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Baron Kelly 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 Randall Duk Kim: A Sojourn in the Embodiment of Words Baron Kelly By Published on May 22, 2022 Download Article as PDF For Asian American actors, there is a persistent fear of being left out of the diversity conversation entirely, since “diversity” has often been conflated with Black representation only. Black actors Earle Hyman, James Earl Jones, Gloria Foster, and Franchelle Steward Dorn broke ground by playing leading roles in classical and contemporary plays. Joining their ranks, Randall Duk Kim is a Hawaiian-born Chinese-Korean American actor whose work may also be held up as an extraordinary yet under-examined example of Asian American representation. Kim has performed leading roles in the works of Shakespeare, Chekhov, Molière, and Ibsen at institutions like the esteemed New York Shakespeare Festival as well as regional theatres, including the American Conservatory Theater, Guthrie Theater, and his own American Players Theatre, which he founded in Wisconsin in 1979. Among his television and film performances, he is most well-known as the Key Maker in The Matrix Reloaded and Oogway in Kung Fu Panda. Kim starred in the American Place Theatre’s historic Asian American productions of The Chickencoop Chinaman and The Year of the Dragon. His Broadway appearances include The King and I (1996), Golden Child (1988), and Flower Drum Song (2002). The following is an edited version of the interview that I conducted with Kim on January 4, 2022. Baron Kelly: Let me start by saying that this is a genuinely incredible honor for me to dialogue with you, Randy. You have been a true inspiration for me and countless others in your work and craft. Randall Duk Kim: That is very kind and gracious of you to say. BK: Let’s start with talking about Earle Ernst at the University of Hawaiʻi when you were a theology major there. RDK: He was the head of the Drama department. And, of course, he was a kabuki expert. He oversaw the censorship program of legitimate Japanese theatre during the American occupation. After the war, Earle was part of the American occupation forces there, and he got to know the kabuki actors and the kabuki theatre. Earl also established The Great Play Cycle at the University of Hawaiʻi. Those works in our dramatic western heritage had a significant impact on me. I became entranced by the great plays’ questions they encompassed. BK: Were you a student actor in the productions, and did that ignite your love of classical drama? RDK: I never had a formal acting class. I jumped right into the work itself. I watched by imitating. I studied under the tutelage of a kabuki master, Oneo Kuroemon II, whom Earl had brought over from Japan. His family is six generations in the kabuki theatre starting in the 18th century. He was passing on centuries of physical and vocal work. In the kabuki tradition, one of the key methods of a student learning anything is imitating someone who’s teaching you specific methods and ways of doing a walk, a gesture, a way of speaking to have the visceral experience in your body, your voice. Another influence was my upbringing as a fundamentalist Baptist and learning my Bible. I had a foothold into Elizabethan speech by using the King James Bible and being familiar with that. In the Bible, you’re dealing with poetic language. BK: Eventually, you left the university, went to New York, and dove into trying to become an actor going to auditions for classical theatre. Did you face any resistance being an Asian American actor auditioning for classical theatre? RDK: No, not really, although I was at a cattle call for a film, and the woman running the call came in the room, saw me, and announced in a booming voice with everyone present, “We don’t need any Orientals. Orientals are not needed for this.” BK: She said “Orientals”? RDK: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I vowed that I was not going to permit myself to be in a situation like that ever again. I was not going to be in a position where either my race or my height would prevent me from doing what I love to do. I was going to prove to people that I could do the job. When I got to New York, I started looking for summer Shakespeare festival work. So, I would send out pictures and resumes and get rejection letters. I finally got hired by the Champlain Shakespeare Festival up in Vermont. I did three summer seasons with them. I also managed to work between summers. I did a couple of stints with the New York Shakespeare Festival. In the meantime, in the city, the American Place Theatre used me. BK: When you talk about the American Place Theatre, are you referring to your work in Frank Chin’s The Chickencoop Chinaman (1972) and Year of the Dragon (1974)? The Chickencoop Chinaman was the first play written by an Asian American to be produced professionally in New York. Frank Chin paved the way for playwrights, including David Henry Hwang and Philip Kan Gotanda. From your standpoint, what was the importance of the premieres of Frank Chin’s plays at the American Place Theatre? RDK: Frank is significant. And just a singular and unique voice among playwrights in general, not just as an Asian American playwright but among playwrights. Frank’s voice is of a contemporary poet. I had to wrestle with the language in his work. The character of Tam Lum in Chinaman said things that I would never say in my life. That was a whole new experience for me. I thought the play was out of my league because it was a contemporary work, and I was uncomfortable doing it. The character was verbose and rough. I was doing too much Shakespeare. Frank would say to me, “I want to dirty your mouth.” BK: Randy, Miss Saigon (1991) framed the modern discussion of racial diversity and Asian American representation. It was argued that the production supported the practice of yellowface, casting non-Asians in roles written for Asians, often relying on physical and cultural stereotypes to make broad comments about identity. Slant eyes have also been used in popular culture as a form of erasure, that whiteness is the norm in the US. Because your artistry is also about transformation, were there any feelings you had? RDK: Asian American actors have been underrepresented in the business. Society has got to deal with issues of representation and wrestle with them. One of the best ways the theatre can deal with these issues is to start a multiracial company. Let me say that nobody under the sun would accept me without my doing something with my physical being in doing Falstaff. They would never believe that I was Falstaff without the padding, face, and makeup. An older man who’s overweight. So, I created a vision of how I thought Falstaff could look. BK: This is a nice segue into my next question. When did your interest in the art of makeup and transformation begin? RDK: I got my first makeup kit in the 6th grade. I found an early makeup book called The Last Word in Makeup. And for a while, I carried that around, my little Bible. It was amazing that someone could have the tools to make themselves into another person. And for me, that was like a key. It was a way to step into somebody else’s shoes, to take on somebody else’s life for a time, for a moment, whether it was an older man or a hag or a Quasimodo. It was a magic key. Our eyes can be biased, and I will play with the audience’s bias to take them on a deeper journey into a story and a character’s life that they may not have expected. We’re drawing up lines now, and we’re drawing each other out of our box. BK: Did no one ever approach you about why you transformed your features as part of your craft? RDK: During a summer Shakespeare workshop at the Public Theater, a young Asian American man practically called me a banana, yellow on the outside, white on the inside. He wanted to know why I had to use makeup. As far as being white on the inside, I was educated in the west; I wasn’t educated in the east. I am closer to Plato than I am to Confucius in my whole frame of reference. I played the role of Hamlet at the Guthrie without makeup, but there are certain characters like Falstaff, Shylock, or Puck I have done makeup for because they deserved their own unique look. In my education, these plays are part of my history. Recently, I saw The Lehman Trilogy with Adrian Lester on Broadway. Lester played the brother of two white actors, and no one batted an eye. BK: Asian American actors have been historically underrepresented on the stage and usually have not been allowed to tell their own stories. You have been and continue to be the exception. Randy, you have been the only Asian American actor to build a track record and develop a reputation in many classical roles. Other actors did not follow your path. You are a true anomaly. RDK: We’ve got to get back to the art of acting. The argument is sometimes used, “Well, it’s more truthful to be without makeup.” It’s nonsense. The Greeks used masks, and a lot of truth was spewed out on their stages. So, don’t tell me masks or makeup inhibit the truth. Theatre should be a place for transformation and that our instruments can be conduits for experiences that are greater than we are. We need to develop a racially diverse and genuinely American repertory company. How we cast our stories is an essential part of creating the American culture we want. BK: When you’ve worked with younger actors on Broadway in plays like Golden Child or Flower Drum Song and The King and I, did anyone ask you to share any advice or wisdom? RDK: What I could share was that I want them to find a way to strengthen and expand their imaginations because possibly what’s happening in our time is imaginations are withering into nothing. I don’t know whether there’s a study on our capacity to imagine. And yet, Einstein said imagination is more important than knowledge. We need to strengthen our imagination somehow to do meaningful work in the theatre. Otherwise, it’s all going to be small, withered, malformed, not healthy, not robust, not as wide-ranging as humankind is. I think. All our stories are rich. BK: I hear you saying that we should encompass the broadest possible human experience. Have you seen courageous casting choices? RDK: I think the most courageous casting choice is to recognize talent regardless of its package. For the actor to communicate to the audience that, “I belong here. I belong in this world.” That’s what’s courageous. The challenge to the actor is to make us believe you’re a Roman. I don’t care what the color of your skin is. You make us believe. Society has to get a grip on itself. Also, I believe the prejudices of the powerbrokers who are casting directors, directors, and producers must be tackled. We must get away from making judgements on a person’s appearance. BK: I think we can both agree that if an actor’s ethnicity aligns with a role whose ethnicity is pertinent to the character in the script, that character should be cast as written. RDK: Yes. BK: Today, many young actors are skimming along the surface of the text without understanding how phrasing plays a large part in speech discipline. The text must live through them. It’s like scoring music. RDK: The best writers manage to take language and almost give the soul a means to express itself. I often use the image of an iceberg. The play itself sits on the top of the iceberg. That’s what you can see and touch. But beneath the iceberg is this vast amount of unknown. And that’s what you’ve got to explore and plummet and find out. BK: You founded the American Players Theatre with your artistic life partners, your wife, Anne Occhiogrosso, and your late business partner, Charles Bright, who had an idea to form a theatre company in Spring Green, Wisconsin. RDK: For fifteen years, we talked about an American classical repertory company. We discovered that cutting a text for whatever reason, whether it’s to get the audience out so they can catch their bus, or whether it’s too long, or whether the scene is repetitious, didn’t make any sense ultimately. We needed to know how the plays worked uncut and conducive to the story in a period that the playwright probably imagined, Ancient Rome, Renaissance Italy, or wherever, to see the story within a context that could perhaps reveal something about the characters living in that world. We needed to start a company to do that kind of work and find out what these great plays say to us. If you already begin to twist it about and manipulate it, you’re not going to learn anything. It’s like a scientist going into an Amazonian village and saying, “Okay. If you dress in jeans, then I’ll observe you.” What are you going to learn from that? So, we needed to do it. By and large, it worked. Audiences sat there thinking, “I understand this. It’s not obscure.” BK: You also had a particular vision to train an acting company. You wanted to form a center for the classics, research, training, and productions. That’s above and beyond just presenting plays. RDK: I wanted to start a school for the actors to study the plays, the playwrights, and the periods in which those plays developed. We hired a superb teacher of martial arts and tai chi. Jerry Gardner was our tai chi teacher. He was a champion kung fu fighter who knew sitting meditation, tai chi, kung fu, and ballet. We were beginning to form a faculty. Then the board came along and said, “No. It’s too costly.” Throw it together, turn it out for the summer, make money, bring in an audience. But the very idea of a quality world repertory company, an American company, couldn’t be had. BK: You had a clarion call for about a decade in this belief for a company. RDK: It was an uphill battle with the board. Every season I felt like a salmon swimming upstream to spawn. I also frequently thought about the description of John the Baptist, the voice in the wilderness. BK: You’ve had many honors in your life, including an Obie for sustained excellence of performance. Currently, you’re participating in the Actors’ Equity Association’s Performing Arts Legacy Project to document your career. How does Randall Duk Kim measure success? RDK: I think I measure it by how well I’ve built a bridge between the past and the present. Has it been a good bridge where the past and the present can meet, see, and hear each other? BK: The legacy and artistry of Randall Duk Kim must not be forgotten. Is there an essence of Randall Duk Kim that you want people to know and always remember? RDK: I would say, “An actor who tried to see clearly.” References Footnotes About The Author(s) Baron Kelly is a four-time Fulbright Scholar and Professor of Theatre in the Theatre and Drama Department at University of Wisconsin-Madison. His teaching of acting has led him to teaching and lecturing residencies in more than a dozen countries on five continents and in twenty American states. Baron has performed internationally for the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain; Stratford Shakespeare Festival of Canada; National Theatre of Norway; Yermelova Theatre, Moscow, Russia; Constans Theatre, Athens, Greece; Academy Theatre Dublin; Edinburgh Theatre Festival; Bargello, Florence, Italy; among others. Broadway credits include Salome and Electra. Classical and contemporary roles for over 30 of America’s leading regional theatres including the Oregon, Utah, Dallas Fort Worth, and California Shakespeare Festivals; Yale Repertory; the Guthrie; Old Globe San Diego; among others. He has a PhD in Theatre Research from UW Madison and a diploma in Acting from London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic 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.

Maurya Wickstrom Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 28 1 Visit Journal Homepage Thinking about Temporality and Theatre Maurya Wickstrom By Published on March 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF Over the past couple of years, I have been increasingly taken with the question of temporality. Giorgio Agamben writes in Infancy and History that: Every conception of history is invariably accompanied by a certain experience of time which is implicit in it, conditions it, and thereby has to be elucidated. Similarly, every culture is first and foremost a particular experience of time, and no new culture is possible without an alteration in this experience. The original task of a genuine revolution, therefore, is never merely to “change the world,” but also—and above all—to “change time.” Although Agamben first published this astonishing recommendation in Italian in 1978 and in English in 2007, I first encountered it in a 2012 book by art historian Christine Ross. In her volume The Past is the Present: It’s the Future Too , Ross identifies characteristics-in-common of work by artists who she sees as participating in what she calls “the temporal turn.” It seems that in the visual arts (including video, performance and installation), artists have for awhile been attuned to and working specifically on alterations in common assumptions about, and the lived experience and capitalist formations of, temporality. Similarly, in queer studies, and in other analyses like that of the brilliant Cruel Optimism , by Lauren Berlant, both visions of changed time, and the identification of new forms of neoliberal time have been underway for some time. Although theatre as a medium is strikingly fluent in and fluid with temporality, we have not perhaps been as engaged with temporality in its own right as some other disciplines have been. This is not to say that there has not been brilliant work of lasting significance in theatre scholarship that has touched on temporality and time. At the risk of generalization, I would say that this work has tended to circulate around phenomenology, finitude, death, memory, hauntings and returns, as well as aspects of Delueze’s thought. And at the risk of generalization, I will repeat that most of this work has not been engaged with the question of temporality per se, with opening out the very meaning and practices of temporality itself. Increasingly, my interest, and the interest of a growing number of scholars and theatre artists, is in how theatre and performance are engaging with time in ways that do just this, guided by explorations undertaken through a variety of philosophical and theoretical apertures which influence political thinking in unfamiliar ways. I think we could say that, if not always explicitly stated, this work wonders how we might continue to open up new insights and practices in order to gesture toward forms of “revolution” initiated by changes to time. Matthew Wagner’s 2012 book Shakespeare, Theatre, and Time stands as one of the few monographs specifically on time currently available in theatre and performance studies. Although guided by some of the conceptual apparatus of phenomenology, Wagner’s book is an important step toward opening temporality and theatre as a significant sub-field within theatre studies in that it is explicitly and fully about time and its multiplicity and variations. I applaud his goal “to revitalize our temporal sensibilities in respect to theatre.” Although remaining committed to the familiar assumption that theatre is implicitly temporally bound to and limited by a passage through time that always must come to an end, Wagner insists throughout on the unruliness of time in the theatre, its refusal to obey the clock. The past few years have seen other work emerging that opens the field more radically, departing from phenomenology as the philosophical center for theorization and description. I will mention just a few of these in the short space that I have. The excellent 2014 issue of Performance Research opens an international and interdisciplinary scope for thinking about temporality and performance. The issue follows from the 2013 Performance Studies Conference at Stanford University entitled “Now Then: Performance and Temporality”—a conference which staged a plethora of emerging thought on time. The essays range from a consideration of cyclical time in a twelve-year Finish performance, to an exploration of translation and temporality through Anne Carson’s translation of Antigonik , to the Chinese concept of yu zhou (something like Einstein’s unified field of space and time), to the concept of dyssynchrony in performance in Bogota, Columbia, to name a few examples. Nicholas Ridout’s 2013 monograph Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism, and Love is for me an exemplary innovation in thinking about theatre and time. While the book engages most deeply with labor (in its amateur forms), part of Ridout’s work is to articulate the ways in which labor (capitalist and otherwise) is always caught up in time. In one chapter in particular he places Walter Benjamin front and center, reaffirming Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” as the central text that it is, above and beyond the familiar (although endlessly rich), image of the angel of history. Agamben, in the quote above, forcefully reminds us that one must think about temporality in conjunction with history and vice versa. He reminds us thus, as Benjamin does, to problematize dominate conceptions of history by drawing them through time. One of the ways I have been investigating temporality is through historically introduced genres, especially tragedy. Two wonderful books are helping my own efforts and should be of note for our field. One is David Scott’s 2014 Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice , and the other is the 2016 The Black Radical Tragic: Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution by Jeremy Glick. The latter is a constellation of a study moving among Brecht, Glissant, C.L.R. James, Paul Robeson, Eisenstein, Adorno, Brecht, Badiou, and Fanon among others to study in part the timeliness or untimeliness of tragedy. The former questions the temporal expectations implicit in revolutionary planning and puts those expectations up against revolutionary failure and devastation, suggesting a temporality of the tragic genre. Another work, Freedom Time , by Gary Wilder, includes a close examination of the political temporalities imagined and practiced by Aimé Césaire, with particular attention to his play about Toussaint Louverture. I cannot close this very partial overview without mentioning, at least in passing, some of the most striking theatrical work with temporality that I have seen in the past year. These include Andrew Schneider’s You Are Nowhere , Gob Squad’s Before Your Very Eyes and Western Society , William Kentridge’s Refuse the Hour , and, most recently, the counter-tenor, “Negro-gothic” performer, M. Lamar. Each of these works experimentally and courageously in modalities of time that seem to be invented before our eyes. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Maurya Wickstrom is Professor of Theatre at The Graduate Center and the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. Her newest monograph, Fiery Temporalities in Theatre and Performance: The Initiation of History , is forthcoming from Bloomsbury Methuen Drama’s Engage series. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Comment New Directions in Dramatic and Theatrical Theory: The Emerging Discipline of Performance Philosophy Changes, Constants, Constraints: African American Theatre History Scholarship Reflections: Fifty Years of Chicano/Latino Theatre Strangers Onstage: Asia, America, Theatre, and Performance Transgressive Engagements: The Here and Now of Queer Theatre Scholarship Thinking about Temporality and Theatre Musical Theatre Studies “Re-righting” Finland’s Winter War: Robert E. Sherwood’s There Shall Be No Night[s] Star Struck!: The Phenomenological Affect of Celebrity on Broadway Performing Anti-slavery American Tragedian Murder Most Queer The Captive Stage Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Maureen McDonnell 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 Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home: Activism and the Advertising of a "Lesbian Suicide Musical" Maureen McDonnell By Published on January 28, 2019 Download Article as PDF Alison Bechdel offered a complicated and compelling memoir in her graphic novel Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006), adapted by Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori into the Broadway musical Fun Home (2015). Both works presented an adult Bechdel reflecting on her father’s troubled life as a closeted gay man and his possible death by suicide. As Bechdel herself noted, “it’s not like a happy story, it’s not something that you would celebrate or be proud of.” [1] Bechdel’s coining of “tragicomic” as her book’s genre highlights its fraught narrative and its visual format indebted to “comics” rather than to comedy. Bechdel’s bleak overview of her father’s life and death served as a backdrop for a production that posited truthfulness as life-affirming and as a means of survival. Fun Home ’s marketers, however, imagined that being forthright about the production’s contents and its masculine lesbian protagonist would threaten the show’s entertainment and economic potential. It was noted before the show opened that “the promotional text for the show downplays the queer aspects,” a restriction that was by design. [2] According to Tom Greenwald, Fun Home ’s chief marketing strategist and the production’s strategy officer, the main advertising objective was to “make sure that it’s never ever associated specifically with the ‘plot or subject matter.’” Instead, the marketing team decided to frame the musical as a relatable story of a family “like yours.” [3] The marketers assumed that would-be playgoers would be uninterested in this tragic hero/ine if her sexuality were known. Ticket buyers who perceived the lesbian protagonist’s sexuality as a barrier to their “recognition of [her] humanity” risked not experiencing the subsequent ethical empathy that tragedy might elicit. [4] In the marketers’ efforts to circumvent the lesbophobia and taboos against suicide they imagined would-be playgoers might hold, they became complicit in such prejudices. As the production was met with commercial and critical success, a “both/and” marketing approach surfaced: that the production was both timeless and timely, with the production newly presented as a vehicle for affirming emerging legal gains for LGBTQ+ rights generally, and marriage equality in particular. This rising sensibility that lesbian characters and culture were commodifiable might justify future shifts from Broadway’s systematic exclusion of lesbian characters, even if for mercenary, capitalistic reasons. The creative team voiced their support of lesbians and their rights throughout the run, a departure from the endorsed narrative of Greenwald’s company. The producers began to echo the creative artists’ advocacy after two nearly simultaneous events: the production’s anniversary of winning five Tony Awards and the Orlando mass shooting as the deadliest incident of violence against LGBTQ+ people in US history. The producers’ commentary swerved in June 2016 when they began championing both the production and the communities it represented, albeit a year after the show’s critical reception was secure. These evolving campaigns suggest the vulnerability of productions that feature female actors playing sexual minorities and gender non-conforming characters. By featuring a butch lesbian as its lead, Fun Home was culturally revolutionary, providing a cultural—and commercial—landmark for mainstream musical theater. The musical featured three different actors performing the characters of Alison Bechdel: “small” Alison at 8, “medium” Alison at 19, and Alison at 43. The categorizations emphasized the characters’ visual differences (e.g. “small” versus “youngest”), in keeping with what may be a cartoonist’s default parameters. The adult Bechdel character served as a narrator, drawing at an artist’s table as she observed and commented on the memories enacted by her younger counterparts. An early line of Alison’s summarizes the plot: “Caption: Dad and I both grew up in the same small Pennsylvania town. And he was gay, and I was gay, and he killed himself, and I became a lesbian cartoonist” (“Welcome to Our House on Maple Avenue”). [5] This expository line frontloaded the musical’s conclusion within the first eleven minutes of performance. [6] The musical’s disclosure was strikingly more efficient than that of the marketing team. It was only after Fun Home opened that Tom Greenwald revealed that the “marketing team jokingly referred to [the play] as a ‘lesbian suicide musical.’” [7] This inaccurate characterization invited misdirection of a familiar type. [8] Despite a long cultural history that presents lesbians as necessarily isolated, doomed, and suicidal, this production challenged those tropes by presenting a lesbian protagonist who survives the dramatic action. [9] This theatrical and biographical outcome indicates the political dimensions of Fun Home ’s tragedy, as its lack of an abject lesbian underscores that the tragic lesbian figure is conjured and constructed rather than fixed and innate. The team’s “joke” not only reinforced a stereotypical narrative about lesbian death, but also suggested that they saw the narrative arc of Bruce Bechdel (Alison Bechdel’s father) upstaging that of his daughter (it is Bruce who dies by suicide in the musical). Despite the decentering and misrepresentation of Alison Bechdel’s character, playgoers would have been able to easily learn that this dramatic protagonist’s real-life counterpart helped shape this creative narrative rather than becoming a victim of it. The marketing team’s omission of Alison Bechdel from the promotional campaign was perhaps motivated by their desire to make the show more broadly appealing to investors by erasing her sexuality and survival. Such concerns about financial solvency reflected the financial structure of 21 st century Broadway productions, a time in which corporate interests frequently override artistic innovation. [10] Theater scholar Steven Adler writes of this trend, noting that production often depended upon partnerships, sometimes with the powerful real estate moguls who owned the theaters, [which] provided the best means of mounting shows. Corporations, with extensive financial and marketing resources, recognized fertile territory in the hardscrabble of midtown Manhattan and joined the fray. A Broadway presence might bolster the corporate brand, as with Disney. [11] Disney-authorized productions are sometimes called “McMusicals” (a term that emphasizes the production’s consumability) or “technomusicals,” which theater director and scholar John Bush Jones describes as “a phenomenon . . . driven by visual spectacle” and “engender[ing] little or no thinking at all.” [12] Such spectacles are often mined from popular movies and books whose familiarity allows productions to draw upon already established fan bases. American musical scholar Elizabeth Wollman points out that these moments of: synergy allow[] a company to sell itself along with any product it hawks. The Broadway version of Beauty and the Beast , for example, can be mentioned in Disney films and television shows, or advertised on Disney-owned radio stations. Disney musicals can also serve as advertisements for one another.[13] Wollman notes that “shows with corporate backing can now be hyped internationally in myriad ways long before a theatrical property begins its run,” a factor that contributes to Broadway functioning as a “global crossroads, populated by transnational corporations catering to tourists.” [14] Given that only one in five Broadway shows recoup their initial investment, derivative productions and revivals included, the marketing campaign reflects both the financial precariousness of theater generally and reticence about Fun Home ’s cultural content specifically. Investor caution is especially warranted with musicals, particularly if they are new. Commercial houses rarely undertake such efforts. Instead, creative teams who wish to develop those works mostly rely on non-profit theaters whose educational and artistic missions state their willingness to sustain financial loss. Such collaborations can be contentious, as revealed by Ars Nova’s decision to file suit for breach of contract over their billing after their production Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 transferred to Broadway in 2016, or result in a commercial juggernaut like Hamilton. [15] Fun Home ’s move from the Public Theater to Broadway was underwritten by three primary producers, Kristen Caskey, Barbara Whitman, and Mike Isaacson. In an interview published shortly after their investment was recouped, the producers provided a thumbnail sketch of the skepticism people held towards the production: “They said we were insane to do this,” said Mike Isaacson. “Really? You’re bringing that to Broadway?” recalled Barbara Whitman. “I think crazy was the word we heard most,” said Kristin Caskey.[16] Admittedly, the producers’ diction may have been only unintentionally ableist. But such comments problematically echoed the disproven historical notion that people who were sexual minorities were mentally ill, another suggestion of discomfort about Fun Home ’s treatment of sexuality from people outside of the creative team. [17] Such stereotypical conflation of “insanity” and lesbianism re-produced the specter of the tragic lesbian the producers attempted to discard. Frank disclosures aren’t the only way lesbianism surfaces within Broadway musicals. Musical theater scholar Stacy Wolf’s generative work invites playgoers to deploy “a spectatorial/auditorial ‘lesbian’ position that is not essentialist but rather performative: any willing, willful spectator may embody such a position of lesbian spectatorship” which can “lesbianize” the text. [18] Fun Home extends itself beyond presenting a “hypothetical lesbian heroine” because its protagonist’s sexuality is not solely dependent on viewers decoding subtext or deploying Wolf’s rhetorical techniques but is additionally affirmed by depicting the character Alison’s queer childhood and subsequent coming out. [19] Moreover, Fun Home offers an androcentric lead, a break from Broadway’s dominant tradition. Fun Home ’s departure from highlighting feminine lesbians risks what literature scholar Ann M. Ciasullo cautions against: dehumanizing the butch lesbian who is imagined as “too dangerous, too loaded a figure to be represented.” [20] However, one of the chief innovations of Fun Home was its butch lesbian lead. Instead of functioning as a surrogate or scapegoat, the theatrical Alisons’ desires “lead the way to a different future” rather than “fasten[ing]” lesbians “to the image of the past.” [21] This theatrical breakthrough appears nowhere in the advertising campaign. In their attempts to de-lesbianize the production, the marketers buried both the lede and the lead. There have been other musicals that prominently include identifiable lesbian characters, although that misrepresentation is often uneven at best and sometimes presents lesbian characters whose sole function seems to be as “the object of the show’s most unsavory jokes.” [22] Lisa Kron, the lyricist and book writer for Fun Home , revealed her response to what she saw as a trend: “there was a moment where someone would say the word lesbian as a non sequitur because it was funny. I’d be so on board, and then I’d be slapped in the face by it. It was just like, This character’s a joke. This is not a person .” [23] Within the production, actor Beth Malone navigated this pitfall when delivering adult Alison’s line that someone she saw briefly as a child was “an old-school butch.” Malone explained her delivery of this line and her efforts to recuperate that term as follows: When I say the word “butch,” I say it with the color of, like I’m saying the word supermodel. Because from my lens, the word butch is the most beautiful adjective I can come up with. “Oh my God, she was an old-school butch !” Like satisfying words coming out of your mouth. Still, it gets titters because the word “butch” is a punch line. For every other show that has ever existed, “butch” and “dyke” have been a punch line for the end of a gay man’s joke. So now we are taking that word, like the word queer, we’re owning it and saying, butch is a beautiful thing.[24] In Malone’s account, her artistic and activist sensibilities converged in playing this role. Such moments are bolstered because Fun Home featured a number of queer characters who are not solely defined by their orientation or gender identity, and whose presence is important for the plot. [25] Although these features were present in other productions, the non-existent track record for butch-centered musicals indicates an asymmetrical Broadway history characterized by sexism and lesbophobia. If we compare Fun Home with another contemporary musical with an LGBTQ+ lead character, Kinky Boots is an apt choice. Based on a 2005 film inspired by true events, Kinky Boots took thirty weeks to recoup its $13.5 million investment, roughly the same timeline as Fun Home (which had lower ticket prices). [26] Kinky Boots had a fuller theatrical tradition than Fun Home to draw upon: male actors inherit a variety of gendered performance traditions, theatrical practices that are increasingly familiar to and co-opted by straight playgoers. [27] Gay male leads and gender non-conforming characters played by male actors are not new features of musicals. (Consider this partial history: Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Rent, Kiss of the Spider Woman, La Cage Aux Folles, Falsettos, A Chorus Line, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Avenue Q, Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Spring Awakening, and Cabaret .) Stacy Wolf usefully points out a key difference between this theatrical tradition and the one women inherit, noting that “the visibility of white gay men’s alliance with musicals stems in part from capital (cultural and real) and the general visibility of a relatively identifiable affluent, urban, white, gay male culture.” [28] This disparity in capital was indicated in material ways by Fun Home ’s relatively small cast of nine, orchestra of seven, and slim advertising budget, all of which kept production costs low. Kinky Boots ’ cast was more than three times the size of Fun Home ’s, and had an orchestra of thirteen musicians. The diverging cultural capital of gay men and lesbians also surfaced in the showcasing of the titular “kinky boots” in that production’s poster campaign, and the cloaking of Bechdel’s experience within that of Fun Home , whose posters evoked the colors of the 1970s in color values too deep to invoke a rainbow flag. [29] The advertisements for Kinky Boots flaunted sexual and gender transgressiveness whereas Fun Home ’s marketers closeted their characters. Fun Home ’s marketing team was not alone in minimizing its connection with underrepresented groups outside of Broadway’s cultural mainstream. For instance, Hamilton ’s producers deliberately distanced Hamilton from the hip hop music and culture that influenced Lin-Manuel Miranda’s show, a redirection that included a name change of the show itself from Hamilton Mixtape despite his earlier hit In the Heights . [30] (Bechdel’s book title, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic , was also abridged.) Such concerns about a production’s broad appeal surface in Fun Home ’s production history, as seen in one critic’s question: “Is America ready for a musical about a middle-aged, butch lesbian?” [31] This hesitancy was echoed by the creative team and by Bechdel, who drily noted that “Lesbians are inherently uncommodifiable. . . . It’s a gift.” [32] Bechdel, in her suggestion that being imagined as uncommodifiable offers lesbians a way to resist being dehumanized, echoes the precise concern of Fun Home ’s marketers. In other words, Bechdel doesn’t realize how right the marketers imagined her to be: she hits a nerve along with her punchline. Lisa Kron discussed this concern after the musical won the 2015 Tony Award: We were constantly having to rewrite the assumed narrative, which was that this was not commercially viable. Because it’s a serious piece of work. You know, it’s not a pure entertainment, even though it is very entertaining. Because it was written by women, because it not only focuses on women characters but lesbian characters and more than that has a butch lesbian protagonist.[33] Kron clearly states her diagnosis of people’s reticence about the show’s viability: misogyny and lesbophobia, particularly towards masculine lesbians. Within that interview, Kron revealed the persistence of that narrative, even after the show was hitting crucial markers of success: Even when we were succeeding, even when it had had a successful run at the Public and we were selling tickets on Broadway, still the question was being asked “do you think this will work on Broadway?” These financial concerns lingered, despite the production’s relatively quick financial solvency. The investors of Fun Home recouped their investment of $5.25 million dollars within eight months. [34] The tour also returned its investment within eight months, benchmarks that belie the supposed need to commercially closet Fun Home. [35] The marketing of Fun Home reveals a two-pronged approach. The first tactic universalized the musical. The subsequent tactic encouraged playgoers to see the production as politically engaged. In one article, readers are told that: The subject matter, obviously, is a complication in a Broadway market dominated by lighter material. The show’s producers, Kristin Caskey, Mike Isaacson and Barbara Whitman, who raised $5.2 million [sic] to finance the Broadway transfer, are emphasizing the father-daughter relationship and journey of self-discovery, rather than the sexuality, the suicide or the fact that Alison’s father ran a funeral home (“Fun Home” was the Bechdel children’s nickname for the business).[36] Occasionally members of the creative reinforced the producers’ tenet that Fun Home is about a generic family whose story resulted in a “father-daughter heartbreaker.” [37] Judy Kuhn, who played Alison’s mother, Helen, appeared in a promo saying that “[e]verybody can relate to [the play] because everybody has a family.” [38] Elsewhere, the investor Kristin Caskey suggested that the musical offers an opportunity for “seeing your parents through grown-up eyes.” [39] Caskey volunteered that: this is how I saw the show: It was about a child and her relationship with a parent, and as she became an adult, how she came to peace with how she saw that parent. . . . I think a broad audience can relate to that, and will give the show a chance to be commercial.[40] Caskey’s comments removed gender and sexuality as factors within the theatrical work, suggesting their irrelevance for audiences. This sidestepping so overgeneralized the musical’s protagonist and her narrative arc that it nearly misrepresents the show. By the production’s end, the producing team detoured from its initial, sanitizing premise of the musical’s universal family to advance a counternarrative: that the show served as a cultural milestone. These antithetical approaches— that the production was both ahistorical and historically prescient—occurred concurrently during the Broadway run. As Fun Home prepared to move to Broadway from the Public Theater the notoriety of Bechdel’s book became a promotional tool, although not an automatically synergistic or positive one. [41] In February 2014, the College of Charleston and the University of South Carolina Upstate announced that Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic would be part of their optional summer reading programs. Politicians responded by voting to defund those public colleges. Rep. Garry Smith, R-Greenville, justified his vote by explaining that the book “goes beyond the pale of academic debate. It graphically shows lesbian acts.” [42] (Readers who pick up Bechdel’s book expecting pornography might be disappointed to find relatively few anatomical moments, aside from her drawing of a male corpse in her father’s embalming studio.) Alison Bechdel and the production team went to South Carolina in April 2014 so that the cast could perform part of the musical as the six-month censorship debate was swirling. [43] This unanticipated pre-Broadway debut “tour” marked a pivot: the creative team began to directly comment on and interact with the censorship debate even as Fun Home ’s marketing products featured no references likely to cause controversy. The production’s responsiveness escalated in the upcoming months: the cast put Fun Home in dialogue with real-time national debates about marriage equality. The play opened a few days before the US Supreme Court began hearing oral arguments about the Obergefell v. Hodges case. Beth Malone commented on this timing in an interview given before the court decision: Right now, the Supreme Court is arguing for our rights as human beings, and I’m going home to my wife tonight who I married in a court of law in New York City. This is a time in our lives. This is quite a time. This is quite a season.[44] Fun Home ’s actors commented on that case in front of larger audiences as well. As he delivered his Tony speech for playing Bruce, Michael Cerveris spoke of his “hope” that the Supreme Court would support LGBTQ+ citizens’ right to marriage. [45] Eighteen days later when the court confirmed marriage equality, the evening’s performance included a new prop: a rainbow flag brought on to stage after the bows. Beth Malone put the flag around her and did a victory lap around the stage, before saying “What an amazing time to be an American. We owe this night to the people who came before us.” [46] In other interviews, Malone specified the activist and artistic pasts to which she felt indebted: The only reason Fun Home itself can be a mainstream Broadway show is because of the fringe work of my sisters that came before me, like the Five Lesbian Brothers, doing this downtown theatre that was so edgy and it was happening in the margins. The margins had to exist for a really long time before it incrementally crept toward the center.