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JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Published by the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center CUNY, supported by American Theater Drama Society. Back to Top Untitled Copy of Untitled Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume 34 Visit Journal Homepage Issue 1 Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience: The Tourist as Actor. Jennifer A. Kokai and Tom Robson, eds. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019; Pp. 292. Hui Peng BOOK REVIEW The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy: Gambling, Drama, and the Unexpected. Edwin Wong. Victoria, Canada: Friesen Press, 2019; Pp. 363. David Pellegrini BOOK REVIEW Susan Glaspell’s Poetics and Politics of Rebellion. Emeline Jouve. Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2017; Pp. 258. Jennifer-Scott Mobley BOOK REVIEW Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry. Soyica Diggs Colbert. New Haven: Yale, 2021; Pp. 273. Kristyl D. Tift BOOK REVIEW The Mysterious Murder of Mrs. Shakespeare: Transgressive Performance in Nineteenth-Century New York Mia Levenson and Heather S. Nathans ARTICLE “What Will Be Changed?”: Maxwell Anderson and the Literary Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti Dan Colson ARTICLE Theatre of Isolation Madeline Pages ARTICLE “A Certain Man Had Two [Kids]”: Tragic Parables, “The Prodigal Son,” and Edward Albee's The Goat Michael Y. Bennett ARTICLE “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells [Her] Story”: An Intersectional Analysis of the Women of Hamilton Leticia L. Ridley ARTICLE Issue 2 Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress Devika Ranjan BOOK REVIEW The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness Craig Quintero BOOK REVIEW Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration grace shinhae jun BOOK REVIEW Introduction to Asian American Dramaturgies Donatella Galella INTRODUCTION Behind the Scenes of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies Donatella Galella, Dorinne Kondo, Esther Kim Lee, Josephine Lee, Sean Metzger, and Karen Shimakawa INTERVIEW On Young Jean Lee in Young Jean Lee's We're Gonna Die by Christine Mok Christine Mok ARTICLE Representation from Cambodia to America: Musical Dramaturgies in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band Jennifer Goodlander ARTICLE The Dramaturgical Sensibility of Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap and Cambodian Rock Band Kristin Leahey with Joseph Ngo ARTICLE Holding up a Lens to the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists: A Photo Essay Roger Tang ARTICLE Theatre in Hawaiʻi: An “Illumination of the Fault Lines” of Asian American Theatre Jenna Gerdsen ARTICLE Randall Duk Kim: A Sojourn in the Embodiment of Words Baron Kelly INTERVIEW Reappropriation, Reparative Creativity, and Feeling Yellow in Generic Ensemble Company’s The Mikado: Reclaimed kt shorb ARTICLE Dance Planets Al Evangelista ARTICLE Dramaturgy of Deprivation (없다): An Invitation to Re-Imagine Ways We Depict Asian American and Adopted Narratives of Trauma Amy Mihyang Ginther ARTICLE Clubhouse: Stories of Empowered Uncanny Anomalies Bindi Kang ARTICLE Off-Yellow Time vs Off-White Space: Activist Asian American Dramaturgy in Higher Education Daphne P. Lei ARTICLE Asian American Dramaturgies in the Classroom: A Reflection Ariel Nereson ARTICLE Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative articles and reviews on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Please refer to our Style Guide for submission information and general formatting guidelines. Send all general queries to the editors at jadtjournal@gmail.com . Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage

JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Published by the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center CUNY, supported by American Theater Drama Society. Back to Top Untitled Copy of Untitled Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume 32 Visit Journal Homepage Issue 1 Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity Donatella Galella BOOK REVIEW Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics Eleanor Russell BOOK REVIEW Law and Sexuality in Tennessee Williams’s America Susan C. W. Abbotson BOOK REVIEW Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze Isaiah Matthew Wooden BOOK REVIEW Staging Family: Domestic Deceptions of Mid-Nineteenth Century American Actresses Shauna Vey BOOK REVIEW Excavating American Theatrical History: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors, Appropriate, and An Octoroon Verna A. Foster ARTICLE Mabou Mines Tries Again: Past, Present, and the Purgatory of Performance Space Jessica Brater ARTICLE Rehearsing Bereavement with Laughter: Grief, Humor, and Estrangement Affect in Sarah Ruhl’s Plays of Mourning Seokhun Choi ARTICLE Issue 2 Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies Collin Vorbeck BOOK REVIEW The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl John Bray BOOK REVIEW A Player and a Gentleman: The Diary of Harry Watkins, Nineteenth-Century US American Actor Amy B. Huang BOOK REVIEW The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography Michael Valdez BOOK REVIEW Introduction: Local Acts: Performing Communities, Performing Americas Jocelyn L. Buckner INTRODUCTION The Architecture of Local Performance: Stages of the Taliesin Fellowship Claudia Wilsch Case ARTICLE “La conjura de Xinum” and Language Revitalization: Understanding Maya Agency through Theatre Sarah Alice Campbell ARTICLE Exploring the History and Implications of Toxicity through St. Louis: Performance Artist Allana Ross and the “Toxic Mound Tours” Rachel E. Bauer and Kristen M. Kalz ARTICLE Finding Home in the World Stage: Critical Creative Citizenship and the 13th South Asian Theatre Festival 2018 Arnab Banerji ARTICLE Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative articles and reviews on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Please refer to our Style Guide for submission information and general formatting guidelines. Send all general queries to the editors at jadtjournal@gmail.com . Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage

JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Published by the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center CUNY, supported by American Theater Drama Society. Back to Top Untitled Copy of Untitled Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume 29 Visit Journal Homepage issue 1 Performance, Identity, and Immigration Law Raimondo Genna August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle James M. Cherry Affective Performance and Cognitive Science Natalie Tenner Kitchen Sink Realisms Joanna Mansbridge Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience Peter Wood Everything Plus the Kitchen Sink Book Reviews Calculated Cacophonies: The Queer Asian American Family and the Nonmusical Musical in Chay Yew's Wonderland Stephen Hong Sohn Historical Subjectivity and the Revolutionary Archetype in Amiri Baraka's The Slave and Luis Valdez's Bandido! Jose Fernandez Issue 2 Acting in the Academy Jennifer Joan Thompson The Theatre of David Henry Hwang David Coley Ruth Maleczech at Mabou Mines Catherine M. Young Directing Shakespeare in America Deric McNish Writing, Acting, and Directing Book Reviews Searching for Solutions: Humanizing Climate Narratives in an Age of Global Change and Connectivity Clara Jean Wilch The Anthropo(s)cenography of Ricardo Monti's Marrathon Milton Loayza Towards a Synthesis of Natural and Human History: Situating the Municipal and Ecclesiastic Viceregal Arches of 1680 Mexico City within the Lacustrine Lisa Jackson-Schebetta Food Futures: Speculative Performance in the Anthropocene Shelby Brewster Tú eres mi otro yo - Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy & the AnthropoScene Theresa J. May Introduction to American Theatre and Performance in the Anthropocene Epoch Bruce McConachie Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative articles and reviews on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Please refer to our Style Guide for submission information and general formatting guidelines. Send all general queries to the editors at jadtjournal@gmail.com . Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage

JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Published by the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center CUNY, supported by American Theater Drama Society. Back to Top Untitled Copy of Untitled Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume 35 Visit Journal Homepage Issue 1 “An Art for Which There Is as Yet No Name.” Mobile Color, Artistic Composites, Temporal Objects Bennet Schaber ARTICLE The Anti-Victorianism of Victorian Revivals Laurence Senelick ARTICLE Tricks, Capers, and Highway Robbery: Philadelphia Self-Enactment upon the Early Jacksonian Stage Raymond Saraceni ARTICLE “The Spirit of the Thing is All”: The Federal Theatre’s Staging of Medieval Drama in the Los Angeles Religious Community Russell Stone ARTICLE The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida, by Karen Jaime. New York City, NY: New York University Press, 2021; 275pp. $28.00 paper. Cailyn Sales BOOK REVIEW Rise Up! Broadway and American Society from Angels in America to Hamilton. Chris Jones. London: Methuen Drama, 2019. Pp. 215. Casey L. Berner BOOK REVIEW Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America. Rebekah J. Kowal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020; Pp. 295. Dahye Lee BOOK REVIEW Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife. Kareem Khubchandani. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. Rahul K Gairola BOOK REVIEW The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical; Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture and Identity Sarah Courtis BOOK REVIEW Issue 2 Chevruta Partnership and the Playwright/Dramaturg Relationship Becca Levy and Jared Rubin Sprowls ARTICLE The Heart/Roots Project and a Pandemic Pivot Beth Wynstra, Mary Pinard ARTICLE From Safe to Brave—Developing A Model for Interrogating Race, Racism and the Black Lives Matter Movement Using Devised Theater Dr. Kimmika L.H. Williams Witherspoon ARTICLE The Front Porch Plays: Socially-Distanced, Covid-Safe, Micro-Theatre Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder ARTICLE Making Up for Lost Time: New Play Development in Academia Post COVID 19 Jackie Rosenfeld and Cade M.Sikora ARTICLE Meet Me Where I Am: New Play Dispatches from the DC Area Jared Strange ARTICLE México (Expropriated): Reappropriation and Rechoreography of Ballet Folklórico Jessica L. Peña Torres ARTICLE Effing Robots Online: The Digital Dramaturgy of Translating In-Person Theatre to Online Streaming L. Nicol Cabe ARTICLE Emergent Strategy Abolitionist Pedagogy in Pandemic Time Marissa Nicosia & Jack Isaac ARTICLE How to Make a Site-Specific Theatrical Homage to a Film Icon Without Drowning in Your Ocean of Consciousness; or, The Saga of Red Lodge, Montana Michael Osinski ARTICLE Playing Global (re)Entry: Migration, Surveillance, and Digital Artmaking Mohamadreza Babaee ARTICLE Reviving Feminist Archives: An Interview with Leigh Fondakowski Caitlin A.Kane INTERVIEW Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator Drew Barker INTERVIEW (Re)Generation: Creating Situational Urban Theatre During COVID and Beyond MK Lawson, Jessica Bashline INTERVIEW Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Talya Kingston INTERVIEW Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times: Edited by Kendra Capece, Patrick Scorese. New York: Routledge, 2023; Pp. 188 Ansley Valentine BOOK REVIEW The Cambridge Companion to American Theatre Since 1945: Edited by Julia Listengarten and Stephen Di Benedetto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021; Pp. 273. Clay Sanderson BOOK REVIEW Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past. Ariel Nereson. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 290. Jada M. Campbell BOOK REVIEW Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Jeanne Klein BOOK REVIEW Aural/Oral Dramaturgies: Theatre in the Digital Age. Duška Radosavljević. New York, NY: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 224. M. Landon BOOK REVIEW Feeling the Future at Christian End-Time Performances. Jill Stevenson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 243. Rob Silverman Ascher BOOK REVIEW Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative articles and reviews on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Please refer to our Style Guide for submission information and general formatting guidelines. Send all general queries to the editors at jadtjournal@gmail.com . Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage

JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Published by the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center CUNY, supported by American Theater Drama Society. Back to Top Untitled Copy of Untitled Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume 36 Visit Journal Homepage Issue 1 Community Circles and Love Triangles: Gun Violence and Belonging in Oklahoma! and West Side Story Meredith Conti ARTICLE Decommissioning the School-to-Prison Pipeline: Anna Deavere Smith’s Notes from the Field and Dominique Morisseau’s Pipeline Cheryl Black ARTICLE More than a Props List: Redefining Material Culture as Survival and Pleasure in Lynn Nottage’s Ruined Christen Mandracchia ARTICLE The Politics of Trance: Victoria Woodhull and the Radical Reform of Platform Mediumship Robert Thompson ARTICLE Beyond Text: Theater and Performance in Print After 1900 Lynn Deboeck BOOK REVIEW Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theatre Erica Stevens Abbitt BOOK REVIEW Made Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era Xiaoqiao Xu BOOK REVIEW Performance in the Zócalo: Constructing History, Race, and Identity in Mexico's Central Square from the Colonial Era to the Present Andrew Gibb BOOK REVIEW Issue 2 Editorial Introduction Benjamin Gillespie and Bess Rowen America Happened to Me: Immigration, Acculturation, and Crafting Empathy in Rags Valerie Joyce ARTICLE Burning it Down: Theatre Fires, Collective Trauma Memory, and the TikTok Ban Danielle Rosvally ARTICLE “A Caribbean Soul in Exile”: Post-Colonial Experiences of a Jamaican Actor Thomas H. Arthur ARTICLE Archiving a Life in Theatre: The Legacy of Michael Feingold Interview with James C. Nicola, Tanya Elder, and Diego Daniel Pardo INTERVIEW Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States L. Bailey McDaniel BOOK REVIEW Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspapers in New York Michael DeWhatley BOOK REVIEW Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre Philip Wiles BOOK REVIEW Another Day's Begun: Thornton Wilder's Our Town in the 21st Century Lucas Skjaret BOOK REVIEW Appropriate Alex Ferrone PERFORMANCE REVIEW Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month Bess Rowen PERFORMANCE REVIEW MáM Sean F. Edgecomb PERFORMANCE REVIEW Scene Partners Benjamin Gillespie PERFORMANCE REVIEW Oh, Mary! Philip Brankin PERFORMANCE REVIEW Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative articles and reviews on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Please refer to our Style Guide for submission information and general formatting guidelines. Send all general queries to the editors at jadtjournal@gmail.com . Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage

JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present.  Journal of American Drama and Theatre (JADT) JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. ISSN Number: 2376-4236 Entries under this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Home Current Issue Archive About & Submission Guidelines Contact Past Issues Curren Issue Current Issue Volume 37 Issue 2 EDITORIAL Censorship/Public Censure and Performance Today: Special Issue Introduction David Bisaha and Pria Ruth Williams ARTICLE Remembering Censorship in the World Premiere of Seán O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned: Lafayette, Indiana, 1959 Nic Barilar ARTICLE The Stage as Networked Battleground: Dissent and Censorship in Contemporary Canadian Theatre and Performance Donia Mounsef ARTICLE Censor/Censure: A Roundtable Pria Ruth Williams, Claire Syler, Amy Hughes, Karen Jean Martinson, David Bisaha ARTICLE Which of These Are Censorship? The Divide Between Prior Restraint and Soft Censorship Rowan Jalso ARTICLE How Can an Artist Respond to Censorship? The Dilemma That Faces Contemporary Creatives in the UK Patrizia Paolini QUEER VOICES The LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project: A Roundtable Conversation Benjamin Gillespie QUEER VOICES Life is Drag: Documenting Spectacle as Resistance An Interview with Rachel Rampleman Benjamin Gillespie BOOK REVIEW Middle Eastern American Theatre: Communities, Cultures, and Artists. Michael Malek Najjar. Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2021; Pp. xvi + 237. Megan Stahl BOOK REVIEW Lessons from Our Students: Meditations on Performance Pedagogy. Stacey Cabaj and Andrea Odinov. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 126 Samantha Briggs BOOK REVIEW 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. Erika Guay PERFORMANCE REVIEW Fauci and Kramer Janet Werther PERFORMANCE REVIEW Our Town I. B. Hopkins PERFORMANCE REVIEW Frankenstein Melissa Sturges Past Issues Past Issues Volume 37 Volume 33 Volume 28 Volume 36 Volume 32 Volume 27 Volume 35 Volume 31 Volume 34 Volume 30 Curren Issue Current Issue Censorship/Public Censure and Performance Today: Special Issue Introduction Censor/Censure: A Roundtable The LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project: A Roundtable Conversation Lessons from Our Students: Meditations on Performance Pedagogy. Stacey Cabaj and Andrea Odinov. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 126 Our Town Remembering Censorship in the World Premiere of Seán O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned: Lafayette, Indiana, 1959 Which of These Are Censorship? The Divide Between Prior Restraint and Soft Censorship Life is Drag: Documenting Spectacle as Resistance An Interview with Rachel Rampleman 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. Frankenstein The Stage as Networked Battleground: Dissent and Censorship in Contemporary Canadian Theatre and Performance How Can an Artist Respond to Censorship? The Dilemma That Faces Contemporary Creatives in the UK Middle Eastern American Theatre: Communities, Cultures, and Artists. Michael Malek Najjar. Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2021; Pp. xvi + 237. Fauci and Kramer Past Issue Archive We are in the process of moving all past journal entries to the current websiite. Please bear with us as we make this transition. You can view all the past issues at www.jadt.commons.gc.cuny.edu . For any queries or clarifications, write to us at jadtjournal@gmail.com Jun 6, 2024 Volume Issue 36 2 Archiving a Life in Theatre: The Legacy of Michael Feingold Interview with James C. Nicola, Tanya Elder, and Diego Daniel Pardo Jun 1, 2024 Volume Issue 36 2 MáM Sean F. Edgecomb Jun 1, 2024 Volume Issue 36 2 Oh, Mary! Philip Brankin Jun 6, 2024 Volume Issue 36 2 Editorial Introduction Benjamin Gillespie and Bess Rowen Jun 1, 2024 Volume Issue 36 2 Appropriate Alex Ferrone Jun 1, 2024 Volume Issue 36 2 Burning it Down: Theatre Fires, Collective Trauma Memory, and the TikTok Ban Danielle Rosvally Jun 6, 2024 Volume Issue 36 2 “A Caribbean Soul in Exile”: Post-Colonial Experiences of a Jamaican Actor Thomas H. Arthur Jun 1, 2024 Volume Issue 36 2 Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month Bess Rowen Jun 1, 2024 Volume Issue 36 2 Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre Philip Wiles Jun 1, 2024 Volume Issue 36 2 Scene Partners Benjamin Gillespie Jun 1, 2024 Volume Issue 36 2 Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States L. Bailey McDaniel Jun 1, 2024 Volume Issue 36 2 America Happened to Me: Immigration, Acculturation, and Crafting Empathy in Rags Valerie Joyce Load More Visit Old Website About & Submission Guideline About The Journal History and Mission Founded in 1989, JADT is a widely acclaimed peer-reviewed journal publishing thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas—past and present. The journal’s 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. JADT is fully online and freely accessible. Our aim is to promote research on theatre of the Americas and to encourage historical and theoretical approaches to plays, playwrights, performances, and popular theatre traditions. Studies of dramatic texts from a purely literary perspective are outside the scope of the journal. “I see American Drama and Theatre as a primary means of reflecting the excitement and progress of our language, our culture, our democracy, our social concerns and our historical roots as Americans. No better opportunity exists for understanding, or for contributing to our understanding, of our American world, past or present, than the Journal of American Drama and Theatre, as shown by the excellence of its past performance and the promise of its future.” – Walter Meserve Submission Guidelines The editors of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre (JADT) are now accepting submissions for essays on any topics relating to theatre, drama, and popular entertainments of the Americas for consideration. Please submit completed manuscripts to jadtjournal@gmail.com . We accept submission on a rolling basis. Please email the editors with any inquiries. Article manuscripts should be 5,000 to 8,000 words in length and prepared in conformity with the Chicago Manual of Style using manual endnotes. Completed manuscripts should be submitted as Microsoft Word attachments via e-mail to jadtjournal@gmail.com . Articles will be peer reviewed, so please allow 3-4 months for a decision. If you are submitting images, please provide the images and captions with your submission. (Pleas e Note: Images should be at least 300dpi and authors are responsible for securing permissions prior to submission). Please include a short bio with your submission. Performance Reviews JADT publishes performance reviews on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas. Single reviews are usually 800 to 1,200 words in length. We encourage authors to contact the editor in advance to propose a review at jadtperformancereviews@gmail.com Boo k Reviews JADT publishes book reviews of monographs published within the last three years. This list of recommended and nominated titles for review is refreshed annually. Reviews are usually 800 to 1000 words for a single review. To propose a book review in advance, please contact the editor at jadtbookreviews@gmail.com . Click here for the complete JADT Style Guide . View Past Issues People Editorial Board Benjamin Gillespie, Bess Rowen Co-Editors Stephanie Lim Book Review Editor Jennifer Joan Thompson Performance Review Editor Jordan Hardesty, Rani O'Brien Journal Assistants Vera Mowry Roberts, Walter Meserve Founding Editors Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Marvin Carlson Director of Publications Frank Hentschker Executive Director Gaurav Singh Nijjer Digital and Web Coordinator 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 James F. Wilson Stacy Wolf Contact Email jadtjournal@gmail.com

JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Published by the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center CUNY, supported by American Theater Drama Society. Back to Top Untitled Copy of Untitled Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume 37 Visit Journal Homepage Issue 2 Censorship/Public Censure and Performance Today: Special Issue Introduction David Bisaha and Pria Ruth Williams EDITORIAL Remembering Censorship in the World Premiere of Seán O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned: Lafayette, Indiana, 1959 Nic Barilar ARTICLE The Stage as Networked Battleground: Dissent and Censorship in Contemporary Canadian Theatre and Performance Donia Mounsef ARTICLE Censor/Censure: A Roundtable Pria Ruth Williams, Claire Syler, Amy Hughes, Karen Jean Martinson, David Bisaha ARTICLE Which of These Are Censorship? The Divide Between Prior Restraint and Soft Censorship Rowan Jalso ARTICLE How Can an Artist Respond to Censorship? The Dilemma That Faces Contemporary Creatives in the UK Patrizia Paolini ARTICLE The LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project: A Roundtable Conversation Benjamin Gillespie QUEER VOICES Life is Drag: Documenting Spectacle as Resistance An Interview with Rachel Rampleman Benjamin Gillespie QUEER VOICES Middle Eastern American Theatre: Communities, Cultures, and Artists. Michael Malek Najjar. Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2021; Pp. xvi + 237. Megan Stahl BOOK REVIEW Lessons from Our Students: Meditations on Performance Pedagogy. Stacey Cabaj and Andrea Odinov. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 126 Samantha Briggs BOOK REVIEW 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. Erika Guay BOOK REVIEW Fauci and Kramer Janet Werther PERFORMANCE REVIEW Our Town I. B. Hopkins PERFORMANCE REVIEW Frankenstein Melissa Sturges PERFORMANCE REVIEW Issue 1 Editorial Introduction Bess Rowen and Benjamin Gillespie EDITORIAL A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Catherine Heiner ARTICLE Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov Alisa Zhulina ARTICLE “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Thomas Keith ARTICLE Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” Allan Johnson ARTICLE “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein James F. Wilson QUEER VOICES Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames Bess Rowen QUEER VOICES The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Jane Barnette BOOK REVIEW Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Nicholas Orvis BOOK REVIEW Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Zach Dailey BOOK REVIEW Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Sebastián Eddowes-Vargas BOOK REVIEW Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. Kelly I. Aliano BOOK REVIEW New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 Stuart J. Hecht, (former) Editor in Chief, New England Theatre Journal NEW ENGLAND THEATRE JOURNAL New England Theatre in Review Martha Schmoyer LoMonaco, (former) Editor, New England Theatre in Review NEW ENGLAND THEATRE REVIEW American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Stephen Kuehler Harvard University SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 Steven Otfinoski Fairfield University SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Tom Grady. Bristol Community College SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Paul E. Fallon. Cambridge, Massachusetts SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 Jan Mason Western Connecticut State University SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Paul E. Fallon Cambridge, Massachusetts SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Karl G. Ruling Milford, Connecticut SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Megan Grumbling University of New England, Southern Maine Community College SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Steven Ofinoski Fairfield University SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Tom Grady Bristol Community College SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Angela Sweigart-Gallagher St. Lawrence University SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Martha Schmoyer LoMonaco, emerita Fairfield University SPECIAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative articles and reviews on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Please refer to our Style Guide for submission information and general formatting guidelines. Send all general queries to the editors at jadtjournal@gmail.com . Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage

JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Published by the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center CUNY, supported by American Theater Drama Society. Back to Top Untitled Copy of Untitled Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume 27 Visit Journal Homepage Issue 1 Refusing the Reproductive Imperative: Sex, Death, and the Queer Future in Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's boom Jordan Schildcrout "Just Saying Our Goodbyes": Elegies' Queer Interventions into the History of 9/11 Michelle Dvoskin James Purdy as Playwright: A Retrospective Reading of A Day After the Fair and The Paradise Circus Michael Y. Bennett Sur la Pointe on the Prairie: Giuseppina Morlacchi and the Urban Problem in the Frontier Melodrama Andrea Harris Issue 2 Introduction (JADT 27.2, 2015) Jonathan Chambers The Best Actor for the Role, or the Mythos of Casting in American Popular Performance Brian Eugenio Herrera Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men Kee-Yoon Nahm Capable Hands: The Myth of American Independence in D.W. Gregory's The Good Daughter Bradley Stephenson Rooting Out Historical Mythologies; William Dunlap’s A Trip to Niagara and its Sophisticated Nineteenth Century Audience. Samuel Shanks Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative articles and reviews on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Please refer to our Style Guide for submission information and general formatting guidelines. Send all general queries to the editors at jadtjournal@gmail.com . Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage

JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Published by the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center CUNY, supported by American Theater Drama Society. Back to Top Untitled Copy of Untitled Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume 30 Visit Journal Homepage Issue 1 May Irwin Franklin J. Lasik BOOK REVIEW American Musical Theater Eric M. Glover BOOK REVIEW Musical Theatre Books Curtis Russell BOOK REVIEW New York's Yiddish Theater Derek R. Munson BOOK REVIEW Chinese Looks Christine Mok BOOK REVIEW Reclaiming Four Child Actors through Seven Plays in US Theatre, 1794-1800 Jeanne Klein ARTICLE The Illusion of Work: The Con Artist Plays of the Federal Theatre Project Paul Gagliardi ARTICLE On Bow and Exit Music Derek Miller ARTICLE Legitimate: Jerry Douglas's Tubstrip and the Erotic Theatre of Gay Liberation Jordan Schildcrout ARTICLE Issue 2 Stages of Struggle and Celebration: A Production History of Black Theatre in Texas Sharyn Emery BOOK REVIEW Immersions in Cultural Difference: Tourism, War, Performance Eero Laine BOOK REVIEW Stage for Action: U.S. Social Activist Theatre in the 1940s Erin Rachel Kaplan BOOK REVIEW Samuel Beckett’s Theatre in America: The Legacy of Alan Schneider as Beckett’s American Director Richard Jones BOOK REVIEW The Contemporary American Monologue: Performance and Politics Kevin T. Browne BOOK REVIEW Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left Kristin Moriah BOOK REVIEW Introduction: Mediations of Authorship in American Postdramatic Mediaturgies Johan Callens, Guest Editor EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION Kaldor and Dorsen's "desktop performances" and the (Live) Coauthorship Paradox Claire Swyzen ARTICLE Ecologies of Media, Ecologies of Mind: Embodying Authorship Through Mediaturgy Christophe Collard ARTICLE Dropping the Needle on the Record: Intermedial Contingency and Spalding Gray's Early Talk Performances Ira S. Murfin ARTICLE #HEWILLNOTDIVIDEUS: Weaponizing Performance of Identity from the Digital to the Physical Ellen Gillooly-Kress ARTICLE Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative articles and reviews on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Please refer to our Style Guide for submission information and general formatting guidelines. Send all general queries to the editors at jadtjournal@gmail.com . Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage

JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Published by the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center CUNY, supported by American Theater Drama Society. Back to Top Untitled Copy of Untitled Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume 31 Visit Journal Homepage Issue 1 Are We “Citizens”? Tony Kushner’s Deweyan Democratic Vision in Angels in America Courtney Ferriter ARTICLE Pageants and Patriots: Jewish Spectacles as Performances of Belonging Rachel Merrill Moss and Gary Alan Fine ARTICLE “Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something”: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the Reconstruction of Melodrama Rosa Schneider ARTICLE Edward Albee’s Sadomasochistic Ludonarratology in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Tison Pugh ARTICLE Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism. Kirsty Johnston. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 240. Alexis Riley BOOK REVIEW Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting. Amy Cook. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Pp. 198. Ariel Nereson BOOK REVIEW The Late Work of Sam Shepard. Shannon Blake Skelton. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016; Pp. 256. Carol Westcamp BOOK REVIEW Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism. Patricia A. Ybarra. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 247. Trevor Boffone BOOK REVIEW Issue 2 Introduction: Reflections on the Tragic in Contemporary American Drama and Theatre Johanna Hartmann and Julia Rössler INTRODUCTION "Take Caroline Away”: Catastrophe, Change, and the Tragic Agency of Nonperformance in Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change Joanna Mansbridge ARTICLE The Poetics of the Tragic in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America Julia Rössler ARTICLE Rewriting Greek Tragedy / Confronting History in Contemporary American Drama: David Rabe’s The Orphan (1973) and Ellen McLaughlin’s The Persians (2003) Konstantinos Blatanis ARTICLE Branding Bechdel’s Fun Home: Activism and the Advertising of a "Lesbian Suicide Musical" Maureen McDonnell ARTICLE Haunting Echoes: Tragedy in Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot Trilogy Nathalie Aghoro ARTICLE Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches. Edited by Sharrell D. Luckett with Tia M. Shaffer. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017; Pp. 233. DeRon S. Williams BOOK REVIEW 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. Javier Hurtado BOOK REVIEW The American Negro Theatre and the Long Civil Rights Era. Jonathan Shandell. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018; Pp. 213 + xii. Jennie Youssef BOOK REVIEW Unfinished Business: Michael Jackson, Detroit, & the Figural Economy of American Deindustrialization. Judith Hamera. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017; Pp. 286 + xvii. Patrick McKelvey BOOK REVIEW A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams. Katherine Weiss, ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2014; Pp. 290. Shane Strawbridge BOOK REVIEW Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative articles and reviews on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Please refer to our Style Guide for submission information and general formatting guidelines. Send all general queries to the editors at jadtjournal@gmail.com . Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage

JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Published by the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center CUNY, supported by American Theater Drama Society. Back to Top Untitled Copy of Untitled Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume 33 Visit Journal Homepage Issue 1 "Ya Got Trouble, My Friend, Right Here": Romanticizing Grifters in American Musical Theatre Dan Venning ARTICLE Troubled Collaboration: Belasco, the Fiskes, and the Society Playwright, Mrs. Burton Harrison Eileen Curley ARTICLE Unhappy is the Land that Needs a Hero: The Mark of the Marketplace in Suzan-Lori Parks's Father Comes Home from the Wars, Parts 1-3 Michael P. Jaros ARTICLE Silence, Gesture, and Deaf Identity in Deaf West Theatre's Spring Awakening Stephanie Lim ARTICLE Contemporary Women Stage Directors: Conversations on Craft. Paulette Marty. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2019; Pp. 292 + viii. Dohyun Gracia Shin BOOK REVIEW Ensemble-Made Chicago: A Guide To Devised Theater. Chloe Johnson and Coya Paz Brownrigg. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2019. Pp. 202. Jaclyn I. Pryor BOOK REVIEW Twenty-First Century American Playwrights. Christopher Bigsby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018; Pp. 228. Shane Strawbridge BOOK REVIEW Encounters on Contested Lands: Indigenous Performances of Sovereignty and Nationhood in Québec; Provocative Eloquence: Theater, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum United States Vivian Appler BOOK REVIEW Issue 2 Introduction to "Milestones in Black Theatre" Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans INTRODUCTION Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Heather S. Nathans PROLOGUE Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Baron Kelly ARTICLE Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Bernth Lindfors ARTICLE Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble Elizabeth M. Cizmar ARTICLE 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented Eric M. Glover ARTICLE A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement Isaiah Matthew Wooden ARTICLE A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Khalid Y. Long ARTICLE Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Lisa B. Thompson ARTICLE Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Michelle Cowin Gibbs ARTICLE Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation Olga Sanchez Saltveit ARTICLE “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Omiyẹmi (Artisia) Green ARTICLE Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Heather S. Nathans INTERVIEW Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Nicole Hodges Persley INTERVIEW 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. DeRon S. Williams BOOK REVIEW Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. Erith Jaffe-Berg BOOK REVIEW The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Jasmeene Francois BOOK REVIEW Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. Kaitlin Nabors BOOK REVIEW 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. Richard Hayes BOOK REVIEW Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Winners ERROL HILL AWARD WINNERS Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative articles and reviews on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Please refer to our Style Guide for submission information and general formatting guidelines. Send all general queries to the editors at jadtjournal@gmail.com . Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage

JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Published by the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the Graduate Center CUNY, supported by American Theater Drama Society. Back to Top Untitled Copy of Untitled Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume 28 Visit Journal Homepage Issue 1 American Tragedian Karl Kippola BOOK REVIEW Changes, Constants, Constraints: African American Theatre History Scholarship Kevin Byrne STATE OF THE FIELD Performing Anti-slavery Heather S. Nathans BOOK REVIEW The Captive Stage Beck Holden BOOK REVIEW Musical Theatre Studies Stacy Wolf STATE OF THE FIELD Reflections: Fifty Years of Chicano/Latino Theatre Jorge Huerta STATE OF THE FIELD Transgressive Engagements: The Here and Now of Queer Theatre Scholarship Jordan Schildcrout STATE OF THE FIELD Strangers Onstage: Asia, America, Theatre, and Performance Esther Kim Lee STATE OF THE FIELD Thinking about Temporality and Theatre Maurya Wickstrom STATE OF THE FIELD Murder Most Queer Laura Dorwart BOOK REVIEW New Directions in Dramatic and Theatrical Theory: The Emerging Discipline of Performance Philosophy Michael Y. Bennett STATE OF THE FIELD “Re-righting” Finland’s Winter War: Robert E. Sherwood’s There Shall Be No Night[s] Thomas F. Connolly ARTICLE Star Struck!: The Phenomenological Affect of Celebrity on Broadway Peter Zazzali ARTICLE Issue 2 Blue-Collar Broadway David Bisaha BOOK REVIEW The New Humor in the Progressive Era Stages of Engagement Introduction: Performance as Alternate Form of Inquiry in the Age of STEM Iris Smith Fischer EDITORIAL iDream: Addressing the Gender Imbalance in STEM through Research-Informed Theatre for Social Change Eileen Trauth, Karen Keifer-Boyd and Suzanne Trauth Moonwalking with Laurie Anderson: The Implicit Feminism of 'The End of the Moon' Vivian Appler ARTICLE Playing Sick: Training Actors for High Fidelity Simulated Patient Encounters George Pate and Libby Ricardo ARTICLE This In-Between Life: Disability, Trans-Corporeality, and Radioactive Half-Life in D.W. Gregory’s Radium Girls Bradley Stephenson Setting the Stage for Science Communication: Improvisation in an Undergraduate Life Science Curriculum Cindy L. Duckert and Elizabeth A. De Stasio Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative articles and reviews on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Please refer to our Style Guide for submission information and general formatting guidelines. Send all general queries to the editors at jadtjournal@gmail.com . Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage

Julia Rössler 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 The Poetics of the Tragic in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America Julia Rössler By Published on January 28, 2019 Download Article as PDF The art of playwriting is not fundamentally a narrative art like novel writing; it is dialogic, it proceeds from contradiction, not cause and effect. - Tony Kushner , “Notes About Political Theater”[1] Since the post-war period, American drama and theatre has been shaped by a strong political consciousness: the Theater of the Ridiculous, queer and gay drama, and the growing public presence of Latin-American and African-American playwrights during the 1960s to 1980s reflect a thematic and aesthetic diversification of American drama that is unparalleled in its history. Some scholars relate new formal developments to the impact of postmodernism as the prime characteristic of a distinctly contemporary American drama and theatre. [2] Moreover, it shows a growing interest among dramatists to establish drama and theatre as a site for critical self-reflection and public debate in which “socio-political goals of challenging hegemonic political representations and presenting identities outside the established social ideal of how Americans ‘should be’” are a central function. [3] In the early 1990s, Tony Kushner, for instance, has received much critical attention for his landmark play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1992) in which he documents multiple ills of US-American society, culture, and politics during Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s. Kushner, who has for years been an openly political voice in American theatre, has on numerous occasions identified himself as a writer of political theatre and describes his political aspirations as a form of “conscious intent to enter the world of struggle, change, activism, revolution, and growth.” [4] Explicit citations of socio-cultural and political events and historical circumstances pervade his dramatic oeuvre in plays such as A Bright Room Called Day (1994), Slavs! (1995), or Angels in America (1992). In many of his plays, dramatic plots and the character’s actions function as symbolic explications of the interrelation between human suffering and the dominant ideologies that inform our understanding of reason, morality, and truth while displacing the absolute value and legitimacy of such notions. In particular, his alertness to the social inequalities and injustices resulting from the discriminatory policies on race, ethnicity, and class give his plays political force and has contributed to his reputation as a receptive analyst of the multiple precarious situations that shape human life and experience. Occasionally, Kushner’s plays give the impression of being a personal venture into the possibilities and limits of a dialectical and Marxists world-view. Many critics see this venture as one main feature of Kushner’s work as a dramatist and yet respond with mixed reactions: Harold Bloom, for instance, voices some concern over an ideological overburdening of Kushner’s creativity and dramatic talent at the expense of his artistic and intellectual openness. [5] Other scholars have taken the political suggestiveness of his plays as cues to explore Kushner’s dramatic and aesthetic style in relation to a close intellectual affinity of his oeuvre with the works of Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, or the theories of Marxism. [6] In this paper, I will situate Kushner’s play Angels in America (1992) in the poetological tradition of tragedy and, in particular, the notion of the tragic. As I will later outline, these two interrelated dimensions have posed profound difficulties both as a matter of literary form and a model of thought during the intellectual climate of the 1980s when Angels was written. Kushner thus resorts to the tragic in a time when it is seen by many as an outdated view on human existence. In this respect, I suggest that Angels in America draws its pressing political consciousness from the way in which Kushner develops his unique poetics of the tragic. It relates the causes of human suffering and agony to concrete moral and political ideologies as well as the ethical implications of human action and will. In this sense, the play most clearly departs from the traditional metaphysics of tragic fate. Even more so, unlike other modern tragedians who negotiate the limitations of human agency as the tragic essence of life, Angels rejects a tragic surrender of human agency in favor of its force to induce change and progress. Finality gives way to visions of progress and profound moral conundrums contribute to a growth of character, will, and new conceptions of freedom. From the perspective of dramatic form, Kushner’s conception of the tragic bears resemblance to one crucial dimension of the Hegelian model of tragic collision which rests on Georg Friedrich Hegel’s assumption, as Simon Goldhill points out, that “the abstract, normative idea of the tragic results in tragedy’s becoming the site where aesthetics, politics, and history are most intimately intertwined.” [7] It is at the intersection of the political and aesthetic innate to the idea of the tragic, in which I place the following discussion of Kushner’s Angels in America . This informs the play’s deeply dialectical grasp of reality and dramatic form. In this vein, the play artfully intermingles aesthetic and politics and can be read to challenge the often presumed separation of the tragic and the political as two mutually exclusive modes of expression and intent while exposing the innate political potentials of the tragic from the perspective of formal structure and ethical inquiry. Visions of the Tragic in the Twentieth Century The tragic, as a site for the literal and figurative envisioning of human agency and its limits has, from the early twentieth century onwards, occupied the minds and creative efforts of American dramatists. [8] Eugene O’Neill’s dramatic works envision the tragic conundrum of human existence as the impossibility to escape suffering. The multiple existential struggles that befall his characters embody this inevitability: the tragic protagonist is one who suffers from shattering inner demons as O’Neill dramatizes a pervading sense of despair against the mechanisms of coping with this innate facet of human existence. It is well known that Arthur Miller envisioned modern tragedy as a transfiguration of the tragic hero’s nobility into the preservation of human dignity against relentless and dehumanizing social orders. [9] While O’Neill bespeaks an insight into the tragic as a human condition as such, Miller’s take on tragedy evokes the quotidian and a concrete social reality. His dramatic accentuation of the average man as a tragic hero inspires a fierce critique on the commodification of human experience and a thoughtful reflection on the changing nature of values, ideals, and virtues in modern US-American society. Dramatists such as O’Neill and Miller have given crucial impulses to many studies that explore the uniquely modern visions of tragedy and the tragic in the mid-twentieth century and link this emergence with the general trend of modern American drama to give shape and meaning to their dramatis personae in relation to social, political, or natural environments and their psychological constitutions. Modern tragedies in this sense are more closely related to a metaphysics of the tragic, although they seldomly refer to the divine or fate as the responsible metaphysical forces but conceive of social, natural, and psychological forces as the constitutive powers that shape human existence. In his study From Büchner To Beckett , Alfred Schwarzer argues that realism and naturalism came into existences as a new poetic of dramatic writing in an attempt to understand and examine the “contemporary version of man’s tragic condition.” [10] He outlines that the modern tragedians dramatize the modern individual’s exposure to natural and social forces that are beyond his immediate control as an essentially tragic experience. [11] Tragedy, hence, serves as a model of thought and dramatic form, as it explores the tragic as a mode and epitome of modern existence in the context of human agency, psychology, or natural and social determinism. During the increased presence of political criticism in the 1980s and 1990s—the time in which Angels was written—tragedy, as a model of thought and a literary form, suffers from a rapid decline of interest. It has often been remarked that in this intellectual climate of the time, tragedy was contemplated as a highly outdated and insufficient literary form with regard to the critical work plays were meant to perform. In her expansive survey on tragic theory, Rita Felski remarks that tragedy was “perceived as the enemy of politics in promoting a sense of hopelessness, fatalism, and resignation” and therefore was cast to the margins of critical discussion. [12] Moreover, in an US-American context, Felski argues, the notion of tragedy became highly unpopular because of its power to displace uniquely American myths such as the “sovereignty of selfhood” and was thus regarded as outmoded in a time in which self-determination and individualism were important ideational cornerstones to the idea of freedom. [13] The Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton situates the occasional abandonment of tragedy from critical debate in the 1980s and 1990s within its particular history of reception as “the word signifies a kind of writing which is no longer possible”. [14] And this principal abandonment of tragedy from critical inquiry results in a discrepancy between theory and practice. In a similar vein, I have signaled in the first section of this paper that this view can be challenged as a premature verdict with regard to Kushner’s Angels in America . In fact, only in recent years a great body of dramatic work has been reconsidered in response to an increased reclaiming of tragedy to critic’s attention (see “Introduction” in this special issue). The skepticism towards the notion of tragedy has survived as a persistent force. In the later twentieth century, George Steiner was a main influence in this regard as he challenged the place and value of tragedy in his book The Death of Tragedy (1961). Steiner’s main claim is that the particular world view that tragedy requires—a metaphysics of the divine and inescapable and unjust fate—has, in modern times, been superseded by the shaping influence of the metaphysics of Christianity and Marxism. The former receives its meaning from the principles of redemption and forgiveness while the Marxist world view draws its effective momentum from the notions of progress, change, and justice. [15] In his personal political commitment to Marxism, Kushner’s association with the tragic seems counterintuitive. Unredeemable failure and radical finality, the cornerstones of tragedy on account of Steiner, are absent from such a logic and thus constitute the basic “anti-tragic” metaphysics of the modern and contemporary period. Because “tragedy is irreparable” and cannot lead to justice, resolution, or atonement but forces us to accept the harrowing insight that “things are as they are,” true tragedy seeks to confront us with the radical and tragic limitedness of human agency. [16] And Kushner’s own aesthetic of theatre coincides with Steiner’s argument to the extent that it renders a certain impossibility of tragedy due to its promotion of a progressivist logic and, as I believe, resistance to the limitedness of human agency. Kushner openly voices his discomfort embracing an essentially tragic outlook on life in his plays: in his essay “Notes About Political Theater” he refers to the “tragic” as a “rhetorical dead end” if it is merely understood as a permanent and universal, or “natural” condition of human existence which withholds the political implications of action and event. [17] In contrast to Steiner’s idea to declare the death of tragedy, Kushner’s Angels in America can be regarded as a successful and imaginative transposition of the tragic into a politically motivated dramatic form in order to explore the dilemmas of contemporary experience. Its openness of form appeals to the investment of the tragic with political meaning and significance which does, in Kushner’s own words, not “lie beyond politics, beyond history” but presents the world as “an interwoven web of the public and the private” suggesting that “the personal is political.” [18] For Kushner, the tragic must rest within the political, the private, and the public and not outside of it, precisely because it—as a dramatic force—artistically enriches drama with multiple impulses of critique, perception, and reflection on the world of lived experience. Meanwhile, Steiner’s claim itself has been challenged from various theoretical directions, let alone through the striking new interest in contemporary rewritings of Greek tragedies (see the article by Konstantinos Blatanis in this issue). But regarding the fact that we need to approach the tragic anew in order for it to work as an insightful operational tool, his arguments are still illuminative. [19] In fact, a number of scholars have made attempts to save the tragic from this “rhetorical dead end” of which Kushner speaks and pursue to interrogate different modalities of the tragic. In this respect, the work of scholars like Williams, Wallace, or Felski reflect a trend to rethink the tragic beyond familiar parameters and to include new frameworks from the field of philosophical aesthetics or reception theory. [20] Rita Felski, for instance, strongly advises to view the tragic as an aesthetic term that involves a “distinctive forming of material” beyond a mere representation of suffering but as a “particular shape of suffering.” [21] The process of shaping that Felski refers to is also a pivotal dimension of Eagleton’s view on the tragic when he writes: “Tragic art involves the plotting of suffering, not simply a raw cry of pain.” [22] Both propose to view the tragic as a particular mode of expression which creates the material composition and symbolic meaning of the play. This appropriation of the tragic beyond the parameters of metaphysics but within the context of drama’s poetological form has its roots in a long tradition of thinking and conceptualizing the tragic. In particular, German Idealism of the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century regarded the tragic as a model of philosophical thought. [23] Since then, Michelle Gellrich points out, the notion of the tragic conflict began to inform attempts of a systematic theories of drama and tragedy. [24] In fact, the notion that conflict is an essential element of tragic drama can nowadays be traced in a lineage of thinkers on tragedy from Hegel (1830), to Martha Nussbaum (2000), Raymond Williams (1966), or Terry Eagleton (2009). [25] The German idealist Georg Friedrich Hegel, in his “Lectures on Fine Arts,” was among the first philosophers of the theory of tragedy to explicitly single out the conflict as a central feature of plot for the dramatic arts. [26] In his chapter on the principle importance of action in dramatic poetry he writes: “it rests entirely on collisions of circumstances, passions, and characters, and leads therefore to actions and then to the reactions.” [27] On the one hand, collisions are an important engine for a swift and effective progression of dialogue and plot. On the other hand, and more importantly, in tragedy, the dramatization of collisions or conflicts between individuals has a particular “manner” or quality: the characters embody what Hegel calls a “substantive basis” as they signify meaning beyond their individual existence: they symbolize general systems of value such as the family, body politic, religious faiths etc. [28] The principle task of tragedy consists in plotting such realms of ethical life against each other to kindle the tragic meaning of the conflict. And, as is well known, Hegel builds his argument primarily on Sophocles’ Antigone . In the confrontation between Antigone and Creon about the rightful burial of Antigone’s brother, Hegel recognizes a clash of equally valid systems of value—family (Antigone) versus the body politic (Creon)—which creates a tragic situation resulting from the juxtaposition of two ethically legitimate realms. As both require different imperatives of action and will, a resolution of the conflict inevitably involves a violation of ethical conduct, and finally death. [29] Hegel writes: “each can establish the true and positive content of its own aim and character only by denying and infringing the equally justified power of the other.” [30] This in essence defines the kind of tragic conflict that Hegel had in mind. It is Hegel’s point that this particular shaping and patterning of conflict—plotting equally valid ethical systems against each other—as the “artistic appearance” of tragic drama determines its tragic essence; the condition of Hegel’s poetics of the tragic is the dramatization of positions of mutual exclusiveness and the characters’ “active grasp” of this conundrum as tragic. [31] But he also acknowledges that the powers and forces that are plotted against each other are subject to historical change: in ancient tragedy, the character’s actions were features of their “essential nature” that was defined by some external law or ethical code. [32] In modern drama, Hegel argues, the internalization of the notions of freedom, free will, and self-determination manifest the codes of conduct: To genuine tragic action it is essential that the principle of individual freedom and independence , or at least that of self-determination , of will to find in the self the free cause and source of the personal act and its consequences, should already have been aroused. [33] Hegel argues that the tragic requires the principles of freedom and self-determination, the theoretical possibility to act otherwise based on one’s own assessment and judgement. Or as Glicksberg put it: “freedom of choice . . . is basic to the tragic conflict.” [34] This refers to another important focus of Hegel’s view on the tragic: his concern with the human subject from a modern perspective which sees the individual’s conflicts as a confrontation between internal and external, or as Goldhill writes, between “inner freedom and external necessity.” [35] Hegel’s notion of tragic action envisions a basic understanding of human agency as an end in itself and thus maps out a pattern of inner logic to the tragic conflict. Williams, rephrasing Hegel’s argument, understands the particular nature in which the tragic conflict figures in modern drama as a “self-contained model of integrity.” [36] American culture has been particularly responsive to the notions of individualism and freedom in their shaping and forming of cultural and national identities, an aspect that is also put to critical scrutiny in Kushner’s poetics of the tragic. Overall, Hegel’s attempt to view tragedy as an embodiment and reflection of human progress on account of the dramatization of tragic collisions has been widely influential for subsequent tragic theory. And the theorems of the transformative impulses of historical and social progress have been particularly attended to by Marxist critics (e.g. Raymond Williams). But I want to conclude my discussion of Hegel by referring to a critical expansion of the kind of critical work the tragic conflict can perform which bespeaks Kushner’s formal procedure. According to Michelle Gellrich, the shortcomings of Hegel’s interpretation lie in his way “of naturalizing the disruptive strategies tied to tragic collision” and she makes the point that Hegel circumvents “textual resistance” [37] in favor of dramatic resolution and closure in order to qualify tragedy as a literary form that achieves a “higher level of spiritual consciousness.” [38] Angels in America : The Poetics of the Tragic Angels in America is set in the New York winter of 1985 to early 1986 amidst the AIDS crisis and Ronald Reagan’s presidency. While the first part, Millennium Approaches , serves as a prolonged exposition which stages the onset of the tragic conflicts that happen in the protagonist’s lives, the second part, Perestroika , becomes centrally a matter of how things can end: in the surrender to fatal error, loss, and suffering or the recognition of the powerful forces and value of human will and agency. This two-part structure in itself mirrors the play’s appropriation of the tragic as a matter of dramatic structure and ethical inquiry. The interrelatedness of both dimensions constitute the particular aesthetic and political implications that are essential to Kushner’s poetics of the tragic: a dialectical dynamic between irreconcilable conflict and resolution, surrender and resistance, self and other. As the play plots the existence of its characters as a series of struggles with conflicting ideologies and ethics, it recalls the hermeneutical infrastructure of tragedy as the tropes of fate (illness), unbearable conflict, or the unavoidability of human suffering are among the salient concerns of the play: Kushner’s play expresses a grasp of reality in which racism, the decline of the ethics of care, irresponsibility and multiple forms of social-cultural discrimination pervade the United States of the 1980s. In the play, all account for the personal struggles the characters have to endure as their actions and decisions are motivated by the internalization of spiritual ideals, religious faiths, or the paralyzing experience of rejection and discrimination. The play’s expansive dramatis personae, on the one hand, symbolizes the omnipresence of suffering on a global scale, and on the other hand, creates a dynamic intersection of multiple storylines and scenes, as the play’s dramatic world impresses through its unusual level of scale and complexity. All minor subplots converge in the play’s dramatization of the relationship between Prior Walter and Louis Ironson. In particular Louis’s reaction to Prior’s incurable illness manifests a dramatic center from which various actions, encounters, and confrontations subsequently precede. This dramatic center unearths Kushner’s negotiation of the tragic as a site of irreconcilable, moral conundrums which cast the protagonists in a profound state of existential precarity about their own ethical situatedness. Like in classical tragedy, this often involves dramatic situations that test a character’s strength and will. Luis’s confrontation with his partner’s outbreak of AIDS emerges as an impossible test of will and character and challenges him to compromise his idealist and dialectical world-view which he holds sacral. In a central scene in the play, Louis probes into the unethicality of his anticipated separation from Prior in a conversation with the Rabbi on the occasion of his grandmother’s funeral: LOUIS : Rabbi, what does the Holy Writ say about someone who abandons someone he loves at a time of great need? RABBI : Why would a person do such a thing? LOUIS : Because he has to. Maybe because this person’s sense of the world, that it will change for the better with struggle, maybe a person who has this neo-Hegelian positivist sense of constant historical progress towards happiness or perfection or something, who feels very powerful because he feels connected to these forces, moving uphill all the time. . . . Maybe that person can’t, um, incorporate sickness into his sense of how things are supposed to go. Maybe vomit . . . and sores . . . and disease . . . really frighten him, maybe . . . he isn’t so good with death (25).[39] The conversation reflects the dramatization of Louis moral conundrum as a crisis of authenticity of the self. Louis’s self-understanding is spiritually and intellectually informed by Hegelian ideals of progress and reason, as the striving towards such ideals is associated with life’s meaning and the purpose to achieve “happiness or perfection.” Louis’s attempts to justify his struggle resonates with the plays’ careful crafting of Louis’s conundrum as an intellectual one: he becomes an object of his own reflection and contemplates the rationale of his actions; self-doubt (‘maybe’) pervade his speech as he refers to himself as ‘this person’ in order to objectify his own actions. In this sense, the play links the crisis of the authenticity of the self with a tragic rift between one’s integrity to the self and one’s loyalty to the other. This involves an active grasp of Louis’s situation as irresolvable and tragic, as the play stages his choice in light of the inevitable violation of his ethics of self or the care and loyalty towards the other. These situations of profound collision and struggle create a level of abstraction in Angels in America that motivates a reflection beyond its concrete and local exploration of the competing ideologies of race, sexuality, and politics. [40] As the intellectual and emotional resourcefulness of the play comes from such an exploration of universal experiences of human existence—such as suffering, love and morality, free will—the careful plotting of the tragic conflict becomes an elemental dramatic feature in Kushner’s poetics. Moreover, in the play this rift between autonomy of the self and the self’s situatedness within communal and interpersonal bonds bespeaks a specific conundrum of the self-perception of the modern subject. In this sense, Angels more explicitly engages with the tragic dimensions of human experience as it reflects on the agential powers of the modern sense of the self which oscillates between self/other, integrity/betrayal, and progress/stasis. The manifestation of the modern sense of self involves a self-perception as an autonomous self that is informed by individualism and freedom as “inner facult[ies]” to use Terry Eagleton’s words. [41] The play does not merely exemplify such struggles but promotes critical examination of the “self-contained model of integrity” as an absolute imperative for action. [42] In this sense, such profound confrontations of mutually exclusive value systems give rise to the dramaturgy of tragic tension. Hence, the dynamic of the tragic is symbolized by Louis’s personal conundrum as the play explores modern notions of selfhood through the prism of the self in relation to the other. On a different level, the play effects a great suggestiveness about the actual realities of American conservative value systems as sources of tragic outcome in its representation of Joseph ‘Joe’ Pitts struggle. Joe, Louis’s first affair after his separation from Prior, is stricken by an internal struggle: faithful to the beliefs of Mormonism, he rejects his own sexual orientation. His marriage to Harper, who suffers from a morphine addiction, is shaped by his failing attempts to simulate attraction and sexual interest which protects him from the “one thing deep within” him which is “wrong or ugly” (40). Joe’s contemplation of Mormonism (a world view which, in the play, is also embodied by Hannah and Harper) as a “second skin” and a layer of “protection” (201) is radically subverted by Kushner as he puts the tragic inherent to Joe’s conflict in the service of critiquing precisely those mechanism of oppression and injustice that are innate to such value systems, i.e. the denial or rejection of homosexuality. The coloration of Joe’s languages with despair and emotional numbness poetically conveys the sense of unbearable existence as a response to the sanction of one’s will, autonomy, and true self. Or, as Joe tells his wife Harper, “so long as I have fought, with everything I have, to kill it” and “I’m a shell. There’s nothing left to kill.” (40–41). It is precisely this powerful disruptive force of tragic conflict, according to Gellrich, which contains a potential to critique and displace the dominant systems of value: Dramatizations of tragic conflict . . . are problematic for critical approaches based on assumptions of normative order because they are subversive. Typically they question a culture’s truths and systems of knowledge, overturn standards of rational consistency, and upset a basis in the tragic action from which resolution, synthesis, or catharsis might come. In short, conflicts in tragedy indirectly challenge the terms on which such critical accounts stand[43] And precisely because the tragic commonly engages with the metaphysics of unalterable fates, natural and cosmic forces, and the absolutisms of civic orders that are beyond human control, Angels , in its fierce political intent, interrelates suffering from AIDS to systematic powerlessness and stigmatization; suffering from AIDS bears political meaning insofar as it gestures towards the mechanisms of power involved in its public perception: in the play, Roy Cohn, who has just been diagnosed with the illness, forbids his doctor to diagnose him with AIDS: “ No , Henry, no . AIDS is what homosexuals have. I have liver cancer” (47). Roy refuses to assume the role of a tragic subject as an outcome of the illness because its potential withdrawal of status, agency and power: “Your problem, Henry, is that you are hung up on words, on labels, that you believe they mean what they seem to mean. AIDS. Homosexual. Gay,” and Roy continues, “like all labels they tell you one thing and one thing only: where does an individual so identified fit in the food chain, in the pecking order? Not ideology, or sexual taste, but something much simpler: clout” (46). Moreover, in its firm place within the aesthetic spectrum of political drama, Angels does not welcome an orientation of the tragic as an end to human agency. Kushner’s play is distinct as it resists the rash impulse to view human experience as essentially tragic, a notion, which is most explicitly spelled out in the event of unpreventable, physical suffering. Kushner’s grasp of reality rejects the tragic as a site for the failing and suspension of human agency which does not principally exclude tragic circumstances from his dramatic universe. Angels ’s tragic figures are those who suffer from misfortunes that give no hope for resolution or betterment. In classical tragic thought, this dramatization promotes a perception of human existence as tragic by nature due to humans’ limited agency and freedom in light of fate, natural disasters, or hereditary forces. However, in Kushner’s play, the response to the inevitable restriction of one’s own agency—for which the sick body functions as a central symbol—do not inevitable lead to surrender and resignation. Prior’s and Roy Cohen’s bodies are stricken by severe pain, bodily dysfunctions, and severe liaisons: “ Prior stops, suddenly feeling sick again: leg pain, constricted lungs, cloudy vision, febrile panic and under that, dreadful weakness ” (279, original emphasis). This plight of suffering is refigured into powerful metaphors for the persistence of human will as forceful dimension of human agency which can challenge the hopelessness that metaphysical determinisms of a tragic view on life commonly involve. In the case of Prior, Joe, and Harper, for instance, the growing consciousness to oppose the loss of their individual will coincides with a spiritual strengthening that eventually triggers life-changing actions. Prior, despite the physical agonies of his battle with AIDS, displays a striking strength and sense of hope which lead him to reject the prospect of relief and eternal spiritual life offered by the Angels. Prior’s comment, “I HAVE SIGHT I SEE ” (224) alludes to the new forms of perception and his strength of will. In as much Prior’s new found perception of life is triggered by his rejection of the Angel, Harper’s personal catharsis comes with her learning the truth about her husband’s real sexual orientation: HARPER : Look at me. Look at me. Here! Look here at — JOE ( Looking at her ): What? HARPER : What do you see? JOE : What do I . . . ? HARPER : What do you see? JOE : Nothing , I— ( Little pause ) I see nothing. HARPER ( A nod, then ): Finally. The truth (244). Prior and Harper both experience such a “threshold of revelation” (199, 218): Harper finally recognizes her husband’s attempt to conceal and suppress his true sexual nature. She experiences a sense of liberation from knowing the truth. The withholding of truth has been the tragic force of Harper’s inner imprisonment as she only finds relief in her hallucinations and her imaginary friend. This prospect of overcoming and opposing tragic circumstances that the play offers, prompts the question of its ending. According to David Kornhaber, much criticism of Kushner’s play finds the ending unsatisfactory because of its “downgrading of revolutionary demands” that Angels otherwise seems to promote. [44] And yet, in Kornhaber’s view the ending circumvents the final surrender of the characters to tragic defeat in the formation of an inclusive polis and a civic community that the play finally stages. The coda of the play, set during a “a sunny winter’s day, warm and cold at once” (288) in Central Park during January 1990, suggests reconciliation instead of irreversible alienation as one alterative outcome of tragic circumstances. Indeed, on this level, dramatic closure is channeled into visions of social change and progress that the character’s imagine during this final conversation in which tragic situations find internal closure in the character’s hopeful envisioning of a better, more just future. This ending also reflects Kushner’s own belief in the transformative potentials of theatre and the political work his plays are meant to perform, or as Louis says: “That’s what politics is. The world moving ahead” (288). This view on the dynamic of constant movement through struggle and conflict also effect the play’s symbolic structure from the point of view of dramatic form. In “Notes About Political Theater,” Kushner writes that in his view, the narrative form of drama is a matter of “contradiction.” [45] Throughout, the play’s aesthetic is grounded on this premise. Kushner’s elaborate use of conflict and juxtaposition as dramatic devices create those situations that contain the tragic tensions. These are not so much concerned with the dramatization of a verdict over human existence as essentially tragic. Rather, these function as a symbolic representations of the human condition in contemporary America as an outcome of particular socio-political and cultural structures. In this respect, the play is reminiscent of the conventions of social realism in its sharp exposure of the multiple inequalities in US American society and its discriminatory ideologies on the grounds of race, sexuality, or religion as a main sources of suffering. It also reflects on the human condition of the modern subject as a sphere of inseparable and conflictual interconnections and relations between the private and the public, the personal and the political, the self and the other. In Kushner’s craft, theatre’s capacity for symbolic representation intermingles with his precise vision of the unique dynamic of dramatic form and reflects his inspiration to create art that is meaningful beyond its self-contained enclosure. Recurrently, the play develops a discursive dynamic that springs from its stress on a composition of dialog that is motivated by the negotiation of different world-views and ideologies. The integrity of the dramatic categories of dialogue and dramatis personae to express meaningful communication and interaction are essential in Kushner’s poetics. Moreover, the poetics of the tragic are grounded in the play’s negotiation of the place and value of human will and agency in the American consciousness and perception. In a scene between Louis and his on-and-off friend Belize, a former drag queen who now works as a nurse, the dynamic of the conversation is driven by the exchange of viewpoints when the implicit question of politics and the implications of one’s own situatedness lead to a heated confrontation: LOUIS : But I mean in spite of all this the thing about America, I think, is that ultimately we’re different from every other nation on earth, in that, with people here of every race, we can’t—Ultimately what defines us isn’t race, but politics. . . . (94). BELIZE : Here in America race doesn’t count. LOUIS : No, no, that’s not—I mean you can’t be hearing that. BELIZE : I— LOUIS : It’s—Look, race, yes, but ultimately race here is a political question, right? Racists just try to use race here as a tool in a political struggle (96). . . . BELIZE : Unlike, I suppose, banging me over the head with your theory that America doesn’t have a race problem (97). . . . BELIZE : You have no basis except your—Louis, it’s good to know you haven’t changed; you are still an honorary citizen of the Twilight Zone , and after your pale, pale white polemics on behalf of racial insensitivity you have a flaming fuck a lot of nerve calling me an anti-Semite. Now I really gotta go (99). As Louis and Belize argue about the politics of race in the country and spring from implicit suggestions to explicit accusations, the dramatic function of such situations is pivotal in the play to create the movement from the specific to the general: beyond the prisms of psychological individuality and socio-cultural determination, the characters of the play can be regarded as embodiments of different world views that are constitutive for the level of abstraction interrelating the dramatic reality and the actual empirical reality of US-American society it refers to: Joe/Hannah (Mormonism, Conservatism), Roy Cohen (Republicanism, corrupt law), Louis (American individualism) and so on. In a conversation between Louis and Prior on the subject of different faiths, Louis ponders on the question of guilt as a matter to be “ abs tracted”: PRIOR : You could never be a lawyer because you are oversexed. You’re too distracted. LOUIS : Not distracted; ab stracted. I’m trying to make a point: . . . LOUIS : That it should be the questions and shape of a life, its total complexity gathered, arranged and considered, which matters in the end, not some stamp of salvation or damnation which disperses all the complexity in some unsatisfying little decision—the balancing of the scales (38-39). The occasional establishment of the protagonists as objects of critical contemplation resonates with a Hegelian logic of the tragic conflict. But in contrast to Hegel’s interpretation that sees the characters as abstract representations of the family and body politic, Kushner’s protagonists are not limited to ethical archetypes but are finely crafted and autonomous individuals. [46] To this extent, the play relies on the staging of rational contemplations, motivations, social and political environments to establish meaningful dramatic action. This effects a logic of representation to realistically portray and seek answers. Even the play’s interspersed minor monologues rarely express subjective, inner perceptions but stage the characters’ confrontation with the validity of different world-views and involve ethical inquiries (e.g. Joe or Louis). Besides, while in the Hegelian model the tragic, internal resolution and formal closure are a necessity to achieve tragic drama, in Kushner’s poetics of the tragic, dramatic conflicts neither ultimately lead to defeat nor to absolute resolution. The dynamic of juxtaposition and debate pervades the play and relieves the tragic of its traditional task to mean final surrender. Ambiguity, movement, and the value of will are all associated with the tragic. Even though Angels permits the prospect of dramatic resolution as a metaphor for the agency of an open dialectic, its attitude towards the political and historical circumstances that lead to a tragic outcome are far from conciliatory intent. It does not involve a sense of resignation in light of the harmful conditions that shape human existence. The seriousness of tone and concern that permeates much of the dialogue of the play creates a dramatic space motivated by the constant negotiation of the state and the ethics of social politics. Moreover, essential to the play are its staging of real circumstance and personalities to reach a symbolic level of reflection. Roy Cohen is the play’s epitome to rely on a historical framework that relates the play to the reality of politics; of all characters, Cohen is the most distressing symbol for the play’s negotiation of the ethical decline and ill state of American politics: JOE ( A beat, then ): Even if I said yes to the job, it would still be illegal to interfere. With the hearings. It’s unethical. No. I can’t. ROY : Un-ethical. Would you excuse us, Martin? . . . ROY : Un-ethical. Are you trying to embarrass me in front of my friend? . . . This is—this is gastric juices churning, this is enzymes and acids, this is intestinal is what this is, bowel movement and blood-red meat! This stinks, this is politics , Joe, the game of being alive. And you think you’re. . . . What? Above that? Above alive is what? Dead! In the clouds! You’re on earth, goddamnit! Plant a foot, stay a while (70-71). Kushner’s rewriting of the infamous jurist Cohen marks his attempt to create a close relatability between the imaginary and the real; his creation of Roy is informed by evoking the actual realities of American politics rather than by parodic and sarcastic intent. In fact, Kushner felt it necessary to clarify the terms of his inclusion of Roy Cohen into the dramatis personae not as a bleak imitation but as an artistic as well as a metaphorical transposition of actual conditions into a dramatic form: in a footnote on the character of Roy Cohen he writes: “The character Roy M. Cohen is based on the late Roy M. Cohen (1927-1986), who was all too real; . . . But this Roy is a work of dramatic fiction; his words are my invention, and liberties have been taken.” [47] Kushner’s oeuvre constantly negotiates the interplay between art and politics – or, put differently, the creation of a distinctly artful and politically meaningful drama. Occasionally, the play breaks with realistic representation and rational discourse as its own principles of dramatic form. In many situations in the play in which unbearable physical or spiritual suffering give occasion for angels to appear, hallucinations to enter the mind, and visions to inspire new forms of insight and understanding, the boundaries of reason and possibility are crossed: in the Diorama Room of the Mormon Visitors’ Center, Prior suddenly sees Louis on stage as part of the costumed mannequins and questions the reliability of his own mind and senses: “Am I dreaming this, I don’t understand” (197). These situations are saturated with symbolic meaning as the rational gives way to the irrational and the play’s own experimentation with dramatic form. When trial victim Ethel Rosenberg frequently appears on stage and hunts Roy Cohen’s consciousness, or when Prior is confronted with the appearance of Angels and his forefathers, the protagonists inner struggle is externalized and transformed into a physical and material presence on stage. On a formal level, this inclusion debases the play’s own reliance on a narrative model of contradictions of reason and introduces the irrational which, from the perspective of formal structure, adds to the play a sense of openness, ambiguity, and a heightened sense of theatricality. This stylistic hybridity bears testimony to Kushner’s openness to form and his devotion to the exploration of dramatic and theatrical territory which is playfully expressed in his own conception of the “Theater of the Fabulous.” [48] Kushner’s achievement with Angels in America is his construction of the tragic beyond the promise of ultimate spiritual transcendence and as a site where human action and will are a matter of ethical and political acts that bear meaning to questions of responsibility, justice, and change. In this sense, the inclusion of the visionary and the irrational also gesture towards the utopian, and the final reward of change which is perhaps most clearly symbolized in the epilogue of the play. If, as Goldhill argues, the essence of true tragic drama according to Hegel was a matter of the subject’s final reconciliation between inner freedom and external necessity, the ending of Angels reaches no such formal or ethical closure. Prior still suffers from AIDS and remains unreconciled with Louis. But Prior’s final words of the play “we won’t die secret deaths anymore. . . . The Great Work Begins” (290) link struggle and suffering with the prospect of a more hopeful future, in which structures of injustice, discrimination, and exclusion can be overturned. Conclusion Kushner’s play derives much of its dramatic and artistic force from the unique interplay of aesthetics and politics. At the beginning of this paper I have argued that the political and the tragic are often regarded as a mutually exclusive dramatic aesthetic. The benefit of creating a relation in the context of political theatre has therefore so far been overlooked. Moreover, Angels in America , as this paper intended to argue, is one striking example of American drama in which the role of the tragic renders the dramatic properties of conflict and contradiction essential to the symbolic value of the play. Change comes from struggle is one of the key ideas that informs the political dimension of the play. Hence, and in contrast to Steiner’s approach to place the tragic in the realm of the metaphysical, I read Tony Kushner’s Angels in America as a striking example that rejects such logic. The play displaces the tragic mode from a universal one—one that refers to a permanent and metaphysical condition of human existence—and situates it in a local contemporary setting to evoke the political challenges of the 1980s and 1990s America. Moreover, in contrast to Hegel, Kushner’s contemplation of the tragic is rooted within a complex, self-reflexive theatre aesthetic. And while Hegel’s view reconciles the tragic in a transcendent experience of the human consciousness, Kushner envisions the tragic as a force resulting from political, personal, and historical circumstance that the protagonists seek to control, confront, and overcome. This struggle, in essence, speaks of the play’s central metaphor on the transformative power of human agency as a social and political responsibility to achieve change and progress. What Kushner has in common with Hegel is the concentration of the human subject as the main locus of the tragic, and the importance of contradiction and collision as a matter of an ethical and formal necessity to express the tragic sense innate to his play. And, in Kushner’s case, within this conjunction of the tragic resides a resonant and meaningful symbiosis of art and politics. Overall, what appears as fitting final description of the innate political dimension of Kushner’s poetics of the tragic is perhaps best summarized by Christopher Bigsby as a “arena for debate.” [49] In this line of thought, I read Tony Kushner’s Angels in America as a continuation of American dramatists’ ongoing interest in and imaginative preoccupation with tragedy and the tragic—among whom rank such great dramatists such as Eugene O’Neill or Arthur Miller. Unlike his predecessors, Kushner subjects tragedy’s metaphysical offerings to critical scrutiny and establishes the tragic as a distinct modality of the poetics of drama as it informs its shape, patterns, and forms of expression. What I refer to as the poetics of the tragic in Kushner’s Angels in America thus describes Kushner’s attempt to reconcile the tragic as a specific poetological mode of composition and expression with a politically motivated theatre that overall promotes a sense of social relevance of art in general. References [1] Tony Kushner, “Notes About Political Theater,” The Kenyon Review: New Series 19, no. 3/4 (Summer–Autumn 1997): 19. [2] Annette Saddik, in her book Contemporary American Drama (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007) writes: “contemporary American theatre as an experimental theatre of inclusion and diversity that, in postmodern fashion, questions the nature of reality, presents multiple versions of truth(s), complicates the notion of an origin or ‘essence’, and destabilises the illusion of fixed identity by blurring the boundaries between role-playing and authenticity, or acting and being,” 7. See also: Kerstin Schmidt. The Theater of Transformation. Postmodernism in American Drama , (New York: Rodopi, 2005). [3] Saddik, Contemporary American Drama , 5. [4] Tony Kushner, “Political Theater,” 26. See also: Tony Kushner. “How do you Make Social Change?” Theater 31, no. 3 (2001): 62–93. [5] Harold Bloom, “Tony Kushner,” in Modern American Drama , ed. Harold Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2005), 297. [6] Christopher Bigsby, Contemporary American Playwrights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). [7] Simon Goldhill, “The Ends of Tragedy: Schelling, Hegel, and Oedipus,” PMLA 129, no. 4 (October 2014): 635. [8] Much criticism has explored tragedy’s importance to the dramatic oeuvre of Eugene O’Neill: see for instance Miriam M. Chirico, “Moving Fate into the Family: Tragedy Redefined in O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra, ” The Eugene O’Neill Review 24, no. 1/2, (Spring/Fall 2000): 81-100; Stephen A. Black, “ Mourning Becomes Electra as a Greek Tragedy,” The Eugene O’Neill Review 26 (2004): 166–88. [9] Arthur Miller, “Tragedy and the Common Man,” The New York Times , 27 February 1949 http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/00/11/12/specials/miller-common.html (accessed 09 September 2018). [10] Alfred Schwarz, From Büchner To Beckett: Dramatic Theory and the Modes of Tragic Drama (Athens, Oh: Ohio University Press, 1978), 5. [11] Schwarz, Tragic Drama , 10. [12] Rita Felski, “Introduction,” in Rethinking Tragedy , ed. Rita Felski (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 4. [13] Ibid., 11. [14] Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (New Jersey: Wiley, 2009), 65, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ub-lmu/detail.action?docID=320111&query=9780631233602. [15] George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. [1961]), 332–42. [16] Steiner, Tragedy , 8–9. [17] Kushner, “Political Theater,” 22. [18] Ibid., 21. [19] A brief reference to German Romanticism and Friedrich Schiller as the most prominent philosopher and representative of viewing life as an essentially tragic experience shall suffice at this point to stress the long tradition of critical thought that interrelates tragedy and metaphysics. [20] Jennifer Wallace, The Cambridge Companion to Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Rowan Williams, The Tragic Imagination , (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Felski, “Introduction,” Rethinking Tragedy . [21] Felski, “Introduction,” 10. [22] Eagleton, The Idea of the Tragic , 63. [23] Goldhill, “The Ends of Tragedy,“ 634. [24] Michelle Gellrich, Tragedy and Theory. The Problem of Conflict since Aristotle . (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988), 19. [25] Eagleton, The Idea of the Tragic, Raymond Williams. Modern Tragedy . (London: Chatto and Windus, 1966). [26] G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art . Volume 11, trans. T.M.Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). [27] Ibid., 1159. [28] Ibid., 1194. [29] An excellent reading of Hegel’s approach to tragedy can be found in Rowan Williams’ The Tragic Imagination (2016) in the chapter entitled “Reconciliation and its Discontents: Thinking with Hegel”. [30] Hegel, Aesthetics , 1196. [31] Ibid., 1194–97. [32] Ibid., 1194. [33] Hegel qtd. in Williams. Modern Tragedy . 33 [34] Charles Glicksberg, The Tragic Vision in Twentieth Century Literature (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963), xii. [35] Goldhill, “The Ends of Tragedy,” 636 [36] Williams, Tragic Imagination , 63. [37] Gellrich, Tragedy and Theory , 10;22. [38] Ibid., 32. [39] Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (New York: Theatre Communication Group, 2013), emphasis added. Subsequent references will be provided parenthetically. [40] A highly illuminative discussion on the way in which Kushner represents American ideologies and myths in his play is offered by David Savran’s essay: “Ambivalence, Utopia, and a Queer Sort of Materialism: How ‘Angels in America’ Reconstructs the Nation,” Theater Journal 47, no. 2 (1995): 207–27. [41] Eagleton, Idea of the Tragic , 118. [42] Williams, Tragic Imagination , 63. [43] Gellrich, Tragedy and Theory , 10. [44] David Kornhaber, “Kushner at Colonus: Tragedy, Politics, and Citizenship,” PMLA 129, no. 4 (October 2014): 737. [45] Kushner, “Notes About Political Theater,” 19. [46] Goldhill, “The Ends of Tragedy,” 635 [47] Kushner, Angels in America: The Characters In Millennium Approaches , 2013. [48] Kushner, “Political Theater,” 32. [49] Bigsby, Contemporary American Playwrights , 87. Footnotes About The Author(s) JULIA RÖSSLER works at the department for North American Literary and Cultural Studies at the Catholic University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt. In her dissertation, she considers the principal role of mimesis in contemporary Anglophone drama. She is one of the organisers of the international conference “Tragedy in American Drama and Theatre: Genre—Mediality—Ethics” and guest-editor of this issue. 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.

