Ain’t they playin’ somewhere for de white folks?” Daisy Taylor, the object of both Dave and Jim’s affections, asks.[6] Dave and Jim arrive from a performance engagement in a nearby all-white town and they treat the citizens of Eatonville to song and dance. They perform their song, “But I Rode Some,” with Dave dancing the cakewalk and Jim playing the guitar. Their desire to win Daisy drives the action forward but Dave stands in the way of Jim’s desire. Daisy chooses Dave but Jim lams him over the head with a mule bone in anger. Jim must stand trial before a judge and jury of his peers. “Now, who’s gonna take me home?” Daisy asks.[7] Act 2 takes place in the Macedonia Baptist Church which also serves as the courtroom. As James R. Grossman notes, “African-Americans in general looked to the church as an institution independent of white domination,”[8] suggesting that in this instance the church may have offered a site to administer Black rather than white justice. Joe Clarke, mayor of Eatonville, presides at the bench and other citizens serve in the capacities of defense counsel (Reverend Simms), prosecution (Elder Long), and town marshal (Lum Boger). The church gallery is full of Dave and Jim's supporters, the division between Baptists and Methodists becoming more and more pronounced. Joe finds Jim guilty of assault against Dave and makes Jim leave town, rehabilitate himself, repent for his sins, and return in no less than two years. “We colored folks don't need no jail,” Lounger, a citizen of Eatonville, declares.[9] However, Dave and Jim repair their relationship and run away together. The Mule Bone illuminates how theater invited Dave and Jim, the characters in the antimusical, to survive and thrive under Jim Crow. Dave and Jim earn their living by performing for white audiences.[10] Dave and Jim's songs, framed as diegetic performances, clue the audience in to the fact that they are in control of who they are and what they want: “Dem foots done put plenty bread in our moufs,” Jim says of Dave's dancing. Dave replies, “Wid de help of dat box, Jim,” referring to Jim's guitar playing.[11] Given that they have to contend with “two competing forces: the demands to conform to white notions of black inferiority and the desire to resist these demands by undermining and destabilizing entrenched stereotypes of blacks onstage [sic],” the audience sees “Dave” and “Jim” in the imaginations of white audiences juxtaposed against the "real" Dave and Jim.[12] Dave and Jim’s proxies, Hughes and Hurston, transform the minstrel stereotype that Dave and Jim perform to undertake social justice. Through their songs and dances, Dave and Jim imagine alternative worlds for themselves. For example, they re-create their subjugation by white audiences in “But I Rode Some” but they also ironically find their antidote to the internalization of white supremacy. Dave and Jim's "But I Rode Some" tells the story of a stowaway on a train captured and beaten by a white conductor, before being thrown in jail and shoved onto a chain gang: First thing I saw in jail Was a pot of peas. But I rode some, But I rode some. First thing I saw in jail Was a pot of peas. But I rode some, But I rode some. The peas was good, The meat was fat, Fell in love with the chain gang jus' for that, But I rode some. (90) Hughes and Hurston reflect on the fact that Black people in the 1920s-30s often experienced denial of a sense of place and displacement by taking up themes of escape and resistance in the musical number. Even in the face of violence, Dave and Jim resist: “Grabbed me by the neck, /And led me to the door, /Rapped me cross the head with a Forty-Four, / But I rode some!”[13] The song structure itself has roots and routes both in the era of slavery and freedom and influenced other genres of popular music around the world.[14] Illicit travel by passenger train, often called “riding the blinds,” offered a dangerous way for Black passengers to experience a thrill of autonomy. They parked their bodies between the locomotive tender (coal car) and the “blind” end of a baggage car to hitch rides from the South to the North and everywhere in between. If conductors caught a Black person riding the blinds, conductors would (literally) throw the passenger from the train.[15] Through its strategic use of irony and subversion, the antimusical The Mule Bone is as much about the affective and cognitive powers of representational visibility as it is about Black people's resilience. It was important to Hughes and Hurston that their Black audience saw a community of Black characters enjoying and loving life--Jim Crow be damned--self-governing their city and supporting its citizens. Looking at its 1931 and 1991 histories alongside each other invites scholars of Black theater to imagine how artists working more than half a century apart have deployed their creative powers to combat patterns of systemic racism that echo across the decades. [1] Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity (Princeton UP, 2006), 91. [2] Rites and Reason Theatre, based in the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University, is dedicated to producing continental African and diasporic stage works. [3] Bass, in his capacity as Langston Hughes's estate's executor, wrote two scenes for the production and he edited a critical edition of the script. [4] As directed by Schultz and choreographed by McIntyre, the opening night cast of the original Broadway production assembled the floor and the walls of a general store which also served as a jook joint with barrels and crates. A train track, beginning off stage left in the fly loft, formed a semicircle around the general store. The opening night cast also assembled the Macedonia Baptist Church which also served as the courtroom, including multiple rows of pews that faced downstage center, a stained-glass window upstage center, and the bench located downstage right. A community of Black people developed through song and dance in some of the most arresting musical numbers in the video of The Mule Bone that is on file at the Theater on Film and Tape Archive at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, New York. [5] Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010), 55-56. [6] George Houston Bass and Jr. Henry Louis Gates, Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life (Harper Perennial, 1991), 58. [7] Bass and Gates, 99. [8] Robin D. G. Kelley and Earl Lewis, To Make Our World Anew: A History of African-Americans since 1880 (Oxford UP, 2005), 90. [9] Bass and Gates, 78. [10] Musician Kenny Neal, a 1991 Theater World Award winner for acting, played the role of Jim and Eric Ware played the role of Dave. [11]Bass and Gates, 125. [12] David Krasner, Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African-American Theater, 1895-1910 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), 1. [13] Bass and Gates, 89-90. [14] It follows what blues musicians refer to as the A-A-B pattern where the first, second, fourth, and fifth lines repeat and the remaining respond. [15] Kusmer, 144. ISNN 2376-4236 Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: “Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble” by Elizabeth M. Cizmar “Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth” by Baron Kelly “A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson's Black Feminist Intervention” by Khalid Y. Long “An Interview with Elaine Jackson” by Nathaniel G. Nesmith "Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Works of Zora Neale Hurston" by Michelle Cowin Gibbs "1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston’s Antimusical The Mule Bone Is Presented" by Eric M. Glover “'Ògún Yè Mo Yè!' Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities" by Omiyẹmi (Artisia) Green "Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar" by Lisa B. Thompson "Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge" by Bernth Lindfors "Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation" by Olga Sanchez Saltveit "A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement" by Isaiah Matthew Wooden www.jadtjournal.org www.jadtjournal.org ">jadt@gc.cuny.eduwww.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Yu Chien Lu, Administrative Producer ©2020 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future Casting a Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative The Theatre of August Wilson Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration The Theatre of Eugene O'Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Introduction to “Milestones in Black Theatre” Interviews and Afterviews on "Milestones in Black Theatre" Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Re-Imagining America and Theater: Race, Representation, and Form Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Shilarna Stokes 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 Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis Shilarna Stokes By Published on May 13, 2019 Download Article as PDF ! Widget Didn’t Load Check your internet and refresh this page. If that doesn’t work, contact us. by Shilarna Stokes The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 3 (Spring 2019) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Over the course of five evenings in May 1914, more than eight thousand St. Louisans dressed up as Indians, Pioneers, and a host of allegorical figures—Gold, Poverty, and Imagination among them—to perform two versions of their city’s history before over a half million spectators. Hailed by George Pierce Baker as the crowning achievement of the early twentieth-century pageantry movement in the United States, The Pageant and Masque of St. Louis proved “what this drama of the masses may do for the masses.”[1] As the most prominent Symbolist dramatist in the U.S., the Masque’s creator, Percy MacKaye, enjoyed a well-established reputation for plays in which “time is a dream” and in which “the real and the ideal, the substance and the show, the actor and the audience, the poet and the figment of the poet’s imagination” are all interchangeable.[2] A friend and advocate of modernist theatre pioneer Edward Gordon Craig, he echoed Craig’s attack on realism in his own writings and advocated instead for the use of emblematic design elements, allegorical plots, and figurative choreographies.[3] In his view, these were essential to what he called “rituals of democracy,” mass masques cultivating “the half-desire of the people not merely to remain receptive to a popular art created by specialists but to take part themselves in creating it.”[4] By enjoining his fellow theatre artists “to illumine and body forth the life of the people in perennial symbols of power and beauty,” MacKaye pointed to a convergence of Symbolist aesthetics and nationalist sentiment that distinguished his unique contributions to the pageant movement in the United States.[5] The Masque was an elaborate work of verse drama, written in an erudite style and meant to be heard as well as seen. Nonetheless, like other pageants of its time, its narrative and its visual impact depended on the collective movement of large numbers of performers. Mass dances, pantomimes, and gestures allowed Masque performers to communicate its complex story to vast audiences that included spectators hundreds of yards from the stage. In U.S. pageantry, all scenes were, in some sense, crowd scenes. Due to their scale—with hundreds or thousands of citizens performing local histories for hundreds or thousands of their fellow citizens—mass pageants claimed an unambiguous correspondence between the actors and characters onstage, and the spectators in the audience. In doing so they were able to generate performative arguments about civic engagement, citizenship, and democracy on a grand scale, to promote certain kinds of collectivities over others, to incorporate communities seen as vital to the development of the social body, and to exclude communities that were regarded as dangerous to its integrity. To date, David Glassberg’s American Pageantry (1990) is the only published work to offer a substantive discussion of The Pageant and Masque of St. Louis.[6] Though he notes the Masque’s significance as a work of theatre, he is mainly interested in how it reflects Progressive Era conceptions of public history. As such, he steers clear of performance-based analytical approaches. By contrast, I offer here a close analysis of the Masque as a multi-layered performance that sought to shape St. Louisans’ conceptions of collectivity through embodied practices of dance, gesture, and pantomime, as well as the embodying practices of casting and puppetry. In what follows, I discuss how MacKaye’s Masque performed processes of civilization and Americanization that were designed to influence the newly expanded white population of the city. I draw on archival materials, MacKaye’s published works, contemporary secondary sources, and the text of the Masque to demonstrate how its three distinct choreographic modes sustained these processes. Its first and second modes of “playing Indian”—the ritualized and the savage—demonstrated for audiences the difference between rational forms of collective self-organization and wild expressions of collective fervor. The third mode, “Playing Pioneer,” gave shape to an ideal civic body that was consistent with the political and economic vision of city officials. The Pageant and Masque of St. Louis and its audience, courtesy of Dartmouth College Library. Reaching its peak of influence in 1914, the American Pageantry movement, as it was called by its supporters, sought to achieve the complete transformation of society through the nationwide production of large-scale pageants: vast open-air historical dramas in which hundreds or thousands of local amateur performers participated.[7] Pageants could be fitted to almost any purpose, though they were nearly always associated with Progressive Era causes and themes. Whereas some reformers saw pageants as civic rituals that would, in time, give shape to a genuine democratic social order, others saw them as an efficient means of achieving immediate political reforms and modernization schemes. Given the wide range of aesthetic and social ideals to which pageants aspired, and the variety of communities that created them, it is not surprising that current scholarship concerned with the American Pageantry movement is similarly varied, tending to ground itself in matters specific to locality and history, and to organize itself around discrete social problems.[8] For MacKaye, pageantry was an antidote to the problem of commercialized leisure and its effect on the white urban working classes. In The Civic Theatre in Relation to the Redemption of Leisure (1911), MacKaye’s sweeping proposal to reform theatre in the United States, he writes that “The use of a nation’s leisure is the test of its civilization. How then does [this gigantic producer America] organize his night leisure? Into what hands of public trust does he commit this most precious engine of national influence? Ignored by the indifference of public spirit, [it] has been left to be organized by private speculation—the amusement business.”[9] For MacKaye, only the symbolist theatre’s refusal to reproduce reality, its utopian insistence on transformation, and its emphasis on universality were powerful enough to redirect the gaze of spectators past motion-pictures, vaudeville, and burlesque shows, and towards a “nobler theatre” existing “not primarily for the boards” but “in the mind of man.”[10] It is on that imaginary stage, MacKaye believed, that human beings may play their proper roles and begin to envision better forms of social organization. The St. Louis Pageant Drama Association (SLPDA), organizers of The Pageant and Masque, had two interrelated aims: to inspire a sense of civic unity in a city with a rapidly growing and increasingly heterogeneous population, and to use this sense of civic engagement to convince voters to pass a new city charter calling for the construction of a downtown plaza and bridge. Three years earlier, Civic League members who had led the charter campaign represented it as a boon to business owners and real estate developers. When the campaign failed they blamed ethnic divisions that, from their perspective, kept residents focused on the growth of their own neighborhoods rather than on projects benefitting St. Louis as a whole. Reinvented as the SLPDA in 1914, former Civic League members argued that The Pageant and Masque would “influence and control the emotions of the masses that their civic activity will be along proper lines,” thereby convincing voters to pass the charter.[11] Whereas MacKaye drew on the language of art, spirituality, and the social good to explain the purpose of his masques and pageants, the SLPDA expressed its aims in terms of progress, efficiency, and the social order. Both, however, operated on the same collective subject: white St. Louisans whose collective mind needed redirection and cultivation, and whose collective body needed redefinition and reorganization. By 1914 St. Louis had already been the site of several monumental celebrations including the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition and Olympic Games, the 1904 Democratic National Convention, and the 1909 Centennial of the city’s incorporation. Whether to surpass its own recent history of mass performances or to outdo other U.S. cities that had recently hosted mass pageants, the SLPDA made a bold decision when it agreed to MacKaye’s plan for a colossal double-feature. Thomas Wood Stevens’s naturalistic pageant would present historical episodes performed during daylight hours. Beginning at nightfall, MacKaye’s masque would reinterpret Stevens’s play in the mode of symbolism, employing allegorical mass characters, abstract design, and sequences of symbolic mass movement. MacKaye’s frequent collaborator, Joseph Lindon Smith, would direct and choreograph the Masque, which in the end took more than five hours to perform.[12] The American Pageant Association defined the masque as a subgenre of pageantry in which the balance between realism and symbolism favored the latter.[13] The differences were more significant, however, for MacKaye. Whereas the function of a pageant is to reenact the past, the aim of a masque, according to MacKaye, is to point to the future progress of civilization. Unlike other pageants of the period, which MacKaye regarded as “tending [too much] toward the static,” his Masque sought to represent the dynamic energies of modern life with its crowded cities and its seemingly endless flows of people by means of “large rhythmic mass-movements of onward urge, opposition, recoil and again the sweep onward”—crowd movements that were part of the script and integral to the plot.[14] The plan to produce both a pageant and a masque solved what MacKaye described as “a special problem in crowd psychology.”[15] Because “a huge, half-socialized, modern multitude [is] unused by experience to imagining,” the unique function of the Masque was to “lead the attention of [the] large masses” from the realistic images presented in the earlier Pageant towards symbolic forms representing the theme of the Masque: “the fall and rise of social civilization.”[16] The idea that civilizations, like organic species, must evolve or suffer extinction, was one to which MacKaye subscribed. Like many among the intellectual elite, he believed that European civilization was in a state of irreversible moral and physical decline because of increasing political unrest and urban overcrowding, plagues that threatened to reach U.S. shores via the mass migration of Europe’s working classes. The Masque took place at the height of the “Great Departure,” historian Tara Zahra’s term for the period between 1846 and 1940 when more than fifty million Europeans moved to the Americas, the majority from Italy, Russia, and Austria-Hungary.[17] Between 1900 and 1910, St. Louis’s foreign-born white population increased nearly 35%, leading to an overall population increase of nearly 20%. Because St. Louis’s rapid growth was directly attributable to recent immigration, city officials recognized the need to communicate with a greater variety of immigrant communities than the city had seen in its history. The SLPDA claimed The Pageant and Masque would break down divisions between the city’s ethnically diverse communities. However, the eventual result of the six-month long casting process was to expand the definition of who counted as a St. Louisan by implicitly establishing whiteness, rather than duration of residency, as the only essential criterion. Although black St. Louisans outnumbered all but the city’s German and Irish populations, and although the overall percentage of black residents was increasing at a much higher rate than that of white residents, only one Black St. Louisan appeared in MacKaye’s Masque—in the allegorical role of Africa. St. Louis’s Indigenous community was small by comparison with other ethnic groups. Nonetheless, when a Chippewa group proposed to perform in an exhibition baseball game for a fee the SLPDA declined their offer.[18] Not one Indigenous person appeared in MacKaye’s Masque. As one example of the “rituals of race” described by Alessandra Lorini, the Masque of St. Louis proposed to gather as many as possible under the sheltering canopy of whiteness in order to answer the question of how to create cohesive civic bodies in an age of racial and ethnic conflict.[19] Although the SLPDA’s refusal to allow the Chippewa to participate was only one of many acts of exclusion from the pageant’s history, the number and variety of Indigenous communities represented in the Pageant by white performers (Mississippians, Osage, Missouri, and more), in contrast to the total invisibility of black communities, invites questions concerning why “Indians” were so heavily represented in the Masque. For the majority of its performers, participation in the city’s largest civic spectacle meant covering one’s face and body with copper greasepaint and “playing Indian,” a concept Philip Deloria has used to describe performances of nativeness by non-native peoples that serve to negotiate contradictory models of U.S. national identity.[20] In the Masque, the symbolic value of Indian bodies is so great that actual Indigenous bodies, as persistent reminders of colonial violence, are rendered invisible. MacKaye himself blamed the “reverted social state” of “the Indian race” on the invasion of the hordes of the bison.[21] Building on Deloria’s work, Shari Huhndorf provides additional context for an interpretation of the Masque through her focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century examples of “going native” that contributed to “the regeneration of racial whiteness and Euro-American society,” particularly during “moments of social crisis that [gave] rise to collective doubts about the nature of progress.”[22] In keeping with Huhndorf’s assessment of the kinds of social malaise that “going native” has habitually addressed, representations of Indians in the Masque in fact bore little resemblance to other contemporary attempts to portray Indigenous peoples, such as those that took place in Wild West shows or World’s Fairs. Rather, “playing Indian” in the Masque was a way to engage and represent white urban workers to themselves—the same leisure-seekers who MacKaye’s Civic Theatre plan proposed to re-educate. That pageants often linked the bodies of Indians to those of white urban workers can be seen in countless images that represent workers and Indians mirroring one another in costume or in gestures of submission. In cartoons like one from the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Masque participants perform gestures involved in Indian work and ritual on a mound “built by Moundbuilders Local no. 6,” and discuss “working class” themes such as baseball, lumbago, and the need for tobacco. The Masque’s representation of Indians was both a continuation of and an exception to the modes of “playing Indian” that took place in Wild West shows or in World’s Fairs, both of which had begun to attract massive audiences well before the pageant movement began. Like the Wild West shows in which Indigenous performers “[observed] traditional spiritual and cultural practices, [and] simulated hunting, shooting, and fighting back,” the Masque’s red-face performers engaged in similar activities for an audience.[23] Like the 1904 World’s Fair that took place in St. Louis, in which a model Indian school operated alongside a model ethnological village, the Masque aimed to articulate differences between “progressive Indians” and “primitive Indians.”[24] Unlike both the Wild West shows and the World’s Fairs, however, no Indigenous performers appeared in the Masque. As such, the Masque’s Indians did not aim at authenticity and were not subjects of an anthropological gaze. Rather, they offered an example of red-face performance that wholly consumed and expelled the bodies of Indigenous persons in order to re-present them as a collective symbol of a vanished past. Mass masques like MacKaye’s were spectacles that claimed to be anti-spectacle, and commercial enterprises that claimed to be anti-commercial. Defined as gatherings of the people and as events performed by the people (rather than as entertainments performed by paid professionals) the exclusion of Indigenous performers in pageants and masques was consistent with the contradictions inherent in an art form that sought to give shape to ideas of “the people” by excluding so many of them. To participate in a pageant not only meant “going native” but “becoming native,” in the sense of performing one’s affective belonging to a place in which one was not born. Indigenous peoples stood apart from the structures of belonging that the pageants and masques offered to others because, being neither white nor able to become white, they could only ever be foreign. Poster for A Pageant of Progress in Lawrence, Massachusetts (1911), courtesy of Dartmouth College Library, and “Sidelights on the Pageant.” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, May 29, 1914. The Prelude to the Masque depicted an invented lamentation ritual of the Mississippian or “moundbuilding” peoples, the eleventh-century inhabitants of the middle Mississippi river valley known for their creation of colossal earthwork mounds. In MacKaye’s mass pantomime, the Moundbuilders performed ceremonial dances, acrobatic feats, and prayers in honor of a deceased leader. Employing a ritualized mode of “playing Indian,” the Masque offered spectators a demonstration of a self-governing civic body that supported both MacKaye’s theatrical vision and the SLPDA’s economic vision, a body that achieved physical excellence through ritual dances imitating the geometrical forms of the city’s sacred architecture. Although few St. Louisans were familiar with them, MacKaye was so enchanted by his visit to the “Mounds” in nearby Cahokia, Illinois that he decided to recreate them in St. Louis’s Forest Park. The densely populated urban center of Mississippian culture, also called Cahokia, was composed of a vast central plaza, surrounded by mounds of differing geometrical shapes that may have corresponded to different civic functions.[25] The plan of this ancient city, with its monumental buildings, vast causeways, and interconnected plazas, correlated well with the city-of-the-future envisioned by the SLPDA. It also suited MacKaye’s goal, which was to imbue his Masque with classical values of form, beauty, and serenity. Despite the depiction of Moundbuilder rituals in the Globe-Democrat cartoon, the participants in the Prelude were not middle-aged men, but Boy Scouts and girls from local athletics clubs as well as young leaders of these organizations. Baker described the choreography of the scene: “Slowly and exquisitely, figures walking, swaying, dancing, filled the great stage [with] right arm extended before them and right knee raised high like figures in Assyrian bas-reliefs, [. . .] their bodies stained a yellow-brown.”[26] Ernest Harold Baynes added, “They represent the race at the very height of its civilization—a people beautiful of form and dress, lithe and graceful of movement, rejoicing in the strength and skill of their bodies which have been brought to a wonderful state of perfection.”[27] As described by Baker and Baynes, the athletic bodies of the Masque’s young performers provided the model material from which great civilizations may be built; moreover, their callisthenic acts confirmed that bodies can be “brought to perfection” through the performance of civic rituals such as the Masque. The Moundbuilders’ tightly choreographed ritual, designed by Joseph Lindon Smith, demonstrated their ability to create complex patterns without the instruction of a visible leader.[28] Instead, their movements were directed by the geometrical motifs of the emblematic setting: the cubic altar, the circular shrine, and the pyramidal mounds. Photographs taken during rehearsal and in performance indicate that although both male and female Moundbuilders entered in winding lines imitating the shape of a river, the boys soon began to dance in a rectangular pattern around the center altar while the girls danced towards them, eventually forming circles on stage left and right. The men playing older priests arranged themselves symmetrically at the edges of the largest central mound, creating a triangle while younger boys imitated their elders by making human pyramids on top of the two smaller mounds at stage left and stage right. In Smith’s choreography, the Moundbuilders were represented as a people who have so thoroughly incorporated the architectural shapes surrounding them that they need no leader to guide their movements. They performed as a self-governing civic body, whose rational and efficient movements corresponded in every detail to the design of their city. Moundbuilders rehearsing the Prelude, courtesy of Dartmouth College Library. As the Moundbuilders’ ritual faded from the audience’s view, an enormous puppet called Cahokia was revealed sitting on the center mound. Waking from a long sleep, he explained to the audience that the preceding Prelude enacted his dreaming memory of the glorious city in which he was once a revered priest. Now, Cahokia lamented, his people have vanished. MacKaye lovingly called Cahokia “my Über-marionette.”[29] Although the convention of beginning a pageant with a soliloquy delivered by an Indian was already well-established, MacKaye’s decision to use a giant puppet was unusual. Cahokia’s majestic presence not only underscored the extent of Edward Gordon Craig’s influence upon MacKaye’s ideas for reforming US theatre, it provided an aesthetic form through which MacKaye communicated his understanding of the relationship between the creative artist and the people in the socio-aesthetic work of pageantry. MacKaye’s profound reverence for Cahokia is unmistakable in numerous photographs that show him gazing up at the puppet and holding his hand. Conversely, photographs showing MacKaye rehearsing with actors tend to betray the posture of a stern disciplinarian. The different attitudes displayed in these photographs suggest that, for MacKaye, as for Craig, the human body was less suitable material for art than the Über-marionette. Unlike the “half-formed” people of St. Louis, who “provide[d] in themselves [the] creative material” for the poet-dramatist to shape and control, Cahokia’s puppet-body was an already complete work of art exemplifying MacKaye’s ideal civic body—his limbs, head, and hands moving in harmony with each other and with the music of the hidden orchestra.