[47] After the Supreme Court passed this civil rights case in June 2015, Fun Home began to be included in publications marketed towards LGBTQ+ readers. One such instance was the article within Out magazine that exclusively featured the actors who identified as lesbian or gay in the Broadway production (Beth Malone, Roberta Colindrez, and Joel Perez) alongside Bechdel and Kron. [48] In another produced segment, Malone appears with her wife in a video that features her Fun Home pre-performance commute. [49] These curated moments provided evidence for Malone’s sense that lesbian rights are moving towards “the center” of public sympathy and support. The marketing of Fun Home as proof of American exceptionalism to seventeen ambassadors from the United Nations in March 2016 also hinted at a newfound security for LGBTQ+ people. [50] Three months later, however, Fun Home responded to an intensely harmful event that targeted LGBTQ+ people. The crimes committed at Pulse (a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida) resulted in the deaths of forty-nine victims and the wounding of fifty-eight other people. This event sparked a number of responses from Broadway workers, including at the Tony Awards which were held on the day of the attacks (12 June 2016) as scheduled. Although individual Broadway actors participated in an Orlando tribute, Fun Home was the only production to travel to Florida to be physically present with the victims, survivors, and their families. [51] Beth Malone and Michael Cerveris each wrote publicly about this pilgrimage in tones consonant with the LGBTQ+ advocacy they articulated before the production’s run. [52] The producers’ willingness to highlight the LGBTQ+ themes of the production was newly evident: Mike Isaacson : “For our company, there is no choice but to respond with what we have, what we know, and the belief that it leads to something.” Barbara Whitman : “I think we all had that same reaction: What can we do? This is something we can actually do.” Kristin Caskey : “It was one of those perfect moments where everyone aligned and did so quite quickly, understanding that many of the ideas and themes within ‘Fun Home’ would be a perfect gift and a way for the community to come together in advocation for LGBT rights.”[53] Their unified perspective diverged from Tom Greenwald’s earlier recommendation to “never ever associat[e] [the play] with . . . the subject matter.” At this moment, some fourteen months after the show opened on Broadway, the producers unambiguously voiced their objection to the homophobic and lesbophobic crimes. [54] Particularly striking is Caskey’s transition in framing Fun Home : the show is no longer about “a child and her relationship with a parent,” but a “gift . . . for the community to come together in advocation for LGBT rights,” with her suggestion that the artistic production and political advocacy were linked. The trio continued this pattern of speaking to LGBTQ+ people when in Orlando, writing in a joint statement that “as the first musical with a lesbian protagonist, we so often hear from audience members at ‘Fun Home’ that it was the first time they saw themselves represented on a Broadway stage. We all feel so helpless, but hopefully this will allow us to give back to the LGBT community in this tiny way.” [55] Here, the protagonist’s identity was presented as a pioneering choice, rather than a detail that needed to be hidden. Moreover, the producers acknowledged their debt to the LGBT community rather than distancing the show from that community. Such a development from reticence and repression to an overt championing of LGBTQ+ individuals’ rights was remarkable and challenged the historical pattern of excluding lesbian characters from Broadway stages. These actions that openly acknowledge and affirm the production’s debt to LGBTQ+ artists speak to the gains that the production enabled. Ceveris and Bechdel offer ways to see the historical context of the run. Michael Ceveris says: We’ve played through an extraordinary moment in our country’s history and the most progressive and heartening ways and the most retroactive and terrifying ways. We played through the Supreme Court’s decision, we played through the naming of the first national monument to gay and lesbian rights, and we played through a massacre that was horrific enough in itself and in its aftermath, when some of the hatred and reactionary comments that were made were just as horrifying. If there was ever a play that arrived on Broadway in the moment it was most needed, I think this would be it.[56] Ceveris encapsulated his perspective of the show as a necessary one. Bechdel’s comments featured her characteristic ambivalence: it’s a funny moment. It’s a very funny moment for LGBT culture and civil rights right now. I feel like the play and the success of the play is very much tied into what’s happening in the culture.[57] Like Bechdel in her emphasis of the production’s connection with the contemporary moment, Fun Home ’s composer Jeanine Tesori spoke of production’s role in advancing agendas outside the theater: And so I think that this has met our time, it’s a musical of our time. It makes me think . . . it’s available, what else can it do? What are the next stages? Where are we, what can we express [in] that conversation, the global conversation, the national conversation?[58] The answers to Tesori’s questions are forthcoming: it remains to be seen what artistic and commercial risks might be undertaken to create a more diverse, inclusive theatrical tradition for women actors to inhabit. Despite the censorship that characterized Fun Home ‘s early promotion, the producers ultimately reckoned with a literal tragedy that befell LGBTQ+ people. This transition suggests a recognition that tragedies can be spurred by settings, such as a homophobic society, rather than by LGBTQ+ people’s existence. Fun Home ultimately offered a way forward for a more varied performance history and for productive interplay between onstage representation and offstage politics. Fun Home ’s temporal context offers a useful demarcation of the interplay between civic and theatrical tragedies, and the creative ways that theater can elicit empathy. References [1] StuckinVermont, “Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home on Broadway,” 11:49, YouTube , 22 April 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9vD7Nc0L3k (accessed 1 May 2017). [2] Sarah Mirk, “Alison Bechdel’s ‘Fun Home’ Will Now be a New York Musical,” Bitch Media , 11 October 2013, www.bitchmedia.org/post/alison-bechdels-fun-home-will-now-be-a-new-york-musical (accessed 17 January 2017). [3] Kalle Oskari Matilla, “Selling Queerness: The Curious Case of Fun Home ,” The Atlantic , 25 April 2016, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/04/branding-queerness-the-curious-case-of-fun-home/479532/ (accessed 21 August 2016). [4] Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 334. [5] This line was taken from a “Stuck in Vermont” interview with Bechdel in 2008. Bechdel’s comment appears around 4:50 minutes into the clip. The varied sources for the musical suggest the creative team’s early openness to Bechdel’s contributions beyond the published pages of her visual memoir. StuckinVermont, “Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home on Broadway.” [6] According to Robert Petkoff, the actor playing Alison’s father during the tour, the content of the show remained a surprise to some playgoers: “There are people in the audience who are like, ‘What?! I saw kids dancing on the poster—this doesn’t seem to be that story!’” Lori McCue, “The star and designer of ‘Fun Home’ on how their show still surprises audiences,” The Washington Post , 27 April 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/express/wp/2017/04/27/the-star-and-designer-of-fun-home-on-how-their-show-still-surprises-audiences/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.80af729129a9 (accessed 20 July 2017). [7] Matilla, “Selling Queerness.” [8] Heather K. Love charts this genealogy in “Spectacular Failure: The Figure of the Lesbian in ‘Mulholland Drive,’” New Literary History 35, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 120–22. [9] The phrase “Bury your gays” serves as a shorthand for this narrative in popular media. GLAAD (formerly the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) provides data on the occurrence and type of LGBTQ+ representations on film and TV. See their Studio Responsibility Index for film data (www.glaad.org/sri/2018), and the “Where We Are On TV” reports (www.glaad.org/tags/where-we-are-tv). [10] Steven Adler, “Box Office,” The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical , eds. Raymond Knapp, Mitchell Morris, and Stacy Wolf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 356. [11] Ibid., 352. [12] Quoted in Mark N. Grant, “The Age of McMusicals,” The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical (Lebanon, NH: Northeastern University Press, 2004), 304–15. Jones’s primary examples of the category “technomusical” are Disney productions and those affiliated with Andrew Lloyd Webber. [13] Elizabeth Wollman, The Theater Will Rock: A History of the Rock Musical, from Hair to Hedwig (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 145. [14] Ibid., 145, 144. [15] Michael Sokolove profiles Hamilton ’s producer Jeffrey Seller in “The C.E.O. of ‘Hamilton’ Inc.,” The New York Times , 5 April 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/04/10/magazine/the-ceo-of-hamilton-inc.html (accessed 10 May 2018). For an overview of the Great Comet attribute dispute and resolution see the following: Michael Paulson, “Three Words Lead to a Battle Over ‘Great Comet’ on Broadway,” The New York Times , 19 October 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/10/20/theater/three-words-lead-to-a-battle-over-great-comet-on-broadway.html (accessed 17 May 2018); Michael Gioia, “ Great Comet Billing Dispute Prompts Lawsuit,” Playbill , 28 October 2016, www.playbill.com/article/ars-nova-sues-great-comet-producers-and-explains-why-were-taking-a-stand (accessed 17 May 2018); Michael Paulson, “Dispute at ‘Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812’ Leads to a Lawsuit,” New York Times , 30 October 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/10/29/theater/dispute-at-natasha-pierre-the-great-comet-of-1812-leads-to-lawsuit.html (accessed 17 May 2018); Jeremy Girard, “Peace Now: ‘Natasha, Pierre’ Production and Non-Profit Group Agree to Secret Deal,” Deadline, 2 November 2016, www.deadline.com/2016/11/broadway-lawsuit-natasha-pierre-josh-groban-1201845138/ (accessed 17 May 2018). [16] Michael Paulson, “‘Fun Home’ Recoups on Broadway,” The New York Times , 13 December 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/12/14/theater/fun-home-recoups-on-broadway.html (accessed 3 June 2016). Caskey repeated the characterization of the show as “crazy” in her conversation with Whitman preserved at Story Corps. “Fun Home producers Barbara Whitman and Kristen Caskey,” Story Corps , 1 April 2016, www.archive.storycorps.org/interviews/fun-home-co-producers-barbara-whitman-and-kristin-caskey/ (accessed 14 June 2018). After the Tony Awards, Isaacson repeated this diction: “Everybody had been telling us we were crazy, even stupid” (Paulson, “Winning”). As the production went on tour within the US, Isaacson described the “whole endeavor [as] a crazy leap of faith” (Moffit, “Taking on ‘tough stuff’”). Michael Paulson, “‘Fun Home’ Finds That Winning a Tony is the Best Way to Market a Musical,” The New York Times , 9 June 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/06/09/theater/theaterspecial/fun-home-finds-that-winning-a-tony-is-the-best-way-to-market-a-musical.html (accessed 15 June 2015). Kelly Moffit, “Taking on ‘tough stuff’ with beauty, talent, humor: St. Louis-produced ‘Fun Home’ opens at The Fox,” St. Louis Public Radio , 17 November 2016, www.news.stlpublicradio.org/post/taking-tough-stuff-beauty-talent-humor-st-louis-produced-fun-home-opens-fox (accessed 21 August 2018). [17] The American Psychiatric Association included homosexuality in the second and third editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders . The classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder was omitted in their 1987 volume. Neel Burton, “When Homosexuality Stopped Being a Mental Disorder,” Psychology Today , 18 September 2015, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/201509/when-homosexuality-stopped-being-mental-disorder (accessed 20 August 2018). [18] Stacy Wolf, “‘Never Gonna Be a Man/Catch Me if You Can/I Won’t Grow Up’: A Lesbian Account of Mary Martin as Peter Pan,” Theatre Journal 49, no. 4 (1997): 494. She uses “lesbianize” as a verb in A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 26. This claim about audience reception is also a starting point for Wolf’s book-length projects, including Changed for Good , in which Wolf argues that Wicked musically and visually codes Elphaba and Glinda as the show’s central couple. Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). [19] Chris Straayer’s phrase describes viewers’ willful interpretations of texts that do not secure the character’s sexuality or heroism. “The Hypothetical Lesbian Heroine in Narrative Feature Film,” in Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian and Queer Essays on Popular Culture , eds. Corey K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 44–69. [20] Ann M. Ciasullo, “Making Her (In)Visible: Cultural Representations of Lesbianism and the Lesbian Body in the 1990s,” Feminist Studies 27, no. 3 (2001): 605. [21] Love, “Spectacular Failure,” 129. In the footnote that follows this sentence, Love references Elizabeth Freeman’s “Packing History, Count(er)ing Generations,” New Literary History 31 (2000): 727–44. [22] Ben Brantley, “Candy Worship in the Temple of the Prom Queen,” The New York Times , 20 April 2007, www.nytimes.com/2007/04/30/theater/reviews/30blon.html (accessed 9 June 2016). In Stagestruck , playwright Sarah Schulman offers a productive overview of lesbian theatrical context and the ways that lesbian characters are considered more commodifiable when presented from non-lesbian playwrights, with Rent as a key example. Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). [23] Mirk, “Alison Bechdel’s ‘Fun Home.’” [24] Adam Hetrick, “For Beth Malone, ‘Butch is a Beautiful Thing’—What This Fun Home Star Learned Playing Lesbian,” Playbill , 29 June 2015, www.playbill.com/news/article/for-beth-malone-butch-is-a-beautiful-thing-what-this-fun-home-star-learned-playing-lesbian-351968 (accessed 1 July 2015). [25] These are key features of “The Vito Russo Test.” See “The Vito Russo Test,” GLAAD, www.glaad.org/sri/2018/vitorusso (accessed 14 August 2018). [26] Andrew Gans, “Tony-Winning Musical Kinky Boots Recoups Initial Investment,” Playbill , 3 October 2013, www.playbill.com/article/tony-winning-musical-kinky-boots-recoups-initial-investment-com-210206 (accessed 19 June 2017). According to Brent Lang, the recuperation happened in large part because of the high costs of Kinky Boots tickets. “ Kinky Boots Recoups $13.5 Investment,” The Wrap , 3 October 2013, www.thewrap.com/kinky-boots-recoups-13-5m-investment/ (accessed 19 June 2017). For additional context, Rent recouped in fifteen weeks, Avenue Q took forty weeks, and Matilda took some nineteen months to recoup its $16 million capitalization (Adler, “Box Office,” 352). Fun Home ’s cost of $5.25 million in 2015 was less than that of Spring Awakening in 2007, which cost $6 million. Spring Awakening ’s production team was concerned that their box office might suffer from their production’s content: like Fun Home , that musical includes suicide, adult language, homoeroticism, and teenage sexuality. For Matilda box office details, see David Cox, “Broadway Musical ‘Matilda’ Turns a Profit,” Variety , 5 December 2014, www.variety.com/2014/legit/news/matilda-recoups-broadway-musical-1201372084/. For all other box office details, see Adler, “Box Office,” 352. [27] Michael Ceveris, incidentally, “set the record for playing the most performances as the East German rock ‘n’ roll singer Hedwig in Hedwig and the Angry Inch.” For information on Ceveris’s record, see Carey Purcell, “Michael Ceveris on the Closing of Fun Home: ‘It Arrived on Broadway in the Moment it Was Most Needed,’” Out, 22 August 2016, www.out.com/theater-dance/2016/8/22/michael-cerveris-closing-fun-home-it-arrived-broadway-moment-it-was-most (accessed 12 February 2017). [28] Stacy Wolf, “The Queer Pleasures of Mary Martin and Broadway: The Sound of Music as a Lesbian Musical,” Modern Drama 39, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 52. [29] Other details specific to Bechdel’s experience were stripped from the campaign. Whereas the cover for Bechdel’s book referenced the family’s funeral home, including a Mass card reappropriated as her book title, the musical’s poster omitted that background and that prop. [30] See Sokolove, “The C.E.O. of ‘Hamilton’, Inc.,” where Jeffrey Seller characterized the name change as a result of “gentle but persistent prodding before Miranda finally agreed.” Patricia Herrera writes about the ways in which Hamilton “proclaims an inclusive narrative of American identity that obscures the histories of racism that are at the base of so much of the American experience,” as well as the promotional distance from the show’s “acoustic environment shaped by Afro-Caribbean and Afro-American musical, oral, visual, and dance forms and practices.” Patricia Herrera, “Reckoning with America’s Racial Past, Present, and Future in Hamilton ,” in Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America’s Past , eds. Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018), 262, 260. [31] June Thomas, “ Fun Home Won Five Tonys. How Did a Graphic Memoir Become a Musical?” Slate , 8 June 2015, www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2013/10/08/fun_home_is_america_ready_for_a_musical_about_a_butch_lesbian.html (accessed 21 April 2017). [32] Rae Binstock, “Why Lesbian Spaces Will Always Be in Danger of Closing, and Why Some Will Always Survive,” Slate , 20 December 2016, www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2016/12/20/why_do_lesbian_spaces_have_such_a_hard_time_staying_in_business.html (accessed 21 April 2017). [33] “Alison Bechdel’s ‘Fun Home’: The Coming-Out Memoir That Became a Hit Broadway Musical,” Democracy Now! , 30 July 2015, www.democracynow.org/2015/7/30/alison_bechdels_fun_home_the_coming (accessed 14 May 2017). [34] Paulson, “‘Fun Home’ Recoups.” [35] Andrew Gans, “National Tour of Fun Home Recoups Investment,” Playbill , 17 May 2017, www.playbill.com/article/national-tour-of-fun-home-recoups-investment (accessed 19 June 2017). [36] Paulson, “‘Fun Home’ Recoups.” [37] Patrick Healey, “Moving Your Show to Broadway? Not So Fast,” The New York Times , 8 May 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/05/11/theater/theaterspecial/moving-your-show-to-broadway-not-so-fast.html (accessed 2 May 2017). [38] “Life with Father! Learn the True Tale Behind the New Broadway Musical Fun Home ,” Broadway.com , 23 March 2015, www.broadway.com/buzz/180076/life-with-father-learn-the-true-tale-behind-the-new-broadway-musical-fun-home/ (accessed 13 March 2017). [39] Paulson, “Tonys.” Kristen Caskey was played off by the orchestra in the midst of her acceptance speech. Lisa Kron’s acceptance speech was not televised, but can be found here: Jerry Portwood, “ Fun Home was the big musical winner at the awards,” Out , 8 June 2016, www.out.com/popnography/2015/6/08/watch-lisa-kron-gives-moving-tonys-acceptance-speech (accessed 9 June 2016). [40] Healy, “Moving.” [41] The Public Theater’s Public Lab held a run of Fun Home in 2012 in their Newman theater, and a subsequent off-Broadway run at the Public Theater that began in September 2014. Manuel Betancourt, “From the Public to Broadway: Fun Home ’s Growing Pains,” HowlRound , 22 October 2015, www.howlround.com/from-the-public-to-broadway-fun-home-s-growing-pains (accessed 27 August 2018). [42] Betsy Gomez provides commentary on this provision, which “mandates that students be allowed to avoid encountering educational material they find ‘objectionable based on a sincerely held religious, moral, or cultural belief.’” Betsy Gomez, “This Compromise Is Not Acceptable: CBLDF Joins Coalition Condemning South Carolina Budget Provision,” Comic Book Legal Defense Fund , 13 June 2014, www.cbldf.org/2014/06/this-compromise-is-not-acceptable-cbldf-joins-coalition-questioning-south-carolina-budget-provision/ (accessed 22 May 2017). [43] Democracy Now! , “Alison Bechdel’s ’Fun Home.’” [44] Hetrick, “Butch is a Beautiful Thing.” [45] Michael Ceveris gave the speech on 8 June 2015. Michael Musto, “Lesbian Musical Crushes Gershwin Show, and Other Tony Awards Revelations,” Out , 8 June 2015, www.out.com/michael-musto/2015/6/08/lesbian-musical-fun-home-crushes-gershwin-show-tony-awards-revelations (accessed 10 June 2015). [46] These moments have been preserved by the production team, and can be easily accessed on their webpage. The Playbill Video site shows Kron commenting that the play is “at the cusp of an evolving opening moment.” Playbill Video, “Lisa Kron, Michael Cerveris, Judy Kuhn and Emily Skeggs Have Fun Talking “Fun Home” at BroadwayCon!,” 7:51, YouTube , 3 February 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdltIKzwLUk (accessed 13 March 2016). [47] Hetrick, “Butch is a Beautiful Thing.” [48] “Out100: The Fun Home Family,” Out , 9 November 2015, www.out.com/out100-2015/2015/11/09/out100-fun-home-family (accessed 17 May 2016). The shoot includes a stylist, an approach reminiscent of some of Rent ’s promotion techniques which included clothing lines at Manhattan’s Bloomingdales and fashion spreads featuring the cast. See Michael Riedel, “Available at Bloomies: The ‘Rent’ Rags Can Be Yours—For a Price,” New York Daily News, 30 April 1996, 35. [49] Theatre Mania, “A Day with Fun Home Star Beth Malone,” 6:35, YouTube , 30 September 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hQw_uwzJCc (accessed 3 June 2016). [50] As Matilla notes, US Ambassador Samantha Powers took her colleagues to this event in May 2016, see “Selling Queerness.” [51] Carmen Triola, “‘Fun Home’ Is Going to Orlando to Perform a Benefit Concert for Pulse Shooting Victims,” FlavorWire , 6 July 2016, www.flavorwire.com/583516/fun-home-is-going-to-orlando-to-perform-a-benefit-concert-for-pulse-shooting-victims (accessed 22 July 2016). [52] For additional reports of this trip, see the following: “Broadway’s ‘Fun Home’ Cast Sets Benefit Performance for Orlando Victims,” Hollywood Reporter , 5 July 2016, www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/broadways-fun-home-cast-sets-908612 (accessed 11 April 2018); Michael Ceveris, “Taking ‘Fun Home’ to Orlando for a Catharsis Onstage and Off,” The New York Times , 6 August 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/08/06/theater/taking-fun-home-to-orlando-for-a-catharsis-onstage-and-off.html (accessed 11 April 2018); Hal Boedecker, “Pulse benefit: Broadway’s ‘Fun Home’ plays Orlando,” Orlando Sentinel , 5 July 2016, www.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment/tv/tv-guy/os-pulse-benefit-broadway-s-fun-home-plays-orlando-20160705-story.html (accessed 11 April 2018). [53] Mark Kennedy, “Broadway’s ‘Fun Home’ cast sets benefit for Orlando victims,” AP News , 5 July 2016, wwwapnews.com/c90a05bc88204ae4950c0ada08bf48e8 (accessed 22 July 2016). [54] After their advocacy, Isaacson was awarded an Equality Award from the St. Louis chapter of the Human Rights Campaign, and Caskey was appointed the executive vice president of Ambassador Theater Group’s North American operations. See Judith Newmark, “‘Fun Home’ reaps more honors for its producers,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch , 20 November 2015, www.stltoday.com/entertainment/arts-and-theatre/culture-club/fun-home-reaps-more-honors-for-its-producers/article_492d110f-3d24-574a-8517-a4dcd372b5f5.html (accessed 6 June 2018); Gordon Cox, “Broadway Producer Kristen Caskey Joins Ambassador Theater Group,” Variety , 29 November 2016, www.variety.com/2016/legit/news/kristin-caskey-ambassador-theater-group-north-america-1201928759/ (accessed 6 June 2018). [55] Matthew J. Palm, “‘Fun Home’: Cast is here for you,” Orlando Sentinel , 20 July 2016, www.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment/arts-and-theater/os-fun-home-orlando-benefit-20160713-story.html#nt=inbody-1%20Ceveris%20%E2%80%93%20idea%20in%20middle%20of%20show,%20producers%E2%80%99%20response (accessed 22 July 2016). [56] Purcell, “On the Closing of Fun Home .” [57] Democracy Now! , “Alison Bechdel’s ‘Fun Home.’” [58] Ibid. Footnotes About The Author(s) MAUREEN MCDONNELL is Director of Women’s and Gender Studies and Professor of English at Eastern Connecticut State University. Her research interests include gender studies, early modern drama (including Shakespeare), and American Sign Language in performance. Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Johanna Hartmann and Julia Rössler Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Kiera Bono Editorial Assistant: Ruijiao Dong Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction: Reflections on the Tragic in Contemporary American Drama and Theatre "Take Caroline Away”: Catastrophe, Change, and the Tragic Agency of Nonperformance in Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change The Poetics of the Tragic in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America Rewriting Greek Tragedy / Confronting History in Contemporary American Drama: David Rabe’s The Orphan (1973) and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003) Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home: Activism and the Advertising of a "Lesbian Suicide Musical" Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches. Edited by Sharrell D. Luckett with Tia M. Shaffer. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017; Pp. 233. Palabras del Cielo: An Exploration of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences. Compiled by José Casas with Christina Marín, ed. Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing, 2018; Pp. 581. The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era. Jonathan Shandell. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018; Pp. 213 + xii. Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, & the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization. Judith Hamera. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017; Pp. 286 + xvii. A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams. Katherine Weiss, ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2014; Pp. 290. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

European Stages serves as an inclusive English-language journal, providing a detailed perspective on the unfolding narrative of contemporary European theatre since 1969. Back to Top Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back European Stages 18, Fall, 2023 Volume Visit Journal Homepage Report from London (December 2022) By Dan Venning Published: November 26, 2023 Download Article as PDF My last theatre-going trips to London were in 2018 and 2019, before the COVID pandemic swept across the globe, shuttered theatres, and transformed theatre-going after the world began to reopen. In the reports I wrote for European Stages after those trips, I identified several major trends that ran through many of the productions I saw. In 2018, numerous productions engaged, in one way or another, with the global #MeToo movement, acknowledging the assaults and microaggressions faced by women and AFAB (assigned-female-at-birth) people. At the end of 2019, only a few months before the pandemic struck, Britain was gearing up for a national snap election that was, in some respects, a sort of second referendum on Brexit. In this particular moment, many of the productions I saw dealt with Britain’s place (often as a former imperial power) in global politics, or the marginalized people within British society. In December 2022, I once again spent nearly a month in London, taking twenty students from Union College in Schenectady, NY to see shows across the city. As in my previous trip, I selected shows eclectically to show my students just some of the many sorts of theatrical productions available in London: West End musicals ( Cabaret ), works at the National ( Hex and Othello ), shows in Shakespeare’s Globe’s indoor candlelit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse ( Hakawatis and Henry V ), new works ( My Neighbour Totoro at the Barbican, Baghdaddy at the Royal Court, The Doctor and Orlando on the West End), and long-running mainstays ( The Woman in Black and Heathers ). In addition to the productions I saw with my students, I separately attended As You Like It at the new @sohoplace theatre; my first West End panto, Mother Goose ; the long-running & Juliet on the West End in advance of its Broadway transfer; and A Streetcar Named Desire at the Almeida, which had sold tickets so quickly that I could not book for my large student group. While my previous London reports consisted of similarly diverse shows, in this iteration, I found few thematic links running through the content or staging of these works. If there was a link between these shows, it was the truism that artists and audiences are rediscovering how to engage with theatre in the post-COVID landscape. Indeed, COVID continued (and continues) to affect how theatre is made and seen. About half of the audience members were masked at every performance (I was always masked). Several members of my term abroad contracted COVID while in London and had to quarantine for five days and miss performances. I had booked tickets to Tammy Faye at the Almeida, a new musical (with music by Elton John, lyrics by Jake Shears, and book by James Graham, featuring superstar Andrew Rannels among others, based on the life of evangelist Tammy Faye Messner), but several performances, including ours, were cancelled due to illnesses in the cast. I booked another show to make up for the cancellation: the solo piece One Night Stand with E.V. Crowe and friends at the Royal Court… and then that was also cancelled due to illness (thankfully Orlando , which I booked at that point, was not cancelled!). And yet throughout the theatres, there was palpable joy—even in the grimmest productions—that artists and audiences were once again able to come together in the same space. Because I found few concrete links beyond the ways COVID continues to inflect theatre-going, I discuss the productions irrespective of the order in which I saw them, but in ways that allow me to draw links between particular shows. Both the first ( Cabaret , 1 December 2022) and final ( A Streetcar Named Desire , 23 December 2022) productions I saw were directed by Rebecca Frecknall, Associate Director for the Almeida Theatre. Frecknall is an unabashedly feminist director who reimagines classic dramatic works—often American—for the contemporary stage and her work desperately needs to be seen on major stages in the United States. Her Summer and Smoke in 2018 was haunting in its simplicity and Patsy Ferran justifiably won the Olivier for her luminous performance; unfortunately Frecknall’s 2019 The Duchess of Malfi featuring Lydia Wilson was less so, sapping the play of its disturbing power in a bland, ultramodern staging that seemed to focus more on the men than the titular Dutchess. I’m glad to say that both of her productions I saw in 2022 were stellar. Cabaret was staged at the Playhouse Theatre on the West End, which was rechristened The Kit Kat Club. Audience members entered through the stage door and wound their way through the basement halls of the theatre, as if we were entering the venue depicted in the show. Stickers were placed over our cell phone lenses to prevent photographs and everyone was given a shot of vodka. Cast members of various genders dressed in vaguely BDSM sexual garb made eyes with us and danced provocatively. Three separate bars were set up in each lobby level and a half hour before curtain an elaborately staged dance number by the “boys and girls” of the Kit Kat Club was executed on the bar of the main lobby (Julia Cheng’s choreography was impressive throughout the show, but particularly here). The show had swept the 2022 Olivier Awards but by the time I saw it all the stars who had won acting awards had rotated out. The Emcee was played by understudy Matthew Gent at this performance and Sally Bowles by swing/alternate Emily Benjamin (both of whom would take over the roles as main cast in 2023), yet this cast was spectacular. Of particular note were Michelle Bishop as Frӓulein Kost (and the Kit Kat girl Fritzie), Vivien Parry as Frӓulein Schneider, and Benjamin as Sally Bowles. Parry seemed to channel the spirit of Lotte Lenya with her rendition of “So What” and Bishop, under Frecknall’s direction, brought genuine pathos to the role of Kost. As a prostitute at the bottom of the social hierarchy, we could understand how Kost would embrace Naziism to find anyone she could denigrate in response to the way society had rejected her. At the end of the show, Benjamin’s rendition of “Cabaret” was among the strongest musical numbers I’ve seen live, surpassing, to my mind, recordings of Liza Minelli: the upbeat lyrics paired with her personal despair had much of the audience in tears. Sid Sagar as Cliff Bradshaw was less successful, but this may be because he seemed to have been directed to be emotionless throughout, preventing any sort of audience empathy with the character who was the analogue of Christopher Isherwood, the queer author of the stories on which the musical is based. Tom Scutt’s stage was almost in the round and his costumes implicated the audience in the rise of fascism that Kander, Ebb, and Masteroff’s show depicts. The Emcee rose from the stage gleefully with a tiny party hat for “Wilkommen” as everyone reveled together in the celebration we were attending; by “Money” he was dressed in a neo-fascist demonic outfit, and at the end of the show he and the boys and girls of the Kit Kat Club wore simple, sexless brown outfits, evoking Hitler’s brownshirts a century ago in the 1920s. Yet in the final moments as they marched in a circle carrying suitcases, Isabella Byrd’s lighting turned the set to a stark gray, making them look like photos of men and women with suitcases on their way to trains to concentration camps. Collaboration would save no one. Thankfully, Frecknall’s production (with original star Eddie Redmayne as the Emcee) is transferring to Broadway in 2024, when the August Wilson Theatre will temporarily become the Kit Kat Club. Cabaret . Photo: Marc Brenner. Of all the shows I saw in London, Frecknall’s version of A Streetcar Named Desire was the strongest—easily the best Tennessee Williams I have ever seen—despite the fact that it was in previews with the actor playing Blanche holding her script throughout. The production sold out within hours of tickets going on sale, but Lydia Wilson, who had been cast as Blanche, dropped out of the production for health reasons two weeks before performances began. The first week of performances were cancelled and Wilson was replaced by Patsy Ferran, who had been such a revelation as Alma in Summer and Smoke four years earlier. On the preview I attended, after barely two weeks of rehearsal, Ferran carried her script, occasionally glancing quickly at it at the beginning of each scene, but never looking at it again. Also at the performance I attended on 23 December, Frecknall herself stepped into the role of Eunice (without a script). Seeing her onstage in her own production was a marvelous experience. Madeleine Girling’s set was a nearly bare square with a few scattered props (and periodic rain effects) and Frecknall’s production raced through the words at the beginning of Williams’s script at lightning pace so that the action could effectively open with Blanche’s arrival in New Orleans. Yet this production was less about the conflict between Blanche and Stanley than about toxic masculinity and patriarchal abuse. Blanche was certainly traumatized, but never for a moment portrayed as “crazy,” and Stanley’s violence towards her throughout the play had little to do with any hatred for her per se. Instead, Stanley wanted complete control over his victimized wife Stella—and his clearest path to getting this, as for any abuser, was to isolate Stella from anyone with whom she could find mutual love or care, particularly her sister. The actor who played Stanley, Paul Mescal, was not a hulking brute but appeared to be an attractive, soulful, young husband with a somewhat silly mullet. Yet in spite of this physical attractiveness, Mescal played Stanley as a profoundly ugly man on the inside: consumed with jealousy, self-pity, and white male rage, taking out his anger most clearly on his abused wife, her sister, and his supposed “friend” Mitch. In this color-conscious production, Stella was played by the British-Indian-Singaporean actor Anjana Vasan (so she and Blanche were clearly not full biological siblings, but loved one another no less) and Mitch by Black actor Dwane Walcott. Walcott’s scenes with Blanche and Stanley took on particular resonances—as Stanley viciously notes that Mitch will never achieve his own career successes, or when Blanche asks Mitch if he has been on the titular streetcar and Mitch does not respond. One of many revelations was that Frecknall’s production made it seem as if Mitch must have always been written for a Black actor. Her feminist version of A Streetcar Named Desire (which won an Olivier for Best Revival, and for which Vasan and Mescal also took home Oliviers), even in previews and with Ferran holding her book-in-hand, will make it hard for me to read or see Williams’s play in the same light again. A Streetcar Named Desire . Photo: Marc Brenner. Nearly as successful were two new adaptations of older works: Robert Icke’s The Doctor and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s My Neighbour Totoro . Icke, the former Associate Director for the Almeida (the position Frecknall now holds) created this production at that theatre before it transferred to the West End where I saw it on 8 December 2022. Like his earlier revelatory adaptations Oresteia and Hamlet , The Doctor has since been presented at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. The Doctor is Icke’s loose adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s play Professor Bernhardi , a work about anti-Semitism in early twentieth-century Europe. While holding fast to most of the events in Schnitzler’s plot—which hinges on a leading doctor’s refusal to admit a priest to deliver last rights to a young girl dying of a botched abortion and the ways in which that Jewish doctor is punished by society—Icke’s adaptation is strikingly contemporary, engaging with identity and perception in today’s world. His script notes that “Actors’ identities should be carefully considered in the casting of the play. In all sections except for [an onstage debate], each actor’s identity should be directly dissonant with their character’s in at least one way […] the acting should hold the mystery until the play reveals it. The idea is that the audience are made to re-consider characters (and events) as they learn more about who the characters are” (viii). For example, when a priest (who we later learn is Black) enters in Act I, the stage direction reads “ The FATHER is played by a white actor .” Hardiman, a particularly chauvinistic white male doctor, was played by the female Afro-Jamaican actor Naomi Wirthner. The central character, Dr. Ruth Wolff, was played by Juliet Stevenson, an actress who does not “look Jewish” at all. Wolff claims to see only talent and facts, never race or sex, and the audience is forced to engage with what actually not seeing these palpable facts about identity would feel like. In one particularly affecting moment, Ruth’s neighbor Sami, played by cis woman actor Matilda Tucker, is revealed to be a trans girl who appears masculine to most people who can see her within the world of the play. We periodically see flashbacks to Ruth’s conversations with her deceased partner Charlie, who suffered from Alzheimer’s, the disease Ruth seeks to cure. Charlie was played by the Black woman actor Juliet Garricks, but Icke never lets us learn Charlie's “actual” gender or race within the world of the play. Hildegard Bechtler’s simple and evocative set and costumes (the set was simply a slowly rotating white room) contributed to all these effects. Icke’s challenging production forced audiences to engage with what they can, cannot, or will not see. The Doctor . Photo: Manuel Harlan. The RSC’s My Neighbour Totoro (7 December 2022) was another stellar adaptation. It won Olivier awards for Best Entertainment or Comedy Play as well as for Phelim McDermott’s direction, Joe Hisaishi’s music as orchestrated and arranged by Will Stuart, Jessica Hung and Han Yun’s lighting design, Tony Gayle’s sound design, Tom Pye’s set design, and Kimie Nakano’s costume design. Also certainly deserving of an award—although an Olivier category does not exist—were Bail Twist’s puppet designs, which were created by the Jim Henson Creature Shop, Significant Object, and Twist’s own Tandem Otter Productions. The production was a faithful adaptation by Tom Morton-Smith of Hayao Miyazaki’s 1988 Studio Ghibli animated film My Neighbor Totoro , about two sisters who move with their father to the rural Japanese countryside in 1955 so that they can be closer to their mother who is in a specialized hospital. In the countryside, the sisters—Mei, aged four, and Satsuki, aged ten—discover mythical creatures from Japanese folklore, including soot spirits, “Totoros” (kind and intelligent furry forest creatures varying in size from tiny to immense), and a giant cat that is also a bus in which the creatures ride. The sisters see tiny sprouts grow into giant trees overnight. Miyazaki’s masterful animated film is a paean to childhood, Japanese folk culture, and imagination, made even more powerful through Hisaishi’s unforgettable score. A cartoon, with all its impossible magic and music, was brought to life onstage through astounding performances by an entirely Asian cast, including twenty puppeteers in Bunraku-style black outfits, singer Ai Ninomiya, and the award-winning designers. Adult actors Mei Mac (Mei), Ami Okumura Jones (Satsuki), and Nino Furuhata (Kanta, a young neighbor boy) empathetically played young children in a way that contributed to the affective power of the production. During the curtain call, the puppeteers swiftly demonstrated how they had manipulated some of the puppets, from the hand-and-rod chickens to the immense King Totoro and Cat-Bus. Notably, production press photos never show the Totoros; they have to be seen to be believed (the production is being revived in 2023 in London and I have no doubt it will tour worldwide considering its success there). My Neighbour Totoro . Photo: Manuel Harlan. Coincidentally, another production I attended was also an adaptation of a film released in 1988: Kevin Murphy and Laurence O’Keefe’s Heathers , based on the cult film written by Daniel Waters and directed by Michael Lehmann (13 December 2022). The musical adaptation of Heathers has similarly achieved cult status with young musical theatre aficionados, despite never having been staged on Broadway. It opened off-Broadway in 2014 at New World Stages, then premiered in the UK (with a few rewritten songs) at the off-West End venue The Other Palace in 2018, transferred to the West End later that year, transferred back to The Other Palace after the pandemic in 2021, and closed in 2023. All of these productions were directed by Andy Fickman. Heathers is set in Westerberg High School in the 1980s and centers on Veronica, a girl who manages to gain acceptance from the popular clique of Heather Chandler, Heather McNamara, and Heather Duke, at the cost of her friendship with the unpopular Martha Dunnstock. Veronica begins a relationship with a new boy at school, the soulful outsider J.D., who reveals himself as a full-fledged sociopath, poisoning the lead Heather and murdering two jocks who try to sexually assault Veronica. Veronica goes along at first—penning a fake suicide note from Heather Chandler that takes the school by storm and later helping to stage the killings of Ram and Kurt as a murder-suicide as if the two were closeted gay lovers. But when J.D. decides to blow up the entire school, Veronica finally takes the initiative and stops his murderous rampage. At the off-West End Other Palace, Fickman’s production as designed by David Shields lacked any technical spectacle but the energetic performances by young actors Erin Caldwell (Veronica), Nathanael Landskroner (J.D.) and Maddison Firth (Heather Chandler) brought the mostly young audience to their feet. O’Keefe and Murphy’s songs from the show are superb, particularly Veronica’s joyously sexual “Dead Girl Walking,” Kurt and Ram’s Dads’ “My Dead Gay Son,” J.D.’s “Our Love is God,” the Heathers’ show stopping poppy “Candy Store,” and the eleven o’clock number “Seventeen,” an ode to high school life. While Heathers had a significant run on- and off- the West End, it pales in comparison to The Woman in Black , which opened in London in 1989 (only one year after the original films of Heathers and My Neighbor Totoro were released), closing in March 2023 after running thirty-three years on the West End. Scores of actors have played the roles of Arthur Kipps and the young unnamed Actor who endeavors to bring Kipps to life (as well as the uncredited ghost role) and playwright Stephen Mallatratt died in 2004 less than halfway through the show’s immensely long run (Dame Susan Hill, from whose 1983 novel Mallatratt adapted the play, is still alive and still writing). I was especially glad to see the show on 6 December 2022 only months before it ended its historic run. It has made its way into numerous British school curriculums and part of the audience was filled with teenagers in school uniforms who had been bussed in to see the show on the West End. Robin Herford’s production, simply designed by Michael Holt, takes place “in this Theatre in the early 1950s” and begins when Arthur Kipps (Julian Forsyth, when I saw it) attempts, poorly, to tell his haunted ghost story for the stage. With a few simple props, the young Actor (Matthew Spencer) takes on the role of the young Kipps, while Kipps himself plays every other character (save the ghost) from his past. Through the power of the imagination, affecting performances, one uncredited woman actor, and a few carefully placed jump scares facilitated by Kevin Sleep’s lighting design and Sebastian Frost’s sound design, the audience is transported from a bare stage into a small seaside town and its haunted house on the moors. Rumors abound of ghosts in London’s theatres—including the murdered actor William Terriss at the Adelphi and the 18 th Century “Man in Gray” at Drury Lane—and if such ghosts do exist, I expect the Fortune Theatre will be a stage haunted by The Woman in Black for some time to come. The Woman in Black . Photo: Mark Douet. In contrast to the simplistic power of imagination celebrated in that show, Hex at the National Theatre (5 December 2022) demonstrated the ways in which spectacle—and powerful performances—cannot save a thoroughly misconceived production. Staged in the National’s massive Olivier Theatre, with its marvelous gigantic drum revolve stage, Hex , a musical adaptation of the Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, is obviously a pet project for Rufus Norris, the artistic director and chief executive of the National. Norris, who directed the production, also wrote the lyrics and developed the concept along with Katrina Lindsay. The convoluted book for Hex is by Tanya Ronder and music is by Jim Fortune. Lindsay’s set and costume designs are spectacular, including a castle that descends from the upstage wall, three flying fairies who deliver their performances while suspended midair, and numerous other delightfully staged creations, including bumblingly misogynistic princes who wish to wake the sleeping beauty, a chorus of poisonous thorns, and many more