Talya Kingston Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 2 Visit Journal Homepage Starting with the Space: An Interview with Patrick Gabridge Talya Kingston By Published on May 19, 2023 Download Article as PDF Patrick Gabridge at Mount Auburn Cemetery. Photograph by Corinne Elicone. 2018. Plays In Place is a Massachusetts-based company that collaborates with museums, historical sites and cultural institutions to commission plays that are fully produced in their space. While re-enactment on historical sites is not uncommon, this company contracts professional playwrights to pull historical information into fully realized stories that allow audiences to more fully engage with the human interactions that happened in different times and contexts. This engagement can bring new audiences in, and open new conversations, thus enlivening the site and making it more relevant in the life of its community. The commissioned playwright is similarly offered a fulfilling creative collaboration that they know from the outset will be both compensated and produced for an audience. It is perhaps unsurprising to learn that a company that centers writers, both creatively and in the budget, is run by a playwright. Producing Artistic Director Patrick Gabridge’s own work is often featured in the repertoire, but as the company has grown, he has commissioned a cadre of other playwrights (including me). Through the creative process he connects us with historical resources, strongly advocates for our creative freedom, and pays us at every stage of development. I sat down with Patrick to talk about his company’s process for developing new works of theater. I’m curious about your original inspiration for starting Plays In Place. Tell me the origin story of this playwright-led company. Plays In Place was inspired from the production of a play called Blood on the Snow that I was commissioned to write for the Bostonian Society for the renovated council chamber at the Boston Old State House. I’ve always loved writing historical work, and I’ve always loved doing site-specific work. This gave me a chance to do both together. It was clear there was a strong hunger from audiences, especially in New England. We sold out that first run before we even opened. We added a week and sold out that week. We came back in the second year for a twelve-week run. Years later, people are still calling that museum regularly asking when the show is coming back! Starting a company made it easier for me to approach other museums. Our goal is creating new site-specific plays in partnership with museums, historic spaces, and other institutions. I’ve founded theatre companies before, but in this particular case, I wanted to found a theatre company where we didn’t have to manage a space or raise money. I didn’t want a development department and I didn’t want a building. Speaking of raising money, can you describe the financial model for playwrights that you’ve developed through Plays In Place and how it differs from the traditional model of play development in this country? There are a few dozen playwrights who operate on commission for larger theatre companies, and they make money that way, and they get their plays produced that way and that’s great. It doesn’t happen for most of us – not all the time anyway! So, the typical model is you write a play on spec, you send it out to a lot of theatres and those may or may not get produced. It’s a scattershot approach to doing your work. It’s nice that you have a lot of control over what you are going to write, but your possibility of getting it in front of an audience, let alone getting paid for it, is pretty small. Even if you are in a position where a theatre company is commissioning you, they might be commissioning a bunch of different writers. They’ll do some development of your plays, and maybe they’ll pick one or two of those plays to fully produce, but maybe they won’t. So, it is good that you got paid and you still have a play that you can shop around somewhere else, but sad if the commission doesn’t end up in a production. What is different about our model is that the commission is part of the development process. We’ve learned to set up our contracts in multiple phases. Typically phase one is writers working with the institution on basic research, to come up with the storyline and structure. In this phase, the writer is paid upfront to come up with a proposal. This puts us in a good spot for phase two: the commissioning to write the plays and one or two in-house readings. And then phase three is rehearsal and production. In general, the institutions we’re working with are not developing a lot of different plays and starting the project because they intend to produce the work. This phased model allows them to raise the money in steps. It’s easier for the institutions to say yes to the partnership if I say to them that phase one is going to cost them $5000 – they might have that money, or a way to get it. Phase Two is significantly more money but it’s not a huge amount, and once we have scripts in hand, it’s easier to raise money for the rest, for the production. Plays In Place can commission playwrights at very competitive terms, especially for shorter plays. There are very few theatres commissioning one-act plays unless the playwrights are very famous. We don’t need our people to be famous, they just need to be good at what they do and willing to collaborate with the partner institution and keep their needs in mind when writing. For example, we are partnering with a historical site, so our production has to connect to the actual history. I like talking about money with writers because I think we don’t talk about it enough, and then we go into our conversations with producers a little ill-informed. Plays In Place mostly develops work in a community, which is different from the somewhat isolated traditional playwriting mode. Can you talk about the development process for writers and other artists, and how we work together with the sites? The process that you and I are involved in now [a partnership with Historic Northampton], as well as the National Parks Service’s Suffrage In Black and White , both involve three writers and we are all meeting somewhat regularly to talk about our work and to coordinate our presentations to the institutions. There is significant independence between each play, but also, I feel that it’s very important as a group to build that project together, so it has some liminal level of cohesiveness. They are plays that are going to sit together in an evening so whatever that meal is going to be for the audience it must be palatable and delivered in some stylistic framework. The model varies quite a bit from project to project. The Historic Northampton plays are shorter and all have the same director, so there will be a unifying feel between them. We are already talking about what shared actors we’re going to use and what the handoff is going to be between the plays. Whereas the Suffrage In Black and White pieces are full-length plays that will each have their own director. Plays In Place acts as a Creative Producer. We work with the teams to kind of tie them together and the writers are part of that tying things together so that we each understand what the other is doing. Having parameters for a writer can be a very stimulating part of the puzzle. We’re solving puzzles. In the traditional theatre the puzzle presented to us is pretty much “here’s a blank stage” and we act like all blank stages are the same, which I think is a fallacy, but it also causes us to create a somewhat generic version of our play. The business model in the traditional theatre is: get your play done at a professional company, have it be very successful, and have it be done by a bunch of other professional companies, and then have it be done by a bunch of community theatres, and then by a bunch of schools, and together that’s going to make you a bunch of money. Which is true when it works out, but you’ve also had to design a play that fits in all those different spaces. Our model is much less practical in some ways, in that if we do our jobs well the play can’t be done nearly as effectively in other places. For example, I just ran Moonlight Abolitionists , which is designed to be done under the full moon at Mount Auburn Cemetery as a concert reading in the dark. A friend of mine saw it and wanted to know if she could do it in her theatre in London. She could, of course, but it would lack the context that the cemetery brings and the atmosphere the moonlight brings. I wrote it for this place and time on purpose. The specificity of what we create as an artistic team is exciting to me. And I’m more interested in that than the ability of it to be done a thousand times elsewhere. It’s a tough question to ask yourself as a writer: would you be ok if this play was only ever done twice? Would it be worth the work? I will say so far, the answer has been yes. The production experiences are so intensely rich that it is worth it. Moonlight Abolitionists directed by Megan Sandberg-Zakian. October 2022. Walking around the site at Historic Northampton before I even had a story was such an inspiration. As a writer, how is the development process different when you are writing for and from a specific place? It depends on what the place is bringing. The plays are still going to be driven by story and character, but how are those stories and characters related to this place? Often the physical action and visual nature, even the sonic nature of the play, is already influenced by the setting. The question I’m always asking as a dramatist is: what is active about this place? As opposed to just a setting. In the plays that we’re writing for Historic Northampton what is interesting is the historic homes, we are in someone’s yard and so there is a familial sense that is going to inform all our writing, as our characters inhabited this neighborhood. The plays that I did at Mount Auburn Cemetery were different. Cemeteries sound like great places to write plays, except for the fact that the things you know the people for are not things they did in that place. This makes it difficult to create present scenes in the space. I wrote ten plays for the cemetery, in two sets of five. The first set was about the natural world, so that involved things that were there like salamanders and mushroom hunters and birdwatchers, all really rooted in the place. The second set of plays tended to be about people who were buried there. So, there is a play that starts out at this giant sphinx monument that is a memorial to the Civil War, but the scene is between the sculptor and the man who commissioned that piece, Jacob Bigelow, who was old and blind at the time. The scene takes place at the arrival of the sculpture, and then the way we made it active is that we know when he arrived, he inspected it with his hands. So, we got permission to bring this old wooden ladder on and the actor is actually feeling the sculpture and asking all these questions and they are in conversation about this object that is there. Matthew C. Ryan and Ken Baltin in Man of Vision . Photograph by Corinne Elicone. The action of the play is strongly influenced by the physical environment, and that in turn determines the structure. A good example is Moonlight Abolitionists . I knew I wanted to write a play to be done under the full moon, and I knew I wanted to write about abolition. So those things come together but then under the full moon, it’s going to be dark, so structurally that sends it towards a concert reading. It wasn’t going to be safe to move people around in the dark. I decided that it was OK if the characters were static physically as long as it was dynamic relationally between them. This decision also allowed the play to encompass a broad range of times. It is performed in the dark and the characters are lit only by their music stands lights, which casts this really eerie glow on the giant sphinx behind them. Lisa Timmel, who was the Director of New Work at the Huntington when I was a Playwright Fellow there, used to say, “structure is destiny” and I think place informs the structure. My mantra is “Don’t fight the site”. Understand where the site is guiding you and use it because you have so much, but if you try to go against it, you can’t win. I could do a play at Mount Auburn Cemetery set on the moon, but why? The audience will have spent all their imagination jumping to this new place. There are things that I can do in these spaces that I could never afford to pay to do. In a theatre I could make a full moon but it’s not going to be the same as a real full moon with the wind blowing on you at 9 o’clock at night in the middle of a cemetery. We also did this play about the Armenian genocide in the Mount Auburn Cemetery and when someone died, they would exit and they would walk away from the action, but the exits would take five minutes! The play would be continuing, and these people would be just walking way off in the background. When we performed at dusk when characters died, they would just wander into the gloom and disappear, in a lighting effect that would take a huge amount of money to replicate in the theatre, but the earth was doing it for us! You also have the dramatic tension in the fact that these events happened in the same place that they are being reimagined and that your audience knows this. Yes! The audience has that feeling, but so do the performers. When we were at Mount Auburn, I knew one of the actresses had gone to visit the grave of one of the people that she had portrayed in the Armenian play, this young woman who had died in childbirth shortly after arriving in America. It’s impossible for that not to deepen your performance as an actor. There is this richness that you feel. When we did Blood on the Snow it was intense because the play depicts this meeting that happened the day after the Boston Massacre, but you’re in the room where this meeting took place 250 years ago and there are 50 audience members crammed in with a dozen cast members but they are all in the room and you can feel the bones of the place all around you. The people feel so alive, and the audience soaks it in. Amanda J Collins and Robert Najarian in Consecration. Photograph by Corinne Elicone. References Footnotes About The Author(s) TALYA KINGSTON is a playwright, dramaturg and educator working primarily in new play development and theatre for social change. She is the Associate Artistic Director at WAM Theatre in Lenox, Massachusetts. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue 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.

Drew Barker 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 Sarah Gancher and Jared Mezzocchi : How Collaboration is Dramaturgy Between Playwright and Multimedia Creator Drew Barker By Published on May 16, 2023 Download Article as PDF Between this interview (edited for length and clarity from October 2022) and the publication of this issue, Gancher and Mezzocchi’s 2020 production of Russian Troll Farm won an OBIE Award. Since it was one of three productions to be given such an honor in the category of “Digital+Virtual+Hybrid Production,” all of which were reviewed over the last three seasons due to the pandemic, one wonders how such recognition will impact and inspire other digital+virtual+hybrid projects in the future. Regardless, it can certainly be argued that Gancher and Mezzocchi’s production (co-directed by Elizabeth Williamson) met the historical moment better than most digital theatre productions. The play satirically addresses the weaponization of misinformation via social media during a presidential election season that mirrored not only the prior presidential election season, but also the weaponization of misinformation in other parts of the world. Ultimately, using satire and a suite of digital technologies allowed the production to feel familiar and dangerous at the same time. If new times demand new forms, what will we miss if we hesitate to embrace the progress made in terms of theatrical creativity and audience engagement? We should remember what Barbara Fuchs declares: “At its most elaborate, digital theater does more than simulate the real: it complicates and remixes it, foregrounding the artifice and conventionality in how we think about production, performance, audiences, and theater itself.” [1] Playwright Sarah Gancher and multimedia creator Jared Mezzocchi collaborated on the critically-acclaimed, digital production of Russian Troll Farm in late 2020, and are now working on a new project — even as other productions of Russian Troll Farm continue their success. In this interview by Performing Arts Librarian, Drew Barker, Gancher and Mezzocchi discuss how their creative process has evolved. Barker: Your 2020 production of Russian Troll Farm was a benchmark for digital theatre during the pandemic. Now you’re both teaming up again, and the word “epic” has been tossed around. What can you tell us about this new project you’re working on? Gancher: We are working on an epic about deep time that is set throughout all the different eras of history present in one Brooklyn bar — Sunny’s in Red Hook. It has been in continuous operation since 1890. And of course, there’s a lot of history on that spot before that point, and there will be a lot of history on that spot after this time. We are asking the question: What would you learn if you were able to see all of the history in one spot superimposed on top of all the moments of history superimposed on top of each other? If you were able to hop back and forth between them, remix and match them? What would we find out about ourselves, and what will we find out about the patterns that we live? We’re hoping that when superimposed that they all add up to make a giant question that none of them make individually. I think that it’s going to be a massive participatory art project sort of made by the community, consisting of a film shoot at Sunny’s with snippets of video that are like scenes or seamless moments from across all the different eras of Sunny’s, and then after playing their part in that people can walk down the street to this big warehouse where there will be an installation showing everything that’s being shot at Sunny’s superimposed on top of each other and allowing people to hop back and forth between them and see the composite story as it begins to emerge. And there’s bluegrass involved because of the famous bluegrass jam that happens at Sunny’s. It will also have an on-line component. It’s very cool, but it’s currently hard to explain. Mezzocchi: I would add that it’s a two-part process for an audience member to participate in the scene, and then go into an entirely different space, and see how that participation plays a role in a much wider, larger container of time and space. And now you’re both the viewer of a kind of a gallery installation of live mixed video, while also seeing yourself reflected inside of it. And so, you’re kind of unlocking the history of the place, but also you’re participating in a new part of the history of the place. What does it mean when we are aware of our own immediate footprint in time? It’s like a widening of the consciousness of the participant. And I think that’s the big question for me — what does that do to a person when they know that they’re a part of the history of a place? Gancher: It’ll be an experiment and obsession, and it’s sort of in two senses: one where we’ll literally have people playing music and jamming, and then also there’s going to be a kind of like a visual jam session as people, essentially solo with images taking turns, matching the images to the music, finding and making meaning in the connection between these different moments. Mezzocchi: So, perhaps we can create a jam session, both audibly and visually. All of those things are for me, as a technologist, taking the discoveries of Russian Troll Farm which made that thing feel more full of breath in life. Because the editor was present, the editor was doing the thing live. Now in this residency [at Bethany Arts Center] working with Sarah, watching Sarah now take the reins, I don’t think our collaboration would have led to this without Russian Troll Farm . I also don’t think that my technological inventions would have brought me where I am today without Russian Troll Farm . Gancher: I think that we both — if I may speak for Jared and I certainly intend to — we found Russian Troll Farm so thrilling because we were making up something that nobody had ever done before, and that we weren’t sure whether or not it was going to work, or how it would work. And so we had to also invent a process, and we both got really into that. I mean, it’s painstaking, it’s slow. It’s frustrating. But it’s also so fun. And so cool, because you feel like you’re making a new form. Mezzocchi: And I think that, I don’t know, the older I’m getting, the more rare I’m realizing it is to find people that you can kind of run around in the dark with. And the pandemic felt like the darkest time. And I felt so fortunate with Sarah, with Elizabeth [Williamson], with that cast, that we all in the middle of a pandemic found each other and said, “Let’s keep playing tag for a second” I wanted to hold onto that accidental joy that was found in the middle of horrific trauma, because that was a joy that I’ve never felt before, ever. Barker: Sarah, you’ve written that as a playwright you’re obsessed with questions of how history shapes us. How has the pandemic shaped your storytelling process? Gancher: My main experience of the pandemic was as a parent trying to raise a five year old, who became a six year old, and then a seven year old, all while in a shoebox apartment. I went from being a full time playwright, writing a minimum of 40 hours a week to virtually having no writing time at all, and kind of going insane. It was a nightmare, watching all of the things that I had planned that I was so excited for all fall apart and crumble. But I do think those ashes have turned out to be very fertile for me, because there have been multiple things that I never would have done, never would have tried, had life continued on its original trajectory. Russian Troll Farm in particular created an appetite to try new things more. So, I just finished the first draft of lyrics for my first musical book, where I’m also writing the music. Considering this new project with Jared, which I’m so hyped on now, I’m not sure I would have been brave enough to attempt it before. And I don’t think that anybody would have thought about offering me that opportunity before Russian Troll Farm . If we’re considering the pandemic as a whole politically, the themes continued to resonate with Russian Troll Farm — disinformation, mass delusion, echo chambers, mass hysteria, and the fact that our collective unconscious seems spiraling into a deep depression — and I don’t know, we should probably get on that. Barker: Indeed. Things were different for you, Jared, but it was still an upheaval, right? Mezzocchi: Yeah, I feel like everything changed for me. I look back on the very beginning, when we did She Kills Monsters [at the University of Maryland in April 2020]. Because I decided to call the chair and say, “Don’t cancel it, we have an opportunity to do research here.” And I made that call to her while I was in a panic down in Arkansas after a regional theatre production of Curious Incident of the Dog in Nighttime that I was directing had just shut down. It had been a moment of real, positive, directorial growth for me that was stripped away the day before tech. And so I look back on that and I don’t know why I made that phone call. And I also don’t know why that same day, I called my board at Andy’s Summer Playhouse and said, “Cancel the summer. Because if we cancel now, then we don’t spend any more money preparing for a summer season that won’t happen, and therefore we have more money to deal with what this brings. And let’s go weird.” I remember the thrill of being in a support system at UMD and at Andy’s that allowed me to take a risk, because the safety net was more educational in both of those realms. And that put me in different shoes, so then I felt more courageous when walking into my freelance life and calling Sarah, which happened about two weeks later. And so, I think that being in two educational environments allowed me — and I’m really saying this for the first time — allowed me the courage and to say, “Fuck it. Like, it’s research.” The flip to using the term “research” was a big thing for me, and that hasn’t changed. And I think that getting the recognition, sharing the lessons learned, getting the positive press, and then making more connections made me realize the power of being an experimenter who could produce things, produce things quickly, and vocalize the flaws of each experiment. Suddenly the power of discovery was the thing, and I’m not ever going to forget that. Barker: How do words and design influence you both now during your creative process in terms of dramaturgy? Is it like asking about the chicken and the egg? Or, how is the story influenced by the format? Gancher: I think it’s both chicken and egg. And nobody knows where either one came from. One of the nicest things that anybody’s ever said to me in my life was when Jared said much of what he technologically invented for Russian Troll Farm only happened because of the demands of the script. A lot of people presumed that it was written for Zoom, but in fact it was barely adapted for that format. In my brain it had always been for the stage. Now in this latest residency, as we began to iterate, I start thinking about the story. What is the event? Sometimes I write “scratch drafts,” like sort of pre-writing, like scenes, but they don’t even have character names yet, you know? I’ve never shown anybody in my life work that early, but I showed it to Jared. And then that sort of kickstarted him thinking from the container and also asking, “What is the event?” What will the tech for this need to look like? And, as we ping pong back and forth, we influence each other. Mezzocchi: I would add to that if you’re coming from content, and I’m coming from form, we’re both kind of saying, “Here’s how I would take your offering and make it function inside of my brain,” and vice versa. If the text is the content constant, and the tech is the variable, here’s how function can form and then flip it and say, if the tech is the constant, and the text is the variable, here’s what happens there. Tech is a tool, and function is the space that we’re kind of finger painting in. That to me feels pretty subversive to the industry standards. Gancher: It’s more related to the sort of experimental devising world that we actually both come from — nobody knows that we’re both musicians, and nobody knows that we both come from the world of devising and experimental stuff. It’s actually quite key to the way that we work together, and it reminds me of my favorite Suzan Lori Parks quote: “Form is content.” And I think that I’m trying to work with Jared not like a playwright traditionally works with the designer, but like the other half of my brain, or like I’m the other half of his brain. Also, his live video editing skills responded to hearing the rhythm in the words, which totally amplified the humor and timing in Russian Troll Farm in a unique way. Barker: Jared, among many other things on Twitter you’ve talked about mediaturgy. Can you comment on how you position that in your current theatrical practice? Mezzocchi: That idea was actually based on a course I teach. It’s not about just telling stories on digital terms. We ask questions like: Why and how are we using technology to drive the story forward? What’s its point of view for the story? How is it used differently for each character? It’s not just spectacle. Mediaturgy informs choices which then contributes to the overall dramaturgy. Ideally, it allows for more collaboration, with the actors understanding a new language within a new process, too. Digital storytelling should be seen as a scene partner. Gancher: I would add that mediaturgy makes you consider new questions as well. For example, how are you casting the audience? Are they spying on the characters? How does the story move in digital theatre? It’s a bit of a filmic question, too, of course. Does it move in jumps, does it move in fades? Does it root us down in one spot, or does it disorient us? But more importantly, does it live up to our vision? Mezzocchi: It was helpful that the world slammed to a halt, and we had to interrogate how we use and connect through technology. As a society, and as a theatre community, in order to get to the necessary technological solutions we must also address the problems of how we use technology. We’re continuing to learn how to use the tech as a tool, not have the technology use us. Gancher: In this new process, the whole team is writing with you. As someone who teaches writing, I want to encourage that kind of collaboration even though it’s scary and difficult. We need to find the people who can make that work. www.sarahgancher.org www.jaredmezzocchi.com (Twitter: @jaredmezzocchi) References [1] Barbara Fuchs, Theater of Lockdown: Digital and Distanced Performance in a Time of Pandemic . (London: Methuen Drama, 2022), 25. Footnotes About The Author(s) DREW BARKER is the Performing Arts Librarian at the University of Maryland at College Park. As a dramaturg he has worked at Triad Stage (NC), Round House Theatre (MD), Center Stage (MD), and Theatre J (DC). He was the curator for the exhibits The Art & Craft of Puppetry (2022), Remembrance & Resilience (2021) and The Triumph of Isabella: Exploring Performance Through Art (2018-19) at the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library. His research and creative projects include information design and literacy, the U.S. Civil War, and the working relationship between playwright Naomi Wallace and historian Marcus Rediker. 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.