[30] MacKaye professed disagreement with Craig’s idea to banish from the theatre all “the personal elements implied in the work of the actor.”[31] However, his repeated descriptions of Masque participants as materials to be harmonized through performance suggest that MacKaye relished the opportunity to transform the individual bodies of St. Louisans as well as the civic body of St. Louis into works of art that might move with as much grace and precision as a puppet. MacKaye holds Cahokia’s hand. MacKaye directs Raymond Koch. Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library. Although the Moundbuilders, like Cahokia, embodied physical perfection, they did not speak. Consequently, it was left to Cahokia to speak as the last member of his once-civilized tribe: [. . .] Ai-ya, my people! Where are the tribes of Cahokia? Lo, where the trails of twilight Hide them, naked and scattered, Luring them backward—backward Deeper in primal darkness, Masking with brutes, and mating In lairs of the jungle.[32] With these lines Cahokia bewailed the de-evolution of his people into the beast-like Wild Nature Forces, a group of characters that allegorized all the allegedly savage Indigenous communities descended from the Moundbuilders. A brief glance at the text of Stevens’s Pageant helps makes this clear for its opening scenes trace the de-evolution of the Indian from a supposedly single, distinct culture (that of the Moundbuilders) to a passel of nomadic hordes whose degenerate habits are easily repelled, then reeducated through the heroic efforts of European colonists. In Stevens’s Pageant the Osage and the Missouri are represented as homeless, cowardly thieves who survive by means of begging and stealing. Those St. Louisans who played Osage and Missouri in Pageant scenes were double-cast as Wild Nature Forces in the Masque.[33] MacKaye’s stage directions indicate what has become of them: “Below [Cahokia], mysterious, half-seen, at the foot of the mound—crouched on its sides and lurking in the dark background--brute-headed forms of the “Wild Nature Forces” move and mingle with glimmering limbs of savages.”[34] Recognizing the Masque’s Indians as a representation of the city’s rapidly expanding white working-class population, it becomes apparent that the transition from “playing Moundbuilders” to “playing Wild Nature Forces” signified a descent from civilization into savagery, and from culture into nature, that was resonant with contemporary fears about urban overcrowding and the corrupting influence of urban life. Like the denizens of modern cities, which sociologist E.A. Ross described as scenes of “mingling without fellowship and [. . .] contact without intercourse,” of “wolfish struggle, crimes, frauds, exploitations and parasitism,” the tribes of Cahokia, the puppet-priest explained, were lured away from their ancestral grounds.[35] No longer heeding Cahokia’s prayers, the Wild Nature Forces began to obey gods of Chaos who urged them to give into their basest animal instincts towards lust, greed, and violence. In all their aspects, the Wild Nature Forces illustrated the savagery of the modern city. Their movements consisted of lurking, crouching, crawling, mingling, mating, leaping, rushing and, unsurprisingly, crowding. Unlike the Moundbuilders, the Wild Nature Forces exhibited only groping, half-formed motions or rowdy, uncontrolled dancing. They gestured in multiple, arbitrary directions, all at the same time. They remained close to the ground where it was darkest and their shapes, which are described in the text of Masque as “half-seen” or “half-hidden,” were indistinguishable from one another. When the allegorical character named Saint Louis first entered the Masque, he appeared as a four-year-old boy, dragging behind him an immense sword that was too heavy for him to lift. Sensing his weakness, the Wild Nature Forces attacked the child, attempting to kidnap him. At the moment Saint Louis miraculously heaved the sword high above his head, the Wild Nature Forces suddenly froze, stunned into stasis and silence, “the beast faces [. . .] startled, glowering, murmurous.”[36] Then, all at once, they “swarm[ed] down the mound sides, rush[ed] into the darkness and vanish[ed].”[37] Saint Louis’s first victory in the Masque was one in which the mere appearance of a symbol of European conquest possessed the power to bring savage bodies to order and banish them from the stage. Having cleared the stage of actual Indigenous persons, stage Indians, and allegorical Indian figures by the end of the first act, the remainder of MacKaye’s Masque followed the actions of an equally complex representation of the urban masses: the Pioneer. Like the Indian, the Pioneer was familiar from earlier public celebrations. Scenes of pioneers marching with the tools of their various trades or symbolically clearing the land in front of them with axes had been a staple of US civic parades since the eighteenth century.[38] Participants in such performances embodied the nation’s pursuit of manifest destiny and the conquest of the frontier. In the Masque of St. Louis, however, the Pioneer was adapted to reflect twentieth-century concerns. Whereas the Masque’s Moundbuilders illustrated a vanished preindustrial and proto-national collective subject, the Pioneers of the second act represented an emerging national and progressive collective subject, one that must repeatedly confront the problems of participatory democracy in an age of industrialization and mass immigration. The first of the Masque’s Pioneers entered a theatrical space from which the ritual center, the sacred altar fire of the Moundbuilders, had been removed. The only remaining light on stage emanated from the small shrine at the apex of the center mound. “Marching [forward] in widespread numbers” with spades, scythes, axes, and rifles, the Masque’s Pioneers were unlike their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forebears.[39] Carrying useless tools that clear no land, they presented themselves as lost and leaderless bands of men, desperately in search of a place to make camp or a direction in which to move. As if suddenly recognizing the urgent need for guidance, one Pioneer cried out: “Our trails blaze with desire and danger and hope born of to-day. For tomorrow is dim and yesterday–dead. Now lead us to-day! Lead us, St. Louis!” In unison the others echoed: “Lead us, St. Louis!” Emerging from a nearby shrine, Saint Louis suddenly appeared as a young knight clad in white armor with a brilliant white sword. The sword, as tall as the actor, animated the immense spaces of the pageant stage, directing the Pioneers onstage and the spectators’ attention. From this scene onward, the Pioneers did not move or act unless directed to do so by Saint Louis and his sword. As the Masque’s promptbook reveals, the leaders of each of the three Pioneer groups were given typewritten sheets that explained where their groups should assemble and provided precise instructions for movement and choral speech. When read together, and in conjunction with the text of the Masque, they demonstrate the degree to which the Pioneers functioned as an automatic onstage audience, one formed by a reflexive, nearly involuntary instinct to applaud the actions of civic leaders.[40] Though the Pioneers were unable to move forward on their own, they were able to pledge their obedience to new leadership without hesitation. By performing spontaneous consensus and by demonstrating their willingness to be guided by familiar symbols of Anglo-European culture, the Pioneers provided an onstage model of the kind of civic responsiveness SLPDA members hoped St. Louisans would emulate offstage. Throughout the Masque’s Second Act, the Pioneers displayed their boundless energy. The prompt sheets instructed them to move swiftly from mound to mound and between various parts of the stage, often for no reason connected to the action of the scene.[41] Though their movement rarely indicated any achievement, it nevertheless performed the dynamism of modernity MacKaye sought to represent. Whereas the measured, ritualized group movement of the Moundbuilders expressed the rhythms of ancient, civilized collectivities, the velocity and urgency of the Pioneers’ numerous flights across the stage expressed the rhythms of the modern city. Though they did not represent a self-organizing collective body on the model of the Moundbuilders, the Pioneers were no less attuned to the necessity of precision, repetition, and rhythm in their collective movements. Once they arrived at their appointed positions on the stage, their vocabulary of gestures was even more restricted than that of the Moundbuilders. Confined to gestures of deference and supplication, the prompt sheets instructed them to stand, half-kneel or kneel, to extend their arms up or out, and to point towards symbols as they appear on stage. Perhaps one of the only opportunities for creative self-expression came in the form of a repeated request, appearing in almost every prompt sheet, for the Pioneers to “make a great show of interest” through audible noises and visible gestures whenever any astonishing action occurred onstage. The Pioneers provided an onstage audience for the allegorical Saint Louis that was intended to serve as an exemplary model for the Masque’s actual audiences. Their prescribed range of movement suggests that in the Masque’s view, being an active participant in modern civic life meant being an appreciative and impressionable spectator. It meant performing one’s patriotism by recognizing symbols, manifesting visible and audible signs of reverence for them, and agreeing to be led by those who employ them. Saint Louis and the Sword, courtesy of Dartmouth College Library. If MacKaye hoped that audiences would concentrate on the mass symbols and choreographies performed by their fellow citizens, the St. Louis press was more focused on the masses of spectators themselves. Local newspapers attempted to give readers an experience of the Masque’s scale by printing panoramic photographs of its audiences, which by the end of its run comprised more than a half-million individuals. Many more saw the Pageant and Masque during its week of rehearsals prior to opening day. The test of any pageant’s success was the degree to which it could hold the attention of its vast crowds. As such, newspaper accounts remarked on the degree to which St. Louisans paid attention to an event that so many had presumed they could not understand. Spectators reportedly sat silent through sizzling summer days just to watch rehearsals, stood in the rain for many hours to gain access to the pageant grounds, and climbed dangerously high into trees to get the best viewing spots. Sitting amongst the minority of spectators who paid for their seats, Baker described several of his co-spectators chattering through the Prelude. From his perspective, they chatter because they are leisure-seekers, unaware that they are participating in a civic ritual. Eventually, however, the Masque worked its magic; the group became quiet and still as the performance continued. Before they left, he explained, they turned back to look at the stage once more before silently walking away. For Baker, this transformation proved that the Masque had succeeded in sparking a moment of collective attention that might be mobilized for social purposes if repeated often enough.[42] Despite Baker’s insistence on its singular social and cultural significance, MacKaye’s Masque, like so many previous civic entertainments, was absorbed into the urban spectacle it promised to transcend. Local papers reported everything from women overcome by heat, children lost in crowds, horses run astray, and water boys mobbed by thirsty spectators. Far from the ideal of civic enlightenment MacKaye describes in The Civic Theatre, spectators at one performance broke through seating barriers and caused a brawl. Rather than diverting attention away from the city’s commercial entertainments, some members of the Pageant and Masque’s chorus performed onstage at one of the city’s vaudeville houses immediately after an evening performance of the Masque. Although the Masque’s critical and popular success was unsurpassed by any previous or subsequent event to emerge from the American Pageantry movement, its legacy remains fraught. On the one hand, the Masque’s success directly contributed to the passing of the charter, which in addition to its construction projects ensured stronger concentration of authority in the mayor’s office, fewer elected and more appointed positions, and rezoning provisions that narrowed participation in the political process. On the other hand, it also led to the establishment of the St. Louis Municipal Opera Company, the expansion of St. Louis’s public arts programs, and the construction of a permanent outdoor amphitheater in Forest Park. Despite MacKaye’s belief that large-scale participation in the Masque would encourage St. Louisans to work together for reforms that grew out of their own desires and imaginations, he misunderstood the extent to which the SLPDA’s interpretation of the Masque as well as its definition of popular participation predetermined its potential social meanings. Luther Ely Smith, who saw the Masque as evidence of “the [same] civic spirit which will build our bridge, pass our charter, [and] stretch a plaza from 12th Street to Grand Avenue” was but one of many voices echoing the official interpretation.[43] In the end, MacKaye’s Masque may have taught St. Louisans more about collectively performing towards the aspirations of its leaders, than about collective action or even collective dreaming. It stands as an unusual cultural experiment, and as a reminder that greater participation by citizens in the social and cultural work of performance neither equates nor necessarily leads to greater participation in official political processes. The work of coalition-building requires more sustainable performance practices than pageant-makers like MacKaye tended to have in mind. Acts of inclusion, when performed on a monumental scale, have the power to make a positive impact on communities, and even to instantiate processes of engagement, but their long-term efficacy depends on how they cultivate the meaning and the practice of collective participation before, during, and after the crowds go home. Shilarna Stokes is a Lecturer in Theater Studies at Yale University. Her research centers on how mass theatrical events give shape to ideas about public space, collectivity, and political life. [1] George Pierce Baker, “The Pageant and Masque of St. Louis.” World’s Work, vol. 28 (Aug 1914), 389. Though known primarily for pioneering the study of playwriting in the United States, Baker was a prominent advocate of pageantry as well as a pageant writer and director. [2] Thomas Dickinson, Playwrights of the New American Theater (New York: McMillan, 1925), 19. Despite his lack of popular success, Dickinson and others considered MacKaye one of the most important playwrights of his day. His most well-known plays are The Canterbury Pilgrims (1903), Jeanne d’Arc (1906), Sappho and Phaon (1907), The Scarecrow (1911), and Yankee Fantasies (1912). [3] Directly quoting Craig’s On the Art of the Theatre (1912) in his own book, MacKaye described realism as “the blunt statement of life, something everybody misunderstands while recognizing,” (Percy MacKaye, The Civic Theatre in Relation to the Redemption of Leisure. New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1912: 28). Despite their occasional disagreements, MacKaye and Craig were lifelong friends and correspondents. On their relationship, see Susan Valeria Harris Smith, Masks in Modern Drama (Berkeley: UC Press, 1984): 49-84. [4] Percy MacKaye, quoted in Joyce Kilmer, Literature in the Making, By Some of its Makers (New York: Harper, 1917), 314. [5] Letter from Percy MacKaye to Grenville Vernon, March 12, 1907, courtesy of Dartmouth College Library. MacKaye’s work in the masque genre predated the rise of the pageantry movement. The Saint-Gaudens Masque, performed at the Cornish Art Colony in 1905, was MacKaye’s first critical success. His first pageant was performed at Gloucester, Massachusetts in August 1909 and, though it never materialized, he developed a pageant for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1910. After The Masque of St. Louis MacKaye created his most well-known and most often studied masque, Caliban by the Yellow Sands, based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. It was produced both in New York and Boston in 1916. MacKaye remained a member of the American Pageantry Association’s Board of Directors until its dissolution in 1930. [6] David Glassberg’s American Pageantry: the Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990) currently serves as the starting point for scholarship on MacKaye’s Masque. Two dissertations also consider the event in some detail from different perspectives: Kenneth Graeme Bryant, “Percy MacKaye and the Drama of Democracy,” (PhD diss., Univ. of Nebraska, Lincoln, 1991), ProQuest AAT 9200131, and Michael Peter Mehler, “Percy MacKaye: Spatial Formations of a National Character,” (PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2010), ProQuest AAT 3417299. [7] A bibliography of contemporary works on American pageantry can be found in Caroline Hill Davis, Pageants in Great Britain and the United States: a List of References (New York: New York Public Library Association, 1916). The American Pageant Association (APA), founded in 1913, was organized for the purposes of protecting the new genre from commercialization, disorganization, and low aesthetic standards. Its founding and development is discussed in Naima Prevots, American Pageantry: a Movement for Art and Democracy (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1990). [8] For examples of the variety of forms that current pageant scholarship takes, see the following: Karen Blair, “Pageantry for Women’s Rights: The Career of Hazel MacKaye, 1913-1923, Theatre Survey, Vol. 31, no. 1: 23-46; Brook Davis, “Let the children speak: The ‘Pageant of Sunshine and Shadow,’ a child labor pageant by Constance D’Arcy Mackay,” Theatre Studies, 1997, Vol. 4: 33-44; Brian Hallstoos, “Pageant and Passion: Willa Saunders Jones and Early Black Sacred Drama in Chicago,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre, 2007, Vol. 19, no. 2: 77-97; Hannah Hammond, “A Masque on Behalf of the Birds,” New England Theatre Journal, Vol. 27: 41-62; Jenna L. Kubly, “Staging the Great War in the National Red Cross Pageant,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre, 2012, Vol. 24, no. 2: 49-66. [9] Percy MacKaye, The Civic Theatre in Relation to the Redemption of Leisure, 30-31. In the Civic Theatre MacKaye draws heavily on Jane Addams’s Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909) and Michael D. Davis’ Exploitation of Pleasure (1911) for support for his ideas. See also, George Elliott Howard, “Social Psychology of the Spectator,” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 18, No. 1 (July 1912): 37-41. [10] Percy MacKaye, “On the Need of Imagination in the Drama of To-day,” Harvard Advocate, vol. 63, no. 10 (June 30, 1897): 140. [11] Luther Gulick, quoted in Glassberg, American Pageantry, 199. [12] Percy MacKaye, Saint Louis: A Civic Masque (New York: Doubleday, 1914), xi-xii. [13] Anne Throop Craig, “Pageantry,” Encyclopedia Americana (Encyclopedia Americana Co., 1919): 101. [14] Percy MacKaye, “Worcester Address on Pageantry,” February 26, 1912, courtesy of Dartmouth College Library; MacKaye, Saint Louis, xiv. [15] MacKaye, Saint Louis, x. [16] Ibid., xvi-xix. [17] Tara Zahra, The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2016), 4. For demographic data see The Thirteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1910: Statistics for Missouri, 602-622. [18] My description of the casting process is based on Glassberg, 178-181, and upon documents in the Dartmouth College Library. [19] Alessandra Lorini, Rituals of Race: American Public Culture and the Search for Racial Democracy (Charlottesville: Virginia University Press, 1999), 236-243. [20] Glassberg, American Pageantry, 178; Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 5. [21] MacKaye, Saint Louis, xix. [22] Shari Huhndorf, Going Native (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001): 3, 14. [23] Rosemarie K. Bank, “Show Indians/Showing Indians: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and American Anthropology,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, vol. 26 (Fall 2011): 152. [24] L.G. Moses, “Indians on the Midway: Wild West Shows and the Indian Bureau at the World’s Fairs, 1893-1904,” South Dakota History, vol. 21 (Fall 1991): 24. [25] Sally A. Kitt Chapel, Cahokia: Mirror of the Cosmos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 142-145. [26] Baker, 391. [27] Ernest Harold Baynes, “The Biggest Show Ever Staged,” Boston Evening Transcript, undated, courtesy of Dartmouth College Library. [28] Joseph Lindon Smith was a painter known primarily for the skill with which he recreated ancient artifacts discovered on archaeological expeditions in Egypt. My description of his choreography for the Prelude is based on more than fifty rehearsal and performance photographs in the Dartmouth College Library, as well as dozens of newspaper accounts from MacKaye’s scrapbook on the Masque, also in the Dartmouth College Library. [29] MacKaye wrote this on the back of a photograph of Cahokia in the PMK Papers. Edward Gordon Craig explains his theory of the Über-marionette in On the Art of the Theatre (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2008), 54-94. Both Robert Edmond Jones and Thomas Dickinson regarded the Masque as the only theatrical work to successfully explore the possibilities of the Über-marionette on the US stage. [30] MacKaye, Saint Louis, x. [31] MacKaye, The Civic Theatre (fn.), 27. [32] MacKaye, Saint Louis, 7-8. [33] Program of the Pageant and Masque of St. Louis, PMK Papers. [34] MacKaye, Saint Louis, 5. [35] Edward Alsworth Ross, Social Control: A Survey of the Foundations of Order (New York: MacMillan, 1901), 19. Highly influential during his lifetime (1866-1951), Ross wrote twenty-seven books and over 300 articles on social psychology, history, and urban reform. [36] MacKaye, Saint Louis, 22. [37] Ibid. [38] See, for examples, Susan G. Davis, Parades and Power: Street Theater in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1986), David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: the Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1997), and Simon P. Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). [39] MacKaye, Saint Louis, 42. [40] Promptbook of The Masque of St. Louis, courtesy of Dartmouth College Library. [41] Ibid. [42] Baker, 391. [43] Luther Ely Smith, “Pageant to Make City Better Place to Live In,” Bulletin of the Pageant and Masque of Saint Louis, No. 2: 7. "Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis" by Shilarna Stokes ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 3 (Spring 2019) ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Lezlie Cross and Ariel Nereson Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: "Introduction: Embodied Arts" by Lezlie Cross and Ariel Nereson "'Must Be Heavyset': Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies" by Ryan Donovan "Unruly Reproductions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville" by Jennifer Schmidt "Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis" by Shilarna Stokes "Collective Choreography for Weathering Black Experience: Janelle Monáe and The Memphis 'Tightrope' Dance" by Dana Venerable www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Yu Chien Lu, Administrative Producer ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical Introduction: Embodied Arts "Must Be Heavyset": Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies Unruly Reproductions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis Collective Choreography for Weathering Black Experience: Janelle Monáe and The Memphis "Tightrope" Dance History, Musicals, and the Americas Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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 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. Cheryl Black University of Missouri The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 28, Number 2 (Spring 2016) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2016 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Blue-Collar Broadway The New Humor in the Progressive Era Stages of Engagement Introduction: Performance as Alternate Form of Inquiry in the Age of STEM iDream: Addressing the Gender Imbalance in STEM through Research-Informed Theatre for Social Change Moonwalking with Laurie Anderson: The Implicit Feminism of 'The End of the Moon' Playing Sick: Training Actors for High Fidelity Simulated Patient Encounters This In-Between Life: Disability, Trans-Corporeality, and Radioactive Half-Life in D.W. Gregory’s Radium Girls Setting the Stage for Science Communication: Improvisation in an Undergraduate Life Science Curriculum Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Jennifer Goodlander Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 2 Visit Journal Homepage Representation from Cambodia to America: Musical Dramaturgies in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band Jennifer Goodlander By Published on May 23, 2022 Download Article as PDF For many, Cambodia and Cambodian American identities remain “unrepresentable.” [1] Jonathan H. X. Lee troubles the relationships between Southeast Asian, American, and specific national identities to suggest a rethinking of identity that might “arise from calibrating subjectivities and internal-alchemies of memories, histories, and visions.” [2] For people from Cambodia, questions of citizenship or status further come into play when considering how the United States shares responsibility for genocide because its policy of bombing the Cambodian-Vietnamese border instigated the political situation that allowed Pol Pot to come to power. Additionally, recent US immigration policy has resulted in the deportation of hundreds of Cambodian Americans to Cambodia, even though many of them have no memory of their “home” land. How then does Lauren Yee in her new play Cambodian Rock Band ( CRB ) craft a moving story of a father and daughter in Cambodia while complicating discourses about Cambodian and Cambodian American identities and responsibility? One of the top ten most-produced plays in 2019 in US professional theatres, CRB will go on a highly anticipated national tour in 2022. The play tells the story of Neery, who is working in Cambodia to help bring the top villains of the Khmer Rouge to justice, and her father, whom she discovers is one of the few survivors of the regime’s infamous prison, S-21. Although physical violence is not completely absent from the play, it is not the focus of emotional or narrative impact. [3] Music moves the play from family drama into larger discussions of truth and healing, memory and politics. Cathy J. Schlund-Vials names this complicated relationship “Cambodian Syndrome,” “a transnational set of amnesiac politics revealed through hegemonic modes of public policy and memory.” [4] The often illusionistic play destabilizes truth through music. Jill Dolan describes the limits of illusionism and focuses on primarily the visual and textual apparatus of representation that might be used to destabilize hegemonic readings. [5] I am proposing using music outside the limits of Brechtian tactics; it is music, not the bodies onstage, that offers the dramaturgical means for representation. Musical dramaturgy examines the way music functions, beyond invoking emotion or creating atmosphere, within a theatrical production; “what music does , rather than what is .” [6] Often, within musical dramaturgy, the focus is primarily, or even solely, on how music lives within or creates the dramatic text. [7] I expand this notion, because music, like the stage itself, is “haunted,” to borrow Marvin Carlson’s term. [8] In CBR , lyric, melody/harmony, cultures, and histories inform what we hear and what that sound means. The play opens with a live band on stage playing two songs before the house lights dim and the dialogue begins. The bouncy, joyful sound of “Cyclo” (both the name of the song and of the band) begins in the diatonic scale commonly used by American rock bands. This is in contrast to the opening refrain of the next song “Uku,” which features a pentatonic scale, the five-note scale that often suggests an “Asian” sound to the listener. A haunting flute dances lightly against the rhythm of the guitar and is complemented by percussion that invokes sounds of distant thunder or gunfire. A female singer adds another level of sound, as her voice invokes a feeling of longing. The words are in Khmer, but the sound suggests the meaning, even without translation: The windy season makes me think of my villageI think of the old people, young people, aunts and unclesWe used to run and play, hide and seekBut now we are far apart [9] This pair of songs challenges and supports various misconceptions of Asian identities as Other and complicates global connections between Asia and the United States. Music serves as a backbone for the play and a significant element of the story; the songs are a mix of Cambodian and American radio-hits from the past and new compositions by the California-based group Dengue Fever. The audience experiences the music in the immediate present, but the music invokes the past and another culture through language and sound. Just as the music jumps across time and locale, the story of Cambodian-born Chum reconciling his relationship with his American daughter Neery explores different cultural values and intertwined histories. Yee’s deep obsession with the music of Dengue Fever inspired her to write the play, but as the play developed, the music also became central to the play’s dramaturgy. The songs do not always propel the action forward, as it would in a musical, but director Chay Yew explains, “the music is actually another character in Lauren’s play.” [10] Discussions of the play often mention that the music makes the play accessible because rock music would be familiar to an audience generally unfamiliar with Cambodia—“music is universal and defies borders.” [11] I argue that the music does more than make the play accessible. In this essay, I use CRB as a case to explore how musical dramaturgies might articulate complex Asian identities that complicate the limits of visuality. Similarly, recent scholarship on Asian and Asian American identities also focuses on the aural. [12] I use music, as Daphne Lei describes, to move identity from a binary of Asian/Asian American to a neither/nor state where “the past is ‘forgotten’ but the future is not yet reached,” and ends with the hope that “interlinked Asian and American ethnicities can be created, negotiated, and