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

Benjamin Gillespie and Bess Rowen Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 1 Visit Journal Homepage Introduction Benjamin Gillespie and Bess Rowen By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF This Fall 2025 issue of the Journal of American Drama & Theatre is once again brimming with compelling topics in the form of articles, book and performance reviews, interviews, and roundtable discussions. Teya Juarez leads the issue with a pressing query into the use of fat suits on stage, particularly in Samuel D. Hunter’s The Whale . Her analysis of the harms of costuming actors in fat suits is particularly resonant in the current moment shaped by the proliferation o f Ozempic and other weight loss drugs. Jewel Pereyra's article offers a fascinating deep dive on the importance of the Afro-Filipina American jazz singer and dancer Maggie Calloway’s "performances of aggregation." As Pereyra states, Calloway both preserved a form of Filipino culture and addressed the pressures of American cultural influence by “staging these political conflicts in front of popular audiences.” In keeping with our interest in expanding the range and scope of materials featured in JADT , the issue features a roundtable with members of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre. Heather Nathans and Javier Hurtado curate this discussion titled “What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre.” The participants include artists and scholars in the field who have dedicated their careers to telling the stories of marginalized communities : Benny Sato Ambush, Henry Bial, Kristoffer Diaz, Kim Marra, and Harvey Young. These major voices speak to the complexity of issues surrounding diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice in U.S. theatre. Our ongoing “Queer Voices” series explores the state of contemporary LGBTQIA+ theatre and performance through interviews. In this issue, Alex Ferrone talks to storied performance artist Carmelita Tropicana on her recent show Give Me Carmelita Tropicana !, the final performance at Soho Rep’s longtime theatre space; Benjamin Gillespie speaks to Canadian playwright Jordan Tannahill to discuss the major success of the controversial Prince Faggot in New York; and Jen-Scott Mobley and Maya Roth ask playwright Jen Silverman about intimacy, paradox, and provide an update on Silverman’s wide range of writing projects. This issue also features four book reviews from our Book Review Editor Stephanie Lim. Lauren Friesen reviews Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage , edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter (Routledge, 2024); Henry Bial reviews Ben Spatz’s Race and Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research (Northwestern University Press, 2024); Eileen Curley reviews Marlis Schweitzer’s Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century (University of Iowa Press, 2020); and Sierra Rosetta reviews Bethany Hughes’s Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity (New York University Press, 2024). If you are interested in reviewing a book, send a query to jadtbookreviews@gmail.com . We are thrilled to welcome JADT ’s new Performance Review Editor, Jennifer Joan Thompson. After adding this section to the journal two years ago to provide more space for scholarly reviews in the field, we are grateful to now have a dedicated editor to run this section. This issue’s performance reviews feature The Shed’s production of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s The Brothers Size by Isaiah Wooden; Audible Theater’s production of Dead Outlaw by Elliot Lee; a roundup up the 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival by Lindsey Mantoan; and a multi-author review of the dance piece ZAZ from the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, directed by Ryan K. Johnson. We encourage our readers to submit their review pitches to jadtperformancereviews@gmail.com . Finally, JADT continues its ongoing commitment in providing a home for the New England Theatre In Review, formerly housed within the New England Theatre Journal . Editor Martha S. LoMonaco has curated a collection of New England-based theatres and seasons including Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres by Paul E. Fallon, theaters in the Berkshires by Steven Otfinoski, and the Long Wharf Theatre by Karl G. Ruling. In these uncertain times, it is remarkable to see the range of scholarship in our field capturing the vitality of theatre and performance practices and studies across the Americas. We hope you enjoy reading the issue as much as we did. References Footnotes About The Author(s) BENJAMIN GILLESPIE   is Assistant Professor of Theatre History & Performance Studies at Santa Clara University and co-editor of the  Journal of American Drama and Theatre (JADT) . He is editor of  Split Britches: Fifty Years On   (University of Michigan Press, 2027) and co-editor of  Late Stage: Theatrical Perspectives on Age and Aging  (University of Michigan Press, 2026) and  The Routledge Companion to LGBTQ+ Theatre and Performance in North America  (Routledge, 2027). BESS ROWEN is Assistant Professor of Theatre at Villanova University. She is also affiliate faculty for both Gender & Women's Studies and Irish Studies. She is a member of Actors' Equity and an intimacy choreographer. Her first book, The Lines Between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment (2021) focuses on affective stage directions. Her next book project looks at the theatrical archetype of the “mean teenage girl.” She also serves as the President-Elect of the American Theatre & Drama Society and co-editor of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre (JADT) . 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 Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale “The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. The Brothers Size Dead Outlaw 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival ZAZ Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Jan Mason Western Connecticut State University Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 Jan Mason Western Connecticut State University By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Renata Eastlick, Carman Lacivita, and Anne Scurria in Hartford Stage's Pride and Prejudice Photo: T. Charles Erickson. Pride and Prejudice Kate Hamill, adapted from the novel by Jane Austen (12 Oct. – 5 Nov.) A Christmas Carol : A Ghost Story of Christmas Charles Dickens, adapted by Michael Wilson (24 Nov. – 24 Dec.) Simona’s Search Martin Zimmerman (18 Jan. – 11 Feb.) The Hot Wing King Katori Hall (29 Feb. – 24 Mar.) All My Sons Arthur Miller (11 Apr. – 5 May) 2.5 Minute Ride Lisa Kron (30 May – 23 Jun.) Hartford Stage’s 2023-24 season opened with a delightful production of Kate Hamill’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, beautifully directed by Tatyana-Marie Carlo with whimsical costumes by Haydee Zeldeth and elegant scenic design by Sara Brown, complete with revolving stage. This wonderful, witty, whirlwind of a production kept audiences laughing while still managing to tug at their heartstrings when Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy finally pledged their love. Fun was the name of the game in this production with clever musical moments composed by Daniel Baker & Co. and choreographed by Shura Baryshnikov. Hartford audiences were graced with the presence of Anne Scurria, a longtime favorite company member of Providence’s Trinity Repertory Theatre, who gave a crowd-pleasing performance as both Charlotte Lucas and Mr. Bennet in this gender-bent production. It was unfortunate to learn that ticket sales for this enjoyable season-opener fell short of projections. For the past two seasons, Hartford Stage has presented Joe Landry’s pared-down It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play as its holiday offering, but last year that production undersold, and this year the theatre took a cue from its audience, bringing back former Artistic Director Michael Wilson to direct his adaptation of the Dickens classic A Christmas Carol . Audiences were clearly hankering for this holiday tradition, and they came out in droves to see this lively, spectacular production that involves many families from the area with its inclusion of dozens of children and local actors. In addition to many returning performers, Allen Gilmore joined the cast as Scrooge for the first time and brought new depth to this familiar character. Alejo Vietti and Zack Brown were responsible for the fabulous costumes, with impressive wigs designed by Brittany Hartman. In January, Hartford Stage began the year with a world-premiere production of Martin Zimmerman’s Simonia’s Search . The story centered on the concept of intergenerational trauma, the idea that trauma experienced by one person may be passed to subsequent generations of a family. Weighty material by any means, though this production managed some lighter moments, with actor Christopher Bannow donning tentacles to play a sea creature in one of the more absurd twists in the non-linear plotline. Every scenic design this season (excepting A Christmas Carol ) blocked off the tricky upstage area of Hartford Stage’s large thrust theatre space, which had the dual effect of shrinking the playing area while bringing the action closer to the audience. Katori Hall’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning play The Hot Wing King was no exception, with an elaborate two-story set designed by Emmie Finckel. The playing space included a detailed living area and kitchen, an upstairs bedroom, and a side yard complete with basketball hoop. The cast skillfully delivered performances that contrasted broad comedic turns with more heartfelt moments. Israel Erron Ford, who appeared in Yale Repertory Theatre’s delightful 2019 production of Twelfth Night , gave an outstanding performance as the character Isom. This lively production was directed by Christopher Betts, rounding out his tenure as the theatre’s inaugural Willis Fellow. In 2020, Hartford Stage joined many of the nation’s cultural institutions in a realignment toward diversity, equity, and inclusion as a response to the abhorrent murder of George Floyd Jr. As part of this intentional work to create a culture of belonging and inclusion, Hartford Stage designed the Joyce C. Willis Fellowship to engage black artists in a two-year residency. Marsha Mason starred as Kate Keller in the April production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, and the powerful name recognition of both leading lady and playwright proved to be a big draw for regional Hartford audiences. Riw Rakkulchon designed the impressive set for the backyard of the Keller home, complete with a back porch of a two-story 1950s suburban house and grass-filled yard. Marsha Mason did not disappoint, and the strong ensemble gave compelling performances in Miller’s play about duty and betrayal. Lena Kaminsky gave a tour-de-force performance in 2.5 Minute Ride, Lisa Kron’s one-woman show, to round out the season in June. The simple set of cardboard boxes by Judy Gailen and effective lighting by Daisy Long deftly guided the audience through the sprawling storyline which included international travel and leaps through time spanning most of the last century. Hartford Stage has settled into a new normal post-pandemic that must be less frenzied and is certainly more economical. Prior to the pandemic,the theatre consistently presented six or sometimes seven productions in a season over and above the dutifully presented annual holiday show A Christmas Carol, which they previously treated as a separate entity and did not ever include in their season lineups. Since reopening post-pandemic, Hartford Stage has presented six shows, including A Christmas Carol . This reduction of one to two productions per year includes a shift in scheduling that puts one production in the fall before the holiday show instead of two, and four plays spanning the months of January to June. Given the theatre industry’s current trend for equitable, safe workplaces with reasonable schedules, this new normal may be a much-needed shift to a manageable workload. It should be noted however, that these reduced seasons are accompanied by a reduction in staff and sources of funding. A comparison of program notes from this season and one from the 2017-2018 season shows a reduction in artistic and administrative staff by a number ranging between one to five people across most departments, with the abolishment of staffing for apprentices and writers under commission. It is also made clear by this comparison that the number of institutional and individual donors is down from pre-pandemic levels. Although Hartford Stage has a strong history of new play development, it seems that next year there will be a pause to that tradition as well. Next season includes the classics Romeo and Juliet, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and the holiday extravaganza A Christmas Carol, along with more contemporary works: Two Trains Running, Laughs in Spanish, and Hurricane Diane. This reviewer hopes Hartford Stage will continue to build back post-pandemic and succeed in its efforts to consistently bring audiences back to the theatre. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Jan Mason has directed theatre in Boston, Connecticut, and New York City, and she has directed opera in Connecticut and Italy. In New York City she developed new plays with Ensemble Studio Theatre (Theatre Lab Member); The Women’s Project (Director’s Forum Member); Rattlestick (Artistic Associate); and New Georges (Affiliated Artist and Roaring Girl). She teaches and directs at several Connecticut colleges and universities. In 2023 her play Lost & Found was produced in a festival of new work in Vermont, and her play Jack & Jill was published in Mini Plays Magazine and Literature Today . Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Steven Otfinoski Fairfield University Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 Steven Otfinoski Fairfield University By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Adam Chanier - Berat and Andy Grotelueschen in A New Brain at Barrington Stage. Photo: Daniel Radar The Happiest Man on Earth Mark St. Germain (24 May-17 Jun.) Cabaret John Kander, Fred Ebb and Joe Masteroff (14 June-8 July) Tiny Father Mike Lew (27 June-22 July) Blues for an Alabama Sky Pearl Cleage (18 Jul. -5 Aug.) Faith Healer Brian Friel (6-28 Aug.) A New Brain William Finn and James Lapine (16 Aug.- 10 Sept.) English Sanaz Toossi (27 Sept.-15 Oct.) Artistic Director Alan Paul’s first season at BSC was a winning combination of compelling musicals, thoughtful plays, and worthy revivals. When we first saw Eddie Jaku (ably played by Kenneth Tigar) in the season’s opener, The Happiest Man on Earth, he was chatting with patrons at the St. Germain Stage and appeared to indeed be the titular character. Only when he began his harrowing narrative did we understand that the price for such happiness. Based on Jaku’s memoir, effectively dramatized by St. Germain, Jaku relives his life as a Jew in Hitler’s Germany from his expulsion from school in his native Leipzig to barely surviving Auschwitz to his final rescue at war’s end in Belgium. This tight, 80-minute monologue took place on an appropriately stark set by James Noone, backed by a wall of horizontal boards evoking the boxcars that carried Jaku and thousands of other Jews to the death camps. Jaku’s final message that we must see ourselves as part of an extended human family is one that reverberates in our own troubled times. Troubled times indeed haunted an emotionally charged revival of Cabaret , the first production directed by Paul. The Kit Kat Club, the symbol of 1920s free-wheeling Berlin, never looked more dazzlingly decadent or shockingly contemporary. The first time we heard the stirring anthem “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” it was not sung by Hitler’s minions but by a quartet of trans and nonbinary performers, whose hopes for a better future would soon be dashed. At the center of this growing conflict is the Emcee, brilliantly embodied by Nik Alexander, who alternated between the svelte seducer and the play’s conscience. Paul skillfully blended some of the club scenes with the book relationship scenes, perhaps no more effectively than when American Cliff (Dan Amboyer), an unwitting courier for the Nazi cause, was seen in transit as the company sang “Money,” the prime motive for his actions. Krysta Rodriguez was a tortured Sally Bowles who turned the title number into a gut-wrenching anthem of despair. Tiny Father, a co-world premiere with the Chautauqua Theater Company, written by Mike Lew, takes place in a neonatal intensive care unit rendered in every stainless steel detail by scenic designer Wilson Chin. Daniel, compellingly played by Andy Lucien, is the hapless Black father who is overwhelmed by the premature birth of a daughter he initially had no intention of letting into his life. As the intermission-less production progresses, the tiny baby grows, and so does the ‘tiny father,’ thanks in large part to the help of Caroline, the compassionate yet by-the-book nurse (Jennifer Ikeda). Once Daniel resolves his issues with fatherhood, the play loses some steam as a less convincing conflict arises over care and the possible prejudice between father and caregiver. However, the ending, where Daniel finally recognizes his debt to Caroline, is a fitting conclusion for a beautifully uplifting play. Race also plays a role in Blues for an Alabama Sky, the fine revival of Pearl Cleage’s 1995 play. The drama is set in 1930 Manhattan, where the Harlem Renaissance is in full flower and the dreams of ordinary Blacks are built on the success of such giants as poet Langston Hughes and entertainer Josephine Baker, the toast of Paris. Brandon Alvion was pure kinetic comic energy as Guy, the not-so-closeted gay costume designer, whose dream of working for Baker in France is finally realized. Yet his triumph results in tragedy for two of his closest friends and his antagonist, a transplanted Alabamian. Tsilala Brock was the struggling singer who chose Guy and Paris over a more stable life with country boy Leland, an earthy and empathetic DeLeon Dallas. Funny, engrossing, and ultimately heartbreaking, Blues captures the aspirations and struggles of Black America today as well as any contemporary play. Another revival, Brian Friel’s Faith Healer, is a remarkable quartet of monologues for three characters that deal with the mysteries of faith, friendship, and guilt. Christopher Innvar was mesmerizing as Frank Hardy, the titular character who bears the weight of his work and its consequences for others. Gretchen Egolf played his long-suffering wife, Grace, a chain-smoking neurotic who claims, “I’m one of his fictions, too.” Finally, there is Frank’s manager, Teddy, whom Mark H. Dold brought to life with a much-needed comic flair. In the end, when Frank shuffled off, overcoat buttoned tightly, into a netherworld of his own making, we were left to wonder what was truth and what was fiction and which is more important to humanity’s survival. BSC’s second musical of the season was a sparkling revival of William Finn and James Lapine’s A New Brain. Songwriter Gordon Schwinn (a lovable nebbish Adam Chanler-Berat) is frustrated writing songs for a TV kiddie show when he suffers what might be a brain hemorrhage or stroke. The catchy, propulsive tunes and heartfelt lyrics made for a gloriously entertaining 95 minutes, although, at times one wished the composer had plumbed deeper into his characters and their conflicts, especially in the relationship of Gordon and his boyfriend Roger, a powerhouse-voiced Darrell Purcell, Jr. Other memorable members of the energetic cast were Mary Testa as Gordon’s mother and Andy Grotelueschen as the delightful Mr. Bungee, the kiddie show star, who is alternatively Gordon’s froggy nemesis and his gentle mentor. BSC’s season ender, English, is appropriately about immigrants and the language they leave behind when they come to America. The four Iranian students learning English before they leave their homeland, like their teacher Marjan (Nazanin Nour), are wrestling with an uncertain future. The only male member, Omid (Babak Tafti), actually has American citizenship but stays in Iran to connect with a culture and people he fears he is losing. This sense of cultural loss permeated the play just like the bright fluorescent lights by lighting designer Masha Tsimring that glared down on Afsoon Pajoufar’s boxed-in classroom that left no place to hide. Playwright Toossi portrayed the contentious Elham, who, like other characters in the play, is both “understood and misunderstood.” Shortly after this production was announced, the play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) STEVEN OTFINOSKI teaches in the English department at Fairfield University. He is an award-winning playwright with productions across the Eastern states and abroad. His ten-minute comedy “The Audition” won the Best Script Award at the Short + Sweet Festival in Sydney, Australia. Steve is also the author of more than 200 books for young adults and has been the long-time reviewer of summer theater in the Berkshires for New England Theatre in Review . He lives in Stratford, Connecticut with his wife Beverly, a retired teacher and editor, and their two Aussie Shepherds. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Donatella Galella Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 2 Visit Journal Homepage Introduction to Asian American Dramaturgies Donatella Galella By Published on May 21, 2022 Download Article as PDF “Look, this country’s a disaster in so many ways,” actor Raymond J. Lee belts with ferocity in David Henry Hwang and Jeanine Tesori’s 2019 musical Soft Powe r. [1] Yes! At the concert celebration of the Kennedy Center’s fiftieth anniversary in 2021, he softened, “Look, this country’s still hurting in so many ways.” [2] Yes . With increased public attention to rhetorical and physical attacks against Asians and Asian Americans, works like Soft Power have received more attention, and this very issue on “Asian American Dramaturgies” has felt more urgent. But does the price of admission to the stage and legibility to the public need to be a spectacularization of recent anti-Asian violence? As #StopAAPIHate trended on social media, it was exhilarating and exhausting to witness some colleagues come into consciousness and care about the existence of systemic anti-Asian racism, given how histories of colonization, incarceration, and assimilation haunt Asian Americans. Still, Lee delivers his next line in Soft Power with hope held over a long note, “But we have the power to change.” [3] Asian American theatre and Asian Americanist thinking offer criticality and possibility. As Dorinne Kondo writes in Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity , “Dramaturgical critique deploys research, theory, and scholarship for reparative ends.” [4] Ambivalence remains, because even as representation matters, visibility politics must go beyond the surface. In this special issue, the first that the Journal of American Drama and Theatre has dedicated to Asian American theatre and performance, I asked, “What can Asian American dramaturgies do? What can we do with Asian American dramaturgies?” The following pieces offer a range of answers. Inspired by Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather Nathans’s co-edited 2021 special issue “Milestones in Black Theatre,” “Asian American Dramaturgies” consists of short pieces from interviews with artists to interventions in academia. To set the stage, the issue begins with a roundtable of Dorinne Kondo, Esther Kim Lee, Josephine Lee, Sean Metzger, Karen Shimakawa, and myself reflecting on the field of Asian American theatre and performance studies. The following dramaturgical readings give much-needed attention to the politics of whiteness and possibilities of music and history in Young Jean Lee’s and Lauren Yee’s plays (Christine Mok, Jennifer Goodlander, and Kristin Leahy with Joseph Ngo). A photo essay and interviews put the spotlight on major Asian American theatrical institutions and on Hawaiian artistic-political epistemologies (Roger Tang, Jenna Gerdsen, and Baron Kelly). kt shorb, Al Evangelista, and Amy Mihyang Ginther consider their own artistry and writing as putting Asian American dramaturgies into practice from strategies of re-appropriation to refusal and deprivation. Bindi Kang and Daphne Lei provide inside looks into their crucial dramaturgical work on recent Asian American theatrical productions. In the final piece, Ariel Nereson brings readers back to Kondo and Yee and invites us all to teach Asian American dramaturgies. Including this introduction, these fifteen contributions join the past fifteen articles that JADT has published with some engagement of Asian American theatre and performance, from analyses of US dramas performed in Asian countries to meta-critiques of canonical Asian American plays in the US theatre landscape. I share this bibliography in order of publication: Brian Richardson, “Genre, Transgression, and the Struggle for (Self) Representation in U.S. Ethnic Drama,” JADT 8, no. 3 (Fall 1996): 1-18. Hsieh-Chen Lin, “Staging Orientalia: Dangerous ‘Authenticity’ in David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly ,” JADT 9, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 26-35. Robert Ji-Song Ku, “‘Beware of Tourists if You Look Chinese’ and Other Survival Tactics in the American Theatre: The Asian(cy) of Display in Frank Chin’s The Year of the Dragon ,” JADT 11, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 78-92. Byungho Han, “Korean Productions of A Streetcar Named Desire ,” JADT 13, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 36-51. Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, “Listening with the Third Ear: Kabuki, Bharata Natyam and the National Theatre of the Deaf,” JADT 14, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 35-43. Dan Kwong, “An American Asian in Thailand,” JADT 14, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 44-54. Dan Balcazo, “A Different Drum: David Henry Hwang’s Musical ‘Revisal’ of Flower Drum Song ,” JADT 15, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 71-83. Jon D. Rossini, “From M. Butterfly to Bondage : David Henry Hwang’s Fantasies of Sexuality, Ethnicity, and Gender,” JADT 18, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 55-76. John S. Bak, “Long Dong and Other Phallic Tropes in Hwang’s M. Butterfly ,” JADT 21, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 71-82. Ashis Sengupta, “‘Coming Out of the Closet’: Re-reading The Boys in the Band and On a Muggy Night in Mumbai ,” JADT 22, no. 1 (Winter 2010): 33-50. Kee-Yoon Nahm, “Visibly White: Realism and Race in Appropriate and Straight White Men ,” JADT 27, no. 2 (Spring 2015), https://jadtjournal.org/2015/04/24/visibly-white-realism-and-race-in-appropriate-and-straight-white-men/ . Wu Wenquan, Chen Li, and Zhu Qinjuan, “Arthur Miller: Reception and Influence in China,” JADT 27, no. 3 (Fall 2015), https://jadtjournal.org/2015/11/20/arthur-miller/ . Esther Kim Lee, “Strangers Onstage: Asia, America, Theatre, and Performance,” JADT 28, no. 1 (Winter 2016), https://jadtjournal.org/2016/03/23/strangers-onstage-asia-america-theatre-and-performance/ . Stephen Hong Sohn, “Calculated Cacophonies: The Queer Asian American Family and the Nonmusical Musical in Chay Yew’s Wonderland ,” JADT 29, no. 1 (Fall 2016/Winter 2017), https://jadtjournal.org/2016/12/17/calculated-cacophonies-the-queer-asian-american-family-and-the-nonmusical-musical-in-chay-yews-wonderland/ . Arnab Banerji, “Finding Home in the World Stage: Critical Creative Citizenship and the 13th South Asian Theatre Festival 2018,” JADT 32, no. 2 (Spring 2020), https://jadtjournal.org/2020/05/20/finding-home-in-the-world-stage-critical-creative-citizenship-and-the-13th-south-asian-theatre-festival-2018/ . I offer warm thanks to my comrades who made this special issue possible. The guest editorial board members Arnab Banerji, Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns, Broderick Chow, Chris A. Eng, Esther Kim Lee, Sean Metzger, Christine Mok, and Stephen Sohn offered careful feedback to the authors and encouraging words, emojis, and punctuation marks to me. Managing Editors Dahye Lee and Emily Furlich communicated clearly and attended well to details. Co-Editors Jim Wilson and Naomi J. Stubbs patiently answered my questions. Book Review Editor Maya Roth thoughtfully reached out and curated her section to engage with our issue’s theme. Finally, I appreciate the American Theatre and Drama Society membership that elected me, enabling me to propose and edit this special issue. Asian American dramaturgies have unfinished work to do, not for mere inclusion but for radical shifts in telling stories, redistributing resources, and knowing differently. As the author-character DHH concludes in Soft Power with fragile optimism, “Good fortune will follow. If we somehow survive,” the ensemble intones, “In America.” [5] References [1] Play and lyrics by David Henry Hwang, music and additional lyrics by Jeanine Tesori, “Soft Power,” Public Theater Opening Night Draft, 11 October 2019, 92. [2] Reynaldi Lindner Lolong, “Democracy,” YouTube video, 2 October 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKdj3jQTatc (accessed 30 April 2022). [3] Hwang and Tesori, 92. [4] Dorinne Kondo, Worldmaking: Race, Performance and the Work of Creativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 197. [5] Hwang and Tesori, 93. Footnotes About The Author(s) Donatella Galella is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Riverside. She researches how systemic racism shapes contemporary American theatre from the ways white institutions capitalize on blackness to the persistence of yellowface in musicals. Her essays have been published in journals including Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism and books including Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture, and Identity and Casting a Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative. Her book America in the Round: Capital, Race, and Nation at Washington DC’s Arena Stage (University of Iowa Press) was an Honorable Mention for the 2020 Barnard Hewitt Award from the American Society for Theatre Research and a Finalist for the 2020 Outstanding Book Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration Introduction to Asian American Dramaturgies Behind the Scenes of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies On Young Jean Lee in Young Jean Lee's We're Gonna Die by Christine Mok Representation from Cambodia to America: Musical Dramaturgies in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band The Dramaturgical Sensibility of Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap and Cambodian Rock Band Holding up a Lens to the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists: A Photo Essay Theatre in Hawaiʻi: An “Illumination of the Fault Lines” of Asian American Theatre Randall Duk Kim: A Sojourn in the Embodiment of Words Reappropriation, Reparative Creativity, and Feeling Yellow in Generic Ensemble Company’s The Mikado: Reclaimed Dance Planets Dramaturgy of Deprivation (없다): An Invitation to Re-Imagine Ways We Depict Asian American and Adopted Narratives of Trauma Clubhouse: Stories of Empowered Uncanny Anomalies Off-Yellow Time vs Off-White Space: Activist Asian American Dramaturgy in Higher Education Asian American Dramaturgies in the Classroom: A Reflection Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