fantastical effects. The plot centers on the “low” Fairy (the marvelous singer Lisa Lambe), who loses her powers after accidentally “hexing” the young princess Rose (Rosie Graham) and putting her into a sleep until she can find a true love’s kiss. Fairy wants to regain her powers and join the effervescent “High Fairies” (Kate Parr, Olivia Saunders, and Rumi Sutton), so seeks a prince to undo the curse; she finds him in Bert (Michael Elcock), the half-human son of Queenie (another superb singer, Victoria Hamilton-Barritt), an ogress who has turned vegetarian in order to resist her urges to consume human flesh. After a convoluted plot that also involves generations of stewards named Smith and Smith-Smith (Michael Matus), Fairy sneakily preventing Queenie from eating her grandchildren (Rose and Bert’s children Duncan and Dyllis), and much more, Fairy succeeds and is elevated to “high fairy” status—renouncing her lifelong goal only seconds later to rejoin her earthbound friends. Tone shifts abound—the show was billed for ages eight and up, but in addition to fairy-tale hijinks it includes a baby-eating ogress, graphic descriptions of animal slaughter, and a “comic” song from the princes about sexual coercion. Even worse is the music: Fortune’s tunes and Norris’s lyrics are sometimes earworms precisely because of their banality (Bert cannot stop singing about his name in “Prince Bert,” impressively and athletically choreographed by Jade Hackett; Rose and Bert’s romantic duet “Hello” consists mainly of the words “Hi, Hi, Hello”). Of the twenty-eight songs, eight are reprises (with one song reprised twice). Hex aspired to be a creative retelling of fairy tales along the lines of Sondheim’s Into the Woods , instead it demonstrated what happens when an artistic director of a major theatre is too enamored of his own project. Hex . Photo: Johan Persson. The other production I saw at the National, Clint Dyer’s staging of Othello (16 December 2022), was far more successful. Othello is a deeply troubling play, written by a white man over four hundred years ago but engaging with the charged issues of racism and spousal abuse and murder. Probably my favorite analyses of this play come from the Black British actor Hugh Quarshie (see “Is Othello a Racist Play on YouTube).and Ayanna Thompson’s new intersectional feminist introduction to Arden revised edition (2016)both of which acknowledge the ways in which the play remains strikingly painful today, especially for Black or woman/AFAB readers and audiences. Dyer’s production, in the National’s smaller proscenium Lyttelton Theatre, with a set designed by Chloe Lamford that looked like some sort of public forum, began with a stagehand sweeping the stage as images were projected on the upstage wall showing the long and troubling production history of this play. In Dyer’s production, almost every character, from ensemble members to Cassio (Rory Fleck Byrne), Bianca (Kirsty J Curtis), Montano (Garteth Kennerley), or the Duke of Venice (Martin Marquez) was also credited as “System”—in other words, these people were part of a system of oppression that would lead to Othello and Desdemona’s deaths. Only three characters were not also listed as “System”: Othello (Giles Terera), the Black man oppressed by systemic racism, Desdemona (Rosy McEwen), his white wife who rejects the system to love a Black man, and Iago (Paul Hilton, who was as superb in this as he had been in the benevolent roles of Walter and Morgan in The Inheritance ), who manipulated the system to destroy Othello and Desdemona. Notably, during the trial in Act I, Iago sat to the side alongside Roderigo/System (Jack Bardoe), making a noose out of a long rope. Iago and Roderigo assumed that the trial would be perfunctory and Othello would be executed—and they might have been right, had the Turkish invasion of Cyprus not required Othello’s military leadership. But perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of the production was how Dyer conceived of the role of Emilia/System (Tanya Franks): throughout the production, one of her arms was in a cast and she had a massive black eye. She was obviously being abused by her husband Iago, yet no one commented or even subtly acknowledged this fact. Dyer effectively communicated that systems encourage horrific cruelties (towards women by men, towards Black people by white society) and react violently not to abuse but instead to those who dare to oppose these oppressions. Othello . Photo: Myah Jeffers. Another successful and contemporary staging of a Shakespearean play was Josie Rourke’s gorgeous intersectional production of As You Like It (15 December 2022), the second play to be staged at the new @sohoplace theatre, an ultramodern complex that is London’s first purpose-built West End theatre to open in fifty years. Staged in the round, Robert Jones’s set consisted mainly of a large piano center stage where Michael Bruce played underscoring for the action and accompaniment to the songs (Bruce also composed all the music) throughout the show. When the characters entered Arden, leaves fell from above, covering the stage in an autumnal tapestry. At that point, Jones and Poppy Hall’s Elizabethan-style costumes gave way to more contemporary, rustic attire. Particularly noteworthy was the casting: Leah Harvey (a Black nonbinary female-presenting actor who uses they/them pronouns) played Rosalind—and Harvey was not the only nonbinary actor in the cast: Cal Watson (they/them) played Le Beau and the second de Bois brother. Several of the actors and their characters were deaf, including Rose Ayling-Ellis, who played Celia, and Gabriella Leon, who played Audrey. These identities mattered in the play: Celia and Audrey communicated using a mixture of British Sign Language (BSL) and sign-mime, and most of the characters communicated with them in this way. But the vicious Duke Frederick (Tom Edden) refused to communicate with his daughter in sign, forcing her to lip read and to speak orally to him. Duke Frederick also used his daughter’s disability against her: turning his back to her as he spoke in anger, so that she could not read his lips and understand what he was saying. The play’s scenes of reconciliation and love at the end were particularly moving because of these intersectional identities. Instead of returning in “women’s weeds,” Harvey’s Rosalind simply walked offstage and back on, and then Alfred Enoch’s Orlando recognized them. Ben Wiggins’s Oliver demonstrated his reformation by struggling to learn BSL so that he could communicate with Celia, with whom he had fallen in love. In fact, the American actor Martha Plimpton, always excellent in Shakespeare, despite a solid performance as a female Jacques, with the famous “All the world’s a stage” speech, was one of the least compelling parts of the production. Rourke’s staging demonstrated that Shakespeare’s fictionalized Forest of Arden can allow us to imagine and visualize a world where everyone can be celebrated, no matter their race, gender identity or expression, or disabilities. As You Like It . Photo: Manuel Harlan. The same day I saw Othello at the National in the evening (16 December 2022), I had also attended a matinee of Henry V at the nearby Shakespeare’s Globe, meaning that I saw three Shakespearean productions in London within two days. Unfortunately, Holly Race Roughan’s staging of Henry V was the least inspiring of any of the productions I saw during my time in London, including the misconceived Hex . Roughan had a clear concept: that war and power could corrupt even the most well-intentioned leader and that brutally violent men can come to be revered as heroes. Over the course of the play, her Henry (Oliver Johnstone) transformed from an optimistic, well-intentioned ruler to a dangerous psychopath, raging at his people, ordering executions without a second thought, and killing the Dauphin at Agincourt in retribution for the insult that helped spark his war. Henry’s scene with Katherine had not a single spark of romance, but was the culmination of his violence as he demanded her hand in an overtly political marriage, and then the play ended with the scene (usually much earlier in the play; Act 3, scene 4) between Katherine and Alice (Eleanor Henderson) as Katherine began to learn English in preparation for her forced marriage. Perplexingly, this was followed by an epilogue where the actress who had played Katherine, Joséphine Callies, transformed into a modern immigrant, responding to a British naturalization exam; perhaps a comment, albeit unrelated to the earlier action of this production, on the fact that England, which had once had imperialist dreams of conquering foreign lands, after Brexit now places major barriers against Europeans who wish to become British citizens. While Roughan’s concept was clear, everyone spoke Shakespeare’s verse excellently, and the production was one of the best lit I’ve seen in the indoor Wanamaker Playhouse (designer Moi Tran’s metallic upstage wall reflected the candlelight that serves to light productions at this indoor recreation of Shakespeare’s Blackfriars playhouse), little else made sense. Except for Johnstone as Henry, the nine remaining cast members played all the other roles in the play, often with only the smallest costume or accent change meant to indicate a change in character. However, sometimes this convention wasn’t followed: an actor removing a coat might mean a change in character, or simply that character removing their coat. Even for a Shakespeare scholar, it was often unclear to whom Henry was speaking; I could tell that my fellow audience members were totally befuddled. This is the sort of misconceived production that sadly leads modern audiences to feel that they “just don’t understand” (or like) Shakespeare. Henry V . Photo: Johan Persson. Hakawatis: Women of the Arabian Nights , a new play by Shakespeare’s Globe writer-in-residence Hannah Khalil, which I had seen two days earlier at the Wanamaker (14 December 2022) was far more successful. A testament to women’s empowerment, storytelling, and collaborative creation, the play follows five women (Wahida the Dancer, played by Houda Echouafini; Fatah the Young, played by Alaa Habib; Zuya the Warrior, played by Laura Hanna; Akila the Writer, played by Nadi Kemp-Sayfi; and Naha the Wise, played by Roann Hassani McCloskey) who are imprisoned and awaiting their marriage to, sexual assault by, and subsequent execution at the orders of the unseen King, who is currently married to (the also unseen) Scheherazade. In contrast to the original version of the tale, it is not Scheherazade but these women who come up with the stories that Scheherazade will tell her husband, saving all their lives. The play includes riffs on classic stories from the 1001 Nights along with new tales, as if they are stories from these women’s lives, or ones told to them by their mothers, sisters, cousins, or female friends. At one point, they argue about a story that Zuya tells, which metaphorically depicts male violence and women cleverly overcoming it: Akila realizes that it will enrage the King and might lead to everyone’s death, and that this is not the moment to share that particular tale. The women argue about self-censoring, but ultimately agree with Akila that “there is a power in words. Stories. They must be told in the right way and at the right time” (61). The five very different women, placed in the same dire situation, forge close relationships, and earn their freedom, but, as they leave after 1001 nights, they vow to find some way to free Scheherazade (who had shared their stories) from her vicious husband. The moving play, presented with an Arab cast, was aided by the material conditions of the Wanamaker playhouse, where the candlelight (actors had to hold light sources at the same time as playing their roles) enhanced the sense that Rosa Maggiora’s set was indeed a dank prison room, one of the many sorts of cages (metaphorical or literal) throughout history from which women have had to escape. Hakawatis . Photo: Ellie Kurttz. Like Hakawatis, Baghdaddy at the Royal Court (8 December 2022) was a new feminist Arab play—but in every other respect the works could not have been more different. Written by Jasmine Naziha Jones, who also performed the central character, Darlee, a second-generation British-Iraqi girl from age eight to twenty, the play, which is dedicated to Jones’s father, delves into the relationship between Darlee and her Iraqi Dad as the girl comes of age during wars between the West and Iraq. The expressionist play was staged by Milli Bhatia on a set of stairs designed by Moi Tran—similar in some respects to Chloe Lamford’s set for Othello —and also featured a chorus of “Quareens”—“spiritual companions from another dimension,” two female and one male, helping Darlee “reconcile her childhood memories with Dad’s story” as an immigrant (2). Part clown show and part fictionalized reconstruction of a traumatic childhood, the show built up to two monologues: Darlee’s railing against a so-called democratic Western society that has never fully accepted her and Dad’s lament for his family who died in the Iraq war after he came to the UK. The play—and Jones’s performance as a fictionalized version of her younger self—was deeply painful but felt only half-formed, perhaps as do any of our half-remembered recollections of childhood. Baghdaddy . Photo: Helen Murray. Orlando (17 December 2022), as adapted by Neil Bartlett from Virginia Woolf’s novel and staged by Michael Grandage at the Garrick Theatre on the West End, featuring the nonbinary actor Emma Corrin as its titular immortal gender-defying character, was another sort of coming-of-age story. Of course, Orlando comes into his/her/their own over the course of centuries (and also it’s no coincidence that Orlando shares the same name as one of the romantic leads in the gender-bending As You Like It ). Excepting Corrin and Deborah Findlay, who played Mrs Grimditch, a very long-serving confidant to Orlando and the audience, the remaining cast (consisting of one man and eight women or nonbinary performers) all played both a chorus of Virginia Woolfs and Orlando’s many, many loves. When Orlando appears, the audience briefly sees him frontally naked (Corrin wore a prosthetic penis for this moment) and when Orlando transforms into a woman, she is once again naked (although this time only seen from the waist up). The play was a celebration of transformation and potentiality, ending by acknowledging that Orlando might thrive in the world today (or an approaching future, signified by an intensely bright door at the top of Peter McKintosh’s set that Orlando passed through at the end of the play) in a more accepting world that Woolf herself, who committed suicide in 1941, could only dimly imagine. The play was especially moving to my students on the mini-term, several of whom are trans and/or nonbinary; one said she was going to get a tattoo of that bright door that signified the possibilities of the future if we are willing to “try courage” (78). Orlando . Photo: Marc Brenner. Less successful in its feminism but still a delightful spectacle onstage was the jukebox musical & Juliet (20 December 2022), directed by Luke Sheppard with a book by David West Read and featuring over two decades of pop songs written by Max Martin. It’s hard to believe that Martin wrote so many of the best-known hits for artists including Bon Jovi, The Backstreet Boys, NSYNC, Britney Spears, Robyn, Kelly Clarkson, Kesha, Justin Timberlake, Demi Lovato, Katy Perry, The Weeknd, and more. The show bills itself as a feminist revision of Romeo and Juliet , in which Anne Hathaway, in a frame story, accuses Shakespeare of not giving his doomed heroine enough of a voice or agency and imagines a new ending in which Juliet doesn’t kill herself after awakening to find Romeo poisoned. Taking off from that premise, Juliet (still played, when I saw it years after it opened on the West End, by Olivier-winning Miriam-Teak Lee) goes on an adventure across Europe, along with her friends including the trans character May (now played by nonbinary actor Joe Foster). The show is raucously self-aware (a jukebox sat visibly near the center of Soutra Gilmour’s set and the spectacularly lit titles that descended from the flyspace at the opening, interval, and close resembled nothing more than a West End/Broadway marquee) and builds to Juliet’s rendition of Katy Perry’s “Roar,” which indeed stopped the show for at least a minute of applause after Lee’s performance of the song. The show has since transferred to Broadway, where Justin David Sullivan, the nonbinary actor who played May, declined to be considered for Tonys since the awards continue to require actors be nominated in binary gender categories for men and women. Thankfully, the production has fixed its original gaffe of casting a cis man as a trans character (Arun Blair-Mangat originated the role of May on the West End), but the supposed feminism continues to ring a bit hollow even as Anne, Juliet, and her friends sing about women’s empowerment. Perhaps this is because all of the authors and the director of the show were men: as noted in Hamilton (another musical created almost entirely by men that was intended to reimagine the past more inclusively), “who tells your story” matters and it’s too bad that the producers of & Juliet didn’t find a woman to write the book or direct. Just as much frothy fun, but with a lot less pretense, were two holiday shows I saw towards the end of my trip. Who’s Holiday! at the tiny Southwark Playhouse (19 December 2022) was a solo holiday drag show which was the final work to which I brought my students. Written in 2017 by Matthew Lombardo in the comic verse of Dr. Seuss, the play imagines Cindy Lou Who from How the Grinch Stole Christmas! all grown up, bleached blonde, hard drinking, foul mouthed in rhyme, having escaped a relationship with the Grinch, and planning a Christmas celebration despite constant cancellations from her friends. The play is thoroughly dirty and definitely not for the young children who might still read Dr. Seuss. But, as directed by Kirk Jameson, it is perfect for camp as performed by Miz Cracker, an American drag queen who gained fame on the television show Ru Paul’s Drag Race , and in the end Who’s Holiday! still celebrates the joy and spirit of Christmas every bit as much as its less transgressive source material. Who’s Holiday!. Photo: Mark Senior. My first West End panto was equally delightful, if far more spectacular. Jonathan Harvey’s Mother Goose , directed by Cal McCrystal at the Duke of York’s Theatre (20 December 2022), the same theatre where I had seen The Doctor a few weeks earlier, featured stand-up comedian John Bishop as Vic Goose and the legendary Sir Ian McKellen in drag as Mother Goose (the panto Dame), using wit and constant references to contemporary British politics to facing down holiday financial struggles from exorbitant energy bills. Their struggles are abated by the arrival of a goose (Anna-Jane Casey) who starts laying golden eggs and gives Mother Goose the chance to achieve her dreams of stardom. The songs, dances, and audience participation were all delightful—when one nearby audience member heard that Mother Goose was my first panto, she let me know she had been to hundreds and that this was among the very best she’d ever seen. Yet no one was enjoying themselves more than Sir Ian, obviously gleeful at the chance to ham it up in the sort of work he had adored in his youth. As he delivered key lines from Gandalf in Lord of the Rings or Portia’s “The quality of mercy” speech in the tenor of Mother Goose, his wry smile was infectious and had the audience grinning just as much as he was. On our feet at the end, we were all celebrating the holiday spirit together again, in the theatre. Mother Goose . Photo: Manuel Harlan. The holiday spirit that suffused Mother Goose and Who’s Holiday! in some ways ran through all these productions, even the darkest like Othello, Henry V, The Doctor , and A Streetcar Named Desire , since we were, once again, able to be in London’s excellent theatres together. COVID will remain part of our world for some time to come: many audience members remain masked, theatres have to cancel performances and hire more understudies (or even have the director go on for a role in a pinch!), and more. This is probably a good thing: it has led to conversations about how the arts can be safer and more equitable for everyone. I expect to return to London at the end of 2025 and I am excited to discover what will suffuse the city’s theatrical scene then, when it will have been half a decade since the height of the pandemic. Image Credits: Article References References About the author(s) Dan Venning is an associate professor in the department of Theatre & Dance at Union College (Schenectady, NY), where he also teaches in the English department and the interdisciplinary programs in American Studies and Gender, Sexuality, & Women's Studies. He has published numerous chapters in scholarly edited collections, book reviews, and performance reviews in a broad range of scholarly journals, including several overviews of theatre in London for European Stages . He is currently working on a book about Shakespearean performance and nation-building. European Stages European Stages, born from the merger of Western European Stages and Slavic and East European Performance in 2013, is a premier English-language resource offering a comprehensive view of contemporary theatre across the European continent. With roots dating back to 1969, the journal has chronicled the dynamic evolution of Western and Eastern European theatrical spheres. It features in-depth analyses, interviews with leading artists, and detailed reports on major European theatre festivals, capturing the essence of a transformative era marked by influential directors, actors, and innovative changes in theatre design and technology. European Stages is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents Report from London (December 2022) Confessions, storytelling and worlds in which the impossible becomes possible. The 77th Avignon Festival, July 5-25, 2023 “Regietheater:” two cases The Grec Festival 2023 The Festival of the Youth Theatre of Piatra Neamt, Romania: A Festival for “Youth without Age” (notes on the occasion of the 34th edition) Report from Germany Poetry on Stage: Games, Words, Crickets..., Directed by Silviu Purcărete Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Watch Red Day by Besim Ugzmajli at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2024. Arsa, a deaf little girl, and her mother Dodona, an ex-actress, want to be part of “Festival of Performance”. Arsa is not on the list of participants but she and her mother are ready to do everything, only to show up on stage and present their unique story, which ends bloodily. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Red Day At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Besim Ugzmajli Theater, Film This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks, as well as screened in-person on May 20th. About The Film Country Kosovo Language Albanian Running Time 15 minutes Year of Release 2022 Arsa, a deaf little girl, and her mother Dodona, an ex-actress, want to be part of “Festival of Performance”. Arsa is not on the list of participants but she and her mother are ready to do everything, only to show up on stage and present their unique story, which ends bloodily. https://filmfreeway.com/projects/2177983 About The Artist(s) Born in 1986 in Ferizaj, Republic of Kosovo, Studied in University of Prishtina, Faculty of Arts – Film and TV Directing. He has worked as writer and director in the biggest film company in Kosova, and in these last years in his own company Figurina Film’s, where he made his most awarded short films such as: Forgive me, The Path, Beyond the Gates. Get in touch with the artist(s) ugzmajlibesim@gmail.com and follow them on social media https://filmfreeway.com/projects/2177983 Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here. "Nightshades" - Veronica Viper Ellen Callaghan Dancing Pina FLorian Heinzen-Ziob Genocide and Movements Andreia Beatriz, Hamilton Borges dos Santos, Luis Carlos de Alencar Living Objects in Black Jacqueline Wade ORESTEIA Carolin Mader Schlingensief – A Voice that Shook the Silence Bettina Böhler The Hamlet Syndrome Elwira Niewiera & Piotr Rosolowski Wo/我 Jiemin Yang "talk to us" Kirsten Burger Die Kinder der Toten Nature Theater of Oklahoma:Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska Hans-Thies Lehmann – Postdramatic Theater Christoph Rüter MUSE Pete O'Hare/Warehouse Films QUEENDOM Agniia Galdanova Snow White Dr.GoraParasit The Making of Pinocchio Cade & MacAskill Women of Theatre, New York Juney Smith BLOSSOMING - Des amandiers aux amandiers Karine Silla Perez & Stéphane Milon ELFRIEDE JELINEK - LANGUAGE UNLEASHED Claudia Müller I AM NOT OK Gabrielle Lansner Making of The Money Opera Amitesh Grover Red Day Besim Ugzmajli The Books of Jacob Krzysztof Garbaczewski The Roll Call:The Roots to Strange Fruit Jonathan McCrory / National Black Theatre/ All Arts/ Creative Doula next...II (Mali/Island) Janne Gregor Chinoiserie Redux Ping Chong Festival of the Body on the Road H! Newcomer “H” Sokerissa! Interstate Big Dance Theater / Bang on a Can Maria Klassenberg Magda Hueckel, Tomasz Śliwiński Revolution 21/ Rewolucja 21 Martyna Peszko and Teatr 21 The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be Andrea Kleine The Utopians Michael Kliën and En Dynamei Conference of the Absent Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) GIANNI Budapesti Skizo, Theater Tri-Bühne Juggle & Hide (Seven Whatchamacallits in Search of a Director) Wichaya Artamat/ For What Theatre My virtual body and my double Simon Senn / Bruno Deville SWING AND SWAY Fernanda Pessoa and Chica Barbosa The Great Grand Greatness Awards Jo Hedegaard WHO IS EUGENIO BARBA Magdalene Remoundou

Watch Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread by Jean-Baptiste Mathieu at the Segal Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2025. Constantly pushing the limits of the body and the laws of physics, tightrope walking is about navigating between acrobatic elegance and the earth's gravitational pull. The artist must master the skillful technique that enables them to move forward as if dancing, without losing their balance. It's a fascinating circus art, both for the performer and the audience.. The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2025 A film by Jean-Baptiste Mathieu Screening Information This film will be screened in-person at The Segal Centre on Friday May 16th at 7:10pm and also be available to watch online on the festival website till June 8th 2025. RSVP Please note there is limited seating available for in-person screenings at The Segal Centre, which are offered on a first-come first-serve basis. You may RSVP above to get a reminder about the Segal Film Festival in your inbox. Country Germany Language French Running Time 52 minutes Year of Release 2025 About The Film Constantly pushing the limits of the body and the laws of physics, tightrope walking is about navigating between acrobatic elegance and the earth's gravitational pull. The artist must master the skillful technique that enables them to move forward as if dancing, without losing their balance. It's a fascinating circus art, both for the performer and the audience. About The Artist(s) Tatiana-Mosio Bongonga was seven years old when she witnessed a tightrope walker crossing between two buildings — a moment of pure fascination that sparked a true calling. Now a star in her field, she is one of the rare women to perform more than 30 meters above the ground on a 300-meter-long wire. Tatiana lives with her three-year-old daughter and the artists from her company in a village nestled at the foot of the Cévennes mountains. The film follows their preparations for a spectacular challenge: crossing the Saint-Denis Canal toward the Stade de France. The feat Tatiana is about to accomplish is a technical, artistic, and human endeavor. Around her, an entire team is mobilized. In Saint-Denis, her partner and technical director Jan Naets is assisted by five riggers. For three days, he oversees the setup of a complex installation and trains those who will ensure the wire’s stability from the ground. Balancing grace and calculated risk, Tatiana captures everyone's attention. Each performance is an aerial and choreographic adventure, accompanied live by musicians playing melodies and rhythms that strike the perfect chord. It’s an undertaking that couldn’t happen without the help of many volunteers who take part in stabilizing the wire — a delicate operation requiring constant adaptability. Get in touch with the artist(s) cie@ciebasinga.com and follow them on social media https://www.jeanbaptistemathieu.fr/films-documentaires/decouverte-passions/tatiana-funambule-des-cevennes-au-stade-de-france https://www.facebook.com/CieBasinga/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2025 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here His Head was a Sledgehammer Richard Foreman in Retrospect Moi-même Mojo Lorwin/Lee Breuer Benjamim de Oliveira's Open Paths Catappum! Collective Peak Hour in the House Blue Ka Wing Transindigenous Assembly Joulia Strauss Bila Burba Duiren Wagua JJ Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Lucie Brux Acting Sophie Fiennes; Cheek by Jowl; Lone Star; Amoeba Film PACI JULIETTE ROUDET Radical Move ANIELA GABRYEL Funambulism, Hanging by a Thread Jean-Baptiste Mathieu This is Ballroom Juru and Vitã Reas Lola Arias The Jacket Mathijs Poppe Pidikwe Caroline Monnet Resilience Juan David Padilla Vega The Brink of Dreams Nada Riyadh, Ayman El Amir Jesus and The Sea Ricarda Alvarenga Grand Theft Hamlet Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls Theater of War Oleh Halaidych Skywalk Above Prague Václav Flegl, Jakub Voves Somber Tides Chantal Caron / Fleuve Espace Danse

Valerie Joyce Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 2 Visit Journal Homepage America Happened to Me: Immigration, Acculturation, and Crafting Empathy in Rags Valerie Joyce By Published on June 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF An immigrant mother arrives at the border with only her child and the possessions she can carry. Whether she chose to leave her homeland for a chance at a better life or she was forced to flee persecution and violence, she left behind her community and her culture. However, in her memory and her body, she carries her traditions as tangibly as the most precious belongings. This story could be ripped from the headlines in 2024 about a woman at the southern border of the United States or be a tale about an expectant mother disembarking at Plymouth with a band of religious separatists from the seventeenth century. Whatever the setting, these women all have a common acculturation experience once they arrive: America begins to shape them just as they begin to shape America. Upon contact with a new culture, immigrants begin to acculturate, choosing what traditions and behaviors to keep and what to discard. According to cross-cultural psychologists David Sam and John W. Berry, acculturation is an integration process that occurs in three distinct phases: “contact, reciprocal influence, and change.” (1) This often-painful assessment process lives in the body as much as in the possessions, language, and clothing each immigrant evaluates as they navigate between the need to protect their heritage and the pressure to assimilate. For American immigrants, acculturation often centers around adapting to an ideal of Anglo-conforming “Americanness” and, for millions of immigrants, this process began upon arrival at Ellis Island. In 1883, a group of Russian Jewish immigrants detained at Ellis Island inspired empathy in poet Emma Lazarus. Hoping to offer a more welcoming beginning at Ellis Island, she composed “The New Colossus” which reads: Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! (2) Lazarus’s evocative sonnet harnesses the powerful symbolism of the towering Statue of Liberty that greeted millions of Eastern European Jewish immigrants approaching Ellis Island, signaling that they had reached the land of freedom. (3) These intertwined pieces of art have long inspired Americans to empathize with the fate of immigrants who arrive at its borders. Similarly, American musical theatre has taken up the project of developing empathy for the painful task of abandoning cultural traditions while forging an American identity. Musicals such as West Side Story (1958), Rags (1986), and Hamilton (2016) have interwoven story and song with evocative choreography to elevate the expression of the immigrant experience, creating a vocabulary of movement and a gestural language for the immigrant body. In her work, Choreographing Empathy , dance theorist Susan Leigh Foster asserts that empathy is a phenomenon that “connects humans to one another” and that choreography helps audiences connect to what a character is feeling so that they might better understand the character’s emotional pain. (4) In coalescing with the plot, music, and lyrics, choreography magnifies the immigrant character’s thoughts and desires, mapping their tension onto the actor’s body and creating a visible and visceral spectacle of acculturation. The original Broadway production of Rags , considered a flop due to its brief run of four official performances, provides an excellent illustration of musical theatre choreography—deployed here to tell an embodied story of acculturation—as a powerful tool to create empathy, motivating its audience to be more compassionate, engaged, and supportive of the American immigrant experience. Rags was created by Joseph Stein (book), Charles Strouse (score), and Stephen Schwartz (lyrics) as a follow-up to Stein’s smash hit Fiddler on the Roof . The action begins at Ellis Island in 1910 and follows Rebecca Hershkowitz, a mother who has followed her husband to America for a better, safer life for her son. Like most immigrant mothers’ experiences before and after hers, Rebecca’s transformation begins upon arrival, as she is challenged to find her way alone in a mysterious system of housing, employment, social relationships, and politics. Through a case study of the plot, score, and movement in the original production of Rags , this essay highlights how performers’ bodies create and build tension through a confrontation of music and movement styles that echoes their characters’ transition from Jewish immigrant to acculturated American. Jewish identity, as dance theorist Rebecca Rossen argues, is “a multilayered performance of repetition and invention” and “dance and the dancing body are particularly germane locations for providing theoretical insight into identity.” (5) This choreographed tension around the loss of these characters’ cultural traditions was impactful for me as a non-Jewish audience member as I watched the videorecording of the original production, and I argue that the detailed and accumulating embodiment of the painful immigration process in Rags crafted empathetic connections that have lasted long beyond my viewing experience. Despite the brevity of its initial run, the choreography of acculturation in this production illustrates the power of musical theatre to connect us to different cultures in ways that remain with us, shaping our understanding of and empathy for others as they wrestle with their own acculturative journey. Tradition(s): From Fiddler to Rags Jewish ethnicity involves traditions based on teachings of the Torah passed from generation to generation. In American popular culture, the musical Fiddler on the Roof (1964), with Stein’s libretto that centered on traditions at the heart of the Jewish culture, defined and even dictated broader cultural understandings of these traditions. Stein and his collaborators, Sheldon Harnick (lyrics), Jerry Bock (music), and Jerome Robbins (direction and choreography), cemented the musical theatre expression of three aspects of Jewish culture in the first moments of Fiddler : first, the role tradition plays in setting fundamental social expectations; second, the interpolation of traditional klezmer music into a Broadway sound; and third, an identifiably “Jewish” physicality in movement, gesture, and dance. Alissa Solomon asserts that a “special alchemy” among these aspects turned Fiddler into “folklore” and “a sacred repository of Jewish ‘authenticity.’” (6) A brief examination of Fiddler’s opening number, “Tradition,” delineates the Jewish cultural traditions still at play in Rags . “Tradition” establishes the conflict at the heart of Fiddler’s plot, setting up gender role expectations and society’s rules for marriage, appropriate dress, and business. Patriarchal milkman Tevye articulates the tension around these conflicts stating, “And how do we keep our balance? That I can tell you in one word. Tradition!....And because of our traditions, every one of us knows who he is and what God expects him to do.” (7) Throughout Fiddler , modernizing forces test these traditions in both Tevye’s home and the larger tightknit community. In Rags , Stein stages the pressures and pain of the “double bind” many immigrants face choosing between maintaining tradition or assimilation. (8) His plot illustrates the three formal phases of acculturation and how the characters’ values, attitudes, and behaviors change, resulting in four different outcomes identified by Berry and Sam: integration, assimilation, separation, and marginalization. These outcomes reflect the degree to which each has embraced or rejected their original and new culture and their overall sense of belonging. (9) The acculturation story in Rags invites audiences to make empathetic connections as the central characters experience contact and reciprocal influence in the first act and more intense reciprocal pressure that results in change and belonging in the second act. In crafting the Fiddler score, Bock relished the opportunity to explore his own cultural memories, claiming the musical about Russian Jewish shtetl life “opened up a flood of possibilities for me.” (10) The ersatz sonic landscape he established in “Tradition,” heavy with violins, clarinets, and klezmer rhythms, became the iconic musical theatre sound to evoke the Eastern European Jewish culture. Strouse had a similar connection to the material in Rags stating, “These were our grandmother’s journeys.” (11) His score echoes and builds upon Bock’s work in Fiddler , purposefully fusing two musical idioms that were popular in America at the turn of the twentieth century, klezmer and ragtime. Strouse also articulates the “Jewish” sonic identity in Rags through klezmer music, which had historical roots in Ashkenazi Jewish culture that migrated to America from areas throughout Eastern Europe but was considered “immigrant street music” by the 1900s. (12) He then utilized rags, the popular music of the era that was distinctly not imported from Europe, but rather originated in African American communities, to represent the “American” influences in the musical. The expressions of klezmer and ragtime music in Rags are theatrical realities, rather than literal expressions of the original forms of music, and are both filtered through Strouse’s subjectivity and orchestrated to offer the Broadway audience a cultural memory rather than documentary accuracy. Strouse places these forms in concert with and in contrast to one another to establish cultural and ethnic sonic traditions. Through this fusion that extends Bock’s work in Fiddler , Strouse creates and builds tension in a confrontation of musical styles that echoes the characters’ negotiation of the transition from immigrant to acculturated American. Finally, Jerome Robbins’ choreography in Fiddler on the Roof establishes the gestural language for each familial character group in “Tradition ” with communicative hand and arm movements that embody cultural traditions of Anatevka. Walter Zev Feldman asserts that gestures incorporating the hands and arms “formed a large part of the vocabulary of Jewish dance” and were a way that Jewish dancers expressed individuality and “sought connection to the divine.” (13) In the opening number Robbins also utilized the circle, a prominent feature of Jewish dance, to establish the central metaphorical movement pattern for the production which would wind and unwind as traditions were affirmed or destroyed. (14) In Rags , Strouse’s eclectic fusion of klezmer and ragtime syncopations and melodies also inspired an evocative clash of “Jewish” and “American” choreography. Through carefully arranged “Jewish” and “American” gestures and accumulating movement patterns, the actor’s bodies accrued culturally specific meanings and magnified the immigrant characters’ thoughts and desires regarding their traditions and their acculturation process. These careful arrangements and meaningful structures, however, cannot be attributed to a specific collaborator on Rags , as the original production suffered from a lack of consistent directorial vision, cycling through several directors and even opening for previews in Boston without a director listed. (15) Compounding this frantic shifting, producers brought in Broadway veteran Ron Field to replace choreographer Kenneth Rinker three weeks before opening in New York. Since the choreography and movement cannot be assigned to either Field or Rinker, I must focus my analysis on the choreography of acculturation in the musical, including the vocabulary of movement they created, as well as the character work of the individual actors, that established a gestural language for the Jewish immigrant body. As Foster asserts, this immigrant body invites an empathetic response from its audience through a choreographed “system of codes and conventions,” that are expressed in “physical images” that convey meaning through the arrangement of parts of the body. (16) Utilizing Foster’s theories to analyze the choreographic coding of empathy in Rags, I examine three expressive areas of the performer’s body—the hands and arms, the feet and legwork, and the position or shape of the torso—to illustrate how the immigrant body is developed and articulated throughout the musical. This study also expands Foster’s theories on the way dance “summons its viewers into an empathic relationship” by an inclusive evaluation of choreographed, gestural, and natural character movement utilizing these categories: body stances (open or closed), bodily shapes (erect or curved), timing of movements (slow or quick, continuous or abrupt), qualities of motion (restrained, sustained, or bursting), and relation to dimensional space (center, upstage, downstage). (17) By applying Foster’s analytical structure to immigrant identities and expanding the field of consideration to the actor’s characterization and movement, I argue that the compelling contrasts in stylized movement, in concert with the varied flavors of the musical score, build tension and define the Jewish characters’ immigrant identities in the choreography of acculturation through various stages of their struggles with tradition and change. Jewish cultural traditions, like the ones set out in Fiddler’s “Tradition,” have proven instructive in the theatre, as enacting the painful process of melting away these defining practices while acculturating has created dramatic impact in plays from Israel Zangwill’s The Melting Pot (1908) to Paula Vogel’s Indecent (2015). Rags joined this lineage in the 1980s, as American popular culture reclaimed a narrative of American multiculturalism in a wave of nostalgia for the early twentieth century. Theatre theorist Henry Bial argues that Broadway began to see a phenomenon of playwrights focused on a “desire to reconstruct a lost or forgotten Jewish culture” that had been “denied them by their parents’ desire to assimilate.” (18) He argues that this “desire to remember” produced work that offered audiences “key elements of acting Jewish” and distinguishes more modern work “from earlier ‘Jewish revivals’ such as Fiddler on the Roof .” (19) Stein crafted Rags in this cultural moment to explore how core Jewish traditions adapted once they met the American melting pot, purposefully connecting within the musical’s title the rags of the syncopated musical style with the physical rags the immigrants wear. And, although the constant changes spelled disaster for the production, what emerges in the archival performance footage from 1986 is a coherent and complex synthesis of artistically embodied immigrant characters who dance with joy and pathos to Strouse’s score. Rags encourages empathy in its audience by illustrating the turmoil immigrants experience while acculturating, creating opportunities for viewers to be moved to be more compassionate to, engaged in, and supportive of the broader American immigrant experience. Contact with a Brand New World: Acculturation Begins Rags ’s creators begin crafting an empathetic response by artistically constructing the contact stage of the acculturation process, starting on Ellis Island where the Eastern European Jewish immigrants and Americans first make contact and then illustrating how the initial interactions during this phase can result in acculturative stress. (20) The central characters’ choreographic coding falls on a spectrum pinned by two starkly different embodiments, as both the Jewish immigrant and the American bodies are established in the opening number “I Remember/Greenhorns.” (21) These contrasting songs splice together two conflicting musical styles, and the physical staging of this sequence emphasizes the characters’ chaotic initial moments of transition from Immigrant to American. In “I Remember,” Strouse’s music begins with the lush brass sounds of classical Americana which then turn harmonic, evoking a Eastern European mood as a “Homesick Immigrant” sings, “Sometimes we don’t love things/ Till we tell them goodbye/ Oh, my homeland, my homeland/ Goodbye.” (22) Aurally and lyrically, Rags establishes its focus on the internal emotions of more than two million Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who arrived between 1880 and 1924, as the immigrants experience the confusion and homesickness that is typical of this stage of acculturation. The Jewish Immigrant physicality becomes discernable as they shuffle to disembark, clothed in ragged overcoats and carrying packages. (23) Although each character holds something different, a belonging, luggage, or a child, their body is the main vessel of what they carry with them – their history, relationships, religion, memories, and sorrow. They huddle together, establishing the core coding for the Immigrant body in Rags . This corporeal expression is characterized in Foster’s terms by a closed stance with torso collapsed, legs together, and arms bent to chest in a clutching motion. Their huddled shape is curved, with their shoulders thrust forward, functioning in the mode of “protecting” their belongings as well as their physical center. Even as the music and lyrics recall their beloved homeland, the still, strained quality of their bodies express their exhausting ordeal, and their huddling conveys their communal instinct to protect their children, their