performed.” [13] I argue that the music within the play offers an alternative means to engage some of the complex relationships between Southeast Asia and the United States and mirrors a similar need for engagement within scholarship between Asian performance and Asian American performance. From the beginning, the play establishes the limits between visual versus aural regimes of knowledge. As the opening music concludes, everyone is seated and the house lights dim. A man appears onstage to thank and introduce the band. He says, “From their first, last, ONLY album, recorded in Phnom Penh, April 1974. A tape that—like so much of Cambodia’s music of the time—no longer exists,” then he changes his tone, “but that’s not what you think of when you think of Cambodia, is it? YOU think of something a little more like this.” [14] The man clicks through several slides of Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge that the stage directions describe as “Black and white. Gruesome.” [15] The images are from Cambodia in 1975-1979, when the Khmer Rouge, the name commonly given to Cambodia’s Communist Party, attempted to turn the country back to Year Zero. They emptied the cities, abolished the currency, dismantled education, and sought to eliminate any reference to the past or foreign influence. More than two million Cambodians died, some from starvation or illness, but many were also killed for petty crimes, such as stealing food. The country’s elite prisoners, including artists and intellectuals, were held at detention centers where they were tortured, forced to confess their “crimes,” and driven out of town to dig a shallow grave before they were killed. More than 20,000 people are thought to have been tortured and executed at Tuol Sleng (commonly called S-21), a former high school in Phnom Penh. When the Vietnamese liberated the city, only seven people were left alive in the prison. [16] Now a museum, Tuol Sleng represents both the power and limits of visual representation. This site of both horror and later attempts at reconciliation is one of the most popular tourist sites in Cambodia. When I visited in 2016, I was overwhelmed by the hundreds of photos hanging on the walls—mug shots of victims and documentation of the torture they endured. Scholar and Khmer Rouge survivor Boreth Ly describes how “the Khmer Rouge was very visually focused. It was a scopic regime that enforced visual surveillance on its victim and deliberately traumatized and destroyed their vision.” [17] When he was twelve years old, he and his grandmother finally returned to their home after four years of forced labor. The house was empty, and they searched for any photographs of their relatives, but they were all gone. He contrasts this loss with the multitude of photos at Tuol Sleng, documenting the prisoners who were executed. [18] These photographs have circulated globally in museums, books, and online as the primary representation of the genocide. Michelle Caswall, describes how, “a complex layering of silencing is revealed” [19] and “Because of both the transformative power of the creation of these mug shots and the complete oppressiveness of Tuol Sleng as a total institution within a totalitarian state, there are no whispers of the victims in these records; the photographs, like the dead they depict, remain frustratingly silent.” [20] The problem is that the images confound the viewer and render the victim silent. Yee engages the problem of visual representation through the many overt mentions of photographs and seeing in the play. The man in the opening is Kaing Guek Eav, or Comrade Duch as he was known, the head officer of S-21. [21] He taunts the gruesome images of the genocide—“boring,” “tragique,” “genocide, genocide, genocide, boo,” and threatens that he is always “watching watching always watching.” [22] Later, Neary realizes that her father, Chum, is likely the eighth survivor featured in a photograph. She confronts him; he confirms his identity but refuses to testify. Chum argues that the truth cannot be found in a photograph, and that if Duch is guilty, so is he. In a flashback, Yee suggests that the photographs that really matter are the ones that never existed. Chum delayed his family’s escape so his band could record the last song on their album. They want to take a photograph, but they forgot to bring a camera; there was no photo and there was no escape. These examples illustrate the complicated ways that visual evidence is threatening, unreliable, and incomplete. Another method is required to sort through the various relationships between Cambodia and American identities in the play and music offers that means. Two songs played within the prison space towards the end of the play are especially effective at dramatizing this history. Chum is eventually arrested and brought to S-21. He tries to hide his identity by claiming he is a banana seller, but he eventually ends up in a room with Duch himself. Duch asks about some words that Chum wrote and learns that they are the lyrics to Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” Duch orders Chum to play the song, but Chum requires a guitar because, “I just want you to hear how it’s supposed to be played. So you know the absolute truth,” and for the first time in months, the sound of music calms Duch and allows him to sleep. [23] Chum’s words echo Dylan’s own feelings that a song is more than its lyrics; “they’re meant to be sung, not read.” [24] Dramaturgically the insertion of this quintessential American anti-war song echoes perceptions about the futility of the American effort in Southeast Asia, and especially Cambodia. Even though Dylan conceived of this song as a big statement to unite the civils rights movement and folk music, many critics dismissed it as an “empty gesture” with “little political relevance.” [25] Perhaps Duch is lulled to sleep by this reminder that likewise America has little relevance and is unlikely to come save the suffering people in Cambodia. While in prison, Chum writes, and on the night of his scheduled execution, he plays one last song, “Hammer and Nail,” the first half of which is in English: Something old Something new Something borrowed And something blue Couldn’t keep me from trying and fighting Doing everything I can To somehow end up with you again. You can call me a fool And I know that I am Won’t let you slip through my fingers Just like sand [26] On the surface, the song is about a pending wedding and a possible break-up, but the singer promises to fight for his love. Musically it bridges the sound of American folk and Cambodian surfer rock. From the first line, “Something Old,” until “just like sand,” the chord progression moves slowly up the scale, and structurally is not unlike the Dylan song. The second part repeats the lyrics in Khmer, but this time with back-up singers adding an angelic, otherworldly quality. In the context of the scene, it is about fighting for life, about fighting for something bigger than oneself. The play ends with Chum and his daughter playing “I’m Sixteen,” originally by Ros Serey Sothea, together in the prison/museum. Sothea was one of the most beloved singers of Cambodian rock before the Khmer Rouge, and “I’m Sixteen” functions as an anthem connecting Cambodians to the past. Also, this mesmerizing anthem both inspired and is featured on Dengue Fever’s first album. [27] The song and the moment onstage combine to create a kind of, to borrow Sean Metzger’s term, “temporal folding,” where “subjects emerge in a relation of figures through one another, through actions in the present associated with those in the past” that allows for a simultaneous representation of past/present and Asian/Asian American. [28] The staging reinforces the power of music, as the stage lights shift to indicate that the sun is coming up and the stage directions read “behind them, the sun rises higher and higher, blinding us. We see the bandmates’ silhouettes as they rock out to one last song.” [29] Sight is obliterated, and representation happens in the music alone. Postscript Since the world premiere of CRB in 2018, the context of the show and even this article has changed, making the play’s message even more imperative, and music continues to be the crux of representation. On July 20, 2020, in response to cancelled productions due to Covid–19 shutdowns and the growing Black Lives Matter protests after the death of George Floyd, Lauren Yee and Joe Ngo [30] announced the #CRBChallenge . Ngo articulated a debt to the Black civil rights movement and the intertwined histories of rock music: “Who hasn’t borrowed Afro-Caribbean beats?” [31] The challenge called for singers around the world to recreate songs from the show or Cambodia more generally in order to raise awareness about and to fundraise for organizations working for both Black and Cambodian American communities. The resulting videos, with #CRBChallenge , demonstrate a multi-faceted connection to the play, its story and music, and the depth of talent among Asians and Asian Americans. References [1] Ashley Thompson, “Forgetting to Remember, Again: On Curatorial Practice and ‘Cambodian Art’ in the Wake of Genocide,” diacritics 41 no. 2 (2013): 82-109. [2] Jonathan H. X. Lee, “Southeast Asian Americans: Memories, Visions, and Subjectivities,” in Southeast Asian Diaspora in the United States: Memories and Visions, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow , ed. Jonathan H. X. Lee, Cambridge Scholars Publisher (Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom: 2014), 1. [3] The script calls for several scenes of torture and violence, however, I have read hundreds of reviews and these scenes are not the focus and rarely mentioned. [4] Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 13. [5] Jill Dolan, Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 1-3. [6] Kim Baston, “Not Just ‘Evocative’: The Function of Music in Theatre,” Australasian Drama Studies 67 (2015), 5. Emphasis in original. [7] Carl Dahlhaus and Mary Whittal, “What is a Musical Drama?” Cambridge Opera Journal 1, no. 2 (1989): 95-96. [8] Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). [9] Lauren Yee, “Cambodian Rock Band,” American Theatre 35, no. 6 (July/August 2018), 49. The songs used in the production are written by Dengue Fever. In my descriptions of the music, I am relying on my memory of the 2019 production at the Victory Gardens, Chicago, IL, directed by Marti Lyons, and the cast album that was released in May 2020. [10] Donatella Galella, “Listening to Cambodian Rock Band: An Interview with Lauren Yee and Chay Yew,” Performance Matters 6, no. 2 (2020), 127. [11] Ibid., 130. [12] For more on Asian American identities and accents see Shilpa Davé, “Racial Accents, Hollywood Casting, and Asian American Studies,” Cinema Journal 56 no. 3 (2017): 142-147. Also for insight on performing race and the music of Dengue Fever see Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, A Race So Different: Performance and Law in Asian America (New York: New York University Press, 2013), especially chapter 5. Spoken word as music, which playwright Chay Yew calls the “nonmusical musical,” is also key to identity in Stephen Hong Sohn, “Calculated Cacophonies: The Queer Asian American Family and the Nonmusical Musical in Chay Yew’s Wonderland ,” The Journal of American Drama and Theatre 29, vol. 1 (2016). [13] Daphne Lei, “Staging the Binary: Asian American Theatre in the Late Twentieth Century,” A Companion to Twentieth Century American Drama , ed. David Krasner (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 301-317. [14] Yee, CRB , 49. [15] Ibid. [16] David P. Chandler, Voices From S-21: Terror and History In Pol Pot’s Secret Prison (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). [17] Boreth Ly, “Of Performance and the Persistent Temporality of Trauma: Memory, Art, and Visions,” positions: east asia cultures critique 16, no. 11 (2008), 118. [18] Ibid., 115-116. [19] Michelle Caswell, Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory, and the Photographic Record in Cambodia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), 7. [20] Ibid., 158. [21] For a history about Duch and his trial, see Alexander Laban Hinton, Man Or Monster?: The Trial of a Khmer Rouge Torturer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). [22] Yee, CRB , 50. [23] Music as a tool of survival is perhaps taken from the real-life story of Arn-Chorn-Pond whose life was saved because he played music for the Khmer Rouge. This story is retold by Patricia McCormick in the novel Never Fall Down (New York: Balzer + Bray, 2012). [24] Dylan quoted in Larry Starr, Listening to Bob Dylan (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021), 1. [25] Starr, Listening , 34. [26] Yee, CRB , 65. [27] Nic Cohn, “A Voice from the Killing Fields,” The Guardian , 19 May 2007, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2007/may/20/worldmusic.features (accessed 25 January 2022). [28] Sean Metzger, “At the Vanishing Point: Theater and Asian/American Critique,” American Quarterly 63, no. 2 (2011), 279. [29] Yee, CRB , 69. [30] Ngo, whose parents are Chinese Cambodian and survived the Khmer Rouge, played the original Chum in CRB and has recreated the role for numerous productions. [31] “Welcome to the CRB Challenge! #CRBChallenge ,” Facebook, 5 July 2020, https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=282008519582298 (accessed 20 January 2022). Footnotes About The Author(s) Jennifer Goodlander is an Associate Professor at Indiana University in the Department of Comparative Literature. Jennifer has published numerous articles and two books: Women in the Shadows: Gender, Puppets, and the Power of Tradition in Bali (Ohio University Press, 2016) and Puppets and Cities: Articulating Identities in Southeast Asia (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2018). Her current research looks at transnational Southeast Asian identities as expressed in performance, literature, and art. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration Introduction to Asian American Dramaturgies Behind the Scenes of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies On Young Jean Lee in Young Jean Lee's We're Gonna Die by Christine Mok Representation from Cambodia to America: Musical Dramaturgies in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band The Dramaturgical Sensibility of Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap and Cambodian Rock Band Holding up a Lens to the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists: A Photo Essay Theatre in Hawaiʻi: An “Illumination of the Fault Lines” of Asian American Theatre Randall Duk Kim: A Sojourn in the Embodiment of Words Reappropriation, Reparative Creativity, and Feeling Yellow in Generic Ensemble Company’s The Mikado: Reclaimed Dance Planets Dramaturgy of Deprivation (없다): An Invitation to Re-Imagine Ways We Depict Asian American and Adopted Narratives of Trauma Clubhouse: Stories of Empowered Uncanny Anomalies Off-Yellow Time vs Off-White Space: Activist Asian American Dramaturgy in Higher Education Asian American Dramaturgies in the Classroom: A Reflection Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Donatella Galella Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 32 1 Visit Journal Homepage Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity Donatella Galella By Published on November 6, 2019 Download Article as PDF Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity . Dorinne Kondo. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018; Pp. 376. Using dramaturgy, autoethnography, psychoanalysis, and critical race theory, Dorinne Kondo argues that performance shapes race in Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity . She stakes a claim to creativity as work that can imagine new ways of existing, but also reify the status quo and drain minoritarian life force. She builds on her previous book, About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater , by theorizing racialized reception; restructuring the normative form of academic manuscripts; and examining plays by Anna Deavere Smith, David Henry Hwang, and herself. Kondo critiques how liberal humanism evacuates the uneven power dynamics of theatre, yet she ultimately insists on possibilities for progressive change. Worldmaking resembles a drama that demystifies theatrical and academic labor. In the Acknowledgements, Kondo considers the embodied, emotional conditions of writing this book. She shows the work. She organizes her theoretical interventions, dramaturgical analyses, and personal stories into an overture, chapters within three acts, and three entr’actes, culminating in her own original play, Seamless . Early on, Kondo defines an array of key terms. Taking seriously Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s understanding of racism as group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death, Kondo theorizes “ racial affect , which enlivens some and diminishes others, and affective violence , especially in sites assumed to be far from racial violence,” like the theatre (11, italics in original). The unequal distribution of emotions accords with racial hierarchies. For instance, white spectators might laugh uproariously at Clybourne Park , Bruce Norris’s white reframing of A Raisin in the Sun , while spectators of color might shudder. Kondo cites psychoanalytical thinkers like Melanie Klein and Hanna Segal to theorize reparative mirroring, reparative criticism, and reparative creativity. In the first case, audience members of color can feel invigorated seeing representations of themselves on stage. Dramaturgs and other artists can enact reparative criticism and creativity by making plays more progressive and composing their own feminist, anti-racist artworks. Stressing collaboration, Kondo further offers the terms politics of affiliation and politics of agonistics to convey solidarity and struggle toward a more equitable world in and beyond the theatre. As Kondo lays out the field of theatrical production, she does not presume that readers already know details like how little playwrights earn for playwriting as opposed to screenwriting. She provides statistics and interview excerpts to demonstrate how resources go disproportionately to white men. Kondo speaks to scholars from a wide range of fields—Theatre and Performance Studies, Anthropology, Ethnic Studies—as well as practicing artists and students. In Act Two, Kondo applies her terms to her case studies, primarily Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1993) and Yellow Face (2007). She contextualizes Anna Deavere Smith’s and David Henry Hwang’s careers as well as her relationships with them; she served as dramaturg for three of Smith’s plays— Twilight , House Arrest (1997), and Let Me Down Easy (2008)—and she has dialogued with Hwang in person and in her scholarship. Kondo devotes one chapter to Smith’s artistic process and political project. Smith interviews and performs as subjects involved with a particular event or theme, in this case, the Los Angeles uprisings after police assaulted Rodney King and were mostly exonerated for their anti-black violence. By embodying subjects across various identities, Smith grounds their experiences, demonstrates their relationality, and represents minoritized voices too often silenced in the theatre. Because Twilight presents different perspectives and no easy solutions to systemic oppression, the play models a nuanced history. At the same time, Kondo recognizes that some critics praised Twilight due to their interpretation of the play as celebrating power-free, individual-based common humanity. A highpoint of Worldmaking is when Kondo details her experiences as one of four dramaturgs for Twilight . Her behind-the-scenes account distinguishes various versions of the text, from the premiere at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, to the transfer to Broadway, to the adaptation for television; she also explains how dramaturgs gave feedback on Smith’s performances of the interviews. For example, she discusses how they switched the play’s last monologue to avoid letting audiences presume racial equity to be inevitable. Exemplifying a politics of affiliation and politics of agonistics, Kondo describes how she fought for the inclusion of Asian Americans to disrupt the black-white binary, represent Korean Americans, and challenge stereotypes. She even brought Smith to tears. But what she greatly admires about Smith is her willingness to be challenged. Another distinct pleasure of Worldmaking is Kondo’s style of storytelling. She recalls unexpectedly seeing Smith perform as herself (Kondo) and voluntarily handing dramaturg-director-producer Oskar Eustis five single-spaced pages of notes on Yellow Face . And the book reproduces these notes! The book underscores the major contributions of dramaturgs. For Kondo, “Dramaturgical critique deploys research, theory, and scholarship for reparative ends” (197). In her chapter on Yellow Face , Kondo articulates how David Henry Hwang makes and unmakes race, and she suggests that she might have influenced the final script for the Public Theater. Set against the 1990s Miss Saigon protests and U.S. yellow peril, the comedic docudrama follows playwright DHH dealing with his immigrant father, who longs for the American dream, and his own accidental casting of a white man to play an Asian American character. In the original East West Players staging, the play ended with a melding of the Chinese father and white actor, evoking an ethereal racial equality. After Kondo offered critiques of this power-evasive liberal fantasy, the revised Yellow Face underlined that fantasy as such and firmly connected anti-Chinese persecution with the father’s death. Kondo concludes the book with reparative creativity: her play Seamless and a chapter covering her journey with the play, including the racialized challenges of trying to persuade a professional theatre to produce it. The play centers on Diane Kubota, a lawyer grappling with the extent to which she can know her parents and their experiences of Japanese American internment, and, too, how gendered generational traumas affect her. Combining realism, direct address, fantasy sequences, and flashbacks, Seamless draws from Kondo’s life and raises questions about Asian American epistemology and ontology. Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity joins new, necessary scholarship reflecting on the work of minoritarian art such as After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life by Joshua Chambers-Letson and Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, and the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization by Judith Hamera. In reading this book, I felt the reparative mirroring that Kondo theorizes, from her experiences of spectatorial affective violence to her centering of an Asian American woman in her play. Like DHH at the end of Yellow Face , Kondo reminds us, “And I go back to work, searching for my own face.” References Footnotes About The Author(s) Donatella Galella University of California, Riverside Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics Law and Sexuality in Tennessee Williams’s America Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze Staging Family: Domestic Deceptions of Mid-Nineteenth Century American Actresses Excavating American Theatrical History: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors, Appropriate, and An Octoroon Mabou Mines Tries Again: Past, Present, and the Purgatory of Performance Space Rehearsing Bereavement with Laughter: Grief, Humor, and Estrangement Affect in Sarah Ruhl’s Plays of Mourning Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Stephen Kuehler Harvard University Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Stephen Kuehler Harvard University By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Ben Levi Ross as Nick in Gatsby at American Repertory Theater. Photo: Julietta Cervantes. The Half-God of Rainfall Inua Ellams (8 - 24 Sept.)  Real Women Have Curves Joy Huerta and Benjamin Velez (music and lyrics), Lisa Loomer (book) (8 Dec.–21 Jan.)  Becoming a Man P. Carl (16 Feb. - 10 Mar.)  Gatsby Florence Welch (music and lyrics), Thomas Bartlett (music), Martyna Majok (book) (23 May - 3 Aug.)  In its third post-pandemic season, the American Repertory Theater signaled that it was looking confidently toward the future. On November 17, the company announced that its proposed “Center for Creativity and Performance” in the Allston section of Boston (across the Charles River from Harvard’s main campus) had received formal approval from the city. The new theatre complex, which would replace the Loeb Drama Center in Cambridge as the A.R.T.’s home upon its projected opening in 2026, was described as a model of sustainable design for cultural buildings. Meanwhile, at the Loeb, the A.R.T. presented a season of four shows (down from its pre-COVID norm of five or six) with its now-familiar mix of cultural diversity, gender non-conformity, and Broadway ambition. In The Half-God of Rainfall, Nigerian playwright Inua Ellams wedded three pantheons: the West African spirits called orishas , the Greek gods of Mt. Olympus, and the superstars of the National Basketball Association. The deities clash when Zeus rapes a Nigerian girl, Modúpé, who is under the protection of the river orisha Oshun. Modúpé gives birth to Zeus’s son, a half-god named Demi, whose divinity reveals itself in his extraordinary skill on the basketball court. Although she is mortal, Modúpé defeats Zeus in an epic battle; her victory inaugurates a feminist utopia, with the Black orishas ascendant and the white European gods crushed. As dramatic as all this sounds, the play is more a declaimed recitation than an acted-out story; the characters simply narrate most of their actions in the third person. Stacey Derosier’s lighting and Tal Yarden’s projections supplied the theatricality that this mythic spectacle needed. The next production, Real Women Have Curves , used the format of a traditional book musical to examine contemporary concerns about immigration, xenophobia, generational conflict, and body positivity. Based on a play and film, the show centers on Ana, an 18-year-old Mexican American woman whose family runs a small sewing factory in East Los Angeles. Ana has been accepted into Columbia University, but she is conflicted about pursuing her educational dreams when the family business needs her help. She’s also vexed by her mother’s criticisms of her weight, although the young man she is dating assures her that she is beautiful. Offsetting Ana’s personal struggles are larger social and political problems, such as anti-Hispanic bias and the predicament of undocumented immigrants. One such migrant, a worker in the clothing factory, is caught in a raid and deported; her plight renews Ana’s determination to study law and fight for immigrants' rights. Lisa Loomer’s book sets up these multiple conflicts and issues broadly, simply, and efficiently, allowing plenty of room for tuneful ballads and comic numbers in a Latin pop style flavored with salsa and mariachi rhythms. However, the multiplicity of issues prevents the musical from having a clear thematic center; even body affirmation, which gives the show its title and title song, turns out to be a minor concern for the show as a whole. Nevertheless, the production benefited from strong, appealing performances by the whole ensemble, especially Lucy Godínez as Ana, Florencia Cuenca as her sister Estela, and Justina Machado as their mother Carmen. The show that followed Real Women , P. Carl’s autobiographical play Becoming a Man , also focused on the struggle to affirm what’s real in matters of body and gender. After decades of living as female, including a lesbian marriage, Carl makes the transition to masculinity—a rocky process that he presents as both harrowing and exhilarating. Most difficult of all is negotiating the effects of the change on his relationship with Lynette, his wife, as she grapples with the new realities of her spouse’s body and self-presentation. Carl’s jubilant, self-absorbed embrace of his male identity makes him somewhat oblivious to Lynette’s pain, leading to raw confrontations between them that are the most compelling and affecting moments in the play. The work’s non-chronological structure reflected the erratic process of transitions both in gender and in relationships; even the physical staging, with sets by Emmie Finckel and video by Brittany Bland, was characterized by fluidity and motion. Ambitious, pretentious, rich, good-looking, and doomed—these adjectives for the title character of The Great Gatsby might also describe Gatsby , the musical version that capped the A.R.T.’s 2023-24 season. Mimi Lien’s imposing set—a junkyard piled with the mangled corpses of luxury cars, from which gleaming Art Deco stairways and platforms emerged—captured the sense of an opulent era that was headed for disaster. The same pessimism, but not the same panache, characterized the pop-opera score by Florence Welch and Thomas Bartlett. Except for a couple of numbers that had compelling shape and character, the music was a tedious stream of semi-songs, one much like the others. Although the leading performers—especially Isaac Powell as Gatsby, Charlotte MacInnes as Daisy, Solea Pfeiffer as Myrtle, and Adam Grupper as Wolfsheim—sang attractively and with conviction, their occasional incandescence couldn’t lighten the prevailing gloom, or make it feel truly tragic. In its glumness, one could argue that the show was echoing the novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway, who doesn’t glorify the Jazz Age but rather regrets being seduced by its hollow glamor. But Nick responds to his disenchantment with the world of Gatsby by writing an elegy for it in lyrical prose. The bitter taste of disillusionment was all that Welch and Bartlett’s Gatsby had to offer, and there was nothing elegiac about it. Nevertheless, as Nick observes: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.” The A.R.T. seems to believe in that future too: as Gatsby continued a healthy summer run, with many shows sold out, Playbill.com reported that the company was considering a Broadway opening. At the same time, the organization announced that its next season would once again offer five shows, including world-premiere commissions by tap choreographer Ayodele Casel and playwright Kate Hamill (adapting Homer’s Odyssey , no less). The A.R.T. appears to be gathering energy for solid achievement in its final years at its Cambridge house, as it prepares to follow the green light of a gleaming new home across the river. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Stephen Kuehler is a librarian at Harvard University, serving as the Harvard Library’s main research contact for performing arts, especially for students and faculty in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Media. Steve received his master’s degree in theater history from Tufts University, and he also holds degrees in philosophy, theology, and library science. As a member of the Theater Library Association, Steve was a co-organizer of TLA’s 2011 symposium “Holding Up the Mirror,” which focused on the interplay of authenticity and adaptation in contemporary Shakespearean performance. 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.