Bernth Lindfors 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 Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Bernth Lindfors By Published on April 30, 2021 Download Article as PDF The British Newspaper Archive continues to offer a fruitful research tool for scholars wishing to study reviews of performances by actors on the British stage. I used this remarkable resource extensively when preparing biographies of the famous Black performers Ira Aldridge and Samuel Morgan Smith, [1] and I go back to it from time to time whenever new microfilms of old papers from the nineteenth century are added to it in order to see if there are any reports or anecdotes about these two actors that I might have missed. Sure enough, I have found two documents that shed some new light on Aldridge, and I offer them here in tribute to Errol Hill’s pioneering research on black actors. The first of these accounts appeared in London’s Weekly Dispatch on February 10, 1828 as a contribution on “Metropolitan Oddities” focusing on “The African Roscius,” the name ironically bestowed upon Aldridge by the London Times in its racist review of his debut in the role of Oronooko at the Coburg Theatre on October 10, 1825. Aldridge had made his initial debut in London at age seventeen five months earlier in a condensed production of Othello at the smaller Royalty Theatre in the East End, performing under the pseudonym of Mr. Keene, a deliberately playful allusion to the surname of Edmund Kean, one of England’s greatest tragedians, famous for his portrayal of Othello. Aldridge kept this facetious stage name until the real Kean collapsed on stage while playing the Moor at Covent Garden Theatre on March 25, 1833, and managers called upon Aldridge to replace him in the same role in the same theatre two weeks later. He was then billed both honestly as Mr. Aldridge and dishonestly as “a Native of Senegal,” possibly a ploy to validate his identity as a true African performer. This charade led to a controversy so bitter that it kept Aldridge off the London stage for the next fifteen years. He had already spent eight years seeking to turn what was meant as a racial insult into a praise name, and he persisted in assuming this honorific title alluding to Roscius, a great Roman actor, for the remainder of his career. When he started appearing at the Royalty Theatre, advertisements described him as a “Gentleman of Colour from the New York Theatre,” [2] and press reports on his subsequent provincial tours spoke of him as having “attained considerable celebrity in America,” [3] a gross exaggeration. One playbill in Bristol went so far as to claim erroneously that he was “known throughout America by the appellation of the African Roscius, a performer of Colour, whose flattering reception at New York and throughout all the principal Theatres in America has induced him to visit England professionally.” [4] This was more media puffery. Later in 1826, when he was finding it difficult to secure engagements and had become nearly destitute, Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post and the Theatrical Observer; and Daily Bills of the Play actively sought to solicit funds that would enable him to return to America. [5] In these early years he was known to have moved to England from the New World, not directly from Africa. So the article in the Weekly Dispatch two and a half years later purported to clear up some of the confusion surrounding this unusual stranger. It may have been the first biographical article published on him in Britain and deserves to be remembered both for its errors as well as its truths. The author of this piece, identified only by his initials—W.L.R.—was William Leman Rede, the younger brother of Leman Thomas Rede, author of The Road to the Stage (1827). Both brothers enjoyed active careers in the theatre, William initially as a young actor and journalist who “speedily established himself in high favour as a critic on all matters connected with the drama. None better could distinguish between talent and pretension; none better adjust the intricate balance between the practiced charlatan and the unpractised man of promising merit.” [6] He had written a few early plays and novels and later became a very prolific playwright, specializing in popular farces and melodramas. At the time he wrote about Aldridge, he was only twenty-six years old, just six years older than Aldridge himself. Having seen so young an actor performed remarkably well in a variety of roles, Rede went to interview him in order to collect information on his background and previous experience. Here is his scoop on this surprising American African: THE AFRICAN ROSCIUS The London Stage has alternately presented every novelty that Europe can afford—we have had rope-dancers and wire-walkers, that performed all sorts of apparent impossibilities—we have had men-monkies, real dogs, horses, and elephants—even the less civilized quarters of the globe have supplied us with the phenomens [ sic ], and those lofty domes in which they profess to “hold the glass up” to nature, have been made the arena for tumblers. Novelty and merit are not twins, yet they are sometimes simultaneously produced, and the subject of my present article is one instance of this desirable conjunction. The visiters [ sic ] of the Coburg must all remember the genuine Oronooko [,] Gambia, &c., who appeared there about three years since—his late efforts have been made in the provinces, and, as it is said, he is shortly to appear at Covent Garden Theatre, a sketch of him and his adventures may prove acceptable. FREDERICK WILLIAM KEENE (the African Roscius) is the son of the Rev. W. Keene, who, though an African by birth, is a Protestant Minister in New York, and has the care of the souls of a large number of blacks; his wife (my hero’s mother) was a Creole, and the Roscius, I believe, the “first fruits” of their union, was born in New York (24th July 1807). His early days it would be difficult to describe, unless my readers were acquainted with the pastimes followed by the juvenile in the United States. At an early age, he shewed a predilection for the drama, and when about 15, joined some Gentlemen “of his own rank and complexion,” in a Theatrical scheme; they were a sort of a chess-board company—half black half white. The theatre was situated in Green-street, New York, and their first play was Richard the Third , the principal characters by four blacks, i.e. Duke of Gloster [ sic ], by the Roscius; King Henry , by Mr. Bates; Richmond , Mr. Hewlett; Buckingham , Mr. Jackson; Lady Anne (the fair Lady Anne)! by a negress , called Miss Sukey Stevens; and the Queen , by a brown fair one yclept Miss Dixon. These performers of colour were set off by the appearance of a white Tressel — (Mr. Lamb). The Roscius made a decided hit, and, after a few more trials, set out on a starring tour in Boston—where he played Othello , with a black Desdemona and a white Emilia . He then returned to New York and appeared at the Park-street Theatre as a star ; he ran through a round of characters in different parts of the United States, and then embarked for England—but, ere I follow him thither, another word of the Green-street Theatre. It was a desideratum in New York—where a large portion of the inhabitants are virtually, if not actually, excluded from the other playhouses on no plea but their colour; the prices were as follows—Boxes, 8s., (5s. English)—Pit, 4s.—Gallery, 2s. The company were most respectable—unlike some damsels of our drama—amid the black ladies there were no light characters. Mr. Mathews, in his piece of pleasantry, entitled “A Trip to America,” has described the performance of Hamlet at this theatre; now “I have been most accurate in my researches;” and finds that this story has only one fault; i.e.—that it is not true Hamlet was never performed at Green-street; it was, indeed, rehearsed for a Miss Johnson’s benefit, but never played. When Mathews visited the theatre, Pizarro was the play, and my hero was Rolla . One anecdote will suffice to show the genuine innocence (call it not ignorance) of the company. Fortune’s Frolic was got up, and Robin Roughhead (a Yorkshireman) played by a negro, who studied it from an Irishman, and went through the part with a fine Cork brogue: In this farce, there is one character who delivers some eight or ten lines—this part is marked in the cast as “a clown”—Messieurs of the somber hue, who had no notion of any clown but a pantomime one, such as they had seen at Price’s theatre, absolutely dressed this character a la Grimaldi! Some of the technical phrases of the drama, and portions of the texts, were perversely retained by them, though, in their mouths, they sounded paradoxical; for instance, Othello , bending over a Desdemona , as black as a crow, exclaimed— “Yet I’ll not shed her blood, nor scar That whiter skin of her’s than snow.” Let me return to the Roscius—he came to London, and drew crowded houses at the Coburg, where a piece, called The Negro’s Curse , was prepared for him by Milner. Since then he has been at Edinburgh, Glasgow, Bath, and Bristol—at Manchester and Liverpool seven times, and he is now in Birmingham. Whilst in Scotland he met Mr. C. Kemble, who, I am informed, undertook to procure him an opening at Covent-Garden. The strongest point of his acting is intense feeling—not violent, but deep—there is a pathos even in his colloquial tones peculiar and affecting. Our first meeting was in High Holborn, where he had collected a mob round him by his extravagant laughter at the braying of a donkey, an animal he had never seen in America— Othello and Zanga are his favourite parts—but Mungo is, perhaps, his chef-d’oeuvre —his style of humour is totally different from that of any other performer—his drunken scene is a thing by itself—the very personification of liberty run mad—and presents a lively image of what we might conceive to be the folly of the Spartan slaves, when they had their one day of unrestrained freedom, both in speech and diet. The African Roscius (notwithstanding his faults and mannerisms) is an actor of great natural powers; he practices no tricks to catch applause, and rather under than over acts. His talents, and the singular circumstances in which he stands in the profession he has chosen, are claims upon kindness. His line is a limited one; and, I trust, if any prejudice arises on his appearance, it will be one favourable to him. He is a stranger, untaught, unaided, totally friendless in this country, and, with nothing to rely on but his talent, which is of an order that practice in the metropolis will render great. Some of the biographical details given here are known to be accurate; for instance, Aldridge’s date of birth, his father’s profession, his own predilection for the drama at an early age, and his involvement in a multiracial “Theatrical scheme” in New York. But his father’s name was Daniel, not a name that began with a W, and Rede wrongly assumed that Aldridge was the firstborn child in his family (he had a brother, Joshua, born seven years earlier). [7] However, Rede’s article contains one fact that has never before been mentioned by others: that Aldridge’s mother was “a Creole.” In those days the term spanned a range of different meanings. According to the Oxford English Dictionary , a Creole could indicate someone white, black, or a person of mixed racial ancestry. A creole white was usually “a descendant of European settlers, born or naturalized in those colonies or regions [of the West Indies or America] and more or less modified in type by the climate and surroundings.” A creole negro was “a negro born in the West Indies or America, as distinguished from one freshly imported from Africa.” [8] Since the Manhattan Death Libers records that Aldridge’s mother Luranah, mistranscribed in this source as Lavinia, was born in Delaware and buried in the cemetery of the black church her husband served, theatre scholars may assume that she belonged in the latter category of creoles, but cannot be certain that she had no mixed blood. [9] After all, Aldridge himself, during his initial performances at the Royal Coburg, was often described as not very dark-skinned. The Times said “The gentleman is in complexion the colour of a new half-penny, barring the brightness.” [10] The British Press confidently declared “Mr. Keene is a Creole.” [11] And when he came back to London to appear at Covent Garden, there was a good deal of commentary on his color being light brown or dark olive, and of an “oily and expressive mulatto tint” which “seems to show that he has European blood in his veins.” [12] Rede had never been to New York, but he knew a little about the “African Theatre” where Aldridge had made his start as a professional actor because a year earlier he had watched the comedian Charles Mathews mock and mimic a ludicrously inept “African Tragedian” he claimed to have seen butcher the role of Hamlet there. This was one of the most memorable satirical character sketches he performed in his popular one-man show Trip to America , which opened at the English Opera House on March 25, 1824. Mathews’s African was not a caricature of Aldridge in performance. Rather, it was a parody of the acting style of James Hewlett, the principal actor at that theatre. But when Aldridge started performing at the Coburg, some theatergoers went there expecting to see the actor Mathews had famously lampooned. Rede knew better, having spoken with Aldridge, but for more details on his acting career, he had to rely on whatever Aldridge told him, some of which was more fanciful than factual. There has been some good research done on New York’s African Theatre in recent decades, including studies by Errol Hill, George Thompson, Shane White, and Marvin McAllister. [13] By comparing what these scholars have said with what Aldridge told Rede, contemporary scholars may gain a better understanding of how Aldridge chose to present himself to the public and how that public responded to what they saw in him. The African Theatre originally grew out of the African Grove, a cabaret or “public garden” intended for the enjoyment of New York City’s black community. Opened in the summer of 1821 by William Alexander Brown, a West Indian, it offered drinks, music, and dramatic entertainments to its patrons, who initially met at Brown’s Thomas Street home in Lower Manhattan. After neighbors complained about the noise, Brown moved thirteen blocks further north to his home at the corner of Bleeker and Mercer streets a few months later. However, the space offered seating for only fifty people and audiences proved thinner, so in November or December of 1821, Brown decided to move his troupe again, this time south to a tavern or hotel in Park Row facing City Hall Park and next door to the well-established Park Theatre. Unfortunately for Brown, Stephen Price, the business manager at the Park Theatre, did not like having such competitors on his doorstep, especially since they were now performing three times a week and drawing white as well as black audiences. He sent in hecklers to disrupt performances by throwing firecrackers onto the stage and even arranged for police to raid the theatre one night and arrest all the actors. In order to be released, the actors had to promise that they would never act Shakespeare again. This kind of harassment led Brown to lease an empty lot on the east side of Mercer Street near Broadway and build a proper playhouse with seating for hundreds that opened in mid-July 1822. (Greene Street, mentioned by Rede, sat one short block west of Mercer.) Unfortunately, the harassment resumed almost immediately. On August 10 th , a mob of white ruffians interrupted a performance, assaulted the actors, and vandalized the playhouse. Brown and his actors boldly fought back. Police arrested and charged eleven of the white rioters, some of them circus workers in the city, but the case against them was eventually dismissed. To make matters worse, a severe yellow fever epidemic had started to spread throughout the city, and by early October Brown’s theatre, now called the American Theatre, had to close. Brown took his players to Albany, where they performed for the rest of the year. Surviving playbills indicate that several performances were mounted at Brown’s new theatre in the spring and early summer of 1823, but by mid-July Brown was bankrupt. Several members of his troupe stayed together and gave scattered performances in 1824, but they had to find other venues for their entertainments. [14] What was Aldridge doing during these three years? At what point did he join the African Theatre company and take part in their performances? Theatre scholars cannot confirm this precisely. His name does not appear in any of the documents concerning the company, but he may have performed under a pseudonym since his father did not approve of such sinful behavior and wanted him to be a preacher rather than an actor. But statements made by others who knew him and also by Aldridge himself suggest that he was indeed attached to Brown’s theatre company for a time. Philip A. Bell, one of his classmates at the African Free School, recalled some years later that Aldridge left school in 1822 and joined Brown’s American Theatre in 1823 after seeing a Shakespeare performance there. [15] In an autobiography Aldridge published around 1848, he claimed that his first visit to a professional theatre, specifically the Park Theatre, had “fixed the great purpose of his life, and established the whole end and aim of his existence. He would be an actor.” [16] So he “fell to work and studied the part of Rolla, in the play Pizarro , and in that character he made ‘his first appearance on any stage.’ This was at a private theatre, where he was singularly successful, and all his fellow-performers were of his own complexion” [17] —in other words, Brown’s theatre. Brown’s troupe produced Pizarro at the Hampton Hotel next door to the Park Theatre in the winter or spring of 1822, but James Hewlett played Rolla (not Aldridge). However, a second performance of Pizarro staged by Brown’s company in Albany on December 19, 1823 may have given Aldridge the opportunity to replace Hewlett in that heroic role. [18] So Bell and Aldridge’s accounts may contain some elements of truth. Aldridge also reported that he had also once played a love-sick Ethiopian Romeo opposite an Ethiopian Juliet with the same supporting cast, but there remains no hard evidence in the extant literature on the African Theatre to support this claim. [19] How reliable was the information that Aldridge gave Rede? Richard III was among the first plays ever performed at the African Grove, the pleasure garden that Brown had created for the black community. Brown staged it three times in September and October 1821 and a fourth time in January 1822, but in at least two of the performances Hewlett played the leading role supported by Mr. Bates and Mr. Jackson but not by any of the other actors and actresses Rede names in his account. In fact, none of the female performers, except Miss Dixon who later appeared in The Poor Soldier , appear to have been employed by Brown, and it seems extremely unlikely that Aldridge (thirteen years old and still at school at that time), would have been recruited to play a major role in a Shakespearean play. However, he could have become an active member of the troupe while still young, for James McCune Smith, who also had gone to school with him, reported years later that upon graduating, Aldridge, “being of a roving disposition,” had briefly shipped out on a brig. “Shortly after his return home, Brown’s theater was opened, and Ira, with his brother Joshua, took to the stage; but their father, finding it out, took them away from the theater.” [20] It remains tempting to speculate that the two actors, listed as Hutchington and J. Hutchington, performing as Buckingham and Lord Stanley in at least one of the African Theatre’s productions of Richard III , might have been these two delinquent youths. Hutchington also earned a part as a Castilian Soldier later in the African Theatre’s first performance of Pizarro . [21] In any case, Aldridge subsequently defied his father and rejoined Brown’s troupe. The rest of what Aldridge told Rede about his career in the United States appears the kind of inflated fiction that P.T. Barnum famously called Humbug or Bunk. He had never performed before Charles Mathews at the African Theatre. In fact, Mathews had never attended a production there; instead, James Hewlett had performed privately for him in the spring of 1823, inspiring Mathews’s skit of an ignorant African Tragedian in Trip to America . Aldridge also never appeared as a star at the Park Theatre, nor is there any record of him playing Othello in Boston or running through a round of characters in different parts of the United States. Aldridge could tell funny stories about other black actors at Brown’s theatre, one of whom had imitated a Yorkshireman with an Irish brogue, and another who botched lines as Othello, but these too may have been little more than highly embellished anecdotes. But Rede’s recitation of Aldridge’s impressive string of previous appearances on stage on his provincial tours seems very accurate. Indeed, over a twenty-month period after leaving London in December 1825, Aldridge had performed not only at Brighton, Bristol, Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Liverpool, and Birmingham—the major cities Rede mentions—but in at least seventeen smaller towns and villages along the way. During this time, rumors circulated that he planned to appear at Drury Lane and Covent Garden in London, but in mid-1826 his nemesis Stephen Price had become lessee of Drury Lane and remained there for the next four seasons, depriving Aldridge of that opportunity. Charles Kemble ran Covent Garden as an actor-manager and proprietor, but from 1826 to 1829 the theatre struggled with serious financial difficulty, so he probably could not have afforded to take a risk on a black actor. Rede’s article suggests that he saw that this young actor had talent and merited public attention. The last paragraph of Rede’s report in which he describes watching Aldridge perform offers a shrewd, insightful assessment of his salient abilities and minor defects. Later eyewitnesses confirm Aldridge possessed “great natural powers” as a tragedian and comedian, and one who might with further practice become still greater. But Rede need not have pitied him for being “totally friendless in this country” because Aldridge was happily married to a British woman, and two British actors he had met in New York, Henry and James Wallack, had encouraged him and helped launch him in London. Plus, by this time Rede himself had become his good friend. [22] Actually, Rede had already become so good a friend that when Aldridge announced his decision to experiment as the lessee of a theatre in Coventry on March 3, 1826 (three weeks after the publication of Rede’s essay), he said he had invited Rede to serve as his stage manager. Their collaboration included acting as well as managing the motley crew of performers and musicians they hired. Their brave experiment in running a theatre lasted barely two months, for by the end of April and beginning of May each had moved on to performer elsewhere, Aldridge in Worcester, Rede in York. I found a second source of new biographical information on Aldridge in the Carlisle Journal of April 16, 1889. It comes in the form of an amusing eyewitness report by a gentleman who recalled having seen Aldridge perform a scene from Othello at his school forty-one years earlier: Looking last week over a collection of old play bills which was in the library of the late Mr. John Clarke Ferguson, I noticed one which referred to the performance of Ira Aldridge, “the African Roscius,” in the Theatre Royal at Carlisle in the year 1848. Ira Aldridge was a man of colour—a veritable “black man”—who could assume the part of Othello without the use of burnt cork, and I have often laughed at an incident that occurred during his visit to Carlisle. He came to our school to give some recitations. It was a hot summer’s evening, and the windows of the schoolroom, which looked upon the neighboring street, were thrown wide open for the purposes of ventilation, while the boys sat listening with rapt attention to the African Roscius while he gave some scenes from Othello . He was in the midst of his address to the Senate and describing the arts by which he had wooed and won the gentle Desdemona, when a noisy fellow in the street began a most terrible row by ringing a big bell and calling “Fresh herrings!” with a loud, hoarse voice. We tittered at the curious mixture of Shakespeare and costermonger; but Ira went manfully on. So did the fresh herring merchant. My story being done She gave me for my pains a world of sighs— continued the tragedian. “All alive! Just come in!” vociferated the costermonger. Ira hesitated a moment, but resumed— She swore, in faith, ‘twas strange, ‘twas passing strange, 'Twas pitiful, ‘twas wondrous pitiful, “Fresh herrings! Fresh herrings!” came booming through the window once more. The “dusky Moor,” already perspiring at every pore, with ill-concealed indignation made one final struggle— She wish’d she had not heard it— But the fresh herring man was noisier than ever— “All alive! Alive!” and the bell gave another loud clang. The blood of the African Roscius was now up. Unable longer to constrain himself he broke off in the middle of the sentence, rushed from the stage, and behind the wings we could hear him shouting—no longer the musical blank verse of the poet, but— “Stop that row, you rascal, or I’ll come and choke you with a mutton chop!” The coster was evidently taken aback for a moment by the apparition of the negro’s head through the open door; but he soon recovered his equilibrium and his voice, and the altercation which ensued helped—to the school, at least—give an amusing turn to the entertainment.[23] This prompted a response in the Carlisle Journal on 24 April the following week by another former schoolboy who remembered the same incident but also provided additional information on the black actor: A Kendal correspondent writes: — “Your notes on Ira Aldridge, the African Roscius, have interested me greatly as I knew that robustuous [sic] actor very well in Edinburgh many years ago when he played the part of Aaron, the Moor beloved by Tamora, in Titus Andronicus .[24] These remarks affirm that Aldridge made an indelible impression on audiences young and old. He could amuse schoolboys with a comical tirade and years later could remind them of the vigor with which he portrayed Aaron not as a villain but as a romantic hero. Such memories of Aldridge like the ones described in this essay, preserved in newspapers of the day, merit resurrecting and adding to the documentary record of his life and experiences. References [1] My biography of Aldridge was published in four volumes by the University of Rochester Press between 2011 and 2015. The one I wrote on Morgan Smith was published by Africa World Press in Trenton, NJ in 2018. [2] There was no theatre by that name in New York City. [3] Brighton Gazette , 15 December 1825. [4] Playbill held at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. The same notice appeared in the Bristol Mercury , 20 January 1826. [5] Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post , August 31, 1826; Theatrical Observer; and Daily Bills of the Play , 2 September 1826. [6] “Recollections of Leman Rede,” New Monthly Magazine and Humorist , new series 80 (1847): 102-09. [7] Bernth Lindfors, Ira Aldridge: The Early Years ((Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2011), 21. [8] These definitions are drawn from The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 601. [9] Lindfors, Ira Aldridge , 20. [10] London Times , 11 October 1825. [11] British Press , 11 October 1825. [12] English Chronicle , 11 April 1833; Morning Chronicle , 11 April 1833; Town Journal , 14 April 1833; the direct quotations are taken from the Globe and Traveller , 11 April 1833, and the Observer , 11 April 1833, respectively. [13] One of the first reliable accounts was given in Errol Hill’s Shakespeare in Sable: A History of Black Shakespearean Actors (1984). Then came A Documentary History of the African Theatre (1998) by George A. Thompson, Jr., a New York City librarian who tracked down 134 published and unpublished sources that told much of what was happening there. Next was Shane White’s Stories of Freedom in Black New York (2002) and Marvin McAllister’s White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentleman of Colour: William Brown’s African and American Theater (2003). Each provides insightful commentary on the significance of Brown’s theatre, White writing as a historian of black New York, McAllister as a theatre historian and performance theorist. [14] I have been following George Thompson’s chronology throughout this portion of the narrative. [15] Philip A. Bell, “Men We Have Known: Ira Aldridge (1867),” Elevator (San Francisco), 2, and reprinted in Ira Aldridge: The African Roscius , ed. Bernth Lindfors (Rochester: Rochester University Press, 2007), 49. [16] Memoir and Theatrical Career of Ira Aldridge, the African Roscius (London: Onwhyn, [1848]), and reprinted in Ira Aldridge: The African Roscius , ed. Bernth Lindfors (Rochester: Rochester University Press, 2007), 13. [17] Ira Aldridge: The African Roscius , ed. Bernth Lindfors (Rochester: Rochester University Press, 2007), 14. [18] H.P. Phelps, Players of a Century: A Record of the Albany Stager (Albany: Joseph McDonough, 1880), 56. [19] Memoir and Theatrical Career of Ira Aldridge , 14. [20] James McCune Smith, “Ira Aldridge,” Anglo-African Magazine , 2, no. 1 (January 1860), 27-32, and reprinted in Ira Aldridge: The African Roscius , ed. Bernth Lindfors (Rochester: Rochester University Press, 2007), 37-47. [21] See George A. Thompson, Jr., A Documentary History of the African Theatre (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 70 and 228, for further details. [22] For further information on Aldridge’s theatrical activities in New York, London, and on his first tours of the British provinces, see Lindfors, Ira Aldridge and the books by Hill, Thompson, White, and McAllister cited in footnote 13. [23] Carlisle Journal , 16 April 1889. [24] An Edinburgh playbill shows that Aldridge performed as Aaron there on 24 July 1850. Footnotes About The Author(s) BERNTH LINDFORS Professor Emeritus, University of Texas at Austin 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.