possessions, and their traditions. Strouse’s sorrowful tune disrupts the scene with the catchy ragtime music of “Greenhorns,” which features clarinets, trumpets, and percussion in a polyrhythmic melody over a metrically regular accompaniment figure. Two Anglo-looking “Cynical Americans” in white suits, white shoes, and boater hats appear in spotlight. The men dance in a powerful spatial position at center, downstage of the mass of immigrants, hungrily observing, “Another load of greenhorns/ Fresh off the boat/ Another wave of refugees/ To fill the mills and factories/ A little grist/ For the capital system” (1-1-10). The men in white stand in stark contrast to the shadowy mass of bewildered immigrants in dark rags shuffling in line behind them. These commanding men establish the active “American” physicality for the production, characterized by an open stance with their loose torso, arms, and legs. Their shape is erect with shoulders back and head up, evoking a sustained quality of ease in their movements that captures the essence of freedom they embody. The Americans’ movement timing is quick and continuous as they execute a simple combination of grapevine steps in unison while shaking their boaters, a playful style that evokes the most notable Yankee Doodle song-and-dance man of the period, George M. Cohan. Their heels jauntily scuff as they walk downstage, with small kicks and a wide lean, opening their arms and torsos to the huddled “Greenhorns” who are desperate for jobs. Filled with a sense of belonging, the Cynical American’s relaxed attitude and loose physicality indicates full assimilation into the culture. As the Immigrants join their last lyric, “We’ll keep America green!” (1-1-10), the men stand together and swing their left arms open wide on “America,” as if opening Emma Lazarus’ mythical Golden Door for this latest flood of immigrants. As “Greenhorns” ends, Rebecca Hershkowitz, played in the original production by opera diva Teresa Stratas, emerges from the huddled mass with her ten-year-old son David, played by Josh Blake. Stratas was malleable as the beleaguered yet indestructible Rebecca at the center of the musical. At five foot tall with a “birdlike physique,” she effectively performed frailty, but her powerful voice established her commanding presence and tremendous gravitas on stage. (24) As Rebecca, Stratas’s first physical choices are emblematic of the “typical” immigrant: curved, collapsed, and shielding David. She experiences a specific crisis in the first stage of acculturation, looking expectantly for her husband, Nathan, who arrived in America six years ago. Rebecca is detained when Nathan does not appear, but an older passenger, Avram Cohen, accepts responsibility for her and her son. Avram, his daughter Bella, and Bella’s would-be fiancé Ben round out the core group of immigrants in Rags and offer audiences alternative versions along the spectrum of the Jewish immigrant physicality to follow through their individual acculturation processes. Dick Latessa plays Avram, the dignified and humble religious scholar, and chooses a closed stance and erect shape with his hands clasped in front of him, only opening his torso when he praises God. Avram is the intellectual community elder who vigilantly protects the traditional values and practices that define their Jewish faith, including rules for aspects of conduct in daily life, all with the goal of embodying in “everyday conduct the consequences of the revelation of the Torah.” (25) Latessa’s embodiment establishes Avram as the cultural cornerstone that each character trips over as they rush into choosing their American life. In direct contrast to Avram, Bella is hopeful and in love with Ben Levitowitz, the brash, young, self-starter played by Lonny Price. Bella and Ben embody the youthful Jewish immigrant who is ready to embrace all America has to offer, even if that means abandoning Old World traditions. With his suit open, no hat, and no beard, Ben is “assertive and romantic,” and Price’s stance is wide open as he bursts onto Ellis Island with his arms extended in forward momentum. (26) Judy Kuhn’s stance as Bella is tentatively open as she flits about, trying to contain her excitement. Avram informs his daughter, “He’s not for you…He’s cut from cheap cloth. Besides, a Jewish boy without a hat…Ah well, with God’s help, we’ll never see him again.” Undaunted, Ben promises Bella, “I will find you in America!” before dashing off into his future (1-1-10). The Jewish immigrants in Rags move swiftly through the confusion of the contact stage, exploring their new culture. Setting out for the Cohen family’s tenement on the Lower East Side, they excitedly sing “Brand New World.” However, during this phase, immigrants (in the musical and in life) also experience sensations of difference, including in dress, ideas, language, values, food, and clothing. According to Sam, the contact stage can transition to Acculturative Stress (sometimes likened to Culture Shock) which can result in disorientation and anxiety. (26) Finally alone after settling David in their cramped room, Rebecca takes a moment while her new reality sets in. Although Stratas’s diminutive figure is almost hidden as she crouches behind her suitcase, she projects Rebecca’s intense fear. She protectively curves herself over Blake’s sleeping body, singing, “Shasha, Shasha, Duvedel…We’ll find papa, and we’ll be/ Safe again at last, love…/ Like the Old World,” a lullaby that is klezmer encoded with violins and clarinets in thirds (1-2-12). In the first of many musical confrontations that will open Rebecca’s body and mind as she transforms into an American, Strouse interrupts her solitude with a stock ragtime figure wafting up from the street featuring a trilling synthesized sound like a carnival ride over which a piccolo and tuba continue the melody of “Brand New World.” Transfixed, she sings, “What’s that music/ Playing down there in the street?...So many noises, colors/ Mixed up and swirled/ Into a brand new world here” (1-2-12). However, David awakens, and the music returns her mind to her Old-World lullaby. Before Rebecca can quiet David, Strouse’s contrasting music cuts through again. Together, they absorb the sights and sounds of their new world from the tenement fire escape as the ragtime music begins to affect their immigrant physicalities. Here, Stratas and Blake play at “trying on” the American body with different stances, shapes, and qualities of movement. They slouch forward and lean on the railing, their bodies relaxed for the first time. David, who has little to protect and fewer traditions to preserve, blossoms into another youthful immigrant ready to embrace America with an open torso and outstretched arms. Rebecca, realizing that the encroaching outside world will change her son, is torn between restraining David or allowing him to experience the city. Stratas conveys Rebecca’s choice to embrace their future as she stands behind Blake and mimics the gesture of the Golden Door the Cynical Americans made, opening the “New World” to David. As they sing in counterpoint, David grows more entranced and Rebecca more fearful of losing their connection to their traditions. In their final pose, Stratas’s physicality evokes her emotional turmoil as she opens one arm as if receptive to this new world, but holds David close with the other arm, huddling protectively as the song ends. The early portion of the acculturation process typically concludes with a difficult period as immigrants become frustrated with the choices they must make between their old and new cultures. At times, their experience can be humiliating, leading to depression and despair as they are forced toward change. In the original production of Rags , Rebecca reaches this breaking point after days of searching for her husband Nathan, becoming more and more vulnerable and realizing she will have to fend for her son alone. Recalling their harrowing escape from the violent pogroms and how David had been physically hurt, Rebecca is terrified. Stratas heightens the magnitude of this moment by falling to the floor, creating a striking contrast with her crumpled body on a bare stage. As Stratas begins singing the musical theatre anthem “Children of the Wind,” she is an extreme version of the huddled immigrant body almost prostrate on all fours. Foster notes that this pose “evokes a more primeval or earthly existence.” (27) From this emotionally bereft spatial and physical position, Rebecca pulls herself up and embraces becoming an American. Stratas moves forward and rises with growing passion, motion that Foster interprets as indicating “progress and increasing significance.” (28) Her arms remain clutched to her chest until she sings, “Bring us to the shore/ No more/ Children of the wind” (1-3-16). Stratas finishes the operatic crescendo on “wind” fully erect, with her torso and legs flung open and her arms extended. Her palms face forward to the audience, as though Rebecca is not pleading or begging, but rather connecting to and drawing strength from a larger entity that fuels her transformation in this new world. Stratas’s final gesture makes the overall arc of the movement in “Children of the Wind” at once as simple and as complex as Rebecca’s acculturation journey in America. With “Children of the Wind,” Rags’ s creators conclude the contact phase of Rebecca’s journey with choreographic coding that blends the Jewish Immigrant body with the American body in a thrilling song, tailored to highlight Stratas’s operatic talents. The plot, music, and movement coalesce in this moment, placing Rebecca in a position to move on without Nathan and embrace what America has to offer. This choreography of acculturation formulates, in Foster’s terms, “an appeal to viewers to be apprehended and felt, encouraging them to participate collectively in discovering the communal basis of their experience,” summoning the audience into an empathetic connection with the immigrant experience. (29) Reciprocal Influence: Old World, New World, Strange Harmonies Once the characters have established their physicalized starting points, Rags builds on this emotional and artistic foundation to develop empathy as the Jewish immigrant characters move into the reciprocal influence stage of acculturation, where “both cultural groups affect the other’s cultural patterns” economically, domestically, and socially. (30) During this phase, the choreographic coding of the Jewish immigrant body is in constant tension with the American body as the immigrants engage in the decision-making process of adapting while also maintaining connection to the integral parts of their heritage. Throughout this section, Strouse places klezmer and ragtime music in increasingly closer proximity, sometimes in true contrast and counterpoint, and the audience learns how the immigrants develop a sense of belonging by coping at work, exploring romance, and surviving violence. As time passes, Rebecca and David find employment and adjust to their new community. The song “Penny a Tune” illustrates this transition as Rebecca stitches in a dress factory, David and Avram sell pots from a pushcart, Ben makes cigars in a warehouse, and Bella sews at home. The entire neighborhood sings, “Where folks are poor/ That’s where music is rich/…At only a penny a tune,” as three klezmer street musicians accompany the upbeat rhythm of their work (1-3-17). The musicians’ appearance on stage is significant, as the klezmer sound and rhythm ground the Jewish characters in their ethnic traditions, even as their world expands. (31) David acclimates swiftly, and the klezmer band shifts to a swinging ragtime rhythm and instrumentation as he sings out his peddler’s spiel. Blake’s new embodiment mimics the movements of the Cynical Americans, conveying that David has embraced his role and now moves at a ragtime tempo. This shift is highlighted by his pairing with Avram, who retains his closed, erect, and protective physicality. As David slips away from their reserved culture, Avram’s dismay is amplified as the klezmer band’s syncopated ragtime rhythms crescendo and now incorporate the klezmer sounds as well. The neighborhood sings, “Old world, new world, jumbled up in strange harmonies” in an overwhelming cacophony (1-3-27). Although a klezmer band is playing, the Jewish characters either stand still or gently step touch to the ragtime rhythm. Once again, Strouse has placed the musical styles next to one another, but the neighbors’ reticence to dance to these familiar sounds paints a vivid picture of their ongoing process of deciding to keep or abandon their traditions. The band underscores this cultural conflict as it returns to the raucous klezmer rhythm and melody, presenting the first opportunity for the Rags choreography to teach the audience about joyful Jewish expressiveness through additions to the movement vocabulary. In response to the music, the crowd separates by gender, and the Jewish neighbors dance with an open stance, heads high, and arms up. Their quick synchronized steps and claps are a part of the folkdance traditions that remain in their memories and bodies. Some neighbors execute more intricate steps that Feldman notes are embellishments or variations on the conventional Jewish dance canon, linking arms and circling one another with open torsos and outside arms extended. In this circle dance, similar to a traditional hora , Feldman notes that “upper body movement was deemed essential for the cohesion and internal communication of the group.” (32) This celebratory group dancing connects the spirit and the corporeality of these immigrants with the communal joy of the Old World’s customs, while highlighting how much has been forgotten or already lost as they disperse from their tight-knit community and focus on work each day. The immigrants also experience the reciprocal influence of acculturation as romance blossoms. Rebecca develops confidence as an independent American woman while at the dressmaking factory. She meets union-organizer Saul there, who introduces her to the Yiddish Theatre and radical activist Emma Goldman. One evening, Rebecca loses her inhibitions and allows Saul to kiss her. Afterwards, she sings “Blame it on the Summer Night,” during which Stratas’s embodiment of Rebecca changes, in stance, shape, tempo, and quality of movement. Stratas’s relaxed and open body conveys that Rebecca is awash in conflicting emotions that, for the first time, do not directly relate to her very survival. A klezmer musician accompanies Rebecca with a bluesy clarinet, as Stratas’s swaying hips betray Rebecca’s burgeoning sexual freedom. She spends most of the number leaning back on a low wall, with an open torso, closed eyes, and her head thrown back. Stratas’s gestures are particularly expressive, with her hands on her throat and solar plexus, enjoying Rebecca’s inner tumult. Rebecca claims, “I’m not to blame/ It’s just the shameless summer night” (1-5-40). Stratas then dances and skips around the empty stage, flinging her arms overhead and swaying to the music. In this moment of acculturation, the music, lyrics, and movement intersect to support Rebecca’s rejection of traditional Jewish cultural expectations of propriety and her defiant denial of blame for her actions. Only in the last moments, as Stratas slides from riffing in the blues idiom to an operatic trill, does the musician return to an authentic klezmer riff as he fades into the background. The choreography of Rebecca’s developing embodiment of an independent American woman invites the audience to empathize with her as she embraces what now may be possible. Meanwhile, in another budding romance, Ben visits Bella at the apartment and sweeps her up to dance an Irish waltz. She is shocked and delighted, as traditional Jewish communities forbade men and women from dancing together and maintaining “close physical contact.” (33) With no dancing experience between their characters, Price and Kuhn hold hands while running in circles until they are interrupted by an astonished Avram who condemns this radical behavior. Avram accuses Ben of turning “his back on his people” to embrace America, and Bella flees the stifling apartment (1-6-48). Choking on the polluted air outside the tenement, Bella sings the song “Rags” while arguing with her father about their future. During the narrative portion of the song, Strouse’s music blends klezmer instrumentation, mainly clarinets and violins, with ragtime piccolo, brass, and percussion in a rhythm that bursts forth as Bella laments her lost sense of belonging and her frustration with being outside of the acculturation process she sees around her. Strouse’s music underscores the conflict she faces while living between two cultures but having access to neither. Once Bella escapes uptown to an affluent neighborhood, the music changes to evoke the dreamlike state of an early Hollywood dance film. Couples in stark white suits and gowns surround her while dancing a balletic social dance called the Maxixe to an up-tempo ragtime rhythm that is reminiscent of Vernon and Irene Castle’s dance in the 1915 film The Whirl of Life . Carol Téten describes the beginning of ragtime dancing as a wild expression of the New World’s freedom danced by both acculturating immigrants and the American elite. For both demographics, this new style reacted “against inhibited and restricted movements” and rejected “an antiquated lifestyle.” (34) This synchronized dancing is the first sustained choreography in Rags and serves to highlight Bella’s drastic marginalization from American culture. The Castles, who were prominent dance instructors of the period, invented rules to refine ragtime dancing that “bridled the energy and enthusiasm fostered by the up-tempo music.” (35) The Maxixe in Rags follows the Castle’s technical and social standards which forbade (among other things) wiggling the shoulders, shaking the hips, and twisting, flouncing, or pumping parts of the body. They admonished their students to glide rather than hop and to “avoid low fantastic and acrobatic dips.” (36) These parameters, though somewhat restrictive, channeled potentially wild movements into an elegant and stylish dance. In Bella’s fantasy, the dancers display the animated and erect torso of the ragtime style, and their heads and arms turn together as they change directions in sustained motion across the floor. Danielle Robinson notes that ragtime dancing fascinated young immigrant women like Bella for several reasons. First, the style “offered them access to a particular kind of Americanness…[through which] they affiliated themselves with whiteness…and obfuscated their connections with the foreignness that other Americans projected onto them.” (37) Second, ragtime dancing appealed because it “radically differed from Jewish folk dancing both in terms of social context and movement vocabulary.” Without friends and relatives watching, Robinson notes, the dancers could explore the “unparalleled expressions of sexual desire and pleasure [that] were made possible by the physical intimacy between dancing partners.” (38) Tellingly, Bella’s fantasy embraced the intimate and sustained means of communication between two free adults while rejecting traditional multi-generational, sexually segregated ethnic street celebrations like “Penny a Tune.” Her dream fades as Bella spits out, “I’m the same as you/ but it isn’t true/ I’m just one more Jew/ in her rags!” (1-6-53). The contrasts within the staging of this sequence, from the fantastical white elegance against Bella in her rags to the highly stylized Maxixe whirling around her emphasized the disparity between Bella’s American Dream and her reality in class-conscious American society. These dramatic choreographic contrasts compel the audience to connect with Bella’s pain through, as Foster asserts, a “fundamental physical connection between dancer and viewer.” The choreography has constructed and cultivated “a specific physicality whose kinesthetic experience guides our perception of and connection to what another is feeling,” increasing the likelihood of creating empathy for Bella’s troubled acculturation experience thus far. (39) Finally, Rebecca’s husband Nathan surfaces at the East Side Democratic Club as an assimilated American with political ambitions who is, as John Bush Jones notes, “vigorously denying his Jewish heritage.” (40) As Nathan, Larry Kert leans back on a bar stool with an open stance, smiling and drinking beer in a three-piece suit and boater hat, the very embodiment of a Cynical American. With his Tammany Hall-style cronies, he sings, “What’s Wrong with That?” which filters ragtime through the Vaudevillian idiom. These cronies, including “Big Tim” Sullivan, are not fooled by Nathan’s American camouflage and encourage him to convince recent immigrants of his “persuasion” to register as Democrats (1-7-57). Nathan arrives in the Lower East Side as Rebecca huddles over David who has been injured in a street fight. Having returned to her original immigrant physicalization, Stratas reinterprets her lullaby to comfort David. Surprised to find them, Kert lifts them both, clutching them to his chest and revealing his own vulnerable, closed, and curved immigrant body. But, even as Nathan reconnects with his Jewish immigrant physicality, Rebecca asks him in disgust, “Where were you?” (1-8-63). The cataclysmic end to the act makes clear to Rebecca the dangers of assimilation into American culture and her role in resisting this process. Rags ’s creators detailed the characters’ experiences during the reciprocal influence phase of acculturation, illustrating how American society created pressure to assimilate and offered opportunity to grow in their work, romantic lives, and social connections, to further encourage an empathetic response in viewers. Throughout this stage, Rebecca’s values, behaviors, and identity were malleable, but she faced an instructive crisis when David, who had begun to assimilate, was attacked. As she returned to her huddled immigrant body and the Eastern European sounds of the lullaby, Strouse conveys her strong connections to cultural memory, and Stratas’s body expresses her core objective – protecting her child. By the end of the act, through the choreography of acculturation, Rags’ s creators deliver Rebecca and her fellow Jewish immigrants to the brink of change, where they must decide how America will shape them and how they will shape America. Changing into Americans: Belonging and Legacy The final movement of Rags summons the audience to an empathetic response to the immigrant characters during the last stage of acculturation, as they change into integrated, assimilated, separated, or marginalized Americans. Throughout this phase, the conflicting musical styles and physical expressions of identity continue to clash until several climactic events finalize their full transition from Immigrants to Americans. At this point, the central characters’ choreographic coding transforms into a stabilized interpretation of their adapted American body. Markers of change are apparent as the second act of Rags opens at a rooftop Fourth of July party, with exuberant ethnic dancing set to Strouse’s wild klezmer music that is punctuated by ragtime music when patriotic fireworks burst. Nathan has dropped Hershkowitz and now introduces himself as “Nat Harris,” an identity that horrifies Rebecca. She recoils at trying on this American name for herself, but he equates this exciting improvement with “getting new clothes” (2-1-66). Nathan, in his bid to be Ward Leader for the East Side Democratic Club, works the tenement crowd with an open, erect, and expressive American body shouting, “Nice to see ya” and shaking hands (2-1-64). To emphasize his full assimilation, Nathan sings “Yankee Boy,” playing on the popular 1904 George M. Cohan Broadway musical Little Johnny Jones . Kert’s performance of “Yankee Boy” becomes a condensed enactment of Nathan’s transition from immigrant to American, with his body as the site of contestation. He begins by imitating Latessa’s reserved Avram physicality with a closed stance, his arms stuck tight to his sides and legs together. Kert shrugs his shoulders and brings his arm up along his torso and twists his wrist in two slight circles to complete the parody of a devout Jewish scholar. To underscore Nathan’s distance from this embodiment, Kert’s movements are broadly comic, disjointed, and abrupt. He then adapts the Cynical Americans’ choreography from “Greenhorns,” and David, the remaining potential legacy of Old-World traditions, enthusiastically joins the dance on “I’m gonna be/ A Yankee boy” (2-1-67). The Jewish neighbors tentatively march in place with their arms close at their sides, observing tradition. However, when Nathan and David sing “America the Beautiful,” the neighbors parade down to the street as newly minted Democrats. To accomplish his goal of living “Uptown” like “real Americans,” Nathan convinces Rebecca that he needs money to buy finer clothing for the Democratic Club on election night. Rebecca hands over her entire savings, and Kert greedily hordes the money as he leaves her. Although she reaches after him, her physicality is not curved or closed. She is already solidifying her American stance and stands erect with the contrasting swell of the klezmer strings and wind instruments betraying the pain this choice causes her, as she reprises the Homesick Immigrant’s tune, “Sometimes we don’t love things/ Till we tell them goodbye…” (2-2-70). With acceptance that her old life is gone, Rebecca prepares for the final transition in her acculturation journey. The East Side Democratic Party Rally is the culminating moment in the confrontation of music and dance styles in Rags. During this scene, Rebecca encounters more immigrants like Nathan who have abandoned, forgotten, or hidden their immigrant personas and assimilated as Americans. The intense pressure for Rebecca to assimilate produces a choreographic struggle at the rally that communicates the deeply rooted physical and emotional struggle immigrants experience as they choose what to keep and what to leave as they acculturate and find a sense of belonging. First, Rebecca is tested on how she is adapting to American norms and values as “Big Tim” Sullivan, who has assimilated enough to become the Democratic Party Boss, addresses Rebecca as “Mrs. Harris” and encourages her to dance with one of his men. Her partner pulls her close, and Rebecca becomes a reluctant enactor of Bella’s earlier ragtime dance fantasy. Stratas’s syncopated imitation of her partner’s Fox Trot is more suited to an ethnic dance, and she receives a scandalous slap on the upper thigh as a reprimand. The precisely choreographed formal dancing mimics Bella’s dream, with couples sailing about the room. However, Rebecca breaks off from her partner, and Stratas weaves through the crowd like the leader of a circle dance might, displaying quick footwork, open arms, clapping, and turning, the markers of Jewish ethnic group dancing seen earlier in “Penny a Tune.” Feldman describes a leader creating “snake formations” breaking the circle “into a line moving in a single direction.” (41) To curb Rebecca’s act of resistance, her partner drags her back into line and overpowers her by throwing her back in a dip to finish the number. As the dancers turn upstage to applaud the band, a spotlight isolates Rebecca who faces downstage, isolating her from the assimilated crowd. Stratas holds her arms above her head, clapping with a strongly opposing rhythm. She dances alone to klezmer music, with an open stance and strong angular arms raised in a display of power. Then, as she bows her head, her hands flutter down in the shape of an hourglass. This gesture is the only movement in Rags where an actor performs what Feldman describes as an artistic “communicative” gesture with the hands and arms. (42) By embracing her Jewish ethnic identity through movement, Rebecca reconnects with her past through the cultural and religious traditions she is expected to abandon. As Rebecca’s confidence in choosing her heritage over assimilation grows, Stratas moves center stage, lifts her skirts, and begins to incorporate her entire body into a traditional Eastern European Jewish dance. With her feet together, Stratas moves toe/heel/toe/heel from side-to-side, stomps, circles herself and draws in her dancing partner for coordinated deep knee bends that evoke Ukrainian Hopak dancing. Rebecca is so transported by her corporeal connection to her cultural traditions that it galvanizes the latent immigrant body in the other dancers who divide by gender, replicating the traditional format of the ethnic celebration in “Penny a Tune.” With Nathan and “Big Tim” Sullivan watching from the bandstand, the male dancers move to the klezmer music. Their bodies recall the traditional movements as they do athletic deep knee bends with their hands on their waists and then spring up to their heels with their arms extended, palms flat to ceiling. They perform high jumps with two feet flung behind their body, as one hand touches the soles of their feet and one arm is raised above their heads. Their expert choreography is technical, sustained, and up-tempo. By shrugging off their American identities, these former immigrants reconnect to their cultural roots. However, the struggle continues as the music slides into ragtime rhythms, and the men shift to the “Chicken Scratch,” a ragtime animal walk, that alternates high steps and low kicks with their arms creating angular “wings.” (43) The women then take their turn as the klezmer music returns, building on the men’s ethnic dance style. The groups continue to alternate with the clashing music and dance styles, moving back to their original partners and dancing in unison to ragtime music. The dancers turn to center, forming a large circle holding hands with arms raised, evoking the traditional hora dance. The group circles, kicking their legs high and rocking their bodies front to back, then return to the formal partner dance position. The chaos of switching between dance styles and the cacophony of clashing music not only physically and aurally expresses the pressure these immigrants feel to adapt to American norms and values, but it also engages the audience energetically in the culmination of the choreography of acculturation. The conflict within the dance creates the greatest tension in Rebecca’s acculturation process, forcing an integrated rather than assimilated resolution to her journey . Stratas finishes the jubilant dance at center lifted by her partner with her arms raised in a strong “V” position. This physical image recalls her earlier pose at the end of “Children of the Wind,” blending a refusal to abandon her cultural beliefs and an openness to embrace being an American. Visually connecting these two dramatic moments, one her breaking point and one her triumph, is the production’s most effective climax for crafting empathy through movement. As they finish, Sullivan shouts, “She’s full of vinegar!” recognizing that Rebecca will be an asset who can touch the very heart of the community and bring people together (2-5-86). To Nat’s delight, he is announced as the new Ward Leader. However, this joy is undercut by the news that Bella has died in a factory fire, invoking the infamous 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire that took the lives of one hundred forty-six mostly young, Jewish immigrant girls. This tragedy brings Rebecca to her lowest point since “Children of the Wind” and tests her sense of belonging as an American. To mourn Bella, the creative team chose to incorporate the Mourner’s Kaddish into the musical. The producers were concerned that audiences might find this interpolation offensive, but Stein, Strouse, and Schwartz insisted that the realist aspect was “essential” to the emotional impact of the scene. (44) They crafted “a semi-operatic duel between male and female mourners,” with Schwartz setting transliterated lyrics to Strouse’s music that reinterpreted the traditional melody of the Kaddish. (45) During the scene, Rebecca, David, and Avram cling together but never revert to the closed off physicality of the opening scenes of the musical, affirming that even this sorrow cannot crush their burgeoning American spirit. Rags’ s creators crafted the musical’s original dramatic climax to summon the audience’s empathy for the immigrant characters acculturation struggle. The most marginalized character, Bella, suffers a tragic end, resulting in Ben’s continued assimilation and Avram’s deepening separation from American culture. After Bella’s funeral, Rebecca quits her factory job, joining the Union organizers. She leads with a strong American stature but also loses Nathan. Confounded by her transformation, Nathan asks, “What happened to you?” Her simple reply, “America. I guess America happened to me,” belies the cataclysmic struggle she has experienced (2-7-97). She ascends the Union platform, surrounded by a tableau of American bodies with open torsos and arms extended in unity and power, and reclaims herself as “Rebecca Hershkowitz.” This final sustained, open, and erect gesture expresses the balance she now feels as an integrated Jewish immigrant who will not abandon her cultural heritage but embraces her new identity. *** In 1985, Stein wrote, “ Rags is a story of one woman forced to flee with her son to America and a safe life. She doesn’t find it. Instead, she finds the pleasure-pain of involvement and the price we often pay in caring for others. These others pry open doors within us that allow us to recognize what we are and mold ourselves into something new and wonderful.” (46) Rags ’s creators purposefully crafted empathy by coalescing the plot, score, and movement, recognizing that empathy for immigrants is important, both as a social ideal and for personal growth. Through a screen decades later, the embodied empathy of the choreography of acculturation was still affective, and their ideals have sustained multiple revisions and revivals of the musical for almost forty years. Losing cultural traditions while becoming American is painful and, as sociologist Kris Kissman notes, developing empathy for this process increases the likelihood of building positive relationships with our students, co-workers, and clients who have experienced immigration. This work may include recognizing difficult immigrant experiences, respecting language preferences, or patiently accepting how much time the acculturation process takes. (47) However, developing the empathetic response grows increasingly difficult in a deeply divided and ultra-mediated America. The arts, and specifically musical theatre through its combination of visual, aural, and visceral impact, can craft powerful work by staging the embodied stories of others that invites and provokes audiences to make empathetic connections that remain long after the performance ends. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References David L. Sam, “Acculturation: Conceptual Background and Core Components” in The Cambridge Handbook of Acculturation Psychology Eds. David L. Sam and John W. Berry, (Cambridge UP: New York, 2006), 11 &14; John Berry and Feng Hou, “Immigrant Acculturation and Wellbeing Across Generations and Settlement Contexts in Canada,” International Review of Psychiatry 2021, 33, no. 1–2, 142. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540261.2020.1750801 Barry Moreno, The Statue of Liberty Encyclopedia (New York: Simon & Shuster, 2000), 111, 140 & 172. Moreno, 172. Susan Leigh Foster, Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance (New York: Routledge, 2010), 168 & 2. Rebecca Rossen, Dancing Jewish: Jewish Identity in American Modern and Postmodern Dance (online edn, Oxford Academic, 19 June 2014), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199791767.001.0001 , accessed 16 Apr. 2024.12. Alisa Solomon, “Balancing Act: Fiddler’s Bottle Dance and the Transformation of “Tradition”, TDR: The Drama Review 55:3 Fall 2011, 22. Joseph Stein, Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, Fiddler on the Roof (New York: Crown Publishers Inc., 1965), 1. Rossen, 29, and Henry Bial, Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage & Screen (E-book, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 30. Sam, “Acculturation,” 17; Berry and Hou, “Immigrant,” 141-142. “‘Fiddler’ Songwriters Discuss Putting Themselves in the ‘Soul of The Characters,’” Fresh Air January 15, 2016 https://www.npr.org/2016/01/15/463162072/fiddler-songwriters-discuss-putting-themselves-in-the-soul-of-the-characters . Alvin Klein, “Hoping to Turn Rags into Riches,” New York Times , August 17, 1986, 11LI. Klein, “ Rags into Riches.”; Frank Rich, “Teresa Stratas as a Jewish Immigrant in Rags , a Musical,” New York Times , August 22, 1986. C3. Walter Zev Feldman, Klezmer: Music, History and Memory (New York: Oxford UP, 2016), 164 & 201. Feldman, Klezmer , 174; Richard Altman, The Making of a Musical: Fiddler on the Roof (New York: Crown Publishers, 1971), 31. Ken Mandelbaum, Not Since Carrie (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 321. Foster, Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in American Dance (Berkeley: U of California Press, 1986), xviii. Foster, “Choreographies,” 209. Bial, Acting Jewish , 5 & 110. Bial, 110. Sam, “Acculturation,” 14. These song titles are connected by a slash in published and unpublished scripts, but not in the original playbill. Joseph Stein, Charles Strouse, and Stephen Schwartz, Rags, unpublished libretto, 1987, 1-1-1. Joseph Stein papers, *T-Mss 1993-010. Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. All text and lyric references are to act, scene, and page of this edition. Stein, et al., Rags , filmed August 23,1986, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Billy Rose Theatre Division, Theatre on Film and Tape Archive, videorecording. All descriptions of movement and choreography in Rags are from this recording at the Mark Hellinger Theatre. Peter G. David, The American Opera Singer (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 522. Jacob Neusner, Halakhah: Historical and Religious Perspectives (Leiden: BRILL, 2002), 135. Accessed February 20, 2024. ProQuest Ebook Central; Harmeet Kaur, “What does it mean to be Jewish in the US?” CNN , April 4, 2023. Accessed February 15, 2024 https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/04/us/us-jewish-racial-identity-religion-explained-cec/index.html . Klein, “ Rags into Riches.” Berry, “Stress Perspectives on Acculturation,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Acculturation Psychology Eds. David L. Sam and John W. Berry, (Cambridge UP: New York, 2006), 43. Foster, Reading Dancing , 85. Foster, Reading Dancing , 85. Foster, Choreographing Empathy , 218. Sam, “Acculturation,” 14-15. Mark Slobin, “ Klezmer Music: An American Ethnic Genre,” Yearbook for Traditional Music v. 16 (1984): 34-35. Klezmer music first appeared in America circa 1910. At its core is “good-time music…inextricably tied to dance.” Feldman, Walter Zev, Klezmer: Music, History, and Memory (New York: Oxford Academic 2016), 174. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190244514.001.0001 , accessed 27 Mar. 2024. Feldman, Klezmer , 175. Carol Téten, How to Dance Through Time: Dances of the Ragtime Era: 1910-1920 (Volume II) , Dancetime Productions, 2003, DVD. Ralph G. Giordano, Social Dancing in America Vol. 2 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007), 16-18. Maurice Mouvet introduced the Brazilian Maxixe to America in the 1910s. Téten, How to Dance Through Time . Danielle Robinson, “Performing American: Ragtime Dancing as Participatory Minstrelsy,” Dance Chronicle 32 (2009):108. Robinson, 101 & 108. Foster, Choreographing Empathy , 2. John Bush Jones, Our Musicals, Ourselves (Hanover, MA: Brandies University Press, 2003), 223. Feldman, Klezmer , 174. Feldman, Klezmer , 172 and 187. Giordano, 11; Robinson, 116. Animal dances served in a “liberating, escapist capacity.” Russo, “Tailoring Rags. ” No choreography accompanied this scene and, although the choice to include the Kaddish was dramatically effective, it also illustrates the creators’ own acculturation, since using this sacred ritual for entertainment was blasphemous. See Bial 70. Vito Russo, “Tailoring Rags for Broadway,” Newsday , August 17, 1986, 3. “ Rags : The Theme,” Stein Papers, Box 16.6, dated October 14, 1985. Kris Kissman, “Deconstructing the journey from assimilation to acculturation in academia,” International Social Work (Sage Publications: London) 44(4): 423. Footnotes About The Author(s) Dr. Valerie Joyce is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Theatre & Studio Art at Villanova University. Her scholarship cuts across race, genre, and historical period to center on the cultural constructs of gender and the theatre’s role in shaping American womanhood. She has published chapters in The Palgrave Handbook of Musical Theatre Producers and The African Experience in Colonial Virginia: Essays on the 1619 Arrival and the Legacy of Slavery as well as articles in Complutense Journal of English Studies and Pennsylvania History Journal . She is also a director, choreographer, and costume designer with recent credits that include The Drowsy Chaperone , Sunday in the Park with George , and The Importance of Being Earnest . Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction America Happened to Me: Immigration, Acculturation, and Crafting Empathy in Rags Burning it Down: Theatre Fires, Collective Trauma Memory, and the TikTok Ban “A Caribbean Soul in Exile”: Post-Colonial Experiences of a Jamaican Actor Archiving a Life in Theatre: The Legacy of Michael Feingold Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspapers in New York Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre Another Day's Begun: Thornton Wilder's Our Town in the 21st Century Appropriate Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month MáM Scene Partners Oh, Mary! Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

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