James F. Wilson Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein James F. Wilson By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Harvey Fierstein. Photo by Carol Rosegg. When Torch Song Trilogy opened in 1982, the show’s playwright and star, Harvey Fierstein, was lauded as the first openly gay writer and lead actor on Broadway. In an interview with Barbara Walters the following year, Fierstein scoffed at the dubious distinction: “Isn’t it totally ridiculous that I’m getting all this attention because I’m the first openly gay [Broadway star and playwright]?” Schooling a visibly perplexed Walters, he explained, “You know that the women in your audience are sitting out there, and they go to see movies and they’re dying over these gorgeous men, [who] you know they’re gay.”(1) Out-spoken and unafraid to be controversial, Fierstein, a four-time Tony-Award winning writer and performer, is both a prolific artist and committed activist. He was at the forefront of the nascent AIDS protests and grassroots fundraising, and he remains a staunch advocate for LGBTQ+ visibility and rights. In a career spanning more than fifty years, Fierstein got his start with the Gallery Players in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and while still a teenager, he appeared in Andy Warhol’s Pork (1971). As he writes in his memoir, I Was Better Last Night (2022), he played Amelia, “an asthmatic lesbian maid with a penchant for porn mags and plate jobs.”(2) (Fierstein advises non-squeamish and scatological-curious readers to look up the latter fetish.) Experimental and semi-autobiographical work followed, including the three plays comprising Torch Song Trilogy , International Stud (1978), Fugue in a Nursery (1979), and Widows and Children First (1979), all of which began at La MaMa in New York City’s East Village. In addition to Torch Song , Fierstein’s Broadway plays, Safe Sex (1987) and Casa Valentina (2014), confront issues affecting LGBTQ+ communities. As a librettist, Fierstein has been instrumental in bringing the American musical out of the closet. La Cage aux Folles (1983) is credited as the first Broadway musical to feature a gay couple as the main characters, and the show has proven to be remarkably durable and revivable. His book for A Catered Affair (2008), based on a teleplay by Paddy Chayefsky and Gore Vidal’s film adaptation, includes a lonely gay uncle (played by Fierstein originally), embittered by a sense of exclusion from his own extended family. Kinky Boots (2013) ran on Broadway for six years, and the musical celebrates community, pride, and the complexities of gender and sexual identities. Fierstein, with his distinctive and oft-imitated gravelly voice, is a unique figure in queer theatre history, and he continues to be a brash and uninhibited spokesperson for a new generation of LGBTQ+ individuals. James Wilson: In a nod to Harry Hay, you dedicate your memoir “to the radical fairies who flew before” you. Who were the most significant radical fairies on your life and work? Harvey Fierstein: I was thrown into the gay community very young. I didn't know about the prejudice and stuff until later in life because when I joined [the Gallery Players in Brooklyn], everyone was gay. There were a couple of heterosexuals, but they bussed them in! Everyone else was gay. I was thirteen or fourteen years old, and all these older men and women were all gay and lesbian. And now it’s so funny to me to think of her as a famous person, but there was Marsha P. Johnson and the street queens. We all hung out together on Christopher Street and none of us had money to go into a bar. Even when I was older, I didn't have the money to go to a bar. I was working at La MaMa or at WPA or whatever. I was making fifty dollars a week, which barely covered my subway to and from the city. So, we just all hung out on the street together. But it was these people who lived the gay life who were so natural in it that it never occurred to me to ever lie. I mean, the idea of coming out of the closet was so strange to me because I couldn't imagine being in the closet, you know? We’re not talking about mother and father stuff, we’re talking about in the real world. And that was the kind of real world that I lived in. And I’m thinking of the playwrights who wrote for me: I had H.M. Koutoukas, Robert Patrick, Billy Hoffman, and Paul Foster, who always wore those white shirts, making him look straighter! Then there was María Irene Fornés. Ronald Tavel, of course, and Harvey Tavel, were huge influences, as were Donald L. Brooks and John Vaccaro’s [Play-House of the Ridiculous] troupe. [ Laughing .] I was just laughing because I saw an interview with Diane Lane, and I knew Diane Lane as the naked little girl who was carried over the heads in Andrei Serban’s The Trojan Women . That’s how I remember her! And then all of a sudden, she was a movie star! Wilson: You mention H.M. Koutoukas, and that makes you a direct descendant of the Caffe Cino and the birth of Off-Off-Broadway. Fierstein: The Cino was gone already, but there was Robert Patrick, Donald L. Brooks, and the dancer James Waring. Wilson: And the Trocks?(3) Fierstein: The Trockadero came along later. Eric Concklin was one of the lead ballerinas for the Trockadero, and he directed all my early plays. And Tony Bassae was also a Trockadero. And of course, the lead ballerina, Larry Ree—he and Eric worked together dressing shows. Wilson: What were performances at La MaMa and other Off-Off-Broadway theatres like in the 1970s and 1980s? Fierstein: They were inspirational. There was a wildness and a “Join us!” kind of spirit. The first show that I did with the Play-House of the Ridiculous when John Vaccaro asked me to come in was called Persia: A Desert Cheapie [by Vaccaro and Bernard Roth] in the second-floor theatre at La MaMa. He had ramps built down the two sides with a stage at one end and a stage at the other, and the audience was in the center, and we were on the four platforms. We ran around the audience, and it was absolute chaos. We also did [Paul Foster’s] Satyricon on those four platforms. It just occurred to me this moment that Andrei Serban was doing the same thing in the basement, and I wonder if John ripped that idea off Andrei! I don't know. But anyway, so we would perform in this very much in-your-face manner: The audience would come in. Ellen [Stewart] would come out with her bell, and say, “Welcome to La MaMa, dedicated to experimental theater, dedicated to the artists and all aspects of the theater. . . .” She’d make her announcement and leave. When she was done, the audience sat down on the ground to watch the show, and John Vaccaro would come out and shout, “Get up, you lazy mother fuckers! Stand the fuck up! Who told you to sit down? Get the fuck up!” I absolutely love that. Wilson: You said in a recent interview, “I wish that experimental theater still existed. There were a few of us that I would say destroyed Off-Off-Broadway. I think greed is what destroyed Off-Off-Broadway.”(4) Can you explain what you mean by that? Fierstein: I’m trying to think of the first one who actually crossed over. I mean, I know one of the early ones was Hair , of course. You know, Tom [O’Horgan] moved Hair to Broadway. Wilson: Hadn’t Dames at Sea moved from the Chino to Off-Broadway? Fierstein: Oh, yeah, but that was so much earlier. That was way before I arrived. I don’t know what effect that really had. I mean, everyone was aspirational in that way. You had Bette Midler or Sly Stallone doing a role at La MaMa and then moving on, but they never turned around and looked back. You know, I never heard Sylvester Stallone send Ellen a check. And as much as I love Bette, I’ve never been able to get her to do a benefit with me for La MaMa. But it was Tom Eyen that directed her. I don’t remember who Sly Stallone was with when he did a show. But anyway, what happened was Hair moved, and all of a sudden, there’s this possibility of making money. You know, instead of fifty dollars a week that we were getting from Ellen, there was the possibility of more. Paul Foster was just pushing and pushing. One of the famous ones was Elizabeth I. It was a musical starring Ruby Lynn Reyner. Ruby’s still around. You could always talk to her, but I think it lasted one night on Broadway.(5) Jerry Ragni and [Galt MacDermot]’s next show where they once again went to a Broadway theater—I forget what theater it was—and hollowed it out to make it look like . . . like outer space. Wilson: Was that Dude ? Fierstein: Dude ! And that also was like, boom!(6) So, there were people trying. And then Tom [O’Horgan] did Jesus Christ Superstar . And then after that it was this constant push to have another hit, which never happened for him because he did the one about Joe McCarthy, Senator Joe , I think it was called, and which was a commercial production.(7) But there was that kind of push. I was doing my shows, and I can’t say I wanted them to move. I certainly wasn’t against them moving, but I would have rather just run them longer at La MaMa. International Stud moved Off-Broadway and bombed. Widows and Children and A Fugue in a Nursery then moved Off-Broadway and bombed, and then the Broadway rights for Torch Song never happened. And you know, they brought in Joan Darling, who had done an episode of Mary Tyler Moore . In our world that made her a big director, I guess. Nice woman. As I remember, she didn’t want me in the show. She wanted Austin Pendleton to play Arnold, and I’m trying to remember who she wanted for the mother. But it was somebody equally not right. Estelle Getty, who was “Estelle Gettleman” at that time, would call me every night saying, “You can’t let them do this to me! That’s my role! It’s my role!” I kept saying, “Estelle, it’s never gonna happen. Calm down. It’s never gonna happen.” Wilson: And that was for the Off-Broadway production when it went to the Actors’ Playhouse, or when it was going to Broadway? Fierstein: It had been bought for Broadway by a producer, but never happened. And then we did the reading for the Glines, and Lawrence Lane called me and said, “Can we meet and talk?” And I took my last dollar—took the subway in from Brooklyn on my last dollar. We had this meeting, where he said after that reading, we want to produce Torch Song Off-Broadway. I had to borrow a dollar to get home from him. But thankfully, he lent me a dollar. Wilson: Switching topics but related to Torch Song : You began your career in drag, and I’m just wondering how you feel now about the commercialization of drag, and, on the flip side, the demonization of drag. They’re going after the Drag Queen Story Hours, for instance, which might be similar to your experiences doing drag in the 1970s and 80s. Fierstein: I was doing drag in a world which had no problem with doing drag. You know, when I was doing Flatbush Tosca or In Search of the Cobra Jewels or Freaky Pussy , my world had no problem with drag. What you’re talking about is once we moved Torch Song Trilogy . But there was something a little bit more challenging than drag: I was getting fucked up the ass center stage in the fourth scene. So, putting on a dress really didn’t seem like too much of a problem to the audience. That was not the scene I was asked to cut before it moved to Broadway. I was asked to cut the fuck-up-the-ass scene, so I have to say, I didn’t have that problem. Also, we were not as pretty. I mean, Jesus Christ, I look at these queens and these makeup jobs, and you can faint. You know, Nina West just played Edna in the non-union tour of Hairspray , and she’s gotten better and better at her makeup. They all get better and better at their makeup. But they are so gorgeous. And the wigs are so gorgeous. We never dreamed. I mean, we slapped that shit on. And we put some glitter on top of it, and huge eyelashes, and we thought that was drag. We would have been laughed out of—I mean, not a single one of us would have made it to RuPaul’s Drag Race as it is, but RuPaul wouldn’t have made it to RuPaul’s Drag Race ! I remember Ru when he first started at the Pyramid Club down on Avenue A, I think it was. He did that show, he and Lady Bunny, and those queens wouldn’t have made it. It’s gotten so sophisticated and so gorgeous. Wilson: I saw the original La Cage , which was brilliant, but if you compare those queens to the most recent revival, there’s a huge difference. Fierstein: Well, there’s been a problem with La Cage . The original production you had Arthur Laurents, who was scared to death and stuck two women in the chorus and made one of the gentlemen, Sam Singhaus, grow his hair long. So, when they pulled off their wigs, the two women would show that they were women, but one of the men had hair as long as the women. [Laurents] was so scared of so much of that stuff, which, of course you wouldn’t see now. On the other hand, I was very thrilled to see a woman on RuPaul’s Drag Race —and a heterosexual drag queen on RuPaul’s Drag Race —which says to me we are growing still, our community is growing still.(8) That was the original production, and Theoni V. Aldredge put them in those Erté coats, and they had fun little costumes and all that. And she tried to make them as pretty as possible. The revival that Jerry Zaks did, Jerry Mitchell had them dancing and—when they did the can-can, their chests were totally exposed.(9) There was nothing about them that said, “We’re girls.” These were muscular men doing muscular male dances. The gender fuck was in there, but you never felt they wanted to be drag queens. You didn’t. There was no love of it. Even Gary Beach’s performance was lovely, but I never felt that that’s who he was, that he was Zaza, and that this was important to him and that he felt beautiful this way. He never felt that. I thought that production was—but as I say in the book, I just turned to Jerry Herman and said, “I don’t like any of these choices, so let’s make a deal. You give me the next production; I'll give you this one.” He said, “Fine.” And so, he got his orchestra that he wanted. He got his singers that he wanted. I mean, that was the production where I said, “Are you telling me you would have rather had Beverly Sills play Dolly instead of Carol [Channing]?” And he said, “Absolutely.” It was about the music. And when the next production happened—David Babani’s production at the Menier Chocolate Factory—once again, they brought in a heterosexual director. I love him, and there was so much that Terry [Johnson] did that I really loved, but they brought in a heterosexual cast again. But the drag queens at least were having fun. They were enjoying who they were, and I felt that more. And in Doug Hodge’s performance, I felt that Zaza was there. I felt that very much. He’s a wonderful actor and his Zaza was one of my favorites.(10) Wilson: My favorite was you. I saw you and Chris Sieber, and that was the ideal La Cage for me. Fierstein: Well, we were already so beaten up by then because we’d gone through that shit with what’s his face, who’s now not allowed—the one I was put in with. Wilson: Jeffrey Tambor. Fierstein: Jeffrey Tambor! And we went through that, and then the reviews—we didn’t even have reviews because he only lasted like ten days.(11) But what a horror that was. And then the understudy had to go on. Finally, Chris came in. When Chris came in, we sort of knew the writing was on the wall because as sold out as it was, once the word got out about [what] bad shape it was in, the ticket sales just disappeared, and I knew we weren’t going to run very long. We had a really good time together. It was lovely to have this gay couple that really cared about each other. I could play with that role and play with a couple of lines and stuff like that. In the “La Cage” scene, I did a tribute to Charles Pierce. If you remember, I did his Marlene. [ As Marlene Dietrich :] “I’m going to tell the story of a girl. She look at him. He give her a heart. She look at it and give it back. I tell the story now.” I just played with that kind of stuff. We’ve never had the La Cage chorus line being female impersonators. We’ve never done that. Like I said, I did it a little. Doug Hodge did it a little bit. Did you see Doug? He did Piaf. He sort of walked out as Piaf, and it was very funny. I love the idea of playing with that to show the culture—to have the gay culture of who we love. Wilson: I watched an interview you did with Vito Russo days before La Cage started performances.(12) It took place in your Torch Song dressing room, and you predicted then that “I Am What I Am” will be a gay anthem. Fierstein: I did? Well, you know, I wrote it as a monologue, and then Jerry took it and turned it into the song. “I Am What I Am” comes out of my book for La Cage , but “A Little More Mascara” was actually Jerry musicalizing the opening of Torch Song Trilogy —the drag scene. That was the first thing he ever played for me before we even started writing the show. I went up to his house and we went up to the fourth floor to his studio, and he said, “I really wanna sing this tribute that I wrote for you,” and he sang “A Little More Mascara.” And he said that’s how we should open the show. And I said, “No, no, no. I don't think so. We did that with Torch Song .” I said, “A musical should open with a big musical number. A gay musical should open with a really big gay musical number!” That was the birth of that. What he would tell you while he was still alive—and Arthur would tell you also—I predicted then that “Look Over There” would become a song that everyone sang at every wedding and everything. I still think that song is so gorgeous. “Look Over There” is for anyone who loves you the most. Jerry will tell you how wrong I was because when Harry Como came to him to record from La Cage , he tried to push “Look Over There” because of me. And of course, Perry Como only wanted to sing “Song on the Sand.” He sort of had a little AM [radio] hit with it. Wilson: And there was the disco version of “I Am What I Am.” Fierstein: Shirley Bassey had her big hit with “I Am What I Am.” Wilson: About the recent Torch Song production, you wrote in your book, “There was no tension left, no danger. The fear was gone.” I’m curious to hear more about that experience of what it was like in 2017. And how do you see queer theatre in 2024? Fierstein: I felt the same thing when I saw [the 2018 revival of] The Boys in the Band . It wasn’t dangerous anymore, whereas it really was dangerous to see that kind of theatre. When I would look at an audience—not Off-Broadway of [the original] Torch Song —but when we moved to Broadway, it was all straight people with gay people mixed in, many times in couples looking more like straight people. When the movie opened, there was a cartoon in New Yorker, I think it was, that showed the front of a movie theatre and it was Tequila Sunrise , The Terminator , and Torch Song Trilogy —three “T’s.” A man says to his friends, “I’m not getting in that line.” They wouldn't even go near the theatre. That feeling was gone in 2017. The audience was very largely gay, and they came in with an ownership of Torch Song . It wasn’t my show anymore; it wasn’t this daring thing anymore. They came in with an ownership of it. And so, they sat there and waited for their moments. There was not even an anticipation of the story. They knew the story too well. It was like watching The Rocky Horror Show for the 700th time. That was hard for me because I want an audience to see something, and they weren’t seeing something new. Also, the casting was not my favorite. I love the two young men in it. I absolutely love them as actors. But both of them were way too old. David, the character of the son is fifteen years old. Matthew [Broderick] was eighteen. The boy who played it originally, Fred [Allen], was seventeen, I think. And this kid in the revival was twenty-eight or something. I mean, he was actually older than the boy who played Alan. Both of them should be dangerous. And the danger of the character of Alan is that he’s so close to the other one’s age, that you say, “Wait, you were just sleeping with somebody that age, and now he’s your son?” There was no danger. Partly because the audience knew what was coming, and partly because of the casting. There was no drama of a kid knowing who he is. The kid, David, knows who he is better than Arnold knows who he is. Obviously, more than Ed knows who he is. They were wonderful actors, and I love them. I was greatly disappointed in that. The only roles that worked—the only challenging roles were Arnold, Ed—the character just wanting to be straight and all that still worked just fine; people understood that—and the mother character. Wilson: It’s interesting that you mention David because his depiction is particularly dangerous, and I’m surprised it wasn’t more of a scandal originally. People don’t talk about kids and sexuality, and here you have in 1979, a fifteen-year-old kid who, as you say, was very sure of his sexuality. Fierstein: And he could walk out that door and make his living. Alan was a hustler, and both of them were hustlers. In the very first runs, audiences were scared of it. Period. To even talk about it. In the later runs, they just accepted it. And it’s sort of funny because people don’t talk about gay kids unless it’s really in a precious kind of way. You know, the lovely coming-out pieces that are not dangerous at all. But it’s a very dangerous thing for a kid. Wilson: Relatedly, one of my favorite moments in the film The Celluloid Closet is when you embrace the sissy stereotype, and you pursue that in your children’s book The Sissy Duckling . Fierstein: Well, there’s something that’s sort of interesting happening right this moment. Someone has written a musical version of Sissy Duckling , a children’s theatre piece. I think she’s done a nice job of it. They went to MTI, who are the people that license out these shows, and MTI said, “Well, we might have a problem with this, not with the content directly, but calling it the ‘Sissy Duckling.’” I need to write a two-three sentence response to MTI saying, “You don’t understand. It’s not the word that’s hurtful. He’s willing to accept that. You want to call him a Sissy? Go ahead and call him a Sissy.” Yes, I am a Sissy and I’m proud of it. It is who I am. And if you wanna put the word Sissy on it, that’s fine with me. I don’t care. You wanna call me a faggot? I don’t care. I, for one, will never really be comfortable with queer. I accept that. It’s another generation, and it’s their choice. I think I talked about in the book when all of a sudden on Gay Day, and it was one of the first times that we were starting up at Central Park as opposed to starting in the village, and they turned everything all around. We had those years where we were marching uptown, and they were marching downtown. The original Stonewallers were marching uptown! Anyway, I guess we worked it all out, because now we have floats! But I arrived at the fountain up at Central Park, and the biggest group there was the Marriage Equality group. I thought, “What the fuck is wrong with you? We can be put in jail. We can lose our apartments. And you care about wearing a wedding dress? What is wrong with you?” But I shut up because I said, “Look at them—I mean, I was thirty-five or forty—they are the young generation. They’re the next ones. We had our fight. We fought our fight. This is their fight. If this is what they want, this is what they want.” And they turned out to be right because many heterosexuals were able to say, “Oh, you want to be able to visit so-and-so in the hospital? I get that. Oh, you don’t want to lose your apartment if that one dies? I get that. Oh, you want to inherit this? I get that. You want to be on the life insurance or the health insurance? I get that.” In a funny way, they were very right about that being the next level of our fight. And now, people have said, “Aren’t you gonna make any real statement about Trump and about this Project 2025 and all that?” And I say, “I’m not sure yet. I need to see if this next generation is going to say this is what our fight is about.” I mean Project 2025 is attacking it all. They want to make gay marriage illegal. They want to take us out of the school system. Someone published a list of the top ten banned musicals. (Because of course they don’t care about plays. You actually have to listen in a play.) But the top ten musicals to be banned from schools, and I’m very proud to say I wrote three of them: La Cage , Hairspray , and Kinky Boots .(13) I heard that my book Sissy Duckling is banned from schools, and I’m very proud. Wilson: Do you get to New York much? I was wondering if you’ve seen Oh, Mary! Fierstein: No, I have not seen that. You know, COVID changed so much, just reshaped everything—made me a lot more lazy. I don’t go in as often. I saw a bunch of shows around the 2024 Tony’s, and I was invited to the opening night of Oh, Mary! , but I didn’t go. I saw Cabaret because I know half the cast, and half the cast of Hell’s Kitchen , and I presented the Lifetime Achievement Award to Jack O’Brien. The city has changed so much. I don’t think it’s just my age. I think it feels different when I walk down the street in the city. It just feels. . . off. Wilson: I still go to the theatre a lot, but theatre is different. It’s just become so ridiculously expensive, which is a shame. Fierstein: What do you think is the answer? What would you do? Wilson: I honestly don’t know. Fierstein: I’m curious because these are questions I ask myself every day. I obviously still have a lot of friends in the theatre, and they come up and stay with me to get away from it. And I’m asked to do theatre a lot, which I turn down constantly. I turn down these offers because they’re just not thrilling to me. There’s nothing new enough to make me want to go work six days a week. I’d rather sew. Wilson: As an academic and as a teacher, I am really moved by your nurturing quality among your castmates, and you call your online followers your “children.” Where does that come from? Fierstein: It was the way I was treated. I mean, Ellen Stewart was my mama, and my mother was my mother. The two of them talked to each other that way: “You’re his mama.” “You’re his mother.” So, it could be partly that. But even the older men, such as the director of the Gallery Players, took me to Fire Island for the first time, and I stayed in his house that he called Poverty Gardens. I saw what the gay scene looked like when I was still way underage to have sex or anything. “Each one, teach one?” That’s my attitude. *Author Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Above: Fierstein in the East Village, early 1970s. Photo by Irene Stein. References Barbara Walters, Interview with Harvey Fierstein. 20/20 . ABC, September 22, 1983. Harvey Fierstein, I Was Better Last Night: A Memoir (Penguin Random House, 2022), 52. The Trockadero Gloxinia Ballet Company was created by Larry Ree and members of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatre Company in 1972 and frequently performed at La MaMa. In 1974, Peter Anastos, Anthony Bassae, and Natch Taylor separated from Gloxinia and formed Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. The Trocks, as they are affectionately known, continue to tour. Interview with Greg Shapiro, “Better than Ever: An Interview with Harvey Fierstein,” Philadelphia Gay News (March 22, 2022). https://epgn.com/2022/03/22/better-than-ever-an-interview-with-harvey-fierstein/ Elizabeth I , a play with music, ran for eleven previews and closed after five performances on April 8, 1972. Dude opened at the Broadway Theatre on October 9, 1972, and ran for 16 performances (and 16 previews). Senator Joe performed three previews before closing on January 7, 1989. Victoria Scone (Emily Diapre) was the first cisgender woman contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race UK in 2021, and Maddy Morphosis (Daniel Truitt) was the first cisgender heterosexual man contestant on Season 14 of RuPaul’s Drag Race . The first Broadway revival of La Cage opened on December 9, 2004, and ran 229 performances. Gary Beach was Zaza and Daniel Davis played Georges. Davis left the show after just four months and was succeeded by Robert Goulet. A London revival of La Cage opened at the Menier Chocolate Factory on January 9, 2008, and transferred to the West End the following October. Douglas Hodge repeated his performance opposite Kelsey Grammer in the Broadway revival that opened on April 18, 2010, and ran for 433 performances. Jeffrey Tambor replaced Kelsey Grammer in the part of Georges in the 2010 revival. Tambor’s first performance was on February 15, 2011, and he left the show on February 24, 2011. The producers stated that he was “experiencing complications from recent hip surgery,” and he left the show because “the pain and the challenge of performing in a musical eight times a week proved to be too physically demanding.” Theatre gossip columnist, Michael Riedel, reported that Tambor was struggling in the role and was “freaking out.” Applying his usual snark, Riedel claimed, “[Tambor]’s hitting notes in some of Jerry Herman’s lovely ballads that aren’t found anywhere on the traditional Western scale.” (“Tambor Battles ‘Cage’ Fright,” New York Post [February 25, 2011]. https://nypost.com/2011/02/25/tambor-battles-cage-fright/ ) Vito Russo, Interview with Harvey Fierstein. Our Time . WNYC TV and Manhattan Cable TV, March 8, 1983. Hairspray ’s book is credited to Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan. Fierstein was hired as the show’s ghostwriter and receives royalties for his contributions to the libretto. Footnotes About The Author(s) JAMES F. WILSON is the Executive Officer of Theatre and Performance at the City University of New York Graduate Center. His research and teaching interests include African American theatre and performance; gender and sexuality studies; and musical theatre history. He is the author of Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance and Failure, Fascism, and Teachers in American Theatre: Pedagogy of the Oppressors . His essays have appeared in numerous academic journals and chapter anthologies. He is a voting member of the Drama Desk. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Sierra Rosetta Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 1 Visit Journal Homepage Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. Sierra Rosetta By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. Bethany Hughes’s Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity is the book that the fields of theatre, American, Native, and historical studies have long needed. With clarity and care, Hughes braids together these disciplines to expose the theatrical mechanisms that have produced and sustained the racialized figure of the “Indian” on stage. Hughes names this racialized figure “The Stage Indian,” a term analogous to “Playing Indian,” found in Philip Deloria’s monumental book of the same name, or John Troutman’s “Indianness” from his book, Indian Blues: American Indians and the Politics of Music, 1879-1934 . The term “Stage Indian,” along with her subsequent chapters that masterfully examine this topic, redefine the practice of redface as a robust communal process, one that all sides of the theatrical sphere participate in, and identifies the power of theatre as a central site of American culture. Hughes begins by stating exactly what this book does and does not do. Redface is not a comprehensive history of Indigenous performers or plays. Instead, it is a critical analysis of how Indigeneity was and is made legible through performance and how visual, affective, and narrative codes have transformed into the Stage Indian persona that continues to shape Indigenous representation today, both on and off the physical stage. After reading this book, people will be able to describe how redface is not simply about paint, feathers, or moccasins worn by non-Indigenous people. Instead, it is “a collaborative, curatorial process through which a body is made legible as an Indian” (11). This reframing is central to the book’s contribution, moving the conversation from surface to structure, which transforms the case studies Hughes provides into long-term patterns of embodied colonialism. Redface is not just about appearing Indian; it is about being recognized and named as Indian. The book examines how redface operates through acts of recognition, reinforcing not only theatrical conventions but also legal and political definitions of Indigenous identity. In an incisive argument, Hughes suggests that what audiences often subconsciously seek is not authenticity but the power to determine what is or is not an Indian. The methodological rigor of this book involves Hughes weaving together autoethnography, archival research, production analysis, and performance theory. To name a few, Hughes analyzes costume lists for Nick of the Woods (1838), production photos of Annie Get Your Gun , witness accounts of Edwin Forrest’s infamous portrayal of Metamora, and Indian princess plays that illustrate how Stage Indian conventions were absorbed into theatrical spaces. In Chapter Three, Hughes explains how physical gestures and stage movement, not just dialogue or costume, helped codify the portrayal of the Stage Indian in Edwin Forrest’s portrayal of Indian chief, Metamora, in Metamora . She spotlights Forrest’s Metamora “to understand how strategies for authenticating Indianness have shifted over time and to demonstrate that authentication is inherent to redface” (119). Later chapters trace these codes through other performances, like Hughes’ analysis of the Broadway revival of Annie Get Your Gun in Chapter 4. The structure of Redface is both innovative and an effective praxis of Hughes’s invitation for alternative modes of knowledge reception for scholars in the field doing decolonizing work. In the introduction, she asks: “How do we respond to knowledge production modes that require atypical labor?” (19). Hughes addresses this through her essay, Hinushi Inla , which means “a different path” in the Choctaw language (18). Whereas Hughes’ first four chapters trace the evolution of redface from the 1830s through the twentieth century, Hinushi Inla is braided through the book in non-linear order, providing a necessary counterpoint to the historical narratives presented in the chapters and also inviting readers to disrupt the habit of linear knowledge reception in the academy. One example is while one side of the book examines racial stereotyping in Will Rogers’ career or the blood-quantum logic embedded in casting practices, the other side explores the artistry of Native artists like DeLanna Studi, Hanay Geiogamah, Lily Gladstone, and Hughes’s own relationship to Indigeneity. It was profoundly moving for me, as both a scholar and an artist in the fields of theatre and Native studies, to see how far we have come from Metamora and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Shows. As a reader, it was also powerful to encounter both history and futurity on the same page. The Hinushi Inla sections loosen the braid of racism to show the gaps in representation and invite even more strands of knowledge to enter the conversation. Even in the twenty-first century, the search for “authentic” Native representation on and off the stage often asks for the same visual codes developed in the 1800s. In Chapter Four, Hughes explores how cutting racist lyrics from Annie Get Your Gun in the 1999 revival may soften the language, but it leaves the representational logic intact: “The revisal reshaped the Stage Indian and connected it to centuries’ long conceptions of blood that continue to delimit Indianness in many ways” (204). Hughes intervenes that fixing redface is more than editing scripts; it demands a new practice of seeing that requires action from all of us. Hughes does not excuse the racist performances of the past, nor does she ignore the ways Indigenous performers themselves have been made to navigate redface for survival. Instead, she humanizes each historical figure the book touches on to illustrate how performers, audiences, and institutions all contribute to the curation and policing of Indianness. The result is an honest account that humanizes historical subjects without excusing harm. In the final chapter, Hughes writes, “There has always been an ‘instead’ of redface. It is up to audiences to choose a hinushi inla ” (101). This call to action is not symbolic but an invitation to participate in a new kind of embodied, relational, and transformative praxis. As a scholar, theatre practitioner, and a reader, I find myself returning to this book in my thoughts and writing for its arguments, research methods, and a demonstration of decolonizing scholarship. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity is both an invitation and a critique, one that is honest, vital, and restorative toward a different path. References Footnotes About The Author(s) SIERRA ROSETTA is an enrolled citizen of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe currently completing a PhD in Theatre and Drama, with an emphasis in Native American studies, at Northwestern University. She is also a professional dramaturg, arts journalist, and playwright. Both her artistic and academic passions focus on Ojibwe storytelling, Indigenous resistance, and decolonizing dramaturgy. 