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

Jada M. Campbell 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 Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past Jada M. Campbell By Published on April 11, 2023 Download Article as PDF In this important scholarly work, Ariel Nereson defines historiography through movement, allowing us to see “democracy moving” through the lens of Bill T. Jones, choreographer and co-founder of BTJ/AZ. Early on, she introduces Bill T. Jones’ "The Auction," performed during the 2010 Kennedy Center Honors, and analyzes its rejection of assessing black progress as validated by white standards. The dance embodies modes of black excellence through historically white narratives, using movement. Nereson explains the symbolism of the piece’s location. For Jones, showcasing this piece in front of the former president, Barack Obama, represents his 2008 election as the signifier of "inclusion." Nereson explains how representation becomes a trend promoting the new standard of national optics in the US. While American enslavement has long ended, its modes still haunt and dilute the potential of freedom and liberty. "The Auction" succeeds by rejecting the image of integrational unity and tokenism-enforced diversity as the solution to achieving black success and overcoming racial oppression. In the first chapter, “Commission,” Nereson explains that "total artistic freedom" (Nereson 26) is a choice that comes with sacrifice. This chapter focuses on commercialized liberty. Dance artists, particularly black dance artists, are faced with the conflict of limited freedom over their craft and how it gets presented. While many dance companies in the U.S. strive to promote diverse representation, the terms are mostly conditional. Many dance companies view black dance artists and choreographers as a monolith, stripping them of individuality. Non-black funders inform the public of what it means to be black. Race influences funding as appearance plays a significant role in decisions made from positions of power. Nereson explains the ways in which Jones resists these limitations as a dance artist and a producer, knowing that being selective risks steady work. Being selective does not solely concern which jobs to reject or accept, but also how choreographers use movement to define narratives. Jones' main struggle was interpreting the narrative of Abraham Lincoln's mission as it relates to black liberty, rather than choreographing a narrative of the Great Emancipator. In the second chapter, "Text," Nereson delineates the complex relationship between text and movement. Nereson uses BTJ/AZ's Serenade to illustrate a cohesive relationship between text and movement as the piece contains several speeches. While language can have multiple meanings, it can be more clearly defined by movements, incorporating speeches into their works. The company’s fine line between formalism and true storytelling matters: Because Jones wants to avoid over-romanticizing and making fantastical true historic events relating to black trauma and oppression, he incorporates honest storytelling. He draws parallels between the relationship of pure movement and its opposition to text/movement dualities to parallel those between separate but equal beliefs. Creating pure movement through segregation from text embodies racial purity in the form of performance art. Chapter Three, "Character," focuses mainly on alternative ways of humanizing through movement. Nereson uses BTJ/AZ's Serenade/The Proposition and FDWH to illustrate how the development of character, especially a historical figure, can be viewed from a different angle. While this approach is not iconoclastic, Lincoln’s character gets taken down a peg from deity status to a more relatable one. This chapter identifies the shift away from the traditional historiography of Lincoln pertaining to heroism to his personal, romantic life as central to Lincoln’s story. Nereson analyzes the three primary narrative prototypes: heroic, sacrificial and romantic. While challenging the national value based on patriarchal white supremacy, Serenade/The Proposition also challenges Lincoln’s narrative as a historical figure by painting him as an erotic partner. The piece stages eroticism, yet targets the human experience rather than vulgarity. Jones forms character development through movement and the characters’ physicality. In Chapter Four, "Place," Nereson analyzes the function of site-specific projects, using BTJ/AZ's 100 Migrations to explain the relationship between location and community. 100 Migrations, also known as “The Hundreds,” is a project that premiered in Charlottesville, VA, a liberalized conservative area. This chapter’s main argument emphasizes how the climax of a piece devised by Charlottesville residents and BTJ/AZ choreographers created a “kinesthetic landscape” serving as both a performance and community space. Nereson analyzes BTJ/AZ’s 100 Migrations as history through dance, speculating on the democratic tendencies within the conservative space. Nereson looks at the relationship between staging and place, discussing the symbolism of the South as the setting, making it a physical representation of Virginia’s history. In the fifth chapter, “Body,” Nereson examines the racialized embodiment in Lincoln Repertory performances. Specifically focusing on the FDWH piece, Nereson looks for answers in Jones’ investigation of blackness as a body vs character. Blackness is not viewed through a humanized scope but is rather objectified and made for display. Here, we journey back to the discourse concerning American enslavement relating to property over agency. In this case, the Lincoln Repertory is placed on display as Nereson illustrates the redefined enslavement of company expectations and its regulations over creativity that has yet to be diluted or stripped of its authenticity. Nereson highlights how the pressure to meet company standards changes the voice of the black dance artist. Chapter six, “Circulation,” covers the cyclical relationship between art and community. Here, Nereson outlines the artistic practice of spreading cultural wealth in communities, while respecting historically minoritarian foundations. This chapter discusses the dark side of diversity that caters to optics, leading to the erasure of individuality. Nereson analyzes the power of institutional spaces and the influence that universities carry as places of education and development. Nereson narrates the event of BTJ/AZ’s visit to the University of North Carolina- Greensboro presenting Serenade/The Proposition. This piece circulated a response to critical concerns regarding race and neoliberalism. Circulating performance means engaging with the community. In the coda, Nereson examines how Bill T. Jones’ Lincoln Repertory influences movement-based performance. She also analyzes how New York’s Live Arts perception of dance relies on visual differences to speak for diversity. Democracy Moving embodies scholarship that speaks most loudly to not only black aspiring dance artists and choreographers but also mid-career dance artists and choreographers of various racial backgrounds. Rather than simply concluding the volume’s impressive analysis of dance as an engaging history, this coda questions the ways we can continue striving to avoid essentialism through the expansion of neoliberal arts in the Americas. References Footnotes About The Author(s) JADA M. CAMPBELL Texas Tech University Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Jane Barnette Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Jane Barnette By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF THE SPECTACULAR THEATRE OF FRANK JOSEPH GALATI: RESHAPING AMERICAN THEATRE IN CHICAGO, ILLINOIS. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama/Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022; Pp. 215. There’s a sort of melancholy ache triggered by reading this love story for all who had the good fortune to know Frank Galati. As Julie Jackson (who observed Galati in both rehearsal and classroom over the period of 1999-2006) describes him, “he’s a dancer who dances and supposes along with the rest of us” (10). Too soon after this tribute to Galati’s “spectacular theatre,” on January 2, 2023, he passed away. Jackson’s portrait of the Tony Award-winning director and beloved professor emeritus mirrors the resolute care with which Galati listened to his collaborators, from actors to designers to technicians. Her uncanny ability to recount a distinct moment—whether onstage or off—practically conjures Galati’s spirit via her prose. Recently published studies about groundbreaking theatre artists tend to excel in either biography (e.g., Alexis Greene’s 2021 book about Emily Mann) or frame the subject as a means of understanding their unique contributions to performance (e.g., Yuko Kurahashi’s 2020 book about Ping Chong). Jackson’s book is not simply a biography, nor is it entirely a theatre history text: it resists expected molds for both academic and trade manuscripts that otherwise claim to be about a person, place, and/or time period. Yes, it’s a book about the rise of Chicago’s theatre scene (and thus can be seen as a microhistory of the second city), and of course, it’s also about Galati’s life in theatre, but its overall claim transcends either familiar genre. This book is also about a kind of theatre-making that Galati helped create: a spectacular theatricality that, Jackson argues, reshaped American theatre in ways still felt and seen today. Divided into three parts, Jackson’s book tackles the legacy of Galati through different lenses in each section. In Part One (“The Rise of Off-Loop Theatre”), she takes a more traditionally theatre historical approach, providing an overview of the formative years (1969-86) for both Chicago theatre and Galati, as they matured artistically together. This section is particularly compelling for the definition Jackson builds regarding the “spectacular theatre” of the book’s title. Namely, that (in Galati’s words) “the relationship between spectacle and spectator is defined by connection and interaction rather than separation” (5). In Part Two (“Staging Stein and Steinbeck”), Jackson uses a different lens to explore Galati’s aesthetic: the middle section analyzes two pivotal productions produced between 1987 and 1990: She Always Said, Pablo and The Grapes of Wrath . Through the case studies, the author demonstrates how Galati’s work is best understood through the frame of Cubism, insofar as his worlds onstage rely “on spatial and kinesthetic intelligence rather than linguistic reasoning and causal logic” (6). Part Three (“Backstage Process and Onstage Themes”) takes yet another lens to the subject: maternal (if not matriarchal) tactics and symbols, in her analysis of his directing methods and of productions that featured “Galati’s Dangerous Women” (the subtitle of chapter 7). Overall, Jackson’s three sectional lenses heighten and enrich her overall thesis: that Frank Galati’s indelible methods of “’theatricaliz[ing]’ the novel” laid bare “the theatre’s paradoxical copresence of real and fake, truth and illusion, presence and absence” (6). Together, the sections help readers understand Galati as part of a genealogy forged in Chicago that merged the oral interpretation methods of literary adaptation emerging from Northwestern University with the playful improvisational games of Second City and the raw naturalistic style of Steppenwolf Theatre. Taken alone, Part One offers readers a broad sketch of Galati’s aesthetic and impact, but when combined with Jackson’s deeper dive into the intertwining of what she identifies as “three specific Cubist strategies,” readers glimpse his unique contribution to American theatre. The stark contrast between Pablo and Wrath —productions that initially appear to be polar opposites of abstract assemblage ( Pablo ) and gritty realism ( Wrath )—proves a useful device for centering those tactics of Cubism: “playful subversion,” inspiring “extra-ordinary attention” from spectators, and the paradoxical yet planned “co-presence or mutability of… representation and presentation” (98). The final section both solidifies and troubles Jackson’s argument. Its first chapter (“Rehearsing Ensemble”) satisfies readers’ curiosity about how Galati operated backstage through poignant testimony gathered from actors and other theatre-makers who worked with him; as such, this chapter strikes me as crucial reading for emerging directors and adapters alike. The final chapter before the epilogue, however, is less successful. In her attempt to weave together nine plays directed by Galati between 1987 and 1998, Jackson leaves little room to explore nuance or overlaps between the short summaries. As a result, the final argument of the book—an attempt to heighten the ways Galati centered strong female characters (played by extraordinary actors) feels forced—an especially frustrating turn to make at the close of an otherwise persuasive and provocative read. There are a few other small details that may distract readers who are also theatre practitioners: between the Acknowledgements and the Author’s Preface, there is a Disclaimers page that includes one particularly puzzling choice. Jackson shares that unless stated otherwise, “stage right and stage left refer to the point of view from the audience” (xii). One could argue that the decision to focus on the stage from the audience’s point of view should be expected in a book like this, given the author’s perspective not only as a fan and frequent spectator of Chicago performance but also her recognition that Frank “loved the audience with his entire being and the audience loved him right back” (xv). But why not use the practical terms for this perspective (house right or left)? However bewildering this disclaimer (and other minor spelling anomalies throughout the text) may be, it cannot overshadow the welcome contribution that The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati makes to American theatre history and directing praxis: it is a fitting tribute to a man whose attentiveness to spectators’ sight and sound made space for literature and other media to utterly transform our theatrical imagination. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) JANE BARNETTE is a Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Kansas, where she teaches courses in dramaturgy, theatre history, script analysis, and seminars in theatrical adaptation and the performance of gender and sexuality. She is the author of Adapturgy (SIU Press 2018) and Witch Fulfillment (Routledge 2024). 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.

Allan Johnson 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 Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” Allan Johnson By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF The musical Pippin (1972), with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz and book by Roger O. Hirson, famously employs an anarchic, metatheatrical narrative structure. As the actors are drawn deeper into the world of an inset play that they are performing, called Pippin: His Life and Times , the boundaries between their individual identities and their roles within the play begin to blur, highlighting the complicated interplay between self and performance and the complexity of filling or rejecting the social roles that one has inherited. This play-within-a-play recounts the story of Pippin, a fictionalized son of Charlemagne who goes on an episodic journey in search of the meaning of life. At the climax of the musical, the Leading Player and the other performers prepare Pippin for the ultimate “grand finale” in which he is expected to leap into a blazing fire as the climax to the play-with-a-play, and, in doing so, fulfill his presumed destiny. Faced with a dawning awareness of being manipulated by the performers around him, Pippin realizes that true fulfillment is not to be found in external validation and, instead, chooses a more authentic life away from the artifice of performance. In Bob Fosse’s original 1972 production, the musical ends with Pippin (both the actor embodying the role of “Pippin” and the now fully self-actualized character of Pippin) leaving the production to live a simple family life with his wife, Catherine, and stepson Theo. The Leading Player and troupe, exasperated by his defiance, remove the scenery, leaving Pippin, Catherine, and Theo alone on a bare stage in the musical’s final moment. In contrast, the 2013 Broadway revival directed by Diane Paulus introduced a revised ending in which Theo returns to the stage after Pippin and Catherine have exited. In this scenario, Theo is rejoined by the Leading Player and troupe, who now resume the musical with Theo in the lead role singing the opening of the iconic “Corner of the Sky.” The so-called “Theo Ending,” the most common choice of ending in professional productions today, including the 2021 Off West End revival directed by Stephen Dexter, reflects the cyclical nature of the hero’s journey. Despite the seemingly minor change that it creates in the overall structure of the work, its addition results in a necessary critical recalibration of the metatheatrical elements at play within the musical. To date, there has been surprisingly little academic discussion of Pippin nor consideration of the metatheatrical conceit employed in the musical’s conclusion, including both the original Fosse ending and the revised Theo ending. In The Musical Theater of Stephen Schwartz, Paul Laird merely refers to “the show’s ambiguous ending, when the Leading Player strips away the production elements.”(1) Robert Emmet Long describes the work somewhat unassumingly as “a concept musical in which the sense of estrangement in Pippin’s world makes a comment on our own contemporary one.”(2) Despite its innovative structure and thematic depth, Pippin has not received the scholarly attention it deserves, particularly when acknowledging its significant contributions to the development of metatheatrical techniques in contemporary musical theatre. Dissecting the implications of the “Theo Ending” underscores the critical importance of the recent revision, particularly how the “Theo Ending” revisits and reinvigorates the central theme of male psychosocial development, not only reshaping the resolution of the musical, but also shifting from the work’s comparatively static resolution to a new perspective on the evolving nature of masculine identity. One possible explanation for the emergence of the “Theo Ending” is that it makes the musical, for want of a better word, more “commercial.” Seen this way, it is more in tune with the trends in contemporary commercial musical theatre, which emphasize crowd-pleasing, satisfying conclusions, often accompanied by the reprise of the musical’s most widely popular number—in this case reprises of both “Corner of the Sky” and “Magic to Do.” This is at least partially true and, as I demonstrate below, Pippin has seen numerous updates and revisions since its inception. Additionally, the “Theo Ending” crucially brings into sharper focus the nature of the Leading Player as not simply an embodiment of Pippin’s ego or subconscious, or as a cypher for the forces of capitalist surveillance culture, but rather as the voice of the collective unconscious—what psychologist Carl Jung saw as the deepest and most perplexing layer of the psyche that unites all humans through a shared language of archetype and understanding. I argue that Pippin and Jungian theory can engage in a productive dialogue about the nature of male psychosexual development that enhances understanding of both without subordinating one to the other. As the son of King Charlemagne, Pippin struggles with the formidable shadow of his father, as well as the scheming of his stepmother, Fastrada and his half-brother, Lewis, who leave him trapped between the expectations of his class and his desire to find something more authentic and, perhaps ironically, something more “exceptional” than becoming Holy Roman Emperor. The metatheatrical techniques of the musical, further intensified and complicated by the “Theo Ending,” reflect the psychoanalytic process itself, particularly in the way they reveal the multi-layered, often contradictory aspects of the self. Viewed through this lens, the “Theo Ending” ultimately reflects a bolder and more daring approach to the metatheatrical contours of the work, while also serving as a poignant mirror to the masculine shadow and archetypes that underlie Pippin’s transformational journey, as well as Theo’s similar journey, which is set to follow his stepfather’s. The significance of the new ending lies in its reinforcement of the musical’s central thematic figuration: that the pursuit of extraordinary accomplishments, while enticing in youth, ultimately results in a debilitating lack of authenticity and connection to the world around oneself. By shifting the narrative focus to Theo in the final moments, this ending emphasizes that this struggle is not confined to the protagonist but is a recurring challenge across generations. Metatheatre in Pippin Hirson’s original book for Pippin (already an almost complete revision of a musical of the same name that Schwartz wrote while attending Carnegie Mellon University)(3) underwent a substantial metamorphosis under Fosse’s direction, which altered both the tone and narrative trajectory of the musical. Known for his penetrating and assertive directing style, Fosse left an indelible mark on the musical’s development, and his collaboration with Schwartz during the original production was marked by passionate disagreements and creative conflicts that continued to drive the development of the musical.(4) Fosse recreated the character of the Leading Player, originally known in a different form as the Old Man, after casting director Michael Shurtleff introduced him to actor Ben Vereen. Reshaping the role specifically for Vereen, Fosse transformed the Leading Player into the essential narrative fulcrum for the musical’s metadramatic layers.(5) Stuart Ostrow contends that Fosse’s addition of this character turned Schwartz’s work “from a sincere, naïve, morality play to an anachronistic cynical burlesque."(6) A further crucial alteration made by Fosse was a slight modification of the musical’s ending. In the original book, Pippin closes the show by declaring himself “trapped, but happy;” Fosse opted to eliminate the final two words, leaving Pippin “trapped” in a state of tantalizing ambiguity.(7) This directorial choice not only underlines the pervasive fear of being trapped by social expectations, which is woven into the revised narrative, but also challenges the convention of a happy marital resolution as the best and most desirable conclusion. Pippin might have found a wife, but that is no guarantee of his happiness. The work concludes on an ambiguous note regarding Pippin’s fate and the dynamics of desire, ambition, and the quest for fulfillment that he strives for but ultimately fails to achieve. The ending of Pippin has evolved over time, creating an enduring sense of ambiguity for critics and audiences regarding its significance and the role of the Leading Player in it.(8) As Elodie Paillard and Silvia Milanezi describe, metadrama encompasses “theatricality, reflexivity, auto-referentiality, forms of theatrical illusion, or what is called play-within-the-play.”(9) This framework of metadrama introduces a sense of self-reflexivity and dramatic irony, a narrative deice that Yifen Beus acknowledges has early origins despite its seemingly postmodern ambiance and tone. (10) The use of metatheatricality in Pippin is emblematic of the form’s evolution over dramatic history, as the technique can be traced back to the works of early Greek playwrights of the fourth century BCE, including Euripides and Aristophanes.(11) In these classical Greek comedies, characters could be acutely aware of their role within the theatrical performance and frequently broke the fourth wall to address the audience directly, a dramatic tradition also notably employed by William Shakespeare in works such as Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream .(12) Closer to Pippin ’s time, the backstage musical films of the 1920s and 30s, including The Broadway Melody (1929), 42nd Street (1933), Footlight Parade (1933), and Dames (1934), interpolated the lives of performers into the performance itself, suggesting an equally resonant influence on the form of Pippin. This blurring of the boundaries between the world of the play and the real lives of the actors is a recurring theme in the history of musical theatre, including perhaps the most famous example of Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate (1948). The plot conceptually turns on the juxtaposition of reality and fiction as a theatre troupe stages an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew . In Porter’s musical, the interplay between the characters’ on-stage personalities and their off-stage struggles becomes a central thematic focus, a dynamic explored in darker and more sombre ways in later works such as A Chorus Line (1975) and Follies (1971). Iconic pieces of 1970s musical theatre, these two works drew not merely on the metadramatic mode employed in earlier musicals and musical movies, but also upon Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt (or “alienation effect”) to challenge prevailing norms of dramatic representation that prompted audiences to engage with the material in a more introspective and critical way. By using methods such as direct address, visible stage mechanics, and deliberate breaking of the fourth wall, Brecht aimed to disrupt the passive consumption of theatre and instead promote a socially aware audience experience. More recent musicals such as Nic Doodson, Andrew Kay, and Ben Norris’s The Choir of Man (2017) have taken this self-reflexivity in a new direction that, in the twenty-first century, now seeks to engage rather than alienate or distance the audience. In it, the actors use their real names, and the book is updated with each successive cast, incorporating specific real-life details such as their birthplaces and family backgrounds into the narrative, blurring the line between the performers’ onstage personas and their authentic identities. Metatheatrical techniques witnessed a remarkable revival during the postmodern era. The Fantasticks (1960) and Man of La Mancha (1965) transpose the original metatextual elements of their source material—Edmund Rostand’s Les Romanesques (1894) and Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605 and 1615)—into productions that first emerged during a time of significant social and cultural upheaval in the United States involving personal liberation, self-discovery, and the questioning of social norms. These works stand alongside Cabaret (1966), Hair (1967), Godspell (1971) and King of Hearts (1978) as part of a movement toward more experimental and thematically complex musicals that collectively began to push the boundaries of the genre—not only by moving away from the conventions of the book musical form but, in doing so, introducing political and social commentary in a way that was more explicitly daring than in earlier eras. Pippin ’s self-referential and metatheatrical approach elevates the act of performance to a central narrative device. With a conscious and continuous self-awareness within the narrative structure of the work, Pippin’s developmental journey is entirely dependent on the unfolding of that journey within the play-within-a-play structure. In this sense, Pippin represents a fusion of the long history of metatheatre with a new postmodern reckoning with the validity of historical narrative. More specifically – and in sharp distinction to The Fantasticks , Man of La Mancha , Cabaret , Hair , and Godspell – Pippin is an example of what Phillip Zapkin describes as “historiographic metatheatre . ”(13) Historiographic metatheatre refers to a type of performance that not only recounts an historical event, but also self-consciously examines the nature of historical representation itself and, in doing so, modulates and manipulates both the methods of the historian and the established historical record. Thus, works of historiographic metatheatre question the ways in which history is constructed and understood, often blurring the lines between fact and fiction, and reality and performance. Zapkin is drawing upon Linda Hutcheon’s influential definition of “historiographic metafiction,” defined by Hutcheon as fiction that “works to situate itself within historical discourse without surrendering its autonomy as fiction” by manipulating and challenging its own very nature as historical.