Christine Mok 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 On Young Jean Lee in Young Jean Lee's We're Gonna Die by Christine Mok Christine Mok By Published on May 22, 2022 Download Article as PDF “It was built to be super universal.”—Young Jean Lee [1] In counting Young Jean Lee’s contributions to Asian American theatre, We’re Gonna Die is, on the surface, an oblique entry. We’re Gonna Die is Lee’s 2011 cabaret slash indie-pop concert, the antepenultimate production by 13P, which was formed in 2003 by 13 midcareer playwrights to produce each other’s work. [2] With creative and production control in the hands of playwrights, the first production of We’re Gonna Die is a series of songs and interstitial monologues that Lee performed herself, backed by a band, Future Wife. Lee chronicles a meditation on grief, mourning, and loss, as an indie pop paean and elegy to liberal humanism. We are all going to die . Lee sings this refrain, placing her body, marked by race and gender, front and center. While theatre critics and audiences focused on Lee’s own body as the Singer bearing confessional weight in monologues and songs, the 2013 studio album version gave the monologues to a who’s who of white indie rockers to embody, or rather give voice to, the narratives of the play, putting further weight on the body, present and absent, in question/confession. Almost a decade later, the New York revival cast Janelle McDermoth, an African American performer, as the Singer. With each iteration – the first run, album, revival – We’re Gonna Die shifts bodies, playing with surfaces as it moves away from Lee’s Asian American one . By focusing on Lee’s body and her subsequent erasures, I follow Kandice Chuh’s invitation for an Asian Americanist critique such that “taking Asiatic racialization seriously opens and sometimes compels avenues of inquiry and raises questions and creates archives that would otherwise be unavailable.” [3] While performance pieces are oft written to outlive their creators’ embodiment, I propose that Lee’s eventual disappearance informs how we are asked to encounter Lee’s racial surface in her performance. This short essay returns to Lee’s performance in We’re Gonna Die, while holding onto the other productions, in a series of provocations to offer up a deep cut of Asian American dramaturgy that explores the stakes of universal feeling to the aesthetic politics of whiteness. If cut is slang for a track or song, indexing the historical materiality of recording when sound was cut as a groove into vinyl, a “deep cut” refers to the songs deemed uncommercial (not a “single”) and placed “deep” within the album. As a deep cut, We’re Gonna Die is not a play “about” Asian Americans, nor do the stories or songs mine Asian American subjectivities or identifications, yet Lee’s performing body and its subsequent evacuations serve as an obstinate wedge and unwieldy accomplice to the universal feeling and liberal politics of recognition that the piece constructs. Akin to Asian American refusals theorized by Summer Kim Lee, Vivian Huang, and Xine Yao [4] as, in turn, asociality, inscrutability, and unfeeling, the Asian American dramaturgies in Lee’s performing body defy elision, disorienting how we see Asian American and how we know and feel whiteness. If Lee, following Hilton Als, “makes her body the central text of the piece,” [5] I linger on how we as spectators are asked to read Lee’s Asian body as a central text to refashion what Ralph Rodriguez, following Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, names a “surface reading of race” to “attend to what we have before us” [6] on stage. Sincerity Forever What we have before us is Young Jean Lee, playwright as performer. Lee sought to “create a show about ordinary human failings that an ordinary person could perform, experimenting with and subverting a genre that traditionally depends most heavily on star-power and charisma: the one-person cabaret show.” [7] While compelling as herself, Lee is not a virtuosic or trained performer. As an ordinary performer, Lee deploys the affect and effort sublimated in post-Method acting, such that refusal or resistance to emote idealized forms of expressiveness becomes hallmarks of truth and depth of feeling. [8] Lee’s acting instead foregrounds surface. In interviews, Lee remarks that to go beyond surface was beyond her: “I was just totally incapable…even the most basic things. He [director Paul Lazar] really couldn’t tell me to do anything. Also, my default performance mode when I started out was just to stand stock-still like a statue without any facial expression or vocal expression whatsoever.” [9] That the racialized scripts of inscrutability do not overwrite her inexpressiveness hint that something else is at play. Surfaces, as Uri McMillan writes, “register and sense our presence as well.” [10] Alternating between songs and stories, We’re Gonna Die traces the vicissitudes of growing up and growing old. Singer’s stories are populated by biological family (mother, father, grandmother, uncle), childhood frenemies, an ex-boyfriend, and a friend with her own domestic tragedy. They detail experiences of isolation, illness, frustration, and infidelity. The songs are rejoinders to the stories, with advice, mantras, and a letter offered to the Singer as lyrics set to upbeat tempos. These offerings, both by the Singer’s community to the Singer, and now by the Singer to the audience, range from marginally comforting to bleak: “You are not the only one!” [11] “Horrible things happen every day,” [12] and “When you get old/You will Lose your mind!” [13] Yet, reviews index a different affective range closer to the musical key: “sly, weird and thoroughly winning” (Charles Isherwood for the New York Times ); “uplifting” (Adam Green for Vogue ). [14] Perhaps the piece’s winsomeness and uplift reside in theatre’s capacity for what Bruce Wilshire named, “standing in,” whereby the actor stands in for the character, “but the character is a type of humanity with whom the audience member can identify, either directly as a stand-in for his [sic] person, or indirectly as a stand-in for others whom the audience member recognizes and with whom he [sic] can be empathetically involved.” [15] The actor is the lynchpin who stands in for the character and through this standing-in, gives access to spectators who themselves stand in for that character — a riff on Richard Schechner’s “not-me and not-not-me” [16] by way of Sally Fields: (she is) like me/really, really like me. We’re Gonna Die foregrounds this by highlighting a “type of humanity” that rests in empathetic identification, suturing the phenomenological with the confessional conventions of cabaret, the one-person show, or the singer-songwriter. Yet, Lee is explicit in her acting style, interviews, and author’s note that the work is not confessional: “All of the stories in this show are true, but not all of them happened to me…the character of ‘Singer’ is not meant to be me.” [17] Given the deracinated “universal” substance of the stories and lyrics, it is her racial surface [18] that Lee offers to the audience for identification. How then is Young Jean Lee’s Asian body, her racial surface, a type of humanity with whom audience members can identify? Lee’s Asian body poses a problem for standing-in’s seemingly “neutral” processes of empathy and attachment. Asian Americans as performing bodies operate in contradiction. Their performances have been marked as national abjection by Karen Shimakawa [19] and exception by Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson. [20] Their labor is highly visible, theatrical, and spectacular. At the same time, their bodies and national identity are invisible; their racialization subtended to everyday enactments, Ju Yon Kim’s racial mundane. [21] Americans of Asian descent have historically been racialized as both indeterminate and undesirable subjects to the nation-state, seen and unseen, marked and unmarked, though that unmarking is framed by the provisionality of the honorary whiteness of the model minority who, Ellen D. Wu reminds us, was constructed to be “inherently apolitical and therefore definitively not black.” [22] Asian American racialization operates through inversion— not political/not Black— as much by what is invisible as by what is visible. The problem posed by the Asian American body is in whether it is marked by racial difference or elided (provisionally) with honorary whiteness. Junaid Rana foregrounds honorary whiteness as a social performance of collusion, “to pass as…honorary white in the case of the myth of the model minority,” because “racial performance is an important aspect of interpreting structures organized in relationship to whiteness.” [23] On stage, the interpreting structures framing how and whether spectators see “honorary whiteness” is linked to casting. To the ways that “nontraditional,” and I borrow Angela Pao’s terminology for color-blind, racially conscious, cross-cultural, and societal, casting, [24] has reshaped spectators’ apprehension of embodiment, whereby spectators toggle between seeing actors’ bodies as “unmarked” and as “incorporat[ing] their knowledge of racial histories and relations into their experience and interpretation.” [25] Given the mechanisms of intimacy and interiority at play in We’re Gonna Die, how do we feel with and through Lee’s racial surface? When Hilton Als writes that, “by assuming the role of the performer, Lee is taking on the kamikaze-like vulnerability that comes with making your body the central text, thus writing another chapter in her vital and necessary work,” [26] he sees an act of subsumption. While the “texts” of the performance are doubled, the script and lyrics, on the one hand, and Lee’s own body, on the other, both are enfolded into Lee’s own body of work. In Als’ reading, it is the cabaret performer’s “kamikaze-like vulnerability,” the almost suicidal (tinged by etymological Japanese aviators) exposure of interiority that is the challenge he sees Lee taking on. But the “almost, but not quite” vulnerability of We’re Gonna Die resides in the act of “taking on” of the role of performer, as opposed to taking in — as in take (us) in — where both valences, to dupe us into believing and provide the audience cathartic access to the self, are set in contradiction. Self-obliterating vulnerability is a curious counterpoint to the inscrutability that dominates discourse around Asian (American) affect; yet, is it not self-annihilation that is at the heart of Asian American femme racialization, from Madama Butterfly (1904) to Miss Saigon (1989)? Uneasy Feelings We’re Gonna Die is deceptively moving, exceeding its ambitions to provide “a very little bit of comfort,” [27] “in the hopes that [the stories and songs] might help you feel less lonely when you’re in pain— which I hope you’re not.” [28] While the relationship between “I” and “you” is structured by convention (the stage conventions of performer and audience), it is how the performance negotiates “I” and “we” that has a particular entanglement with racialization, surface, and depth. Sara Ahmed, writing on affect and the body, highlights surface’s relationship to emotion: “It is through emotions that…surfaces or boundaries are made: the ‘I’ and ‘we’ are shaped by, and even take the shape of, contact with others.” [29] Thus, my interest, and suspicion, in both how and whether her racialized body comes to embody the ordinary through the move between “I’’ and “We.” If We’re Gonna Die is taken as memento mori , it is a symbolic reminder of the inexorability of mortality, that life and death are absolute processes that knit humanity together; however, just as we are not equal in life, we are not equal in death—now, more than ever. The shift from singular to plural from “I’m going to die” to “We’re going to die,” is particularly insidious, because what is staged, or rather what I am afraid of, even as I am moved, is how processes of universality, humanism, and whiteness are one and the same. That what happens to Lee’s body, cheerily dressed in yellow skinny jeans, blue Adidas sneakers, and a sweater with a sailboat on it, is a disciplining of the Asian American body through honorary whiteness, with its attendant apolitical-ness and anti-Black racism. As opposed to the difficult politics and aesthetics that Karen Shimakawa corrals in her analysis of Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven , [30] We’re Gonna Die turns to a politics and aesthetics of “easy” feeling that Lee’s racial surface refracts. My unease at the ease through which Lee’s body can be drafted into the liberal politics of recognition hinders standing-in (even when her body and mine share a fungible Asian-ness), thus recoding ordinariness and defamiliarizing deracination. I am not alone in pausing during the final song to wonder at spectators singing along to “We are going to die.” Such dissonance gestures to the ways that Lee’s Asian American dramaturgies are not reparative; they do not smooth over inclusionary and exclusionary mechanisms by which Lee’s Asian body comes to stand-in for a “type of humanity,” when western bourgeois whiteness, or the category of “Man,” as Sylvia Wynter argued, overrepresents itself as universal humanity. [31] Instead, Lee’s performing body shores up what Patricia Stuelke names the ruse of repair, [32] how the reparative turn, though it began as a response to state violence, is put to the service of neoliberal policies and their ideological constructions. Even as it mobilizes reparative feelings to elicit empathetic identification, Lee’s racial surface belies the “feel-good fix” [33] of the show. This ambivalence about the processes of subsumption and self-annihilation are dramaturgical constants in Lee’s work especially when she stages whiteness. From Sheila and Terence in Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals , reprised as White Person 1 and 2 in Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven , and given full force in Straight White Men , [34] whiteness pervades Young Jean Lee’s work. Or rather, it keeps invading the plays, as if Lee is hell bent on showing her audiences that whiteness abhors not only a vacuum, but also the spaces filled by minoritarian bodies and voices, occupying that space, making glaringly visible whiteness’s presumed invisibility. If, in Lee’s plays, audiences are asked to scrutinize the seemingly totalizing nature of whiteness, that metatheatrical move is evacuated in the studio album of We’re Gonna Die , as displaced as Lee’s own body. No longer the Singer, Lee is relegated to the singer in the band, performing songs backed by lusher orchestrations, while the monologues are portioned to (white) indie rockers including Beastie Boy’s Adam Horovitz, Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna, David Byrne, and Laurie Anderson. Rather than stories that exceed the singular body of the solo performer, each monologue is isolated to a single voice in recording. If Lee’s own not-white body asks us to consider processes of deracination as the (racial) engulfment [35] of whiteness, the collapsing of narrative into the isolated voice signals not the taking on of universality, but the taking in of whiteness. We are taken in by whiteness, sonically surrounded like noise-cancelling headphones. Jump Cut Lee’s performing body and voice recede altogether from the stage in the revival of We’re Gonna Die. Directed and choreographed by Raja Feather Kelly, the show featured Janelle McDermoth, an African American performer. The Second Stage production opened February 25, 2020, and closed early on March 12 when COVID–19 closed NYC stages. I did not see this production, and for some, [36] this is one of the last productions they saw before theatres shuttered. This production is part of poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong’s article, “A Season to Celebrate Asian-American Theater Is Lost to Pandemic,” [37] which marks the lost 2020 season as an Asian American loss. Hong’s collection Minor Feelings: An Asian American Racial Reckoning struck a chord during the pandemic, offering public vocabulary for the resurgence of anti-Asian violence. Hong’s minor feelings are “racialized emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed.” [38] That she comes to minor feelings through Richard Pryor — by way of Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings [39] — enacts Claire Jean Kim’s racial triangulation that, for me, makes McDermoth’s casting as Singer, with Lee as Playwright, provocative. Does a Black woman’s body and voice center We’re Gonna Die ’s Asian American dramaturgies by decentering the (white) universal human subject? Is McDermoth’s skilled and virtuosic performance reparative? Poring over production images I am struck by the transformation of Lee’s original costume design. The sailboat emblazoned on Lee’s chest has become the proverbial heart on McDermoth’s sleeve, a glitter-trimmed sailboat on the arm of her leather jacket. Perhaps McDermoth as Singer with the majority BIPOC musicians as her fellow performers and the possibilities they pose are what set off theatre critic Jesse Green to cling to his individual “specialness” and project his recalcitrance onto fellow spectators at the end of his review: In answer to the central question — “What makes you so special?” — the singer at first answers: “I believe, deep down, with all my heart, that I deserve to be immune not only from loneliness and tragedy, but also from aging, sickness and death.” Surely I was not the only audience member nodding vigorously in agreement at that point. [40] “We” is curiously absent in Green’s rendering of the scene. In his response — in his insistence on himself — Green refuses what he calls the “trick” of the piece, to be moved from special and individual to collective shared experience — that in a few weeks would be inexorable for everyone. How impossible to remain “immune…from loneliness and tragedy…aging, sickness and death” during a global pandemic that continues today. In her performance of the final text, Lee complicates and undercuts the process of honorary whiteness of her performance by focusing on personhood in an interrogation of self that Green fails to register. I return to Lee’s performance and dilate the moment to underscore Lee’s focus on personhood not circumscribed by hierarchy or domination or even millennial “specialness”: “…I asked myself, ‘Okay, so, who do you think you are?’ And the answer was, ‘I think I’m special.’ I believe, deep down, with all my heart, that I deserve to be immune not only from loneliness and tragedy, but also aging, sickness, and dying. But I’m not special. I’m a person.” [41] That statement of personhood, of not being special, different, or marked, frames the final song where Lee makes the transitive and synecdochical move from “I’m gonna die” to “We’re gonna die” to the finality of “We are going to die.” Any trace of a radical politics of personhood is then erased in the album, an act of vocal whitewashing as yellowface. What “very little bit of comfort” that We’re Gonna Die , the album, provides the listener — and a listener attuned to Lee’s Asian American dramaturgies — may reside in the knowledge that white supremacy will in fact die, is in living also dying, even as we might be caught in — and still cut by — its death grip. References [1] John DelSignore, “Playwright Young Jean Lee, We’re Gonna Die, ” Gothamist , 13 April 2011, https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/playwright-young-jean-lee-emwere-gonna-dieem. [2] “Our Mission,” 13 Playwrights, https://www.13p.org. [3] Kandice Chuh, “It’s Not About Anything,” Social Text 32, no. 4 (Winter 2014): 125–134. [4] Summer Kim Lee, “Staying In: Mitski, Ocean Vuong, and Asian American Asociality,” Social Text 37, no. 1 (2019): 27–50; Vivian Huang, “Inscrutably, Actually: Hospitality, Parasitism, and the Silent Work of Yoko Ono and Laurel Nakadate,” Women and Performance 28 no. 3 (2018): 187-203; Xine Yao, Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth Century America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021). [5] Hilton Als, “Body of Work,” The New Yorker , 11 April 2011, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/11/body-of-work-hilton-als. [6] Ralph Rodriguez. “In Plain Sight: Reading the Racial Surface of Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings” in Drawing New Color Lines: Transnational Asian American Graphic Narratives (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015), 87-106. [7] DelSignore, “Playwright Young Jean Lee.” [8] Shonni Enelow marks this style in contradistinction to Method acting’s “iconography of emotional expression, in which everyday repression gives way…to outpourings of powerful feeling.” Shonni Enelow, “The Great Recession,” Film Comment, September/October 2016. See also: Shonni Enelow, Method Acting and Its Discontents: On American Psycho-Drama (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015). [9] DelSignore, “Playwright Young Jean Lee.” [10] Uri McMillan, “Introduction: Skin, Surface, Sensorium,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 28, no. 1 (2018): 1-15. [11] Song: “Lullaby for the Miserable” in Young Jean Lee, We’re Gonna Die (New York: Theatre Communications Group [TCG], 2015), 21. [12] Song: “Horrible Things” in Lee, We’re Gonna Die , 39. [13] Song: “When You Get Old” in Lee, We’re Gonna Die , 29-30. [14] Charles Isherwood, “Amid Catchy Choruses, Personal Tales of Life’s Brutal Verities,” New York Times, 10 April 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/11/theater/reviews/were-gonna-die-by-young-jean-lee-at-joes-pub-review.html; Adam Green, “Stage Notes: We’re Gonna Die Spins Tales of Hot Pain in Cool Tones,” Vogue, 14 August 2013, https://www.vogue.com/article/theater-music-stage-notes-were-gonna-die-spins-tales-of-hot-pain-in-cool-tones [15] Bruce Wilshire, Role Playing and Identity: The Limits of Theatre as a Metaphor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 22-23. [16] Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2002), 92-93. [17] Young Jean Lee, “Author’s Note,” We’re Gonna Die (New York: TCG, 2015), 7. [18] For more on racial surface: Anne Anlin Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker & the Modern Surface (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Sean Metzger, Chinese Looks: Fashion, Performance, Race (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014); Uri McMillan, “Introduction: Skin, Surface, Sensorium,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 28, no. 1 (2018): 1-15; Colleen Kim Daniher, “Yella Gal: Eartha Kitt’s Racial Modulations,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 28, no. 1 (2018): 16-33. [19] Karen Shimakawa, National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). [20] Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, A Race So Different: Performance and Law in Asian America (New York: New York University Press, 2013). [21] Ju Yon Kim. The Racial Mundane: Asian American Performance and the Embodied Everyday (New York: New York University Press, 2015). [22] Ellen D. Wu, The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 256. [23] Juniad Rana, “Race,” Keywords in Asian American Studies (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 204. [24] Angela Pao, No Safe Spaces: Re-Casting Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in American Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. [25] Ibid., 29. [26] Hilton Als, “Body of Work,” The New Yorker , 11 April 2011, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/11/body-of-work-hilton-als. [27] Lee, We’re Gonna Die , 39. [28] Ibid., 21. [29] Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 10. [30] Shimakawa turns to Sianne Ngai’s ugly feelings to unpack the “affective ‘difficulties’” that are “directly and intimately related to its ‘difficult’ politics and aesthetics.” Karen Shimakawa, “Young Jean Lee’s Ugly Feelings About Race and Gender: Stuplime animation in Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven ,” Women & Performance 17, no. 1 (March 2007), 92. [31] Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation — An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (Fall 2003), 257-337. [32] Patricia Stuelke, The Ruse of Repair (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021). [33] Ibid., 30. [34] Patricia Ybarra’s essay explores, through an analysis of realism, how an early workshop of Straight White Men “stages the performance of the straight white male self under neo-liberal capitalism” (514). Patricia Ybarra, “Young Jean Lee’s Cruel Dramaturgy,” Modern Drama 67, no. 4 (Winter 2014): 513-532. [35] For more on racial engulfment, see Denise Ferreira DeSilva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). [36] I am grateful to Peter Kim, Brian Herrera, and Darren Gobert for recounting their spectatorial experiences. For reviews: Dan Venning, “ We’re Gonna Die,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 43, no. 3, (September 2021): 60-62; Benjamin Gillispie, “ We’re Gonna Die by Young Jean Lee,” Theatre Journal 73, no. 2 (June 2021): 245-247. [37] Cathy Park Hong, “A Season to Celebrate Asian-American Theater Is Lost to Pandemic,” New York Times , May 21, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/21/theater/asian-american-playwrights.html. [38] Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (New York: One World, 2020), 55. [39] Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). [40] Thank you, Brian Herrera, for teasing out the contrarian closing of Green’s review. Jesse Green, “Review: In ‘We’re Gonna Die,’ Pop Songs for the Reaper,” The New York Times, 25 February 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/25/theater/were-gonna-die-review.html. [41] Lee, We’re Gonna Die , 39. Footnotes About The Author(s) Christine Mok is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Rhode Island. She has published in Theatre Survey , Journal of American Drama and Theatre , PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art , Modern Drama ,and the Journal of Asian American Studies . She is co-editor with Joshua Chambers-Letson of Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s China Trilogy: Three Parables of Global Capital (Bloomsbury, 2021). 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.

Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 26 1 Visit Journal Homepage Between Blackface and Bondage: The Incompletely Forgotten Failure of The Underground Railroad's 1879 Midwestern Tour By Published on March 9, 2014 Download Article as PDF In 1879, nineteen-year-old Pauline Hopkins's musical slave drama, The Underground Railroad, flopped. Reviews panned the production, suggesting the plagiaristic knock-off of Joseph Bradford's Out of Bondage "lacked interest and was devoid of plot." Audiences noted the lackluster performances, asserting "the company can't sing like the Hyers sisters" (the pioneering African American sister act who had performed in Out of Bondage only a few months earlier). Even the play's leading man, Sam Lucas, accepted the production's failure [ . . . ] [scribd id=211700003 key=key-wx0gvnnrb7bq62uslcn mode=scroll height=930 width=600] References Footnotes About The Author(s) Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Between Blackface and Bondage: The Incompletely Forgotten Failure of The Underground Railroad's 1879 Midwestern Tour “One Live as Two, Two Live as One”: Bert Williams and the Uprooted Bamboo Tree Playwright as Publicity: Reexamining Jane Martin and the Legacy of the Humana Festival Feminist Periodization as a Structural Component of Wendy Wasserstein's The Heidi Chronicles Waiting for Triumph: Alan Schneider and the American Response to Waiting for Godot Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Rowan Jalso 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 Which of These Are Censorship? The Divide Between Prior Restraint and Soft Censorship Rowan Jalso By Published on July 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF Theatrical censorship in a global sense is depressingly familiar. American censorship, however, is an interesting case. It has definitely occurred in the purest sense: from 1922 to 1927, the “Play Jury” in the United States policed what performances were allowed to be produced and who was allowed to act within productions. Theatre makers in this era had to follow these rules or be banned, as was the case with Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms .(1) The First Amendment has, at times, offered protection against some forms of governmental bans, protecting American theatre more so than some other countries. However, that does not mean that governmental control of American theatre is a relic of the past. Today, many states are creating laws and policies to cut “indecent” performances off at the knees. Censorship is a broad term that encompasses a variety of distinct legal measures, and the legality of censorship varies between eras and locations. However, since we are discussing “contemporary American censorship,” I will highlight two prevalent forms: prior restraint and soft censorship.(2) Prior restraint is a form of censorship that allows the government to review the content of printed materials and prevent their publication.(3) If any material touches on a topic that the government has deemed off-limits, then that material may be censored. It has been “restrained” before it has had any chance to be reviewed by a governing body, amended by the playwright, or produced for an audience. Under a prior restraint system, if “gender ideology” is a banned topic, then anything that discusses that topic will be prohibited. Currently, this is most evident in educational settings and in situations involving state and federal funding. For example, The Laramie Project , a play which has been frequently banned or protested, was lately banned by a school in Texas in February 2024 and by Kansas schools a year earlier. It is one thing for an institution or government to forbid you from putting on a production, and another to stop yourself from staging one because you suspect that it will not draw a crowd or earn a profit, or that there could be public backlash. This second instance is known as “soft censorship.” With theatres still trying to claw their way back from the downturn caused by the pandemic, many are worried about doing anything that would kick the proverbial hornet’s nest. This can manifest as: locations that should or should not be toured through, venues that may or may not accept a production, and seasons that will or will not generate controversy. (For instance, Arena Stage’s 1992-93 season is an example of an attempt at casting diversity that created backlash from theatre donors.) All these factors and worries have to be carefully managed, on top of the issues around federal and state funding that are becoming increasingly proliferate. In today’s American theatre, there are cases of prior restraint censorship, such as theatres being denied grants unless they adhere to or avoid specific topics, and there are cases of private venues choosing to forgo certain topics. These two instances may, on the surface, appear to produce the same result—a production is not allowed to be staged—but in actuality, they are vastly different. One flies in the face of the First Amendment, and the other is a private entity’s choice not to engage with certain topics. In a confusing, reactionary, and fast-paced public sphere, it is vital to note when something is facing unconstitutional censorship and when something is just not being staged. As worrying as it is when the latter happens, it is in the private entity’s right. This provocation will explore the divide between prior restraint and soft censorship. Some theatres have been forced to toe the line in order to secure grants, while others have spoken out, employing everything from boycotts to lawsuits. Although brief, this overview of the field aims to highlight contemporary American censorship. Private and Public Institutions Refusing to Produce Certain Theatrical Productions Let us begin with “soft censorship.” In America, there are private institutions that sometimes refuse to lease venues or allow theatrical tours to perform in their areas. Many people may see a venue or a certain township’s refusal to allow a production to occur within their walls and decry it as censorship, but, in a legal sense, it is not. While the First Amendment prevents governments from limiting the speech of private individuals, there are no laws against private institutions or individuals from limiting each other. Yet, these actions may seem similar to censorship, and so this phenomenon should still be looked at as an indicator of anxieties in theatrical production. The reasons why a certain show is not staged, even when there is no First Amendment issue at play, can show what topics are being seen as too risky or inappropriate for a venue, location, or group. For example, in October 2024, New York’s Connelly Theater was unable to continue its season when the Archdiocese of New York (which owns the theatre) refused to sign booking agreements, which are needed for the bookings to be legally valid. The planned productions were Kallan Dana’s Racecar Racecar Racecar, Emil Weinstein’s Becoming Eve (based on the memoir by Abby Chava Stein), and Zach Zucker’s Jack Tucker: Comedy’s Standup Hour .(4) The SheNYC festival, which had used the Connelly for eight years, is now looking for a new venue for its 2025 festival, fearing they too will not be granted booking agreements. Due to this issue with the Archdiocese, the Connelly Theater’s artistic director resigned, and the theatre suspended all operations. The Archdiocese did not give an explicit reason to find fault in the planned plays, a spokesman said that “it is ‘standard practice’ that nothing should take place on the property that is ‘contrary to the teaching of the church.’”(5) The Archdiocese may have refused to renew the booking because of this “contrary” content, specifically Becoming Eve , an adaptation of Stein’s memoir about her coming out as trans and her Hasidic rabbinical family. The Archdiocese could have been motivated by a fear that the planned season would not generate revenue, or that it would cause outrage, or any number of other reasons. As distressing as this is, in essence, a private institution refused to house certain content, which, by law, they are within their rights to do. This differs from prior restraint, as the entity banning work is not a governmental group, but a private one. The Archdiocese is not a state or federal governmental body. They have the power to choose who and what uses their commercial space. A Note on Restricted Theatre in Schools and Higher Learning Institutions The Educational Theatre Association (EdTA) reported that approximately 67% of educators were concerned about potential controversies in the plays for their upcoming seasons. In current reporting, many high school and college productions face the heaviest restrictions, as parents can influence school boards and funding. Here are a few instances of recent academic theatrical bans: in 2023, a public arts high school in Florida canceled a production of Indecent ; an Illinois public high school canceled a production of The Prom ; an Indiana public high school canceled a production of Marian, or the True Tale of Robin Hood ; an Ohio public high school requested twenty-three revisions of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee before it could hit the stage; and a Texas public school board canceled several primary school field trips to see James and the Giant Peach due to a social media post that equated actors playing both male and female roles as “drag.”(6) These “theatres” are overseen by governing boards which control the funding and curriculum of the school, and so they must contend with the oversight of the students’ families (who make up the cast, crew, and audience). There is a discussion to be had regarding the differences between public and private schools, and whether the former should have First Amendment protections if they are tied to or funded by state institutions. The government cannot limit the speech of a non-governmental entity. Are public schools funded by the state or federal government governmental entities? What about private institutions that receive government grants? And how does this question change when the school in question is a primary school, and not a high school or a college? When minors are involved, worries over “indecent” content rise, and when the funding for a public school is provided by the community (taxpayers, local grants, etc.), then a situation similar to the Connelly Theater arises. If a group of private citizens or donors chooses to not fund (to allow funds to go to) a particular production due to its themes, is that within their rights? As state laws vary significantly, more work needs to be done to compile a comprehensive list of institutions that do and do not have First Amendment protections, and to examine how public funding affects private institutions, as well as the reverse, as private funds may support both private and public institutions. Contemporary American Governmental Censorship According to Artists at Risk Connection (ARC), an independent organization dedicated to advancing and defending artistic freedom globally, artists are increasingly being censored in the United States for creating work that intersects with their politics or identities—particularly those from marginalized communities, including artists of color and LGBTQIA+ individuals.(7) In many prior restraint incidents, the content that is being targeted deals with identity issues, such as LGBTQA+ representation. There are other cases of ideological depictions—namely, plays about non-Christian religions and plays engaging questions or themes of race. (Regional theatres produce more plays written by white playwrights than by playwrights of color.) One of the main components of today’s artistic attitude is the 1990 Congressional decision that stated that any grants to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) should be subject to “general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs and values of the American public.” This has become known as the “decency clause” and is an example of prior restraint; a topic is deemed unsuitable for public display from the get-go.(8) Thankfully, this clause has been challenged numerous times. In 1994, the Dallas Theater Center produced Six Degrees of Separation by John Guare, and the theatre was cited for running a sexually oriented business due to the play’s nude scene due to the decency clause, but the charges were later dropped.(9) In a 1998 ruling, a federal judge for the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals maintained that the clause’s vague language would fetter artistic freedom.(10) A more current example of prior restraint is Florida’s 2023 House Bill 1069, an education law which is stated to “restrict media with sexual content.”(11) This legislation has had the chilling effect of curtailing a wide breadth of theatre, including Shakespeare, as many of his characters cross-dress, which is enough for Florida to classify it as sexual in nature. In Orlando, the decision was made to no longer permit Shakespeare’s plays to be read in their entirety in schools due to sexual innuendos and allusions to sex, such as in Romeo and Juliet .(12) The bill is primarily directed at K-12 schools, as it was proposed by the Senate’s “Education Pre-K-12 Committee”; however, it has also had an impact outside the classroom. During the 2023 holiday season in Orlando, a theatre hosted a “drag Christmas,” and they were instructed to sell tickets only to people 18 or older due to the performance content. And yet, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis took their beverage license anyway, claiming that minors were admitted, but also stating that “the fact that there were people performing opposite to their gender was sufficient to pull their license.”(13) The ACLU’s Lawsuit Against the NEA At this time, the most significant case of prior restraint we are seeing is the new grant application policy of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) for federal grants, and the ensuing lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which began on 6 March 2025. President Trump had outlined new guidelines for NEA funding, which required applicants to state that they will not “promote gender ideology” in the project for which they are requesting the grant. This move came on the heels of President Trump’s 2025 executive order 14168 that identified “male and female as the only two sexes and said that federal funds should be used to promote [this] gender ideology.”(14) Additionally, applicants for NEA grants were required to state that they were not operating DEI programs. The ACLU is filing this lawsuit on behalf of Rhode Island Latino Arts, the National Queer Theater, The Theater Offensive, and Theatre Communications Group. They argue that these requirements violate the First Amendment and fall under prior restraint. They requested a temporary restraining order (TRO) or preliminary injunction on these requirements before the March 24th deadline for the NEA funding application for the 2025 fiscal year.(15) According to the ACLU website, on March 7th, the NEA agreed to remove the requirement from the application that had grant applicants state that their projects would not “promote gender ideology.” However, while the statement is no longer required for the application process, the NEA has not agreed to remove the criterion.(16) On March 27th, the U.S. District Court in Rhode Island began to hear arguments for the case. During this time, the application deadline was pushed from March 24th to April 7th, and the NEA agreed not to begin disbursing funds until April 30th, when “the agency determines how to implement the executive order.”(17) However, on April 3rd, the Court denied the motion for a TRO. The court held that: …the NEA’s decision on Feb. 6 to make any project that “promotes” what the government deems to be “gender ideology” ineligible for funds likely violated the First Amendment and exceeded its statutory authority, it… concluded that, because the NEA is currently in the process of determining whether to reimpose that ban, the court could not get in the way of the agency’s decisionmaking [ sic ] process.(18) The case is still ongoing, with the latest update being from May 12th. After the NEA’s self-imposed April 30th deadline passed, artists and theatre makers called for the clarification promised. The NEA grant guidelines still leave it unclear whether applicants must explicitly state that they are not promoting gender ideology to be eligible for funding. Therefore, the case remains in limbo, as courts will not comment on a NEA policy that is subject to change, and since the NEA has yet to clarify that policy, the ACLU has no grounds to present to the court.(19) What Does This Mean for the Field? This is by no means an exhaustive look at current threats against theatrical productions, and many of the cases discussed above may or may not be resolved by the time this paper is read. In the current political climate of 2025, theatres must worry about whether their productions will meet grant requirements that could change to align with a current political agenda. They must worry about whether they will be allowed to tour certain locations and use specific venues, or if a script can even be produced in certain institutions. It would be so nice to say that we can rest easy in the arms of the First Amendment to keep theatre safe from governmental censorship, but as it stands, that is not the case. Whether through state legislation or executive order, the rules that would have allowed all viewpoints and opinions to ring out are being sidestepped and ignored. So what are we to do? Some theatres have decided to conform to current trends and refrain from producing anything that may be divisive. Others have decided to boycott the space, as many performers did when President Trump took over the Kennedy Center: Lin-Manuel Miranda announced that a production of Hamilton , which would have played at the Kennedy Center in 2026, for the 250th anniversary of America, would be canceled, and will remain canceled as long as Trump is the chair of the center.(20) As of May 2025, this is still the case. There are lawsuits, news articles, public outcries, and eyes being drawn to the issues. These instances of true censorship, prior restraint censorship, cannot be allowed to be swept up into the never-ending tide of current events. However, at the risk of sounding like a fence straddler, we also must remain apprised enough to recognize what is actual and actionable censorship, and what are examples of private venues and entities exercising their rights. It is all too easy to jump to “Censorship!” when any production hits a roadblock. But the First Amendment allows private citizens to speak their minds, and this includes venues not wishing to associate with certain topics. It may hurt, but it is their right, and all rights need to be respected. A nuanced perspective is necessary to ensure that the field can move forward in a manner that is both legal, holistic, and respectful. The danger is present. The use of governmental power to curtail voices is on the rise. Pushing back and being too loud and too numerous to ignore is the best weapon we have against this. But we cannot let ourselves be desensitized to the volleys or be quick to jump at perceived slights. In a world that is slowly losing touch with critical thinking and nuanced analysis, we cannot fold. References Duffy and Duffy, “Watchdogs of the American Theatre 1910‐1940,” 54–56. O’Neill’s play in particular is highlighted on page 56. I’d like to thank Dr. John Fletcher at LSU for helping me land on these questions of prior restraint versus soft censorship. Baracskay, “Prior Restraint.” Racecar Racecar Racecar is a surreal trip taken by an unnamed father and daughter cross country, Becoming Eve is a true story about a female trans Rabbi, and Jack Tucker is a comedy show in which Zach Zucker portrays Jack Tucker, a divorcing, in debt, washed up comedian. PEN America, “Cancellation of Plays at New York Theater by Catholic Archdiocese Undermines Artistic Freedom.” Considine et al., “The Courage to Produce: A Conversation on High School Censorship.” PEN America. Filippo, “Censorship Problems in Commercial and Collegiate Theatre,” 192. Filippo, 193. National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley , 524 U.S. 569 (1998).” Anderson and McClain, CS/CS/HB 1069: Education. The Associated Press, “Shakespeare and Penguin Book Get Caught in Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ Laws.” Considine et al. I am attaching this article to the Florida House Bill as the legal document from the Florida Senate Website is quite hard to understand. Considine’s summarization is clear and useful. Executive Order 14186. ACLU, “Artists Mount First Amendment Challenge to New Grant Requirements by the National Endowment for the Arts.” ACLU, “In Response to ACLU Lawsuit, National Endowment for the Arts Removes Certification Requirement on Funding Applications.” ACLU, “Court Hears Arguments in First Amendment Challenge to Federal Arts Funding Restriction.” ACLU, “Court Denies Preliminary Relief to Arts Organizations.” ACLU, “Arts Organizations Push for Answers in National Endowment for the Arts Funding Suit.” At the time of writing, this is the last update on the ACLU case. It is highly probable that this has changed by the time you read this. Zirin, “Is Trump Now a Patron of the Arts?” This decision occurred in February 2025, and according to the Kennedy Center webpage, is still the case. While there have been reports of David Rubenstein remaining in the position until September 2026, the most current news is that President Trump immediately replaced Rubenstein upon his appointment in February. This may be subject to change. Bibliography ACLU. “Artists Mount First Amendment Challenge to New Grant Requirements by the National Endowment for the Arts.” ACLU , March 6, 2025. https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/artists-first-amendment-national-endowment-arts . ———. “Arts Organizations Push for Answers in National Endowment for the Arts Funding Suit.” ACLU , May 12, 2025. https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/arts-orgs-push-for-answers-in-national-endowment-for-the-arts-funding-suit . ———. “Court Denies Preliminary Relief to Arts Organizations.” ACLU , April 3, 2025. https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/court-denies-preliminary-relief-to-arts-organizations . ———. “Court Hears Arguments in First Amendment Challenge to Federal Arts Funding Restriction.” ACLU , March 27, 2025. https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/court-hears-arguments-in-first-amendment-challenge-to-federal-arts-funding-restriction . ———. “In Response to ACLU Lawsuit, National Endowment for the Arts Removes Certification Requirement on Funding Applications.” ACLU , March 7, 2025. https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/nea-funding-certification-removed . Anderson, and Stan McClain. CS/CS/HB 1069: Education, 1069 § Education Pre-K -12 Committee (ED) (2023). https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2023/1069 . The Associated Press. “Shakespeare and Penguin Book Get Caught in Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ Laws.” NPR , August 8, 2023. https://www.npr.org/2023/08/08/1192767641/shakespeare-florida-excerpts-dont-say-gay . Baracskay, Daniel. “Prior Restraint,” Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University, July 2, 2024. https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/prior-restraint/#:~:text=Prior%20restraint%20is%20a%20form,materials%20and%20prevent%20their%20publication . Considine, Allison, Jessica Lit, Jordan Stovall, and Nadine Smith. “The Courage to Produce: A Conversation on High School Censorship.” American Theatre , April 1, 2024. https://www.americantheatre.org/2024/04/01/the-courage-to-produce/ . Duffy, Susan, and Bernard K. Duffy. “Watchdogs of the American Theatre 1910‐1940.” Journal of American Culture 6: 1 (Spring 1983): 52–59. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1542-734X.1983.0601_52.x . Executive Order 14186 of January 20, 2025, “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” 90 FR 8615 § (2025). https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/01/30/2025-02090/defending-women-from-gender-ideology-extremism-and-restoring-biological-truth-to-the-federal . Filippo, Joe. “Censorship Problems in Commercial and Collegiate Theatre.” Journal of the Association for Communication Administration 23: 3 (September 1994): 192–94. Huston, Caitlin. “ACLU, Theater Companies File Lawsuit Against National Endowment for the Arts.” The Hollywood Reporter , March 6, 2025. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/aclu-theater-companies-lawsuit-against-national-endowment-for-the-arts-1236156608/ . National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley . 524 U.S. 569 (1998). PEN America. “Cancellation of Plays at New York Theater by Catholic Archdiocese Undermines Artistic Freedom.” PEN America , October 29, 2024. https://pen.org/press-release/cancellation-of-plays-at-new-york-theater-by-catholic-archdiocese-undermines-artistic-freedom/ . Zirin, James D. “Is Trump Now a Patron of the Arts?” Washington Monthly , March 13, 2025. https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/03/13/is-trump-now-a-patron-of-the-arts/ . Footnotes About The Author(s) ROWAN JALSO (she/her) is a fourth-year PhD student at Louisiana State University. She received her bachelor's degree in Technical Theatre from West Virginia University and her master's degree in Theatre and Performance Research from Florida State University. She has worked as a stage manager and dramaturg at WVU and FSU. At LSU, she works as the head of house management and as a director (recent credits include No Exit and World Builders ). Her research focuses on the uses of mental illness as a horror trope in theatre (past and present). She also enjoys researching avant-garde theatre, disability studies, and has a History minor with a focus on the Interwar period and WWII Europe. 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.