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 Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale “The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. The Brothers Size Dead Outlaw 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival ZAZ Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Jocelyn L. Buckner Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 32 2 Visit Journal Homepage Introduction: Local Acts: Performing Communities, Performing Americas Jocelyn L. Buckner By Published on May 23, 2020 Download Article as PDF This American Theatre and Drama Society special issue of JADT features four essays that explore what “local” performance means across very different community contexts. Throughout the Americas, communities generate and are informed by performance in ways that reveal, challenge, and strengthen shared understanding about the identity of the local. Performance plays a role in articulating a collective representation of self not only to local residents, but perhaps also to communities outside the realm of the art work’s place of origin. The call for papers for this issue was inspired in part by Jan Cohen-Cruz’s L ocal Acts: Community-Based Performance in the United States [1] . Cohen-Cruz explains that in community-based productions, members of a community are “a primary source of the text, possibly of performers as well, and definitely a goodly portion of the audience … Community-based performance relies on artists guiding the creation of original work or material adapted to, and with people with a primary relationship to the content, not necessarily to the craft” (2). This special issue builds upon Cohen-Cruz’s work to further explore the significance and influence of local and community-based performances, both past and present, across the Americas.This collection not only illuminates performance practices in specific locales by particular constituents; it also creates connections between studies of community performance and other methodologies and theories of theatre and performance studies. The five authors featured here consider performances in artistic residencies, immigrant communities, localized eco-tourism, and indigenous-language theatre. These pieces highlight culturally specific work generated at the local level, advance the argument for studies focused on performance tuned to community rather than commercial appeal, and draw correlations to larger social and artistic phenomena in the process. In “The Architecture of Local Performance: Stages of the Taliesin Fellowship,” Claudia Wilsch Case explores the local and regional impact of performances by members of Frank Lloyd Wright’s residential apprenticeship program. The Taliesin Fellowship encouraged its participants in a range of creative endeavors. Its amateur public performances developed into a popular attraction for local residents hungry for artistic experiences. Case provides detailed analysis of the apprentices’ early concerts and skits alongside film screenings from the 1930s, tracing the development of physical movement pieces inspired by Eastern mystic Georges Gurdjieff in the 1950s which, by the 1960s, had evolved into original dance dramas written and choreographed by Wright’s daughter, Iovanna Lloyd Wright. Case argues that the performances occurring at Taliesin and Taliesin West from the 1930s to the 1970s exemplified the Fellowship’s role in remapping the American cultural landscape. By privileging work developed locally, rather than dispatched from larger cultural centers such as New York, Case illustrates how the Taliesin Fellowship cultivated area audiences’ appreciation for locally crafted performances, reinforcing community ties while also priming them for the US regional theatre movement. Sarah Campbell advocates for a multi-faceted approach to studying Maya theatre in the Yucatán peninsula, arguing that it is often perceived as insignificant due to how it has been treated in scholarship. In “’La conjura de Xinum’ and Language Revitalization: Understanding Maya Agency through Theatre” Campbell considers Maya language theatre as an “art world,” defined as a system of interconnected participants determining the reception and influencing the significance of a piece of art. She highlights how dialogues surrounding Maya identity reflect the ways external alliances intersect with community members and organizations that produce theatre, resulting in varying valuations of this work. To illustrate her point, Campbell provides a compelling argument for considering the context for and ensuing local and critical responses to a community-based performance in Tihosuco, Quintana Roo, Mexico, called “La conjura de Xinum.” Campbell makes the case that one should not dismiss the play as simply a fringe act by a community theatre troupe in rural Mexico; instead, the performance exposes the agency of Maya artists in promoting language and cultural revitalization. By illustrating the interconnected nature of artists, audiences, and scholars/critics, Campbell illuminates the roles of respective participants and their influence on the creation, perception, and valuation of Maya language theatre, both in the community from which it emerges and beyond. In “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 employ performance studies to examine how Ross privileges place, environment, and history in her performance, revealing the long term effects of environmental contamination and its consequences for residents living adjacent to the five stops on her Toxic Mound Tour. By featuring several spaces whose contamination dates back to WWII and Cold War era weapons production, Bauer and Kalz argue that Ross’s tour educates ecotourists on the environmental and health risks that the St. Louis community has assumed in the interest of national safety, thereby rewriting the local history of these spaces and their legacy for today’s community. Sharing their experience as ecotourists in their own community, Bauer and Kalz underscore the significance of featuring place as event to reveal how disparate individuals are linked through a deeper understanding of community spaces and a collective awareness of belonging. Arnab Banerji’s critical analysis of New Brunswick, New Jersey’s South Asian Theatre Festival (SATF) defines the dynamics of the festival’s shared creative community and the immigrant community’s efforts to affirm itself as a major American subculture. In “Finding Home in the World Stage: Critical Creative Citizenship and the 13th South Asian Theatre Festival 2018,” Banerji asserts that the artists involved in the festival are not only celebrating their culture of origin, but also delineating its relationship with their new home culture here in the United States. While the SATF might at first glance be regarded as simply a public performance of plays, Banerji’s analysis of the audience’s engagement with the works, the mindful curation of festival content, and the cultural sensitivity given to the production of the festival, reveals the complex dynamics of immigration and integration at play on stage and in the audience for these performances. Through examining the SATF as a site for individuals of the South Asian diaspora to assert their cultural citizenship as well as an opportunity to perform acts of creative citizenship, Banerji illustrates how these artists appeal to an audience that does not necessarily conform to geographic, linguistic, and socio-cultural boundaries. Banerji’s piece contributes to the growing field of scholarship on South Asian American performance as well as local acts. As much as theatre and academic communities often privilege “professional” nationally and internationally recognized centers of cultural production, the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing closure of virtually all productions and performance venues well into 2020 and beyond, has revealed how much we actually rely on local resources and artists for a sense of connection to one another and to ourselves. During these unprecedented times, what so many of us are searching for – and missing desperately – is the reassurance that comes from connection to community. Theatre has survived centuries of crises – from plagues, to world wars, to economic collapses. With each threat, theatre has always managed to realign with the needs of the audience, sometimes by relocating, whether that be to the outskirts of town or to cyberspace, and often by reframing the definition of “local” and where, how, and through whom artistic communities coalesce. The sphere of community held by theatrical performance is proving elastic in the age of the coronavirus, expanding to circle the globe and welcome audiences around the world who are hungrily streaming professionally produced, pre-recorded theatrical content online. Simultaneously, theatre has compressed to include synchronous, intimate, devised Zoom performances for audiences of one who have isolated themselves at home and are desperate for personal, human connection. By reimagining the parameters of production and participation by both artists and audiences, theatre and its communities will not only survive, but it will reinvent itself and its relevance to those looking for themselves and for a sense of belonging. This issue goes to press in the wake of ongoing violence against people of color, specifically the anti-Black violence evidenced in the recent murders of George Floyd, Ahmuad Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade, and many others, alongside the subsequent violence perpetrated against those peacefully protesting their deaths. The idea of community, at the local and national level, is being tested once again. Theatre artists and scholars are uniquely positioned to reflect on systemic prejudices, which are also manifest in the theatre industry at large. As scholars/artists/citizens we have an obligation to aid in the development of new community models both within our industry and at the local level that are committed to supporting and participating in anti-racist protests, pedagogy, and productions; honoring and mourning the lives of those who have been lost; amplifying voices of the marginalized and silenced; and advocating for messages of allyship, equity, and inclusion. Theatre must help heal and build community and I encourage you to find ways to participate in and support this work. As uncertainty and possibility simultaneously loom in the future of theatre and performance, this issue serves as an example of work yet to be done to herald the role of theatre and performance in defining and preserving community at the local level throughout the Americas. This issue was made possible by the support of Lisa Jackson-Schebetta, President of the American Theatre and Drama Society; the stewardship of JADT editors Naomi Stubbs and James Wilson and managing editor Jessica Applebaum; the dedication of members of our Editorial Board who contributed their time and expertise to fostering these essays; and the keen eye of editorial assistant Zach Dailey. I wish readers health and safety in these extraordinary times, and hope this scholarship inspires others to consider their relationship to local acts within their own communities. Editorial Board for Special Issue Dorothy Chansky Mark Cosdon La Donna Pie Forsgren Khalid Long Laura MacDonald Derek Miller Hillary E. Miller Heather S. Nathans Diego Villada References [1] Jan Cohen-Cruz, Local Acts: Community-Based Performance in the United States , (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 2. Footnotes About The Author(s) Jocelyn L. Buckner is an Associate Professor of Theatre at Chapman University in Orange, California. She is the editor of A Critical Companion to Lynn Nottage (Routledge), and a former book review editor and managing editor for Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism . She has published articles and reviews in African American Review , American Studies Journal , Ecumenica Journal , Journal of American Drama and Theatre , HowlRound , Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism , Popular Entertainment Studies , Theatre History Studies , Theatre Journal , Theatre Survey, and Theatre Topics , as well as book chapters in the collections Performing Dream Homes: Theater and the Spatial Politics of the Domestic Sphere and Food and Theatre on the World Stage , and over a dozen entries in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Stage Actors and Acting . Buckner is also the resident dramaturg of The Chance Theater in Anaheim, CA, and has collaborated with other theatres including South Coast Repertory Theatre, Center Theatre Group, Native Voices at the Autry, as well as London’s Donmar Warehouse and Theatre 503. She is the Vice President of the American Theatre and Drama Society. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Theatre, Performance and Cognition: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies The Drama and Theatre of Sarah Ruhl A Player and a Gentleman: The Diary of Harry Watkins, Nineteenth-Century US American Actor The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography Introduction: Local Acts: Performing Communities, Performing Americas The Architecture of Local Performance: Stages of the Taliesin Fellowship “La conjura de Xinum” and Language Revitalization: Understanding Maya Agency through Theatre Exploring the History and Implications of Toxicity through St. Louis: Performance Artist Allana Ross and the “Toxic Mound Tours” Finding Home in the World Stage: Critical Creative Citizenship and the 13th South Asian Theatre Festival 2018 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Bess Rowen Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames Bess Rowen By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Photo: Selfie by James Ijames. Playwright James Ijames was already a household name in Philadelphia before he won the Pulitzer Prize for his play Fat Ham . He first garnered critical attention as a performer after graduating with an MFA in Acting from Temple University. He then turned his attention to directing at major Philadelphia theaters such as the Arden and the Wilma, and he later became one of the co-Artistic Directors of the latter. And plays like 2017’s Kill Move Paradise , a meditation on the killing of unarmed Black men by police set in limbo, had already gained important national interest. As his colleague at Villanova University, I have had the opportunity to watch his accomplishments grow. And in 2022, I watched as audiences flocked to the family cookout for his explicitly Black and queer adaptation of Hamlet , first at The Public Theater and later on Broadway. His public profile continues to rise, as proven by his newest play, Good Bones , which was in rehearsal at The Public as I sat down to ask him about the current state of the American theatre. Bess Rowen: I’m curious to start by asking what are you excited to see in the forthcoming season? What excites you about the American theatre season right now? It can be individual plays, playwrights, or themes you’re seeing pop. And it can include your own work! James Ijames: What am I excited to see? I’m excited to see Branden Jacobs-Jenkins back on Broadway. Soon. And in a new play category. I’m excited that Jamie Lloyd is going to be directing on Broadway again. Rowen: Yes! And are there any themes that pop for you? What stands out to you as something that’s going on right now, or something that’s coming, that marks a difference? Ijames: Yeah, that’s the thing. I actually think we’re actually reverting back to some of our old stuff. A little bit. I think we, as an industry, were like, ( smugly ) “Wow, look at us. We did it. They saw us. They saw the white American theatre. And we fixed it. We’re great, right? Okay, we’re great.” It feels like that a little bit. And that’s not everywhere. But there is this sense of congratulation, of making it through a trying time—if you were able to make it through a trying time. And then I think the very real, and natural, impulse right now is to stop the hemorrhaging and get people back into the buildings. And the quickest way that people do that is by doing things that feel comfortable. And what happens when you start to make art that feels comfortable is that you start to build systems around it that also offer certain people comfort—not everybody comfort, but certain people comfort. Yeah, I think we are flipping a little bit on some of the stuff we were gonna do. Now, I do think we overcorrected as well. There were some places where I thought “how many of these do we gotta…?” There was a bit of that as well, but now we’ve sort of patted our collective selves on the back and said we’re this great inclusive space. But hey, you know, as always in transition…I do think it is better than when I started. I do think young people coming into this industry are finding a much better industry than the one that I found when I came in. Both as a Black person, as a queer person, as a person not born in an urban setting and doesn’t know how to move through those spaces, who had to sort of learn how to do that. Yeah, I don’t know. Rowen: That’s such a good point, too. Because it reminds me that so often the theatre is reacting. It’s reacting and trying to kind of guess at what the next thing it needs to touch is. Ijames: Yes. Rowen: And I have noticed more butts in seats at theaters that I’m going to that have new work in them a lot of the time. But I think a lot about what “new work” means. Is it the same story by a new person, or is it actually a new story? And those are two different ways of selling tickets, which is important for us to remember. But you’ve been a part of that change of moving the dial at least slightly forward, and that’s something! That is really an impressive feat. And I do hope that now that we went very far in one direction and are now heading kind of far in the other direction that we land in some sort of happy medium. Ijames: Yeah. I think we learned a ton so that there are lessons we all learned that we can come back to. But it’s just so easy to go back to the how you used to do it. It’s so easy. It’s so intoxicating to just go there. And just because of the circumstances, I think there’s a bit of that. But, I will say this. I also think this is a moment that is kind of ripe. I think the best work to come…How do I say this? We haven’t seen the great works that are gonna come out of this moment. We might start to see that, but I really do think we’re gonna see artists be theorists in their craft more. That’s the thing I’m kind of hungry for. Like, who’s doing something formally interesting? There was this moment with Jackie Sibblies Drury and Lucas Hnath where there were some real formal challenges. You know, we usually let Europe do that for us ( laughs ). Rowen: Yes! It’s true. But Europe is more anti-text than we are. So, we have this American writing tradition that can also be a staging tradition. But often we have not thought of it like that. We’ve thought of it as, “look at this great piece of literature that someone wrote.” And, right, but those people staged that. And that’s what’s so cool about Jackie Sibblies Drury’s work and Lucas Hnath’s work, because those plays say “okay, I need a pool on stage. Okay, there’s a moment where the audience needs to come on stage.” That’s a bold choice, and people were up for it. Ijames: You know, people are really game for that! And I think in this moment where is so easy to watch some of the best dramatic writing in the world on television, on your couch—I mean, Succession is a beautifully written show. It is incredible writing! So, what can we do in the theatre that requires liveness, that requires you to be in space with other people, to sort of be in citizenship with other people. I think we have to begin to find forms that feed that and that will draw people back. Because people pay thousands of dollars to see Beyoncé because they want to be in a community with a lot of people. Rowen: And they want to see something they can’t see anywhere else! Like we need to give them something they can’t see anywhere else, and they can’t experience everywhere else. And you’re so right about the TV aspect, too. I think about that because I watch these shows like Only Murders in the Building , which I’m not saying is the best written show in the world. But it’s a very smart show that is written by a bunch of theatre people, which is why the characters are so interesting and fully fleshed out. Bringing the theatre to TV is really interesting, now we have to figure out what we can bring from those series back into the theatre. And that’s a little more challenging. Because I feel like we often not quite apologizing to our audiences, but we’re saying, “don’t worry, it’s so worth this money, and we won’t even keep you here that long! It’s gonna be fine!” There’s something about the safeness of “don’t worry, you’re gonna sit there and see this thing and you don’t have to come back for the next episode. Just sit back and relax!” Ijames: ( laughs ) Yes! Rowen: I want us to trust our audiences a little bit more, because I do think that what we’ve learned is that they will show up for something different. It’s a different audience that might show up for something different, but they will. Ijames : They will! Yes, I think that’s the thing we haven’t confronted. Is that what an audience is has changed a little bit. And we have all of these “rules” about our industry that we have from, I guess, the 19th century. Like plays start at 8. Why do plays start at 8 still? If I wanted to catch a show on my way home from work, no, I have to wait. If I’m in midtown, I’ve got to wait around, if I’m downtown…that’s a thing that we have just accepted and not questioned. So, that’s one example of audience changing, and the needs of the audience changing. Rowen: Right! Ijames: I also think that there’s a lot of talk about how our attention span has been shortened—I just think it’s been reorganized. Like, I’m able to pay attention. You just have to hold my attention. And it’s a little more difficult to hold my attention. Rowen: Exactly! But people will sit there and binge a show. We do have the attention span to do that, you’re right. It’s just that we won’t sit there passively for just anything. Ijames: Yes. Rowen: That’s the change. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Ijames: I don’t think that’s a bad thing either. And I also wonder about…what are some things that can happen in a theatre—I won’t call these play—that people can come in and out of? Like if you can get people in there because they can have some agency about how they can move through the space, you can reorient people into what this is. So, when you do ask them to sit down, they’re not like “I’ve never been here before.” Rowen: Right. Ijames: So, I just think we have to mix up what we’re doing. We can’t just plan a season of a bunch of plays and musicals and think just because they won Tony’s last year they’re going to automatically sell. The thing I always wonder about in Philadelphia is that it has this huge sports fan culture. And I just wonder: what is the way to harness and invite those people into our space to come and see? Because they wanna be in a collective. Maybe they just don’t feel like they’re allowed in that space, so they don’t come into that space. I don’t know. Rowen: Yeah, because at an Eagles game you could leave and get a refreshment and come back. Some people do sit or stand there and watch the game the whole time, and don’t go anywhere, but some people are coming in and out. And still, that creates community and there is an overwhelming community feeling with the sports teams at the center. And those fans would do anything to see those teams, like they travel all over to see those teams compete. And I’ve heard people say that the difference is that there’s no competition in the theatre. Ijames: Hmmm. Rowen: Which is fascinating because I feel like I can talk about plays where there is competition, but it’s not “real” competition. Like it’s falsified somehow because the understanding is, I think, that there’s no real risk. Ijames: Right. Rowen: But we know there is a real risk in doing live theatre. But the competition can’t be between the actors and the audience. It has to be something that people are signing up to watch. So, I’m sure there’s a way to harness that. That’s such an interesting point. Because also, as a New Yorker, I tend to defer to thinking about New York. But the New York is a very particular theatre community, and it is not like what is happening in most of our country and the world. So, we have to think local in terms of what our community needs from the theatre. And I think a lot of people don’t think like that. Thinking of an untapped audience who would be into it is a great way of thinking about it instead of worrying that we’re going to scare off our subscribers. There’s so often a reaction of, “we’re going to lose them if we don’t do something.” Ijames: And I’m like, “we’ve lost them. They’re already gone. They’re not coming back.” Rowen: And also, are we raising the next generation of subscribers? There’s no rule that subscribers have to be a certain age. If you make a season people want to see, they’ll come. […] That’s a really interesting point about untapped audiences and what we’re actually doing, aside from just doing programming we think is interesting to get people into “the American theatre.” In terms of what you’ve seen recently, what excites you as an audience member lately? Ijames: What have I seen lately? I’ve been pretty intensely in rehearsal. But I really loved Stereophonic . Yeah, I really loved that. Rowen: Me too. What an unusual, creative play. The basis is so simple and it’s so unique. Ijames: Right? I just was sort of dazzled by it. Rowen: Also proof that people will sit there for three hours if it’s good. Ijames: This is also very true, yeah. I saw Kenny Leon’s [direction of Suzan-Lori Parks’s] Topdog/Underdog last season…was it last season? The season before last? Rowen: I think it was two seasons ago. It was excellent. Ijames: And I also saw his [direction of Samm-Art Williams’s] Home at the beginning of this season. And I just love what he’s doing with bringing those plays back that, you know, had a life but didn’t really get the wind in their sails the way they should have because of the time. And it was really lovely to see that play. What else have I seen lately that I’ve liked? I really liked Hilma at the Wilma ( laughs ). Rowen: Hilma at the Wilma! Ijames: The Comeuppance . Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s The Comeuppance . I just…he can do anything. Rowen: Yeah. I said to him when I talked to him that when I was sitting there and watching that play I literally had a thought in my head that was: this must have been what it felt like to watch a new Eugene O’Neill play at the time. Something that makes you think, formally, I’ve never seen anything that does this. It totally works, but what a different approach. What a fascinating and subtle change. I’m excited to see it at the Wilma this season. And I’ve been telling everyone I know to see it. Ijames: It’s such a good play, and I haven’t been in any rehearsals, but I imagine it will be a very good production. What else? I haven’t been seeing a bunch lately. Rowen: It’s okay, you’ve been a bit busy! I’m gonna let you go in a second, so for a final provocation for you: If you could say something to the current American theatre about what you hope is coming next, what would you like to see happen next in the US queer theatre? Ijames: Oh. I want to see larger and more robust and sustained systems of support and development for trans playwrights in particular. I feel like there are times sometimes people will come to me with “oh, this is kind of interesting, you should do something with this.” And I say, “there’s a trans playwright who should be writing this and you should find them to write it.” You know, I think organizations maybe feel timid to program it, but the audience is there. People are ready for that kind of storytelling. I think a lot of formal and structural things that we don’t even think about are happening in that space that we could all learn from. And that could really change and elevate what we’re doing in this country in theatre. So, that’s a thing I want. I want there to be plays about queer people where their queerness is completely quotidian. Rowen: Yeah, yes. Ijames: Like, the problem is: we’ve gotta sell the cherry orchard. You know, just like in a straight play. Rowen: Right! We, a gay couple, must sell our cherry orchard. Ijames: Yeah, are we gonna keep the piano or sell it? Can the problem be, “Laura, what are you gonna do if you don’t get married?” We don’t get to do that. It’s always gotta be: “Oh, you’re queer. What a problem!” ( laughs ). Rowen: ( laughs ) It’s true! Well, I feel like you do that, though. One of the things I love about your work in terms of representation, and I’ve said this to you before, is that you write bi and pansexual men, particularly Black men, who are…where that’s not the problem of the play. And specifically for bi and pan people, that is often the problem of what the representation is. It’s often like, “oh no! What kind of gender do you want to be with, and how does that define your personhood?” And, it’s like, no, they’re just existing in space. And when that’s revealed, that’s never the conflict. That is such a radical move, and so generous. It always moves me so much when I see those particular kinds of representation. And I’ve been lucky enough to see it live in a few of your plays. And I’m always thinking that there is someone in the audience who this is opening up…this is a moment where they’re just going ( exhales ). They’re relaxing. And they’re thinking, “Okay, I’m alright. I’m safe here.” And it isn’t going to be an hour and half more of people being like “Oh, but what about your identity?” So, thank you for that! References Footnotes About The Author(s) BESS ROWEN is an Assistant Professor of Theatre and affiliated faculty in Gender & Women’s Studies and Irish Studies at Villanova University. Her first book, The Lines Between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2021. Recent articles have appeared in Theatre Survey , Theatre Topics , Modern Drama , and The Eugene O’Neill Review . Her next book project focuses on the representation of mean teenage girls on stage. She also served as the co-editor of the Journal of American Drama & Theatre and the performance review editor for The Eugene O’Neill Review . Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Alex Ferrone Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 2 Visit Journal Homepage Appropriate Alex Ferrone By Published on June 1, 2024 Download Article as PDF Michael Esper, Elle Fanning, Natalie Gold, Alyssa Emily Marvin and Corey Stoll in Appropriate. Credit: Joan Marcus. Appropriate By Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Directed by Lila Neugebauer Helen Hayes Theatre New York, NY November 30, 2023 Reviewed by Alex Ferrone A prolonged blackout opens Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate , so it is through sound—the tremulous hum of “ a billion cicadas ”—that the audience first encounters the yet unseen world on stage. In Lila Neugebauer’s production at the Hayes Theatre, the play’s first time on Broadway, ten years after regional co-premieres in Louisville and Chicago, sound designers Bray Poor and Will Pickens immersed the audience in a surround-sound cicada song that seemed almost to overwhelm the senses. I say senses (plural) because the soundscape’s penetrative quality was intended to exceed audition: as Jacobs-Jenkins explains in the stage directions of the play’s prologue, the sound “ sweeps the theater […] over and beyond the stage – washing itself over the walls and the floors, baptizing the aisles and the seats, forcing itself into every inch of every space, every nook, every pocket, hiding place and pore until this incessant chatter is touching you. It is touching you .” We were thus meant to feel the sound on our bodies, on our skin. When the lights finally came up on the meticulously cluttered interior of an old two-story Arkansas plantation house, designed by the collective Dots, the play’s premise was deceptively familiar: the semi-estranged family of a dead white patriarch reunites to auction off the property and divide the assets, but their long festering resentments soon dominate the proceedings and cause irreparable fissures. Appropriate knowingly riffs on the American tradition of the family reunion play, inviting easy comparisons to plays like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , Buried Child , and August: Osage County —a tradition Jacobs-Jenkins admires and also problematizes for its racial exclusivity. “No one ever talks about Raisin in the Sun as a family drama,” he told Diep Tran in the December 2023 issue of Playbill : “It’s always ‘a social allegory about race and class.’” Jacobs-Jenkins expressed a similar misgiving in American Theatre nine years earlier, the first time Appropriate was mounted in New York in an off-Broadway production at the Signature Center: “there were a lot of triggers for me in hearing people list and describe the ‘great American family dramas.’ I’d look around and be like, ‘There’s no people of color on these lists.’ […] Who has access to this idea of ‘family’ as a universal theme?” Michael Esper, Elle Fanning, Natalie Gold, Alyssa Emily Marvin and Corey Stoll in Appropriate . Credit: Joan Marcus. Of course, the Lafayette family drama was front and center at the Hayes Theatre for Appropriate ’s almost three-hour runtime. The cast, led by an indomitable Sarah Paulson, traded endless verbal (and eventually physical) assaults as they aired their grievances and exposed each other’s indiscretions. Supporting performances were uniformly excellent: Corey Stoll, as the absent, entitled son for whom care entails merely signing checks, and Nathalie Gold, as his apprehensive wife who struggles as an outsider in the family, were standouts; so was Michael Esper, as the prodigal son whose serial transgressions alienate those close to him; Elle Fanning was especially memorable as his suspiciously young girlfriend, whose new-age spiritualist word salad was a consistent source of humor. But the evening belonged to Paulson: she gave an astonishing performance as the eldest daughter Toni, at times beset with exhaustion, at others ferociously stalking the stage, her fierce commitment to her family barely concealing both vulnerability and venom. If there is familiarity here, soon comes the curveball, a series of disturbing discoveries as the family sorts through Daddy’s things: first, an album of lynching photos; then, jars of “weird stuff” that resembles human remains; finally, a Klan hood over the head of the youngest grandchild, which, when I saw the show, drew the night’s loudest combination of belly laughs and horrified gasps. It is a rupture the family is determined to avoid, as they downplay and outright deny Daddy’s obvious involvement in anti-Black violence. But their insistence on centering themselves, on claiming victimhood at each other’s hands, wilfully sidelines the Black victims of racist violence whose traces continue to crop up on the family estate. And so the photo album shifts signification, no longer a physical record of heinous racist violence but a commodity worth “hundreds of thousands of dollars” whose sale would enact yet another indignity on the murdered Black people among its pages. While the family cannot fathom calling Daddy an outright racist (gasp!), daughter-in-law Rachael points out that the Antebellum South is “the soil upon which his worldview was fashioned.” This mention of soil is no coincidence, for the vast property includes two burial grounds: one, a cemetery for generations of the Lafayette family; the other, the unmarked graves of generations of enslaved people who worked on the plantation. Even unseen, they are nevertheless there. And so we return to the cicadas, whose characteristic life cycle confines them to the soil for thirteen years at a time. In Appropriate , the cicadas never left, their low thrum pulsating through the theatre for the full length of the show. (In the text, Jacobs-Jenkins specifies that they “ fade to a place just beyond us but never disappear ,” and, sure enough, the stage directions that end each scene reinvoke their continuous presence.) It is an unnerving element of the sound design, something the audience acclimates to, often drowned out by the onstage histrionics, but never absent—an ongoingness that recalls Christina Sharpe’s figuration of “antiblackness as total climate” in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Ultimately, little is resolved by the end of the play. Instead, Jacobs-Jenkins pulls another narrative trick (and maybe exacts some revenge) by absenting the Lafayette family altogether: generations whoosh by (“ it is some day – any day – tomorrow – thirteen years from now – twenty-six years from now. It is the future. It is the present. It is any present. Is the past – any past – now ”), and, in a stunning coup de théâtre , the house falls apart before our eyes. Jane Cox’s dazzling lighting produced a cinematic timelapse as shelves collapsed and windows shattered and a chandelier swung from a rope. Finally, a colossal tree grew from the ground, its wide trunk and full branches stretching out of view, high up into the fly space—radical growth after so much decay. Neugebauer’s final image departed from the text, but it was perhaps in direct conversation with the titles of the play’s three acts, not reproduced in the Playbill. Where Act II, “Walpurgisnacht,” gestures to paganism and witchcraft (and surely to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , another “family drama” in its own way), Acts I and III, titled “The Book of Revelations” and “The Book of Genesis,” take us from the end of the world back to the beginning, to the garden and the great flood, to regeneration. The production’s final scene, with its spectacular collapse and its magnificent tree growing through (or perhaps from) the ruins, beautifully captured the extent to which Appropriate is not really about the Lafayettes at all: it’s about the house and about the land on which it stands and eventually falls. It’s about the soil. Sarah Paulson in Appropriate . Credit: Joan Marcus. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Alex Ferrone (PhD) is an Assistant Professor of English in the Département de littératures et de langues du monde at l’Université de Montréal, where he teaches dramatic literature, theatre history, and performance studies. He is the author of Stage Business and the Neoliberal Theatre of London (Springer, 2021), and his articles and reviews have been published in Theatre Survey , Theatre Journal , and Comparative Drama . Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction America Happened to Me: Immigration, Acculturation, and Crafting Empathy in Rags Burning it Down: Theatre Fires, Collective Trauma Memory, and the TikTok Ban “A Caribbean Soul in Exile”: Post-Colonial Experiences of a Jamaican Actor Archiving a Life in Theatre: The Legacy of Michael Feingold Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century United States Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspapers in New York Applied Improvisation: Leading, Collaborating, and Creating Beyond the Theatre Another Day's Begun: Thornton Wilder's Our Town in the 21st Century Appropriate Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken Present It’s That Time of the Month MáM Scene Partners Oh, Mary! Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Martha Schmoyer LoMonaco, emerita Fairfield University Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Martha Schmoyer LoMonaco, emerita Fairfield University By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Yale Rep’s The Far Country. Photo: T. Charles Erickson Wish You Were Here Sanaz Toossi (5-28 Oct) The Salvagers Harrison David Rivers (24 Nov-16 Dec., world premiere) Escaped Alone Carol Churchill (8-30 Mar) The Far Country Lloyd Suh (26 Apr-18 May) Yale Rep enjoyed its first normal season since the COVID pandemic shuttered its doors for almost a full two years, from February 2020 through January 2022. This season, for the first time, audiences were not required to wear masks, and it is clear that Yale is still re-thinking and re-inventing the way it produces theatre, following its September 2021 declaration “to advance anti-racist training and production by focusing on the well-being of the School of Drama/Yale Rep community, increasing emphasis on process and quality and decreasing emphasis on product and quantity.” All production choices, from scripts through casting and artistic leadership, reflected a determination to make work by and for a diverse a range of people. Yale also hired, rehearsed, and gave full playbill credit, with printed biographies, to an Understudy Cast for each show, thus providing a safety net for the principal actors along with opportunities for more actors to embody these roles. Yale had a spectacular season opening with Sanaz Toossi’s Wish You Were Here about six Iranian women friends preparing each other for marriage and new lives between 1978 and 1991, a period of political and cultural upheaval in Iran. The stellar cast and artistic leaders—playwright, director, and scenic designer—were largely Iranian American and not previously affiliated with Yale, unusual for Rep productions. They also were deeply committed to the Woman Life Freedom movement ( womanlifefreedom.today ) and on opening night, the actors returned to the stage to share scripted remarks on gender discrimination and inequality in Iran in a post-show commentary that reinforced the major themes of the play. The flexible set, by Iranian scenic designer Omid Akbari, featured a large living room with handsome, over-sized white furniture and a prominent upstage wall with Islamic geometric patterning to suggest the upper-class status of the characters; the set would transform to signal the rise in social turmoil over time. All six actors gave robust performances as women whose lives revolve around their deep, passionate friendships, made manifest through verbal and physical intimacies. They loved talking about penises, their “pussies,” and body hair (in one scene Nazanin, the lead character, was shaving her legs with wax, which she unsuccessfully tried to get her friend to rip off) and enjoyed caressing each other with impunity. The play provides a fascinating window into the lives of these women, largely cut off from the world through religious and social strictures, who are most alive through their interactions with each other. The world premiere of Harrison David Rivers’s The Salvagers , commissioned by Yale Rep and developed and supported by Yale’s Binger Center for New Theatre, opened in late November. The script centers around Boseman Salvage Senior and Boseman Salvage Junior, an estranged father and son who are only 14 years apart in age, Junior being the product of a teenaged couple, now divorced, and the three women in their lives: Junior’s mail-carrier mother, Nedra; his co-worker and potential love interest, Paulina; and Senior’s current lady, Elinor, a substitute teacher. It was a difficult show to sit through; despite strong performances by the all Black cast, the characters were largely unsympathetic as they allowed their unhappiness and frustration to erupt in a steady stream of invective and angry outbursts. There were some interesting visuals, which are a hallmark of Yale Rep’s shows, created by current students and faculty in the David Geffen School of Drama’s excellent design and theatre technology programs. The Salvagers is set in Chicago and the famous elevated trains, which Junior rides to and from his job daily, were theatrically realized by intricate lighting on passenger seats moving on tracks back and forth across the stage. Junior also spent a lot of time shoveling snow and it was fascinating to witness falling snow being scooped up and traveling airborne through the set. Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone , set in a classic English backyard garden, beautifully designed by Lia Tubiana, focuses on the quotidian conversations of four British women in their 70s, according to a textual note by Churchill, enjoying camaraderie as they sip afternoon tea. Mrs. Jarrett, played by African American actor LaTonya Borsay in a bit of non-traditional casting, abruptly launched into monologues about the coming apocalypse, rendered scenographically through dramatic shifts of time, space, and environment with lighting, designed by Stephen Strawbridge, projections by Shawn Lovell-Boyle, and sound by Sinan Refik Zafar. Eventually the three other women, ably performed by Mary Lou Rosato, Sandra Shipley, and Rita Wolf, also are afforded monologues to express their own fears and insecurities. The one-hour play veered from idle chatter to moments of hilarity, as when they broke into a rousing rendition of Ray Charles’s “Hit the Road Jack,” to expressions of disquiet and uncertainty, a feeling that eventually permeated the entire theatre. Escaped Alone left us with more questions than answers, which, one suspects, was precisely Churchill’s intent. Lloyd Suh’s The Far Country deals with Chinese immigrants stranded at a detention center on Angel Island in San Francisco harbor, with little hope of attaining the U.S. citizenship they so fervently desire. The action bounces back and forth between Guangdong Province, China, and Angel Island, both stunningly rendered by Kim Zhou (scenery), Yichen Zhou (lighting), and Hana S. Kim (projections). The mostly Asian American acting company, especially Tina Chilip and Hao Feng as the mother and son at the center of the tale, did a superb job under the sensitive direction of Ralph B. Peña. It’s a talky play set in the early 20th century that unveils sanctioned racial bigotry under the Chinese Exclusion Act, in force from 1882 until the mid-1960s. Next season, the Rep will expand its offerings to five shows: the world premiere of Falcon Girls by Hilary Bettis; Whitney White’s Macbeth in Stride , a co-production of The Philadelphia Theatre Company, Shakespeare Theatre Company, and Brooklyn Academy of Music; Eden by Steve Carter; a new adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector by Yura Kordonsky; and Notes on Killing Seven Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Board Members by Mara Vélez Meléndez. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Martha S. LoMonaco is a theatre director, historian, and writer. She is Professor Emerita of Theatre and American Studies at Fairfield University, where she was resident director and ran the theatre program for thirty-four years. She is the author of two monographs Every Week, A Broadway Revue: The Tamiment Playhouse, 1921-1960 and Summer Stock: An American Theatrical Phenomenon ( Choice 2004 Outstanding Academic Title) and an edited collection, Theatre Exhibitions , volume thirty-three of Performing Arts Resources . She has been editor of New England Theatre in Review since 2010. Marti holds a doctorate in Performance Studies from New York University. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Karl G. Ruling Milford, Connecticut Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Karl G. Ruling Milford, Connecticut By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Adil Mansoor in Amm(i)gone at Long Wharf Theatre. Photo: Curtis Brown Photography Black Trans Women at the Center Eva Reign, Elisawon Etidorhpa, Simone Immanuel, Asteria LaFaye Summers, Indie Johnson (28 Sept. online, then streamed through 1 Oct.) The Year of Magical Thinking Joan Didion, adapted by Jonathan Silverstein (8 Nov. – 10 Dec., various locations) A View from the Bridge Arthur Miller (10 Feb. – 10 Mar., Canal Dock Boathouse, New Haven) Sanctuary City Martyna Majok (28 Mar. – 21 Apr., TheaterWorks Hartford) Darren Criss Benefit Concert (13 May, Lyman Center for the Performing Arts) Amm(I)gone Adil Monsoor (28 May – 23 Jun. Yale Theatre and Performance Studies Black Box) Long Wharf Theatre used two marketing slogans during the 2023-24 season: “Theatre is for Everyone” and “Theatre of Possibility.” The two themes come together in the statement on the theatre's home page, “We are committed to revolutionizing the power and possibility of live theater [sic] as a catalyst to bring people together and   fulfill our promise of 'theatre for everyone.'” The themes came together in Long Wharf's four in-person dramatic productions, which were presented in a variety of venues, exploring where it is possible to do theatre, and bringing people together to experience stories representing the diversity of New Haven's communities. Three of the four shows were co-productions with other East Coast theatres, connecting these theatre communities. The Year of Magical Thinking, produced in partnership with the Keen Company, was an adaptation by Jonathan Silverstein, the director, of Joan Didion's book, performed by Kathleen Chalfant. Last year Long Wharf left the theatre space it had occupied since 1965 and adopted a mobile theatre model; The Year of Magical Thinking took that to an extreme by being performed in Long Wharf supporters' living rooms and public libraries around New Haven. In a New Haven Register article, Kit Ingui, Long Wharf's managing director, explained that the show is designed to be staged in intimate spaces. Indeed, the show I saw was simply Kathleen Chalfant, as Joan Didion, talking to us, the audience, about the year during which both her husband and daughter died. The staging at the Milford Public Library was minimal: a low platform, two side tables, a chair, and a table lamp at one side of the library's meeting room—space enough for a grieving woman to tell us her loss. Anshuman Bhatia was credited with the lighting design, but there was no stage lighting. It was a simple, powerful piece. A View from the Bridge was performed on the top floor of the Canal Dock Boathouse, a carpeted room with a curved wall of windows looking out at the New Haven Harbor and Long Island Sound. The setting was composed of planked platforms, three free-standing doorways, a row of coat hooks, furniture, and a hanging lamp in a corner of the room, with the audience in seating banks wrapping the playing space by 90 degrees. Stage lighting equipment was hung on a black truss grid. The open deck outside the windows was used for street scenes, and the fateful knife fight was staged there. Microphones and speakers brought the noise and dialog inside for the audience, but it was easier to hear the action than to see it. The show tapped themes important to Long Wharf Theatre—immigration, gender roles, and homophobia—and probably had resonance for New Haven's large Italian-American community. However, the casting muddied the message. Alfieri, Eddie's lawyer and the narrator, was played by Patricia Black, a woman wearing a man's suit. It was hard to believe that Eddie, who worries that Rodolpho is homosexual and who has trouble dealing with the two female characters as his equal, would confide in a woman. Sanctuary City was a coproduction with TheaterWorks Hartford and was performed in TheaterWorks's theatre. It was co-directed by Jacob G. Padrón, Long Wharf's artistic director, and Pedro Bermúdez. Set in Newark, starting shortly after 9/11 and running through late 2005, it's a three-character piece about two undocumented alien teenagers—girl G and boy B—trying to stay in the USA, and B's lover, who complicates G and B's relationship. It's a compact story about the struggles of two Dreamers, well-acted by Sara Gutierrez and Grant Kennedy Lewis, but a tight playing space made it hard for me to see them. Emmie Finkel designed a setting with translucent panels for video projections by Pedro Bermúdez. The panels forced the action downstage where audience members and support columns blocked my view. Some of the projections were pretty but slowed the show. The show's opening was a video of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. That attack triggered tighter rules and suspicion of immigrants—part of the play's background—but I doubt anyone in the audience needed to be reminded of what happened on 9/11. For the final show, Long Wharf Theatre presented Amm(i)gone , a Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company and PlayCo show produced in association with Kelly Strayhorn Theater and presented in the Theater and Performance Studies Black Box at Yale University. It was a one-person show created and performed by Adil Monsoor, supported in his storytelling by recorded video, live video, and audio recordings in a setting of Ramadan lanterns, cubes, and panels with mashrabiya lattice work. It was an intensely personal story about coming to America from Pakistan, Adil's relationship with his mother, and the tension between familial love and religious duty. His mother has become extremely religious and struggles to accept Adil’s queerness. To connect with her, Adil engaged with her by phone on a project to translate Sophocles' Antigone into Urdu. Antigone is often viewed as a conflict between Antigone and Creon over civil law and religious duty, but Adil emphasized the love between Ismene and Antigone, which endures despite Ismene's concern that Antigone is making a terrible mistake. During the post-show talk-back, one audience member identified herself as a gay Asian woman who came from an extremely religious family. This was the first time she'd seen her story on stage, and she was grateful. I thought about my own Catholic grandmother struggling to reconcile Church Law with her daughter's remarriage after divorce. It was a show about being gay, Muslim, and an immigrant, but it spoke to many. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Long Wharf Theatre has announced the 2024-25 season with the marketing slogan “Building our future together”: Artistic Congress, the 5th Annual Black Trans Women at the Center: New Play Festival , She Loves Me , El Coquí Espectacular and the Bottle Of Doom,  and Unbecoming Tragedy: A Ritual Journey Toward Destiny . The Artistic Congress will be a conference, held a little more than a week before the US presidential election, to discuss theatre and democracy, consider the intersection of creativity and civic engagement, and create a broad network of artists amplifying the impact of collective effort—building our future together. References Footnotes About The Author(s) KARL G. RULING is the technical editor for Protocol , the journal of the Entertainment Services and Technology Association. Prior to that position, he was the technical editor for Theatre Crafts and Lighting Dimensions magazines, and a contributor to Stage Directions . He has an MFA in theatre design from the University of Illinois, and a BA with majors in Dramatic Art and Psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has designed scenery, lighting, special effects, or sound for over 100 productions. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Megan Grumbling University of New England, Southern Maine Community College Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 1 Visit Journal Homepage Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Megan Grumbling University of New England, Southern Maine Community College By Published on December 16, 2024 Download Article as PDF Ashanti D.Williams and Robbie Harrison in Portland Stage Company and Dramatic Repertory Company's Angels in America. Photo: James A. Hadley Saint Dad Monica Wood (25 Oct.-19 Nov.) A Christmas Carol Charles Dickens (2 - 24 Dec.) The Play That Goes Wrong Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer & Henry Shields (31 Jan.- 25 Feb.) What the Constitution Means To Me Heidi Schreck (6 - 24 Mar.) Clyde’s Lynn Nottage (3 - 21 Apr.) Angels in America, Part 1: Millennium Approaches Tony Kushner, Co-Produced with Dramatic Repertory Company (1 – 26 May) Manning Benjamin Benne (5 - 16 Jun.) This 2023-24 season, Portland Stage Company celebrated its fiftieth anniversary onstage. The theatre opened the season triumphantly, having completed its $6.4 million “Making An Entrance Capital Campaign” for facility renovations, which bore fruit in a beautiful new box office and elevator, and featured an all-local cast and a collaboration with Portland’s Dramatic Repertory Company for one of the year’s most important productions, Angels in America. The season also found PSC returned to pre-pandemic theatre ways, with all in-person shows and masking “welcome but not required.” The theatre opened the season with another play by beloved Maine writer Monica Wood, Saint Dad, which had received a workshop reading at PSC the previous year. Saint Dad , set in a Maine camp on a lake, is a romp of a comedy about three siblings who sell their dad’s camp when he’s on his last legs, then try to keep this fact from him once he’s miraculously recovered. Sally Wood directed a wonderfully physical production of the play, which explores issues of family, gentrification, and being “from away,” with a standout comedic performance by local actor Moira Driscoll as the especially laconic sister. For its holiday show, PSC brought back its full-cast theatrical tradition of A Christmas Carol. Michael Dix Thomas directed a cast headed by PSC favorites Dustin Tucker as Bob Cratchit and the formidable Tom Ford as Scrooge. From there, PSC pivoted to meta-theatrical screwball comedy with The Play That Goes Wrong, about the foibles of an inept community theatre company’s production of a British murder mystery. Kevin R. Free directed a rollicking production of the show, rife with incredibly intricate set design as the play-within-a-play’s portraits, doors, walls, and floors all become hilariously compromised. The cast of eight had terrifically quick timing, and was funniest when performers let us see the community-theatre actors dropping their British characters in dismay or abandon. PSC will bring back the show this August as its summer theatre offering. March brought Heidi Schreck’s popular show What the Constitution Means To Me to the PSC stage, starring Portland actor Abigail Killeen. Brian Todd Backus directed a well-paced and emotional production, and Killeen’s nuanced and wide-ranging performance was by turns silly, tender, and enraged. The show also featured the excellent Matt Delamater, as a nuanced Legionnaire, and a rotating cast of “debaters” – young women from the local community, including Evangeline Cambria, Vagni Das, Lily Marie Jessen, Paige Scala, and the amiable and intellectually nimble Lyra Legawiec, who was onstage the night I attended. The company’s next show turned to theatre great Lynn Nottage’s recent new play, Clyde’s , about redemption, second chances, and beatific sandwiches (and an oblique sequel, of sorts, to Sweat ). Germán Cárdenas Alaminos designed a marvelous down-and-out diner kitchen set for director Dominique Rider’s production, which featured excellent rapport between the four down-and-out sandwich makers, played by Lance E. Nichols, Roland Ruiz, Tatrisha Talley, and Derek Chariton. And Breezy Leigh was a terrifying Clyde, the malevolent, deeply damaged boss lady, in her incredible, incredibly hued power outfits, including a gold and hornet-green wonder (terrific costume design was by Emily White). Up next was Tony Kushner’s theatrical powerhouse of imagination and grief, Angels in America, Part 1: Millennium Approaches , an all-local co-production with Dramatic Repertory Company, a Portland company long committed to staging new, overlooked, and challenging shows, and co-directed by Peter Brown and Keith Powell Beyland, DRC’s founder. The show featured arresting performances by Portland actors Joseph Bearor, Paul Haley, Robbie Harrison, Michela Micalizio, Denise Poirier, Nate Stephenson, Casey Turner, and Ashanti Dwight Williams. Haley’s fast-talking portrayal of Roy Cohn made him both pathological and pathos-ridden, while Harrison, as Prior, was marvelous in animating the dying man’s emotional range, between rage, terror, sadness, and fascination. PSC will stage part two of Kushner’s masterpiece, Perestroika , in 2025, again in co-production with DRC. As its regular-season mainstage closer, Portland Stage presented Manning, Benjamin Benne’s 2023 Clauder Competition Grand Prize Winning play, which was workshopped last spring as part of the 34th annual Little Festival of the Unexpected. Alex Keegan directed a cast of four in Benne’s show about two brothers who return home to their grieving father – and a supernatural zucchini – after the death of their mother. This May and June, Portland Stage presented its 35th annual Little Festival of the Unexpected, featuring a live reading of John Cariani's latest play, Not Quite Almost, another show of linked vignettes about love, hope, and being understood. Cariani is the author of the massively successful , Almost Maine, and his new show – which will take the PSC Mainstage in 2025 – is being billed as “It’s a prequel. And a sequel. You decide.” Portland Stage continues to vocally support anti-racism and the decolonization of the arts and public spaces. The theatre’s land acknowledgment encourages theatergoers to connect with Wabanaki REACH (a Maine organization that advocates for the self-determination of the Indigenous peoples in what is now called Maine) and also acknowledges Maine’s historical involvement in the slave trade. Next season will open with Conscience , a look at the relationship and political calculus between Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy and Maine Senator Margaret Chase Smith before turning to Angels in America Part 2: Perestroika , in another co-production with DRC. PSC’s holiday show next season will shift to The Snow Queen , followed by an Agatha Christie murder-mystery comedy, Murder on the Links. Two Maine-grown plays, Bess Welden’s Madeleines and John Cariani’s Not Quite Almost (Or, Almost Almost, Maine) take the stage next spring, before closing with Albee’s toxically careening masterpiece Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf— a terrifying classic of the canon. This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Megan Grumbling is a critic, poet, and librettist. She is the author of the poetry volumes Booker's Point and Persephone in the Late Anthropocene, has written lyrics for musical compositions about octopuses and glaciers, and teaches writing and environmental literature at the University of New England. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Editorial Introduction A Comedy of Sorts: Race, Gender, and Satire in Slave Play Performing Girlhood, Riffing on Lolita: Fornés and Vogel Respond to Nabokov “It’s Cumming yet for a’ that”: Bringing the Scottish Bard to Life in the 21st Century Historiographic Metatheatre and Narrative Closure in Pippin’s Alternate “Theo Ending” “Each One, Teach One”: Interview with Harvey Fierstein Artists as Theorists in Their Craft: Interview with James Ijames The Spectacular Theatre of Frank Joseph Galati: Reshaping American Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Julie Jackson. London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing. 2022. 215pp. Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief. Lindsay Brandon Hunter. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2021; Pp. 192. Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity. Ryan Donovan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023; Pp. 316. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232. Queering Drag: Redefining the Discourse of Gender Bending. Meredith Heller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020; Pp. 236. New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023 New England Theatre in Review American Repertory Theater . Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2023–2024 Barrington Stage. Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 2023 The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre (The Gamm). Warwick, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres. 2023-24 Season Hartford Stage. Hartford, Connecticut, 2023-24 The Huntington. Boston, Massachusetts, 2023-24 Long Wharf Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Portland Stage Company. Portland, Maine, 2023-24 Shakespeare & Company. Lenox, Massachusetts, 2023 Trinity Repertory Theatre Company. Providence, Rhode Island, 2023-24 Vermont Stage. Burlington, Vermont, 2023-24 Yale Repertory Theatre. New Haven, Connecticut, 2023-24 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Lezlie Cross and Ariel Nereson, Guest Editors Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 3 Visit Journal Homepage Introduction: Embodied Arts Lezlie Cross and Ariel Nereson, Guest Editors By Published on May 13, 2019 Download Article as PDF This American Society of Theatre and Drama special issue of JADT offers four essays that reconsider the contours of the study of U.S. American performance through centering embodiment as the site where aesthetic values are developed, mobilized, and contested. Though all of the arts are arguably embodied, this special issue, by isolating “The Embodied Arts,” features scholarship about forms that foreground the body as the primary meaning maker. Our CFP was inspired by Nadine George-Graves’s proposal in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater (2015) that performance research might productively adopt an overarching rubric of “performative embodiment” to explain performance phenomena. [1] In coining this phrase, George-Graves sought to bridge what Kate Elswit calls “[t]he artificial divisions between the thing most often called ‘theatre’ and the thing most often called ‘dance’ in both academic and artistic spheres.” [2] Drawing on current scholarly energies around this interdisciplinary (or in George-Graves’s essay, “intradisciplinary”) concern, one of our central questions was: What might emerge as a coherent area of scholarly inquiry were disciplinary divisions forsaken in favor of metrics of legibility that arise not from genre but from the materials of performance phenomena themselves? The four essays featured in this issue demonstrate the efficacy of performative embodiment as a new metric to understand a diversity of performance events. The resultant collection of essays does much more than probe or surmount the generic academic divide between dance and theatre studies; it also offers a breadth of methodologies drawn from dance, theatre, and performance studies. The sites investigated by these four authors — Broadway, vaudeville, pageantry, and music videos — have historically incorporated both choreographed movement and mimetic action. As such, these sites are situated in the center of a proverbial venn diagram of performative embodiment. In a welcome shift, the four essays that compose this special issue refocused our initial call away from academic genre toward a more expansive examination of bodies in motion. The essays share a scholarly commitment to elucidating the interrelationships between body-based performances and what Susan Leigh Foster has termed “bodily theorics,” or a given historical moment’s normative and resistant modes of embodiment. [3] A focus on historically situated power dynamics emerges when these essays are examined collectively. Rather than evidencing an ideological project that equates identity politics with embodiment, this focus develops from a primary physics of choreography, wherein time and energy produce the power required to activate movement repertoires. All movement happens within sets of constraints; here, our authors consider U.S. American norms of bodily comportment as socio-cultural constraints that frame the choreographies their subjects generate and complicate. The essays therefore comment on the hierarchies of power embedded in embodied performances, opening up conversations about race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and size. All four essays engage with popular representations that challenge traditional aesthetic values about bodies in motion. Each essay articulates and argues against an ideal U.S. American form: the trim, athletic, disciplined, white body. Through their discussions of thin and fat bodies, bodies that trouble ideas of femininity, oppositional aesthetics of white and indigenous bodies, and the legacy of black female embodiment, the authors show how performing artists describe, interpret, and subvert established norms of bodily comportment through their embodied performances. Additionally, the authors’ serendipitous shared focus on forms of popular entertainment reveals a wide range of social and cultural implications of embodied performance. We interpret this emphasis on “popular” (though not always commercial) rather than “concert” performance as affirmation of the degree to which theories of embodiment structure the bodily lives of everyday people. Ryan Donovan’s investigation of Broadway casting practices in relation to body size and the widespread commodification of thinness opens our issue. “‘Must Be Heavyset’: Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies” contributes to a growing and compelling body of scholarship at the intersection of performance studies and fat studies, as well as the current and lively conversation on casting within performance studies. Utilizing an archive comprised of original interviews and voluminous press seen through theories of fat embodiment and performativity, Donovan carefully describes the process of workshopping and producing Hairspray for Broadway, a process wherein allegedly inclusive aims were hamstrung by commercial imperatives. Contextualizing Hairspray within historical and contemporary Broadway productions reveals an unsurprising yet critical emphasis on women’s body size and a concomitant mandate of thinness in order for female romantic desires to be culturally legible and, importantly, profitable. Donovan’s attention to not only the representational dynamics of these productions but also their pragmatics, including the language of fat stars’ contracts and the use of prosthetics, broadens his critique to include Broadway’s means of production as well as its narrative content and form. Donovan concludes that “The lack of fat actors cast in leading roles belies Broadway’s vision of itself as a fully inclusive institution, and the use of fat suits and contractual weight clauses has perpetuated fat stigma,” and, moreover, “[B]y not casting fat women outside of prescribed roles, Broadway musicals enforce a system of gendered bodily norms that police how all women act, consume, and labor in the U.S.” In “Unruly Reproductions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville,” Jennifer Schmidt demonstrates how female comics on the vaudeville stage used their embodied caricatures to fight against the superficialities of feminized consumer culture found in the theatre and print media of the late nineteenth century in the U.S. Schmidt places the performances of female mimics Cissie Loftus, Elsie Janis, and Gertrude Hoffmann in a critical conversation with the embodiment of femininity emblematized by the Gibson Girl and the women of Florenz Zeigfield’s Follies . For instance, Hoffmann’s burlesque of the Gibson girl included an exaggerated “kangaroo walk” which satirized the embodied impact of that “ideal” on the female form. Through rich archival details of their physical performances, Schmidt argues that these mimics, through their mockery of both feminine and masculine figures, brought attention to the manufactured nature of womanhood at the turn of the twentieth century. The women additionally disrupted the audience’s expectations of gender, by maintaining their “girlishness” even when creating caricatures of figures like President William McKinley. Schmidt demonstrates that, through these embodied forms of reproduction, Loftus, Janis, and Hoffmann created critical space which allowed them to comment on the representations of women in the celebrity culture of their time. Through a detailed examination of their repertories, Schmidt’s essay reveals the cultural and political potentials of embodied performance, by showing how the moving body can be a tool for creating critical parodies of popular culture. Shilarna Stokes’s essay “Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis ” reveals how Percy MacKaye’s symbolist pageant reinforced the processes of civilizing, and thereby Americanizing, both participants and observers through mass embodied practices of dance, gesture, and pantomime. In MacKaye’s view, the “emblematic design elements, allegorical plots, and figurative choreographies” he created in the masque were an essential element of what he called the “rituals of democracy.” Stokes shows how the hundreds of thousands of everyday people involved in the creation of MacKaye’s embodied performance, “were able to generate performative arguments about civic engagement, citizenship, and democracy” through their participation in the pageant. Through Stokes’ close analysis of the Masque , including a wealth of new archival research, she demonstrates how the pageant shaped St. Louisans’ conceptions of collectivity and directly influenced the newly expanded white population of the city. In her reading of the Masque, Stokes identifies three distinct choreographic modes of embodiment. She analyzes the pageant’s two modes of “playing Indian,” one which she terms “the ritualized” and the second “the savage,” arguing that these embodiments showed audience and performer alike “the difference between rational forms of collective self-organization and wild expressions of collective fervor.” The contrast between the two modes of “playing Indian” pointed St. Louisans’ toward acceptable forms of civic organization. The third mode she identifies, “playing pioneer,” modeled an ideal citizen who conformed to the “political and economic vision of city officials.” Through her detailed analysis, Stokes critically parses the fraught legacy of the Masque , revealing both MacKaye and the city officials’ aims for the piece as well as the impact of the pageant on the city and its citizenry. Finally, Dana Venerable’s essay “Collective Choreography for Weathering Black Experience: Janelle Monáe & The Memphis ‘Tightrope’ Dance” considers contemporary popular performance as a site of critical intervention in the daily repertoires of constrained embodiment experienced by black U.S. Americans. Venerable provides a detailed close reading of the popular music artist Janelle Monáe’s instruction of the “Tightrope,” a dance to accompany Monáe’s 2010 hit of the same name. Venerable locates Monáe in a genealogy of black female performance makers and theorists, emphasizing Katherine Dunham and Zora Neale Hurston, who share a project of performance as collective healing for marginalized black U.S. American communities. This genealogy is placed in conversation with contemporary theories of black experience developed by Arline Geronimus and Christina Sharpe that posit “weathering” as quotidian strategies for living in a climate of anti-blackness. Venerable argues that the “Tightrope” “acknowledges in its name and choreography the physical risk of black embodiment in the U.S. and enacts strategies of emotional stability, physical balance, spontaneity, and support as navigational tactics.” Her analysis is rooted in the moment of 2010 and she reads the “Tightrope” as responsive to both local dance scenes, particularly in Memphis, Tennessee, and national narratives of racialized embodiment activated by the Obama presidency. Venerable’s essay offers alternative lineages of influence that cross “high” and “low” dance and posit that distinctions in cultural production are secondary to tracking the omnipresence of the hostile environment within which black U.S. Americans live and create. These seemingly disparate essays, which interrogate entirely different landscapes and forms, create generative conversations about performance when gathered under the rubric of embodiment. By foregrounding disciplinary concerns in our CFP, we unwittingly replicated the generic binary of dance and theatre. Donovan, Schmidt, Stokes, and Venerable instead highlight the work which already takes place at the boundaries of what performance is and can be. In this way, the “Embodied Arts” issue gathers scholarship evidencing Elswit’s observation that “Once presumptions about form are suspended, even temporarily, all sorts of histories in the borderlands begin to emerge, and with them larger ecosystems of practice.” [4] By drawing on theoretical frames that consider embodiment as epistemological as well as historical, lived social choreographies, these authors raise the stakes of their respective analyses to include both representational and experiential dimensions of performative embodiment. This special edition ultimately seeks to spur a conversation around the proposal that we might do more to probe the cultural relevance of performance in the Americas thinking through, but not within, genre distinctions and disciplinary divides. This conversation has benefitted enormously from the guidance of Dorothy Chansky, President of the American Theatre and Drama Society, from the mentorship of JADT editors Naomi Stubbs and James Wilson, and from the members of our Editorial Board, who tirelessly and generously devoted their time and energy to furthering this discussion. We hope readers will engage the scholarship within this issue as they continue to reimagine the histories and theories of American performance. References [1] Nadine George-Graves, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater (New York: Oxford University Press), 2015: 5. [2] Kate Elswit, Theatre & Dance (London: Palgrave), 2018: 2. [3] Susan Leigh Foster, Choreographing History (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), 1995: 8. [4] Elswit (2018), 28. Footnotes About The Author(s) LEZLIE CROSS is an Assistant Professor at the University of Portland. Her published articles and book reviews appear in Theatre History Studies, Theatre Annual, Shakespeare Bulletin, The Journal of American Drama and Theatreand Theatre Survey as well as the book projects Women on Stage, Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom and Performing Objects and Theatrical Things. Lezlie is also a professional dramaturg who works at regional theatres across America. ARIEL NERESON is Assistant Professor of Dance Studies at the University at Buffalo – SUNY where she teaches across the MA, PhD, and MFA programs in Theatre & Dance. Her current book project, Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past, theorizes choreo-historiography as a method of understanding how movement makes, conveys, and reimagines historical narratives of race and nation. Her essays on movement and embodiment across dance and theatre can be found in American Quarterly, Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Studies in Musical Theatre, and in JADT, amongst others. Editorial Board for Special Issue: David Bisaha Meredith Conti Leah Lowe Inga Meier Robert Vorlicky Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Introduction: Embodied Arts Collective Choreography for Weathering Black Experience: Janelle Monáe and The Memphis "Tightrope" Dance Unruly Reproductions: The Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville "Must Be Heavyset": Casting Women, Fat Stigma, and Broadway Bodies Choreographies of the Great Departure: Building Civic Bodies in the 1914 Masque of St. Louis Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance. Stephanie Nohelani Teves. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018; Pp. 220. Ellen Stewart Presents: Fifty Years of La MaMa Experimental Theatre. Cindy Rosenthal. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017; Pp. 198. In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement. La Donna L. Forsgren. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018; Pp. 200. Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina. Noe Montez. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017; Pp. 239 + xi. Big Deal: Bob Fosse and Dance in the American Musical. Kevin Winkler. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018; Pp. 368. Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past. Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter, eds. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018; Pp. 399. Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Jordan Schildcrout Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 28 1 Visit Journal Homepage Transgressive Engagements: The Here and Now of Queer Theatre Scholarship Jordan Schildcrout By Published on March 22, 2016 Download Article as PDF I consider it a sign of the vibrancy of queer theatre scholarship that publications over the past few years contain a greater variety of subjects, methodologies, and theoretical perspectives than ever before. I would hope for no less from a field that celebrates transgression, categorical slippage, intersectionality, and the inability to follow a single “straight and narrow” path. At the most recent ATHE Conference , I attended a panel where scholars—many of them involved in the creation of the LGBTQ Focus Group 20 years earlier—spoke about the field’s early years, when pursing queer theatre scholarship could endanger one’s career and reputation. Since the emergence of seminal works such as “We Can Always Call Them Bulgarians” (1987) by Kaier Curtin and The Feminist Spectator as Critic (1988) by Jill Dolan, much has changed for LGBTQ people in America. Even though such work now has a more esteemed position in the academy, new queer theatre scholarship at its best continues to be bold—and maybe even a little dangerous. I still remember the thrill of being a college student and, on a trip to New York City, purchasing Curtin’s book on “the emergence of lesbians and gay men on the American stage” from a gay bookstore. Along with books like John Clum’s Acting Gay (1992), it allowed me to understand a history of the representation of my own cultural identity. Later, as a graduate student, I acquired theoretical frameworks for comprehending various relationships between gender, sexuality, performance, and society from books by scholars like Dolan , Sue-Ellen Case , Judith Butler , and Peggy Phelan . I remain drawn to scholarship that creates insightful readings of plays and performances, grounded in historical context and activated by original theoretical perspectives. So my bookshelf has been happily full of late, with a number of excellent volumes published over the past five years that enrich the field of queer theatre and performance scholarship. One key goal continues to be the preservation and illumination of what might be deemed the heyday of queer theatre from the 1960s through the 1980s. Kate Davy’s Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers (2011) is an excellent historical analysis of the seminal dyke theatre, the WOW Café, and it now has the perfect companion in the recently released Memories of the Revolution: The First Ten Years of the WOW Café Theater , edited by Holly Hughes, Carmelita Tropicana, and Jill Dolan. Robert Schanke, whose previous books include excellent anthologies of queer theatre history co-edited with Kim Marra, also celebrates the life and work of a pioneer in Queer Theatre and the Legacy of Cal Yeomans (2011). The revolutionary fervor of that era can feel distant as LGBTQ cultural and political goals seem to move toward the mainstream and the “normal.” In opposition to that trend, Sara Warner’s Acts of Gaiety: LGBT Performance and the Politics of Pleasure (2012) focuses on anti-normative plays and performances, celebrating the gleefully subversive. The interrogation of homonormativity, which informs my my own study of “ negative representations ,” is a major strain in queer theatre scholarship, evident most recently in Jacob Juntunen’s Mainstream AIDS Theatre, the Media, and Gay Civil Rights: Making the Radical Palatable (2016). While anti-normativity leads some queer scholars to look primarily at alternative systems of theatrical production, others dive into the mainstream, offering queer readings of popular culture. Broadway plays and musicals have been rich subjects for scholars like D.A. Miller , David Savran , and David Roman , and now Stacy Wolf has made a significant addition to the field with Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical (2011). Brian Eugenio Herrera, in Latin Numbers: Playing Latino in Twentieth-Century U.S. Popular Performance (2015), brings a critically astute and refreshingly queer perspective to his examination of mainstream cultural representations. José Esteban Muñoz, whose passing was a great loss to our community, helped bring greater interdisciplinarity and intersectionality to performance scholarship . It’s heartening that these goals are pursued by an increasing number of scholars, including Ramón Rivera-Servera, author of Performing Queer Latinidad: Dance, Sexuality, Politics (2012) and co-editor with E. Patrick Johnson of important contributions to black and Latino/a queer performance scholarship: solo/black/woman: scripts, interviews, and essays (2013) and the forthcoming Blacktino Queer Performance (2016). I’m also a fan of James Wilson’s Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies (2011), an impressively researched look at queer performance in the Harlem Renaissance, as well as Marlon M. Bailey’s Butch Queens in Pumps (2013), an ethnography based on Bailey’s own experiences with contemporary African-American ballroom culture in Detroit. If recent journal articles and conference presentations are any indication, then theatre and performance scholarship is trending toward a firmer commitment to exploring the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, class, and other identities. As we cultivate greater diversity in the systems that produce theatre and performance—and in the systems that produce theatre and performance scholars—I look forward to the publication of more books that represent a wide range of perspectives on a variety of different kinds of queer performance, particularly those focusing on trans* artists and representations. With all these exciting books published over the past five years, perhaps the most notable trend is the changing position of books in our culture. The gay bookstore where I bought that copy of “We Can Always Call Them Bulgarians” ? It closed years ago . The Internet has now become a dynamic site for those writing about queer theatre and performance, potentially engaging with a broader and more diverse readership. I enjoy both new and old media and believe they can intersect in productive ways, which is why I’ve bookmarked Jill Dolan’s blog and have a copy of the published collection of her blog articles, The Feminist Spectator in Action (2013), on my shelf. Now that the Journal of American Drama and Theatre has “gone electric,” I’m looking forward to having another online source for articles and book reviews on queer theatre scholarship. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Jordan Schildcrout is an Associate Professor of Theatre & Performance at Purchase College, SUNY, and the author of Murder Most Queer: The Homicidal Homosexual in the American Theater (University of Michigan Press). Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue American Tragedian Changes, Constants, Constraints: African American Theatre History Scholarship Performing Anti-slavery The Captive Stage Musical Theatre Studies Reflections: Fifty Years of Chicano/Latino Theatre Transgressive Engagements: The Here and Now of Queer Theatre Scholarship Strangers Onstage: Asia, America, Theatre, and Performance Thinking about Temporality and Theatre Murder Most Queer New Directions in Dramatic and Theatrical Theory: The Emerging Discipline of Performance Philosophy “Re-righting” Finland’s Winter War: Robert E. Sherwood’s There Shall Be No Night[s] Star Struck!: The Phenomenological Affect of Celebrity on Broadway Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Xiaoqiao Xu Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 36 1 Visit Journal Homepage Made Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era Xiaoqiao Xu By Published on December 11, 2023 Download Article as PDF MADE UP ASIANS: YELLOWFACE DURING THE EXCLUSION ERA. Esther Kim Lee. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022; Pp. 268. Esther Kim Lee’s recent scholarly book presents essential reading in Asian American and theater history. In Made-Up Asians:Yellowface during the Exclusion Era , Lee proposes the framework of yellowface and contends that it intentionally created and sustained Asian exclusion in American society. Instead of focusing on how Asian people in and beyond America reacted to yellowface performances, Lee focuses instead on the technology of yellowface, used mainly by white actors and actresses to don Asian characters during the Exclusion Era in the United States between 1862 and 1940. Made-Up Asians traces the origin of yellowface to British pantomime—when Joseph Grimaldi (1778–1837) performed as a Chinese clown in Whang-Fong; or, the Clown of China (1812), which was written by Charles Isaac Dibdin Jr. at Sadler’s Wells. Kazrac, Grimaldi’s most popular character was the famous prototype of “clown yellowface,” presented in Aladdin; or, the Wonderful Lamp (1813) as a Chinese slave assisting Aladdin to gain wealth and power, epitomizing Britain’s fantasies about ‘the Orient’ as exoticism and opportunism. Later, as Britain attempted to expand the opium trade in China during the Opium War (1839-1842), Victorian theater featured increasingly pejorative representations of China and Chinese people, usually emphasizing physical torture. British versions of Chinese culture largely influenced people in theUnited States. The Americanized Aladdin (1815) created an Americanized character with traits deemed local, which influenced “Chinaman” characters; these depictions changed over more than a century: from clownish and comic to menacing and vile, channeling reactions toward Chinese people that led to the Chinese Exclusion Act. Chapter two focuses on “scientific yellowface,” linking yellowface and race science. As immigration flourished, changing metropolises in the United States, nineteenth century citizens sought guidance on how to comprehend human and cultural differences. Meanwhile, as Lee examines, phrenology and physiognomy became popular: just in time to cater to American audiences’ curiosity about the ‘Mongolian race,’ including Chinese and Japanese peoples. Race science cast the Anglo-Saxon race, or the Caucasian race—which often denoted whiteness—as most noble. Directly linked with physiognomy, theater embraced this ranking by concentration on actors and actresses’ physical looks—presenting the beauty of whiteness. Accordingly, nonwhite actors were primarily regarded as lowbrow performers and entertainers. While white actors were believed capable to “portray all humans” (67), including “the yellow race,”portrayals of Asian characters echoed descriptions in race science texts, shows Lee, emphasizing the Mongolian fold, eyebrows, nose, and broken English, instead of observance of real Asians in everyday life. These “made-up Asians,” to quote the book’s title, together with exhibitions of “exotic Asians,” reinforced white Americans’ sense of normality and superiority. Lee’s scholarship is extensive with detailed examples. Chapters three, four, and five elaborate on the development of yellowface makeup. Chapter three, for instance, examines how “private yellowface” evolved via theatrical makeup guidebooks. After the Civil War, the American stage presented myriad international and ethnic characters, a craze that influenced amateurs’ private performances. Scant sources for costumes and makeup led Samuel French to provide an all-in-one service package for amateur actors, from guidebooks reprinted from British authors to license rights and scripts. Most importantly for Lee’s research, French published the first step-to-step makeup guidebook: How to “Make-Up: A Practical Guide to the Art of “Making-up” (1877), which thoroughly explained how to stage Asian characters. The invention of greasepaint in the late nineteenth century pushed forward makeup technology to create supposedly “natural” makeup for Asian characters. However, this version of naturalism did not result in bringing Asian and Asian American actors into the industry, nor observing Asian people in everyday life. Instead, based in race science, such“natural” portrayals stereotyped and excluded Asians from immigration and naturalization into the United States, while enriching white actors for range and professionalism. During the Exclusion era, when Asian women faced harsh immigration obstructions, stage representations of tragically beautiful Asian women became most popular. Blanche Bates—a white American actress whose career was already established in New York City before performing the tragic female leads in Madame Butterfly (1900) and The Darling of the Gods (1902)—exemplifies this trend. Lee’s scholarship reveals that Bates’s influence was so profound that she was regarded as America’s model for representing East Asian female characters. Bates promoted her artistic excellence by denying universality and staging otherness. Chapter Four shows how the technologies of cosmetic yellowface relished fictional tragedies of Asian women on stage, while real-life experiences of Asian women were ignored. By the end of the Exclusion Era, the prosthetic Oriental eye became the most critical aspect of yellowface makeup, analyzes Lee. The film industry’s photorealism led performers to look as much like their characters as possible in close-up shots, pressing on the evolution of yellowface makeup. Wearing “Chinese” greasepaint was not enough for early black-and-white films since actors still looked too white—hence not “Chinese” enough. To highlight their racial difference, the Oriental eye, with its epicanthic fold, emerged as the most significant marker. For example, Boris Karloff impersonated Fu Manchu in The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932), among the most infamous examples of the yellow-peril trope, with the prosthetic Oriental eye created by the Makeup Department at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). The invention of the more natural epicanthic fold continued, with foam latex technology coming out around 1944 and moveable fake lids in 1970. These technologies further alienated and excluded Asian and Asian Americans from stage and screen, reinforcing European heritage and Hollywood’s norm of whiteness. As Chapter Five concludes, only those who were considered white could perform Asian characters; their performances reiterated that Asians deserved to be excluded from citizenship and American society. Esther Kim Lee’s work demonstrates how yellowface has profoundly influenced the twenty-first century. As a technology of exclusion, yellowface blocked possibilities for Asian American actors and actresses to be cast in leading roles—and theater history. While whiteness is reinforced when actors remove their yellowface make-up, the real sufferings of Asian and Asian Americans gets obscured, sunk into oblivion. Made-Up Asians is an invaluable read that dissects the historical construction of yellowface and its persistence in contemporary times. References Lee, Esther Kim. Made-Up Asians: Yellowface during the Exclusion Era. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022. Footnotes About The Author(s) Xiaoqiao Xu is a lecturer in Modern Chinese Literature and Cinema at the University of British Columbia. Xiaoqiao Xu’s research covers a wide range of topics, from late imperial China to modern China, with a particular focus on women’s literary and theatrical productions. Her work explores the intersectionality of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity, challenging the neatness of the contrast between the old and the new. Xiaoqiao analyzes female gazing and recurring objects, as well as female playwrights’ engagement with gender politics to gain a deeper understanding of the roles women played in Chinese society. In her current research, she examines women’s engagement with religion, particularly Buddhism and Daoism. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Community Circles and Love Triangles: Gun Violence and Belonging in Oklahoma! and West Side Story Decommissioning the School-to-Prison Pipeline: Anna Deavere Smith’s Notes from the Field and Dominique Morisseau’s Pipeline More than a Props List: Redefining Material Culture as Survival and Pleasure in Lynn Nottage’s Ruined The Politics of Trance: Victoria Woodhull and the Radical Reform of Platform Mediumship Beyond Text: Theater and Performance in Print After 1900 Emily Mann: Rebel Artist of the American Theatre Made Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era Performance in the Zócalo: Constructing History, Race, and Identity in Mexico's Central Square from the Colonial Era to the Present Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

David Bisaha and Pria Ruth Williams Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 2 Visit Journal Homepage Censorship/Public Censure and Performance Today: Special Issue Introduction David Bisaha and Pria Ruth Williams By Published on July 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF By David Bisaha and Pria Ruth Williams, Special Issue Editors This special issue turns toward censorship at a time in which both the definitions and mechanisms of censorship are changing in the United States. Theatre historian John Houchin, in Censorship of the American Theatre in the Twentieth Century , argues that “attempts to censor performance erupt when the dominant culture construes its laws, rituals, and traditions to be in the process of significant change . . . such behavior is indicative of a conservative society, one whose energy is used to maintain its political, moral, and social infrastructure.”(1) In such societies, the impulse to consolidate and enforce values of propriety becomes a powerful, flexible tool of cultural battle. In this issue, we consider censorship in the Americas, with an emphasis on the changing nature of censorship and discourses of censorship and censure experienced by performing artists today. Indeed, in the time between the call for this special issue and its publication, a great deal has changed in the United States. We have seen an authoritarian regime installed in the Executive Branch that is being backed up by a conservative-majority Supreme Court. The ways in which language has been censored by the government is terrifying, impacting the right to bodily autonomy, the ability to speak openly in criticism of the U.S. or Israeli governments, the ability to do science and forecast the weather, the continuation of grants for research and university work, public health, and more. Recent politics demonstrate just how much local, state, and federal governments are now willing and eager to start policing theatre content at multiple levels and with the heavy hammer of authoritarian control. While much of the focus has been on issues of drag performance and gender, these cases are also an obvious testing ground. Based on historical precedent and current actions, it is likely that censorship will continue to expand under the Trump regime. Theatre scholars in the U.S. are going to need to reexamine the ways in which the field has faced censorship in the past and from across the globe to understand the strategies and tactics needed to avoid self-censoring our art and scholarship, and to face the threats of authoritarian power and control. Quickly . However, the connotative and denotative meanings of the term “censorship” are not fixed properties. In a time of increasingly authoritarian power, it is important to interrogate how and why the term is being deployed. In 2006, Janelle Reinelt wrote of censorship in the context of the United States’ “War on Terror”: I have become increasingly uneasy in the wake of an upsurge in the rhetoric of censorship used to describe many actions by different agents, acting for different reasons and under quite different—sometimes extenuating—circumstances. ‘Censorship’ has become a common-sense catchword; since everyone knows what it means, merely to name it is to proclaim it. I worry about these imprecise uses of the term because today in the West we find ourselves increasingly concerned about the erosion of freedoms of expression, considered as rights. Now more than ever I think we must be alert to how we use the term and what, exactly, we mean by it. The performing arts become a flashpoint for issues of censorship once again, as they have many times in the past. For that reason, we theatre and performance scholars must think about this terminology with special care, since historically and presently it appears performatively within our discipline.(2) The “common-sense catchword” quality of the term has only expanded in the nearly two decades since Reinelt’s writing. Claims of censorship apply a specific rhetorical frame to one’s situation. Censorship is predominantly viewed as a negative force to be resisted, though circumstances in which censorship would be acceptable if not widely acclaimed could be imagined. To claim censorship is to position the value of free speech against other cultural values, which might include national security, public morality, decency, ethical treatment and education of children, and social justice. At a time when specific words, ideas, and people’s identities are being legislated against by state and federal forces, thinking about the boundaries of censorship may seem like scholarly hair-splitting. Direct, obvious censorship is an urgent problem, yet it is occurring simultaneously with other claims of censorship, which may be designed to distract from, or to gain, other goals of policy or cultural acclaim. Because the concept of censorship is deployed by many different forces and for many different reasons, unpacking its various definitions and applications is crucial. We must resist harmful censorship, but we further suggest that absolute positions, opposing censorship whenever the concept is invoked, risks rewarding bad-faith applications of the term. Mindful of the ways in which digital media and socially networked culture have changed both our methods of censorship and attempts to resist it, we built the concept of public censure into the call for this special section. Media campaigns exposing and critiquing censorship have long been a tactic of resistance, but public outcry made via the internet has profoundly shaped the US culture in sometimes dangerous and even deadly ways.(3) Internet-powered public censure—calls for boycotts, “cancellation,” doxxing, or other resistance that might lead to violence—may be a new phenomenon. What has changed are the locations and tactics of power, not the core principle that censorship is an exercise of power. Houchin’s “conservative society,” one invested in maintaining old systems of order, has enlisted new forms of censorship in its pursuit of power over culture. One of the elements we noted in building this special issue (section) was that many works defer censorship in time and/or place. This may be because the more easily apprehended versions of censorship are those that are not currently unfolding around us. Indeed, the call for this special issue participated in this definition of the concept by referring to the past. For scholars and critics, “true” censorship retains iconic examples in the past or the not-here, in the censorship of European Renaissance courts, authoritarian book burnings, and Hollywood’s Hays Code, or—as depicted in Paula Vogel’s Indecent (2016)—in the combination of producer-led and justice-backed obscenity trials dating from the early twentieth century. But these are not always the most present or pernicious forms of censorship encountered today. This issue gathers articles and reflections on the varying ways that censorship and censure have been used in theatre. Nic Barilar’s article explores the performance history of Séan O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned , which premiered in Lafayette, Indiana the year after it was removed from the 1958 Dublin International Theatre Festival lineup because of religious censorship. Barilar explores the way that the Lafayette Little Theatre’s production engaged in “prosthetic memory” during their 1959 production. The history of censorship provided a timely reason for choosing to produce the play, but as Barilar shows, the memory of censorship also produced confusing political and aesthetic distortions. The theatre company sought to amplify its conservative, anti-communist, “All-American” values while differentiating itself from an old-world Ireland beset by religious traditionalism, sectarian conflict, and socialist politics. Donia Mounsef examines several case studies from the censorship of drama in Canadian theatre. By exploring several moments since the 1970s in which community groups have engaged in calls for the closure or removal of works, Mounsef explores the complexities of “community-based censorship” and argues that “self-inflicted or socially sanctioned suppression…reshapes public discourse with new imperatives.” In addition to full-length articles, we also sought out shorter pieces based on case studies; both shorter pieces included here further explore the boundaries of censorship in theatre and performance. Rowan Jalso offers a brief survey of contemporary censorship in the United States with respect to educational institutions; Patrizia Paolini compares a set of interviews she conducted after experiencing her own censorship during Ms. Paolini’s Phantasmagoria Cabaret , an experimental cabaret performance in London de-programmed due to controversy over depictions of the partially nude body of an older male performer. Finally, we conclude our issue with a roundtable on censorship, featuring three ATDS members joining the editors to discuss recent experiences with censorship on campus and to theorize tactics for engaging with censorship and censure at the university level: in performance, in the classroom, and as administrators and activists. As we continue to navigate our current political turmoil, it may be a good time for us all to reflect on the ways in which censorship derives its power from fear: notably, the fear of future negative action, the loss of liberty or funding or reputation. Thus, censorship makes institutions cautious and individuals afraid to speak—perhaps especially in ways that can be recorded or published. With this issue, we invite you to consider the roles that censorship and public censure play in our lives at this pivotal time in history, and how, as scholars, artists, and teachers, we can help each other navigate and/or mitigate their impact on our work, our lives, and our pedagogy. References John H. Houchin, Censorship of the American Theatre in the Twentieth Century , Cambridge (2003), 1. Janelle Reinelt, “The Limits of Censorship,” Theatre Research International 32:1 (March 2007), 3; emphasis added. Indeed, it is possible that Mahmoud Khalil’s warrantless arrest by ICE for speaking about the Palestinian genocide was caused, in part, by the social media and internet calls for his arrest by two organizations: Betar US and Canary Mission: Shapiro, Eliza (March 9, 2025). “ICE Arrests Pro-Palestinian Activist at Columbia”. The New York Times . Footnotes About The Author(s) DAVID BISAHA (he/him) is an Associate Professor of Theatre at Binghamton University, SUNY. He currently researches theatre design history and the more recent history of immersive and participatory performance. His book American Scenic Design and Freelance Professionalism was published in 2022 by Southern Illinois University Press. PRIA RUTH WILLIAMS (she/her) is an Instructional Associate Professor at the University of Mississippi and teaches for both the Department of Theatre & Film and the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies. Her research has focused on the Living Theatre company's early period between 1947 and 1963, feminist critiques of theatre and film, and the work of playwright Mac Wellman through the lens of cognitive science. She also makes music as These Liminal Days and can be found on most streaming services and at https://theseliminaldays.com . Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Censorship/Public Censure and Performance Today: Special Issue Introduction Remembering Censorship in the World Premiere of Seán O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned: Lafayette, Indiana, 1959 The Stage as Networked Battleground: Dissent and Censorship in Contemporary Canadian Theatre and Performance Censor/Censure: A Roundtable Which of These Are Censorship? The Divide Between Prior Restraint and Soft Censorship How Can an Artist Respond to Censorship? The Dilemma That Faces Contemporary Creatives in the UK The LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project: A Roundtable Conversation Life is Drag: Documenting Spectacle as Resistance An Interview with Rachel Rampleman Middle Eastern American Theatre: Communities, Cultures, and Artists. Michael Malek Najjar. Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2021; Pp. xvi + 237. Lessons from Our Students: Meditations on Performance Pedagogy. Stacey Cabaj and Andrea Odinov. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 126 Choreographing Dirt: Movement, Performance, and Ecology in the Anthropocene. Angenette Spalink. Studies in Theatre, Ecology, and Performance Series, no. 3. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 116. Fauci and Kramer Our Town Frankenstein Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Benjamin Gillespie Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 37 2 Visit Journal Homepage The LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project: A Roundtable Conversation Benjamin Gillespie By Published on July 1, 2025 Download Article as PDF This roundtable brings together key voices in the LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project including co-directors Linda S. Chapman and Alyce Dissette along with Ain Gordon and Moe Angelos . The discussion offers a behind-the-scenes look at a significant initiative to preserve the legacies of eleven pioneering LGBTQ+ performance artists including Ain Gordon, the Five Lesbian Brothers, Lola Pashalinski, Carmelita Tropicana, John Kelly, Richard Move, and Ishmael Houston-Jones. The project, which began in 2024, is housed under the Pick Up Performance Company and was born out of a shared recognition that queer performance histories—especially those emerging from the experimental downtown New York scene—remain vulnerable to erasure. The group discusses the logistical, political, and ethical stakes of preserving ephemeral theatre, dance, and performance work, particularly when much of it was created in non-traditional theatre spaces such as bars and clubs and beyond institutional frameworks. Overall, the roundtable explores questions of archival accessibility, digitization, and the necessity of preservation from the unique perspective of living artists shaping their own histories and how they are told. This wide-ranging conversation reflects on personal and intergenerational connections and the role of community in shaping how queer art is made and remembered. It also considers the archive as an artistic undertaking that resists linearity through embracing the complexity and contradictions embedded in queer history. Finally, the respondents offer an intimate and pragmatic look at how queer collective memory, aesthetics, and activism intersect to shape a more inclusive historical record of performance. This roundtable conversation was conducted on May 23, 2025 via Zoom. It has been edited for clarity and brevity. Benjamin Gillespie: I thought we could start by having each of you briefly introduce how you got involved with the LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project. Linda S. Chapman: I left New York Theatre Workshop in 2020 after twenty-six years with the company. In 2023, Alyce and Ain asked me to join the board of the Pick Up Performance Company following the death of Ain’s father and co-artistic director, David Gordon. They asked me to help develop new projects for the company, extending the work that Ain and David did to making new work with “friends and family”, very much a part of the ethos of the Pick Up Performance Company. I had already begun preliminary work on organizing my longtime partner Lola Pashalinski’s archive. Alyce had worked with David Gordon on creating an incredible digital archive for him over the course of six years ( https://davidgordon.nyc/ ) which I had followed closely, and I thought maybe she could advise me on creating an archive for Lola. Understanding that, for a performer, it’s more difficult to raise funds to support archive work, we started thinking: Who else might we invite into this idea to help? Of course, Ain and Alyce were right there—and would need Ain’s work organized. And I had been in conversation with Moe and the Five Lesbian Brothers about their thoughts around archives and where they might go. There was some nascent interest already, and then, organically, the rest of the group came together. The project evolved out of our conversations together. Carmelita Tropicana joined in. Alyce was doing work with John Kelly and so he joined. Ishmael Houston-Jones and Richard Move were also artists from the community that we deeply admired. It developed organically out of the desire to preserve this work. Moe Angeles (right) on the stoop beside the St. Marks Baths on the street of that same name, being documented by Rio Sophia (left) from Queer/Art/Mentorship. Photo by Jess Dobkin Moe Angelos: I’m a downtown theater/performance maker and have been a character in that landscape for a long time. I’m one of the Five Lesbian Brothers. Linda produced all of our plays at New York Theatre Workshop. We are all connected. I think at some point I was kvetching, “What are we going to do with all our stuff?” because there isn’t just one, but five of us. We’re a company. I knew it was going to be some work to figure out what to do with the archive because there are a lot of voices who might want different things. The Brothers have figured that out, but I was informally consulting with Linda, asking “How do we go forward?” Because we’re getting old. One of us will die eventually. Our first concern was not to leave a huge mess for the other Brothers. Just to make it cleaner. That tumbled into a whole set of questions: How do we collect, catalog, digitize, store? Who’s going to take our stuff? Because it’s important. It’s a piece of history—self-made playwrights, devisers, whatever we are. Sometimes I look back at performance work that was done and think, “Oh my God, that was an amazing idea!” But it’s gone—forgotten. Couldn’t some of those things be captured for others so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel? That’s how I got scooped up into this fantastic world of the project. Alyce was gung-ho on the project and kindly asked the Five Lesbian Brothers to be a part of it. One offshoot of the archive project is generating collaborations within the group as well. Ain just directed my revised show This Used to Be Gay last weekend which was a great success. I learned so much from the process. Ain, you did a beautiful job directing. I got nothing but wonderful feedback, especially the new visual elements. It really enhanced the piece. Ain Gordon: There’s nothing to decorate and stage if there isn’t a script. Thank you for making that, Moe. I enjoyed it. I’m a fan. With regards to the project, there are a couple things I want to mention. My father and I co-directed the Pick Up Performance Company. He died in 2022. There were the tangible realities of going from a two-artist budget to a one-artist budget project company, and questions about how to practically handle that. It felt jerry-rigged to bring someone else in as co-director, but familial extension is in the DNA of the company. Alyce and I moved to the idea of “friends and family”—artists who have worked with me or who worked with David who don’t have infrastructure for their projects, bringing them under the Pick Up Company umbrella to offer a home for their work. It felt like a way to serve the community and grow the company in a way that feels right. Orbiting conversations about archiving happened without me at first. Things do happen behind my back! ( laughs ). But it eventually came back to me. As a playwright and theatre-maker, I do a lot of work sourcing archives and overlooked stories. I have strong feelings about how history is traditionally constructed and how people are sucked into believing it’s a fact when, in reality, it’s just an interpretive engine. Archives also tend to be for the converted. People go looking for what they already know is there. That’s a problem. We talked a lot about that and how to pierce that wall. We also talked about how we might not be able to secure real support for our individual archives, but that a critical mass could attract interest and also offer a contextual portrait of a geographic, generational moment. Over the years, as theatre-makers we didn’t all collaborate directly all the time, but we were side by side seeing each other’s work. We were making work in parallel. That interaction is useful for researchers and for young queer theatre-makers to know about. Alyce Dissette: I feel as if I’m the more pragmatic member of the team ( laughs ). I recall having a coffee over Christmas break two years ago with Moe and Linda. They were talking to me about where to go with Lola’s archive, where to go with the Five Lesbian Brothers’s archive. I’m not a complicated thinker. I just said, “You’re never going to raise money for individual archives. So one way to approach this may be to put us in a group—a group that made some sort of sense for us to work together.” That conversation led to other conversations. We brought in Ain—because not too much secret goes on without him knowing! ( laughs .) And then we all talked for a while. Ain, Linda, and I curated the other artists that would participate—thinking about what made sense aesthetically and practically in terms of forming a group initiative. Then we tested the waters to see if we could actually raise money for such a thing. It was one of those wonderful moments where nobody was negative about this idea or about these artists. It’s a very special group we’ve created. They represent a time when two things were happening in the field: first, they were emerging as queer artists and gaining legitimacy in the downtown art scene in New York; second, they were simultaneously being hit with the AIDS epidemic. Those two factors were major in the careers of these people. We also have a generational divide. Lola is our oldest artist. Richard Move is our youngest artist. That’s also representational of the impact they had on the field and on LGBTQ+ rights. A lot of the artists that came through while they were working died. A lot of people died. And people seem to forget that. So, I said that I would be co-director of the project. But I didn’t want to do it alone, and Ain suggested Linda as my partner in crime. We’ve also formed an amazing group of advisors representing the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the Library of Congress, the National Theatre Archive Project, and other movers and shakers in the field. They’ve been more than generous with their time and support. Gillespie: It’s wonderful how all of you are connected and have a common vision that honors individual artists’ perspectives. I should mention that this project also relates to the work I’m doing in my scholarship. I’m currently working on an anthology about Split Britches’s work that documents the last two decades of work by Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver including scripts, interviews, essays, along with a companion digital archive with photos and video to accompany the book. More broadly, I’m interested in queer legacy, performance archives, and how intergenerational connections can be made and sustained between younger and older queer artists. What is the mission of the LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project, and what are its central goals? Dissette: The two central portions of the mission are 1) To create legitimate archives that go into a permanent collection so that the work will be saved, and 2) To figure out a way to make the material publicly accessible as opposed to disappearing into a collection only scholars can access. Obviously, the process of archiving a career, a body of work, is a huge undertaking. It takes a lot of time and work. But then where does it go? We don’t want it to disappear in boxes. One of the things we did with David Gordon’s archive is make it publicly accessible online, and it is available now ( https://davidgordon.nyc/ ). Because the Mellon Foundation gave us the funding for that project, we were able to create an in-depth artistic legacy that people can access online. That’s a new thing in the digital age. It’s exploding in some places and nonexistent in others. But for us, both parts are essential: a legitimate collection that lives somewhere, and public access. Ideally, there will be public access for the entire group so that anyone can search and access all eleven artists in the project. We don’t know where that will land yet. We can work on that while doing the pragmatic work of assembling the archives—which is a long and complicated process. Chapman: Could I just add a subsection of our mission? Alyce and I don’t feel we can do more than help put these archives together, but we’d like to distribute some of our findings and the work we’re doing to support the larger community. We’re developing inventory systems, making connections throughout the community of people interested in theatre and performance archives. We’re organizing an event in June (2025) on digital archives, bringing together the American LGBTQ+ Museum, The Feminist Institute, and our project. We’re seeking opportunities to meet people in the community. We’re reaching out to the major archives including Fales Library at NYU, the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and others. We’re hoping to contribute beyond just building the archives to help disseminate what we’re learning for others to benefit. Gillespie: And you did an exhibition at BAM last year right? Dissette: The BAM exhibition was huge for us. It really helped kick things off. BAM’s artistic leaders were instrumental partners. At the time, BAM was producing Taylor Mac’s Bark of Millions and they wanted to show there was an existing LGBTQ+ artistic legacy—that this work didn’t just appear out of nowhere. There was whole history and community of artists practicing for decades. Amy Casello is a great thinker and supporter of it all. Gillespie: Is BAM also one of your community partners? Dissette: Yes. We did a few events in conjunction with the exhibition last year. We are in conversation with BAM about future collaborations. Institutions get busy, especially now, but we want to maintain a community around this project throughout its development. We’ll do a few events every year as we work, and BAM is certainly a part of that community. Gillespie: I want to ask about the actual archives themselves. You mentioned the digital archiving process. What are some of the challenges or difficulties with building performance-based archives? It’s obviously quite different than other genres of art when you’re archiving ephemeral work. Gordon: One of the challenges is right here among us: there are very different types of performance histories across the artists in our group. Carmelita, John, and to some extent the Five Lesbian Brothers did a lot of work in clubs, which are very rarely documented. Or if they are, they’re on very endangered media formats. This is part of what I mean when I say that history is a kind of fictive engine. There are economic factors that make some work easier to document and some harder. Then there’s the question of how the archive tells the story of why things are missing or absent from the record, or do we just passively let the absence remain? What is the narration that frames that absence for an uninitiated viewer? Dissette: These are very particular archives. They’re artist-driven, not institutionally driven, and that’s a very different approach. We’re using the David Gordon Archive as a model because David made all the decisions about how he wanted his work left behind. There’s video, scripts—we had to figure out how to organize it so it could be accessible. Then there’s the boring digital labor of scanning everything. When we sent his forty boxes to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, we had digital copies of everything meaningful. David contextualized everything by writing what he called “scripts,” but they’re really stories—decade by decade—about how the work was made and what happened. That matched his philosophy that art and life are the same thing. Each artist will need to find their voice in this process—how they want to frame their body of work and what they want people to know. Then there’s the more conventional archive methodology: organizing scripts, video, letters, documents. There’s just a lot of stuff, and we need to figure out what will be saved and what digitized. David’s online archive is organized by decade. All the work from that decade is listed. You click on the work, and everything—programs, photos, etc.—are accessible from that page. This isn’t something you can do on WordPress. It was professionally programmed. We hope to have resources to do something similar. But first we have to do the grunt work—organizing archive materials and making them accessible. And it’s a lot of labor. Most of us don’t even know what we have yet. We’re just starting. Angelos: And then there’s the inherent problem with live performance. We’re doing the work to be in the room with the people in the room. It’s not necessarily intended to be recorded. We’re not making a movie. We’re not making a video. It’s ephemeral. You can’t really capture what was happening behind the camera at a club. And we did a lot of one-offs—someone’s benefit, an avant-garde-arama, and other things like that. We’d write a specific thing for a one-off event and maybe all that’s left behind is a lyric sheet. So that’s interesting too. We did a lot of that type of work. We all did. Dissette: We were just talking about that yesterday with Carmelita—about starting to organize things. She has all these sheets of paper, and now they need to be organized in some way. Chapman: In the case of Lola’s work with the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, they weren’t able to record it most of it. They didn’t have access to equipment in those days. We’re talking about the late 1960s into the early 1980s when Lola left the company. That was the time people were just starting to record performances. So there’s very little live documentation—at least from that period. With the Five Lesbian Brothers, and with David and Ain’s work, some performances are documented. But it’s uneven. The other thing I want to add, and this isn’t about digitization per se, but I think an important part of our mission is that our artists are all living. They’re all still alive and are making the decisions about what they want to be archived. With Lola, for instance, we’re doing oral histories and transcribing those as a form of storytelling—the kind Ain described so beautifully. Gillespie: It’s important that you mentioned that these are artist-led projects. Oftentimes, archives aren’t consolidated by the artists themselves. That’s what’s so exciting about this project. The artists have a lot of say in how their work will be digitized or archived, but also in how that legacy will look in public-facing contexts. Gordon: Yes, and the word “consolidation” is exactly the one I want to avoid. There’s a project I did for the Mark Taper Forum. I have fourteen of the twenty-five drafts of that script. I want all fourteen to be in the archive. I want everyone to know what hell that was. Gillespie: I understand that impulse because then you get to see the artist’s process. That’s a big part of the work. Gordon: It fights what I think writing history tends to do—making it seem like there was a series of steps that led inevitably to the thing that’s now historicized. And that’s rarely the case in creating performance. I’m interested in making the archive demonstrate the chaos of the creative process. History narrows an array of events into a traceable sequence that appears to have led to the thing it wishes to historicize. But that’s the opposite of what actually occurs, at least for me. That’s not how any work comes to be. In a lot of these downtown shows, someone would ask you to participate in a show. I’d say, “Okay, great!” I had a title but hadn’t written a word before I was invited to participate. Chapman: Here’s an example. Lola and I made a piece about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas that we worked on for many years. It relates back to how HIV impacted our work. We started the piece with our friend Georg Osterman, another member of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. We were making a piece about Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson. George passed away in 1995. We had a draft script and we were ready to go into production. But without Georg—because the work was so personal to both George and Lola—we didn’t see how we could go forward. Our friends and community encouraged us to think differently. They didn’t want all that work to be lost. That led us to evolve a new piece about Gertrude and Alice. But that work would never have come about without the AIDS epidemic. That’s the unwieldy kind of story that we’re documenting. It’s part of telling the story of a whole era. Gillespie: Do you feel there will be difficulties navigating how to tell this story without narrowing it—or “consolidating” it? (I promise I won’t use that word again, Ain!) How will you present it publicly in a way that’s visible to people who might not have been around or don’t necessarily know the context. One thing about this group is that you all knew each other. You were all working in the same time and place. You saw a lot of the work. But a future viewer may not have. And it’s still important for them to try to understand it. Moe: What do you think the challenges might be in telling your story through the archive, or the Five Lesbian Brothers’ story? Angelos: All of what we’re talking about is rooted in personal relationships, right? That’s the part I don’t know how to make legible—other than “we were in the same room at the same time.” But it’s such an important part of this work. It’s the “family business,” as the Pick Up Performance Company says. It’s about who you know. I don’t know that it’s so different from insider trading—it’s who you know, and who shares some sensibility in a context. We were all in New York City. And what did that mean in that era? The city was very different. You could still hang out your shingle and start making shows without an MFA from Yale or wherever. No dis on that, but I don’t know if it’s possible to do it the same way now. There was this autodidactic process, and we were teaching ourselves as we went. That feels very different now. It’s hard to make it legible without sounding like, “It used to be better—get off my lawn.” But it really made a difference. We didn’t have to work four days out of five for the landlord. I don’t know what young artists do now. I don’t know how they do it. Gillespie: And your work in This Used to Be Gay really captures that history in a unique way. You’re calling back to a queer history that helps contextualize the work being made and tell that story. It’s also very funny. Chapman: I worked at Theater for the New City in the early eighties. It was my first administrative job. That’s where I met Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver, who had worked with Spiderwoman Theater. That was even before Split Britches emerged from the work they did together. I saw the first two WOW festivals—before there was a dedicated WOW space. In her show, Moe takes us back to the original WOW Café theatre on 11th Street. Then we move 4th Street. I’m very connected to that history. I’m motivated and inspired by the begats—seeing Gordon’s work at Dance Theater Workshop, knowing he came out of Judson Church, where George Bartenieff and Crystal Field had worked. Those connections, how these artists influenced each other beyond our group—it’s eternally fascinating! I get excited about how these elements of community affect aesthetics, how we make work, what we’re interested in. I think our particular brain trust in the project—our artists—is really dynamic. There’s so much potential in how we relate and communicate across aesthetics and generations. There’s so much more to explore beyond sorting papers and digitizing materials. We’re telling the story of work in the East Village, a sort of performance phenomenon. You can’t recreate those moments or that time and place. It’s unique. Ain Gordon (left) with Josh Quillen in “Relics and their Humans" at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. Photo: Darrell Hoeman Gordon: I think telling the story is the same as designing the experience of the archive itself, especially for someone arriving at it online. It's like the first ten minutes of a live performance. I ask the same questions: What will they see first? What will set the tone? How do we make it feel the way we want it to feel? How do we disassemble the linear steppingstones that history likes to create and convey some of the randomness, the chaos, and the chance? Those things can happen—it depends on how it’s designed, what kind of contextualizing the artists do. Personally, I loathe finding aids. I won’t even read them anymore—I go straight to the indexing. Because the finding aid does exactly what I don’t want done. So how do we rethink finding aids for these archives? Could we write something different? Maybe six different people write six different versions, and users can choose which one to follow. I don’t know, but I want us to think about that. Chapman: And we’re talking about people who were groundbreaking. These are artists telling stories that had never been told before. They were pushing against years of repression and silencing. And once you break that open . . . who knows? I don’t think we’re finished exploring that yet. Dissette: It’s a little overwhelming, to be honest. But one good thing about archiving is that it takes time. It’s not like a production. We will learn things as we go, and I’m counting on that. We certainly made it up as we went along with David’s archive. I have colleagues who work in tech. I worked at the Voyager Company that produced those CD-ROMs. I ran the first digital art contest back in the 90s. I’m interested in the process. And what we gain are opportunities that emerge within that process. That’s the most interesting part of this work to me. Gillespie: The digital archives of David Gordon ( https://davidgordon.nyc/ ) and Lola Pashalinski ( https://performingartslegacy.org/pashalinski/ ), as they stand now, are kind of independent of this project, right? Do you imagine that the archives you’re assembling in this project will resemble the work on those archives? Dissette: David’s archive is independent and is strictly a model for what we’re doing. It’s not part of this project except to show what’s possible. Lola’s current online presence is through the Entertainment Community Fund’s Legacy Project . That’s another kind of framework where many artists are represented. They designed the portal. It’s a possible model for us, but I’d like something more complex, technologically speaking. They did a really good job creating infrastructure where people could enter information. But my fantasy is that we partner with a major institution to create a portal—a really complicated portal—where this would be one entity, and other entities could also live in the future. Gordon: In fantasy land, all of us would be on one portal. If you searched “1980,” you’d get everything all eleven artists made in 1980—not just one. Dissette: That’s the cool thing about David’s archive—it has a search engine. You can’t do that in many places. As the technology improves, there are more possibilities. But there are also difficult decisions. Video will be all over the place. There’s no way to consolidate it. Ishmael Houston-Jones has something like thirty videos at the NYPL through Dance Theater Workshop. In David’s case, we partnered with the NYPL Performing Arts Library since his work was going into their permanent collection. So now there’s a direct link to the NYPL Digital Collections where David’s videos live. The public can access it online. But we don’t know yet what will be streamable outside the NYPL system. Right now, to view most of it, you need to physically go to the library. Sometimes, there’s a lack of sophisticated understanding about what websites can be. David’s site was designed by someone who is a media artist, someone from MIT—an artist in her own right. She and David talked through the vision. Then she came back with a structure for the archive. That’s different than someone just making categories in WordPress. It’s a different level. Chapman: Also, the Legacy Project site for Lola is not a complete archive. It does have a fairly developed chronology of all the work. But it doesn’t have all the photos. It doesn’t have a lot of audio. It’s material that we could easily transfer to another kind of site if we want to do that as we develop. But it’s not complete. We’re further ahead because we actually do have a dedicated archivist, but these are incredibly time-consuming processes. Gillespie: It sounds like the archives, in an ideal world, are kind of a new collaborative art project where the artists themselves will collaborate with a media artist to think about how this will look and be mapped out in a non-traditional, nonlinear way. That is really interesting because it’s kind of a queering of the archive itself. It’s not chronological. You want these to tell the story in a way that’s messy and real and shows the connections between artists. Dissette: It’s important to say also that they wouldn’t have access to anything without producers, which in this project are Linda and myself. The producers are the people who are facilitating a process. Just putting an archivist with an artist will not be enough. There must be someone guiding the process at some level. I mean, it’s like a show. Chapman : I think making new work out of the archival materials is something a lot of us are interested in right now. Dissette: David Gordon named it “Archivography.” The performances were called “Live Archivography,” and then there’s the website. I think also he resented being relegated to historicizing as the only fundable action. He had more to give. And I think that’s actually the benefit of us all doing it before he died. Gillespie : I’m curious about funding. What is your approach right now, or what are your plans for procuring funding to help with this project? Angelos: Oh, we’re going to ask the NEA and NEH immediately! ( laughs ). Their new mandate—what the NEA is supposed to do now—is fund disaster recovery. And, you know, this is a disaster! Gordon: We’re all in recovery. Angelos: Just little gallows humor there . . . Chapman : Alyce is going through all the various funding agencies that we can think of. And Ain and Alyce particularly have really developed great language which we are using. We’re leaving no stone unturned. Of course, anybody we ever knew who ever gave any money as an individual is getting approached. We’ve had a very generous anonymous donation. Because of some former funding that the Pick Up had, we’re able to start making this a project that is part of the broader work of the company. Dissette: Having been raising money for a long time, one of the wonderful things about raising money for this project is that everybody we’ve talked to likes the project. Nobody had told us it’s a terrible idea. Nobody. And nobody’s been even middle-of-the-road about it. That’s been the response universally so far. We got initial startup money from the Howard Gilman Foundation which has helped. But we will need more. We’re approaching some major foundations about that. And the fact that we're committed to making the process be part of the community—working with the community—is key. And so NYSCA and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs have been supportive of this, in addition to our other projects though the Pick Up Performance Company. Funding takes a while, especially big funding. They commit money years in advance. But we’re working on it. The artists are also helping. Gillespie : Do you see additional projects like Moe’s This Used to Be Gay with the Pick Up Performance Company connected to the project? Gordon: If the artists are interested in it then absolutely. It’s artist-driven from our standpoint. Some of these artists have enough infrastructure that they wouldn’t necessarily want to do that. Some don’t. It would be very case by case. We’re absolutely open to it, and also in no way mandating it. Gillespie We’ve talked about digital archives, but what about the physical archives? Have you thought about what to do with all the paper? Chapman : Absolutely. And we do also have other artifacts besides just the paper. Those are all big questions that come up as we’re putting these collections together. But I think the physical collections are really important too. Dissette : We have said that the physical archives could go to different repositories as long as the virtual one unites them all. But there are some people who are also interested in perhaps the physical archives going into one repository. So that’s a moving part of a conversation now. Collage image created for the LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project – in top center photo left to right Co-directors Linda S. Chapman, Alyce Dissette, archivist Vivian Stein, Advisor Robert Croonquist References Footnotes About The Author(s) MOE ANGELOS is a theatre artist and writer. She's one of the OBIE-Award winning Five Lesbian Brothers and has been a member of the Wow Café Theatre in NYC since 1981. She's a main collaborator in The Builders Association, creating media-infused performances that have toured all over the universe that is accessible to non-billionaires. She has collaborated with many downtown NYC luminaries including Holly Hughes, Lisa Kron, Anne Bogart, Lois Weaver, Kate Stafford, Carmelita Tropicana, Brooke O’Harra, Half Straddle, New Georges and The Ridiculous Theatrical Company. She has been a mentor in Queer/Art/Mentorship several times and in Toronto, her work has been presented at FADO Centre for Performance Art and Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. In October 2024 she was in the latest Builders' premiere at the Skirball Center at NYU, Atlas Drugged which is about artificial intelligence's insidious influence on the democratic process, which now seems more plausible than ever. During Covid-19, she appeared on Zoom, Twitch and Streamyard and currently by day, she works in United Scenic Artists 829 painting scenery and helping make Hollywood dreams come true. Moe is not on the socials so don't try to click and subscribe but if you're curious ask ChatGPT about her. LINDA S. CHAPMAN (Co-Director LGBTQ+ Artist Archive Project) is Founding President of Youth Arts New York (YANY) providing experiences in the arts, science, and civil society to engage youth in building a future of peace, social justice, and sustainability. A current member of the Board of the Pick Up Performance Company, she retired in 2020 as the Associate Artistic Director of New York Theatre Workshop. Chapman joined the company in 1995 and served as an instrumental curator, advocate, and collaborator. Prior to her time at NYTW, she was Managing Director of The Wooster Group from 1983—94. She was a co-producer of DYKE TV, a grass roots, public access program, made by and for the lesbian community. Linda is also co-writer and performer of the Obie Award-winning Gertrude and Alice: A Likeness to Loving with her life partner of forty years Lola Pashalinski, their two-character play about Gertrude Stein and her longtime companion Alice B. Toklas, directed by Anne Bogart. She co-adapted Ann Bannon’s lesbian classics The Beebo Brinker Chronicles for the stage with playwright Kate Moira Ryan. The play was awarded a GLAAD Media Award and nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. She is a Lilly Award and Prelude ‘23 Frankie Award winner. ALYCE DISSETTE (Co-Director LGBTQ+ Artist Archive Project) is a producer for performing, visual, film, and digital artists who has worked in a wide range of venues and projects from staff member in the Metropolitan Opera Presentations Department to former Executive Producer of the PBS national series, “Alive from Off Center,” and on digital media productions with the Voyager Co. She has worked with hundreds of artists including filmmakers Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, François Girard, Mark Pellington, visual artist James Turrell, author Art Spiegelman, and in the performing arts, Sir Richard Alston, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Karin Coonrod, Ain Gordon, David Gordon, Philip Glass, Nona Hendryx, John Kelly, Urban Bush Women, and Robert Wilson. She has served on the Board of Directors for Dance/USA and the Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York. She produced the multi-faceted archive project for director/choreographer/writer David Gordon that is considered a model in the field. She has been the Producing Director for the Pick Up Performance Company since 2001. AIN GORDON is a three-time Obie Award-winning writer/director/actor, a two-time NYFA recipient a Guggenheim Fellow in Playwriting, and a Creative Capital Awardee. Gordon’s work often focuses on marginalized/forgotten histories and the obscured figures found within. Recent projects include Relics And Their Humans : collaborating with Josh Quillen to frame a real-life couple from Dover, OH, at Krannert Center (IL), Arizona Arts Live, Wexner Center (OH), and La MaMa (NY); These Don’t Easily Scatter : excavating the early years of the AIDS crisis in Philadelphia, in collaboration with the William Way LGBT Community Center with support from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage plus development at Boston University; Radicals In Miniature : collaborating with Josh Quillen on a series of requiems to personal icons at Baryshnikov Arts (NY), International Festival of Arts & Ideas, Quick Center, Connecticut College (all CT), Williams College and The Yard (both MA); and 217 Boxes Of Dr. Henry Anonymous : culminating a 2-year residency at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania focused on Dr. John Fryer who, in 1972, disguised as Dr. Anonymous opposed the American Psychiatric Association’s classification of homosexuality as a disease at the Painted Bride (PA), Baryshnikov Arts (NY), Transylvania University (KY) and the Center For The Art of Performance UCLA. Gordon’s work has also been seen at BAM Next Wave, New York Theater Workshop, the Mark Taper Forum, Flynn Center, HERE Arts Center, DiverseWorks, Performance Space 122/PSNY, Dance Theater Workshop/NYLA, George St Playhouse (NJ), and MASS MoCA, among many others. Gordon is a former Core Writer of the Playwright’s Center (MN), has twice held the post of Visiting Artist at the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage (PA), a former Artist-In-Residence at NYU Tisch School of The Arts, former Resident Artist at The Hermitage (FL), and was a 2020 Pabst Endowed Writer-In-Residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Gordon has been a Director of the Pick Up Performance Co(s) since 1992. Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Censorship/Public Censure and Performance Today: Special Issue Introduction Remembering Censorship in the World Premiere of Seán O’Casey’s The Drums of Father Ned: Lafayette, Indiana, 1959 The Stage as Networked Battleground: Dissent and Censorship in Contemporary Canadian Theatre and Performance Censor/Censure: A Roundtable Which of These Are Censorship? The Divide Between Prior Restraint and Soft Censorship How Can an Artist Respond to Censorship? The Dilemma That Faces Contemporary Creatives in the UK The LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Project: A Roundtable Conversation Life is Drag: Documenting Spectacle as Resistance An Interview with Rachel Rampleman Middle Eastern American Theatre: Communities, Cultures, and Artists. Michael Malek Najjar. Critical Companions Series. London: Methuen Drama, 2021; Pp. xvi + 237. Lessons from Our Students: Meditations on Performance Pedagogy. Stacey Cabaj and Andrea Odinov. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 126 Choreographing Dirt: Movement, Performance, and Ecology in the Anthropocene. Angenette Spalink. Studies in Theatre, Ecology, and Performance Series, no. 3. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 116. Fauci and Kramer Our Town Frankenstein Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