(14) E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (1975), a classic example of historiographic metafiction, weaves together the lives of three fictional families with historical figures such as J.P. Morgan, Harry Houdini, and Henry Ford, blending reality and fiction in a way that questions the traditional boundaries of historical storytelling and, through this, scrutinizes the history that America told of itself through the twentieth century. Doctorow’s Ragtime would later be adapted into Flaherty, Ahrens, and McNally’s Tony Award-winning musical of the same name, which led to the emergence of more historiographic metatheatre musicals into the twenty-first century, including Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton (2015) and Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss’s Six (2017). The significance of these works inhere in their ability to reflect on the nature of historical storytelling itself, questioning and reshaping the way historical narratives are constructed and consumed. Both critical and popular successes, the works examine the interplay between historical facts and representation in the form of musical theatre, portraying both historical events and the processes through which they are remembered and interpreted. There is a long tradition of historical musicals that detail real events or the lives of individuals, such as Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone’s 1776 (1969) , Maury Yeston and Peter Stone’s Titanic (1997), and Jason Robert Brown and Alfred Uhry’s Parade (1998) . But what establishes Pippin as an early frontrunner in the historiographic metatheatre tradition of Ragtime, Hamilton, and Six is its innovative use of metatheatricality to interrogate the nature of historical representation, personal identity, and, ultimately, the psychological forces that shape our understanding of both. Pippin stands apart by not only dramatizing historical moments or figures, but by using metatheatricality to explore the internal dynamics of its characters’ psyches. This self-referential technique places Pippin at the forefront of the historiographic metatheatre tradition, prefiguring later works that similarly use metatheatrical devices to explore and comment on the representation of historical figures and events, offering new perspectives on the past through the lens of contemporary performance. The events of the inset play, Pippin: His Life and Times , are set in the early Middle Ages: however, the period and context during which that story is told have varied considerably across productions. The original 1972 production broadly adhered to the eighth-century setting, with a group of itinerant miracle play performers set in an imaginary design tapestry that blended elements of eighth-century costumes with the flair and sensuality of twentieth-century vaudeville and burlesque. The effect was striking, and Tony Walton won a Tony Award for Best Scenic Design, while Patricia Zipprodt was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Costume Design. In many ways, this bold visual design served as a metaphorical reflection of the fragmentary nature of history and its retelling, visually representing the historiographic metatheatrical maneuvers of the play-within-a-play while emphasizing the musical’s attentiveness to themes more consistent with the sexual revolution of the late twentieth century. Later revivals, however, have made use of a number of innovative interpretive interventions in the staging of the musical’s metatheatrical narrative arc and the startling ending. The 2013 Broadway revival, directed by Diane Paulus, moved the setting of the inset play to the world of the early-twentieth-century circus, a rich terrain for examining tensions between external glamour and internal fulfillment, and the musical’s Off West End revival in 2021 was set in the 1967 Summer of Love. Staged as a protest storytelling circle that gathered to denounce war, this reinterpretation contextualiszd Pippin’s quest within the ethos of social upheaval created by the Vietnam War and the countercultural rebellion that emerged alongside it. In each of these interpretations, metatheatrical elements highlighted the permeability of the historical record: the traveling wonder play, the circus, and the countercultural hippie context each illustrate how the story of a young man’s growth toward individuation can adapt to different cultural, historical, and social contexts. In navigating the function and design of the play-within-a-play, directors and designers are confronted with the challenge of maintaining plausibility and coherence in the seeming chaos of the invented and at times contradictory narratives. At the heart of the metatheatrical dynamics of Pippin is the deliberate and artful dissolution of the boundaries between historical fact and narrative fiction. In reforming the historical account of Charlemagne and his eldest son Pippin (in reality, Pepin [c. 768 to 811]), Pippin tests the delicate balance between narrative authenticity and theatrical form. Charlemagne’s reign marked a pivotal moment in European history. Unlike his father, Pepin is mostly forgotten by the established historical record, largely because he was ultimately exiled, leading his younger brother Louis the Pious to become their father’s successor. The musical’s historiographical narrative artifice (embodied in the form of the Leading Player, who manipulates his constructed historical record), challenges both personal and collective historical narratives and, perhaps more provocatively, draws attention to the artifice of the historical record itself. As the putative director of the inset play, the Leading Player explicitly directs Pippin’s own developmental story in favor of spectacle, enticing him with a series of caricatured versions of “meaningful” pursuits: war, politics, and hedonistic sexual pleasure. The Leading Player’s cruelty and sadism trivialize the portrayal of events, such as in the Act I song “Glory,” which stylizes the horrors of war as a battle against the Visigoths, a historically inaccurate context as the Visigoths had already been largely defeated before Charlemagne’s reign. Here, the Leading Player reframes battle as an opportunity for personal glory, which relies only on the existence of an anonymous enemy. Fosse’s signature “Manson Trio” dance routine, which first appeared in the original production of this song, shows the Leading Player responding to the bloodshed with a stylized detachment and a parodically mechanical vaudeville dance that trivializes violence with jazz hands and bravado. His manipulation of these moments reduces complex, often violent historical events to consumable performance, emphasizing his control over the inset play and underscoring the performative nature of historical narrative. In her seminal work The Death of Character , Elinor Fuchs discusses the role of metatheatricality in disrupting narrative immersion, particularly in the reemergence in the 1930s of the mystery play in the symbolist works of playwrights such as Maurice Maeterlinck and August Strindberg. “The medieval mystery plays told the sacred history of the world,” Fuchs writes,. “The moralities, based not on history but on doctrine, recapitulated this universal form through a central figure’s progress toward salvation.”(15) Just as miracle plays used allegory to explore spiritual questions, Pippin employs its metatheatrical structure to interrogate contemporary notions of selfhood and identity rather than medieval concerns regarding the correct way to embody spiritual devotion and redemption. This shift brings with it a distinctly Jungian engagement with the psyche, and Pippin thus not only explores the nature of identity and selfhood but also enacts this process of individuation through the metatheatrical form. Pippin’s Individuation Embedded within the thematic tapestry of Pippin is the exploration of individuation through a quest for life’s meaning, a journey frequently hindered within the musical by Pippin’s pursuit of external validation. His search for purpose leads him through a series of episodic vignettes—he tries to find his purpose in war, hedonism, politics, love, and fatherhood. Each illuminates different facets of his personal and psychological journey toward what Jung called “individuation” the integration of different aspects of the self in order to achieve psychological wholeness. Jung explained that “the aim of individuation is nothing less than to divest the self of the false wrappings of the persona, on the one hand and the suggestive power of primordial images on the other.”(16) Jung’s theories, particularly his concepts of the collective unconscious and archetypes, are deeply rooted in his study of artistic and cultural artifacts. He believed that these artifacts, including myths, fairy tales, and religious narratives, contain symbols and motifs that reveal universal patterns of the human psyche. In their influential book King, Warrior, Magician, Lover , Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette highlight four of Jung’s twelve primary archetypes—the four named in the book’s title—which they identify as the essential functions of mature masculinity. The King archetype represents the benevolent and authoritative aspect of masculinity and embodies qualities such as leadership, responsibility, and wisdom. The Warrior archetype represents assertiveness, courage, and the ability to protect and fight for what is just. The Magician is associated with insight, knowledge, and transformative power and emphasises the importance of intellect and spiritual awareness. Finally, the Lover emphasizes the relational aspects of masculinity and represents sensitivity, emotional depth, and the capacity for intimate relationships,. Though Moore and Gillette’s work postdates Pippin and thus did not directly influence the original production, there are striking parallels between their archetypal framework and Pippin’s journey. In Pippin , the protagonist literally embodies the roles of King, Warrior, and Lover throughout his quest for meaning and, at various points in the musical, he also reflects the Magician archetype, particularly in his search for existential understanding and transformation. These symbols are manifestations of the collective unconscious, a shared reservoir of experience and knowledge that transcends individual consciousness. Jung believed that individuation entails a psychic journey of personal discovery in which the individual confronts and integrates his or her hidden or shadow aspects, those aspects of self, such as desires, fears, repressions and unresolved conflicts that have been pushed to the limits of our own awareness as a protective strategy for the ego. Pippin presents an allegory of this process. Following the opening number, “Magic to Do,” in which the Leading Player and ensemble remind audiences that history is not a singular, unchanging truth, but rather a rich field of diverse stories, perspectives, and interpretations, the actor playing the role of “Pippin” is introduced. “He may be a little nervous; this is his first time playing the role,” the Leading Player explains to the audience, breaking the fourth wall and explicitly identifying the metatheatrical nature of Pippin’s character arc as both a participant in the mystery play, and a new actor to the role. This self-referential comment draws an uncanny parallel between the character Pippin and the performer playing the role; the character of Pippin’s nervousness comes from having to give a valedictory speech to the faculty of the University of Padua, while the nervousness of the performer of that character comes from this being his “first” performance of the role. Here, Pippin, recently honored as Scholar of the House, struggles with the tension between accepting this prestigious role and pursuing a more meaningful existence, mirroring the performer’s own apprehensions about stepping into this new role. In a gesture that will be brought into sharper focus in the musical’s final moments, there is a convoluted overlap of “self” and “role,” between the nervous character of Pippin and the “first-time actor” performing that role, insomuch as all social behaviours are a performance. Pippin’s intention, as introduced in “Corner of the Sky,”is to find his own unique place in the world and to transcend the mundane to achieve the extraordinary. In this widely popular song (indeed, one of the most musically successful numbers in the show), Pippin explores the complexity of human ambition, which seems to necessitate a ceaseless pursuit of meaning. For the youthful Pippin, meaning and purpose seem attainable only through grand, exceptional achievements, dismissing the ordinary as inherently unfulfilling. This dichotomy between the extraordinary and the ordinary underscores Pippin’s internal conflict and his relentless search for significance beyond conventional success. For Pippin, the “false wrappings of the persona”(17) are reflected in his frequent desire to fulfill the expectations imposed on him by his position in society (first as a student, then as a warrior, lover, leader and, finally, father), while at the same time painfully and pitifully recognizing that the persona society imposes on him does not suit him. His negotiation of identity comes through engagement with archetypal figures—the authoritarian father, a menacing mentor embodied by the Leading Player, and the nurturing anima represented by Catherine—who, together, serve as symbolic manifestations of various facets of Pippin’s subconscious mind. Each of these characters plays a crucial role in developing Pippin’s understanding of himself and the world around him, contributing to the rich palette of themes explored in the musical. “The suggestive power of primordial images,” to use Jung’s phrase, is powerful and unmistakably reflected in the figure of the Leading Player and his coercive performers, emblematic of the overwhelming desire for greatness and visibility that Pippin must ultimately reject in favor of a more authentic understanding of self. In Jungian analysis, as in Pippin’s own journey, this process often involves confronting the “shadow,” the repressed or rejected aspects of the self that have been pushed into the depths of the unconscious in order to find harmony between the self and its public expression. Midway through Act II (18), the song “Extraordinary” offers a striking encapsulation of the pursuit of the extraordinary and, ultimately, the futility of the search, as Pippin will only later come to fully realize at the musical’s conclusion. The seductive lure of fame and greatness, a fundamental facet of social masculinity, captures Pippin’s imagination and mirrors the societal expectations surrounding him as he navigates the maze of masculine archetypes and expectations. This otherwise light, pop-inflected song reflects the collective desire for recognition and significance that often defines a man's worth in the eyes of society. It ultimately captures the inner conflict still stunting Pippin’s individuation—the struggle between conforming to external expectations and carving out an authentic identity. As a whole, the musical gestures toward the paradoxical recognition that the more exceptional someone wants to be, the more he runs the risk of losing his authenticity through the erosion of personal coherence and the fragmentation of the self. In this way, the song captures a key paradoxical insight at the thematic heart of the musical: the more one seeks to stand out and achieve exceptionality, the greater the risk of losing one’s true self. The quest for extraordinary achievement often leads to a fragmentation of identity, where the pursuit of external validation undermines personal authenticity. Theo’s Individuation Pippin was, in its formative stages, a fairly standard book musical about the growth and development of a minor historical figure, and did not include any of the metatheatrical elements now most associated with the work. Indeed, in an earlier formation, the musical ended with Pippin’s attempted assassination of his father, until producer Hal Prince encouraged Schwartz to use that material as the first act and then continue Pippin’s story in the second act.(19) In the Fosse ending, Pippin’s decision to settle down with Catherine while feeling “trapped”(20) reflects a dejected yet also deeply human capitulation to societal norms. It represents a mature compromise between his personal desires and commitment to family, highlighting the complex negotiation of masculinity in relation to societal expectations of being father, protector, and provider. Carol de Giere imagines that “on one level, the show’s ending reflected transitions in Schwartz’s own life as he and [his wife] Carole settled into the first home of their own in rural western Connecticut.”(21) It is thus not insignificant that the Theo ending once again extends the timeframe depicted by the musical by expanding the story to imagine Theo’s own subsequent search for his “corner of the sky,” ultimately mirroring Prince’s initial suggestion to explore what happens beyond the climax. Just as Prince’s advice questioned the boundaries of when a narrative can or should conclude, the “Theo Ending” proposes an ongoing cycle of self-discovery and endeavor and is not confined to a single life, but is a recurring journey that is passed down through generations. By positioning Theo as the new seeker of the “corner of the sky,” the “Theo Ending” offers a poignant echo of the burden of parental and societal expectations that Pippin experienced and had to overcome. This original Fosse ending is a clear example of what the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index of folktales, used to categorize similar narrative structures across a wide range of folkloric traditions, calls a “treasure at home” narrative, in which a journey is undertaken only to find that what the protagonist had been seeking was already at home. The significance of this narrative archetype lies in the dramatic irony of a protagonist embarking on a long journey in search of riches, only to discover that the treasure or fulfillment he sought lay within the familiar confines of his own home. The “treasure at home” narrative emphasises the idea that true happiness and contentment are often found in the ordinary and mundane aspects of life, rather than in distant and extraordinary adventures. It emphasises the importance of appreciating and valuing what one already has and suggests that the pursuit of external success and wealth only ultimately lead back to the simplicity and richness of one’s home and family. In the context of Pippin , Pippin’s desires and dreams, symbolized by his search for his “corner of the sky,” gradually intertwine with the realization that the seeds of his own contentment have already been sown in the family life he has created and, at least for a time, tried to discard. What is most striking when considering the masculine archetype and metatheatrical form of Pippin is that the alternate “Theo Ending” explicitly points out that the voice of the Leading Player is not merely symbolic of Pippin’s ego and subconscious. Rather, it symbolizes a collective psyche that is crucial to the development of the individual from youthful innocence to mature masculinity. Each whispered word of the Leading Player, which Pippin has now learned to recognize and control by the show’s culmination, represents the conflicting demands of societal expectations and personal desires that each individual must learn to deal with. The Leading Player becomes a manifestation of the Jungian collective unconscious, the deepest and most inaccessible layer of the human psyche comprising symbols, archetypes, and primordial images that are common across humans. These archetypes and their associated drives are innate and not shaped by personal experience. According to Jung, the collective unconscious forms a reservoir of common myths and symbols of humanity that influence our thoughts, behaviours, and perceptions: The existence of the collective unconscious means that individual consciousness is anything but a tabula rasa and is not immune to predetermining influences. On the contrary, it is in the highest degree influenced by inherited presuppositions, quite apart from the unavoidable influences exerted upon it by the environment. The collective unconscious comprises in itself the psychic life of our ancestors right back to the earliest beginnings. It is the matrix of all conscious psychic occurrences, and hence it exerts an influence that compromises the freedom of consciousness in the highest degree, since it is continually striving to lead all conscious processes back into the old paths.(22) The collective unconscious acts as a source of personal and cultural expression, tapping into a vast reservoir of archetypal meanings that transcend individual experience. Whereas the Fosse ending emphasized the singularity of Pippin’s developmental story (i.e., that his conflict with the Leading Player and the other performers represented an inward psychic journey toward individuation that was unique to him), the “Theo Ending” reemphasizes the universality of the journey toward individuation that occurs in all humans. Although not biologically related to Pippin, Theo nevertheless inherits the “predetermining influences” that shaped his stepfather, and the explicit recognition of the Leading Player of these influences underlines the crucial role they play in Pippin’s development from youthful naivete to mature masculinity. The reintroduction of Theo at the end and his subsequent confrontation with the Leading Player demonstrates the ongoing process of individuation that goes beyond a single life. It points to the permanence of archetypal challenges and the perpetual human search for meaning, establishing the idea in the show’s final moments that the path to maturity and self-knowledge is a universal journey. The musical’s initial Broadway run in 1972 was met with much critical acclaim, and the work has enjoyed considerable success in Broadway and West End revivals over the past 50 years. While the musical was very much a product of its time and place, its enduring appeal is due in no small part to the mutability afforded by the metatheatrical structure, which allows directors to continue to reshape the thematic contours of the work. The “Theo Ending” reiterates the universal human search for purpose and meaning, achieved by reconciling the innate complexity of the self with its external, public expression and, even more so than the Fosse ending, speaks to a conceptual pluralism in which all humans are united by a shared journey of self-discovery. This interplay between the individual and social expectations—between the authentic self and its social mask—is the central theme of Pippin . More importantly though, the musical’s engagement with a notoriously porous historical record of a largely forgotten son of Charlemagne embeds it within a broader postmodern context in which the boundaries between truth and fiction are constantly renegotiated. By presenting Theo’s journey toward individuation as a continuation of Pippin’s, the musical emphasizes the eternal cycle of growth and transformation that characterizes human experience. Despite the typically postmodern ambiguity of the metatheatrical close, the revised “Theo Ending” points out that the search for one’s own “corner of the sky” is not unique to Pippin, but is a universal experience shared by others, including Theo, who also encounters the fantastical voices of the collective unconscious in his own psychic drama of growth and individuation. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Paul R. Laird, The Musical Theater of Stephen Schwartz: From Godspell to Wicked and Beyond (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), p. 76. Robert Emmet Long, Jerome Robbins and the Great Choreographer-Directors 1940 to the Present (London: Continuum, 2003), p. 165. Robert Emmet Long, Jerome Robbins and the Great Choreographer-Directors 1940 to the Present (London: Continuum, 2003), p. 165 Paul R. Laird, The Musical Theater of Stephen Schwartz: From Godspell to Wicked and Beyond (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), p. 62; Robert Emmet Long, Jerome Robbins and the Great Choreographer-Directors 1940 to the Present (London: Continuum, 2003), p. 165. Douglas Watt, ‘Bob Fosse Added a “Leading Player” Made Pippin Easy’, Sunday News 19 November 1972, Leisure, p. 3; Carol de Giere, Defying Gravity: The Creative Career of Stephen Schwartz from Godspell to Wicked (New York: Applause, 2008) , p. 88. Stuart Ostrow, A Producer’s Broadway Journey (London: Praeger, 1999), p. 117. Paul R. Laird, The Musical Theater of Stephen Schwartz: From Godspell to Wicked and Beyond (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), p. 66. Paul R. Laird, The Musical Theater of Stephen Schwartz: From Godspell to Wicked and Beyond (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), p. 76. Elodie Paillard and Silvia Milanezi, ‘“Theatre”, “Paratheatre”, “Metatheatre”: What Are We Talking About?’ in Theatre and Metatheatre: Definitions, Problems, Limits, ed by Elodie Paillard and Silvia Milanezi (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2021), 1-20, p. 1. Yifen Beus, ‘Self-Reflexivity and the Play within the Play and its Cross-Genre Manifestation’, in The Play within the Play: The Performance of Meta-Theatre and Self-Reflection, ed by Gerhard Fischer and Bernhard Greiner (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 15-26. See: Emilie Ruch, ‘Metatheatre and Dramaturgical Innovation: A Study of Recognition Scenes in Euripides’ Tragedies Electra, Helen, Iphigenia in Tauris, and Ion, in Theatre and Metatheatre: Definitions, Problems, Limits, ed by Elodie Paillard and Silvia Milanezi (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2021), 153-176; Marco Vespa, ‘Animal Metaphors and Metadrama’ in Theatre and Metatheatre: Definitions, Problems, Limits, ed by Elodie Paillard and Silvia Milanezi (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2021), 193-212. Bernhard Greiner, ‘The Birth of the Subject out of the Spirit of the Play within the Play: The Hamlet Paradigm’, in The Play within the Play: The Performance of Meta-Theatre and Self-Reflection, ed by Gerhard Fischer and Bernhard Greiner (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 3-14. Phillip Zapkin, ‘Compromised Epistemologies: The Ethics of Historiographic Metatheatre in Tom Stoppard’s Travesties and Arcadia’ , Modern Drama, 59:3 (2016), 306-326. Linda Hutcheon, ‘Historiographic Metafiction, Parody and the Intertextuality of History’, in Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction, ed. by Patrick O'Donnell and Robert Con Davis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 4. Elinor Fuchs, The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theater After Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 39. Carl Jung, ‘The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious’ in The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, vol. 7, (London: Routledge, 1977), p. 172. Carl Jung, ‘The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious’ in The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, vol. 7, (London: Routledge, 1977), p. 172. The original production had no interval; however, all recent productions have now employed a two-act format with interval. Carol de Giere, Defying Gravity: The Creative Career of Stephen Schwartz from Godspell to Wicked (New York: Applause, 2008) , p. 83. Paul R. Laird, The Musical Theater of Stephen Schwartz: From Godspell to Wicked and Beyond (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), p. 66 Carol de Giere, Defying Gravity: The Creative Career of Stephen Schwartz from Godspell to Wicked (New York: Applause, 2008) , p. 86. Carl Jung, ‘The Significance of Constitution and Heredity in Psychology’, in The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, vol. 7, (London: Routledge, 1977), p. 112. Bibliography Bacon, Lloyd, director. 