Khalid Y. Long Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 2 Visit Journal Homepage A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Khalid Y. Long By Published on April 27, 2021 Download Article as PDF Glenda Dickerson (1945-2012) is often recognized as a pioneering Black woman theatre director. [1] A more expansive view of her career, however, would highlight Dickerson’s important role as a playwright, an adaptor/deviser, a teacher, and as this essay will illustrate, a progenitor of feminist theatre and performance theory. This essay offers a brief rumination on how Dickerson made a Black feminist intervention into feminist theatre and performance theory as she became one of the earliest voices to intercede and ensure that Black women had a seat at the table. [2] Glenda Dickerson’s intervention into feminist theatre and performance theory appears in her critical writings. Accordingly, these essays illustrate her engagement with Black feminist thought and elucidate how she modeled a feminist theatre theory through her creative works. Dickerson, along with other pioneering feminist theatre artists, “reshaped the modern dramatic/theatrical canon, and signaled its difference from mainstream (male) theatre.” [3] Dickerson’s select body of essays prompted white feminist theorists and practitioners to be cognizant of race and class as well as gender in their work and scholarship. [4] Moreover, Dickerson’s writings serve a dual function for readers: first, they offer an entryway into her life and creative process as a Black feminist artist. Secondly, they detail her subjective experiences as a Black woman within the professional worlds of theatre and academia. Feminist Theatre Theory: A Brief Overview of Inclusion and Exclusion Emerging as both an analytical tool as well as a methodology, feminism has been one of the foremost theoretical apparatuses to shape the field of theatre especially as it has called scholars’ attention to the dynamics of gender and sexuality. The scholars and critics, such as those mentioned below, who have contributed to founding and shaping a feminist theatre theory are diverse in their historical ideas, cultural approaches, and theoretical foregrounding. While there is no singular definition or description of feminist theatre theory to encapsulate such a wide-ranging array of positions, a brief overview of the legacies of some of the most significant contributors may help to situate Dickerson’s contribution to the field. Some of the foundational voices to assist in establishing feminism as an area of study within theatre/drama and English programs during the early part of the 1980s include Dinah Louise Leavitt, Helen Krich Chinoy, Linda Walsh Jenkins, and Helene Keyssar. As Elaine Aston notes, their texts had an impact on the field of theatre studies, however, they focused mainly on the playwrights and theatre practitioners who came to prominence during the 1970s. Aston maintains, “Studies of this kind were instrumental in making feminist and/or women’s theatre work visible but, to develop this, what was needed […] was a more fully rehearsed critical response critical frameworks appropriate for feminist analysis and ‘looking’.” [5] The scholars to heed Aston’s call were Sue-Ellen Case, Jill Dolan and Lynda Hart, among others. In Theatre & Feminism, Kim Solga provides a summary of the ground-breaking studies, including the works of Case, Dolan, and Hart, arguing that their scholarship indelibly changed the field of theatre studies and theatre practice by forging a relationship between feminist theory and theatre/performance. Solga singles out the year between 1988 and 1989 as “a watershed for feminist performance theory and criticism.” [6] The year witnessed the publication of some of feminist theatre’s major works: Sue-Ellen Case’s Feminism and Theatre , Jill Dolan’s The Feminist Spectator as Critic, and Lynda Hart’s edited collection, Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women’s Theatre . As this quick survey suggests, scholars, critics, and practitioners sustained a commitment to deconstructing the landscape of male privilege that positioned women on the margins or, in many cases, excluded them entirely from the histories of theatre and performance. Even though feminist theatre theory advanced theatre studies and practice, most of the earlier scholars and critics to develop a feminist theatre theory were predominantly white women concerned with gender , rather than race as a determining factor. And even though theatre scholar Sandra L. Richards pressed the issue back in 1991, declaring that it was “time that white women and men began to participate in the project of bringing more black women’s writing and theatre work to critical attention,” [7] the concerted efforts of white feminists still marginalized the lived experiences of Black women and other women of color. Within early theoretical studies of feminist theatre, the inclusion of women of color seemed an afterthought. A Return to 1987 Dickerson’s first significant contribution to the burgeoning field of feminist theatre and performance theory appeared in 1987—predating Solga’s “watershed” moment for feminist scholars and artists. During the 1987 pre-conference of the Women and Theatre Program, a focus group of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, Dickerson delivered her groundbreaking speech, “The Cult of True Womanhood: Toward a Womanist Attitude in African-American Theatre.” [8] With this speech, Dickerson infused a Black woman’s voice into the field of theatre and performance while simultaneously theorizing a Black woman’s subjectivity. Dickerson made her speech the same year that pioneering Black feminist scholar Barbara Christian wrote her pivotal essay, “The Race for Theory,” in which she suggests that we “read the works of our writers in our various ways and remain open to the intricacies of the intersection of language, class, race, and gender in the literature.” [9] Just as Christian called for a new way to nuance Black women’s cultural productions (i.e., fiction, poetry, novels, etc.), Dickerson led the charge in theatre to reverse what she identified as Black women being “triply locked out: by class, by race, and history.” [10] Dickerson’s and Christians’ declarations underscores their engagement with the theory of intersectionality (foreshadowing Kimberlé Crenshaw’s coining of the term in 1989). Dickerson’s concern with the “silenced voice of the woman of color” [11] fueled her mission to reclaim and re-center Black women’s voices and image through performance so that they no longer had to “depend on an often-distorted illustration.” [12] Throughout “The Cult of True Womanhood,” Dickerson also evokes the names of early “race women” [13] such as Sojourner Truth, Maria Stewart, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as more contemporary writers, cultural critics, and activists such as Lucille Clifton, Mary Helen Washington, Eleanor Traylor, and Winnie Mandela. Dickerson’s essay draws on Black feminist theory and literary criticism. As Lisa Anderson notes in Black Feminism in Contemporary Drama (2008) and La Donna Forsgren discusses in In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatist of the Black Arts Movement (2018), Black feminist theory and literary criticism helped to propel a new critical language that, in turn, formulated a method to read and analyze Black feminist aesthetics within a plethora of literary and artistic mediums and genres. Dickerson’s “The Cult of True Womanhood” essay also invokes the concept of “womanism.” She writes, “I went searching with Alice Walker for ‘our mothers’ gardens.’ That’s when I became a womanist. So, naturally I had to incorporate her salty definition. . .” [14] Womanism encompasses the concept of being “Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. […] Traditionally universalist…” [15] Theatre scholar Freda Scott Giles writes about Dickerson’s manifestation of womanism within her works: “Some feminists have given the impression that much of the feminist movement is fixated on the victimization of women; womanism resists that notion. The big picture is liberty and justice for all. The goal of freeing society from racism, classism, and sexism is mutually exclusive.” [16] A number of revolutionary Black feminist and womanist writers including Gloria I. Joseph and Audre Lorde have asserted that Black feminism, as well as womanism, offers a globally-inclusive framework. As early as 1979, Lorde called for feminist-activists (regardless of gender identity) to overthrow the ideologies that have contributed to racist, classist, and sexist attitudes and practices both in the United States and abroad. For example, in her essay, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” Lorde contends that feminist theory is not complete “without examining our many differences, and without a significant input from poor women, Black and Third World women, and lesbians.” [17] Lorde’s theoretical manifesto calls for a liberatory praxis unequivocally focused on the absence of Black women, poor women, queer women, and third world women’s experiences, among others, from larger feminist discourses. Like Lorde, Dickerson also takes a global perspective with her work. In “The Cult of True Womanhood” she writes: When you start reading ancient myths and womanist literature and traveling to countries where the people look like you, you gain a so-called global perspective. Not only is the language of oppression the same the world over; the anguish of women is echoed around the world and resonates from continent to continent. The torture of mothers who lose their daughters to rape, war, drugs, poverty; the suffering of women who are tortured and die in Latin American prisons; the untimely death of young women who are killed by drunk drivers or yuppie lovers in New York’s Central Park and then twice victimized by the courts and press: these women are sisters in suffering, fixed on the fangs of the two-headed serpent. Their silenced voices, their stilled tongues are symbolized for me in the illegal banning of South Africa’s Nomzamo Winnie Mandela, whom the people call “Mother of the Nation.”[18] Seen in this light, Dickerson’s artistic mantra mirrors Lorde’s manifesto as she strove to create a theatre that materializes what Lorde considers “differences” among women’s lived experiences. This appears most clearly in Dickerson’s final artistic work, The Kitchen Prayer Series, a trilogy of performances inspired by the tragic events of 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror. Centered around the question, “What is it like for women all around the world to live with war and terror daily?” Dickerson’s triptych interrogates how women from across the globe, navigate a world where war and terror are quotidian experiences. Several white feminist scholars have recognized Dickerson’s contribution to the developing field of feminist theatre studies. [19] For example, in the introduction to Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre Sue-Ellen Case writes about Dickerson’s essay, “The Cult of True Womanhood”: Dickerson amplifies the audacity of that voice and its strength within a critique of the form of the drama – its predilection for heroes – particularly heroes of a certain gender and class. From the pleasures of those audacious roots, Dickerson creates a theatre, as a director, and a theory of the theatre, as a feminist theorist. Dickerson’s move illustrates one way in which the social movement and the feminist theorist/theatre practitioner traverse a common terrain – the pleasure of a historical moment, a material condition moving with the gestures of the stage and the dynamics of performative forms.[20] Interestingly, Case does not explicitly name race as a factor within Dickerson’s theoretical framework. Instead, she focuses on gender and class. However, by calling out the “historical moment, a material condition,” as a “common terrain” Dickerson negotiates, Case makes the point that Dickerson’s theory, as well as her theatre are formulated through materialist feminism which aims to critique the “conditions of class, race, and gender oppression, and demands the radical transformation of social structures.” [21] Additionally, Case makes an important observation by calling attention to Dickerson’s role as an innovative feminist performance maker. As Dickerson laments, “Gone was the pompous director’s gaze, absent the royal director’s chair.” [22] Renouncing a longing to sit among the “ranks of directors,” Glenda Dickerson declared herself a “PraiseSinger.” “A true PraiseSinger,” Dickerson explains, is a guardian of the archetypes of her culture’s collective unconscious. Her function is not to invent but to rediscover and to animate. From this day forth, I will be concerned not with acts, and scenes and curtains; but with redemption, retrieval, and reclamation. The chair in which I sit will no longer be called the director’s chair, but the blood-bought mercy seat. From that seat, my work will be a mission, my goal will be a miracle.[23] With Dickerson denouncing the patriarchal throne of the director in her pioneering essay, she emerges as one of the earliest women theatre artists to use a Black feminist lens to reconsider the position of the director and their function. Final Thoughts I hope that this essay will shed light on Dickerson’s role as an audacious critical theorist and excavate her from the hidden cracks of (theatre) history. A closer look at her other essays – written at various periods throughout her career – would further illustrate her deepening commitment to Black feminist theatre as well as Black feminist epistemology. As both her critical writings as well as her creative works demonstrate, Dickerson challenged conventional modes of theatre making while also using theatre as a platform to bring marginalized, silenced, and forgotten people center stage. Dickerson’s scholarly and artistic works offer a model for those looking to subvert the dominant paradigms. References [1] When Dickerson is referenced in studies that address African American theatre or Black women in theatre such as Errol Hill and James V. Hatch’s A History of African American Theatre (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003) or Anthony Hill and Douglas Q. Barnett’s Historical Dictionary of African American Theatre (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009), it is usually a small survey of her work as a director. Anne Fliotsos and Wendy Vierow’s reference book, American Women Directors of the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008) also provides a broad survey of Dickerson’s work in the theatre that is premised on interviews Fliotsos conducted with Dickerson. [2] My larger project in progress offers a richer exploration of Dickerson’s career, from her start as a student of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s to her final creative project The Kitchen Prayer Series before her untimely death in 2012. [3] Elaine Aston, An Introduction to Feminism and Theatre (New York: Routledge, 1995), 57. [4] Dickerson’s essays include: “The Cult of True Womanhood: Toward a Womanist Attitude in African-American Theatre” which was first published in Theatre Journal (vol. 40, no. 2, 1988) and republished in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre edited by Sue-Ellen Case (New York: Methuen, 1988); “Wearing Red: When a Rowdy Band of Charismatics Learned to Say ‘NO!’” in Upstaging Big Daddy: Directing Theater as if Gender and Race Matter , edited by Ellen Donkin and Susan Clement (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993); “Rode a Railroad that Had No Track” in A Sourcebook of African-American Performances edited by Annemarie Bean (London and New York: Routledge, 1999); and “Festivities and Jubilations on the Graves of the Dead: Sanctifying Sullied Space” in Performance and Cultural Politics , edited by Elin Diamond (London and New York: Routledge, 1996). [5] Elaine Aston, “Foreword,” in Feminism and Theatre , ed. Sue-Ellen Case (New York: Methuen, 2014), ix -x. [6] Kim Solga, Theatre & Feminism (New York: Palgrave), 16. [7] Sandra L. Richards made this statement in a paper she delivered, “Women, Theatre, and Social Action,” at the ‘Breaking the Surface” conference/festival held in Calgary, November 13-17, 1991. I learned of Richards’ paper, and subsequently her quote, from Lizbeth Goodman’s book Contemporary Feminist Theatre: To Each Her Own (London and New York: Routledge, 1993) . [8] “The Cult of True Womanhood: Toward a Womanist Attitude in African-American Theatre” was later published in Theatre Journal in 1988 and in 1990 re-published in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre , edited by Sue-Ellen Case. I am utilizing the published version of Dickerson’s speech and will therefore refer to it as a written essay. [9] Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory,” Cultural Critique , no.6 (1987): 53. [10] Glenda Dickerson, “The Cult of True Womanhood: Toward a Womanist Attitude in African-American Theatre,” in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre , ed. Sue-Ellen Case (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1990), 110. [11] Dickerson, “Cult of True Womanhood” 110. [12] Khalid Y. Long, “The Black Feminist Theatre of Glenda Dickerson,” in The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance , ed. Kathy A. Perkins et al (New York: Routledge), 183. [13] In her book, Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women , Black feminist studies scholar Brittney C. Cooper defines the phrase “race women” as “the first Black women intellectuals [and activist]. As they entered into public racial leadership roles beyond the church in the decades after reconstruction, they explicitly fashioned for themselves a public duty to serve their people through the diligent and careful intellectual work and attention to proving the intellectual character of the race” (11). [14] Dickerson, “The Cult of True Womanhood,” 115. [15] Alice Walker, In Search of Mother’s Garden: Womanist Prose , 1st ed. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), xi. [16] Freda Scott Giles, “Glenda Dickerson’s Nu Shu: Combining Feminist Discourse/Pedagogy/Theatre,” in Contemporary African American Women Playwrights: A Casebook , ed. Philip C. Kolin (New York: Routledge, 2007), 141. [17] Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984), 111. Lorde’s essay was first delivered as a speech at a conference in 1979 honoring Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex , and later published in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa (page missing?). The essay was republished in Lorde’s collection Sister Outsider . [18] Dickerson, “Cult of True Womanhood” 115. [19] Similar to Case, Ellen Donkin and Susan Clement, the editors of Upstaging Big Daddy: Directing as if Gender and Race Matter, consider Dickerson a “godmother,” noting that her “intellectual and artistic courage and generosity have given us permission to think past the limits of our own cultural identification as white women and to begin investigating the way Big Daddy crosses into communities of color,” 5. [20] Sue-Ellen Case, “Introduction,” in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1990), 4. [21] Aston, Feminism and Theatre , 9. [22] Dickerson, “The Cult of True Womanhood,” 118. [23] Ibid., 118. Footnotes About The Author(s) KHALID Y. LONG is an assistant professor of theatre and coordinator of theatre studies at Columbia College Chicago. Khalid has published essays in Continuum: The Journal of African Diaspora Drama, Theatre and Performance as well as the Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance . His forthcoming scholarship includes essays in Theatre Design & Technology , TDR: The Drama Review , and Critical Essays on the Politics of Oscar Hammerstein II edited by Donald Gagnon. Khalid has also contributed essays to Black Masks , a long-established black theatre magazine. Khalid’s current book project is a critical study of Black feminist artist Glenda Dickerson. 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.