Joanna Mansbridge Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 1 Visit Journal Homepage Kitchen Sink Realisms: Domestic Labor, Dining, and Drama in American Theatre. By Dorothy Chansky. Theatre History and Culture Series. Series editor Heather Nathans. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015; Pp. 620. Joanna Mansbridge By Published on December 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF Kitchen Sink Realisms: Domestic Labor, Dining, and Drama in American Theatre . By Dorothy Chansky. Theatre History and Culture Series. Series editor Heather Nathans. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015; Pp. 620. In 1996, John Guare summed up the aesthetic battle in American theatre as “the war against the kitchen sink.” Although the phrase “kitchen sink drama,” in a British theatrical context, signifies a postwar turn toward gritty social realism, in American theatre, this same phrase carries with it vaguely derogatory connotations. The dominance of realism and the thematic emphasis on family in American drama has been pointed out often and emphatically. And while feminist scholars have ably deconstructed realism for its associations with a masculinist representational system, what has been consistently overlooked is the very labor signified by the kitchen sink. As Dorothy Chansky brilliantly demonstrates in Kitchen Sink Realisms , that infamous sink and the domestic labor for which it acts as a metonym have been used as theatrical material throughout the twentieth century, and its continued relevance – as both dramatic theme and stage action – suggests its enduring importance as a topic of social debate. Moreover, realism, Chansky reminds us, is itself a variable and varied form (hence the realisms in her title), shaped by (and shaping) specific socio-economic pressures. Chansky’s impeccably researched and engagingly written study examines theatrical representations of domestic work in twentieth century American drama, contributing an invaluable perspective to sociological questions surrounding feminized labor and theatrical debates regarding realism. Chansky is broadly concerned with reevaluating how the modern American theatre has negotiated the enduring question: Who is responsible for cleaning, cooking, and running the home? This question was posed differently in the 1920 than it was in the 1980s. However, Chansky underlines the structural issue that makes this a particularly persistent debate: “While the representations changed […] the central issue has not: American society offers no practical and affordable way for most adults to combine gainful employment with child rearing and housekeeping” (60). Indeed. Chansky states her goal thusly: “My project here is to examine the multiple ways in which a too-often belittled but perennially popular realm of American theatre can be fruitfully and seriously reassessed” (77). Organized chronologically into seven chapters and an Introduction, the book covers the timespan between 1918 and 2005, the end of World War I and the dawn of the digital era. While the study overall has a chronological structure, Chansky productively complements that linearity by linking the plays thematically as well. Each chapter provides incisive close readings, as well as thick descriptions of the surrounding conditions of production and reception, incorporating relevant and often fascinating historical materials that give the plays a vivid context. Bringing some plays out of obscurity, Chansky points to their popularity in the original context, and their significance as forums for public debates around “woman’s work.” These debates were especially lively, not surprisingly, during periods when women were either gaining employment in greater numbers or marrying in fewer (such as the 1920s and 30s and the 1980s). As Chansky points out, “Domestic labor had not always been portrayed in American drama as a potential trap. Nor had it been something to avoid onstage and hand off to invisible help” (80). Domestic labor, in fact, was staged as pure spectacle in James A. Herne’s hit of 1893, Shore Acres , in which a full act was “devoted to the preparation and consuming of an anniversary dinner” (80). Chansky’s focus on food, cleaning, and domestic labor sheds new light on changing gender roles over the past century, as well as on issues relating to social class, immigration, ethnic identity, and assimilation in the US. In Susan Glaspell and George Cram Cooke’s Tickless Time (1918), for example, Annie, a first generation Irish servant (played in the original production by Edna St. Vincent Millay), accommodates the WASP couple she works for by adapting “ethnic” meals, like spaghetti, for a “modern” middle-class American palette (94). Incorporating data about the number and national origin of immigrant servants in this period adds a rich sociological understanding of this and other plays. Chansky astutely situates references to food and the people who prepare it, instructing contemporary readers about the meaning of these references to early twentieth century audiences. The author also sharpens how we might think about these audiences in the early years of legitimate American theatre. She writes, “theatregoers who read criticism by critics understanding themselves as specialists became, in turn, a cohort who saw theatregoing and drama as salutary and important, even when scripts or genres might suggest otherwise” (84-85). While each chapter offers crucial insights and intelligent reinterpretations, it is the last two chapters, “Prisoners of Total Blame, 1963-1990” and “The Clean House, or Change” that make this study seem especially urgent. The penultimate chapter covers feminism’s second wave and its aftermath in the Reagan era, when debates around family values and women’s new role in the public sphere were hotly contested. Adding to ongoing discussions of canonical plays such as Sam Shepard’s True West (1980) and Marsha Norman’s ‘night Mother (1984), Chansky reframes them from the standpoint of the domestic spaces and laborers depicted in these plays. Pointing out that critics often ignore or are baffled by the Mom character in True West , who enters after the brothers’ climatic fight (and into the decimated kitchen that results), unaffected by the disaster she comes home to find, Chansky succinctly summarizes her appearance on the scene: “While the brothers remain deadlocked in a stranglehold as the lights go down, Mom has shown that she is able to leave, come back, and leave again, as if in some kind of existentially realist fort da maneuver” (455). Sharp (re)readings such as these abound in Kitchen Sink Realisms . The final chapter outlines five post-Nannygate cultural phenomena that shaped American cultural attitudes toward domestic life and plays that dealt with it: the economic prosperity of the Clinton years; the rise in immigrants from Asia and Latin America; a decline in the two-parent family; a “no-turning-back presence of women of all classes in the workforces”; and lastly, a consumerism retooled “as a form of self-improvement or activism” (486-87). From within this context, Chansky looks at three works produced in 2003: Joan Holden’s Nickel and Dimed , a Brechtian play inspired by journalist Barbara Ehrenreich’s exposé of working class poverty; Lisa Loomer’s Living Out , which looks at the relationship between a privileged yuppie mother and her Latina nanny; and Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori’s through-composed musical set in 1963, Caroline, or Change (2003), which Chansky pithily describes as a work that “portrays tension within a maid/mistress household, the difference between the households of the two, and how historic distance can deflect assessment of present-day problems” (504). Chansky concludes her study with Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House (2005), a play focusing on the relationship between an upper-class white woman and her Brazilian maid, Ana, who is depressed and refuses to clean. This perceptive comedy brings kitchen sink realisms, as a genre, into an age of globalization. While the second-wave feminist struggle for the right to participate equally in the public sphere has largely been achieved, this seismic shift has resulted in a need for imported domestic care. What was once a local division of labor among the predominately white middle classes has now become global division of labor between a developed world in need of domestic laborers and developing world in need of better economic opportunities and living conditions. So just what does a kitchen sink signify onstage? How does it communicate gender, class, ethnicity, and Americanness? And how do these codes of social identity relate to broader public debates around the value of domestic work, the changing demands of the marketplace, and the erosion of “the good life”? The answers to these questions vary vastly, it turns out, depending on the historical context. Whereas in the early twentieth century, a clean kitchen with a live-in servant cooking the meals signified middle class-ness, in the late twentieth century, it might suggest a global division of feminized labor. Chansky’s nuanced, rigorously contextualized readings of both canonical and non-canonical plays provide a rich resource not only for theatre scholars, but also for Americanists interested in adding to their understanding of the social texture of the twentieth century. This immensely satisfying study will be of great value to those working in theatre history, feminist theory and theatre, and American studies, and is equally suitable for upper class undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars. Impressive in both its historical scope and interpretive depth, Kitchen Sink Realisms is an important contribution to scholarship in American drama. References Footnotes About The Author(s) JOANNA MANSBRIDGE Bilkent University 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 Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Comment Historical Subjectivity and the Revolutionary Archetype in Amiri Baraka's The Slave and Luis Valdez's Bandido! Calculated Cacophonies: The Queer Asian American Family and the Nonmusical Musical in Chay Yew's Wonderland August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle: Critical Perspectives on the Plays. Edited by Sandra G. Shannon. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016; Pp. 211. Performance, Identity, and Immigration Law: A Theatre of Undocumentedness. By Gad Guterman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014; Pp. 236. Kitchen Sink Realisms: Domestic Labor, Dining, and Drama in American Theatre. By Dorothy Chansky. Theatre History and Culture Series. Series editor Heather Nathans. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015; Pp. 620. Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: Body, Brain and Being. Edited by Nicola Shaugnessy. London: Bloomsbury, 2013; Pp. 300. Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience. Edited by Clelia Falletti, Gabriele Sofia, and Victor Iacono. Performance and Science: Interdisciplinary Dialogues Series. Series editors: John Lutterbie and Nicola Shaugnessy. London UK, New York NY: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 260. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Paul Gagliardi Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 1 Visit Journal Homepage The Illusion of Work: The Con Artist Plays of the Federal Theatre Project Paul Gagliardi By Published on December 11, 2017 Download Article as PDF In a chapter of her memoir on her tenure as leader of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), Hallie Flanagan details the trials and tribulations of staging plays in New York City. While much of the chapter explores the controversies over certain plays and the successes of others, Flanagan dedicates a portion of that chapter to recalling some of the more outlandish plays produced by her unit in New York (and elsewhere). In between praise for the “insane moments” of a production of Dance of Death and for “the inspired lunacy” of Horse Eats Hat, Flanagan describes another play which she appears to consider outrageous: the confidence artist play Help Yourself by Paul Vulpius which “created comedy from its situation of the unemployed young man brightly hanging up his hat in a bank where he had no job and becoming the leading expert in a land deal that never existed in fact.” [1] The fact that the FTP staged a play featuring a man swindling a bank seems curious given that the con has historically been condemned by commentators and that, at least outwardly, the con does not seem to bear the hallmarks of work, especially given, as David Kennedy notes, the prevailing principle for Franklin Roosevelt’s programs “was work.” [2] While a play featuring a man swindling a bank may have contradicted the prevailing ideology of the New Deal, plays that featured confidence artists—defined as any person who defrauds or outwits another person or group by gaining their confidence—were hardly unusual in the FTP. [3] In addition to Help Yourself , the FTP staged John Murray and Allen Boertz’s Room Service , which was the basis for a Marx Brothers film of the same name, wherein a Broadway producer named Gordon Miller engages in a series of ruses to prevent his theatrical company from being thrown out of a hotel by management while he attempts to secure funding for their latest production. Similarly, in John Brownell’s The Nut Farm, an aspiring film director named Willie Barton outwits a shady film producer by taking control of the project and outwits the producer by selling the film to a Hollywood studio. [4] And, in Lynn Root and Harry Clork’s The Milky Way , a promoter fixes a series of boxing matches in which a scrawny milkman wins the middleweight championship. While Flanagan often promoted popular fare like the con artist plays (she frequently mentions various productions of Help Yourself in her memoir and was eager to praise similar plays during her tenure), popular plays like these have not garnered the attention of critics or scholars. For then-contemporary reviewers, the FTP con artist plays were often dismissed, in part, because they considered the plays farces, or cheap commercial fare, and they were often more inclined to write about the more controversial socially-minded theatre the FTP was producing. Meanwhile, scholars have rarely analyzed these plays; Help Yourself is dismissed as “a very mild comedy” by Malcolm Goldstein, [5] while Barry Witham employs the audience reports of the Seattle Unit’s Help Yourself as a way to gauge the socio-economic makeup of that theater’s audience. [6] Indeed scholars like Witham, Loren Kruger, and Rena Fraden have focused their efforts on the more radical and avant-garde plays performed by the agency—such as the Living Newspaper plays or Orson Welles’s productions—that were a small percentage of the overall number of productions. Recent studies such as Elizabeth Osborne’s Staging the People: Community and Identity in the Federal Theatre Project and Leslie Elaine Frost’s Dreaming America: Popular Front Ideals and Aesthetics in Children’s Plays of the Federal Theatre Project have contributed to FTP scholarship by examining how under-analyzed plays fit into the agency’s complicated history, but overall, comic plays are deemphasized in these works. Yet while discussions of these plays are rare, the con artist plays of the FTP were some of the agency’s most complex works and, as I hope to demonstrate in this essay, are worthy of continued study. To accomplish this, I will focus on two of the more popular con artist plays, The Milky Wa y and Help Yourself. While the plays do promote the importance of employment and hard work, they also invite their audiences to act as participants in the con of the stage, providing agency to Depression-era audiences. At the same time, these plays also reminded audiences of the problematic nature of both the American Dream in the 1930s and the dangers that tolerance of confidence artists by institutions like the banking industry still held for Americans. The Con Artist and the Federal Theatre Project: Yet despite the ideological problems presented by the con artist, one can also see the appeal of these plays for the FTP. First, Flanagan’s belief that the FTP should embrace the “geography, language origins, history, tradition, custom, occupations of the people” in its theatre aligns with regional, historical, and cultural ubiquity of the confidence artist narrative. [7] Tales of confidence men and women in American culture can be traced back to the founding of the Republic and writers, playwrights, and producers frequently centered their works on the exploits of swindlers of all types. The con artist plays were also primarily written by then-contemporary American playwrights (except for Help Yourself ) and helped fulfill Flanagan’s aim of promoting new voices in the theatre. Yet another reason why these plays likely appealed to the FTP was that they could be used to temper criticism of the agency. In one sense, producers could illustrate a collective sense of humor on the agency’s behalf by staging plays like Room Service and The Nut Farm with their less-than-flattering portrayals of actors. Additionally, given long standing connections between the confidence scheme and theatre in American culture, the theme embedded in these plays that actors and con artists were not that dissimilar may have resonated with audiences. [8] The con artist plays were also more conservative in nature than many of the radical plays the agency was known for producing. Throughout its run, the FTP was accused of promoting leftist productions by critics in the press and the Republican Party; while the agency did produce a relatively small number of Living Newspaper plays and other shows that did contain radical themes, Flanagan and her producers continually had to deal with accusations from their critics that they were promoting leftist or communist plays. As such, the agency could have staged con artist plays to deflect some of these criticisms because these works could be read by audiences and critics as promoting a safe version of the con. For starters, the plays often feature swindles that are, as Flanagan said, “outlandish”: from outfoxing a nation of boxing fans to declaring one just works at a bank, the plots of this plays border on the absurd and appear to lack any realism. Moreover, there are no real victims in the plays: in contrast to real-life swindles such as Ponzi schemes, the marks of the con artists benefit from the deception (the bankers and employees of the brick factory in Help Yourself , the hotel manager and the acting troupe in Room Service ), or are implicit in the con (boxing fans in The Milky Way ). But perhaps most importantly, the plays feature characters whose goal is employment; for them, the confidence game is a means to an end. For example, in both The Milky Way and Help Yourself , the plays conclude with the the swindler characters getting full-time work in a dairy and a bank respectively. In addition to promoting the importance of employment, the plays also feature characters who dedicate themselves fully to their labors, reinforcing work ethic norms. The connection between swindling and traditional work is not unusual, as both scholars and confidence artists have understood the con as another form of work. As Joseph Maurer asserts, many confidence artists find they must dedicate themselves fully to their con, such as being versed in “business and financial matters, have a glib knowledge of society gossip, and enough of an acquaintance with art, literature, and music to give an illusion of culture.” [9] Similarly, the con artists in these plays have to dedicate an often impressive amount of effort to maintain their illusions, from toiling to complete a film ( The Nut Farm ), to studying the performances of a banker ( Help Yourself ). While the appeal of con artist plays to the FTP may have been in their outward approval of more conservative ideals, members of agency also likely understood the more subversive nature of the plays. In one sense, it seems that FTP workers sought to restore the character of the con artist to its more heroic status, similar to how Flanagan aimed to restore theatre to its cultural status of the late nineteenth century. Indeed, there existed an interesting parallel between the character of the confidence artist and theatre during the 1930s, as modernity had changed how Americans viewed both. Whereas the rise of cinema and radio as popular entertainments had helped diminish the importance of theatre in the minds of Americans, the lingering effects of the First World War and the Great Depression altered how the American public viewed confidence artists. While the con artists in nineteenth-century culture were emblematic of an optimistic country, the confidence artists that appear in American culture after 1920, like Jay Gatsby, Miss Lonelyhearts, and Elmer Gantry, are “painful victims betrayed by a vision of the new country that retains only the power to delude rather than to fulfill.” [10] And for the most part, the con artists in these plays swindle heroically, trying to protect their associates or families, or attempting to outwit institutions that were unpopular during the Depression. These plays provided the FTP the opportunity to give a measure of agency to its audiences. As Elizabeth Osborne notes, Flanagan believed that her agency should provide “economic, physical, and psychological relief” to both actors and audiences. [11] And the confidence plays could have afforded audiences the opportunity to have their spirits “uplifted,” as Flanagan often noted. This effect partially came from the confidence tales themselves, as historically Americans have long admired the confidence artist’s daring and risk—especially through the reading of literature and in the retelling of tall tales or other stories—while celebrating the plodding determination of the self-made man in ceremony. [12] However, the confidence artist plays of the FTP seem to have reversed that dynamic, as the plays invited their audiences to participate in the art of deception by enjoying their complicity as “shills” who are enjoying seeing richer, less unaware marks being deceived on-stage. In his essay on the production history of Room Service , Sebastian Trainor draws on the work of Raymond Williams and Mark Fearnow to assert that the play’s long term success (it was frequently staged through the 1950s and saw revivals in the 1990s) may have resulted “from an audience’s failure to realize that the tale portrayed the artful manipulation of the American capitalist system by the agents of an emergent ideology.” Yet Depression audiences “likely derived considerable ‘Freudian pleasure’ from witnessing the abuse of authority figures on stage” and the farcical con artist plays gave audiences the agency to engage in such fantasies. [13] Yet perhaps the most significant reason why the FTP staged so many con artist plays was because they provided the FTP another opportunity to comment upon the socio-economic issues of the Depression. In part, this is because the character has long afforded artists and writers to note, as Gary Lindberg argues, that “the boundaries [of the social structure] are already fluid, [and] that there is ample space between society’s official rules and its actual tolerances.” [14] In particular, Help Yourself and The Milky Way illustrate the long standing intersection between the con and capitalism, investigating economic themes similar to those of the Living Newspaper plays like One Third a Nation , Power , or Triple-A Plowed Under . Scholars have often noted that there is often little to no difference between the labor of the con artist and the work of “the self-made man” that is praised in American rhetoric. For example, Stephen Mihm asserts that conning and finance are “to a certain extent,” interlocked, as “the story of one is the story of the other.” [15] He argues that it is a testament to the mythology of the work ethic that it has persisted in society when dishonest swindling has been favored by Americans rather than the “plodding, methodical, gradual pursuit of wealth.” [16] Instead, Mihm argues that the true American financial ethos “captures the get-rich-quick scheme, the confidence game, and the mania for speculation” that obsessed not just antebellum America, but that continues to grip American society into this day. [17] With their representation of socio-economic issues, the con, and the intersections between them, plays like Help Yourself and The Milky Way afforded the FTP another opportunity to challenge audiences; while not as overt in addressing the audience as the Living Newspaper plays, The Milky Way and Help Yourself still offered their audiences complex themes that also implicated all levels of society and forced audience members to reevaluate the myths they believed in and their complicity in the dangerous cons. [18] The Milky Way While its popularity has fluctuated since its inception in the late nineteenth-century, professional wrestling in the United States (and elsewhere) remains one of the most popular confidence games. As Susan Maurer explains in her analysis of wrestling, professional wrestlers relish their participation as members of an elaborate confidence game, selling audiences their roles, personas, and the narratives in an environment that generally preaches the concept of “kaybabe” (the illusion that the performances and actions in and around the ring are real). [19] As Roland Barthes writes in his seminal essay on professional wrestling, the spectator of a wrestling match must attach meaning to the outcome of a match not based on the science of who won or lost, but on the match’s moment within a grander narrative. Barthes writes, “The public is completely uninterested in knowing whether the contest is rigged or not, and rightly so; it abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle, this is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not what it thinks but what it sees.” [20] The observations of Mazar and Barthes on professional wrestling help explain the significance of the FTP productions of The Milky Way . Like other plays of its type, the play centers on an outrageous swindle (in this case in the world of boxing), but the believability of the con is not an issue here. Like the professional wrestling audience, the fictional and real audiences in and of the play are shills of the confidence artists of The Milky Way and enjoy taking part in the con. This provided Great Depression audiences a form of agency in times when many Americans questioned their own power. And while the play appears to reinforce traditional norms of work and success, The Milky Way subtly challenges the continued validity of myths like the American Dream. The Milky Way centers on a seemingly ludicrous con in the boxing world. At the beginning of the play, a middleweight boxer, Speed McFarland, is accidently knocked out by his drunken trainer during an argument. However, newspapers report that a meek and mild-mannered milkman named Burleigh Sullivan who happened to be near McFarland and his trainer knocked out McFarland. To protect his boxer’s reputation, McFarland’s manager, Gabby Sloan, decides to send Sullivan on a whirlwind tour of the United States where the milkman will appear in a series of staged fights (even Sullivan is unaware the fights are fake) in which he “knocks out” his opponents in the first round. With each succeeding fight, Sullivan’s fame grows, and Sloan decides to have McFarland and Sullivan fight in a staged bout in which Sloan and his cronies can bet heavily in favor of McFarland. However, Sullivan accidently knocks-out McFarland with an elbow to the head during the match. Having bet their life savings on the fight, the manager and his cohorts believe they will end up destitute, until Sullivan announces that he bet on himself and will buy a milk dairy with his winnings and happily give his friends jobs. Originally staged on Broadway in 1936, Root and Clork’s play was performed nine times by the FTP in 1938: Holyoke and Salem, Massachusetts; New York City; Los Angeles; Portland, Oregon; San Diego; Denver; and two productions in Manchester, New Hampshire. While the FTP staged the play rather frequently, press coverage of these productions is limited. [21] In many respects, the FTP productions of The Milky Way appear to have suffered from the competition of a major Hollywood adaptation, as The Milky Way was adapted for the screen by Paramount in 1936. Directed by Leo McCarey, the film starred the famous silent comedian Harold Lloyd, and many reviewers of the FTP production appear to have preferred Lloyd’s version. According to a review from the Los Angeles Evening News , the film was far superior to any stage production. The reviewer writes, “At best, the Lynn Root and Harry Clork comedy, which made a choice film vehicle for Harold Lloyd, would seem pretty flat in any stage production.” [22] In places like Manchester and Salem, productions garnered little attention from the press while reviewers of other productions found the play to be not worthy of serious attention. A member of the audience for the Portland production found the play to be trivial. The unnamed reviewer believed that “regular audiences, accustomed to serious theatre, were apathetic to this show” and some “individuals were critical of our doing a ‘trivial’ show, contrasted the bill unfavorably with Prologue to Glory, One Third a Nation , etc.” [23] Meanwhile, an unnamed reviewer for the San Diego Union noted in his or her 1938 review that the play’s authors had written a text that, while humorous and representative of the boxing world was simply entertainment. The reviewer notes, “We are ready to believe the funniest possible stories about the fighting ring promoters, champions and their trainers, but Lynn Root and Harry Clork have written a three act play that . . . is merely something to be enjoyed.” [24] One of the interesting elements of this “trivial” show was how problematic the con scheme is in The Milky Way . Boxing has long fostered the con as fixed matches have long dogged the sport. However, Sloan’s con is complicated by the fact that the key member of his scheme, Burleigh Sullivan is a terrible shill for the majority of the play, especially in terms of his performances. In his autobiography, the boxer Jake LaMotta, the inspiration for the film Raging Bull , explains that the most important aspect of throwing a fight was selling it in the ring. Recounting his infamous thrown fight with Billy Fox in 1947, LaMotta explains a successful fixed fight must, like other cons, be predicated on a near-flawless performance: I’ll also tell you something else about throwing a fight. The guy you’re throwing to has to be at least moderately good. . . . I thought the air from my punches was affecting him, but we made it to the fourth round. By then if there was anybody in the Garden who didn’t know what was happening he must have been dead drunk. There were yells and boos all over the place. Dan Parker, the Mirror guy, said the next day that my performance was so bad he was surprised the actors Equity didn’t picket the joint. [25] While Sloan is an experienced con man who is skilled at flattering boxers, promoters, and fans, Sullivan is depicted as too naïve and honest to be fully in on the con. Not only does Sullivan consistently bemoan the dishonesty of the scheme, but also he is woefully underprepared for his role. When a reporter asks Sullivan about his possible connection to the famous boxer John L. Sullivan, Sullivan responds that he has never heard of the man, which makes Sloan claim that the milkman is just joking. He exclaims, “That’s a good one! Quote that—‘The contender, with a sardonic smile and a twinkle in his eye.’ . . . He’ll clown like that with you all day.” [26] Additionally, the playwrights portray Sullivan as someone who does not even resemble a professional boxer in either appearance or performance. In his character description in the play and in FTP performance stills, Sullivan is a wiry, un-toned, and bespectacled figure who does not look like a professional athlete. In particular, the Los Angeles production of the play frequently dressed the actor in Sullivan’s role in loose sleeveless t-shirts that emphasized the character’s lack of muscle mass. Moreover, Sullivan’s in-ring performances are even weaker. During his first fight, Sullivan begins the bout with his bathrobe on. Later, in his fight with McFarland, Sullivan needs to be “boosted into the ring” like a child because he has trouble with the ropes and becomes entangled in them and his boxing style consists of incredibly awkward jabs and ducking of punches. [27] Yet while both fans and the press covering his bout condemned LaMotta’s fight, the obviously staged fights in The Milky Way do not garner such criticism from fans or media within the play, a fact made all that more complicated given Sullivan’s lack of strength and ability. In particular, the media covering Sullivan’s fights seem to be fully deceived by the bouts. One newspaper article declares that the milkman was born for the role: “Sullivan’s a natural. A born fighter. Cheered as he left the stadium.” [28] Nor is it just the press that is taken by the act: boxing patrons are completely taken with Sullivan’s performance. Audiences seem especially enamored with Sullivan’s ability to hop and duck around the ring and his knockout punch, which is a “right you can see comin’ from the dollar seats.” [29] Even during Sullivan’s title bout with McFarland (which ends in roughly sixteen seconds after McFarland knocks himself out by falling into Sullivan’s elbow) the radio announcers describe a crowd that does not boo or jeer the sudden outcome. Such a reaction seems muted in contrast to typical reactions to real boxing dives from journalists and fans. As noted earlier in this section, many of the fans, reporters, referees, and officials in attendance at some of boxing’s most infamous thrown fights were aware that they were seeing a fix, including Jake La Motta’s fight, during which calls of “fix” and “scam” rained down from the angry crowd at Madison Square Garden. However, there is a broader implication of Sullivan’s performances and of the audience’s acceptance of them. In particular, The Milky Way shows a con perpetrated on institutions. The con artists of the play symbolically subvert the power structures of the era. Not only does the complicit audience of Sullivan’s fights read his bouts as a triumph over adversity, but also as counter-con of the boxing establishment. After having been treated to a litany of fixed matches, the audiences (and perhaps even the press) within the play are celebrating their own complicity in a con that literally subverts the boxing industry and the media and metaphorically outwits other social institutions. While the believability of the play might be suspect, the theme of a fictional audience performing and participating in a confidence scheme against an institution likely would have resonated with Depression audiences. For workers and audience members used to the swindles of capitalism, the staged narrative of workers flaunting their own cons to industries and institutions that had been swindling them for ages must have been a pleasurable experience. Yet if the reactions of the boxing fans in The Milky Way are read in terms of the performances of professional wrestling, the fans’ embrace of Sullivan speaks to their need to find meaning in his bouts. The fans’ embrace of the obvious swindling in front of them signals that they read these performances not as an athletic competition, but as a staged narrative like professional wrestling that holds mythological implications. And the myth that The Milky Way is wrestling with is the American Dream. Like other con artist plays as well as many plays produced by the Children’s Theatre Unit of the FTP that Leslie Elaine Frost argues balanced ideals of model citizenry with an increasing apprehension over declining American fortunes, The Milky Way illustrates both the idealized and problematic American Dream through its portrayal of Sullivan. [30] In one sense, his story is a near-perfect representation of the American Dream, as Sullivan achieves fame and fortune and uses his winnings to purchase a dairy and provide jobs to his former con artists. Yet the model actions of Sullivan, as well as his procurement of the American Dream, is undercut by the play. Despite his pluck and hard work as a milkman, the play provides us no sense that Sullivan would have been able to maintain his station in life by working for the dairy; indeed, given the nature of many other FTP plays that addressed economic issues, it is likely that audiences would have understood Sullivan’s hold on his employment as tenuous at best. Moreover, Sullivan is only able to achieve the American Dream through a confidence scheme that not only requires the assistance of trainers, boxers, media members, and complicit national audience, but also his willingness to gamble on a staged fight rather than working hard and saving his winnings. While the play outwardly showcases a model American who achieves the American Dream, The Milky Way also illustrates the public’s fear over “viability of the American . . . economic system” and the American Dream itself. [31] Help Yourself Intellectuals in the United States have long privileged the plodding, diligent worker. For example, in his autobiography, Ben Franklin celebrates the accumulation of his wealth and the ability of a man to retire from business. But as Gary Lindberg suggests, Franklin wanted work to be treated as pleasurable because while gaining wealth has its benefits, for Franklin, the greater joy is the game of business. Lindberg explains: The model self feels exhilarated less by final rewards than by the immediate sense of competition and play . . . living for and in the amusement of the present performance. . . . The skillful player can move easily from one game to another, say from business to politics, as he senses more invigorating play or more interesting or satisfying competition. [32] While Lindberg makes clear that Franklin does not openly advocate diddling or conning, he hypothesizes that Franklin would have understood the thrill of swindling. In particular, Lindberg argues that Franklin believes one should only adopt new roles in business or in life once “the game” has lost its appeal, just as many con artists felt the need to change their roles when their work was done. The play Help Yourself shows a kind of Franklin-esque hero who manages to play at work and business by adopting and playing the role of a banker. Yet this play is not simply about workers adopting a more playful approach to their labor. In the context of the 1930s, the play is both a satirical examination of the banking industry and the tendency of Americans in any number of fields to act as confidence artists. More significantly, the play demonstrates the prevalence of the confidence scheme in American society and warns its audience about their complicity in ignoring the more dangerous confidence schemes such as the games played by the bankers in the play and in real life. Help Yourself centers on an unemployed man named Chris Stringer who wanders into a bank where his college friend Frank is a clerk. Much to Fred’s chagrin, Stringer sits at a desk and begins to work without holding a position in the company. When Fred accurately asserts that Stringer has no business training, Stringer writes up a false business memo regarding a defunct brick factory project, which leads to a meeting between his bank and a competing bank. While no one can remember the specifics of the proposal, Stringer convinces the trustees of the banks to move ahead with the project. As the project progresses, Stringer endears himself to the other employees of the bank by telling jokes, going to lunches, and dating the boss’s daughter, even though they cannot remember working with him. As the new brick factory nears completion—with additional support from the federal government—Stringer panics when he realizes that he has no employment record and will be fired, but a last-minute forgery by Fred and his girlfriend permits Stringer to stay on at the bank. At the play’s conclusion, Stringer earns a promotion to the vice presidency of the bank. [33] Given that it was produced by the FTP twenty-one times, Help Yourself left an extensive record of audience reception. [34] In its report to the FTP, the Omaha production stated the audience reaction was “very favorable,” [35] while the Des Moines report notes that many audience members left the theater repeating Stringer’s refrain of “up she goes!” [36] Meanwhile, a writer for the Boston Herald declares Help Yourself to be a “featherweight variation of the fairy tale about the Emperor’s new clothes” and “that only the most reactionary of audiences would see the political element in a harmless farce.” [37] Similarly, audience members of the Los Angeles production found the play to have provided some relief from the economic climate of the Depression, but demonstrated the limitations of theatre. As one reviewer noted, “This is an amusing way of presenting a social problem. But I don’t see the trials of the new generation being solved in this way except in the theatre.” [38] Commenting on the production of the play of by FTP Seattle, a writer for the University of Washington newspaper finds the play to be highly enjoyable, but imbued with a very serious message. She writes, “The spirit of 1929 is on the way back. The catch line of the play is ‘up she goes.’ . . . The play was not produced in the same era was Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing . A new spirit is on the march.” [39] The varied responses to Help Yourself can be explained by the play’s complicated portrayal of work and banking. Like other con artist plays produced by the FTP, the play represents more conservative ideals about employment and working. For example, not only does the play reinforce the importance of employment by having its main character procure a job, the play undermines the normal labor contract with Stringer happily working for free. When his friend asks him why he’s working without compensation, Stringer retorts that if he is not on the payroll, then he cannot get fired. If they try to cut his job, he will “keep right on working.” [40] From the perspective of employers, Stringer is the perfect employee, given that he is willing to work for free. Additionally, Stringer espouses a hyper-individualistic attitude toward work throughout the play. Stringer declares that he “changed from the unemployed to the employed not because I asked for work, but because I took it.” [41] Taking work, he reasons, was preferable to sitting idly by and waiting for work to come to him. At such moments, Stringer embodies the mythology of the self-made man. Stringer echoes these traditional views of work when he implores the bankers to proceed with the Kublinski account. He says, “We must go on working, as life goes on working. Not figure and ponder, but work. You must pick up the first packing-case you see with a shout of up she goes! ” [42] Yet despite its promotion of more business-friendly ideals, Help Yourself is far more critical of the banking system. And for audiences who likely would have suffered as the result of real-life banking policies, seeing such a representation would have given them both enjoyment and a semblance of agency. One such moment is when the bankers are swayed by Stringer’s rhetoric about work, in which the play satirizes the promotion of traditional work norms by nineteenth and twentieth-century capitalists. In the meeting between banks to discuss his business proposal, the bankers struggle to comprehend (or remember) the details of Stringer’s plan. Since he is able to detail some vague references about the fictional proposal, Stringer wins over the bankers by urging them to approve the plan through a speech that arouses the interests of the assembled businessmen. He says: Yes, gentlemen, that’s how we must begin today—“Up she goes.” This happy cry of the simple workman should be our slogan. Workers and employers, bakers and carpenters—“Up she goes!” Statesmen and politicians—Europe and America—“Up she goes!” In the mountains where the coal lies buried, in the ground where the treasures are hidden—up she goes—Out there, machines lying cold—“Up she goes.” Rusty shovels lie in the engine rooms—“Up she goes!” Damn it gentlemen, bang on the table—Forget about your positions—put aside your official expressions. [43] Stringer first heard the phrase “up she goes” while watching movers attempting to hoist a piano through a window. Stringer felt a physical reaction to watching the movers, and he says that “with much spirit my muscles began to itch to work” and he decided to just pick up a suitcase and help them carry items upstairs in the townhouse. [44] While the sight and sound of the laborers inspires Stringer to work, his evoking of the phrase “up she goes” compels the bankers to do the same. As the scene ends, the bankers dance out of the conference room shouting “up she goes” in unison. There is an irony to the fact that the actions of manual laborers compel the bankers (as well as Stringer) to act, and the play satirizes how proponents of traditional work ethics promoted the idea that work could provide workers with upward mobility when, ultimately, many workers would never achieve such aims. As such, the bankers are convinced to work by Stringer’s usage of language that parodies traditional work ethic rhetoric. In addition, Help Yourself satirizes the nature of business performance, portraying the bankers of the play who are easily duped through vague language and action. Throughout the play, Stringer is able to convince his colleagues of his legitimacy as a banker through a series of superficial gestures. While the line between the business realm and the con realm were often vague, the publication of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People in 1935 signaled a new emphasis on the performance of business. Karen Hatthunen argues that Carnegie’s manual, is a de facto guidebook to swindling one’s professional colleagues. According to Halttunen, “Carnegie’s purpose was to train men in a very special type of corporate salesmanship, ‘the salesmanship of the system selling itself to itself.’” [45] While Carnegie’s manual demonstrated how businessmen should perform to other businessmen, it also taught its readers how to convince themselves that they were performing their roles properly. In other words, Carnegie was also selling to his readers the spectacle of selling themselves to themselves, as if a reader were both the mark and the confidence man at the same time. This insincere performance is essential to Stringer’s con of the bank. By studying the “bank inside and out,” he has learned how to craft business proposals so ensconced in vague rhetoric that the bankers reading the proposal are inclined to accept it as is. In addition, Stringer manipulates his coworkers by evoking workplace rhetoric that persuades the other worker to react per the norms of the business world. [46] When someone asks Stringer if he is a new employee, Stringer replies that he has been at the bank for years, but had been working in another department. Stringer also provides vague details about himself, such as “I was the guy in the corner” or “I always ate ham and cheese sandwiches.” [47] Invariably, the other bank employees, after a brief pause, acknowledge that they remember Stringer. At points, Stringer is even able to tell “inside jokes” that his colleagues laugh at not because they understand, but because they are supposed to laugh at such jokes per the performance norms of the business world. While Help Yourself critiques banking culture, it also suggests that these performative elements in work extend beyond the banking industry. In stating part of his rationale for engaging in his con, Stringer claims that adopting a false persona is a game that everyone plays at. When his friend asks him why he is undertaking this scam, Stringer explains, “Just the illusion of working does something for you. Everyone plays at something—children play at being policemen—politicians at being statesmen. . . . Why shouldn’t I play at working?” [48] In one sense, Stringer’s statement echoes the Franklin’s belief that one must adopt new roles once their particular game has lost its appeal; Stringer also suggests through his words and actions that the solution to one’s working ills is to play your role and others will presume you are working. [49] Yet Stringer’s declaration that “everyone plays at something” seems to have be a signal for audiences to consider not only the importance of one’s sociological role, but also how prevalent false personas (and cons) such as politicians attempting to be statesmen are in society. And yet this play, like The Milky Way , offers readers a more complex and perhaps accusatory message in its conclusion. While the play seems to suggest that understanding a role gives you believability, Help Yourself also appears to assert that this form of conning is endemic in all institutions—not just banking or other businesses. Echoing the ideological stances of some of the Living Newspaper plays, Help Yourself suggests to audiences that they need to be aware of the dangers of the con Stringer pulled. While Stringer may have demonstrated daring in swindling the banks and procured jobs for other unemployed people, he nevertheless operated a far more dangerous confidence scheme than seen in The Milky Way : while Sullivan and his cohorts engage in a scheme in the entertainment world (although they do risk their own savings and the money of gamblers), Stringer’s swindle involves two separate banks and their respective investors as well as the government, and failure of this scheme would have likely endangered the money and jobs of other people. The danger of Stringer’s con is reinforced to the audience by how the play utilizes them. Whereas the real and fictional audiences of The Milky Way are (for the most part) in on the con, the bankers in Help Yourself are mainly unaware of how Stringer operates, while FTP audience members would have understood how little he knows about the banking industry and how his con succeeds through a considerable amount of chance. As such, when Stringer is promoted to vice president of the bank at the conclusion of the play, audiences are, on the one hand, encouraged to enjoy his success, but on another, unnerved by the bank’s inability to engage in due diligence with a powerful employee and the sense that Stringer will likely try another risky proposal in the future. Just as The Milky Way questioned the stability of the American Dream, Help Yourself presented to its working class and poor audiences a rather terrifying idea: that bankers—despite New Deal reforms—would engage in the same careless and risky practices that occurred in “the spirit of 1929.” Conclusion Hallie Flanagan believed that one of the aims of the FTP was to produce theatre that should be “socially and politically, aware of the new frontier in America, a frontier not narrowly political or sectional, but universal, a frontier along which tremendous battles are being fought against ignorance, disease, unemployment, poverty and injustice.” [50] Her ideal has often influenced critics and scholars to examine overtly radical plays like the Living Newspaper plays, the national production of It Can’t Happen Here , or the works of Orson Welles while downplaying farces, comedies, or other broad entertainments. And given that plays like The Milky Way and Help Yourself were in part farcical, outlandish tales that outwardly reinforced some traditional values, downplayed the appeal of the confidence scheme, or promoted the importance of employment, it is easy to see why researchers of the FTP have focused their efforts on other plays. However, plays like The Milky Way and Help Yourself were far more representative of the goals of the FTP than many critics have observed in the past. While the plays certainly featured more heroic con artists than other elements of American culture in the first half of the twentieth century, the performances of these plays permitted audiences to “get in on the con” as the characters on stage outwitted their foes. While granting their unemployed and lower-class audiences some necessary (if temporary) agency during the Depression, the plays also illustrated how endemic the confidence scheme was in American society, as actors, boxers, bankers, and most workers engaged in swindling of some form. But more importantly, these plays also addressed their audiences’ increasing anxiety over the decline of socio-economic status in the United States, as well as the dangers posed by unregulated institutions and workers. In this sense, the con artist plays of the FTP not only afforded audiences another opportunity to consider “the new frontier in America,” but did so under the guise of entertainment. Audiences may have been singing “up she goes!” as they left productions of con artist plays, but they were very likely also contemplating the meaning and their roles in the cons. References [1] Hallie Flanagan, Arena: The Story of the Federal Theatre (1940; New York: Limelight, 1985, 77. [2] David A. Kennedy, Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) 176. [3] I use the terms “swindler,” “con artist,” “confidence artist,” as well as “confidence scheme,” “con,” and “con game” interchangeably throughout this essay. Rather than “con man,” I mainly rely on the gender-neutral term confidence artist in these pages. [4] I provide an overview of the production history of The Milky Way and Help Yourself in their respective sections, but as an example of its popularity, despite competing with a major Hollywood film adaptation, Room Service was produced seven times in three years: Wilmington, North Carolina (1938), San Francisco (1938), San Diego (1938), New Orleans (1939), Denver (1936 & 1939), and Miami, Florida (1939). See George Mason University, The Federal Theatre Project: A Catalog-Calendar of Productions (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 135. The Nut Farm was less popular. On the FTP stage, the play was only performed twice in Manchester, New Hampshire, and Springfield, Illinois (neither of which appears to have attracted much, if any, press coverage). George Mason, The Federal Theatre Project , 113. [5] Malcolm Goldstein, The Political Stage: American Drama and Theatre of the Great Depressio n (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 268. [6] Barry Witham, The Federal Theatre Project: A Case Study (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 4. [7] Flanagan, Arena , 22-23. [8] For a discussion of the overlap between theatre and the con artists of medicine shows, see James Harvey Young, The Toadstool Millionaires: A Social History of Patent Medicines in America before Federal Regulation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961). [9] David Maurer, The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man (New York: Merril, 1940), 158. [10] William E. Lenz, Fast Talk & Flush Times: The Confidence Man as a Literary Convention (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985), 199. [11] Elizabeth Osborne, Staging the People: Community and Identity in the Federal Theatre Project (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 6. [12] Jackson Lears, Something for Nothing: Luck in America (New York: Penguin, 2003), 100. [13] Sebastian Trainor, “It Sounds Too Much Like Comrade”: The Preservation of American Ideals in Room Service ,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 20, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 29-49, 31. [14] Gary Lindberg, The Confidence Artist in American Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 9. [15] Stephen, Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 13. [16] Ibid., 13. [17] Ibid. [18] I use Elizabeth Osborne’s reading of the Living Newspaper play Spirochete as a model to thinking about the effect of The Milky Way and Help Yourself on their respective audiences. Osborne, Staging the People , 47. [19] Sharon Mazar, Professional Wrestling: Sport and Spectacle (Oxford, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1998). [20] Roland Barthes, Mythologies. trans. Annette Lewis (1952; repr., New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 15. [21] George Mason University, The Federal Theatre Project: A Catalog-Calendar of Productions (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 103. [22] “Review of The Milky Way .” Los Angeles Evening News, August 5, 1938. Box 1040, Los Angeles The Milky Way Folder, Federal Theatre Project Collection, Library of Congress, Washington DC). Hereby referred to as FTP LC. [23] “Audience Survey.” Ibid., Portland The Milky Way Folder. [24] Review of The Milky Way . San Diego Union , August 26, 1938. Ibid.,San Diego The Milky Way Folder. [25] Jake LaMotta, Raging Bull (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1970), 162. [26] Lynn Root and Harry Clork, The Milky Way (New York: Samuel French, 1936), 84. [27] Ibid., 98. [28] Ibid., 60. [29] Ibid., 64. [30] Leslie Ann Frost, Dreaming America: Popular Front Ideals and Aesthetics in Children’s Plays of the Federal Theatre Project (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013). See also Amy Brady, “Staging the Depression: The Federal Theatre Project’s Dramas of Poverty, 1935-1939” (PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, 2013). Brady details how “poverty dramas” of the FTP also represented lingering anxieties over the stability of the American Dream. [31] Frost, Dreaming America , 5. [32] Lindberg, The Confidence Artist in American Literature , 88. [33] Help Yourself was originally written after the First World War by the Austrian playwright Paul Vulpius. Vulpius was a somewhat popular playwright in Germany and Austria during the inter-war period, and was responsible for a popular play entitled Hau-rack ( Heave Ho!). According to Anselm Heinrich, a theatre group sympathetic to the Nazi Party wrote the Prussian Theatre Council in 1933 and inquired as to whether Vulpius was Jewish. Initially, the Theatre Council informed the group that Vulpius’ lawyer had informed them that Vulpius was Aryan. However, in 1934, the Prussian Theatre Council declared Vulpius to be a “non-Aryan,” quoted in Anselm Henrich, Entertainment, Propaganda, Education: Regional Theatre in Germany and Britain Between 1918 and 1945 (Herefordshire: University of Herefordshire Press, 2007), 121-22.Vulpius appears to have relocated to England at some point during the 1930s where his play Youth at the Helm was adapted into a 1936 British film entitled Jack of All Trades which centers on a con man who fakes his way through a series of jobs in order to help his sick mother. Vulpius is credited as a writer on a 1950 BBC version of Youth at the Helm which, according to the BFI, is nearly identical to the plot of Help Yourself . [34] Help Yourself was performed twenty-one times by the FTP: New York City, Syracuse, and White Plains, New York (1936); San Bernardino, California (1936); Peoria, Illinois (1936); Los Angeles (1937); Springfield, Massachusetts (1937); Denver (1937); Omaha, Nebraska(1937); Cincinnati (1937); San Francisco (1937), Wilmington, Delaware (1937); Des Moines, Iowa (1937); New York City (1937); Salem, Massachusetts (1937); Boston (1937), Bridgeport, Connecticut (1937); Philadelphia (1937); Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania (1937); Seattle (1937), and Atlanta (1938), quoted George Mason University, The Federal Theatre Project: A Catalog-Calendar of Productions (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 71-72. [35] “Audience Reaction Report.” (Box 1016, Omaha Help Yourself Folder, FTP LC). [36] “Audience Reaction Report.” Ibid., Des Moines Help Yourself Folder . [37] Review of Help Yourself.” Boston Herald . 27 Jan.1937. Ibid., Boston Help Yourself Folder. [38] “Audience Reaction Report.” (Box 1015, Los Angeles Help Yourself Folder, FTP LC). [39] Mary Sayler, “ Help Yourself. ” University of Washington Daily , November 6, 1937 (Box 1016, Help Yourself Seattle Folder, FTP LC). [40] Paul Vulpius, Help Yourself . trans. John J. Coman (New York: Samuel French, 1936), 22. [41] Ibid., 18. [42] Ibid., 63, emphasis in original. [43] Ibid., 63. [44] Ibid., 12. [45] Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture In America, 1830-1870 (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1982), 185. [46] Ibid., 19. [47] Ibid., 16. [48] Ibid., 22-23. [49] In several respects, Help Yourself foreshadows How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and, as several colleagues have told me, many episodes of Seinfeld . [50] Flanagan, Arena , 372. Footnotes About The Author(s) Paul Gagliardi is currently a lecturer of American Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He has written for the online journal Howlround, and will have another essay appearing in the journal LATCH this winter. His research centers on portrayals of work in American theatre and literature, and he is working on a manuscript on work-comedies of the Federal Theatre Project. He earned his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue May Irwin American Musical Theater Musical Theatre Books New York's Yiddish Theater Chinese Looks Reclaiming Four Child Actors through Seven Plays in US Theatre, 1794-1800 The Illusion of Work: The Con Artist Plays of the Federal Theatre Project On Bow and Exit Music Legitimate: Jerry Douglas's Tubstrip and the Erotic Theatre of Gay Liberation Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

By Nehad Selaiha, Marvin Carlson | A stimulating eyewitness account of modern Egyptian drama by Nehad Selaiha. < Back More Information & Order Details To order this publication, visit the TCG Bookstore or Amazon.com. You can also get in touch with us at mestc@gc.cuny.edu Selected Essays: Plays and Playwrights Nehad Selaiha, Marvin Carlson Download PDF At once personal and scholarly, analytical and reflective, The Egyptian Theatre: Plays and Playwrights provides a stimulating eyewitness account of modern Egyptian drama, seen in its relation to Egyptian reality at different historical moments on the one hand, and to the art of making theatre on the other. Explore Other Books To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. See All Books

Lezlie Cross and Ariel Nereson, Guest Editors 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 Introduction: Embodied Arts Lezlie Cross and Ariel Nereson, Guest Editors By Published on May 13, 2019 Download Article as PDF This American Society of Theatre and Drama special issue of JADT offers four essays that reconsider the contours of the study of U.S. American performance through centering embodiment as the site where aesthetic values are developed, mobilized, and contested. Though all of the arts are arguably embodied, this special issue, by isolating “The Embodied Arts,” features scholarship about forms that foreground the body as the primary meaning maker. Our CFP was inspired by Nadine George-Graves’s proposal in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater (2015) that performance research might productively adopt an overarching rubric of “performative embodiment” to explain performance phenomena. [1] In coining this phrase, George-Graves sought to bridge what Kate Elswit calls “[t]he artificial divisions between the thing most often called ‘theatre’ and the thing most often called ‘dance’ in both academic and artistic spheres.” [2] Drawing on current scholarly energies around this interdisciplinary (or in George-Graves’s essay, “intradisciplinary”) concern, one of our central questions was: What might emerge as a coherent area of scholarly inquiry were disciplinary divisions forsaken in favor of metrics of legibility that arise not from genre but from the materials of performance phenomena themselves? The four essays featured in this issue demonstrate the efficacy of performative embodiment as a new metric to understand a diversity of performance events. The resultant collection of essays does much more than probe or surmount the generic academic divide between dance and theatre studies; it also offers a breadth of methodologies drawn from dance, theatre, and performance studies. The sites investigated by these four authors — Broadway, vaudeville, pageantry, and music videos — have historically incorporated both choreographed movement and mimetic action. As such, these sites are situated in the center of a proverbial venn diagram of performative embodiment. In a welcome shift, the four essays that compose this special issue refocused our initial call away from academic genre toward a more expansive examination of bodies in motion. The essays share a scholarly commitment to elucidating the interrelationships between body-based performances and what Susan Leigh Foster has termed “bodily theorics,” or a given historical moment’s normative and resistant modes of embodiment. [3] A focus on historically situated power dynamics emerges when these essays are examined collectively. Rather than evidencing an ideological project that equates identity politics with embodiment, this focus develops from a primary physics of choreography, wherein time and energy produce the power required to activate movement repertoires. All movement happens within sets of constraints; here, our authors consider U.S. American norms of bodily comportment as socio-cultural constraints that frame the choreographies their subjects generate and complicate. The essays therefore comment on the hierarchies of power embedded in embodied performances, opening up conversations about race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and size. All four essays engage with popular representations that challenge traditional aesthetic values about bodies in motion. Each essay articulates and argues against an ideal U.S. American form: the trim, athletic, disciplined, white body. Through their discussions of thin and fat bodies, bodies that trouble ideas of femininity, oppositional aesthetics of white and indigenous bodies, and the legacy of black female embodiment, the authors show how performing artists describe, interpret, and subvert established norms of bodily comportment through their embodied performances. Additionally, the authors’ serendipitous shared focus on forms of popular entertainment reveals a wide range of social and cultural implications of embodied performance. We interpret this emphasis on “popular” (though not always commercial) rather than “concert” performance as affirmation of the degree to which theories of embodiment structure the bodily lives of everyday people. Ryan Donovan’s investigation of Broadway casting practices in relation to body size and the widespread commodification of thinness opens our issue. “‘Must Be Heavyset’: Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies” contributes to a growing and compelling body of scholarship at the intersection of performance studies and fat studies, as well as the current and lively conversation on casting within performance studies. Utilizing an archive comprised of original interviews and voluminous press seen through theories of fat embodiment and performativity, Donovan carefully describes the process of workshopping and producing Hairspray for Broadway, a process wherein allegedly inclusive aims were hamstrung by commercial imperatives. Contextualizing Hairspray within historical and contemporary Broadway productions reveals an unsurprising yet critical emphasis on women’s body size and a concomitant mandate of thinness in order for female romantic desires to be culturally legible and, importantly, profitable. Donovan’s attention to not only the representational dynamics of these productions but also their pragmatics, including the language of fat stars’ contracts and the use of prosthetics, broadens his critique to include Broadway’s means of production as well as its narrative content and form. Donovan concludes that “The lack of fat actors cast in leading roles belies Broadway’s vision of itself as a fully inclusive institution, and the use of fat suits and contractual weight clauses has perpetuated fat stigma,” and, moreover, “[B]y not casting fat women outside of prescribed roles, Broadway musicals enforce a system of gendered bodily norms that police how all women act, consume, and labor in the U.S.” In “Unruly Reproductions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville,” Jennifer Schmidt demonstrates how female comics on the vaudeville stage used their embodied caricatures to fight against the superficialities of feminized consumer culture found in the theatre and print media of the late nineteenth century in the U.S. Schmidt places the performances of female mimics Cissie Loftus, Elsie Janis, and Gertrude Hoffmann in a critical conversation with the embodiment of femininity emblematized by the Gibson Girl and the women of Florenz Zeigfield’s Follies . For instance, Hoffmann’s burlesque of the Gibson girl included an exaggerated “kangaroo walk” which satirized the embodied impact of that “ideal” on the female form. Through rich archival details of their physical performances, Schmidt argues that these mimics, through their mockery of both feminine and masculine figures, brought attention to the manufactured nature of womanhood at the turn of the twentieth century. The women additionally disrupted the audience’s expectations of gender, by maintaining their “girlishness” even when creating caricatures of figures like President William McKinley. Schmidt demonstrates that, through these embodied forms of reproduction, Loftus, Janis, and Hoffmann created critical space which allowed them to comment on the representations of women in the celebrity culture of their time. Through a detailed examination of their repertories, Schmidt’s essay reveals the cultural and political potentials of embodied performance, by showing how the moving body can be a tool for creating critical parodies of popular culture. Shilarna Stokes’s essay “Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis ” reveals how Percy MacKaye’s symbolist pageant reinforced the processes of civilizing, and thereby Americanizing, both participants and observers through mass embodied practices of dance, gesture, and pantomime. In MacKaye’s view, the “emblematic design elements, allegorical plots, and figurative choreographies” he created in the masque were an essential element of what he called the “rituals of democracy.” Stokes shows how the hundreds of thousands of everyday people involved in the creation of MacKaye’s embodied performance, “were able to generate performative arguments about civic engagement, citizenship, and democracy” through their participation in the pageant. Through Stokes’ close analysis of the Masque , including a wealth of new archival research, she demonstrates how the pageant shaped St. Louisans’ conceptions of collectivity and directly influenced the newly expanded white population of the city. In her reading of the Masque, Stokes identifies three distinct choreographic modes of embodiment. She analyzes the pageant’s two modes of “playing Indian,” one which she terms “the ritualized” and the second “the savage,” arguing that these embodiments showed audience and performer alike “the difference between rational forms of collective self-organization and wild expressions of collective fervor.” The contrast between the two modes of “playing Indian” pointed St. Louisans’ toward acceptable forms of civic organization. The third mode she identifies, “playing pioneer,” modeled an ideal citizen who conformed to the “political and economic vision of city officials.” Through her detailed analysis, Stokes critically parses the fraught legacy of the Masque , revealing both MacKaye and the city officials’ aims for the piece as well as the impact of the pageant on the city and its citizenry. Finally, Dana Venerable’s essay “Collective Choreography for Weathering Black Experience: Janelle Monáe & The Memphis ‘Tightrope’ Dance” considers contemporary popular performance as a site of critical intervention in the daily repertoires of constrained embodiment experienced by black U.S. Americans. Venerable provides a detailed close reading of the popular music artist Janelle Monáe’s instruction of the “Tightrope,” a dance to accompany Monáe’s 2010 hit of the same name. Venerable locates Monáe in a genealogy of black female performance makers and theorists, emphasizing Katherine Dunham and Zora Neale Hurston, who share a project of performance as collective healing for marginalized black U.S. American communities. This genealogy is placed in conversation with contemporary theories of black experience developed by Arline Geronimus and Christina Sharpe that posit “weathering” as quotidian strategies for living in a climate of anti-blackness. Venerable argues that the “Tightrope” “acknowledges in its name and choreography the physical risk of black embodiment in the U.S. and enacts strategies of emotional stability, physical balance, spontaneity, and support as navigational tactics.” Her analysis is rooted in the moment of 2010 and she reads the “Tightrope” as responsive to both local dance scenes, particularly in Memphis, Tennessee, and national narratives of racialized embodiment activated by the Obama presidency. Venerable’s essay offers alternative lineages of influence that cross “high” and “low” dance and posit that distinctions in cultural production are secondary to tracking the omnipresence of the hostile environment within which black U.S. Americans live and create. These seemingly disparate essays, which interrogate entirely different landscapes and forms, create generative conversations about performance when gathered under the rubric of embodiment. By foregrounding disciplinary concerns in our CFP, we unwittingly replicated the generic binary of dance and theatre. Donovan, Schmidt, Stokes, and Venerable instead highlight the work which already takes place at the boundaries of what performance is and can be. In this way, the “Embodied Arts” issue gathers scholarship evidencing Elswit’s observation that “Once presumptions about form are suspended, even temporarily, all sorts of histories in the borderlands begin to emerge, and with them larger ecosystems of practice.” [4] By drawing on theoretical frames that consider embodiment as epistemological as well as historical, lived social choreographies, these authors raise the stakes of their respective analyses to include both representational and experiential dimensions of performative embodiment. This special edition ultimately seeks to spur a conversation around the proposal that we might do more to probe the cultural relevance of performance in the Americas thinking through, but not within, genre distinctions and disciplinary divides. This conversation has benefitted enormously from the guidance of Dorothy Chansky, President of the American Theatre and Drama Society, from the mentorship of JADT editors Naomi Stubbs and James Wilson, and from the members of our Editorial Board, who tirelessly and generously devoted their time and energy to furthering this discussion. We hope readers will engage the scholarship within this issue as they continue to reimagine the histories and theories of American performance. References [1] Nadine George-Graves, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater (New York: Oxford University Press), 2015: 5. [2] Kate Elswit, Theatre & Dance (London: Palgrave), 2018: 2. [3] Susan Leigh Foster, Choreographing History (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), 1995: 8. [4] Elswit (2018), 28. Footnotes About The Author(s) LEZLIE CROSS is an Assistant Professor at the University of Portland. Her published articles and book reviews appear in Theatre History Studies, Theatre Annual, Shakespeare Bulletin, The Journal of American Drama and Theatreand Theatre Survey as well as the book projects Women on Stage, Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom and Performing Objects and Theatrical Things. Lezlie is also a professional dramaturg who works at regional theatres across America. ARIEL NERESON is Assistant Professor of Dance Studies at the University at Buffalo – SUNY where she teaches across the MA, PhD, and MFA programs in Theatre & Dance. Her current book project, Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past, theorizes choreo-historiography as a method of understanding how movement makes, conveys, and reimagines historical narratives of race and nation. Her essays on movement and embodiment across dance and theatre can be found in American Quarterly, Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Studies in Musical Theatre, and in JADT, amongst others. Editorial Board for Special Issue: David Bisaha Meredith Conti Leah Lowe Inga Meier Robert Vorlicky Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction: Embodied Arts Collective Choreography for Weathering Black Experience: Janelle Monáe and The Memphis "Tightrope" Dance Unruly Reproductions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville "Must Be Heavyset": Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance. Stephanie Nohelani Teves. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018; Pp. 220. Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre. Cindy Rosenthal. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017; Pp. 198. In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement. La Donna L. Forsgren. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 200. Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina. Noe Montez. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017; Pp. 239 + xi. Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical. Kevin Winkler. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018; Pp. 368. Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past. Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter, eds. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018; Pp. 399. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Michelle Cowin Gibbs 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 Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Michelle Cowin Gibbs By Published on April 28, 2021 Download Article as PDF Best remembered as a novelist, fiction writer, essayist, and anthropologist, Zora Neale Hurston’s extensive work as a playwright has been largely overlooked in evaluating her contributions to Black theatre. Many of her plays were imagined lost until 1997, when the Library of Congress recovered a previously unknown body of her work that Hurston submitted for copyright between 1925 and 1944 as unpublished plays. [1] Rutgers University Press published the first full volume of Hurston’s plays in 2008. [2] Scholarly explorations of her playwriting legacy remain at a comparatively early stage. Yet, in those small number of plays published before 1997, including Color Struck (1926) , The First Ones (1927) and Mule Bone (1931) (co-authored with Langston Hughes), performance scholars can see a style of playwriting that presents a stark contrast to Hurston’s more popular contemporaries. Hurston was an anthropologist, auto-ethnographer, and playwright, and as such, many of her plays featured characters that reappear across her collection. Her plays also included many of the same rituals and customs that she witnessed and participated in during her fieldwork in Black Southern folk communities. Along with exploring Black Southern folk vernacular in her dramas, Hurston also included songs, games, and other rituals such as popular word play performatives like signifying, woofing, and playing the dozens. Hurston’s exploration of Black Southern folk culture plays did not validate Eurocentricity as a necessary pre-condition for recognizing, understanding, and affirming Black experiences (an approach popular among her contemporaries, including Angelina Weld Grimké, Mary P. Burrill, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson). Hurston’s plays also often failed to fit within the parameters of the propagandistic style theatre aimed at racial uplift. Thus, for many scholars of Black theatre, Hurston’s early plays have eluded easy categorization. However, I argue that by using dramaturgical analysis to explore Hurston’s plays – particularly her focus on the community game popularized in many Black communities called “playing the dozens”—students of Black theatre can access a radically different set of Black folk characters for the stage aimed at reconfiguring prevailing models of blackness and Black womenness in the early twentieth century. This short essay offers some first steps towards developing a Black feminist dramaturgical lens to contextualize Hurston’s contributions to Black theatre. While my approach is still a work in progress, I hope that it will offer a catalyst for considering Hurston’s early plays in a different light, and for developing further discourses around Black feminist dramaturgy. Hurston developed a method of playwriting that drew upon her work as an anthropologist and auto-ethnographer to depict everyday Negro life in Black Southern rural communities. [3] In particular, she affirmed Southern Black folk women identity by depicting her women characters in ways that transcended familiar archetypes and stereotypes. [4] Hurston revealed Black women’s social networks in her plays, and even though few of her works were staged during her lifetime, the networks she depicted offer insight into larger processes of Black cultural formation. For example, in De Turkey and De Law (1930), a play based on a collection of short stories from Hurston’s field work as an anthropologist and auto-ethnographer ( The Bone of Contention and The Eatonville Anthology ), the audience sees Black women who negotiate the intersections of sexism and personal autonomy in their community on a daily basis. Exploring Hurston’s dramaturgy here suggests how her field research could have contributed to the ways audiences, particularly Black women, saw themselves onstage during a time when minstrelsy attempted to strip our humanity from us. Hurston included Black Southern folk rituals and customs that also contributed to how these practices nuanced conflict and character relationships in her plays. In De Turkey and De Law , Hurston presents the town of Eatonville that becomes divided when best friends, Dave (a Baptist) and Jim (a Methodist) fall in love with the same woman, Daisy. Tempers flare, and Jim assaults Dave with a mule bone. Jim is arrested and put on trial for assault, a trial presided over by the town’s major, Joe Clarke. The town’s Baptist and Methodist folks attend the trial. The Methodist women refuse to believe that Jim will get a fair trial since Mayor Clarke is a Baptist and the trial will take place in the Baptist church. The Baptist women want to make sure justice is served. The trial gets off to a rocky start when the Methodist women are bullied by the Baptists. The church men and women engage in what Hurston describes in Mules and Men as playing the dozens, [5] a comical exchange of personal insults and verbal attacks. [6] Like other rituals she observed during her field research in Eatonville, playing the dozens is a dramatic device that helps to authenticate and ground character interactions. These verbal battles reveal both the power structures of the community as well as the complex network of personal relationships, marital relationships, gendered power structures, and perhaps most importantly, the rituals that govern their interactions. The purpose of the game, according to cultural historian Lawrence W. Levine, is to “display linguistic virtuosity for an audience of peers.” [7] In Turkey , the dozens is a way for Hurston to explore character relationships and dynamics that also contribute to the conflict in the play. For example, the game is usually played by only men, but in Turkey , both women and men play the game, which contributes to the animosity and antagonisms. Whereas the Baptist men and women want the trial to continue from their position of power in the church, the Methodist women use the dozens to push for accountability and fairness by attempting to discredit and shut down anyone that would marginalize their voices. They always stop just short of physical violence. While characters playing the dozens may make verbal threats toward each other, the purpose of the dozens is not to cause physical harm to one’s opponent. The dozens provide a nonviolent method for social control and community advocacy. [8] Rather than settling grievances using physical force, players advocate for themselves and the communities using verbal duels. [9] For example, when Mayor Clarke threatens the women with physical harm by sending in the bailiff, Lum Bailey, Hurston uses the dozens to dismantle male authority. She sows the seed of doubt over Bailey’s ability to actually, as Clarke commands, “shut dem women up or put ‘em outta here.’” [10] Methodist women, Sister Taylor and Sister Lewis, use their familial relationship with Bailey to remind him that they are his mother-figures and elders and can easily “knock every nap of yo’ head one by one.” [11] Lum Bailey retreats and the women celebrate a victory until Mayor Clarke steps in. Mayor Clarke operates from a position of power in the community. In the heated exchange between the Methodists and Baptists, Mayor Clarke remains an outsider in the game because of his relationship to the community. He does not see himself as part of the community so much as he is in charge of the community. He will not respect the nuances of the game and sees the women as a distraction rather than advocating for their right to have a voice in the community. In the same scene, Mayor Clarke admonishes Sister Nixon for talking during the trial. She turns on him and says, You can’t shut me up, not the way you live. When you quit beatin’ Mrs. Mattie and dominizing her all de time, then you kin tell other folks what to do. You ain’t none of my boss. Don’t let you’ wooden God and corn-stalk Jesus fool you now. Not de way you sells rancid bacon for fresh.[12] Sister Nixon challenges Mayor Clarke by using his immoral actions toward his wife against him. Perhaps more importantly, she reveals the intimate sharing of knowledge across the community and the way in which that knowledge confers power. Clarke does not dispute Nixon’s claims, but his anger at having been called out ripples throughout the courtroom. Sister Nixon’s husband tries to smooth things over, by pleading with her,” Aw honey, hush a while, please, and less git started.” [13] Sister Nixon obliges her husband and sits down. The trial continues. Although, it may seem that Sister Nixon yields to her husband, I believe Hurston gives the women more agency than initially appears. Sister Nixon does not apologize for her comments, and the other women in the play also feel free to speak out when they perceive an injustice or believe they are being treated unfairly. Hurston uses the trial to present a community of dynamic, smart, witty, Black women, unafraid to challenge traditional gender norms. Hurston’s depictions of Black women playing the dozens allow audience members to see the characters as more fully human onstage. [14] She uses the dozens as a way to inform a more realistic and empowered depiction of Black women that I argue, also, demonstrates her incorporation of her field research into her creation of Black women characters. [15] In Turkey , Hurston centers Black women’s autonomy and helps Black women see a representation of themselves (or their ancestors) onstage. For today’s audiences, Turkey highlights how Hurston dramatized her everyday interactions with Black folks and gave space for characters to explore Black expression onstage. [16] In tracing connections between Hurston’s ethnographic fieldwork and her playwriting, I have proposed a way of analyzing her plays that includes considering how Black Southern folk rituals and customs, such as playing the dozens, contributes to how contemporary scholars understand conflict and character relationships among Black men and women in De Turkey and De Law . In many ways, this form of Black feminist dramaturgy represents a paradoxical subject for this type of analysis of Hurston’s theatre. Black feminist dramaturgy looks at play analysis and intentionality in performance . It centers the audience’s response to the work, and in Hurston’s case, it also highlights her process of exploring Black women’s autonomy by distilling her field research into a theatrical experience. And yet, the majority of Hurston’s plays have never been produced. Outside of a few productions of some of her more well-known works, [17] contemporary scholars have had few opportunities to experience Hurston’s theatre in rehearsal and performance spaces. For me, this is where Black feminist dramaturgy truly lives. The process of playing the dozens demands an audience to witness and affirm the ritual being enacted. These interchanges reveal deep layers of oral folk culture that offer interactive experiences for both performers and audience members–I hope that they will ultimately inspire a Hurston revival in the Black theatre. References [1] William Triplett, “Hurston Plays Discovered; Find at Library of Congress May Shed New Light on Black Writer,” The Washington Post , 24 April 1997, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1997/04/24/hurston-plays-discovered/70a6c41e-983b-4226-8597-8d0c2f620403/ [2] Jean Lee Cole and Charles Mitchell, Zora Neale Hurston: Collected Plays (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008), xv. [3] Jennifer Staple. “Zora Neale Hurston’s Construction of Authenticity Through Ethnographic Innovation,” The Western Journal of Black Studies 30, no. 1 (2006): 62, Gale Academic OneFile , https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A182035988/AONE?u=uiuc_iwu&sid=AONE&xid=a100cad1 (accessed 12 March 2021). [4] Henry Louis Gates Jr. “ Why the ‘Mule Bone’ Debate Goes on.” New York Times , 10 Feb 1998, https://www.nytimes.com/1991/02/10/theater/theater-why-the-mule-bone-debate-goes-on.html [5] Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (1935) (New York: 1 st Harper Perennial Modern Classic, 2008), 13. [6] Christine Levecq. “’You Heard Her, You Ain’t Blind’: Subversive Shifts in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 13, no. 1 (1994): 87-111, accessed 26 March 2021. doi:10.2307/463858. [7] Lawrence W. Levine. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 347. [8] Harry G. Lefever. “’Playing the Dozens’: A Mechanism for Social Control.” Phylon 42, no. 1 (1981): 76, accessed 29 March 2021. doi:10.2307/274886. [9] Lefever, “’Playing the Dozens,’” 80. [10] Zora Neale Hurston, De Turkey and De Law , in Zora Neale Hurston: Collected Plays, ed. Jean Lee Cole and Charles Mitchell (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 169. [11] Hurston, De Turkey and De Law, 169. [12] Hurston, Turkey , 172. [13] Hurston, Turkey , 172. [14] Norman Marín Calderón. “Afrocentrism, Gaze and Visual Experience in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God,” Káñina 42, no. 1 (2018): 261, http://dx.doi.org/10.15517/rk.v42i1.33568 (accessed 23 November 2020), DOI 10.15517/RK.V42I1.33568. [15] Staple, 66. [16] Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzales, “’From Negro Expression to “’Black Performance,’” in Black Performance Theory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 3. [17] In 1932, Hurston’s The Great Day premiered on Broadway and toured major theatres in New York City, Chicago, and Orlando. Additionally, Arena Stages in Washington D.C. produced a Polk County in 2002. Footnotes About The Author(s) MICHELLE COWIN GIBBS , Ph.D. , is an assistant professor of Theatre and Head of the BA Theatre Arts program at Illinois Wesleyan University. Her scholarly research includes Zora Neale Hurston’s theatrical works and a spectrum of interdisciplinary studies in Black dance performance, Black performativity, and critical identity studies in and around The New Negro movement in early 20th century Black modernist theatre. Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf ISNN 2376-4236 Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to "Milestones in Black Theatre" Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration. Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Beth Wynstra, Mary Pinard 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 The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot Beth Wynstra, Mary Pinard By Published on April 30, 2023 Download Article as PDF The final moment of Heart/Roots: Wabaunsee County , a new community-based play, is a poem, called “Sonnet in the Voice of the Ruin.” This moment invites an actor to embody a ruin and state, Some of us, over time, become once restored, what we were, while others of us naturally stir new ideas, art, the infinite sum of dreams, made possible on a stage by stories, breathed to life from a page. These closing lines are a fitting end to a play inspired by stories from residents living in Wabaunsee County, Kansas. The lines also speak to the location of the 2022 premiere production of Heart/Roots , namely the ruin of a burned house on the grounds of The Volland Store, a one-time mercantile and general store that opened in 1913 and soon became the social and cultural center for the surrounding rural community. While The Volland Store fell into disrepair by the 1970s, it was transformed in 2015 by visionary philanthropists Jerry and Patty Reece into an art gallery, with a residence for visiting artists; it now features an outdoor amphitheater, built from the ruin of the burned house (hereafter referred to as the Ruin). Heart/Roots , thus, is a play steeped in local history and lived experience, informed by a specific location, and cognizant of the potential for transformation. These unique characteristics indicate that in-person engagements with space, place, individuals, and narratives would be crucial ingredients for the crafting and rehearsal of the community-based play. The original plan for Heart/Roots included such in-person elements. Yet, like so many theater performances over the last few years, Heart/Roots was a production paved with Covid-induced curves, hurdles, and discoveries. Ultimately, the road we (Mary Pinard, poet and playwright, and me, Beth Wynstra, theater historian and director) needed to travel with Heart/Roots was one that included cross-country dramaturgy, technological tools and methods, and only concentrated bursts of interaction with production team and cast. Yet these elements elicited new kinds of community-building that informed and ultimately buoyed the play in surprising ways. [1] Seeds of the Project In late 2018, the seeds of Heart/Roots were planted. Mary, who had been a poet-in-residence at The Volland Store, was invited to create a work that would serve as the inaugural production in the Ruin and would run in conjunction with a traveling Smithsonian Institute exhibition called Crossroads: Change in Rural America . This exhibition continues to tour museums, libraries, and universities throughout the United States today and had a 2020 visit scheduled at The Volland Store. One goal of Crossroads is to “prompt discussions about what happened when America’s rural population became a minority of the country’s population and the ripple effects that occurred.” The exhibition also poses the question, “Why should revitalizing the rural places left behind matter to those who remain, those who left, and those who will come in the future?” [2] Mary felt a theater production would offer a compelling space to examine these questions and to bring the voices of the specific rural community of Wabaunsee County to life. She invited me, her colleague at Babson College, to join her in imagining the parameters of such a production. We were guided by theater scholars and practitioners, in particular Sonja Kuftinec, who argues that community-based theater is “grounded in locality, place, or identity” and can “directly engage and reflect its audience, by integrating local history, concerns, stories, traditions, and/or performers.” [3] We were inspired by Kuftinec’s assertion that this kind of performance has the potential to be a “site for philosophical and ethical inquiry into the forging of identity.” [4] Indeed, theater for, about, and performed by members of a specific community has the power to bring individuals together for a special, communal experience, where these individuals might recognize their own stories and experiences on the stage. Furthermore, at this time, or “crossroads,” when the landscape of rural America is literally and metaphorically changing at a rapid pace, community-based theater offers space to reaffirm identity, reflect on stories and memories, and ruminate on future possibilities. The plan we initially developed was to travel from Massachusetts, where we both reside and teach, to Volland, Kansas, to meet community members, interview individuals, collect narratives, and conduct historical research, all to create a play inspired by what we heard and learned. We would then return to Kansas for a multi-week residency to audition actors, to rehearse the play, and finally to produce the work in the Ruin. The COVID Pivot The play, scheduled for a 2020 summer production, would ultimately need to be postponed, and the Smithsonian Crossroads exhibit eventually became a digital experience. This COVID moment, while disappointing in many ways, prompted us not only to rethink our creative process, but also to return to and solidify our initial impulses for a community-based production. In other words, the COVID-mandated pause (which, for our project, extended into 2022) gave us a chance to re-consider the why and how of creating a theater performance for and about Wabaunsee County and our place as both creators and outsiders to this locale. While our project would no longer be connected to the Smithsonian exhibit, we still believed a community-based theater production could remain true to the important goals of Crossroads . We also hoped that our project would offer cast, production team, and audience an original, experiential, interactive opportunity to think about and discuss the rich history and changing dynamics in rural America in general, and in Wabaunsee County, in particular. After a two-year delay, we felt safe and ready to launch our community-based project, initially called Theater at the Ruin, in 2022. Our revised plan was to make three trips to Kansas: the first for introducing our project at several different events and venues in Wabaunsee County and to collect stories; the second for auditioning actors; and the third for in-person rehearsals, tech week, and final production. Between the first and second visit (in August and March respectively), Mary would write the play. Between the second and final visit (in June), I would direct rehearsals via Zoom. While before 2020, we could not fathom things like online rehearsals or digital story gathering, the pandemic gave us new tools and methodologies to create and collaborate. It became surprising to us how essential and helpful these technological tools ended up being for our project. Welcome to Kansas and Story Collection During our first visit to Kansas, which was my very first time in the state, we were deeply aware of our outsider status as we introduced the project and met with community members and potential actors, story-givers, and production team members. We held meetings and informational sessions at several different places: The Volland Store, an annual classic car show, the historical society, a local bakery, a yoga studio, an antique store, and even a cemetery. Our goal was to meet community members where they lived and worked, all in an effort for us to demonstrate our desire to listen and to learn. We knew well the dangers of outsiders creating community-based theater productions. Eugene van Erven warns that without careful and thoughtful interactions, community members can be “arguably used as pawns in a professional artist’s aesthetic game.” [5] Overall, we tried, at every meeting and interaction, to emphasize the fully collaborative nature of the experience we were launching and the goal of celebrating Wabaunsee County and christening the new performance space in the Ruin. Our awareness of outsider-ness also helped us to consider some crucial questions for the project: Haven’t we all been outsiders at some point? Been unsure about how to move ethically through and beyond the uncertainty and potential obstacles of difference—local, regional, personal, cultural? How then do we imagine, enter, negotiate, understand, embrace the possibilities implicit in these encounters with others not like ourselves? And how are we, in turn, shaped by them? These questions led us to consider the other outsiders who came before us, arriving and transforming the land and locale that would be central to our production. For example, we considered the turbulent unsettling initiated by European settlers who brought their own cultures, values, hopes, and unavoidable misconceptions about this place. We learned through the stories we heard and the research we conducted that the impact of this “settlement” on its own cannot be underestimated. This disruption also coincided necessarily with other kinds of unsettling developments such as the displacement of Indigenous peoples, and a maze of commerce driven by the carving into the land of more lines: roads, railroads, the establishment of fences for the burgeoning work of cattle driving and ranching, and the swift usurpations brought on by agriculture that followed on the effectiveness of the plow in breaking the prairie sod. With all of these patterns and evolutions in mind, we gingerly entered a small cattle-ranching community with an invitation for storytelling and its eventual embodiment in a play. Notions of outsider-ness would eventually form an important throughline of the stories we would hear and the script Mary would write. We also found inspiration, support, and integrity in Jerry and Patty Reece’s own outsider status and their renewing project of The Volland Store. We were able to apply many of the lessons learned from them about how best to work with—and in spite of—our position as “outsiders.” While we were grateful for the many face-to-face encounters we had on this first visit to Kansas, technological tools aided mightily with story collection. For stories shared with us in person, such as those by two cousins in their 90s who remembered the early years of The Volland Store, or those from a middle-aged rancher and fence builder, we relied on audio recordings that were saved to a file on Dropbox, so that we both could access the recordings in the weeks and months to come. Several individuals did not feel comfortable or could not be available for sharing stories with us in person. We set up a digital story collection page on The Volland Store website. Although we missed seeing and observing these storytellers in action, their narratives, delivered digitally, were significant contributions to Heart/Roots . Other Wabaunsee County residents preferred to speak to us via Zoom, either out of an abundance of caution about the pandemic or due to scheduling conflicts when we were in Kansas. These Zoom conversations, recorded with the storytellers’ permission, proved illuminating in several ways. Some storytellers, like the owner of a yoga studio in the small, nearby town of Alma, had prepared commentary and stories. Others, like a rancher and mother, who studied Agricultural Economics at Kansas State University, was open to answering our questions and actually surprised herself with how much she could detail about the special nuances and appeals of living in Wabaunsee County and her emotional attachment to the place. We found that in these Zoom sessions storytellers were forthcoming and seemed to feel safe in sharing their narratives with us. We hypothesize that perhaps home environments or the protection of a screen made certain individuals more comfortable than they would have been in person. Such dynamics would again emerge in rehearsals. Photo 1, The Ruin at the Volland Store, photo by Maddy Michaelis Heart/Roots: Creation and Zoom Rehearsals The eight monologues and scenes that comprise Heart/Roots were crafted from the stories we gathered and with additional historical details provided by The Wabaunsee County Historical Society and Museum. Mary found the recordings of story-givers especially useful since they provided her not only with narratives, but also with the flow and cadence of local speech, diction, and expression. And since a number of the most powerful stories were lyrical and informed by the rural rhythms of the land, she also pushed the limits of playwriting form. The pandemic had already jarred our process to the core, so why not allow this innovative mode even more space? Mary decided that the sonnet—a 14-line formal poem using stanzaic structure, rhyme, and metrics—would be a perfect addition to the play. It could accommodate the richness and brevity of certain stories, and it also echoed the literal contours of Wabaunsee County on a Kansas map. Suggesting the shape of a broad hand, this county map evokes those most essential capacities: to create and to work. Central to the nature of this county, the work of the human hand is thus at the core of this play, both through its characters’ experiences and in its creation by Mary as the playwright. The fact that the fingers of the human hand have a total of 14 bones also suggests a meaningful connection to the anatomy of the sonnet, whose 14 lines work themselves into poetry across a page. The final script of Heart/Roots is a tapestry of sonnets, monologues, and scenes. Like so many other elements of this project, the script was also enriched and deepened by our efforts to address and embrace the unpredictable impact of the pandemic. In March, we were able to hold auditions at The Volland Store, with again some participants opting to audition via Zoom. It seemed that the groundwork we laid through our visits to several different community locations months earlier as well as the multiple and digital ways we collected stories helped to ensure trust in us and thus a robust audition pool. Our final cast of ten included a former mayor, a grassland ecologist, a yoga studio owner (the same one who supplied a story and who offered her studio as a story-gathering location), a cattle rancher, an undergraduate student, and a paramedic. After nearly two years of teaching on Zoom as well as directing a digital production at Babson College during the pandemic, I felt comfortable using this platform for the rehearsals between March and June, when we would be returning to Kansas for the production. Although we both remain certain that in-person rehearsals for a theater production are the ideal route, Zoom provided opportunities to build important community and relationships in ways we could not have predicted. Like our story sessions on Zoom, actors in Zoom rehearsals joined us from their living rooms, kitchens, dorm rooms, and even ambulance bays. Almost every Zoom session started with one or more of the actors explaining where they were and sharing some detail about their environment. Our undergraduate student proudly shared his fraternity flag. Our paramedic showed how she could adjust her radio system to hear news of incoming emergencies and accidents. Our horse-owning cast member showed his pastures. While at the time we thought of these very local show-and-tells as a way to break the ice of the rehearsal or to get actors talking, in retrospect we see these moments as important for trust-building. It is a profound experience to see someone’s home or work environment and even more profound when that person is willing to share artifacts or facets of that place. Zoom rehearsals, by their nature, are not always conducive to getting actors on their feet or for sketching out blocking. Nonetheless, we found that these rehearsals extended our table work and thus our conversations about objective, language, and timing. I readily admit that in most rehearsal hall scenarios, I am quick to experiment with and solidify movement. The Zoom rehearsals for Heart/Roots slowed down this impulse. The conversations during our rehearsals gave actors a chance to ask questions of playwright and director, to investigate and analyze each line for meaning and objective, and to discuss with scene partners interactions and relationships. Furthermore, almost every actor told us during the rehearsal process personal stories and histories that somehow connected to or resonated with moments in the script. We cannot be certain that these important conversations would have transpired in a traditional rehearsal experience. When we consider the delicate nature of outsiders creating community-based performance, we understand how vital the talking, sharing of stories, and showing of home environments that comprised our Zoom rehearsals were to the creative process of Heart/Roots . A director, understandably, takes on a leadership position in any production. Such a position usually does not disrupt the kind of built-in, equal relationship to place that a theatrical cast and crew share. In community theater performances, when all cast and crew come from the same area, or in regional or professional theater performances, where cast and crew travel from disparate areas to a specific theater to perform, there is, for the most part, a shared connection to place. Not so with community-based theater. There is a large risk that an outsider, specifically an outsider director, might seem too authoritative or all-knowing when starting rehearsal work. This fear, we feel, could have very well come to fruition had the Heart/Roots cast and crew rehearsed in person from the very start. The Zoom moments instead allowed us to learn and talk about the place in which we would be producing the play. We built trust and ensured that when we finally could come together, for the first time, as a cast in June, we knew each other in ways that safeguarded a solid foundation to begin blocking and to begin a compressed tech week. Heart/Roots: Final Moments and Production Another seeming disadvantage that actually turned advantageous for our production was the fact that the performance space in the Ruin was an unseen and unknown entity not just for the cast but for us as well. Re-construction on the Ruin began after our first trip to Kansas in August and was ongoing when we were at The Volland Store in March. Although a few actors ventured out to the Ruin once it was completed in late Spring to practice their lines and work with their fellow actors, the space was a mystery to most of us working on the production. So, unlike many theater productions, where a director would have an intimate knowledge of the performance space and thus could guide a cast with this knowledge, the production of Heart/Roots was a moment where we all were discovering our performance space together. Although there were hurdles in this discovery process—such as how to work in 100-degree heat, how to shade the audience, how to manage interactions with mosquitos and ticks, how to ensure sound enhancements elevated actors’ voices while keeping a naturalness, and how to block a show with audience sitting on three sides—we navigated these challenges together. Perhaps the greatest difficulty, yet the one that became the most fun to solve together as a cast and production team, was the freight trains that ran on a track just yards from the Ruin and on an unpredictable schedule. Mary had written the “Train Sonnet” for just such a moment, where actors would rejoice and celebrate the passing train and then attempt to recreate the train sounds in a sonnet. We did not know, though, if we would end up using this sonnet or how often. Thus, in our 14 days together before the production opened, our team had much work to do and in tough conditions. We do feel that the bonds solidified—largely through technological means—enabled us to work together, to laugh together, and ultimately to produce a successful, sold-out run of Heart/Roots . Photo 2, Act One of Heart/Roots , photo by Stephen Deets Conclusion The final production was a civic celebration, where long-term residents and newcomers to Wabaunsee County and the Flint Hills heard stories, made connections between past and present, and saw their fellow community members perform entirely new roles on the stage. The reverberations of the show continue. In the months following the production of Heart/Roots cast members have been asked to perform moments from the play for small and large gatherings, and a published version of the script that was on sale during the production is now available for purchase at The Volland Store. And, perhaps most importantly, the Ruin has become a vibrant space for music, with future theater and dance productions already in the works. Photo 3, Audience at Heart/Roots , photo by Lorn Clement Photo 4, Curtain call of Heart/Roots , photo by Abby Amick References [1] Please see the Volland Store website for photos and more information on Heart/Roots in rehearsal and production. http://thevollandstore.com/latest-news-on-the-ruin-and-heart-roots/ [2] “Crossroads: Change in Rural America,” Smithsonian, Accessed September 15, 2022. https://www.sites.si.edu/s/topic/0TO36000000aR1sGAE/crossroads-change-in-rural-america . [3] Sonja Kuftinec, Staging America: Cornerstone and Community-Based Theater (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003): 1. [4] Ibid, xvi. [5] Eugène van Erven, “Taking to the Streets: Dutch Community Theater Goes Site-Specific,” Research in Drama Education 12, no. 1 (2007): 29. Footnotes About The Author(s) BETH WYNSTRA is an Associate Professor of English at Babson College. Beth’s book, Vows, Veils, and Masks: The Performance of Marriage in the Plays of Eugene O’Neill (University of Iowa Press, Theater History and Culture Series) will be published in 2023. Beth has written extensively on the life and plays of Eugene O’Neill and often works as a dramaturg with professional theater companies around the country who are producing the works of O’Neill. Beth regularly directs plays and musicals at Babson and is the Founding Artistic Director of The Empty Space Theater. MARY PINARD is a Professor of English and a poet. She teaches literature and poetry courses in the Arts & Humanities Division at Babson College. Her poems have appeared in a variety of literary journals, and she has published two collections: Portal by Salmon Press in 2014, and Ghost Heart , which won the 2021 Ex Ophidia Press Poetry Book Contest and was issued by the press in 2022. Over the last fifteen years, she has collaborated with a range of Boston-area musicians, theatre directors, painters, and sculptors to create performances and exhibits. She was born and raised in Seattle. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Previous Next Attribution:

Image Credits: The Universe is a Small Hat, directed by Cesar Alvarez and Sarah Benson at PRELUDE 13 Festivals At the Segal Center, we are committed to showcasing the best of contemporary theatre, performing arts and academic endeavours through dedicated festivals that celebrate the New York and global arts community PRELUDE Festival The annual PRELUDE festival is dedicated to artists at the forefront of contemporary New York City theatre, dance, interdisciplinary and mediatized performance. Visit Festival Page Prelude in the Parks Festival Celebrating the best of NYC art and artists, with an outdoor festival of music, dance, theatre and discussions, and the nature that takes us back to the basics. Visit Festival Page Segal Film Festival The Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance is an annual event showcasing films drawn from the world of theatre and performance. Visit Festival Page Down To Earth Festival Down to Earth brings world-class international performance, contemporary circus, and in-situ performances—absolutely free—directly to New York City's vibrant, diverse communities. Visit Festival Page

Karina Gutiérrez 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 Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina. Noe Montez. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017; Pp. 239 + xi. Karina Gutiérrez By Published on May 13, 2019 Download Article as PDF Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina. Noe Montez. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017; Pp. 239 + xi. The precarious era of Argentina’s dictatorship (1976-1982) stifled political resistance and artistic expression. However, the years following the administrative regimes of Jorge Rafael Videla, Emilio Massera, and Leopoldo Galtieri prompted many people in the newly democratic Argentina to reflect upon and recoup their national identities. Noe Montez’s Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina considers (re)emerging individual and collective memory narratives and their effects on judicial policies in Argentina’s transitional postdictatorship period. Drawing on contemporary research in memory studies and theatre history, Montez recounts the momentous artistic reactions to policies implemented by the administrations of Carlos Menem, Néstor Carlos Kirchner Jr., and Cristina Kirchner. In so doing, Montez’s text contributes to a growing repertoire of Argentine works in the field of performance studies. As Montez himself rightly notes, the vast majority of scholarship on theatrical responses to the dictatorship tends to focus on the oeuvres of more internationally renowned playwrights such as Ricardo Bartis, Griselda Gambaro, and Eduardo Pavlovsky, whose works were staged during or directly following the dictatorship. Instead, Montez charts the trajectory of emerging directors, playwrights, actors, designers, and companies that flourished in Buenos Aires during this transitional era. Montez divides his book into four chapters, arranged chronologically to highlight theatrical productions that reacted to each administration’s approach to transitional justice and contributed to collective memory. Chapter one explores “disconstructive resistances,” a term that is never fully unpacked but appears to refer to the disjuncture between collective memory narratives and state-sanctioned memory narratives constructed and propagated by the Menem administration’s Truth and Reconciliation hearings held from 1989 to 1999. Each of the four plays that Montez examines in this chapter considers the limitations of state-sanctioned narratives of impunity, to say nothing of clemency and amnesty policies, directed toward those in office accused of human rights violations. Montez devotes a substantial amount of space to key performance groups and playwrights including El Periférico de Objetos, Javier Daulte, Marcelo Bertuccio, and Luis Cano. He describes their use of multimedia and avant-garde artistic practices to advance their political agendas; by exposing the artifice of authorized modes of remembrance, these artists resisted the Menem administration’s politics of erasure. The second chapter centers on how Teatroxlaindentidad , a long-running Buenos Aires-based theatre festival created to raise awareness about the hundreds of children kidnapped during the dictatorship, collaborated with artists to promote public access to declassified archives. Montez notes that works by Patricia Zangaro, Hector Levy-Daniel, and Mariana Eva Perez demonstrate the value of historical archives for the construction of personal and national identities. However, Montez adds a further dimension: he studies how institutional support from non-theatrical entities impacts an organization’s overall creative output and longevity. He offers as an example Teatroxlaindentidad’ s partnership with the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. The partnership is notable because the goals of the latter imposed significant restraints on the artistic visions of the former, specifically in the earliest years of this alliance. Indeed, the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and other stakeholders limited commissioned work in the festival’s line-up to those who spoke directly to reuniting kidnapped children with their next of kin through genetic testing. In the second half of the book, Montez attempts to capture the ideological dissonance of various agents staking claims to history. Chapter three, “Reparation, Commemoration, and Memory Construction in the Postdictatorship Generation,” looks at the importance of self-archiving or self-reflexive personal testimony as a means of talking back to state-appointed sites of memory. Of particular interest are those testimonies that “talk back” to sites established during the Néstor and Cristina Kirchner administrations (2003-2007 and 2007-2015, respectively). Montez delineates the social divide between those who favored the Kirchner administrations’ memorialization efforts and those who did not. Meanwhile, in the final chapter, Montez explores four theatrical performances produced alongside Christina Kirchner’s rebranding of the Malvinas War (also known as the Falklands War). Montez describes how the Kirchner administration sought to recast this national defeat as a point of nationalistic remembrance, shaping memory narratives of the war and the people of Malvinas. While works by Patricio Adadi, Mariana Mazover, and Lisandro Fiks critiqued Kirchner’s commemoration, Julio Cardoso’s vision fell in line with the administration’s memorialization efforts as he opted to honor veterans as heroes. The differing reactions to the Malvinas War demonstrate how acts of remembrance can be linked to acts of erasure in a variety of contradictory ways. Though Montez does not explicitly make this point, one can surmise that the opposing artistic treatments of the Falkland Islands mirror the contradictory socio-political views of these territories today. Montez’s illustration of performance and social engagement in postdictatorship Argentina highlights the nation’s vibrant and tenacious theatre scene. More importantly, his book draws attention to Argentina’s artistic agents—long neglected by U.S. scholars and theatre audiences—who are determined to grapple with identity, social justice, and individual/collective memory. Montez weaves pertinent historical content with play descriptions for what is, overall, an assessment of current artistic measures that seek to reify or contest dominant memory narratives. Scholars of Latinx theatre and performance, specifically those who concentrate on politics, will value Montez’s timely study of artistic mobilization in postdictatorship Argentina. I would, however, recommend this book be read in conjunction with texts by Diana Taylor and Jean Graham-Jones; though often cited, reading their respective theories on performance and activism firsthand may deepen understanding of Montez’s argument. Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina contributes to the growing archive of memory studies and, more importantly, to nuancing the fledgling U.S. awareness of Latin American performance and performance studies scholarship in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. References Footnotes About The Author(s) KARINA GUTIÉRREZ Stanford University Editorial Board for Special Issue: David Bisaha Meredith Conti Leah Lowe Inga Meier Robert Vorlicky Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction: Embodied Arts Collective Choreography for Weathering Black Experience: Janelle Monáe and The Memphis "Tightrope" Dance Unruly Reproductions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville "Must Be Heavyset": Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance. Stephanie Nohelani Teves. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018; Pp. 220. Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre. Cindy Rosenthal. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017; Pp. 198. In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement. La Donna L. Forsgren. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 200. Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina. Noe Montez. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017; Pp. 239 + xi. Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical. Kevin Winkler. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018; Pp. 368. Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past. Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter, eds. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018; Pp. 399. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Collin Vorbeck Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 32 2 Visit Journal Homepage Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies Collin Vorbeck By Published on June 12, 2020 Download Article as PDF Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies . Edited by Rhonda Blair and Amy Cook. London: Bloomsbury, 2016; Pp. 243+xii. Rhonda Blair and Amy Cook’s co-edited volume Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies advances the cross-disciplinary discourse inspired by the cognitive turn by interrogating the ways practitioners and audiences make meaning through our varied encounters with theatre. Buoyed by their individual groundbreaking scholarship in the field, the editors curate a complex collection of American and international perspectives that how “the implications of embodied, embedded, enacted and extended minds” impact engagement with a variety of performing arts (3). Their volume invigorates the intersection of theatre and cognition with incisive case studies that partner physiological and psychological research to expand our awareness of how we generate understanding of performance. Blair and Cook argue that our embodied experiences shape the meanings we draw from theatrical encounters, and they structure their book to explore the three cognitive relationships evoked by their subtitle: interpretation of the text, communication through action, and synergy of performance and environment. This structure subtly mirrors a production process and moves organically from script analysis through the rehearsal process to engaged performance, exposing cognitive revelations with each progression. The editors provide a salient overview of the current landscape of cognitive studies, and they succinctly introduce each section to frame their selected essays. Blair and Cook augment their cross-disciplinary emphasis by concluding each section with a response from a preeminent cognitive scholar. Culminating in an inventive After Words section, this invitingly conversational volume offers practitioners and scholars fresh perspectives on how theatre and performance create meaning on the page and on the stage. Blair and Cook’s first section explores the way language creates and sustains realities onstage by applying cognitive linguistics and metaphor theory to dramatic texts. Barbara Dancygier investigates how the materiality embedded within the script influences reception. She outlines what she calls the “dramatic anchors” in Julius Caesar and Richard II that trigger deeper meanings and layered connections throughout each play, directly citing Caesar’s mantle and Richard’s mirror as material elements that activate understanding (32). Laura Seymour’s essay also draws from Julius Caesar , focusing on the behaviors of the conspirators prior to the assassination. Seymour studies the act of kneeling and other bodily-situated references to address how these seemingly acquiescent actions engender metaphorical associations in readers and audiences. Vera Tobin moves away from specific dramatic texts to inspect the inherently theatrical elements of irony. She borrows from conceptual blending theory to illustrate how comprehending irony requires the activation of multiple mental spaces derived from “how we move around within a particular viewpoint configuration” (66). Cognitive linguist Mark Turner responds to this section by praising its interdisciplinary endeavors and outlining methodologies that will bolster future partnerships between cognition and performance. The second section examines the ways the enacted body creates and sustains meaning through a wide variety of artistic engagement, partnering performance strategies with neuroscientific research to investigate the power of perception. Neal Utterback’s essay proposes a theatre training model, for instance, that draws from the psychological and physiological rigors of Olympic competition to create an actor-athlete regimen. To prepare his student actors for sustained engagement in their performances, Utterback developed a process that uses “power posing combined with mental imagery and positive self-talk” to connect the benefits of cognitive perception to embodied results (80). Dance scholar Warburton surveys ArtsCross , an international collaborative event, and zooms in on the psychophysical experiences enacted during the rehearsal process. He compares the physical and mental output utilized when marking versus dancing full-out and concludes that the compression and compartmentalization of marking “reduces the multi-layered cognitive load used when learning choreography” (102). Christopher Jackman furthers the discussion of memory and suggests “an enactive model of cognition” that attempts to avoid the hurdles of self-consciousness in performance (108). Jackman’s mindful approach to training at times feels overcrowded, but his goal to build and maintain the skills of acting through neuroscientific methods is intriguing. Cognitive psychologist Catherine J. Stevens responds to this section by citing recent interdisciplinary studies that seek to deepen understanding of the embodied experiences explored by these essays, specifically attuned to dance and movement. The final section of Blair and Cook’s ambitious book considers how cognition evolves dynamically through engagement with the environment, stressing the importance of accounting for spatiotemporal realities when assessing potential meanings of a given event. Evelyn Tribble’s essay provides a broad overview of these relationships, using television cooking shows, the English Restoration theatre system, and copious cross-disciplinary sources to support her argument. Tribble contends that “distributed cognition” makes possible the “overwhelming cognitive load” required to perform, and that structures external to the body – a theatre, a school, or a familiar kitchen set-up – play a crucial role in understanding how to navigate a given situation (134). Similarly, Sarah McCarroll parallels the cultural signification of fashion with historical stage performances to argue that conscious “body images” and pre-cognitive “body schemas” coalesce to form what she calls the “body map” (144). Her fascinating study of the costume choices in J.M. Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton illustrates how clothing combines with the environment to both enable and restrict embodied action. Shifting modalities, Matt Hayler introduces a new approach to digital technologies and asks readers to actively engage online with his chosen examples. He argues that such engagement results in “reflexive relationships” that impart circular cognitive meaning by continually informing the experience through feedback loops (162). Philosopher Shaun Gallagher responds to this section by applying his “prenoetic” theory of human cognition to each essay, demonstrating the subconscious ways the body interacts with environments, clothing, and technology to make meaning (175). Blair and Cook further their cross-disciplinary endeavor by crafting a unique After Words section that provides deeper insights into the existing scholarship undergirding the emerging field. Through personal essays and interviews with a wide range of theatre practitioners, Blair and Cook reveal how pervasive cognitive studies has become to scholars and creators alike. Their conversation with Deb Margolis is particularly illuminating as the performing artist, teacher, and playwright discusses her own understanding of the important connection between the physical and cognitive limitations of the body. In a time when gathering for live performance is no longer an option due to pandemic, Theatre, Performance and Cognition finds a way to ingeniously engage with elements of the embodied experience that are simultaneously obvious and revelatory, and its essays speak to all levels of cognitive curiosities. What is more, the editors curate an excellent balance of dense but illuminating neuroscientific data and complimentary theatre-making examples. Blair and Cook’s thoughtful commentary throughout this book provides theorists and practitioners alike with inventive methods to approach current work and to create new scholarship, cognizant of the dynamic processes within our bodies that shape our understanding. Interest in cognitive/theatrical scholarship shows no signs of waning, and this volume further demonstrates the value of addressing complex aspects of performance with interdisciplinary lenses. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Collin Vorbeck Texas Tech University Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl A Player and a Gentleman: The Diary of Harry Watkins, Nineteenth-Century US American Actor The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography Introduction: Local Acts: Performing Communities, Performing Americas The Architecture of Local Performance: Stages of the Taliesin Fellowship “La conjura de Xinum” and Language Revitalization: Understanding Maya Agency through Theatre Exploring the History and Implications of Toxicity through St. Louis: Performance Artist Allana Ross and the “Toxic Mound Tours” Finding Home in the World Stage: Critical Creative Citizenship and the 13th South Asian Theatre Festival 2018 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Rob Silverman Ascher Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 2 Visit Journal Homepage Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Rob Silverman Ascher By Published on April 17, 2023 Download Article as PDF Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances . Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. The overlap of performance and evangelical Christianity is typically limited to analyzing preachers and passion plays. In Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances , Jill Stevenson extends the language of performance studies to immersive evangelical experiences she refers to as “End-Time Performances.” These performances, including Hell House , Judgement House , and Tribulation Trail , are semi-professional performances that explicitly preach to audiences that a sincere belief in Christ is the way to avoid the apocalypse in the End of Days. The bulk of Stevenson’s analysis, over five chapters and a coda, is built around the question of how a “dramaturgy of threat [produces] the future End of Time” through interactive performance and staging. The first chapter, “The Landscape of the End: Time, Affect, Threat, Absence” functions as both a sourcebook and a roadmap, effectively introducing the lenses through which Stevenson wants her audience to analyze the productions used as evidence. Stevenson provides a crash course of sorts on theological concepts such as pre- and post-millennial dispensationalism, performance studies concepts like affect theory, and the history of non-denominational American evangelical Christianity. This section is sufficiently informative on its own, enmeshing figures like Cyrus Scofield, author of the Scofield Reference Bible, and Jill Dolan, whose seminal writing on utopian performatives informs Stevenson’s analysis of the role of time in End-Time Performances. While Dolan’s utopian performative is a sunny and aspirational future proposed by the 1960s counterculture, Stevenson notes that the ‘utopian performative’ and evangelical Hell House alike ask their audiences to consider, in Dolan’s language, “that beyond this ‘now’ of material oppression…. Lives a future that might be different.” The biggest difference argues Stevenson that an Evangelical future must take place in the afterlife. The core of Stevenson’s book uses three different End-Time Performances and the stand-alone Ark Encounter Museum as case studies. Nearly all of these are performed on or near church property annually. Hell House is the exception, as it has been licensed by churches and theatre groups across the country, including the New York City-based Les Freres Corbusier. That company performed a “sincere staging” of Hell House , following kits published by Pastor Keenan Roberts, leader of New Destiny Christian Center in Colorado. This homegrown ethos is central to the ethnographic work that Stevenson puts at the core of Feeling the Future . Stevenson, who writes in detail about her experiences as an attendee at the End-Time Performances, takes care to note the age ranges and racial makeup of audiences at these performances. Stevenson notes that the majority of End-Time performance attendees are white and between the ages of 18 and 36, with the exception of Tribulation Trail . This piece had an age-diverse audience comprised primarily of Black and Latine attendees, which fits some creative choices. Notably, in Tribulation Trail , a Black performer portrayed Jesus in the portion depicting the slaying of Satan, aligning with the largely-Black congregational makeup at Mt. Vernon Baptist Church, the producers of Tribulation Trail . Many of the performances with predominantly white audiences take on a much more political bent. Attendees are rushed through an apocalyptic landscape besieged by a One World Government with technocratic ideals, installing the Mark of the Beast in the form of microchips. Stevenson keenly observes the political contexts through which she and her fellow audience members receive the dramaturgical information woven into these apocalyptic landscapes. After all, these End-Time Performances are proselytizing tools. Nearly all of them conclude with a moment of prayer and an invitation to their audience to accept Christ as their savior. Some of these calls to action are profoundly intimate and offer their audience members opportunities to speak with a member of the ministry, while others merely warn the audience to keep Christ in their hearts in the face of the coming Rapture. Stevenson slyly juxtaposes the political context and ticket price of a given show with how intense these proselytizing moments are, quietly casting doubt on the theological integrity of various ministries. Stevenson’s central argument on the dramaturgy of threat and futurity asks readers to hold the content of these performances alongside the emphasis on futurity inherent in evangelical Christianity. A message of Christ’s power as a savior immediately follows vivid images of lakes of fire, piles of clothes, and scenes of abortion and grotesque violence. If, she supposes, the audience is given the opportunity to accept Christ as their savior after being inundated with the End of Days and sins of man, they will take scripture less out of sincere belief and more out of panic regarding “impending futurity.” A focus on the inevitability of Christ’s return or some sort of holy deliverance has roots in medieval British theatre, to which Stevenson devotes a section of her first chapter. Statement of belief is not always sufficient, however, as several of the End-Time Performances feature purportedly Christian characters who were not raptured due to a lack of sincerity. The book concludes with a two-part Coda, written in June 2020 and January 2021, analyzing, in brief, the beginning of the COVID epidemic, the 2020 election, and the January 6th insurrection through the lenses Stevenson has set up for these contemporary End-Time Performances. Shockingly, much of the imagery baked into the apocalypse narratives she has been analyzing has since become central to life in 2021, as COVID is treated as a hoax and evangelicals proudly storm the Capitol. Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances is a compelling text for casual readers, not only scholars, as Stevenson’s writing is clear, concise and vivid in description. Yet, it is also valuable as an educational text, shedding light on the dramaturgical integrity of a mode of performance ignored by the theatrical establishment. Stevenson makes a compelling case for End-Time Performance as a uniquely American form of performance, with roots in the York Mystery Plays, aesthetic references to zombie movies, and a clear sense of theological didacticism. Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances applies theological and performance-theoretical frameworks to an underexplored form, leaving its audience of readers with a dense and rewarding dramaturgical text. This work is important for an array of fields, including Theater and Performance Studies, American Studies and Religious Studies. References Footnotes About The Author(s) ROB SILVERMAN ASCHER University of Iowa Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.