42nd Street . Warner Bros., 1933. 89 minutes. Bacon, Lloyd, director. Footlight Parade . Warner Bros., 1933. 104 minutes. Beaumont, Harry, director. The Broadway Melody . Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1929. 100 minutes. Beus, Yifen. “Self-Reflexivity and the Play within the Play and its Cross-Genre Manifestation.” In The Play within the Play: The Performance of Meta-Theatre and Self-Reflection, edited by Gerhard Fischer and Bernhard Greiner. Rodopi, 2007. Brown, Jason Robert. Parade . Book by Alfred Uhry. TCG, 1998. de Giere, Carol. Defying Gravity: The Creative Career of Stephen Schwartz from Godspell to Wicked.New York: Applause, 2008 . Edwards, Sherman. 1776 . Book by Peter Stone. Concord Theatricals, 1969. Fuchs, Elinor. The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theater After Modernism . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Enright, Ray, director. Dames . Warner Bros., 1934. 91 minutes. Flaherty, Stephen, and Lynn Ahrens. Ragtime . Book by Terrence McNally. TCG, 1998. Greiner, Bernhard. “The Birth of the Subject out of the Spirit of the Play within the Play: The Hamlet Paradigm.” In The Play within the Play: The Performance of Meta-Theatre and Self-Reflection, edited by Gerhard Fischer and Bernhard Greiner, 3-14. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Hamlisch, Marvin. A Chorus Line . Book by James Kirkwood Jr. and Nicholas Dante, lyrics by Edward Kleban. Concord Theatricals, 1975 Link, Peter. King of Hearts . Book by Joseph Stein, lyrics by Jacob Brackman. Samuel French, 1978. Hutcheon, Linda. “Historiographic Metafiction, Parody and the Intertextuality of History.” In Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction, edited by Patrick O'Donnell and Robert Con Davis. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Jung, Carl. The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, vol. 7. London: Routledge, 1977. Kander, John, and Fred Ebb. Cabaret. Book by Joe Masteroff. Concord Theatricals, 1966. Laird, Paul R. The Musical Theater of Stephen Schwartz: From Godspell to Wicked and Beyond . New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014. Leigh, Mitch. Man of La Mancha . Lyrics by Joe Darion, book by Dale Wasserman, 1965. Long, Robert Emmet. Jerome Robbins and the Great Choreographer-Directors 1940 to the Present. Continuum, 2003. MacDermot, Galt, James Rado, and Gerome Ragni. Hair . Hair . Theatrical Rights Worldwide, 1967. Marlow, Toby, and Lucy Moss. Six: The Musical. Concord Theatricals, 2017. Miranda, Lin-Manuel. Hamilton: An American Musical. Hamilton Uptown LLC, 2015. Ostrow, Stuart. A Producer’s Broadway Journey . Praeger, 1999. Paillard, Elodie, and Silvia Milanezi, ““Theatre”, “Paratheatre”, “Metatheatre”: What Are We Talking About?” In Theatre and Metatheatre: Definitions, Problems, Limits, edited by Elodie Paillard and Silvia Milanezi. de Gruyter, 2021. Porter, Cole. Kiss Me, Kate . Book by Samuel and Bella Spewack, Concord Theatricals, 1948. Roberts, David. “The Play within the Play and the Closure of Representation.” In The Play Within the Play: The Performance of Meta-Theatre and Self-Reflection, edited by Gerhard Fischer and Bernhard Greiner. Rodopi, 2007. Ruch, Emilie. “Metatheatre and Dramaturgical Innovation: A Study of Recognition Scenes in Euripides’ Tragedies Electra, Helen, Iphigenia in Tauris, and Ion. ” In Theatre and Metatheatre: Definitions, Problems, Limits, edited by Elodie Paillard and Silvia Milanezi. de Gruyter, 2021. Schmidt, Harvey. The Fantasticks . Lyrics and book by Tom Jones. Samuel French, 1960. Schwartz, Stephen. Godspell . Book by John-Michael Tebelak. MTI, 1971. Schwartz, Stephen. Pippin . Book by Roger O. Hirson. MTI, 1972. Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream . Oxford University Press, 1994. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet . Arden Shakespeare, 1982. Sondheim, Stephen. Follies . Book by James Goldman, 1971. Vespa, Marco. “Animal Metaphors and Metadrama.” In Theatre and Metatheatre: Definitions, Problems, Limits, edited by Elodie Paillard and Silvia Milanezi. de Gruyter, 2021). Watt, Douglas. “Bob Fosse Added a “Leading Player” Made Pippin Easy.” Sunday News 19 November 1972, Leisure, 3. Yeston, Maury. Titanic . Book by Peter Stone, 1997. Zapkin, Phillip. “Compromised Epistemologies: The Ethics of Historiographic Metatheatre in Tom Stoppard’s Travesties and Arcadia .” Modern Drama 59, no. 3 (2016): 306-326. Footnotes About The Author(s) ALLAN JOHNSON is Associate Professor in English Literature and Associate Dean (Doctoral College) at the University of Surrey. He is the author of Alan Hollinghurst and the Vitality of Influence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Masculine Identity in Modernist Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), The Sacred Life of Modernist Literature: Immanence, Occultism, and the Making of the Modern World (Bloomsbury, 2022), and numerous articles and chapters on twentieth-century literature and drama. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction 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. 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James F. Wilson 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 “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein James F. Wilson By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Harvey Fierstein. Photo by Carol Rosegg. When Torch Song Trilogy opened in 1982, the show’s playwright and star, Harvey Fierstein, was lauded as the first openly gay writer and lead actor on Broadway. In an interview with Barbara Walters the following year, Fierstein scoffed at the dubious distinction: “Isn’t it totally ridiculous that I’m getting all this attention because I’m the first openly gay [Broadway star and playwright]?” Schooling a visibly perplexed Walters, he explained, “You know that the women in your audience are sitting out there, and they go to see movies and they’re dying over these gorgeous men, [who] you know they’re gay.”(1) Out-spoken and unafraid to be controversial, Fierstein, a four-time Tony-Award winning writer and performer, is both a prolific artist and committed activist. He was at the forefront of the nascent AIDS protests and grassroots fundraising, and he remains a staunch advocate for LGBTQ+ visibility and rights. In a career spanning more than fifty years, Fierstein got his start with the Gallery Players in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and while still a teenager, he appeared in Andy Warhol’s Pork (1971). As he writes in his memoir, I Was Better Last Night (2022), he played Amelia, “an asthmatic lesbian maid with a penchant for porn mags and plate jobs.”(2) (Fierstein advises non-squeamish and scatological-curious readers to look up the latter fetish.) Experimental and semi-autobiographical work followed, including the three plays comprising Torch Song Trilogy , International Stud (1978), Fugue in a Nursery (1979), and Widows and Children First (1979), all of which began at La MaMa in New York City’s East Village. In addition to Torch Song , Fierstein’s Broadway plays, Safe Sex (1987) and Casa Valentina (2014), confront issues affecting LGBTQ+ communities. As a librettist, Fierstein has been instrumental in bringing the American musical out of the closet. La Cage aux Folles (1983) is credited as the first Broadway musical to feature a gay couple as the main characters, and the show has proven to be remarkably durable and revivable. His book for A Catered Affair (2008), based on a teleplay by Paddy Chayefsky and Gore Vidal’s film adaptation, includes a lonely gay uncle (played by Fierstein originally), embittered by a sense of exclusion from his own extended family. Kinky Boots (2013) ran on Broadway for six years, and the musical celebrates community, pride, and the complexities of gender and sexual identities. Fierstein, with his distinctive and oft-imitated gravelly voice, is a unique figure in queer theatre history, and he continues to be a brash and uninhibited spokesperson for a new generation of LGBTQ+ individuals. James Wilson: In a nod to Harry Hay, you dedicate your memoir “to the radical fairies who flew before” you. Who were the most significant radical fairies on your life and work? Harvey Fierstein: I was thrown into the gay community very young. I didn't know about the prejudice and stuff until later in life because when I joined [the Gallery Players in Brooklyn], everyone was gay. There were a couple of heterosexuals, but they bussed them in! Everyone else was gay. I was thirteen or fourteen years old, and all these older men and women were all gay and lesbian. And now it’s so funny to me to think of her as a famous person, but there was Marsha P. Johnson and the street queens. We all hung out together on Christopher Street and none of us had money to go into a bar. Even when I was older, I didn't have the money to go to a bar. I was working at La MaMa or at WPA or whatever. I was making fifty dollars a week, which barely covered my subway to and from the city. So, we just all hung out on the street together. But it was these people who lived the gay life who were so natural in it that it never occurred to me to ever lie. I mean, the idea of coming out of the closet was so strange to me because I couldn't imagine being in the closet, you know? We’re not talking about mother and father stuff, we’re talking about in the real world. And that was the kind of real world that I lived in. And I’m thinking of the playwrights who wrote for me: I had H.M. Koutoukas, Robert Patrick, Billy Hoffman, and Paul Foster, who always wore those white shirts, making him look straighter! Then there was María Irene Fornés. Ronald Tavel, of course, and Harvey Tavel, were huge influences, as were Donald L. Brooks and John Vaccaro’s [Play-House of the Ridiculous] troupe. [ Laughing .] I was just laughing because I saw an interview with Diane Lane, and I knew Diane Lane as the naked little girl who was carried over the heads in Andrei Serban’s The Trojan Women . That’s how I remember her! And then all of a sudden, she was a movie star! Wilson: You mention H.M. Koutoukas, and that makes you a direct descendant of the Caffe Cino and the birth of Off-Off-Broadway. Fierstein: The Cino was gone already, but there was Robert Patrick, Donald L. Brooks, and the dancer James Waring. Wilson: And the Trocks?(3) Fierstein: The Trockadero came along later. Eric Concklin was one of the lead ballerinas for the Trockadero, and he directed all my early plays. And Tony Bassae was also a Trockadero. And of course, the lead ballerina, Larry Ree—he and Eric worked together dressing shows. Wilson: What were performances at La MaMa and other Off-Off-Broadway theatres like in the 1970s and 1980s? Fierstein: They were inspirational. There was a wildness and a “Join us!” kind of spirit. The first show that I did with the Play-House of the Ridiculous when John Vaccaro asked me to come in was called Persia: A Desert Cheapie [by Vaccaro and Bernard Roth] in the second-floor theatre at La MaMa. He had ramps built down the two sides with a stage at one end and a stage at the other, and the audience was in the center, and we were on the four platforms. We ran around the audience, and it was absolute chaos. We also did [Paul Foster’s] Satyricon on those four platforms. It just occurred to me this moment that Andrei Serban was doing the same thing in the basement, and I wonder if John ripped that idea off Andrei! I don't know. But anyway, so we would perform in this very much in-your-face manner: The audience would come in. Ellen [Stewart] would come out with her bell, and say, “Welcome to La MaMa, dedicated to experimental theater, dedicated to the artists and all aspects of the theater. . . .” She’d make her announcement and leave. When she was done, the audience sat down on the ground to watch the show, and John Vaccaro would come out and shout, “Get up, you lazy mother fuckers! Stand the fuck up! Who told you to sit down? Get the fuck up!” I absolutely love that. Wilson: You said in a recent interview, “I wish that experimental theater still existed. There were a few of us that I would say destroyed Off-Off-Broadway. I think greed is what destroyed Off-Off-Broadway.”(4) Can you explain what you mean by that? Fierstein: I’m trying to think of the first one who actually crossed over. I mean, I know one of the early ones was Hair , of course. You know, Tom [O’Horgan] moved Hair to Broadway. Wilson: Hadn’t Dames at Sea moved from the Chino to Off-Broadway? Fierstein: Oh, yeah, but that was so much earlier. That was way before I arrived. I don’t know what effect that really had. I mean, everyone was aspirational in that way. You had Bette Midler or Sly Stallone doing a role at La MaMa and then moving on, but they never turned around and looked back. You know, I never heard Sylvester Stallone send Ellen a check. And as much as I love Bette, I’ve never been able to get her to do a benefit with me for La MaMa. But it was Tom Eyen that directed her. I don’t remember who Sly Stallone was with when he did a show. But anyway, what happened was Hair moved, and all of a sudden, there’s this possibility of making money. You know, instead of fifty dollars a week that we were getting from Ellen, there was the possibility of more. Paul Foster was just pushing and pushing. One of the famous ones was Elizabeth I. It was a musical starring Ruby Lynn Reyner. Ruby’s still around. You could always talk to her, but I think it lasted one night on Broadway.(5) Jerry Ragni and [Galt MacDermot]’s next show where they once again went to a Broadway theater—I forget what theater it was—and hollowed it out to make it look like . . . like outer space. Wilson: Was that Dude ? Fierstein: Dude ! And that also was like, boom!(6) So, there were people trying. And then Tom [O’Horgan] did Jesus Christ Superstar . And then after that it was this constant push to have another hit, which never happened for him because he did the one about Joe McCarthy, Senator Joe , I think it was called, and which was a commercial production.(7) But there was that kind of push. I was doing my shows, and I can’t say I wanted them to move. I certainly wasn’t against them moving, but I would have rather just run them longer at La MaMa. International Stud moved Off-Broadway and bombed. Widows and Children and A Fugue in a Nursery then moved Off-Broadway and bombed, and then the Broadway rights for Torch Song never happened. And you know, they brought in Joan Darling, who had done an episode of Mary Tyler Moore . In our world that made her a big director, I guess. Nice woman. As I remember, she didn’t want me in the show. She wanted Austin Pendleton to play Arnold, and I’m trying to remember who she wanted for the mother. But it was somebody equally not right. Estelle Getty, who was “Estelle Gettleman” at that time, would call me every night saying, “You can’t let them do this to me! That’s my role! It’s my role!” I kept saying, “Estelle, it’s never gonna happen. Calm down. It’s never gonna happen.” Wilson: And that was for the Off-Broadway production when it went to the Actors’ Playhouse, or when it was going to Broadway? Fierstein: It had been bought for Broadway by a producer, but never happened. And then we did the reading for the Glines, and Lawrence Lane called me and said, “Can we meet and talk?” And I took my last dollar—took the subway in from Brooklyn on my last dollar. We had this meeting, where he said after that reading, we want to produce Torch Song Off-Broadway. I had to borrow a dollar to get home from him. But thankfully, he lent me a dollar. Wilson: Switching topics but related to Torch Song : You began your career in drag, and I’m just wondering how you feel now about the commercialization of drag, and, on the flip side, the demonization of drag. They’re going after the Drag Queen Story Hours, for instance, which might be similar to your experiences doing drag in the 1970s and 80s. Fierstein: I was doing drag in a world which had no problem with doing drag. You know, when I was doing Flatbush Tosca or In Search of the Cobra Jewels or Freaky Pussy , my world had no problem with drag. What you’re talking about is once we moved Torch Song Trilogy . But there was something a little bit more challenging than drag: I was getting fucked up the ass center stage in the fourth scene. So, putting on a dress really didn’t seem like too much of a problem to the audience. That was not the scene I was asked to cut before it moved to Broadway. I was asked to cut the fuck-up-the-ass scene, so I have to say, I didn’t have that problem. Also, we were not as pretty. I mean, Jesus Christ, I look at these queens and these makeup jobs, and you can faint. You know, Nina West just played Edna in the non-union tour of Hairspray , and she’s gotten better and better at her makeup. They all get better and better at their makeup. But they are so gorgeous. And the wigs are so gorgeous. We never dreamed. I mean, we slapped that shit on. And we put some glitter on top of it, and huge eyelashes, and we thought that was drag. We would have been laughed out of—I mean, not a single one of us would have made it to RuPaul’s Drag Race as it is, but RuPaul wouldn’t have made it to RuPaul’s Drag Race ! I remember Ru when he first started at the Pyramid Club down on Avenue A, I think it was. He did that show, he and Lady Bunny, and those queens wouldn’t have made it. It’s gotten so sophisticated and so gorgeous. Wilson: I saw the original La Cage , which was brilliant, but if you compare those queens to the most recent revival, there’s a huge difference. Fierstein: Well, there’s been a problem with La Cage . The original production you had Arthur Laurents, who was scared to death and stuck two women in the chorus and made one of the gentlemen, Sam Singhaus, grow his hair long. So, when they pulled off their wigs, the two women would show that they were women, but one of the men had hair as long as the women. [Laurents] was so scared of so much of that stuff, which, of course you wouldn’t see now. On the other hand, I was very thrilled to see a woman on RuPaul’s Drag Race —and a heterosexual drag queen on RuPaul’s Drag Race —which says to me we are growing still, our community is growing still.(8) That was the original production, and Theoni V. Aldredge put them in those Erté coats, and they had fun little costumes and all that. And she tried to make them as pretty as possible. The revival that Jerry Zaks did, Jerry Mitchell had them dancing and—when they did the can-can, their chests were totally exposed.(9) There was nothing about them that said, “We’re girls.” These were muscular men doing muscular male dances. The gender fuck was in there, but you never felt they wanted to be drag queens. You didn’t. There was no love of it. Even Gary Beach’s performance was lovely, but I never felt that that’s who he was, that he was Zaza, and that this was important to him and that he felt beautiful this way. He never felt that. I thought that production was—but as I say in the book, I just turned to Jerry Herman and said, “I don’t like any of these choices, so let’s make a deal. You give me the next production; I'll give you this one.” He said, “Fine.” And so, he got his orchestra that he wanted. He got his singers that he wanted. I mean, that was the production where I said, “Are you telling me you would have rather had Beverly Sills play Dolly instead of Carol [Channing]?” And he said, “Absolutely.” It was about the music. And when the next production happened—David Babani’s production at the Menier Chocolate Factory—once again, they brought in a heterosexual director. I love him, and there was so much that Terry [Johnson] did that I really loved, but they brought in a heterosexual cast again. But the drag queens at least were having fun. They were enjoying who they were, and I felt that more. And in Doug Hodge’s performance, I felt that Zaza was there. I felt that very much. He’s a wonderful actor and his Zaza was one of my favorites.(10) Wilson: My favorite was you. I saw you and Chris Sieber, and that was the ideal La Cage for me. Fierstein: Well, we were already so beaten up by then because we’d gone through that shit with what’s his face, who’s now not allowed—the one I was put in with. Wilson: Jeffrey Tambor. Fierstein: Jeffrey Tambor! And we went through that, and then the reviews—we didn’t even have reviews because he only lasted like ten days.(11) But what a horror that was. And then the understudy had to go on. Finally, Chris came in. When Chris came in, we sort of knew the writing was on the wall because as sold out as it was, once the word got out about [what] bad shape it was in, the ticket sales just disappeared, and I knew we weren’t going to run very long. We had a really good time together. It was lovely to have this gay couple that really cared about each other. I could play with that role and play with a couple of lines and stuff like that. In the “La Cage” scene, I did a tribute to Charles Pierce. If you remember, I did his Marlene. [ As Marlene Dietrich :] “I’m going to tell the story of a girl. She look at him. He give her a heart. She look at it and give it back. I tell the story now.” I just played with that kind of stuff. We’ve never had the La Cage chorus line being female impersonators. We’ve never done that. Like I said, I did it a little. Doug Hodge did it a little bit. Did you see Doug? He did Piaf. He sort of walked out as Piaf, and it was very funny. I love the idea of playing with that to show the culture—to have the gay culture of who we love. Wilson: I watched an interview you did with Vito Russo days before La Cage started performances.(12) It took place in your Torch Song dressing room, and you predicted then that “I Am What I Am” will be a gay anthem. Fierstein: I did? Well, you know, I wrote it as a monologue, and then Jerry took it and turned it into the song. “I Am What I Am” comes out of my book for La Cage , but “A Little More Mascara” was actually Jerry musicalizing the opening of Torch Song Trilogy —the drag scene. That was the first thing he ever played for me before we even started writing the show. I went up to his house and we went up to the fourth floor to his studio, and he said, “I really wanna sing this tribute that I wrote for you,” and he sang “A Little More Mascara.” And he said that’s how we should open the show. And I said, “No, no, no. I don't think so. We did that with Torch Song .” I said, “A musical should open with a big musical number. A gay musical should open with a really big gay musical number!” That was the birth of that. What he would tell you while he was still alive—and Arthur would tell you also—I predicted then that “Look Over There” would become a song that everyone sang at every wedding and everything. I still think that song is so gorgeous. “Look Over There” is for anyone who loves you the most. Jerry will tell you how wrong I was because when Harry Como came to him to record from La Cage , he tried to push “Look Over There” because of me. And of course, Perry Como only wanted to sing “Song on the Sand.” He sort of had a little AM [radio] hit with it. Wilson: And there was the disco version of “I Am What I Am.” Fierstein: Shirley Bassey had her big hit with “I Am What I Am.” Wilson: About the recent Torch Song production, you wrote in your book, “There was no tension left, no danger. The fear was gone.” I’m curious to hear more about that experience of what it was like in 2017. And how do you see queer theatre in 2024? Fierstein: I felt the same thing when I saw [the 2018 revival of] The Boys in the Band . It wasn’t dangerous anymore, whereas it really was dangerous to see that kind of theatre. When I would look at an audience—not Off-Broadway of [the original] Torch Song —but when we moved to Broadway, it was all straight people with gay people mixed in, many times in couples looking more like straight people. When the movie opened, there was a cartoon in New Yorker, I think it was, that showed the front of a movie theatre and it was Tequila Sunrise , The Terminator , and Torch Song Trilogy —three “T’s.” A man says to his friends, “I’m not getting in that line.” They wouldn't even go near the theatre. That feeling was gone in 2017. The audience was very largely gay, and they came in with an ownership of Torch Song . It wasn’t my show anymore; it wasn’t this daring thing anymore. They came in with an ownership of it. And so, they sat there and waited for their moments. There was not even an anticipation of the story. They knew the story too well. It was like watching The Rocky Horror Show for the 700th time. That was hard for me because I want an audience to see something, and they weren’t seeing something new. Also, the casting was not my favorite. I love the two young men in it. I absolutely love them as actors. But both of them were way too old. David, the character of the son is fifteen years old. Matthew [Broderick] was eighteen. The boy who played it originally, Fred [Allen], was seventeen, I think. And this kid in the revival was twenty-eight or something. I mean, he was actually older than the boy who played Alan. Both of them should be dangerous. And the danger of the character of Alan is that he’s so close to the other one’s age, that you say, “Wait, you were just sleeping with somebody that age, and now he’s your son?” There was no danger. Partly because the audience knew what was coming, and partly because of the casting. There was no drama of a kid knowing who he is. The kid, David, knows who he is better than Arnold knows who he is. Obviously, more than Ed knows who he is. They were wonderful actors, and I love them. I was greatly disappointed in that. The only roles that worked—the only challenging roles were Arnold, Ed—the character just wanting to be straight and all that still worked just fine; people understood that—and the mother character. Wilson: It’s interesting that you mention David because his depiction is particularly dangerous, and I’m surprised it wasn’t more of a scandal originally. People don’t talk about kids and sexuality, and here you have in 1979, a fifteen-year-old kid who, as you say, was very sure of his sexuality. Fierstein: And he could walk out that door and make his living. Alan was a hustler, and both of them were hustlers. In the very first runs, audiences were scared of it. Period. To even talk about it. In the later runs, they just accepted it. And it’s sort of funny because people don’t talk about gay kids unless it’s really in a precious kind of way. You know, the lovely coming-out pieces that are not dangerous at all. But it’s a very dangerous thing for a kid. Wilson: Relatedly, one of my favorite moments in the film The Celluloid Closet is when you embrace the sissy stereotype, and you pursue that in your children’s book The Sissy Duckling . Fierstein: Well, there’s something that’s sort of interesting happening right this moment. Someone has written a musical version of Sissy Duckling , a children’s theatre piece. I think she’s done a nice job of it. They went to MTI, who are the people that license out these shows, and MTI said, “Well, we might have a problem with this, not with the content directly, but calling it the ‘Sissy Duckling.’” I need to write a two-three sentence response to MTI saying, “You don’t understand. It’s not the word that’s hurtful. He’s willing to accept that. You want to call him a Sissy? Go ahead and call him a Sissy.” Yes, I am a Sissy and I’m proud of it. It is who I am. And if you wanna put the word Sissy on it, that’s fine with me. I don’t care. You wanna call me a faggot? I don’t care. I, for one, will never really be comfortable with queer. I accept that. It’s another generation, and it’s their choice. I think I talked about in the book when all of a sudden on Gay Day, and it was one of the first times that we were starting up at Central Park as opposed to starting in the village, and they turned everything all around. We had those years where we were marching uptown, and they were marching downtown. The original Stonewallers were marching uptown! Anyway, I guess we worked it all out, because now we have floats! But I arrived at the fountain up at Central Park, and the biggest group there was the Marriage Equality group. I thought, “What the fuck is wrong with you? We can be put in jail. We can lose our apartments. And you care about wearing a wedding dress? What is wrong with you?” But I shut up because I said, “Look at them—I mean, I was thirty-five or forty—they are the young generation. They’re the next ones. We had our fight. We fought our fight. This is their fight. If this is what they want, this is what they want.” And they turned out to be right because many heterosexuals were able to say, “Oh, you want to be able to visit so-and-so in the hospital? I get that. Oh, you don’t want to lose your apartment if that one dies? I get that. Oh, you want to inherit this? I get that. You want to be on the life insurance or the health insurance? I get that.” In a funny way, they were very right about that being the next level of our fight. And now, people have said, “Aren’t you gonna make any real statement about Trump and about this Project 2025 and all that?” And I say, “I’m not sure yet. I need to see if this next generation is going to say this is what our fight is about.” I mean Project 2025 is attacking it all. They want to make gay marriage illegal. They want to take us out of the school system. Someone published a list of the top ten banned musicals. (Because of course they don’t care about plays. You actually have to listen in a play.) But the top ten musicals to be banned from schools, and I’m very proud to say I wrote three of them: La Cage , Hairspray , and Kinky Boots .