Winners 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 Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Winners By Published on May 12, 2021 Download Article as PDF The Errol Hill Award is given by the American Society for Theatre Research in recognition of outstanding scholarship in African American theater, drama, and/or performance studies, as demonstrated in the form of a published book-length project (monograph or essay collection) or scholarly article. The book or article must deal with African American theater history, dramatic literature, or performance studies (research on dance, acting and directing, public performances, i.e., parades, pageants, etc.). 2020: Kemi Adeyemi, University of Washington, Seattle, “Beyond 90°: The Angularities of Black/Queer/Woman/Lean,” Women and Performance 29:1 (February 2019). 2019: Joshua Chambers-Letson, Northwestern University, After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer Color of Life, New York University Press Honorable Mentions Joanna Dee Das, Washington University in St. Louis, Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora, Oxford University Press Christian DuComb, Colgate University, Haunted City: Three Centuries of Racial Impersonation in Philadelphia, Michigan University Press Shane Vogel, Indiana University, Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze, University of Chicago Press 2018: Kellen Hoxworth, Dartmouth College, “The Many Racial Effigies of Sara Baartman,” Theatre Survey 58:3 (September 2017). 2017: Renee Alexander Craft, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, When the Devil Knocks: The Congo Tradition and the Politics of Blackness in Twentieth-Century Panama (Ohio State University Press, 2016). Honorable Mentions Christen Smith, University of Texas at Austin, Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence, and Performance in Brazil (University of Illinois Press, 2016). T. Carlis Roberts, UC Berkeley, Resounding Afro Asia: Interracial Music and the Politics of Collaboration (Oxford University Press, 2016). 2016 : Uri McMillan, UCLA Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (New York University Press, 2015). Honorable Mention Adrienne Macki Braconi, Harlem’s Theatres: A Staging Ground for Community, Class, and Contradiction, 1923-1939 (Northwestern University Press, 2015). 2015 : Paige McGinley, Washington University in St. Louis, Staging the Blues: From Tent Shows to Tourism (Duke University Press, 2014) Honorable Mention Faedra Chatard Carpenter, Coloring Whiteness: Acts of Critique in Black Performance (University of Michigan Press, 2014). 2014: Kathleen Gough, Kinship and Performance in the Black and Green Atlantic (Routledge, 2013). Honorable Mentions E. Patrick Johnson & Ramon Rivera-Servera, Solo/black/woman: scripts, interviews and essays (Northwestern University Press, 2014). Macelle Mahala, Penumbra: The Premier State for African American Drama (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 2013 : Diana Rebekkah Paulin, Imperfect Unions: Staging Miscegenation in US Drama and Fiction (University of Minnesota Press, 2012). 2012 : Bernth Lindfors, Ira Aldridge: The Early Years 1807-1833 (University of Rochester Press, 2011). Honorable Mention Brandi Catanese, The Problem of the Color[blind] (Univesrity of Michigan Press, 2011). 2011: Harvey Young, Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body (University of Michigan Press, 2010). 2010 : Tavia Nyong’o, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 2009: Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Duke University Press, 2008). 2008: Cedric Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theatre and Film before World War II (University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 2007: Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Performing Race, Gender, and Nation in the Trans-Atlantic Imaginary (Duke University Press, 2006). 2006: Jill Lane, Blackface Cuba, 1840 – 1895 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). 2005: Harry Elam, The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson (University of Michigan Press, 2004). 2004: E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Duke University Press, 2003). 2003 : Thomas DeFrantz, Dancing Many Drums (University of Wisconsin Press, 2002). 2002: David Krasner and Harry Elam, Jr., eds., African-American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader (Oxford University Press, 2001). 2001 : Kimberly W. Benston, Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American Modernism (Routledge, 2001). 2000: George A. Thompson, Jr., A Documentary History of African Theatre (Northwestern Univeristy Press, 1998). 1999: Jill Lane, “Blackface Nationalism, Cuba 1840-1868.” Theatre Journal 50, no. 1 (1998). 1998: David Krasner, Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African American Theatre, 1895-1910 (Macmillan Publishers, 1997). 1997: Annemarie Bean, James V. Hatch, and Brooks McNamara, eds., Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth Century Blackface Minstrelsy (Wesleyan University Press, 1996). References Footnotes About The Author(s) Editorial Board: Guest Editors: Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather S. Nathans Guest Editorial Team for this issue: Mark Cosdon, Stephanie Engel, La Donna Forsgren, Javier Hurtado, Mia Levenson, Khalid Long, Derek Miller, Monica White Ndounou, Scot Reese Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Casey Berner Co-Managing Editor: Hui Peng Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction to "Milestones in Black Theatre" Prologue to the Issue and a Thank-you to Errol Hill Earle Hyman and Frederick O’Neal: Ideals for the Embodiment of Artistic Truth Newly Discovered Biographical Sources on Ira Aldridge Subversive Inclusion: Ernie McClintock’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble 1991: Original Broadway Production of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Antimusical Mule Bone Is Presented A Documentary Milestone: Revisiting Black Theatre: The Making of a Movement A Return to 1987: Glenda Dickerson’s Black Feminist Intervention Dancing on the Slash: Choreographing a Life as a Black Feminist Artist/Scholar Playing the Dozens: Towards a Black Feminist Dramaturgy in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston Guadalís Del Carmen: Strategies for Hemispheric Liberation “Ògún Yè Mo Yè!” Pathways for institutionalizing Black Theater pedagogy and production at historically white universities Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Talking About a Revolutionary Praxis: A Conversation with Black Women Artist-Scholars in the Wake of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration. Sharrell D. Luckett, David Román, and Isaiah Matthew Wooden, eds. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 252. Casting A Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Claire Syler and Daniel Banks, eds. New York: Routledge, 2019; Pp. 266. The Theatre of August Wilson. Alan Nadel. Metuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2018; Pp. 224. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. James Shapiro. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. Pp. 221. The Theatre of Eugene O’Neill: American Modernism on the World Stage. Kurt Eisen. Methuen Drama Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2017; Pp 242 + xiv. Errol Hill Award Winners 1997-2020 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Alexis Riley Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 1 Visit Journal Homepage Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism. Kirsty Johnston. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 240. Alexis Riley By Published on November 8, 2018 Download Article as PDF Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism . Kirsty Johnston. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 240. Kirsty Johnson’s Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism is an invaluable resource. Having previously written Stage Turns: Canadian Disability Theatre , Johnston offers in her latest book an impressive range of approaches to disability theatre scholarship. Beginning with disability theorist Tobin Sieber’s assertion that modern art is preoccupied with twisted bodies, Johnston asks what considerations might emerge when framing disability as a key feature of modern drama. Her provocation ranges from critiques of twentieth and twenty-first century drama featuring themes of disability to contemporary performances created by artists with disabilities. In order to achieve this breadth, Johnson divides the book into two parts. The first section lays the groundwork for the critique ahead, providing a well-structured and accessible overview of disability studies aimed at a wide readership. Chapter one contextualizes disability theatre as a social project that simultaneously constructs and critiques popular representations of disability. As examples, Johnston points to the American-based groups Phamaly and DisAbility Project, the British companies Extant Theatre Company and Graeae Theatre Company, and the Australian Back to Back. Johnston uses this overview to inform her work in the second chapter, “Critical Embodiment and Casting.” Here, she queries the ethics of actor training and casting practices specific to disability theatre. While noting that different bodies require different material considerations, Johnston observes that contemporary performance practices often assume a normative body, rendering the rehearsal process inaccessible to performers with disabilities. Additionally, disabled characters are often portrayed by able-bodied actors, furthering exclusion while engaging in uncritical representations of disability. Chapter three, “Staging Inclusion,” argues for a reconfiguration of normative production practices in order to accommodate a wider range of bodies and abilities. Johnston closes this section of the book with an examination of Graeae Theatre Company’s productions of Federico García Lorca’s Bloodwedding and Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera , as well as Theatre Workshop Scotland’s production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame . Through these case studies, Johnston demonstrates the prevalence of characters with disabilities within twentieth and twenty-first century dramatic literature, and how careful attention to these representations can prompt fruitful readings of familiar scripts. Johnston refutes critics’ claims that configure disability as added layers to understanding modern drama. Rather, she suggests that these layers are “important features of the text that have been there all along” (106). While the first section offers readers a clear, single-authored, scholarly argument, the second section, “Critical Perspectives,” deviates from this form, featuring two critical essays, an interview, and a script. This sharp shift in structure might make readers crave more connective tissue, yet the multifaceted nature of the section exemplifies how Johnston’s critical considerations might be taken up by scholars and applied to modern drama. “Critical Perspectives” opens with “‘Every Man His Specialty’: Beckett, Disability, and Dependence.” Written by Michael Davidson, author of Concerto for the Left Hand , this chapter employs disability theorist Lennard Davis’s concept of dismodernism to show that Beckett’s inclusion of disability serves to position the modern subject as disabled. Ann M. Fox’s chapter is a standout of the volume, generously offering an alternative perspective of The Glass Menagerie through a disability studies lens. Fox persuasively argues that an understanding of disability history, when applied to production practice, highlights the material conditions of disability that inform Laura’s actions in Tennessee Williams’s play. This reading suggests how future productions might position Laura as an empowered individual when presenting the audience with a nuanced critique of disability. One successful strand of Johnston’s investigation is her attention to disability theatre companies, particularly Graeae Theatre Company. Taking the form of an interview with the company’s artistic director, Jenny Sealy, chapter seven provides a probing profile of the company. Here, Johnston asks Sealy a range of questions about the company’s mission, training methods, and production practices, focusing on Blood Wedding and Threepenny Opera . Although the introduction to the interview format requires an adjustment in reading style that is largely unmarked, the chapter effectively integrates previous material, providing examples of how theoretical inquiry shapes production practice. Drawing on earlier discussions of The Glass Menagerie , the final chapter is comprised entirely of the script of Shattering the Glass Menagerie , a play that Terry Galloway, M. Shane Grant, Ben Gunter, and Carrie Sandahl first performed in 2003. The performance toggles between discussions by Sandahl and Galloway (playing themselves) and performances of scenes from The Glass Menagerie , bringing critique to bear in live performance. Curiously, the book ends with the script, not a formal conclusion. Perhaps this is strategic in that Johnston resists presenting disability theatre as a monolith, instead taking a multi-vocal, multi-genre approach to the subject that honors its contested and relatively new status as a field within theatre and performance studies. Furthermore, the arc Johnston builds throughout the book serves as a primer for future disability scholarship. Indeed, Johnston’s strength as a scholar lies in her consistent focus on grounding theories of disability in rigorously-researched theatrical practice. The wide range of resources provided in the text, including a robust collection of endnotes, positions Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism as a foundational text for scholars and artists from performance, history, literature, and disability studies. References Footnotes About The Author(s) ALEXIS RILEY University of Texas at Austin 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: 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 Are We “Citizens”? Tony Kushner’s Deweyan Democratic Vision in Angels in America Pageants and Patriots: Jewish Spectacles as Performances of Belonging “Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something”: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the Reconstruction of Melodrama Edward Albee’s Sadomasochistic Ludonarratology in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism. Kirsty Johnston. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 240. Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting. Amy Cook. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Pp. 198. The Late Work of Sam Shepard. Shannon Blake Skelton. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016; Pp. 256. Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism. Patricia A. Ybarra. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 247. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Ariel Nereson Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 1 Visit Journal Homepage Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting. Amy Cook. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Pp. 198. Ariel Nereson By Published on November 8, 2018 Download Article as PDF Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting . Amy Cook. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Pp. 198. Amy Cook’s Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting argues that casting, as artistic practice and necessary strategy for everyday life, is a performative act related to human cognitive tendencies to organize a large number of stimuli into characters. Our understanding of characters happens within categories that shape assumptions about a character type’s behavior and desires. Cook claims, “The process by which we build a character from the inputs of context, memory, text, and the physical properties of the body playing that character is far more powerful than has been acknowledged” (6). Because she works with a contemporary understanding of situated (also called “embodied”) cognition, inputs like context, memory, and text are just as connected to the experiential embodiment as are the physical properties of the body. Cook uses second generation cognitive science in her theoretical matrix, and I would argue that this text is part of another second generation, that of the cognitive turn in the humanities. Cook’s overall goal is a back-and-forth conversation between cognitive science and theatre studies wherein “a cognitive approach to theatrical character” and “a theatrical understanding of a central component of cognition – characterization” are analyzed together under the term of casting (15). Cognitive humanities scholarship can be easily critiqued as simply slapping cognitive science onto an analytical object and allowing scientific conclusions to become primarily prescriptive, thus circumscribing the scholar’s interpretive work. Cook foregrounds a more difficult, subtle, and ultimately useful process here whereby epistemological models from theatre studies help elucidate cognitive scientific findings, not solely the other way around. Building Character is structured pedagogically (though not pedantically). Chapter one, “Building Titus,” introduces concepts that continue to deepen and pay off in each subsequent chapter. “Building Titus” focuses on the cognitive processes of compression. Cook argues that character building is a process of stimuli compression; characters exist only as “we create them to make sense of our perceptions” (38). Chapter two, “Building Characters,” focuses on how and why “[S]ome bodies…do not seem to disappear as easily as others into their parts” and includes a compelling engagement with celebrity studies (32). Cook takes up the work of Eve Ensler and Anna Deavere Smith in the third chapter, “Multicasting,” exploring the dynamic and embedded nature of building characters. Chapter four moves Cook’s observations about casting into the roles of our everyday lives, including the casting process involved in Barack Obama’s presidency. Cook ends her book with a necessary gesture toward the implications of her argument and the cognitive scientific research upon which it rests for social change. The final chapter, “Counter Casting,” contends that because the cognitive processes behind casting undergird both theatrical and everyday phenomena, their “creativity…suggests ways we might reimagine our selves and our ecosystems” (33). Cook’s array of examples is appropriately capacious given that her thesis depends upon the omnipresence of casting as a tool for sense-making. She examines film trailers, rap music lyrics, advertising, and senate debates; her analysis is particularly strong when the object is dramatic performance. Chapter three includes several illuminating readings of much-discussed material, such as The Taming of the Shrew , the creative methods of Anna Deveare Smith, and Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More . Throughout the text, Cook responsibly owns her positionality and her “casting” by the world, which, as in cognitive scientific studies, both increases precision (her analysis of Shrew ) and limits findings (her account of listening to Dr. Dre’s 1992 album The Chronic ). When she turns her attention to dramatic examples, she clarifies her participation in disciplinary stakes; Cook effectively critiques the Method school of acting as reliant upon outdated models of psychology that prize the unconscious over more current understandings of networked consciousness and cognition, a theatre-based example of a larger critique throughout the cognitive humanities of psychoanalytic theory. The cognitive turn in the humanities can result in difficult prose; accounting for the specificities of scientific studies and the many caveats of their conclusions can often read as watering down the humanities scholar’s argument and muddying their writing. Cook’s writing suffers no such fate. She is remarkably clear in her descriptions of cognitive scientific concepts and their application to cultural phenomena. She also attends to the dynamics of live performance as a making or becoming process, simpatico with cognition as a set of situated processes. Consider Cook’s compelling analysis of Katherine’s final speech in Act Five as staged in Phyllida Lloyd’s 2016 production of Taming of the Shrew : “the all-female casting disrupts our protocols of character interpretation because we cannot find the categories of sex and gender the play insists on and thus the ensemble stages a character breakdown” (108, italics in the original). As an example of clear humanities writing within the cognitive turn, Cook’s text is a welcome addition to graduate and advanced undergraduate classrooms, as well as her peers’ bookshelves. Cook attempts an urgently necessary task if the cognitive turn is to become a flexible theoretical tool in our field, namely, the responsible synthesis of implications from this research with theoretical frames that share an investment in embodiment as epistemology, such as critical race theory, queer theory, and feminist theory. Cook’s claim, supported by second generation cognitive science, that “We do not just think differently because of the bodies we have, we think with and through the bodies we have” is an arrival at the same destination but by an alternate route from many theoretical models found in the traditions listed above (29). Cook models such a synthesis in her engagement with the work of Angela Pao and Brandi Wilkins Catanese. As Cook states, this book is a starting point. It serves as a useful tool for further investigation of, in particular, non-normative bodies and their possibilities in everyday life and on stage and screen. Indeed, claims of normativity, as Cook shows, partially result from cognitive “processes by which we jump to powerful conclusions that it is our duty to challenge” (33). Investigating the relationship between normative brain structures and neural processes that may be cross-cultural and transhistorical as well as social norms of gender, class, race, and sexuality remains a critical need. I would like to see future work engaging with the cognitive turn do more to interrogate and historicize its own theoretical frame. The selection of research areas, funding, and subjects within scientific study is hardly a neutral enterprise. Cook’s text demonstrates the value of engaging with these theories in sharpening our analytical precision using empirical evidence; yet scientific theories are still theories, and they deserve the same rigorous investigation of their cultural commitments and values that we now apply, de rigeur, to other theoretical tools. References Footnotes About The Author(s) ARIEL NERESON University at Buffalo, State University of New York 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: 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 Are We “Citizens”? Tony Kushner’s Deweyan Democratic Vision in Angels in America Pageants and Patriots: Jewish Spectacles as Performances of Belonging “Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something”: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the Reconstruction of Melodrama Edward Albee’s Sadomasochistic Ludonarratology in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism. Kirsty Johnston. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016; Pp. 240. Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting. Amy Cook. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; Pp. 198. The Late Work of Sam Shepard. Shannon Blake Skelton. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016; Pp. 256. Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism. Patricia A. Ybarra. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 247. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Tison Pugh Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 1 Visit Journal Homepage Edward Albee’s Sadomasochistic Ludonarratology in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Tison Pugh By Published on November 8, 2018 Download Article as PDF A relatively new term in the critical lexicon, ludonarratology theorizes the intersection of games and narrative structures in a particularly apt formulation for the theatrical world. Of the intersection of gaming and literary art, Astrid Ensslin explains that “narrative, dramatic, and/or poetic techniques are employed in order to explore the affordance and limitations of rules and other ludic structures and processes.” [1] That is to say, ludic, literary, dramatic, and poetic themes and structures often overlap, with kaleidoscopic refractions of form, structure, and story. From this new perspective, ludonarratology allows a clearer eye on the ways in which the theatre encourages its actors, producers, and audiences to engage in the rituals of play. Certainly, as a site simultaneously recreational and professional in its ambitions, the theatre multiplies the ludonarrative potential of characters qua players, in that actors must adopt the personae of their roles, with these characters then assuming complementary or contrasting stances toward one another as the plot unfolds. Such a dynamic is strikingly evident in Edward Albee’s masterpiece, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), the first act of which alerts viewers to its ludic themes through the subtitle “Fun and Games.” The actors undertaking the parts of Martha and George and of their late-night guests, Honey and Nick, must bring to life the antagonism expressed in the protagonists’ mutually tormenting games, with these sadomasochistic structures challenging viewers to consider the inherent ambiguity of Martha’s and George’s relative positions to each other. Much formalist, structuralist, and even poststructuralist narratology assumes that a given text’s protagonist is clearly identified, and much ludology similarly envisions a sharp distinction between the competitors of a game, yet sadomasochistic ludonarratology, as an interpretive and eroticized dynamic, complicates these simplistic views. Indeed, sadomasochism dismantles the certainty of many narratives because it implicitly—and sometimes explicitly—blurs the categories of sadist and masochist, leaving interpreters of the ludic story unsure of its overarching direction and thus capable of identifying with the players only through an ephemeral sense of relation that might waver in the scene’s next beat. When a game’s players continually shift in their respective positions toward one another, how can one win, how can the other lose, and how can viewers pierce through the dissolution of ostensibly antagonistic roles to determine the game’s meaning? Sadomasochistic ludonarratology envelops characters, players, and interpreters in complex wrangling over the very meaning of desire, with striking repercussions to the play of the game for all involved, particularly when plotlines reveal the characters and structures hidden from view that nonetheless guide the game’s unfolding. Under such circumstances, absence and inaction function as meaningfully as presence and play, alerting interpreters to the structural secrets hidden yet subversively in effect in sadomasochistic narratives. Theatre, Character, and Sadomasochistic Ludonarratology As a whole, the theatre creates a ludic world in and of itself, one that is defined by its lexicon of play, in which playwrights pen plays brought to life by actors playing roles. The theatrical experience is by definition an immersive one, and Sebastian Domsch posits the necessity of immersion for ludonarrative experiences: “Playing games and reading fiction are both activities that involve the temporal and partial neglect of knowledge in order to function.” [2] We know the gameworld differs from the real world, but it proceeds apace into the ludonarrative pleasures at hand. Beyond this creation of a playful zone, the theatre approximates a game in the tension between the guidelines of performance codified in a script and the inherent potential to disrupt these expectations. Building on Elizabeth Bruss’s foundational work in literary ludonarratology, Lynda Davey theorizes that theatrical narratives exhibit ludic features both in the interactions of playwrights and spectators and in the additional elements introduced through the narrative’s inherent performativity, which must be realized by actors, mise-en-scène, lighting and other requisite elements of a theatrical production. [3] Blanket statements about the theatre’s ludic aspects cannot cover all plays and all performances, yet sufficient overlap between theatre and game arises for ludonarratology to illuminate their mutual pleasures. Surely Tom Bishop is correct in his statement that “one does not need a fully worked-out theory of the nature and place of play in human life to perceive or discuss the ludic in drama.” [4] It is the objective of this essay, if not to propose a universal theory of drama, to flesh out a theory of sadomasochism in a particular theatrical artifact while suggesting its utility throughout a range of ludonarrative forms. Games require players, plays require characters, and characters require actors (i.e., players) to play them, with the overlap among these terms highlighting the ludic potential in dramas that stage agonistic and antagonistic relationships among their characters. Many formalist and structuralist theories of narrative envision characters primarily as essential functions of a story deployed to advance its plot, such that they retreat from any sense of organic individuality into a strictly utilitarian position. Aristotle, in his foundational assessment of narrative and drama, asserts that characters must align with a given plot’s ambitions: “In the characters too, exactly as in the structure of the incidents, [the poet] ought always to seek what is either necessary or probable, so that it is either necessary or probable that a person of such-and-such a sort say or do things of the same sort.” [5] Extending this Aristotelian view, Joel Weinsheimer points to the ways in which narrative structures envelop and thereby erase characters: “As segments of a closed text, characters at most are patterns of recurrence, motifs which are continually recontextualized in other motifs. In semiotic criticism, characters dissolve.” [6] Characters become subsumed as their narratives progress, acting in a particular fashion so as to adhere to the expectations of the plotline’s unfolding. Both narratives and games are almost universally established upon a bedrock of conflict, and Baruch Hochman pinpoints the utility of antagonism for discerning a given character’s motivation and identity: “we tend to think of character—of people, to begin with—in terms of conflict, which may be moral, social, or psychological in nature.” [7] Viewers understand the rudimentary structure of many ludonarrative artifacts simply by identifying the characters’ relationship to one another through this lens of conflict. And certainly, such a binary relationship pitting protagonist against antagonist is encoded into the characters of myriad narratives and games, both in the theatre and beyond, such that the assumption of a sharply defined antagonism bleeds into critical perspectives on narratology and interpretation. The binary of protagonist/antagonist, nearly ubiquitous as a narrative and ludic device, predetermines a story’s outcomes, as Ronald Jacobs details: “By arranging the characters of a narrative in binary relations to one another, and doing the same thing with the descriptive terms attached to those characters, narratives help to charge social life with evaluative and dramatic intensity.” [8] Interpreters can anticipate much of the developing action of a drama simply by understanding the characters’ relationships to one another through the oppositional logic of protagonist versus antagonist, in much the same manner as spectators of a game. Whereas formalist and structuralist insights into characters focus on their positions in an overarching storyline, poststructuralist insights have expanded an understanding of their necessity beyond the paradigmatic and functionary. James Phelan discerns characters performing in a trifold fashion as mimetic (representing a personality), thematic (representing a central idea), and synthetic (representing a narrative construct). [9] The theatre productively complicates the concept of character, and Brian Richardson, in terms similar to Phelan’s, argues that dramatic characters fulfill mimetic, formal, and ideological functions, as he further theorizes the necessity of a “performative fourth dimension” in light of the fact that “when a play is enacted on stage, the characters’ portrayal by actors can greatly affect the representation and its reception; dramatic representation by its very nature tends to complicate, enhance, or dissolve the unity of a character.” [10] A particular character bears the potential to shift markedly when performed, as the actor undertaking this role might strengthen or undermine its defining aspects through the vagaries of performance, and although it is more likely that a performance would alter a character’s mimetic features, shifts in its thematic and synthetic functions are possible, too. As Thomas Malaby proposes, games are inherently processual—“Every game is an ongoing process. As it is played, it always contains the potential for generating new practices and new meanings, possibly refiguring the game itself”—with this assessment readily applicable to the ways in which plays and the characters within plays shift according to the codes of performance. [11] Ludonarrative characters liberated from zero-sum formulations of victory/loss operate within a similar framework, for in these instances they transcend the default archetypal positions of protagonist or antagonist. Typically, to play a game involves seeking to defeat one’s opponent yet not concomitantly to view one’s opponent as the co-protagonist of this joint endeavor. In many texts, whether ludonarrative or not, the protagonist and antagonist share the goal of victory over the other, no matter how loosely this victory might be defined, with disruptive potential emerging when their wrangling implicitly troubles any narratological assumption of a single protagonist journeying through various plot points to the climax and then concluding with the dénouement. Whereas in many instances the protagonist and antagonist represent simply the flip sides of the same coin, in other circumstances the “protagonist” and the “antagonist” inhabit roles defined by their mutual aggression but also by the potential for their mutual overlap such that the binary dividing them crumbles. For the interpreter of such a ludonarrative artifact, one’s sense of kinship with a protagonist is always provisional, and no end of interpretive alliances could be formed with characters assigned an antagonistic position that they nonetheless evade. As a hermeneutic relevant to desire, narrative, and game, sadomasochism enlightens the fruitful possibilities of disentangling the protagonist/antagonist binary and instead locating characters qua players in fluctuating relationships to one another. At first glance, sadomasochism would appear to represent yet another instantiation of binary logic: sadist versus masochist, in an erotic ritual pitting protagonist versus antagonist under a veneer of cruelty. Indeed, Leopold Sacher-Masoch’s foundational text of masochism, Venus in Furs , ends explicitly with a moral based on antagonism: the protagonist Severin, humiliated and defeated following his affair with the alluring Wanda, realizes that “woman, as Nature created her and as man up to now has found her attractive, is man’s enemy; she can be his slave or his mistress but never his companion.” [12] Venus in Furs delineates masochistic ritual as a game to be won or lost, yet this is only one potential ending of a sadomasochistic encounter, particularly when the binary of sadist versus masochist is reassessed as a complementary positionality accessible to both players. These archetypal positions need not stand in direct opposition to each other but might instead enable fluctuating, orbiting points of contact. In sadomasochism’s most profound contradiction, a masochist typically seeks out a sadist, thereby initiating the scripts that they will fulfill in complementary service to each other, yet in so doing, the masochist, at least implicitly and if only temporarily, assumes the dominant position. In a cash-based, capitalist economy of desire, those who write the checks control the scenarios, even while casting themselves as the abject and pitiable site of desire’s unchecked degradations. In this light, sadomasochism shatters the logic of much formalist and structural narratology, for most narratological theories presume a clearly identified protagonist. Within a sadomasochistic framework, the linearity of the protagonist’s quest gives way to undulating gyres of desire, with the sadist and masochist contributing unpredictably to the form and structure of the plot. The narratological aspects of sadomasochism are readily apparent, with Gilles Deleuze, in his iconic work Coldness and Cruelty , declaring that both masochism and sadism “tell a story.” [13] More so, masochism is inherently dramatic in its roles and staging, with Deleuze outlining its theatrical characteristics: “Masochism is above all formal and dramatic; this means that its peculiar pleasure-pain complex is determined by a particular kind of formalism, and its experience of guilt by a specific story.” [14] The masochist and the sadist ostensibly inhabit radically opposed roles yet this presumption falters in its very enunciation, particularly when the masochist initiates the encounter. In these instances, the purported victims orchestrate the erotic episode that concludes with the consummation of their desires, and so masochists and sadists do not stand against each other in fixed poles but engage in endless negotiations about the very meaning of desire, as Deleuze further explains: “Dialectic does not simply mean the free interchange of discourse, but implies transpositions or displacements of this kind, resulting in a scene being enacted simultaneously on several levels with reversals and reduplications in the allocation of roles and discourse.” [15] In this manner, sadomasochism, rather than enforcing strict binaries, subverts them, and applying this insight to the ludonarrative realm complicates spectators’ understanding both of any game afoot and of the respective positioning of its players. As a ludonarrative construct, sadomasochism applies particularly well to the theatrical realm, for although in many instances a game’s parameters are clearly demarcated, the theatre facilitates a more porous sense of play and game, one in which its players stand on unequal footings. In his description of theatre’s dark play , Richard Schechner underscores how play dissolves its own borders and how play’s protean force summons potentially dangerous situations. The traits of dark play include that it: “(a) is physically risky, (b) involves intentional confusion or concealment of the frame ‘this is play,’ (c) may continue actions from early childhood, (d) only occasionally demands make-believe, (e) plays out alternative selves.” [16] Dark play intriguingly approximates many of sadomasochism’s most complex psychological and erotic factors: in the possibility of physical harm; in the unsettling reality of sexual play at hand; in the potential for a sadomasochistic impulse to have its roots in childhood desires; in the dissolution of the construct of “make-believe” through its insistent, brute enactments; and in the sadist’s and the masochist’s adoption of their roles that allow them to access alternate aspects of their quotidian personas. Schechner further explains: “Dark play occurs when contradictory realities coexist, each seemingly capable of cancelling the other out. . . . Dark play subverts order, dissolves frames, breaks its own rules, so that the playing itself is in danger of being destroyed.” [17] Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? exemplifies these dynamics, in that the audience must “live in this meaning” of the theatrical experience, as they are simultaneously ensnared in Martha and George’s sadomasochistic game that expands ever outward, catching Honey and Nick within its web. Narrative and metanarrative merge as Honey and Nick model the audience’s reaction, with spectators, watching from the promised safety of their seats, becoming entwined in the unfolding game. As a ludonarratological hermeneutic, sadomasochism disrupts the ostensible clarity of players as adversaries, compelling interpreters to forgo the standard binary of victory/defeat for a looser, more ambiguous sense of the game’s boundaries and aims. Martha and George complicate the very meaning of game as they fiercely struggle over their marriage and their phantom child, with Albee collapsing the dualistic force of protagonist and antagonist and leaving only an oscillation of desiring characters in his wake. Martha and George’s Sadomasochistic Games The plot of Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is stunning in its apparent simplicity: after attending a faculty party, Martha and George host their new acquaintances, Honey and Nick, for a round of drinks. For the three acts of the play—“Fun and Games,” “Walpurgisnacht,” and “The Exorcism”—Martha and George bicker viciously, frequently ensnaring Honey and Nick in their hostilities, while playing four so-called games: “Humiliate the Host,” “Hump the Hostess,” “Get the Guests,” and “Bringing Up Baby.” [18] The titles of these pastimes allude to Martha and George’s mutual attempts to humiliate each other, to George’s fear of (but potential desire for) cuckoldry, to their joint aggression against Honey and Nick, and to the phantom child that symbolizes their joyless marriage. Each game, C. W. Bigsby notes, “clearly act[s] as a substitute for sexual excitement.” [19] With its classic form, adhering to the Aristotelian unities of time, place, and action, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? marches inexorably to its conclusion, as Martha and George divulge each other’s devastating truths, while their guests both observe this debacle in horror and are conscripted into its play. As Walter A. Davis avows, “Aggression is the force that structures [ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? ] by ripping through all masks and roles.” [20] On the narrative’s surface, aggression abounds: Martha’s antagonism toward George positions her as the sadist to his masochist, and she inhabits this role with zest and pleasure, reveling in the humiliation she metes out to him. Before proceeding further into this discussion, however, it should be noted that Albee questioned a sadomasochistic interpretation of their marriage, declaring, “I think [Martha and George] love each other very much. It’s not an ‘S and M’ relationship. I mean there’s some problems there. They’ve had a lot of battles, but they enjoy each other’s ability to battle.” [21] Here Albee appears to envision sadomasochism as incompatible with love, but many would dispute this presumption. Also, Albee graciously conceded to an interviewer pursuing the gender dynamics of his oeuvre, “I don’t observe my plays the way you and other . . . critics observe them. I don’t think about them in those terms, so I can hardly talk about them that way.” [22] As Albee suggests, the fact that he would not discuss his play within a sadomasochistic framework—or likely within a ludonarrative framework as well—does not discount the insights gleaned from these complementary theories. Martha’s sadistic impulses define her character and her relationship with George, particularly when she insults his manhood, pointedly telling Nick and Honey “that maybe Georgie-boy didn’t have the stuff . . . that he didn’t have it in him!” She climactically concludes that he is a “FLOP! A great . . . big . . . fat . . . FLOP!” (210), with her words clearly alluding to his impotent penis. With George symbolically castrated, Martha stands as the more virile of the two, a dynamic further evident when he comments on her masculinity, telling Nick that “Martha is the daughter of our beloved boss. She is his . . . right ball, you might say” (184). Martha agrees, “I’m loud, and I’m vulgar, and I wear the pants in this house because somebody’s got to” (260). Violence, often staged yet painful in its consequences, belongs in the sadist’s repertoire, and Martha recounts an incident of physical abuse when her father was teaching George to box and she sucker-punched him: “I yelled, ‘Hey George!’ and at the same time I let go sort of a roundhouse right . . . just kidding, you know? . . . and he was off balance . . . he must have been . . . and he stumbled back a few steps, and then, CRASH, he landed . . . flat . . . in a huckleberry bush!” (191). Martha’s qualification that she was “just kidding” fractures the binary of play and seriousness, as her punch purportedly launched in jest proves her aggressive physicality with George. Furthermore, in her role as sadist Martha stands symbolically impervious to penetration of any sort, such that it would appear impossible to act upon her or otherwise to overturn the roles of the sadist/masochist dyad. This aspect of her character is evident in her retelling of her schoolgirl days at “Miss Muff’s Academy for Young Ladies.” Through this institution’s crude yet obvious allusion to female genitalia, Martha synechdochally represents herself through her vagina, as she then explains how she was “revirginized” following her brief marriage to the institution’s lawn mower (206). Through the impenetrability of her hymen—registered both in its purported reconstitution following this aborted union and in the phantom child who was never born (and who thus necessitated hymeneal penetration neither in its conception nor in its delivery)—Martha symbolizes the impermeable, imperious woman whose lovers cannot act upon her during even their most intimate encounters. Deleuze tersely comments, “The masochist is morose,” with this assessment applying well to George and his longsuffering, hangdog affect. [23] The hapless victim of his wife’s sadistic torments, George presents himself as emasculated and metaphorically castrated, acquiescing to her sadistic ploys. When Martha asserts that “ Some men would give their right arm for the chance” to marry the daughter of a college president, George replies sardonically, “Alas, Martha, in reality it works out that the sacrifice is usually of a somewhat more private portion of the anatomy” (171). George accepts his masochistic role in the play’s opening act, yet he resents it as well, telling Nick: “Do you think I like having that . . . whatever-it-is . . . ridiculing me, tearing me down, in front of . . . (Waves his hand in a gesture of contemptuous dismissal) YOU? Do you think I care for it?” (214). Explaining to Nick that he has “been trying for years to clean up the mess I made”—referring to his marriage to Martha—he reveals his coping strategies to be the masochistic triad of “accommodation, malleability, adjustment” (222). In this merciless game in which they have entangled themselves, George relies on a strategy of accommodation, apparently having lost any hope of shifting roles with his tormentor. Notwithstanding the appearance of Martha and George’s oppositional roles as firmly established, Albee adumbrates the inevitable erosion of the sadomasochistic binary. In a crucial revelation of the interlocking and mutually undercutting identities of sadist and masochist, George admits the pretense of their outwardly antagonistic relationship: “Now, on the surface of it . . . it looks to be a kind of knock-about, drag-out affair, on the surface of it” (223). Also, at several moments throughout the evening, George stages small rebellions against Martha’s sadistic tyranny, pettily insulting her. “Well, that was probably before my time ” (157), he declares in response to Martha’s questions about Bette Davis’s films, and when discussing the condition of her teeth, he again needles her about her age (163). Such scenes corrupt the logic of sadomasochism as based upon fixed positions, a theme amplified when Martha delights in George’s staged murder of her. He “shoots” her with a gun from which “a large red and yellow Chinese parasol” blossoms, and she asks him, “Where’d you get that, you bastard?” with the stage direction noting she does so with a joyous intonation (192). Indeed, this mock-violent ploy clearly arouses her, as she soon intones, “Yeah . . . that was pretty good. ( Softer ) C’mon . . . give me a kiss,” and then escalates this erotic encounter by placing his hand on her breast (193). George spurns her advances—“What are we going to have . . . blue games for the guests?”—and it is evident that his words wound Martha, as it also evident that he has seized momentary advantage in their sadomasochistic sparring. Martha encourages George to leave aside his masochistic posturing—“I like your anger. I think that’s what I like about you most . . . your anger” (162)—yet it is her sadistic treatment of him that sparks his anger, in a repeating circle of abuse and attraction. The cruelty of Martha and George’s game is balanced out by its pleasures, and several moments suggest that George not only approves but enjoys Martha’s humiliating tactics, thus pointing to the gratification he finds in their sadomasochistic rituals. In one of her salvos against his masculinity, Martha begins, “George hates Daddy . . . not for anything Daddy’s done to him, but for his own . . .”; as her words trail off, the stage directions indicate that George is “ Nodding . . . finishing it for her ” as he then declares “inadequacies” (205). This moment depicts George’s participation in his emasculation, his guiding of the sadist who torments him yet does so at his behest. A telling sign that George understands his masochistic role appears in his ready acceptance of cuckoldry, or more accurately, his insistence on his masochistic role such that cuckoldry becomes nearly unavoidable. Adultery and cuckoldry can be likened to a zero-sum game in which the lovers win and the cheated-on spouse loses, but George bleaches cuckoldry of its zero-sum dynamics by embracing his masochistic role. When Martha begins seducing Nick, George observes them, with the stage directions indicating not merely his awareness but his enjoyment of his wife’s actions: “ George enters . . . stops . . . watches a moment . . . smiles . . . laughs silently, nods his head, turns, exits, without being noticed ” (266). When Martha warns him, “We’re going to amuse ourselves, George,” he agrees, “Unh-hunh. That’s nice.” She further cautions, “You might not like it,” but he genially accedes, “No, no, now . . . you go right ahead . . . you entertain our guests” (269). This encounter might appear to contribute to the gradual unraveling of the sadomasochistic roles that Martha and George have assumed in their marital games, yet it would be more accurate to observe that they underscore the paradoxical and chimerical intransigence of these positions while also admitting the masochist’s latent power. This theme continues as George refuses to step out of his masochistic role—or in other words, he insists that the game continue despite the fact that doing so might compel Martha to cuckold him—and this refusal ironically highlights his agency in the game through his insistent and unwavering passivity. Indeed, when Martha tries to shock him with her adulterous liaison—“Never mind that. I said I was necking with one of the guests”—George encourages her, “Good . . . good. You go right on” (270). As the scene continues, he soon tells her with a touch of exasperation: “Lord, Martha, if you want the boy that much . . . have him . . . but do it honestly, will you? Don’t cover it over with all this . . . all this . . . footwork” (272). George insists on his masochism in this scene, insists that his wife cuckold him, and in so doing, asserts the agency latent in passivity by ascribing this agency to his wife’s staged desires. In such moments, sadomasochism undercuts the presumed telos of ludology in the victory/defeat dyad, for George’s victory over Martha would arise in his refusal to abandon his status as masochist, thus compelling her to remain in her sadistic and cuckolding role despite her hesitance to assert her dominance to this degree. For Martha, any ostensible victory over George by cuckolding him would entail a latent acknowledgment of the force of his passivity, and for George, his erotic defeat through his wife’s betrayal would entail the cuckold’s ultimate victory in the pleasure of abjection. The fluctuating erotics of cuckoldry are further confused by George’s expressed desire not to be cuckolded, evident when he recognizes Nick as a threat and cautions him, “You realize, of course, that I’ve been drawing you out on this stuff, not because I’m interested in your terrible lifehood, but only because you represent a direct and pertinent threat to my lifehood, and I want to get the goods on you” (228). In her reading of the play’s homosocial dynamics, Clare Virginia Eby proposes that Albee “shows how competitive masculinity sustains marriage,” further positing that the playwright depicts the manner in which “homosocial rivalry serves to underwrite heterosexual stability.” [24] George seeks to preserve the sanctity of his union with Martha while simultaneously pushing her to cuckold him through his insistent masochistic posturing. The games of “Humiliate the Host,” “Hump the Hostess,” and “Get the Guests” would appear to necessitate varying strategies to achieve their eponymous objectives, but Martha and George’s sadomasochistic marriage effectively responds to the shifting ludic engagements of the evening, for it is the very adaptability of the sadomasochistic dyad that proves its utility in each round of their evening of games. The play’s façade of sadist versus masochist cracks further at numerous points, as Martha and George expose the contradictions inherent in the sadomasochistic dyad. In a striking exchange, George acquiesces to his masochistic role as Martha confesses her exhaustion with sadism: GEORGE : You can sit there in that chair of yours, you can sit there with the gin running out of your mouth, and you can humiliate me, you can tear me apart . . . ALL NIGHT . . . and that’s perfectly all right . . . that’s OK. . . . MARTHA : YOU CAN STAND IT! GEORGE : I CANNOT STAND IT! MARTHA : YOU CAN STAND IT!! YOU MARRIED ME FOR IT!! (A silence) GEORGE ( Quietly ): That is a desperately sick lie. MARTHA : DON’T YOU KNOW IT, EVEN YET? GEORGE ( Shaking his head ): Oh . . . Martha. MARTHA : My arm has gotten tired whipping you. (257-58) In many ways, this scene represents the critical crux of interpreting Martha and George’s sadomasochistic relationship, and thus of interpreting the play as a whole: is Martha correct that George married her precisely for her sadistic talents, of which even she has grown tired, or is he correct that such an allegation is a “desperately sick lie”? It is noteworthy that these lines come shortly after a moment of domestic harmony between the two, when Martha compliments George: “It’s the most . . . life you’ve shown in a long time,” to which he genially replies, “You bring out the best in me, baby” (256). In this moment of concord, masochist and sadist agree on their mutually satisfying relationship, yet such a moment cannot last given the pressures of their relationship based on the pleasure of conflict. As Martha and George’s games entangle Honey and Nick, the audience witnesses the interpretive disarray created by sadomasochism, for this young couple can neither comprehend nor meaningfully participate in their hosts’ ludic pastimes. Nick disavows any masochistic tendencies in himself, declaring to George that “I just don’t see why you feel you have to subject other people to it” (215). He also states that “flagellation isn’t my idea of a good time,” although he concurs when George suggests that he “can admire a good flagellator . . . a real pro” (215). Honey and Nick denounce the games their hosts are playing: “I don’t like these games,” Honey intones, with Nick agreeing, “Yeah. . . . I think maybe we’ve had enough of games, now” (249). Significantly, Nick understands that any games he plays with George and Martha are unwinnable, that their ludic structures preclude meaningful intervention by outside agents. When George demands Nick’s response to his mock declension of “good, better, best, bested,” Nick explicates his host’s rhetorical trap: “All right . . . what do you want me to say? Do you want me to say it’s funny so you can contradict me and say it’s sad? Or do you want me to say it’s sad so you can turn around and say no, it’s funny. You can play that damn little game any way you want to, you know!” (175). As a ludic experience, sadomasochism establishes a framework that obscures rather than enlightens, and although Nick stumbles upon this truth early in the storyline, he is unable to extricate his wife and himself from the evening’s dark play. George, speaking with feigned awe, approves of Nick’s perceptiveness—“Very good! Very good!” (175)—yet Nick’s comprehension of the game’s traps does not allow him to participate in it and simply emphasizes his role as a bystander ensnared in events beyond his ken. One of the chief tactics in this sadomasochistic game that further destabilizes the identities of its players arises in its allegorical registers, for both the audience and Honey and Nick must pierce through the veil of Martha and George’s blurred accounts of their desires and their lives. In this vein, when George plays “Get the Guests,” he attacks Honey and Nick with an allegorical account of their marriage—“Well, it’s an allegory, really—probably—but it can be read as straight, cozy prose . . . and it’s all about a nice young couple who come out of the Middle-west. It’s a bucolic you see” (250)—as he proceeds to describe Honey and Nick’s marriage and its discontents. According to the stage directions, George ends this part of the game “ abruptly and with some disgust ,” as he concludes, “And that’s how you play Get the Guests” (254). In its doubling of storylines, allegory surrounds a deeper truth with an outer fictional layer, but George ultimately strips the outer layer from the inner, revealing the couple’s humiliating secrets inside. Allegory aligns with ludic sadomasochism in this exchange, for the positions of sadist and masochist establish an interpretative valence for the game that are then radically deconstructed as the game evolves. As allegory encourages interpreters to digest the narrative before them, it also corrupts the potential of interpretation, for the poles of interpretation inevitably shift, and often they do so in light of the savage strategies of the game afoot. As Albee’s conjoining of ludonarrative sadomasochism with allegory corrupts the antagonistic positionality of characters as players, so too does his storyline obscure essential players from view, cloaking their significance to the game’s play and resolution. In particular, the allegorical surface of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? obscures the role of Martha’s father as the instigator of the play’s dysfunctional games. This man, never depicted onstage, lurks in the background of Martha and George’s marriage, with the couple both haunted by his influence and employing him as a totemic weapon. Owing to these inescapable and tortuous family dynamics, they act as children perpetually stunted by living in this man’s shadow, such as when Martha says, “I’m firsty,” with the stage direction stressing that she is “ Imitating a tiny child ” (164). George plays along, calling her his “little yum yum” (213) and suggesting that he will make “a gweat big dwink” for her, his “little mommy” (185). With the epithet “little mommy,” George creates the paradox of an infant parent, one who ostensibly bore him yet who remains preternaturally young and dependent on him for nurturing. Contrasted with these images of Martha and George as developmentally crippled, Martha’s father represents the player who cannot be played against, the character absent from the narrative yet critical to its narrative structure, for his actions have sparked the play’s plot. Martha and George’s marriage and even George’s career have been ordered to his measure; likewise, Martha and George would not have met Honey and Nick if not for his intervention, as George reminds his wife: “If your father didn’t set up these goddamn Saturday night orgies all the time” (158). In defending her invitation to Honey and Nick despite the lateness of the hour, Martha avers, “Because Daddy said we should be nice to them, that’s way,” as she then repeats this rationale in quick succession (160). Enhancing this theme, Albee establishes Martha’s father as an allegorical representation of an arbitrary and callous deity, not just her father but The Father. George states sardonically, “He’s a god, we all know that” (170). In Martha’s account of her father—“Jesus, I admired that guy! I worshipped him . . . I absolutely worshipped him. I still do” (206)—Albee deploys the ambiguity between “Jesus” as a mild exclamation and as a direct address, allowing the conflation between her human father and the Christian deity to deepen the play’s allegorical consideration both of intergenerational and of marital family dynamics. And thus a key critical crux in interpreting Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? emerges in the meaning of a character who shapes the plot but who cannot be held accountable for his actions, who eludes the binary both of antagonist and protagonist and of sadist and masochist while sparking the antagonism that necessitates some sort of resolution. Although one might presume the father/Father corresponds with the sadist—and in Albee’s play it is Martha’s father whose psychic force traumatizes the couple—Deleuze details how this father figure embodies masochistic desire: So when we are told that the character who does the beating in masochism is the father, we are entitled to ask: Who in reality is being beaten? Where is the father hidden? Could it not be in the person who is being beaten? . . . What the subject atones for is his resemblance to the father and the father’s likeness in him: the formula of masochism is the humiliated father.[25] Aligning Martha’s father with George admits a perverse logic to the psychosexual dynamics unfolding throughout this torturous evening: Martha avenges herself against the patriarchal authority that controlled her life to the extent of annulling her first marriage and “revirginizing” her, and George allows himself to be humiliated in the effort to humiliate the father who orchestrated his humiliation. Such an interpretation gives psychological clarity to a play whose fraught emotional dynamics have long enthralled viewers, yet the shifting tides of sadomasochism complicate even this logic. As the poles of sadist and masochist inevitably shift, so too must any allegorical vision of Martha’s father as the antagonist of their marital game. This dynamic is evident in the fact that, as much as Martha’s father stands as the narrative’s invisible character, the omnipotent father who haunts and directs the players’ actions, George reveals that this figure can also be strategically deployed in his games with Martha. To invoke the father is to invoke his uncontestable authority, as in George’s cool reply to Martha’s request for a “big sloppy kiss”: GEORGE ( Too matter-of-fact ): Well, dear, if I kissed you I’d get all excited . . . I’d get beside myself, and I’d take you, by force, right here on the living room rug, and then our little guests would walk in, and . . . well, just think what your father would say about that . (164) George evades Martha’s demands for affection, and even in this early moment of the play, destabilizes the sadomasochistic binary upon which their relationship is presumably established. The father/Father is thus a conscriptable character within their antagonistically ludic marriage, one who may be deployed to advance their individual strategies while standing removed from the play at hand. For a drama with only four characters, it is striking that two additional absent fathers contribute to its plotline, with George’s and Honey’s fathers similarly entering the narrative as spectral figures whose influence cannot be evaded. George tells Nick of an incident in which a boy—presumably George himself—accidentally killed his father, with George recalling the aftermath of the fatal car accident: “And in the hospital, when he was conscious and out of danger, and when they told him that his father was dead, he began to laugh, I have been told, and his laughter grew and he would not stop” (218). George escapes his father’s influence by this man’s untimely death, with his hysterical laughter indicating his liberation from this patriarchal regime and an incipient panic induced by this newfound freedom. Nick says of Honey’s father that he “was a man of the Lord, and he was very rich,” detailing this man’s rise to fame and his accumulation of wealth: “He spent God’s money . . . and he saved his own” (226). In these paternal storylines, the fathers direct their children’s and their in-laws’ lives, constraining their choices and identities, such that the father must be surpassed in the quest for self-determination. The marital game, Albee suggests, cannot be played only by wife and husband, for they are ensnared in erotic rituals established by the preceding desires of the patriarchy. The childlessness of both couples then emerges as a definitive rebuff of patriarchy’s claim to futurity, with the children forever scarred by the previous generation ending this game that cannot be won. As Lee Edelman provocatively argues, “The Child . . . marks the fetishistic fixation of heteronormativity: an erotically charged investment in the rigid sameness of identity that is central to the compulsory narrative of reproductive futurism.” [26] Within the fictions of Albee’s play, the couples’ joint childlessness represents an anti-erotic strategy in the overarching sadomasochistic game that constitutes the American family, as they deny the Father’s power by cutting off the roots of social reproduction. The play’s final game—“Bringing Up Baby”—thus illuminates the potential of a ludic escape from the ruts of familial disharmony. Whereas Martha and George’s sadomasochistic games allow for some ambiguity in its strategies, the game concerning their phantom child requires their mutual and strict adherence to its rules. This child symbolizes both the pleasure and the hollowness of their marriage, yet many viewers have expressed disbelief over this aspect of Albee’s play, such that he defended his choice, declaring that “it always struck me as very odd that an audience would be unwilling to believe that a highly educated, sensitive, and intelligent couple, who were terribly good at playing reality and fantasy games, wouldn’t have the education, the sensitivity, and the intelligence to create a realistic symbol for themselves. To use as they saw fit.” [27] The phantom child imbues their marriage with meaning as it also establishes rules for their interactions. By mentioning the child to Honey and Nick, Martha corrupts the game, piquing George’s anger: “I mean, you can make your own rules . . . you can go around like a hopped-up Arab, slashing away at everything in sight, scarring up half the world if you want to. But somebody else try it . . . no sir!” (257). And whereas sexuality provokes eddies of humiliation and desire in their marital games that prove mutually satisfying, if also fraught, Martha appears truly to torment George by suggesting that he is not the father of their phantom child. “He’s not completely sure it’s his own kid,” she impugns, as George replies in shock, “My god, you’re a wicked woman” (202). Even within the realm of fantasy, in which George could be envisioned if not as a virile lover then at least as a genial father, Martha portrays him as impotent to the point that he could not ejaculate the phantom seed of a nonexistent child. The promise of anti-futurity, registered in the refusal to cede to the Father’s authoritarian impulses, entails the end of Martha and George’s game. Some critics have viewed Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as ultimately conservative in its sexual politics, as evident in Rachel Blau Duplessis’s observation that in the play’s conclusion, “the humiliated, weak, unsuccessful man is shown to be stronger than the brutal, emasculating woman. The family problems are solved not by investigating their ultimate source . . . but by regulating family relations in a highly normative manner.” [28] From another perspective, however, their sadomasochistic marriage fractures the meaning of traditional gender roles, and through their nonexistent offspring, they have radically reformulated the meaning of family and of narrative closure. Complementing this sadomasochistic reading of the play, it is worthwhile to note that George repeatedly refers to Martha’s and his phantom child as a “little bugger” (201, 210), with this deft allusion to sodomy further highlighting the fruitlessness of their marriage. Indeed, several critics have viewed Albee’s play as a queer allegory. Richard Schechner excoriates it as “perverse and dangerous,” declaring that its theme of “sexual perversity [is] there only to titillate an impotent and homosexual theatre and audience.” [29] Sky Gilbert avows that George is a “gay man . . . with certain obvious, stereotypical gay characteristics” and that Martha “is really a part for a drag queen.” [30] John Clum acknowledges the potential for this queer allegory but argues in contrast, “In a way, it’s a good thing for gay men that [Albee] didn’t [write queer scenes]; for a gay Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? would also be antigay.” [31] These various, contradictory readings testify to the protean force of a queer subtext in Albee’s play, one that corresponds well with its themes of sadomasochism and anti-futurity that, to some degree, transcend the genders of the roles. For in the end, Martha and George’s childlessness is the only effective strategy available to them in their jointly sadomasochistic struggle against the Father, a battle that has left them emotionally hollowed yet capable still of feeling, a condition aptly encapsulated in Martha’s assessment of their icy tears: “I cry alllll the time; but deep inside, so no one can see me. I cry all the time. And Georgie cries all the time, too. We both cry all the time, and then, what do we do, we cry, and we take our tears, and we put ’em in the ice box, in the goddamn ice trays (Begins to laugh) until they’re frozen” (273). The play’s conclusion may suggest a slight thaw in their frozen interiors, but the sadomasochistic strains of their marriage and their family hinders any such interpretations from fully recuperating their lives into the range of the heteronormative. Within Albee’s ludonarrative assessment of the American family and its discontents, the pleasure of Martha and George’s marriage arises in their games, as Martha divulges in a rare statement of her affection for her husband: “who keeps learning the games we play as quickly as I can change the rules; who can make me happy and I do not wish to be happy, and yes I do wish to be happy. George and Martha: sad, sad, sad” (277). This enigmatic dynamic, evident in the shifting poles of sadist and masochist that embody a core logic that simultaneously falters in its enunciation and enactment, leaves Nick and Honey unsure of how to interpret a marital game that they uncomfortably observe but cannot decipher: “Hell, I don’t know when you people are lying, or what,” Nick resignedly declares (283). The ultimate game against the Father, Martha and George’s sadomasochistic rituals allow them the pleasure of a game that can never be declared, such that it must end when the one inviolate rule is crossed, as George tells Martha: “You broke our rule, baby. You mentioned him . . . you mentioned him to someone else” (307). As Jesper Juul posits of games and their rules, “rules can cue the player into imagining a world,” an apt assessment of the ways in which Martha and George’s rules animate their marriage. [32] Within the rule structure they have created, to speak of the game is to destroy it, yet it is only through speech that Martha and George can enact their rage against an exterior force that has corrupted the very core of their being. Within this instance of sadomasochistic ludonarrativity, the enemy within is the enemy without, with Martha and George striking blindly at themselves, at their guests, and at Martha’s father, playing a marital game that undulates in its play and strategies yet builds to a climax of a child who will never be born, and thus of a Father who cannot initiate another round of the game against Himself through his children. Ludonarrative Theatre and the Masochistic Audience As Martha and George’s marriage demonstrates, sadomasochism illuminates the ways in which hostile play diffuses other, often more threatening acts of violence, providing a release mechanism through the ludic structures implicated by desire. On a narrative level, these dynamics affect the development of the play’s characters, and on a metanarrative level, they affect the play’s audiences as well. Certainly, Albee envisioned Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as ensnaring the audience to the point that they are actively involved in the psychological carnage depicted on stage. In an interview with Matthew Roudané, Albee detailed how conflict and aggression stand at the heart of the dramatic experience: “All drama goes for blood in one way or another. . . . Sometimes the act of aggression is direct or indirect, but it is always an act of aggression. And this is why I try very hard to involve the audience. . . . I want the audience to participate in the dramatic experience. . . . If the drama succeeds, the audience is bloodied .” [33] Following this compelling image of a bloodied audience, Albee proceeded to explain how viewers must participate in the theatrical experience: If audiences approach the theatre . . . and are willing to participate; if they are willing to have the status quo assaulted; if they are willing to understand that the theatre is a live and dangerous experience—and therefore a life-giving force —then perhaps they are approaching the theatre in an ideal state and that’s the audience I wish I were writing for.[34] Theatre as a “live and dangerous experience” entails the dissolution of the border between stage and seats, the eradication of the safe space of viewing through the crumbling of the “fourth wall” that never existed except in the imagination of performers and viewers who desired it. An art form that bloodies, Albee’s ludic theatre positions the audience as the masochist to the narrative’s unfolding, enduring the discomforting storyline for the sake of the ultimate edification of its experience. And further aligned with masochism, playgoers initiate the sadomasochistic scripts of the theatre by purchasing their tickets, proving both their power within its commercial economy while also submitting to the powerlessness of their positions in their darkened seats. What sadomasochism shares with Albee’s sense of ludonarrative drama is the possibility for a safe space that feels unsafe, for the heady illusion of danger that unfolds within an ultimately protected milieu. Numerous theorists have demarcated play’s mercurial flirtations with danger, such as in Clifford Geertz’s classic study of Balinese cockfights, in which the illicit nature of this play, coupled with its potential to reopen and exacerbate latent hostilities, underscores the fact that games cannot always be marshaled into pre-authorized temporal and spatial boundaries. [35] So too with sadomasochism, in its erotic, its narrative, and its ludonarrative incarnations: it is only “play,” yet it is play that allows conflicts to be waged between partners that destabilize their relative positions to each other. The sadist, the masochist, and the complementary roles they inhabit inevitably bleed out from any attempt to cordon “play” from the reality of the ludonarrative event, and any observer of these interactions must likely become implicated as well, for there is no safety in simply observing, as Honey and Nick demonstrate in their blindsided reactions to Martha and George’s vicious games. And from this vantage point, sadomasochism serves as a particularly apt hermeneutic for thinking through ludonarratology’s structures and secrets. Games require players, objectives, and rules governing their interaction, with narratives similarly necessitating characters pursuing an objective while observing various strictures (whether those of realism or fantasy or any other genre). Sadomasochism tweaks these paradigms and reminds players and interpreters alike that structures hide secrets. A sadomasochistic permutation of ludonarrativity may, in many instances, be designed to withhold pertinent structural information—missing characters, undeclared rules, self-destructive strategies—that undermine the promise of the text’s telos. The game ends, as all games and all texts must, but only through the dissolution of key elements in light of the oscillating enactment of desires that plague a plot with aporias that ironically grant it its foundational meaning. For George and Martha, this aporia coheres in the image of the Father, yet the play of sadomasochistic ludonarrativity cannot be delimited to this one invisible antagonist. As it breaks the borders between characters and their desires, between audience and the perceived events, the game brews a heady concoction of desires that enable the players’ identities to fracture and to unite against an Other with whom one could not otherwise contend, for both Albee’s savaged characters and his bloodied audiences. References [1] Astrid Ensslin, Literary Gaming (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014), 6. [2] Sebastian Domsch, Storyplaying: Agency and Narrative in Video Games (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 27. [3] Lynda Davey, “Communication and the Game of Theatre,” Poetics 13 (1984): 5-15, at 10. For Bruss’s foundational study, see “The Game of Literature and Some Literary Games,” New Literary History 9.1 (1977): 153-72. [4] Tom Bishop, “Shakespeare’s Theater Games,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 40.1 (2010): 65-88, at 67. Bishop offers a strong reading of Shakespeare as a ludologist. [5] Aristotle, Poetics I , trans. Richard Janko (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987), 20. [6] Joel Weinsheimer, “Theory of Character: Emma ,” Poetics Today 1 (1979): 185-211, at 195. [7] Baruch Hochman, Character in Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 51. [8] Ronald Jacobs, “The Narrative Integration of Personal and Collective Identity in Social Movements,” Narrative Impact: Social and Cognitive Foundations , ed. Melanie Green, Jeffrey Strange, and Timothy Brock (Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002), 205-28, at 216. [9] James Phelan, Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996), 29, and Living to Tell about It (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 20. [10] Brian Richardson, “Beyond Poststructuralism: Theory of Character, the Personae of Modern Drama, and the Antinomies of Critical Theory,” Modern Drama 40 (1997): 86-99, at 95. [11] Thomas Malaby, “Beyond Play: A New Approach to Games,” Games and Culture 2.2 (2007): 95-113, at 102. [12] Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs , in Masochism (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 141-293, at 271. [13] Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty , in Masochism 7-138, at 130-31. It should be mentioned that Deleuze argues against the possibility of sadomasochism, deriding it as “pseudomasochism” (124) and as a “semiological howler” (134). [14] Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty , 109. [15] Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty , 22. [16] Richard Schechner, “Playing,” Play and Culture 1 (1988): 3-19, at 14. [17] Richard Schechner, “Playing,” 12-13. [18] Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in The Collected Plays of Edward Albee, 1958-1965 (New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2007), 149-311; cited parenthetically, with all italics and capital letters in the original. [19] C. W. Bigsby, “ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Edward Albee’s Morality Play,” Journal of American Studies 1.2 (1967): 257-68, at 261. [20] Walter A. Davis, Get the Guests: Psychoanalysis, Modern American Drama, and the Audience (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 214. [21] Philip C. Kolin, ed., Conversations with Edward Albee (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988), 187. [22] Kamal Bhasin, “Women, Identity, and Sexuality: An Interview with Edward Albee,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 7 (1995): 18-40, at 23. [23] Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty , 71. [24] Clare Virginia Eby, “Fun and Games with George and Nick: Competitive Masculinity in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? ” Modern Drama 40.5 (2007): 601-18, at 614. [25] Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty , 60. [26] Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 21. [27] William Flanagan, “The Art of the Theatre IV: Edward Albee: An Interview,” Paris Review 10 (1966): 92-121, at 111; italics in original. [28] Rachel Blau Duplessis, “In the Bosom of the Family: Contradiction and Resolution in Edward Albee,” Minnesota Review 8 (1977): 133-45, at 137. [29] Richard Schechner, “Who’s Afraid of Edward Albee?” Tulane Drama Review 7.3 (1963): 7-10, at 8-9. [30] Sky Gilbert, “Closet Plays: An Exclusive Dramaturgy at Work,” Canadian Theatre Review 59 (Summer 1989): 55-58, at 57-58. [31] John Clum, Acting Gay: Male Homosexuality in Modern Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 189. [32] Jesper Juul, Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 196. [33] Edward Albee, quoted in Matthew Roudané, “ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? : Toward the Marrow,” The Cambridge Companion to Edward Albee , ed. Stephen Bottoms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 39-58, at 51; italics in original. [34] Edward Albee, quoted in Matthew Roudané, “ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? ,” 51. [35] As Geertz notes, “Fighting cocks . . . is like playing with fire only not getting burned. You activate village and kin group rivalries and hostilities, but in ‘play’ form, coming dangerously and entrancingly close to the expression of open and direct interpersonal and intergroup aggression (something which, again, almost never happens in the normal course of ordinary life), but not quite, because, after all, it is ‘only a cockfight’” ( The Interpretation of Cultures [New York: Basic Books, 1973], 440). Footnotes About The Author(s) TISON PUGH is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Central Florida. His recent books include The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom , Precious Perversions: Humor, Homosexuality, and the Southern Literary Canon , and Truman Capote: A Literary Life at the Movies . 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: 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 Are We “Citizens”? Tony Kushner’s Deweyan Democratic Vision in Angels in America Pageants and Patriots: Jewish Spectacles as Performances of Belonging “Anyway, the Whole Point of This Was to Make You Feel Something”: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and the Reconstruction of Melodrama Edward Albee’s Sadomasochistic Ludonarratology in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Disability Theatre and Modern Drama: Recasting Modernism. Kirsty Johnston. 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