(13) I heard that my book Sissy Duckling is banned from schools, and I’m very proud. Wilson: Do you get to New York much? I was wondering if you’ve seen Oh, Mary! Fierstein: No, I have not seen that. You know, COVID changed so much, just reshaped everything—made me a lot more lazy. I don’t go in as often. I saw a bunch of shows around the 2024 Tony’s, and I was invited to the opening night of Oh, Mary! , but I didn’t go. I saw Cabaret because I know half the cast, and half the cast of Hell’s Kitchen , and I presented the Lifetime Achievement Award to Jack O’Brien. The city has changed so much. I don’t think it’s just my age. I think it feels different when I walk down the street in the city. It just feels. . . off. Wilson: I still go to the theatre a lot, but theatre is different. It’s just become so ridiculously expensive, which is a shame. Fierstein: What do you think is the answer? What would you do? Wilson: I honestly don’t know. Fierstein: I’m curious because these are questions I ask myself every day. I obviously still have a lot of friends in the theatre, and they come up and stay with me to get away from it. And I’m asked to do theatre a lot, which I turn down constantly. I turn down these offers because they’re just not thrilling to me. There’s nothing new enough to make me want to go work six days a week. I’d rather sew. Wilson: As an academic and as a teacher, I am really moved by your nurturing quality among your castmates, and you call your online followers your “children.” Where does that come from? Fierstein: It was the way I was treated. I mean, Ellen Stewart was my mama, and my mother was my mother. The two of them talked to each other that way: “You’re his mama.” “You’re his mother.” So, it could be partly that. But even the older men, such as the director of the Gallery Players, took me to Fire Island for the first time, and I stayed in his house that he called Poverty Gardens. I saw what the gay scene looked like when I was still way underage to have sex or anything. “Each one, teach one?” That’s my attitude. *Author Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Above: Fierstein in the East Village, early 1970s. Photo by Irene Stein. References Barbara Walters, Interview with Harvey Fierstein. 20/20 . ABC, September 22, 1983. Harvey Fierstein, I Was Better Last Night: A Memoir (Penguin Random House, 2022), 52. The Trockadero Gloxinia Ballet Company was created by Larry Ree and members of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatre Company in 1972 and frequently performed at La MaMa. In 1974, Peter Anastos, Anthony Bassae, and Natch Taylor separated from Gloxinia and formed Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. The Trocks, as they are affectionately known, continue to tour. Interview with Greg Shapiro, “Better than Ever: An Interview with Harvey Fierstein,” Philadelphia Gay News (March 22, 2022). https://epgn.com/2022/03/22/better-than-ever-an-interview-with-harvey-fierstein/ Elizabeth I , a play with music, ran for eleven previews and closed after five performances on April 8, 1972. Dude opened at the Broadway Theatre on October 9, 1972, and ran for 16 performances (and 16 previews). Senator Joe performed three previews before closing on January 7, 1989. Victoria Scone (Emily Diapre) was the first cisgender woman contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race UK in 2021, and Maddy Morphosis (Daniel Truitt) was the first cisgender heterosexual man contestant on Season 14 of RuPaul’s Drag Race . The first Broadway revival of La Cage opened on December 9, 2004, and ran 229 performances. Gary Beach was Zaza and Daniel Davis played Georges. Davis left the show after just four months and was succeeded by Robert Goulet. A London revival of La Cage opened at the Menier Chocolate Factory on January 9, 2008, and transferred to the West End the following October. Douglas Hodge repeated his performance opposite Kelsey Grammer in the Broadway revival that opened on April 18, 2010, and ran for 433 performances. Jeffrey Tambor replaced Kelsey Grammer in the part of Georges in the 2010 revival. Tambor’s first performance was on February 15, 2011, and he left the show on February 24, 2011. The producers stated that he was “experiencing complications from recent hip surgery,” and he left the show because “the pain and the challenge of performing in a musical eight times a week proved to be too physically demanding.” Theatre gossip columnist, Michael Riedel, reported that Tambor was struggling in the role and was “freaking out.” Applying his usual snark, Riedel claimed, “[Tambor]’s hitting notes in some of Jerry Herman’s lovely ballads that aren’t found anywhere on the traditional Western scale.” (“Tambor Battles ‘Cage’ Fright,” New York Post [February 25, 2011]. https://nypost.com/2011/02/25/tambor-battles-cage-fright/ ) Vito Russo, Interview with Harvey Fierstein. Our Time . WNYC TV and Manhattan Cable TV, March 8, 1983. Hairspray ’s book is credited to Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan. Fierstein was hired as the show’s ghostwriter and receives royalties for his contributions to the libretto. Footnotes About The Author(s) JAMES F. WILSON is the Executive Officer of Theatre and Performance at the City University of New York Graduate Center. His research and teaching interests include African American theatre and performance; gender and sexuality studies; and musical theatre history. He is the author of Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance and Failure, Fascism, and Teachers in American Theatre: Pedagogy of the Oppressors . His essays have appeared in numerous academic journals and chapter anthologies. He is a voting member of the Drama Desk. 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.

Samuel Shanks 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 Rooting Out Historical Mythologies; William Dunlap’s A Trip to Niagara and its Sophisticated Nineteenth Century Audience. Samuel Shanks By Published on April 23, 2015 Download Article as PDF William Dunlap’s final play, A Trip to Niagara (1828), might be the most misunderstood play in the history of the American stage. Despite being an unqualified success with its cosmopolitan New York audiences in 1828-9, it has been regularly, and almost always inaccurately, maligned by twentieth and twenty-first century historians who have described the play as a “well-done hackwork;” full of “puerile scenes and irrelevant characters;” and valuable only for the “certain amount of low comedy” that “could be extracted from it.” [1] At best Dunlap’s play has been described as “a workmanlike job;” at worst, “one of his poorest” efforts, a play that “could hardly be said to have challenged the preeminence of contemporary British playwrights, let alone Shakespeare.”[2] As I will argue in this essay, the glaring disconnect between the play’s warm public reception and its subsequent criticism by historians often appears to be rooted in a kind of historical mythology that haunts the field of theatre history. Unperceived biases and assumptions often color interpretations of historical evidence, and these flawed perceptions are frequently transmitted from one generation of historians to the next, forming a kind of mythology around a subject that has the power to color future interpretations of new evidence. Just such a historical mythology appears to be at the heart of most criticisms of A Trip to Niagara. The core of this myth concerns the assumption that the early American theatre and its audiences were sadly primitive, and too many histories of the American stage have followed some variation of the progress-narrative that begins with this notion of primitivism and then moves toward, and ultimately culminates in, the organic emergence of a proud national theatre in the early Twentieth Century. But a careful examination of Dunlap’s A Trip to Niagara and its original reception reveals that this image is at best incomplete; indeed, if one assumes that A Trip to Niagara was not a complete anomaly, then the notion of the primitivism of the early American stage might turn out to be fatally flawed. This overarching myth of primitivism is rooted in a series of more specific assumptions that one might think of as “sub-myths.” It is these more specifically-focused minor myths that can be heard resonating in the criticisms of Dunlap’s play. The assumptions that 1) character development did not reach beyond the presentation of simple stage-types; that 2) American theatres were polluted by pervasive and unreflective racism; that 3) spectacle-driven performances were inferior, simplistic entertainments for simple-minded spectators; and that 4) American audiences were generally unsophisticated and easily sated by inferior fare, combine to lend the impression that the early American theatre had a great deal of growing up to do. The bulk of this essay will focus on the specific problems with each of these sub-myths in turn, but for the sake of those who are not familiar with Dunlap’s final play, a brief overview of its plot will prove useful. A Quietly Complicated Play As the title indicates, A Trip to Niagara is a journey play that follows a group of European tourists, mostly English, on a trip from New York City, up the Hudson River to Albany, across the newly-opened Erie Canal to the shores of Lake Erie, and then finally the great waterfall at Niagara. The most spectacularly realized portion of the journey came in the form of production’s much-hyped ‘Eidophusikon,’ a moving diorama that shifted an enormous painted canvas across the stage between two large scrolls, which depicted the steamship voyage from New York harbor, up the Hudson River, as far as Catskill Landing.[3] The play’s satire-driven conflict arises from the divergent opinions held by the stodgy, upper-class English character Wentworth and his more open-minded sister Amelia regarding the virtues of the nation through which they travel. Wentworth is portrayed as a narrow-minded fool, and early in the play Amelia encourages her suitor, John Bull, to try to “cure” her brother of his “obstinate determination to see nothing but through the coloured glasses of the book-makers.” [4] The tourists’ journey to Niagara Falls is thereafter punctuated by John Bull’s numerous comic attempts to cure Mr. Wentworth’s “social disorder.” Along the way, the ‘travellers’ encounter a broad array of people and places, which together serve as a kind of cultural panorama to compliment the moving diorama in Act II. A Trip to Niagara is interesting in that the unspoken content of the play is, in many ways, more important than its spoken dialog. Dunlap’s nuanced celebration of American achievements in politics, engineering, and the arts serves as a quiet refutation of the works of the numerous critical “book-makers” such as Francis Trollope and the actor Charles Matthews. This unspoken content comes primarily in the form of allusions to cultural materials from the period, most of which lies outside the normal purview of many of the historians who have written about the play, and many of the clearest historiographical errors have popped up in works with a non-theatrical focus. Oral Sumner Coad and Robert Canary, Dunlap’s major biographers, both fail to notice many of the cultural references that Dunlap layered into the play’s characters. Coad describes them erroneously as a series of “dialect characters,” while Canary similarly sees them as “gallery of stage types”; both authors make a point of listing the types (Negro, Frenchman, Yankee, Irishman, etc.) as if their label fully articulated their purpose in the play.[5] Given the largely non-theatrical focus of these biographies, these misinterpretations are understandable; nonetheless, it is worth noting that both Coad and Canary, writing more than fifty years apart, each fall back on the historical myth that stock characters, and little else, were to be expected in plays from this era. It does not help that in the preface to the play, Dunlap downplays his script as a “farce” intended as “a kind of running accompaniment to the more important product of the Scene-painter.”[6] Nearly everyone who has written about this play has mistakenly taken the often self-deprecating Dunlap at his word, and has assumed that what followed would be as unimportant and simplistic as Dunlap claims. But the classification of this play as a farce is a problematic one. A Trip to Niagara really is not a farce. It is, in fact, much closer to the sort of satirical social comedies exemplified by Royal Tyler’s The Contrast, or Anna Cora Mowatt’s Fashion. But even this designation fails to capture the major elements of cultural panorama that are central to the play. These elements place A Trip to Niagara more in line with Dunlap’s other patriotic works such as Andre and The Glory of Columbia.[7] The fact that Dunlap downplays the significance of his own script should not surprise anyone who is familiar with this figure. In his monumental histories of both the American theatre and American painting, Dunlap continuously championed the work of his compatriots while largely downplaying the significance of his own contributions.[8] “A Gallery of Stage Types . . .” I will begin my analysis of the historical mythologies that supported the erroneous criticisms of this play by confronting the assumption that stock-characterization was the rule of the day. To be sure, the use of stock-characters was a prominent force during this period, particularly in the melodramas that were beginning to dominate the playwriting scene in the early Nineteenth Century. But exceptions to this trend were not uncommon; Shakespeare was still the most produced playwright on American stages, and there were a number of American playwrights such as John A. Stone who worked in a consciously Shakespearean vein. In short, the idea that the American theatre landscape was littered with nothing but stock-characters – a criticism which generally carried a derogative connotation within the progress narrative in which American playwrights “developed” toward the more noble goal of creating “well-rounded,” psychologically-complex characters – is simply an example of over-simplification, and that myth has guided more than one historian down the path of simplistic analysis. A careful examination reveals that A Trip to Niagara was populated by characters that were neither “stock” nor “rounded;” to evaluate the play according to this either/or standard is to misunderstand the way that the characters function in this play. Dunlap’s characters would be better described as what I term “referential” characters, which Dunlap used as a highly efficient way to invoke material from the complex cultural universe which he and his audience inhabited. The English actor Charles Matthews, the American theatre manager William Alexander Brown, and the character Leatherstocking from James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers, each appear as characters in A Trip to Niagara, though they are not always acknowledged directly as such in the dialog. Dunlap’s characters have been consistently misidentified as “stock” because the historians writing about the play frequently clearly missed the embedded cultural referents that they were meant to invoke.[9] In the absence of specific evidence to the contrary, the more generalized myth of the use of stock-characters gets invoked to explain the lack of “roundness” exhibited by these characters. The tendency to jump to this conclusion is so great that several historians have overlooked the fact that the “Yankee” the “Frenchman” and “John Bull” in this play are all, in fact, the same character operating in different disguises.[10] The clearest example of Dunlap’s referential technique is his use of “Leatherstocking” from The Pioneers (1823), written by Cooper, a friend of Dunlap’s.[11] In A Trip to Niagara, Dunlap places Leatherstocking on the precise spot atop the eastern escarpment of the Catskills that Cooper describes so memorably in The Pioneers. The clarity of this quotation is unambiguous; this is no “stock” frontiersman, but an homage to a central character from two novels that were the literary toast of New York at the time that A Trip to Niagara opened at the Bowery.[12] Dunlap even has Leatherstocking speak primarily in quotes lifted directly from Cooper’s novel. Given the overwhelming popularity of both The Pioneers and The Last of the Mohicans, it seems reasonable to assume that a fair portion of the audience would have quickly grasped and appreciated what Dunlap was trying to achieve with this appropriation. Proof of this appreciation is evident in a comment made by the critic for the New York Dramatic Mirror: “We should very much like to know... why the character of Leatherstocking has been withdrawn? The first scene might have been curtailed to advantage, and this interesting part, nevertheless retained.”[13] Based on this comment, it would seem that the reviewer was seeing the production for a second time, that Leatherstocking had been pulled from the production, and that the reviewer found this choice distressing. That historians have misidentified some of the other characters in A Trip to Niagara is much more understandable, as their cultural references were often subtle, complexly-layered, and based upon cultural material that might not be generally known to many historians. Yet the very lightness of Dunlap’s hand is a significant part of the play’s charm, and the play’s success points to the presence of an audience that was sophisticated enough to successfully decode and appreciate Dunlap’s subtle references. The most consistently misinterpreted character is the one who appears variously as John Bull, Monsieur Tonson, and Jonathan. The fact that “John Bull” appears in several scenes disguised as “Jonathan” has proven to be a stumbling block for many historians as both John Bull and Jonathan were popular stock-characters from the period.[14] But in A Trip to Niagara, these characters appear as references to both their exterior life as stock-characters and to performances of those characters by Charles Matthews, an English actor whose bastardization of the Yankee character Johnathan in his performances was particularly irksome to many American spectators. Dunlap relied heavily upon his audience’s knowledge of the transatlantic Anglo-American theatre to unpack the multi-faceted satire that he embedded in this character. From his first moment onstage, John Bull’s metatheatrical aura is immediately established when Amelia declares, “Mr. Bull! You in America?” Bull replies, “Yes, Amelia, John Bull in America.”[15] Theatrically-savvy spectators would have immediately appreciated this unambiguous reference to James Kirke Paulding’s 1825 play John Bull in America, or the New Munchausen. Dunlap solidly establishes the link between John Bull and Charles Matthews by having John Bull appear in disguise first as ‘Monsieur Tonson,’ one of Matthew’s more famous roles. In this scene, John Bull is not initially recognized by Amelia. When Bull-as-Tonson inquires, “Mam’selle Wentawort, you no know a me... Not know Monsieur Tonson,” Amelia immediately responds, “Only on the stage.”[16] Again, this metatheatrical reference doubtlessly amused those Bowery spectators who were familiar with the performances from Matthews’s American tour a few years earlier. Later, when John Bull appears in his ‘Jonathan’ disguise, the Bowery spectators would have enjoyed unpacking multiple layers of metatheatrical references: standing before them was William Chapman, an American actor,[17] who was satirically referencing the English comedian Charles Mathews by playing an archetypically defined Englishman (John Bull) who was pretending to be the archetypically defined Yankee Jonathan, a character with its own significant theatrical resonances.[18] As with many of Shakespeare’s ‘breeches’ roles, the perceptual slipperiness between these elements would have served as a primary source of theatrical pleasure in these scenes. This would be a fine example of a character that was metatheatrically-complex rather than psychologically-complex, and thus clearly at odds with the myth of the pervasive use of simplistic stock-characters. Yankee characters were popular with both American and English audiences, but for very different reasons. For urban American theatre-goers, Jonathan served as a kind of cultural intermediary, allowing urbanized spectators to commune, at a comfortable distance, with the virtues of a hard life of manual labor lived close to the American soil, while still highlighting how far they had come in their quest for modern, moral refinement. For the English, Jonathan’s tendency toward crude violence and moral outrage was more straightforwardly comic. As Maura Jortner discusses in Playing ‘America’ on Nineteenth-Century Stages, the English comedian Charles Matthews was particularly successful in his outrageous portrayals of Yankee characters. As performed by Matthews, Jonathan became merely cheap, conniving, and violent; willing to cheat others out of any good or service that they could. Many American spectators, witnessing these performances in England, were not amused.[19] Dunlap used his multivalent incarnation of Jonathan as a way to push back against Matthews and his English audiences. A Trip to Niagara’s original audiences would have noticed and enjoyed the subtle ways in which William Chapman as John Bull was overplaying his Jonathan disguise for the too-gullible Englishman Wentworth. Once the spectators identified the allusion to Matthews, even the play’s title, A Trip to Niagara, would also have acquired an additional resonance as a subtle reference to Matthew’s play A Trip to America, the play in which one of the more notorious corruptions of Jonathan appears. It is worth noting that two of the histories that discuss A Trip to Niagara most favorably, Francis Hodge’s Yankee Theatre and Jortner’s Playing ‘America’ on Nineteenth-Century Stages, are each direct studies of the Yankee character in the American Theatre. Dorothy Richardson’s Moving Diorama in Play focuses entirely on this play. Each of these three historians use their detailed knowledge of the production’s original context to decode Dunlap’s references and to then push back against the tide of unwarranted criticism against this play, particularly as it applied to the presentation of the John Bull/Jonathan character.[20] Dunlap’s depiction of the free black Job Jerryson has also been frequently misunderstood, often cast off as simply another “wooly-headed” stage-negro. In this instance another historical myth -- that the American stage was universally racist in its depictions of African Americans -- has frequently been compounded with the myth of the pervasive use of stock-characterization. Yet when considered in the context of Dunlap’s celebratory cultural-diorama, it seems unlikely that this would have been the case. An analysis of Job’s role within the production, along with an awareness of Dunlap’s abolitionist leanings, makes it very difficult to see this character as yet another in a long line of thoughtlessly buffoonish stock portrayals of African Americans.[21] Job plays an important role in the comic scenes in which he appears, but dramaturgically he is positioned as a straight-man against which the non-American characters Nancy and Dennis Dougherty serve as the comics. The comedy in these scenes arises from the ways in which the foreign characters fail to understand Job’s specific Americanisms; yet it is the foreigners, and not Job, who serve as the butts of the joke. On the contrary, Dunlap’s depiction of this free black should instead be seen as a prime example of the abolitionist sentiment in the early American theatre. Dunlap’s use of name “Job” is an important allusion that sets a clearly reverential tone for this character, yet surprisingly no historian ever discusses it. The biblical tale of a prosperous man who has his wealth and family torn away from him, who then is forced to endure massive physical torture, and who in the end is liberated from his strife and rewarded for his faith and perseverance, has obvious resonances with the story of slavery in America. William Dunlap was an ardent abolitionist: he freed his family’s slaves immediately following his father’s death, he was active in the Manumission Society, and he also served as a trustee of the Free School for African Children.[22] New York’s final eradication of slavery in 1827 would have been a cause of celebration for Dunlap, and his dignified depiction of the Job would seem to be a clear celebration of this event. Dunlap uses Job as the mouthpiece for the independent democratic spirit within this play. Job and Leatherstocking are the only American characters who are given a substantive amount of dialog, and it is Job who espouses the basic tenant of American liberty when he states, “Master! – I have no master. Master indeed... I am my own master.”[23] It seems unlikely, given Dunlap’s abolitionist position, and given the celebratory tone of the play, that Dunlap would have intended these lines to be parodic. Although the word ‘deference’ never appears in the play, it is clear that much of Wentworth’s discontent with the Americans stems from the deference that he expects from them, but fails to receive. The expurgation of deference as a bedrock element of interpersonal behavior in American society was one of the most radical outcomes of the American Revolution, one which set America apart from the rest of the English-speaking world.[24] Dunlap positions Job proudly as his on-stage voice for this liberated perspective. In doing so, he was not alone in choosing to dignify African American characters; he was, after all, part of a large and growing abolitionist movement. The lack of deference that Job displays openly in A Trip to Niagara is echoed by the black house-servant Mistress Remarkable in The Pioneers. Mistress Remarkable similarly refuses to demonstrate deference to the young lady Elizabeth declaring, “I will call her Betsy as much as I please; it’s a free country, and no one can stop me... I will talk just as I please.”[25] As was A Trip to Niagara, Cooper’s novel was warmly embraced by New Yorkers in the 1820’s, many of whom would have openly celebrated the tone of Mistress Remarkable’s declaration, just as they would have celebrated Job’s sense of self-possession. Abstractions aside, Job Jerryson also serves as Dunlap’s on-stage homage to William Alexander Brown, a free Black who managed a pleasure garden and multiple theatres in New York in the 1820’s.[26] Given the allusion to Brown, that fact that Job dresses and acts as a “Black Dandy” may have served, not as an opportunity for ridicule as some have asserted, but simply as an accurate reflection of the dress and manners of the kind of gentleman in question. Dunlap’s biographer Robert Canary is one of the few to argue that the depiction of Job is in fact a dignified, rather than a parodic one stating, “He may be the first picture on the American stage of a realistic, well-educated, free Negro.”[27] Because of the long shadow of blackface minstrelsy in the American theatre, it is very tempting to simply pigeon-hole this Black-dandy as a proto-Zip-Coon. But to do so is to allow the myth of the pervasive racism of the early-American stage to obscure the clear cultural references at work. Free blacks frequently adopted the dress and manners of upper-class Euro-Americans, promenading up and down Broadway with a boldness that was a subject of vibrant debate among cultural critics at the time. However, as Marvin McAllister has powerfully argued, these public demonstrations by free Blacks of their mastery of European social conventions should be seen as significant acts of personal liberation. Far from endorsing white superiority or exhibiting false consciousness, their whiteface acts rejected the negative connotations associated with blackness and advocated an alternative, more self-possessed African-American identity.[28] It seems likely that Job was intended as the embodiment of precisely the sort of self-possession that McAllister describes.[29] Almost nothing is known about how the character Job was performed at the time or how audiences perceived Dunlap’s use of this free Black. But the New York Dramatic Mirror’s review of the production proclaimed nothing but accolades for “Mr. Reed’s black dandy.”[30] It seems reasonable to assume that there would have been were various, competing factions within the Bowery audience who might have held differing views about Dunlap’s sympathetic portrayal of a free Black in this play. However, the final abolition of slavery in New York in 1827 would surely have emboldened the abolitionists like Dunlap within the Bowery audience. Fueling the tendency to view A Trip to Niagara as “a gallery of stage types,” is the fact that there does appear to be a single instance in which Dunlap uses a stock-character in the conventional manner. The Irishman Dennis Dougherty’s comic appeal resides solely in the absurd constancy with which he vacillates between fear and gullibility. Dramaturgically, Dunlap sets up Dougherty as the extreme version of the upper-class Englishman Wentworth. Dougherty possesses none of Wentworth’s social graces, and thus the more extreme Wentworth’s opinions of America become, the more he begins to align himself with the absurdity of Dougherty’s views, and the more ridiculous Wentworth appears to the audience. The less-than-flattering portrayal of the Irishman Dougherty was not lost upon at least one member of the play’s original audience. The production’s only truly negative review was published in The Irish Shield, which bemoaned the depiction of Dougherty stating, “We are sure no Irishman ever sat for the daubed picture of Dennis Dougherty, which is no more like a son of the Emerald Isle, than Mr. H. Wallack is like a Lilliputian.”[31] The fact that Dougherty represents such a strikingly divergence within the play’s dramatis personae could be seen as one of the play’s clearest flaws. But it may also be that this is an instance in which Dunlap layered in a cultural reference that has yet to be uncovered.[32] A Spectacle of Recognition... Historical analyses of spectacle-anchored productions can be maddeningly simplistic, and display an inherent bias against the very idea of such productions. This bias is apparent in the literature on A Trip to Niagara. Nearly every historian who has written about it dutifully recites the fact that six months prior to the opening of the Bowery production, another moving-diorama-anchored production entitled Paris and London: a Tale of Both Cities opened at the Park Theatre, the Bowery’s anglophilic cross-town rival.[33] Given the Park’s status as New York’s preeminent theatre during this period, the Bowery’s subsequent decision to mount a moving-diorama spectacle of its own is consistently offered up as definitive proof of the derivative nature of the Bowery’s production.[34] There are clear problems with this conclusion, however. As the art historian Stephan Oettermann discusses in The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, diorama-based productions had become increasingly common in France, England, and America in the Nineteenth Century, and the Park theatre had no claim to originality in its decision to mount Paris and London.[35] More significantly, Paris and London was not a terribly successful production. The critic from the New York Dramatic Mirror portrayed the Park production’s lackluster ticket sales in a particularly bemused fashion: It is a light, laughable, and exceedingly laughable piece – “yet nobody goes to see it.” It has been got up with great care... the scenery is uncommonly well done, and the succession of paintings, representing the voyage from Calais to Dover, is both novel and beautiful – “yet nobody goes to see it.” The incidents are lively and amusing, the characters good of themselves... London and Paris is an agreeable trifle, which we really expected would succeed.[36] Given the enormous financial risk associated with the creation of a moving-diorama-based production, the sort of simple-minded copycatting of the Park Theatre’s production that has been attributed to the Bowery’s managers seems implausible. Why would they consciously seek to repeat the mediocre success of the Park Theatre’s production? A more likely explanation is that the Bowery managers, like their cross-town colleagues, were tapping into the rising tide of cultural interest in visually-intensive entertainments such as moving-dioramas. Their hopes for success were doubtless rooted more in L. J. M. Daguerre’s hugely successful European dioramic exhibitions in the early 1820’s than in the mediocre “precedent” set for them by their cross-town rivals.[37] A careful examination of the use of spectacle in A Trip to Niagara reveals that its success lay not in the ways in which it mindlessly aped other productions, but in the sophisticated ways that it resonated with the local, culturally savvy spectators at the Bowery Theatre. The clearest example of this is the fact that, in A Trip to Niagara, the ‘Eidophusikon,’ (the title given by the managers to the moving diorama) depicted the least exotic, most familiar portion of the journey from New York City to Niagara Falls. The diorama began scrolling as the tourists boarded their boat in New York harbor, but its visual journey extended only as far as Catskill Landing, about a hundred miles north of New York City; the most familiar portion of the journey to the Bowery’s patrons. The newly-opened Erie Canal and the scenic wonders of the Mohawk River canyon and Niagara Falls itself appear only in static scenes later in the play. So, exoticism aside, what would have been the appeal to the Bowery spectators of this comparatively local content? The immensity of seeing 25,000 feet worth of canvas gliding mechanically across the stage must surely have pushed the boundaries of the spectators’ imaginations. Furthermore, the use of the ‘double-effect’ painting technique, which was becoming prevalent at the time, would have allowed movement-oriented elements such as “boats passing through a fog,” “emergence of a rainbow,” and the “rising of the moon,” to be executed with style and elegance.[38] But far more importantly, by having the ‘Eidophusikon’ focus on the terrain closest to New York, the Bowery audience would have been fully capable of appreciating the detailed minutia that the artists worked so hard to include. Well known ships such as the frigate Hudson and the steam vessel Constitution were probably included for this very reason. As Stephen Oettermann has argued in reference to Robert Barker’s famous panorama of London, the appeal of A Trip to Niagara’s moving diorama might have come from the constant barrage of moments of recognition experienced by the audience. A Trip to Niagara’s ‘Eidophusikon’ presented viewers with visual elements that ranged from the familiar (“Hey that’s my house!”), to the famous (“Look the Bowery Theatre!”), to the alluring (“I’ve always wanted to see Catskill Mountain House!”), thus eliciting a complex, and densely packed array of individualized responses. Assuming that the interplay between these elements constituted an important source of the audience’s pleasure, then the decision to depict the comparatively familiar lower Hudson River valley, rather than the more exotic trip across the Erie Canal, was perhaps a wise one, despite the fact that it runs counter the pejorative myth that spectacles are all about exoticism and novelty. Another, far more subtle source of theatrical pleasure can be found in fact that the ‘Eidophusikon’ also appears to have been a quiet homage to the landscape painter, Thomas Cole. As with the depictions of Leatherstocking, William Alexander Brown, the Erie Canal, and the Catskill Mountain House, an homage to Cole would have tapped into the pride that the spectators felt in the achievements of their fellow New Yorkers. Thomas Cole’s name is never voiced in the play, and unlike Dunlap’s more overt homage to James Fenimore Cooper, none of Cole’s works are unambiguously quoted in the script. Nevertheless, the circumstantial evidence pointing toward Thomas Cole as the ‘Eidophusikon’s muse is compelling and worthy of attention.[39] When A Trip to Niagara was produced in 1828, Thomas Cole was the artist of the moment. Prior to Cole’s emergence as the father of the Hudson River School, landscape was a minor art-form in America, existing wholly in the shadow of portraiture and historical painting. Cole’s emergence, however, sparked a craze of landscape painting that would dominate American painting for the next two generations.[40] Cole’s meteoric rise was launched in 1825 when three of his paintings were purchased by three prominent New York painters: John Trumbull, Asher Durand, and William Dunlap.[41] Dunlap took it upon himself to use his position of prominence in the artistic community to draw attention to the talented young Cole. In his history of early American art, Dunlap states, “I published in the journals of the day, an account of the young artist and his pictures; it was no puff, but an honest declaration of my opinion, and I believe it served merit by attracting attention to it.”[42] From 1825 onward, Dunlap and Cole interacted regularly. Both men were founding members of the New York Drawing Association, a group which met three times a week for drawing sessions,[43] and Dunlap and Cole were also part of J. F. Cooper’s weekly lunches (“The Bread and Cheese Club”) where writers and artists interacted more socially.[44] Given Dunlap’s close association with Cole, specific details of the ‘Eidophusikon’ take on additional meaning. The journey depicted by the moving-diorama, from New York City to Catskill Landing, is the precise journey that was made by Cole on his much-publicized first excursion to the Catskill Mountains in the summer of 1825, the journey that resulted directly in the three landscapes purchased by Trumbull, Durand, and Dunlap. This journey was a well-publicized part of the artist’s public image and of the culture of the Hudson River Valley more generally. In 1827 the owners of the steamship Albany, which plied the Hudson River route, even commissioned a painting from Cole entitled “View near the Falls of the Kauterskill [aka-Kaaterskill], in the Catskill Mountains.” This painting adorned the ship’s cabin, giving passengers an advanced view, interpreted through the eye of the famous artist, of the world that they were traversing.[45] Furthermore, the type of subject matter depicted in the ‘Eidophusikon’ was precisely the sort favored by Cole. Approaching and receding storms, in particular, are a common element in Cole’s paintings. Given Cole’s prominence, it seems almost inconceivable that Dunlap and the Bowery’s scenic painters would not have Cole in mind as they adopted his favored subjects and ‘plein-air’ study methods for this massive moving landscape. Advertisements for the production touted the fact that the scene painters worked from their own sketch-work, obtained in the field, and one wonders if the personal journeys of the scenic painters along the route of Cole’s first excursion to the Catskills might have been a form of conscious pilgrimage.[46] The fact that Cole’s name is never directly invoked is in keeping with Dunlap’s understated approach to the cultural homages in this play. Dunlap instead relied upon the audience’s cultural literacy to identify his allusions. That the ‘Eidophusikon’ was spectacular and was marketed to the public based on its size and grandeur is undeniable, but it might very well be the case that Dunlap’s production succeeded where others failed because of the quiet, understated ways in which spectacle was employed in this production. A Trip to Niagara is outstanding, less for the spectacular sights that it displayed before its audiences, than for the never-ending series of spectacular recognitions that it elicited from them. These are the precise qualities that are lost when the analyses of historical spectacles begins with a mythical assumption of their simplistic nature. Undeniably Sophisticated Audiences In an era when plays were rarely performed more than once a month, the management of the Bowery Theatre staged A Trip to Niagara an astonishing seventeen times in the first month following its premiere, often turning people away from its overflowing 3,500-seat auditorium.[47] The play and the moving-diorama that served as the most notable highlight “saved the season” for the Bowery, which was recovering from a catastrophic fire that same year. Ultimately, A Trip to Niagara became a flag-ship production for the Bowery Theatre, featuring it at major openings and holiday events throughout 1829.[48] There are two divergent conclusions that can be gleaned from the success of this production: either the production was a good one that was embraced by the Bowery’s appreciative spectators, or that that spectators who thronged to see this trifle were little more than simpletons who were “easily sated by inferior fare.” Unfortunately, the latter conclusion has been the dominant one; it flies in the face of the historical evidence, but it resonates with the larger myth of the supposed primitivism of the early American audience. Considerable evidence points to the idea that the Bowery audience of 1828 was probably a culturally sophisticated one. When it opened in 1826, the “New York Theatre”-- it was renamed the Bowery after the fire in the summer of 1828 – was the largest theatre in New York City. The playhouse boasted over 3500 seats, had the largest stage in America and was backed by the well-heeled sons of President James Monroe, John Jacob Astor, and Alexander Hamilton. Far from being the haven for working-class audiences that it would later become under the management of Thomas Hamblin, the original Bowery was envisioned as a direct competitor to the Park Theatre, which had stood as the city’s elite playhouse for more than a generation. Even the often grumpy Fanny Trollope saw the Bowery as “infinitely superior” to its cross-town rival stating, “It is indeed as pretty a theatre as I ever entered. Perfect as to size and proportion, elegantly decorated, and the scenery and machinery equal to any in London.”[49] Dunlap even included the newly reconstructed Bowery as part of his cultural diorama: the theatre’s facade served as the final static image depicted in the background prior to the start of the moving diorama. The fact that A Trip to Niagara was such a tremendous success for the Bowery marks it as a prime example of the kind of fare that the Bowery’s audiences desired. Considering how much of the production consisted of subtle, unspoken references to elite culture from the period, this might not be such a surprise after all. Aside from the references to the work of Cooper, Matthews, and Cole previously discussed, the play also makes subtle references to the nation’s luxurious modern infrastructure in the form of its hotels, roads, ships, and the newly-opened Erie Canal. Dunlap frequently combined these references in startlingly complex ways. In one particularly interesting scene, which beautifully sums up the elegant complexity of Dunlap’s referential style, Leatherstocking and Amelia conduct a reasoned debate about the merits and pitfalls of progress while standing atop the Catskill escarpment, with the facade of the newly-constructed and highly luxurious Catskill Mountain House standing silently behind them. The two characters, one of Dunlap’s invention the other of Cooper’s, politely voice their divergent opinions in a civilized discussion, and then go their separate ways, as friends. The fact that the very spot, which had once served as the private terrace of the famous frontiersman, had now been converted into a bastion of refined luxury was an ironic turn that beautifully encapsulates Dunlap’s quiet celebration of American culture, an approach which his audiences clearly embraced. This is, after all, the same scene that the reviewer for the Dramatic Mirror lamented the absence of when it was cut from one of the performances. With A Trip to Niagara, Dunlap not only celebrated the literary achievements of friends like Cooper and Cole, but also the diversity of American attitudes toward the development of their own society, all within a series of stage pictures that was saturated with multiple cultural references. In making room for multiple, competing viewpoints to hold their own in the same stage space, Dunlap’s play defies the pervasive assumption that in the Nineteenth-Century, spectacle-driven plays and their audiences were as simplistic as they have often been portrayed by historians. It remains to be seen how many other successful productions, as well as the audiences that attended them, might be better understood if we continue uprooting the historical mythologies that we have inherited, and attempt to view the past with fewer preconceived notions of what our gaze will discover. Rather than dismissing audiences that embraced productions that we dislike at first blush, we should trust in their judgment and use their enthusiasm as an indication that there must be more to these productions than meets the eye. Samuel T. Shanks is an independent scholar based out of Duluth, MN. Previously he was an Associate Professor of Theatre and Chair of the Division of General Education & Honors at Briar Cliff University in Sioux City, IA. Sam’s academic interests include early American theatre, Islamic theatre, cognitive studies, and the history of scenic design. [1]There are notable exceptions to this negative treatment including studies by Francis Hodge, Yankee Theatre: The Image of America on the Stage, 1825–1850 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964); Maura Jortner, “Playing ‘America’ on Nineteenth-Century Stages; or, Jonathan in England and Jonathan at Home” (PhD diss, University of Pittsburgh, 2005); and particularly Dorothy B Richardson’s extensive monograph on the play, Moving Diorama in Play, William Dunlap’s Comedy “A Trip to Niagara” (Youngstown, NY: Teneo Press, 2010). The current version of this article is a revised piece based on useful feedback I received from Richardson. [2] Robert H. Canary, William Dunlap (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1970), 71-73; Oral Sumner Coad, William Dunlap: A Study of his Life and Works and of his Place in Contemporary Culture (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962 [Reprint of 1917 edition from The Dunlap Society]), 177, 183; and Don Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge History of American Theatre, vol 1, eds. Don Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 11. [3] William Dunlap, “A Trip to Niagara; or, Travellers in America,” in Dramas from the American Theatre: 1762-1909, ed. Richard Moody (Amherst, MA: The World Publishing Company, 1966), 186. [4] Ibid., 181. [5] Coad, William Dunlap, 177-178. Canary, William Dunlap, 73. [6] William Dunlap, A Trip to Niagara, 178. [7] The Glory of Columbia is, in fact, an adaptation of Andre, but with much the same kind of celebratory spectacle that is employed in A Trip to Niagara. [8] Richardson postulates several other reasons why Dunlap’s disclaimer should be taken with a grain of salt. Moving Diorama, 181-185. [9] Richardson’s book is unique on this point in that it discusses several of the characters as stock while simultaneously explicating their cultural resonances. Richardson, Moving Diorama, 124-128, 213-218, 245-249. The differences between her interpretations of these characters and my own are often quite divergent, despite the fact that we are both aware of the allusions embedded in these characters. [10] Richard H. Gassan, The Birth of American Tourism: New York, the Hudson Valley, and American Culture, 1790-1830, (Amherst, MA, University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), 127. Bigsby & Wilmeth, “Introduction,” 11. Coad, William Dunlap, 177-178. Canary, William Dunlap, 73. [11] The two were so close that Dunlap dedicated his 1834 History of the American Theatre to Cooper. [12] Although Leatherstocking is also central to Cooper’s far more popular novel The Last of the Mohicans (1826), it is the older, more nostalgic version of this character that Dunlap chose to include in his play. [13] “The Bowery,” New York Dramatic Mirror, Dec. 13, 1828. [14] For a list of authors who fail to uncouple John Bull from Jonathan, see note 6. [15] William Dunlap, A Trip to Niagara, 183. [16] Ibid., 183. [17] Today, it might seem odd to look upon an actor such as William Chapman, who was born in England, and merely recruited to work for an American company as an “American” actor. But there is evidence to suggest that the American public, who were themselves frequently first and second generation emigrants, saw these actors as American. Upon her arrival in Philadelphia in 1796, the prominent English actress Anne Brunton Merry was immediately hailed as a great addition to “the American Drama.” Gresdna Ann Doty, The Career of Mrs. Anne Brunton Merry in the American Theatre (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1971), 51. [18] Richardson similarly discusses the “continually close and fluent relationship with each other” that the characters of John Bull and Jonathan would have shared. Moving Diorama, 267. [19] Maura Jortner, “Playing ‘America’ on Nineteenth-Century Stages; or, Jonathan in England and Jonathan at Home” (PhD diss, University of Pittsburgh, 2005), 93-96, 108-111. [20] Jortner, Playing ‘America’…, 93-96, 108-111. Francis Hodge, Yankee Theatre: The Image of America on the Stage, 1825–1850 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), 74-75, 103, 162-163. [21] Gary A. Richardson, “Plays and Playwrights: 1800-1865,” in The Cambridge History of American Theatre, vol 1, eds. Don Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 289-290. Coad, William Dunlap, 177-178. Marvin McAllister, White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Color: William Brown’s African and American Theatre (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 160. [22] Coad, William Dunlap, 23. Richardson, Moving Diorama, 241. [23] Dunlap, A Trip to Niagara, 181. [24] For more on the death of deference see Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1992). [25] James Fenimore Cooper “The Pioneers, or the Sources of the Susquehanna; A Descriptive Tale,” in The Leatherstocking Tales, Vol. I (New York: The Library of America, 1985), 177. [26] The authoritative history of William Brown’s career is Marvin McAllister’s White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Color: William Brown’s African and American Theatre (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). [27] Canary, William Dunlap, 74. [28] McAllister, White People Do Not Know, 22. [29] It is interesting to note that McAllister appears critical of Dunlap’s character, though he mentions the play only in passing, and with some inaccuracy, which might indicate that the analysis of this character was not a central concern to his larger project on Brown. [30] “Mr. Dunlap’s Play of A Trip to Niagara,” New York Dramatic Mirror, Dec. 20, 1828. [31] “The Drama,” The Irish Shield, January 1829. [32] Richardson notes that stage-Irishmen appear several times in Dunlap’s previous works, and thus might have been a more stable element of his dramaturgical sensibility. Moving Diorama, 124-125. [33] Gassan, American Tourism, 127. Coad, William Dunlap, 107-108. George C. D. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, Vol III (NY: AMS Press, 1928), 378. [34] Richardson argues that “the Bowery saw that a moving panorama or diorama was not restricted to a particular genre.” This assertion of the Bowery’s following of the Park Theatre’s lead is clearly less derisive, yet still postulates a causality that does not appear to be substantiated in reliable documentation from the period. Moving Diorama, 85. [35] Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, (NY: Zone Books, 1997), 70-83, 323-324. [36] “London & Paris,” New York Mirror, 24 May 1828. The article from which these excerpts have been gleaned is actually much longer and humorously repeats “yet nobody goes to see it” again and again. [37] Oettermann, The Panorama, 74-83. [38] “Bowery Theatre,” New York Evening Post, 28 November 1828. For more on the ‘double-effect’ technique see Oettermann, The Panorama, 77-83. [39] Richardson also argues that, in addition to Cole, William Guy Wall, may have also served as a source of inspiration. Moving Diorama, 61-63. [40] For more on the emergence of Cole and the rise of the Hudson River School, see Barbara Babcock Millhouse, American Wilderness: The Story of the Hudson River School of Painting (Hensonville, NY: Black Dome Press, 2007), Gail S. Davidson, Landscape Icons, Tourism, and Land Development in the Northeast,” in ‘Frederick Church, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Moran: Tourism and the American Landscape (New York: Bulfinch Press, 2006), and Harold E. Dickson, Arts of the Young Republic: The Age of William Dunlap (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1968). [41] The subject of the painting that Dunlap purchased, “Lake with Dead Trees,” was actually the lake that lay directly behind the Catskill Mountain House. VanZandt, Catskill Mountain House, 119-120. [42] William Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States, Vol. 3 (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1965 [1834]), 140-150. [43] Coad, William Dunlap, 105. [44] Millhouse, American Wilderness, 17. [45] Davidson, Landscape Icons, 23. [46] “Bowery Theatre,” New York Evening Post, 28 November 1828. Odell, Annals, 407. [47] “Mr. Dunlap’s Play of A Trip to Niagara,” New York Dramatic Mirror, 20 December 1828. [48] Odell, Annals, 407. [49] Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003), 209. "Rooting Out Historical Mythologies; or, William Dunlap's A Trip to Niagara and its Sophisticated Nineteenth Century Audience" by Samuel Shanks ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 27, Number 2 (Spring 2015) ©2015 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Guest Editor: Jonathan Chambers Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Phoebe Rumsey Editorial Assistant: Fabian Escalona Advisory Board: Bill Demastes Amy E. Hughes Jorge Huerta Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Beth Osborne Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Esther Kim Lee "The Best Actor for the Role, or the Mythos of Casting in American Popular Performance" by Brian Eugenio Herrera "Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men" by Kee-Yoon Nahm "Capable Hands: The Myth of American Independence in D.W. Gregory's The Good Daughter" by Bradley Stephenson "Rooting Out Historical Mythologies; or, William Dunlap's A Trip to Niagara and its Sophisticated Nineteenth Century Audience" by Samuel Shanks www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director ©2015 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction (JADT 27.2, 2015) The Best Actor for the Role, or the Mythos of Casting in American Popular Performance Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men Capable Hands: The Myth of American Independence in D.W. Gregory's The Good Daughter Rooting Out Historical Mythologies; William Dunlap’s A Trip to Niagara and its Sophisticated Nineteenth Century Audience. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.