William DeVito, Juanita Mejia Restrepo, M. Nance, Robert Pike, and Rufus ZaeJoDaeus Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 38 1 Visit Journal Homepage ZAZ William DeVito, Juanita Mejia Restrepo, M. Nance, Robert Pike, and Rufus ZaeJoDaeus By Published on January 26, 2026 Download Article as PDF ZAZ By Ryan K. Johnson  Directed by Ryan K. Johnson  Wexner Center for the Arts, The Ohio State University Columbus, OH September 5th, 2025 Reviewed by William DeVito, Juanita Mejia Restrepo, M. Nance, Robert Pike, and Rufus ZaeJoDaeus On September 5, 2025, the five of us experienced the dance company SOLE Defined’s world premiere of ZAZ at The Ohio State University’s Wexner Center for the Arts. According to the company’s website, SOLE Defined’s mission is to create pieces “designed to evoke the senses, creating sonic and kinetic performative archives of Black American History through the lens of African Diasporic Percussive Dance methodologies.” ZAZ powerfully realizes this goal: in ninety minutes the show’s director and playwright Ryan K. Johnson leads an energetic cast of six to manifest an expressive docudrama that performs the lived experience of the Black community of New Orleans and reckons with the devastating legacy of Hurricane Katrina. ZAZ deftly casts the theatrical space as a living palimpsest where oral histories, news reports, diverse dance forms, and mourning rituals materialize and dissipate through the physicality of these dancing storytellers. Nearly to the date, this run marked the twentieth anniversary of the disaster that laid bare the social and racial undercurrents dominating America. SOLE Defined’s immersive work responds to that moment by shepherding the bodies in the space—performers and audience alike—in a theatrical experience of shared kinesthesia. ZAZ (Cast: Claude Alexander III, Duante Fyall, Jada Hicks, Quynn Johnson, Ryan K. Johnson, Shannan E. Johnson, Jodeci Milhouse, Funmi Sofola), photo: Becca Marcela Oviatt. The production’s intentional flow submerged the current of audience’s bodies in its scenography as soon as they entered the space. Throughout four audience banks oriented around and facing each side of the set’s central dance floor, we sat among the fifty-some chairs at hazily lit cocktail tables that transformed the black box space into “ZAZ,” the titular New Orleans jazz club. Audience members were scattered throughout the space; some sat in a corner, while others of us shared tables with our backs facing a projected wall displaying performance information integrated with family photographs, posters, and other trappings found in a French Quarter establishment. The seating arrangement fostered an unexpected theatrical communion, which was continued in ZAZ’ s initial moments: amid jazz-infused hip-hop beats, ZAZ ’s host — played by Shannan E. Johnson — beckoned the audience to join her on the dance floor. Several audience members jumped in and improvised, troubling the boundaries between spectator and spectated. As individual actors dressed in everyday clothing subtly integrated into the crowd, they herded all the moving bodies in a coordinated line dance. The collective energy was effervescent, drawing all — even those who remained sitting — into the joyous community of New Orleans.   The celebration was cut short by the wail of sirens. News clips of the impending hurricane replaced the wall projections, sending us back in time to the weeks preceding August 23rd, 2005. The audience returned to their seats, leaving Johnson onstage to narrate this piece’s origins and his individual connection to the “Big Easy.” Then, this literal calm-before-the-storm shattered, and the audience was engulfed by a frightening simulation of Hurricane Katrina. From an overhead projection, the scuffed dance floor rippled as the water droplets of Katrina’s rain invaded the narrative space. The bright noise of New Orleans horns transformed into a somber-toned spiritual intertwined with the roar of helicopters. The wild abandon of social dance gave way to an athletic pas-du-deux between two embattled survivors struggling for a rescuer’s attention, their movements illuminated by isolated shafts of search lights. This was ZAZ ’s power in action: the protean, visceral design emerged through a combination of audience immersion and integrated sound, projection, and lights. As the past evaporated with each scene, experience accumulated on the performing bodies. In nearly every sense, the body was the chief investment of ZAZ . In lieu of distinct set pieces, ZAZ championed the visual effect of the promenade. Performers ebbed, flowed, and exploded onto the scene through the nooks and crannies of the entire space, causing the audience to constantly reorient themselves toward the next area of focus. The sonic world of the play married the quintessentially Black musical forms of jazz, hip-hop, and spirituals with the polyrhythmic resonances of body percussion . The cast of ZAZ , photo: Becca Marcela Oviatt. Floor mics caught these punctuated flows along with the scrapes of sand dancing and raps of tap shoes. In one sequence, as the ensemble danced ferociously, they lit the darkened stage with headlamps affixed to their foreheads, re-centering the locus of control from the light grid to the individual performers. ZAZ’s narrative structure prioritized corporeality over character as Johnson’s individual arc melded with the collage of collective experience. The performers cycled through a variety of characters, transforming their voices and changing clothing frequently, and the action never lingered on a single story long enough for emotive identification. Hurricane Katrina’s effects on the entire community were impressed upon all the attendees. In a particularly poignant moment, cast members dressed as government officials demanded the audience leave their seats. Dividing us by gender, the rescuers marshaled us throughout the audience banks and declared that we were now “displaced.” This aestheticized imposition harkened to the actual displacement of thousands of New Orleans’ s citizens that were shuttled across the country, never to return to their neighborhoods. In reenacting this harrowing experience, ZAZ highlighted the callousness of the government’s process using the actual bodies in the audience. This unique and effective method of theatrical identification crowned ZAZ ’s comprehensive commitment to the body.   As promised in their company mission, the feast of stimulation is the beating heart of ZAZ . Its use of theatrical space and the bodies within it heralded the lived — and living — resilience of a community assaulted, not only by nature, but by our leaders’ apathy towards their plight . ZAZ offers no prescriptive solutions, only experience. Yet, this vivid piece contends that acknowledging that experience is the first step towards a better future. As a coda, the closing moments of the performance advanced this proposition by returning us to the communal dance floor. Now burdened with knowledge and tempered with soul , the continued rhythms of the bodies joyously echoed forth after the storm.  The audience — pulled into the narrative, moved emotionally and physically — kept dancing even after the actors left the stage. References Footnotes About The Author(s) WILLIAM DEVITO is a theatre director and PhD student in Theatre at The Ohio State University. JUANITA MEJIA RESTREPO is a Master’s student in Theatre at The Ohio State University and recent graduate of the MFA Acting program at Purdue University. M. NANCE (they/them) is a PhD student in the Theatre program at The Ohio State University. As a theatre artist, their praxis centers dramaturgy, playwriting, and directing. ROBERT PIKE (he/him) is a theatre artist and PhD student in the Theatre program at The Ohio State University. RUFUS ZAEJODAEUS is a media design MFA at The Ohio State University with an emphasis on immersive experiences. 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 Fat Suits and Fat Futures: Ob*sity Drag in The Whale “The Star of the Aggregation”: Maggie Calloway’s Performances of Aggregation and Pleasure in Colonial Manila and British Malaya What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theatre "The Gift That Keeps on Giving": An Interview with Carmelita Tropicana Saying The F Word: A Conversation with Jordan Tannahill Staging Intimacy and Paradox through a Queer Lens: A Conversation with Jen Silverman Decentered Playwriting: Alternative Techniques for the Stage. Edited by Carolyn M. Dunn, Eric Micha Holmes, and Les Hunter. New York: Routledge, 2024; Pp. 212. Race and the Forms of Knowledge: Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research. Ben Spatz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2024; Pp. 314. Bloody Tyrants & Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. Marlis Schweitzer. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020; Pp. 276. Redface: Race, Performance, and Indigeneity. Bethany Hughes. New York: New York University Press, 2024; Pp. 272. The Brothers Size Dead Outlaw 2025 Oregon Shakespeare Festival ZAZ Introduction: New England Theatre in Review 2.0 Greater Boston’s Independent Theatres, 2024-25 Politics Take Center Stage in the Berkshires, 2024-25 Long Wharf Theatre, 2024-25 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Heather S. Nathans 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 Interviews and Afterviews on “Milestones in Black Theatre” Heather S. Nathans By Published on May 12, 2021 Download Article as PDF During the fall of 2020 I had the privilege of interviewing a group of groundbreaking scholars in Black Theatre: Harry Elam, Jr., E. Patrick Johnson, David Krasner, Bernth Lindfors, Sandra Richards, Sandra Shannon, and Harvey Young . Asking each of these distinguished colleagues the same four questions, I invited them to share their insights into the current state of the field, describe important milestones they have marked, and suggest those that have yet to be documented. What a gift it was to spend time with these generous colleagues and to hear their perspectives on the state of Black Theatre and Performance. The essay below represents a synthesis of roughly eight hours of live interviews as well as written responses to my questions. Additionally, in some instances, the interviewees mentioned works by rising generations of scholars and I reached out to those colleagues for their thoughts. I have included the comments of those who were able to respond in a concluding section entitled “Afterviews,” featuring Julius Fleming, La Donna Forsgren, Donatella Galella, Douglas A. Jones, Jr. , and Adrienne C. Macki. Certain themes echo throughout the comments below: The need to embrace Black Theatre as a site of both joy and resistance; the need to explore and document uncharted histories that lie outside traditional definitions or sites of “theatre,” and the opportunities to create more intersectional narratives of Black theatremakers. I offer my thanks to everyone involved for making the time to share their insights and for laying out a number of pathways and challenges for students and scholars studying Black Theatre’s past, present, and future. What critical junctures in the field of Black Theatre have yet to be marked? David Krasner began with a call to expand and complicate the Black Theatre canon by delving back into the archives for long-forgotten or lost works: “Scholars need to consider what they do with the scripts that never received production—for example, the Black radical left works of the 1930s that often got buried or went unperformed due to political pressure.” Krasner cited earlier manuscript versions of Theodore Ward’s The Big White Fog or of Langston Hughes’s Mulatto that reveal the extent to which authors had to compromise their original visions. He asks, “What might an exploration of these texts reveal about the ongoing political discourses of this formative era in Black theatre and performance? Artists of the 1960s often critiqued what they imagined as the timidity of earlier generations, without grasping the levels of censorship those earlier playwrights faced on a daily basis.” He also pointed researchers towards Bert Williams and George Walker’s unproduced play, Just Like White Folks , which they could never get produced. Krasner describes Black artists walking, “a razor’s edge of how far you can push things – what you can say and what you can’t.” He invites scholars to explore, “what did artists want to say and how did they get their messages across despite the restrictions they faced?” As he notes, “Errol Hill and Jim Hatch really set the trend of exploring what performers had to do to get audiences and how they worked the system.” Bernth Lindfors emphasized the new directions that the field of Black Theatre Studies has taken since he first began his research into nineteenth-century Black star Ira Aldridge many years ago. Lindfors honors Errol Hill’s emphasis on the experience of Black actors beyond the US. He hails it as “essential in imagining the impact of Black performance outside the minstrel traditions and legal restrictions that hampered its growth in the US throughout the nineteenth century. Yet Aldridge continues to dominate the scholarly imagination, and in many ways, valorizes the narrative of exceptionalism so often attached to Black performers.” Just as Krasner urges research into less-familiar texts, Lindfors encourages scholars to explore the stories of lesser-known Black artists (as he has done in his most recent study, The Theatrical Career of Samuel Morgan Smith ), declaring, “Populating the history of Black theatre with their stories not only reveals the number of Black artists who managed to establish successful careers in a white-dominated industry. It can reveal patterns of collaboration and legacies of interracial performance traditions as well.” E. Patrick Johnson laughingly notes that he gives the “answer people would expect” about the critical junctures still to be marked in the field: the influence of LGBTQIA+ artists in Black theatre, as well as the impact of Black women and feminist interventions in Black theatre history. And, he adds, “Black queer theatre history has yet to be told in its fullness,” underscoring the importance of recognizing artists who either self-identified as queer or who likely were (such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston). Johnson pays tribute to the “plethora of Black queer artists producing work during the 1980s that we lost to AIDS, including Marlon Riggs, or the artists whose work explicitly explored the Black queer experience of that time, including the Pomo Afro Homos theatre troupe (1990-1995).” He also notes that Lorraine Hansberry’s queer identity had only been “celebrated very recently.” Sandra Shannon suggests that scholars of Black theatre are beginning to see the fruits of decades of labor and documentation, but that, “the inflection point we see at the moment – with the combination of the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, the murder of so many Black Americans, will inevitably transform our future scholarship on Black theatre in ways we can’t even begin to imagine.” She adds that, “the moment we’re in has put race relations front and center and has dispelled any illusions about what Obama’s election accomplished.” She stresses the need to see the “big picture” on confronting systemic racism through Black theatre. Shannon wryly acknowledges the irony that, “Black artists have always used moments like this to create revolutions,” suggesting that “We may even see the creation of a new cycle series,” (referencing August Wilson’s 10-play history of Black America). Sandra Richards invites scholars of Black Theatre in the Americas to rethink their chronologies, asking, “Where do we start? With Yoruba traditions? With the Middle Passage, to put it on the slave ship as various African aesthetics merged into new genres, all marked by trauma?” Richards asks, “where do we learn what Black is?” She looks to colleagues like Kathy Perkins who have helped to make visible the histories of production at HBCUs, or institutions like the University of Iowa, that contributed to the training of Black theatre artists (particularly designers, who are so often overlooked in chronicles of Black theatre history). Richards reminds contemporary Black artists and scholars that they, “may be following in someone’s footsteps and not realize it,” simply because that history remains undocumented. For her, that lack of historical context robs contemporary scholars and artists of a crucial sense of heritage—of a “family tree” that confers an important sense of belonging . Harry Elam, Jr. ’s comments echo Richards’s call to remember the “family tree,” as he observes, “Are we in a critical juncture now ? There is a tendency to focus on the contemporary in Black Theatre, rather than looking back . We have to mark our history.” Elam points to the rise of “neo-slave plays,” including those by Suzan-Lori Parks, Brandon Jacobs Jenkins, and Jeremy O. Harris, and the ways in which they, “look back at history as a way to reckon with it.” He ponders what scholars might take away from this irreverent approach to playing with history. Like Shannon, Elam also questions how the pandemic crisis will impact opportunities for new Black playwrights to make their mark, asking, “How will rising authors get seen” when theatre makers often privilege the more familiar and established Black writers? Harvey Young argues, “More attention could and should be paid to intersectionality, specifically Blackness and latinidad as well as Blackness and transgender identity. Although there have been important early studies in performance studies and communication studies—such as E. Patrick Johnson and Ramón Rivera-Servera’s terrific edited collection Blacktino Queer Performance and C. Riley Snorton’s stellar monograph Black on Both Sides , there needs to be more scholarship in those disciplines and also an equivalent set of smart, sophisticated writings that specifically center theatre. Furthermore, gender and sexuality, when indexed by race, should not be assumed (as topics) to exist primarily in the disciplines of performance studies or American Studies.” Young notes that, “It is difficult to conceive of latinidad without Blackness or African diasporic presence. This is increasingly apparent in the writings of mainstream authors (such as Junot Diaz). We need to more fully interrogate how and why scholarship on latinidad sometimes seems to deliberately erase or render invisible Blackness even as it offers nuanced, sophisticated ways of considering performances of whiteness and/or indigeneity. Certainly, the similarities of Blackness and Brownness is hinted at in Jose Esteban Munoz’s posthumously published Sense of Brown —in which Munoz (thanks to the keen editorial work of Joshua Chambers Letson and Tavia Nyong’o) links the affective resonance of being and feeling Black and Brown. Blackness and Brownness influence and build upon one another. It might be helpful to think of Blackness and Brownness as twins, perhaps fraternal, which influence and inspire one another with shared roots (and occasionally overlapping diasporic routes). Of course, there are myriad examples in which Blackness is Brownness, co-existing and overlapping within the same body.” How might we document the ways that Black theatre scholars and artists are remapping the field? How have you experienced shifts in the profession? Krasner highlights efforts to shift scholarly attention away from, “familiar urban centers towards less familiar regions such as St. Louis or Seattle that provided homes to active Black theatre artists and companies. By focusing on the performers, designers, dancers, and crew who made those regional theatres possible, contemporary researchers can illuminate rich histories that lie beyond the familiar Broadway-oriented narratives.” As he observes, “There are pockets of local Black theatre history that reveal wonderful acts of resistance and wonderful work.” Lindfors echoes Krasner’s suggestion to look beyond the familiar US circuits, but he directs attention, “beyond the borders of North America to a focus on Black mobility as a productive line of inquiry.” He points to recent studies such as Bill Egan’s African American Entertainers in Australia and New Zealand and Kathleen Chater’s Henry Box Brown: From Slavery to Show Business that looks at the experience of a Black American entertainer in Victorian England. In addition to telling the histories of Black artists in cities beyond familiar urban theatre centers, Johnson argues that, “there is so much Black theatre happening in informal spaces, not on formal stages,” and he highlights the recent scholarship of Koritha Mitchell and Julius Fleming that invites readers to frame alternate spaces for Black theatre. Richards sees Black Theatre becoming, “more inclusive as queer studies and explorations of trans and non-binary identities” intersect with current scholarship. She points to the work of E. Patrick Johnson and a generation of rising scholars who have expanded the parameters of Black theatre studies. She also stresses the expansion of research around Afro-Latinx intersections, Diasporic Studies, and Gender Studies, and their exciting potential to shape future research in the field of Black Theatre. Musing on the terminology that will emerge to define the new directions in the field, she queries, “ Is diaspora the correct term for a new generation?” Shannon points to the work of scholars like Harvey Young, Tavia Nyong’o, Jonathan Shandell, Donatella Galella, Douglas A. Jones, Jr., Koritha Mitchell, La Donna Forsgren, Nicole Hodges Persley, Sandra Mayo, Soyica Diggs Colbert, Adrienne Macki, and Brandi Catanese as part of a critical reimagining of Black theatre history, illuminating the milieu and context of Black dramas. Shannon sees these scholars delving into the histories of the communities that inspire Black theatre and how theatre in turn serves and supports these communities, “these scholars are taking the primacy off the stage and focusing on theatre as an ecosystem.” Like Krasner and Johnson, Shannon also points to the need to document theatre work being done at all levels in the Black community. With the passion that marks her Wilson scholarship, she exclaims, “I want to understand it all!” Like Shannon, Elam salutes Soyica Diggs Colbert, Douglas A. Jones Jr., Harvey Young, and other Black Theatre scholars, “who are changing what we look at.” He also praised editors such as LeAnn Fields of the University of Michigan Press for making books on Black Theatre Studies visible across the profession, and credits Fields, along with Colbert, Young, and others with expanding definitions of Black Theatre beyond the stage to encompass broader definitions of performance. Elam notes particularly the need to look at failures as well as successes in telling the histories of Black Theatre: “Think about things that didn’t work. What reverberations did they create? When we don’t look at failures, we erase histories and we erase legacies of repetition and cycles of learning. Don’t imagine these things never happened. Tell their stories.” As Elam argues, scholars can look at histories of failed attempts to understand how Black Theatre emerged in its present forms. Young points to the opportunities offered by new technologies to document Black Theatre histories: “What is needed is a digital mapping project to better identify and chart the nodal networks of influence and inspiration to reveal how structures (archives, institutes, centers, funding initiatives) have been created to preserve the history and bolster the future possibilities of Black performance.” He adds that achieving a critical mass will prove as important as any new technologies: “A small number of people in the academy research and work specifically in Black theatre. This paucity means that single individuals build entire branches, whole genres, of study. While it is a testament to their rigor that a handful of names have become synonymous with the objects of their study (Sandra G. Shannon’s work on August Wilson’s dramaturgy is a clear example), it is important for collectives to form to engage future researchers in an effort to further these explorations (the August Wilson Society, co-founded by Professor Shannon is a prime example). Each one, Bring one. The work that Monica White Ndounou has done with her Craft Institute, in partnership with Dartmouth College, has helped to brings artists and scholars into conversation with the aim of impacting professional theatre and the academy. It is meaningful that Brandi Wilkins Catanese and thereafter La Donna Forsgren, as editors of Theatre Survey , will frame the conversations on theatre studies through the year 2024.” What and whose legacies have we begun to recognize and where does vital work remain to be done? Like Johnson, Krasner emphasizes the opportunity for researchers to explore and elevate “community” theatre histories in reclaiming legacies of Black theatre and performance. Asking how scholars can uncover the “invisible traditions people come from,” he described not only the community-based performance histories, “but early traveling circuits, Black gay cabarets, and the lives of those artists who had to stay invisible in order to stay safe.” As he argues, “You have to piece the stories together and use your imagination to think about what they went through.” He adds that historians need to, “think about where they see themselves in the story.” Johnson asks, “How do we document informal spaces where Black performance happens?” For Johnson, oral histories, rudimentary recordings, playbills, photos can start to fill in histories, but for pieces created in “non-traditional” spaces, documentation remains a significant issue. Johnson salutes contemporary social media for, “supporting documentation and distribution,” yet he expressed a significant concern about the urgent need to create an archive (and he is part of a Mellon-Sawyer Seminar Grant to develop a Black Arts Archives). For Johnson, “If the works are not documented, how do we provide evidence they occurred?” Lindfors invites scholars to “trace the histories of artists such as Dusé Mohamed Ali, editor of The African Times and Orient Review and The Comet , as well as an actor, playwright, activist, and theatre critic (who once interviewed Oscar Wilde). While much has been written about Ali in the context of literary and political histories, few have focused on his contributions to African theatre. What might a study of Ali’s theatre career reveal about the development of British Black Theatre history and historiography?” Shannon ’s role as President of the August Wilson Society offers her unique insights into the curation of Black theatre histories. She hopes to continue to document the impact of the “Wilsonian Warriors” – the artists, directors, designers, and other theatre-makers whose collaborations with Wilson continue to ripple across the field and to inspire rising generations. Richards recalls her own start in the field of Black Theatre when she had to seek out colleagues like Margaret Wilkerson after graduate school because neither her undergraduate nor her graduate program offered courses in Black or African American theatre and there was “no one else” to offer her guidance. She marks the shift in the profession that has brought Black Theatre into a sharper focus alongside Performance Studies in ways that have, “created more breathing space and more intellectual opportunities.” She also hails, “the push towards Black Theatre of the Americas ,” that she sees emerging across the field. She named colleagues including Douglas A. Jones Jr., La Donna Forsgren, and Koritha Mitchell among those doing exciting work to push the field into new conversations. Young points to developing areas in Black Theatre scholarship, “There has been a considerable effort over the past two decades to spotlight and recognize the work of Black women theatre makers. We are all indebted to the editorial work (as well as to the professional practice) of Kathy Perkins, whose anthologies have made it easier to access the writings of Black women dramatists. Koritha Mitchell’s spotlighting of women writers will inspire a new generation of researchers to consider Black women’s theatrical and performance literature. In addition, recent explorations into the life and theatre of Lorraine Hansberry, by Soyica Diggs Colbert and Imani Perry, are cementing Hansberry’s place within the canon of internationally significant playwrights.” However, he adds, “there is much to be done with regard to exploring Blackness within national theatre cultures. Significant research needs to be done on Black Canadian theatre. The critical study of performance by underrepresented groups (with the possible exception of First Nations theatre) in Canada remains at a nascent stage. Maureen Moynagh’s important edited collection, African-Canadian Theatre , helpfully charts the landscape. There is an emerging body of critical scholarship on contemporary Black British theatre but the volume of work does not compare with that centering African American theatre. However, Lynette Goddard has been an enviably effective champion of this necessary work and alongside other scholars, such as Deidre Osbourne and Mary F. Brewer, has created an impressively substantial critical core. In addition to continued exploration of the Caribbean influence inherent in the works of Lloyd Richards, Trey Anthony, and Winsome Pinnock among others, it is helpful to spotlight the ongoing theatre in the Caribbean, including but not limited to Jamaica.” Have you uncovered a milestone from the past whose impact scholars have yet to realize? In thinking about milestones, legacies, and the call to think about where he sees himself in the stories he explores, Krasner acknowledges his privilege in being a “Jewish boy from Brooklyn,” who feels the responsibility to bear witness to the racism he saw growing up and that he sees around him still. He argues that “scholars can connect to those who can no longer speak for themselves,” and they can honor the artists, “who refused to run away” from overwhelming racism and discrimination. Citing Ada Overton Walker, Krasner hails her bravery: “How good, how brave, how savvy, and how determined she must have been to succeed.” As he contends, “Performance can find the cracks in the walls. You can burn a manuscript, but performance finds a way.” Lindfors describes the moments that Errol Hill reached out to him with encouragement to keep going in his quest to document Ira Aldridge’s career. He mentioned one moment in particular when Errol was terribly ill, yet took the time to reach out and inspire him. He asks, “How can we offer the same generosity, support, and validation to the scholars of today? And can we bear in mind how meaningful it is to have our scholarly ‘heroes’ recognize our work?” Elam echoes Lindfors’s gratitude to the researchers and artists who paved the way for contemporary scholars, including Errol Hill (whom he described as an inspirational “model of rigor”). Hill was renowned as both a scholar and an artist, enjoying a career as a playwright, performer, and director, and Elam recognizes the importance of “ making theatre as well as studying it.” He asks, “Are we creating opportunities for these rising scholars to do work in labs that will help them understand their subjects in new ways?” He stresses the vital relationship of theory to practice as critical in thinking about and with Black Theatre. Elam also envisions a field which honors its past and nurtures its future – underscoring the importance of making those support networks visible so that new generations of scholars never feel isolated. Johnson salutes another group of “heroes,” shifting his lens towards the “unsung heroes in the curation of Black performance who were critical to making sure that the history of Black Theatre happens .” He also looks ahead to the “next frontier” in Black theatre – exploring the impact of sexuality gender and mapping the “whole genealogy of Black theatre made possible by artists like George C. Wolfe, Robert O’Hara, and Michael R. Jackson.” As Johnson notes, “We’re now seeing lots of Black queer artists creating – so many people whose work grew out of the art created in backyards, community centers, churches, and other spaces where Black artists found space and voice.” Shannon declares, “Black theatre has the potential to heal – how can we use Black theatre to show the way forward in this moment?” She invites colleagues to take advantage of this, “call to arms moment,” arguing that “subversive acts are necessary to deal with hegemonic structures.” She cites the current moment as, “particularly ripe for Black women who have become heroines and who are establishing their legacies.” Like Richards, she also reminds contemporary scholars to pay attention to the power of HBCUs, and to “reach up to claim and tout the value of these institutions.” Richards points to the COVID-19 crisis and the many other challenges shaping the professoriate as the next milestone to mark in the field of Black Theatre. She asks, “Where are we going after the pandemic when professional opportunities will have shrunk, but the need to do and to document Black Theatre will not?” Afterviews Each of the scholars I interviewed mentioned a number of newer voices that have begun to shape discourses on Black Theatre. The “ Afterviews ” below showcase some of their responses to the question: “Where do you think the field of Black Theatre is headed in the future?” Julius Fleming: “What will Blackness be?” “What will blackness be?” As I reflect upon the futures of Black Theatre and Performance Studies, this prescient question from literary and performance theorist Fred Moten looms. An aesthetic and political tradition, black theatre and performance has allowed us to probe what blackness is and what blackness might be. Because the construction of the modern world relies on the extraction and abstraction of black bodies, the critical attention that Black Theatre and Performance Studies pays to the body will be vital to understanding, critiquing, and reconfiguring the known world and its futures—and to discovering new worlds and otherwise possibilities. From expanding uses of digital technologies within live theatre to staging plays that spotlight the State’s uneven, race-based practices of State care in the wake of natural disaster, black theatre and performance consistently engages the most innovative tools and pressing social concerns that animate the “now.” And the concerns of the “now,” we know, are the animate legacies of various pasts and the building blocks of times that are yet-to-come. In this sense, what excites me most about the future of Black Theatre and Performance Studies is that it will become an even more radical and robust enterprise, one that expands what we know and how we know it. Mirroring the nature of its object of study (i.e., performance), the field will remain unruly and innovative—on the run as it were. And yet, it will continue to negotiate the structural threat of disappearance and ephemerality ignited by the harrowing rise of increasingly anti-intellectual societies. But whatever the nature of those times that are yet-to-come, Black Theatre and Performance will be a site to which we can continue to turn to understand what blackness is and might be, which is also to say what the world is and might be. Douglas A. Jones, Jr. “ “Hurston’s Call” Two recent publications explore theatrical practices that emerged from the sociality of everyday black persons that pay little to no regard for how such practices comported with mainstream tastes or courted sanction from black elites and other bourgeois gatekeepers. These books—Chinua Thelwell’s Exporting Jim Crow: Blackface Minstrelsy in South Africa and Beyond (UMass) and Rashida Shaw McMahon’s The Black Circuit: Race, Performance, and Spectatorship (Routledge)—offer exemplary historiographies of how Black performance cultures are often at their most inventive and nourishing when they refuse to organize themselves around the white gaze. Thelwell’s examination of Black minstrels forging Black diasporic networks of care across continents and Shaw McMahon’s of thriving African American theatre makers outside and against majoritarian institutions reveal the importance of studying Black performance that traffics in (sociocultural) politics that easily offends prevailing critical opinion. In “Characteristics of Negro Expression” (1934), Zora Neale Hurston called on critics to carry out these very sorts of investigations—our sensibilities be damned! For a host of intellectual and institutional reasons, Black Theatre and Performance Studies has generally pursed tacks more in line with W.E.B. Du Bois’s cultural theories. But Thelwell’s and Shaw McMahon’s fantastic new books show the importance of decentering Du Boisean frameworks for those thinkers like Hurston formulated. Such an approach recovers undertheorized Black performance genealogies and, accordingly, helps redress several of the class, political, and regional biases that continue to organize our field. Heeding Hurston’s call is both urgent and necessary: my hope is that it will shape methodologies and archival priorities in Black Theatre and Performance Studies for decades to come. Adrienne C. Macki: “Clarion Call” Certainly, the Black Lives Matter movement has prompted important global conversations. Black Theatre and Performance will continue to build upon that momentum as it remains at the forefront of this clarion call to promote a more inclusive space advancing diverse, underrepresented, and often disenfranchised perspectives. Of course, this is a divisive time, but I am interested in choosing to embrace radical optimism and recognize Black Theatre and Performance’s labor to mobilize audiences. I have long been interested in activist community-based theatres that employ theatre as a transformative space to promote conversation, healing, equity, and action. Simultaneously, white institutions, white leadership, and white audiences must listen and be vigilant while working towards understanding as well as acknowledging their privilege. Such steps are necessary to topple white supremacy. It sounds simplistic, but I am taking seriously the need for radical change and I am thinking about what concrete actions would look like on a practical level. Towards that end, the recent institutional practice of circulating statements that “we stand in solidarity…” is insufficient; it pays lip service to issues of equity that have plagued the field for far too long. It is high time for theatre organizations and allies to implement real change. Action is imperative to dismantle anti-black racism. Silence is complicit. Accordingly, in this context, Black Theatre and Performance has the potential to cultivate tangible opportunities for communities to rebuild, reconnect, and reimagine equity and inclusion. Likewise, the field may assume an explicit and central role in guiding academic, community, and professional theatres. Donatella Galella: “Read, Cite, and Commit” Black scholars are doing brilliant work in the field of Black Theatre and Performance, and all of us should engage with it. A lot of current scholarship carefully considers affect to understand Black spectatorship and survival. La Donna S. Forsgren’s award-winning essay on The Wiz reveals the pleasures of queer Black feminist viewing practices. Ashon Crawley reminds us of the importance of Black joy in a context that spectacularizes trauma. To identify and navigate “know-your-place aggression,” Koritha Mitchell encourages us to center on Black success and frame white violence as a reaction. At the same time, anger can be useful, as Nikki Yeboah cites Audre Lorde and offers her play The M(O)thers , which encourages audiences to link personal stories of Black mothers to larger patterns of police anti-Blackness and to propel anti-racist action. Black creativity as research also emerges in new scholarship that challenges the normative academic book structure of analyzing one case study per chapter with allegedly objective distance. In Ezili’s Mirrors , Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley follows the lwa to sing multi-voiced Black girl ways of knowing. E. Patrick Johnson similarly follows Miss B., playing with meanings of honeypot and presenting oral histories of same-gender-loving Black women in the U.S. South. This is but a fraction of the exciting work that will shape the future of the field. I am eager to learn more, and I hope that more scholars will read, cite, and commit to radical Black politics from reparations to prison abolition. La Donna Forsgren: “Agitate for Change” While the need to produce life-sustaining art may seem especially urgent during the Black Lives Matter movement of today, the reality is that creating and disseminating Black art has always been vital to our survival as a people. As such, I am cautiously optimistic about the future of black theatre and performance. I envision the rising generation of Black theatre artists creating new works and manifestos that speak to the needs of our community. Manifestos such as “We See You, White American Theatre”—incited by the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests—have created space for critical thought and action to obliterate systemic racism from our professional and university stages. I envision rising scholars also attending to the material realities of what it means to be Black in America and amplifying works produced at historically black theatres, many of which will not survive years of scarce funding compounded further by the financial devastation of a global pandemic. Despite my optimistic vision, I also understand that systemic racism intrenches every aspect of our society. To revolutionize our field, we must agitate for change beyond the appearance of inclusivity. History has shown that granting a select few Black artists and scholars “a seat at the table” does not change the nature of the table. If we do not take action now, this newfound interest in Black art and scholarship will slip through the cracks of history as a passing “trend,” going gently into that good night. I want scholars to reconsider what constitutes the “archive” and reclaim heretofore marginalized works of Black women and LGBTQ+ members of our community. I want historically Black theatres to sustain the next generation of artists and thrive. I want Black artists and their allies to use this moment to dismantle all oppressive behaviors and practices of the past and envision a new, truly equitable future. If we can do this; I envision another great era of Black cultural flowering. BIOS: Harry J. Elam, Jr , currently the President of Occidental College, is the author and co-editor of seven books, including the award-winning The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson (University of Michigan Press, 2006), and dozens of journal articles and book chapters. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as the College of Fellows of the American Theatre. The Association for Theatre in Higher Education awarded him its highest recognition, the Distinguished Scholar Award, and he is the recipient of the Career Achievement Award from the American Society for Theatre Research. Elam has also directed professionally for more than 25 years, including Tod, the Boy, for the Oakland Ensemble Company, and Blues for an Alabama Sky for Theaterworks in Palo Alto, winner of Drama-Logue Awards for Best Production, Best Design, Best Ensemble Cast and Best Direction. He also has directed several of August Wilson’s plays, including Radio Golf, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Two Trains Running, and Fences . Julius B. Fleming, Jr. is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he specializes in African American literary and cultural production and black performance studies. Fleming is currently completing his first book manuscript, entitled “Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Refusal to Wait for Freedom,” under contract with New York University Press. He is also beginning work on a second book project that explores the new geographies of colonial expansion and their impact on Afro-diasporic literary and cultural production. Having served as Associate Editor of Callaloo and Black Perspectives , the award-winning blog of the African American Intellectual History Society, his work appears and is forthcoming in American Literature , American Literary History , South Atlantic Quarterly, Callaloo , The James Baldwin Review , and The Southern Quarterly . La Donna L. Forsgren is an Associate Professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre; concurrent faculty in the Gender Studies Program; and affiliate faculty in the Department of Africana Studies. She currently serves as Vice President/Conference Planner for the Mid-America Theatre Conference. Her first book, In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement, investigates the works and careers of Martie Evans-Charles, J.E. Franklin, Sonia Sanchez, and Barbara Ann Teer (Northwestern University Press 2018). Her second book, Sistuhs in the Struggle: An Oral History of the Black Arts Movement Theatre and Performance (Northwestern University Press 2020) explores the art and activism of pioneering black women intellectuals of the 1960-1970s . She has contributed articles to journals such as Theatre Survey, Theatre Topics, Continuum, and Callaloo, as well as book chapters in The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance (Routledge, 2019), Teaching Critical Performance Theory in Today’s Theatre Classroom, Studio, and Communities (Routledge, 2020), The Great North American Stage Directors (Bloomsbury Methuen, forthcoming), and Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism (Routledge, forthcoming). Her current book project explores queer black feminist spectatorship in contemporary musical theatre. Donatella Galella is an associate professor at the University of California, Riverside. She researches how systemic racism shapes contemporary American theatre from the ways white institutions capitalize on blackness to the persistence of yellowface in musicals. Her book America in the Round: Capital, Race, and Nation at Washington DC’s Arena Stage was an Honorable Mention for the 2020 Barnard Hewitt Award from the American Society for Theatre Research and a Finalist for the 2020 Outstanding Book Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Patrick Johnson is is Dean of the School of Communication and Annenberg University Professor at Northwestern University. A member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Johnson’s work has greatly impacted African American Studies, Performance Studies, and Gender, and Sexuality Studies. He is the author of several books, including Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (2003); Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—An Oral History (2008); Black. Queer. Southern. Women.—An Oral History (2018); Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women (2019), in addition to a number of edited and co-edited collections, essays, and plays. Douglas A. Jones, Jr. is an Associate Professor at Rutgers University, where he is also Assistant Dean of Humanities. He is the author of The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North (Michigan 2014); co-editor of the essay collection Race and Performance after Repetition (Duke 2020); editor of the special issue of Modern Drama 62.4 “Slavery’s Reinventions” (Winter 2019). He is currently writing a book on black minstrelsy and its role in the production of African American literary modernism; an essay from that project appears in Theatre Journal 73.2 (2021). David Krasner has taught acting, directing, and theatre history for 40 years. He is currently Chair of Theatre at Five Towns College in Long Island, New York, where he oversees the BFA Program in Musical Theatre, Acting, and Design/Tech. He is the author and editor of eleven books, three dozen articles, and over sixty book and performance reviews, ranging from theatre history, dramatic literature, a two-volume history of modern drama, acting, theatre and philosophy, theatre in theory, and a two-volume history of African American Theatre. He has twice received the Errol Hill Award from the American Society for Theatre Research for the best work on African American Theatre, and in 2008 he received the Betty Jean Jones Award for the best teacher of American theatre and drama. He has served, and continues to serve, on a dozen editorial advisory boards, including Stanislavsky Studies, Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, African American Review , and Theatre Annual . He has been the co-editor of the University of Michigan Press’s series Theater: Theory / Text / Performance since 2006. Bernth Lindfors, Professor Emeritus of English and African Literatures at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote biographies of Ira Aldridge and Samuel Morgan Smith after retiring from teaching in 2003. His earlier theatrical research focused on works by African playwrights such as Wole Soyinka, Ola Rotimi, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Hubert Ogunde and Mbongeni Ngema, most of whom wrote their plays in English. He also published two books that dealt with African entertainers who performed in Europe and the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business (Indiana University Press, 1999) and Early African Entertainments Abroad: From the Hottentot Venus to Africa’s First Olympians (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014). Adrienne C. Macki is an Associate Professor in Dramatic Arts, Faculty in the Institute for Africana Studies, and American Studies Program at the University of Connecticut. She teaches courses in gender and performance, Black theatre, African American women playwrights, sports and performance, and introduction to theatre. She enjoys developing new work for young audiences and has authored numerous articles and essays. Her book, Harlem’s Theaters: A Staging Ground for Community, Class, and Contradiction, 1923-1939 (Northwestern UP, 2015) received the 2016 Errol Hill Award, Honorable Mention, for Outstanding Scholarship on African American Performance from the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR). She has served on the boards of the American Theatre and Drama Society, the Black Theatre Network, and on the Executive Committee of the American Society for Theatre Research. Adrienne received her B.A. in Theatre from Middlebury College, Masters in Theatre Education from Emerson College, and Ph.D. in Drama from Tufts University. Sandra Richards is Professor Emerita at Northwestern University. Her research specialties include African American, African, African Diaspora, and American theatre and drama, she has authored Ancient Songs Set Ablaze: The Theatre of Femi Osofisan and numerous articles on a range of black dramatists. Richards is co-editor (with Sandra Shannon) of the MLA Handbook of Approaches to Teaching the Plays of August Wilson . She was also part of the editorial term of Kathy A. Perkins, Renee Alexander Craft, and Thomas F. DeFrantz that produced The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance (2018). From 2001-2004, she held the Leon Forrest Professorship of African American Studies that supported research and publication on issues of cultural tourism to slave sites throughout the Black Atlantic. In 2007 ATHE recognized her as an Outstanding Teacher of Theatre in Higher Education, while ASTR honored her with its Outstanding Scholar award in 2017. Sandra G. Shannon is Professor Emerita of African American Literature in the Department of English at Howard University, is widely considered the leading authority on playwright August Wilson and a major scholar in the field of African American drama. She is the author of two book-length studies, numerous essays, and chapters on African American literature, in general, and, more specifically, on August Wilson and his American Century Cycle plays. She has also served as Editor and Co-editor of four essay collections. Dr. Shannon is a Founder member of the August Wilson Society, and, since 2006, has served as its President. She is a Fellow of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre–so honored in 2018 for being a “distinguished achiever in professional and educational theatre.” She was elected by this body to serve as its next Dean (beginning in 2022). In 2018, Dr. Shannon was awarded the prestigious Winona Fletcher Award from the Black Theatre Network for her “academic excellence in theatre scholarship.” Dr. Shannon is currently Artist-in-Residence at Pittsburgh, PA’s August Wilson African American Cultural Center where she serves as a chief consultant for the Center’s forthcoming state-of-the-art interactive exhibit, August Wilson: A Writer’s Landscape. (For a complete list of her publications see: https://works.bepress.com/sandra-shannon/ . Harvey Young is Dean of the College of Fine Arts at Boston University. His research on the performance and experience of race has been widely published in academic journals, profiled in the New Yorker , the Wall Street Journal and the Chronicle of Higher Education . As a commentator on popular culture, he has appeared on CNN, 20/20, and Good Morning America as well as within the pages of the New York Times , Vanity Fair and People . He has published seven books, including Embodying Black Experience , winner of “Book of the Year” awards from the National Communication Association and the American Society for Theatre Research. His forthcoming edited collection (with Megan Geigner) Theatre After Empire will be published in 2021. He is Immediate Past President of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and has served as Trustee/Board Member of the African American Arts Alliance of Chicago, American Society for Theatre Research, Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra and Yale Club of Chicago. References Footnotes About The Author(s) HEATHER S. NATHANS Professor, Tufts University 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.

Donatella Galella, Dorinne Kondo, Esther Kim Lee, Josephine Lee, Sean Metzger, and Karen Shimakawa Back to Top Untitled Article References Copy of References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 2 Visit Journal Homepage Behind the Scenes of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies Donatella Galella, Dorinne Kondo, Esther Kim Lee, Josephine Lee, Sean Metzger, and Karen Shimakawa By Published on May 21, 2022 Download Article as PDF For this historic issue on “Asian American Dramaturgies,” guest editor Donatella Galella brought together Dorinne Kondo, Esther Kim Lee, Josephine Lee, Sean Metzger, and Karen Shimakawa to reflect on currents of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies. They discussed how they created and entered this field, even as they critically questioned a foundations-based framework that reifies some lines of study and inevitably leaves out others, as they themselves made up a select group available for this meeting. They tracked scholarly trends and concluded by sharing their hopes for Asian American theatre and performance on stage and in academia. A joyful gathering with multi-vocal storytelling, this conversation was held over Zoom on November 12, 2021. We hope that this roundtable will stimulate more conversations, more artist-scholars, and more histories of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies. Donatella Galella : I’m so happy to see you today and to have this really important conversation on foundations of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies. I see this as something that’s for us but also makes a major intervention in the larger field of Theatre and Performance Studies. I’m going to start with some questions that I circulated to you beforehand, and basically the trajectory is that I would like to invite you to reflect on the origins of this field, where you think it is now, and where you think it’s going. I’d love if we could start off hearing from everyone on how did you come into your research in Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies, and how would you articulate the foundations of this scholarly field? Esther Kim Lee : I was doing my PhD work at Ohio State University. I started there in 1995 and graduated in 2000. I was an ABD, and I had already chosen the dissertation topic, which was going to be on Korean mask drama. It was all proposed and all that stuff. Then I remember walking around the library, looking at some books to read. I was TA-ing a course on ethnic theatre, and I noticed that there was really nothing on Asian American theatre. There were whole rows of books about African American theatre, maybe a couple on Chicano theatre, but really nothing on Asian American theatre. I had to go to the literature section to find Jo’s book, or anthropology just to find Dorinne’s book. But in the theatre section, there was nothing there. So, I actually got angry, and I thought: this is not right. I decided to change my dissertation topic, and I took a tape recorder—and it was an actual tape recorder back then—and I said, I’ll talk to a handful of playwrights and actors and find out what’s going on. I thought it would be an easy dissertation to write, but I ended up interviewing dozens, and by the time I was done, seventy people. That’s how it grew into a bigger project. In that process, I remember emailing Jo as a graduate student, “You don’t know me, but…” that kind of email. I had to introduce myself. That was the first time we actually connected, and ever since then, Jo has been my mentor. So, just really piggybacking on the works by Dorinne, Jo, and Karen. I think Sean and I are somewhat contemporary. I still have boxes of the tapes, documenting the interviews, and my dissertation became my first book ( A History of Asian American Theatre ), so that’s how I got started. I guess it’s fitting that I’m speaking first because I’m kind of in the middle in many ways and benefited from my predecessors, and I work really well with Sean and continue to collaborate. Josephine Lee : I’ve always been interested in theatre. I grew up in the New York area, and I used to, as a kid, check out volumes of plays from the library and just read them. I wasn’t involved in theatre as a performer. I did take some acting classes, but I was always, like, terrified on stage. But I did actually do a bunch of playwriting classes when I was in college. One of my teachers was A. R. Gurney, Jr. He was a playwright, and I was at MIT at the time doing physics, but I took some classes with him, and he was the one who said—I think it was my third year there—“Hey, there’s this guy who’s in college, and he has a play going on at the Public Theater, and it’s called FOB , and his name is David Henry Hwang, and you should get a hold of it or maybe even go down there and volunteer to work on it.” At the time, I couldn’t do that, I mean, it was just not feasible. But I did get a hold of the script and looked at it, and I thought this was kind of cool, you know. I had always been aware of the Asian American movement. I have a few older cousins who are maybe about a decade older than I am who were very much involved in that and did historical scholarship. They were really active, and they always looked at me and said, “You’re part of the Me generation. You’re never going to reach the heights of social justice that we have.” So, I’ve been aware of Asian American politics from a pretty young age. But I didn’t really take on the Asian American theatre thing in earnest until later. I was in graduate school at a time when there really wasn’t anything available. I never took an Asian American lit class. I mean, I read a lot on my own, but no one talked about it. I basically did my thesis on Victorian and contemporary plays, Wilde and Shaw, and I did some work on Tom Stoppard. Then when I moved to LA for my first job, I was part of the LA Theatre Center’s Women’s Project, and I got connected with some folks. I got to meet with Wakako Yamauchi. I got to meet people from East West Players, which was super fun. Then around that time was when M. Butterfly won the Tony Award, and I was like whoa, you know? How come no one’s writing about these plays, right? So, I think the germ of an idea got started. But of course, at the time, I was still very much, I guess, in the kind of canonical, traditional world, writing about Pinter and Beckett, none of which got published. Then I went to teach at Smith College, and I got involved in an Asian American Studies collaborative with Mitziko Sawada at Hampshire College and others in the Five Colleges (Smith, Hampshire, Mt. Holyoke, Amherst, and UMass-Amherst). At the time, they didn’t have their Five College Asian American Studies Program going, but I was part of that group that was teaching classes. I taught a class on Asian American theatre because Roberta Uno was just so inspiring, and we had the beginnings of the archival collection at UMass there, and there was New WORLD Theater. It was just a great time for me in terms of shifting what I wanted my scholarly trajectory to be, you know, something that I wasn’t educated in, so it took me some time to learn the ropes. When I took the job at Minnesota, I decided I was done with the modern British stuff. I was going to take a different route, and my first book was Performing Asian America . At that time, I just was so excited to have Dorinne and Karen as compatriots. We were never in the same locations, but we sort of knew each other because of all the work that was going on. It was so rewarding to do it at a time when I wasn’t the only one, right? Because I do feel like that changed the nature of what I was able to do, and with my own work, I could go in a direction that was sort of different. I didn’t have to cover everything. I knew when I published Performing Asian America , it was at a time when there was going to be a new wave of stuff that wasn’t going to make it into that book. But that was fine with me because I thought, wow, there’s just so much out there that people ought to do, and trying to be comprehensive isn’t where it’s at for me right now. So, that was fun. I think that I’ve, since then, changed several times, and some of it is location-specific. Dorinne Kondo : First of all, in terms of Asian American anything, I was like the last generation at Stanford, where I was an undergraduate, who was part of the protest generation: strikes, tear gas, helicopters on campus, “Free the Branner 15,” students from our freshman dorm who were beat up and arrested. We also, at my graduation, walked out on Daniel Patrick Moynihan, our commencement speaker, because of his report on “The Negro Family.” There were teach-ins about that, sponsored by the Anthropology department and St. Clair Drake, the renowned urban anthropologist (and co-author, with Horace R. Cayton, Jr., of the classic Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City ). There’s that part. But I’m an outlier, I feel, because I was trained as an anthropologist and as a Japan specialist. So, my first foray into performance, not theatre as such, was when I was a member of the Gender Seminar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton where Judith Butler wrote Gender Trouble . So, I saw that in formation—very exciting—and all the controversy that it then caused. I mean, now it seems like a classic work, but believe me, there were plenty of arguments, and I got used to conflict as potentially generative. That (Butler, Foucault, and poststructuralist theories of the subject) profoundly influenced my first book , which was based on field work in a Japanese factory, where I was a so-called part-time worker, investigating the performance of gendered work identities on the shop floor and the performativity of artisanal identities and the aesthetics of work. I was trying to take labor, which is often seen only in narrowly political economic terms—I mean, that’s obviously important—but you know, what do people think they’re doing? What are the cultural meanings of work? What about aesthetics, which were in fact very important. I feel like in my latest book ( Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity ), I’m doing the opposite. It’s like the realm of the aesthetic sublime, how can we bring it back to earth and look at it as cultural work, as making, as an industry within a very particular historical and political economic context? So, being with Butler was incredibly important. That was also the year that, similarly to Jo, I saw David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly on Broadway, and I had never ever in my life seen anything like that. I talk about that in About Face , but it was life-changing. I mean I used to go back to the Asian American Theater Company in San Francisco just to see plays. That too had been a revelation, just to see people who looked like me, like in the same room doing theatre, was amazing, just to feel three-dimensional again after being [in Boston]. Frankly, Boston was horrible in terms of racism and overt racism. Anyway, David’s play was extraordinary, and I felt like I had to write about it as though my life depended on it. I know it sounds melodramatic, but that’s the way it felt. So, that started my exploration of theatre as an academic topic. Then it also was a fieldwork strategy. I took the very first David Henry Hwang Playwrights Institute classes. That was amazing—so amazing, I couldn’t sleep. I never felt about anything the way I felt about that. So, I thought, well, I have to do something here, you know what I mean? When do you ever feel that in life? I can’t not do it. I feel like it chose me. I pivoted. So, I was writing the book on transnational Japanese fashion, and then the Asian American theatre piece came in, and then I spent a number of years trying to learn the playwriting craft. In terms of academic scholarship, I’m trying to integrate the creative and critical. So, that’s what’s happening in my latest book, Worldmaking . Karen Shimakawa : It’s interesting that the three of us, the three kind of senior generation, none of us started as Asian American scholars, right? Because there really wasn’t a field there when we started it. It’s interesting that we all came from these really different places. I had come from law school, going to English grad school thinking I was going to be a specialist in Flannery O’Connor. Then for some reason—I can’t remember why—I pivoted to becoming a medievalist, and then finally I thought settled on becoming a Shakespearean. So, I was always kind of moving towards theatre and performance and kind of theatricality in some way. In retrospect, I think I could say that even my interest in Flannery O’Connor was something about theatricality. I just remember, it’s kind of like Esther—although I didn’t have quite the foresight—I remember going into the library and looking in the Shakespeare section, which was just aisles and aisles of things and thinking, I don’t really think we need another Shakespeare book. I think it’s been done. So, then I kind of was in this crisis, like what is there? I was pretty far into my graduate education at that point, and I met with some of my advisors, and they’re like, what else do you know and like? And actually, I had gone to Asian American theatre since I was a kid because, like Jo, I had siblings who were older and more politically literate in this stuff. That was the church field trip that you always take, right? So, I didn’t have quite the kind of sublime experience that Dorinne had. I envy that in some ways because I’m like, well of course I’m seeing myself on the stage. That’s our stories. But it had never occurred to me because there wasn’t really an academic field there, that that was at all connected to my sort of vocational training. That just felt personal and maybe nascently political. It felt very extracurricular at the time. Then I took David Román’s class on American theatre, and we read Dorinne’s piece on M. Butterfly . That was a real turning point for me, I think, like, to imagine that there could be this kind of rigorous, academic, legible-to-other-professors kind of work on the plays that I had grown up watching. That was a real revelation. When I think about it now, and I narrate it retroactively, I think I was always moving towards this because I was always kind of interested, you know—even in, like, medieval literature—the thing that I was sort of drawn to was liveness, the way bodies on stage sort of can perform and imagine what is, what could be, sort of imaginative possibilities, utopian or dystopian, and also kind of what the body that’s talking has to do with that. I do think that that was always kind of the thing that I was chasing. So, it was just a real joy when I read Dorinne’s piece to realize, like, yeah, there’s a way to actually express that, and it’s a legit thing to actually study, and that it’s important and that it matters to people more than just, you know, me. I think that’s really where I started. Sean Metzger : I have the pleasure of coming after the other four speakers both now and also in the past. I think I’m the only one of us who came from practice into the field. I was in high school when M. Butterfly toured, and I remember there being an ad in the San Francisco Chronicle . At that time, it registered as Asian American but also as queer, as an Asian queer play. So, that combination kind of stuck with me for a long time. When I went to university, at some point I decided I was going to be in a college of music. I was doing musical theatre, and I wanted to enter into a more practical setting. I did an internship at the Denver Center Theatre Company, and it just happened they placed me on August Wilson’s Piano Lesson . So, I was doing everything backstage. And that moment—I think this was 1992—coincided with my having emancipated myself from my parents. I was out of money, and the cast actually helped me pay for my schooling until I could pay them back. So, I thought, oh, this is theatre, like this kind of intra-ethnic solidarity. This is amazing! I learned otherwise as I moved forward. I was an undergraduate, [and] I wanted to take Lesbian and Gay Studies classes at the time, but you couldn’t do that at CU Boulder unless you were taking graduate courses because the university didn’t allow it. So, I had to take graduate courses, and I found myself quickly overwhelmed with everything I had to learn. Like, I didn’t know the word “subjectivity.” Boulder had a lot of early modernists, and the first course I took was Gay and Lesbian Literature to 1800, and it was taught by Bruce Smith, who’s now at USC, and who’s a Shakespearean. He was encouraging me to work on Shakespeare, and I also remember looking down the halls and being like, oh my god I have nothing else to say. Joel Fink, who was a professor and director at CU, said, “You should write about M. Butterfly because there’s not a lot of work on it yet.” He wasn’t a scholar, so he didn’t know by that time, 1994, Dorinne’s, Karen’s , and James’s work had been out already. But there was not a lot of material, so I started that project. Then I built my thesis on gay and lesbian Asian American drama, half as an activist piece and half as what I would consider scholarly work, but I had to train myself. I brought in an adjunct to be my Asian Americanist because there was no tenure-track Asian American lit or theatre person. That was Marilyn Alquizola. Then I went to graduate school. I decided I wanted to work in Asian American and Sexuality Studies, so USC was one of the options. They gave me the most money, so I went there. They said, “Oh, we’re hiring David Román,” at that time. So, I went to work with David, and then they said, “Oh, we’re hiring Dorinne,” and I thought, oh, this is perfect. Then as time evolved, Karen came to give a job talk and then went to (UC) Davis. David Román said, “I think you should go to Davis.” So, I did, and that changed lots of things in very good ways and not so good ways, as you can imagine without saying any names. That’s really how I started in the field. Also, because I had been quite impoverished as an undergraduate student, I went to whatever grad program that would let me do the work I wanted to do, and I just figured I’d do whatever requirements; it was basically whoever paid me the most. So, that was my philosophy. I went to Comp Lit first, for that reason, and quickly learned I was to have mastery of these languages, which I still have yet to master. Switching to a Theatre and Performance Studies program sort of made me feel like, oh, I don’t have to have the kind of linguistic expertise that Comp Lit would have required. I wouldn’t have to be in grad school for another ten years. Then my career kind of went all over the place. I was in social services for a while. I came back to grad school, and I happened to get a job at Duke as an Asian American lit and culture specialist. So, once I got that job, it was really, like, okay this is what you’re doing from then on. But I have benefited from all the great writing of all the people here. I would also say, I think for Esther and me, we both had the advantage of a group of people—quite a large group of people—who just happened to be in grad school at the same time: SanSan Kwan, Dan Bacalzo, Lucy Burns, Sel Hwahng, Yutian Wong, Priya Srinivasan, Eng-Beng Lim, Cathy Irwin, Theo Gonzalves, and the two of us. That sort of made me feel like we had a community, and it also made me able to sustain my work over a long time, even though we were located all over the country. DG : Thanks so much for this. I feel like we’re collectively writing this meta history of the field right now, and I really appreciate the names that you’re offering. I also love hearing these personal stories, these origin stories for you as superheroes, but they also gesture toward the structural, toward the material conditions that made this field possible. You’re gesturing toward not only scholarship but also Asian American theatre production. So, I’d invite us to think more about the origins of the field, but I also want to turn to the next question of how have the academic field and the field of production of Asian American theatre and performance changed since the 1980s? DK : I agree with the collective storytelling, and I think that that’s really important. But in some ways, I feel like we’re facing a paradox because of course we want to narrate these stories, but in terms of Asian American Studies as insurgent knowledge, I’ve always been suspicious of origin stories and foundations. Aren’t we about challenging the notion of foundations? Maybe gathering these multiple perspectives and stories (is one way of mounting a challenge); on the other hand, people deserve their props. I realize that one of the functions of something like this is to narrate a history that’s legible in a certain way and establishes that we’re legitimate, we’re rigorous, et cetera et cetera. So, I think it’s paradoxical, and there’s a kind of fundamental ambivalence in the move. I would say, apparently, the field hasn’t changed enough, since this is the first issue dedicated to Asian American issues, right? It reminds me of the interventions at the Claremonts, you know, as part of the mobilization around The Mikado and trying to get Asian American Studies established where Black Studies and Chicano Studies already existed. I think that Asian Americans were seen as the “little people, humble, and silent,” (from Madama Butterfly ) so we had to make some noise and do some organizing. About Face —it’s an early work that does this—but you know look at Sean’s work, for example, I mean all of the work of people in this room, the move toward the transnational and diasporic, I think is like a huge shift. There’s no more Asian American Studies, really. It’s all Asian diaspora work now and rightfully so. I totally understand that. In terms of the profession, I think it’s more professionalized. There’s certainly more theatres, which is great, and more populations represented in the arts. We need more intersectional work, but that’s also growing. There’s still a ton of work to do on all these fronts. There are also more theatre critics of color: Diep Tran, Jose Solís, amongst others. JL : I will just say that Esther and I actually have this six degrees of separation. So, when I was in my first year of college, I took a creative writing course with Tom Postlewait who was a great creative writing teacher, but I didn’t really realize his field was actually theatre history. Then years later, I realized that Esther worked with him, so just shout out to Tom. The world works in really funny ways in terms of who we’re in contact with. The work has just deepened and gotten more interesting and more varied in its approach. I totally get the diasporic, the re-theorizing of what is Asian American. All these things that I think have impacted maybe Asian American Literary and Cultural Studies more generally has also impacted the Theatre Studies field. People have been really great about bringing those in, but there’s a certain kind of depth to it now too. I’m thinking about some of the historical work that Esther brought in, creating this archive, documentation. How do you not just talk about what the theatre means but how it is actually made? I do feel like, you know, books like Esther’s, Yuko Kurahashi’s book on East West Players , what that does is it provides a record for people to dig into. Sean, your book ( Chinese Looks: Fashion, Performance, Race ) was so expansive in terms of that history. In the period before, there wasn’t “Asian American,” like that wasn’t a term that anyone used. There were people of Asian descent and representations of Asia in the Americas, and those really connect to us still. So, I do feel like what’s been wonderful is the way in which Asian American Theatre, Drama, and Performance Studies are now rooted in these larger questions. There’s been solid work everywhere you turn, even as new populations are coming in and new understandings of what this Asian American identity and experience is. It’s so much a fractured category, right? It doesn’t hold up. It’s a category that deconstructs itself. So, every time you teach students Asian American Studies, you have to go back to, “This is a social construct. This is a racial formation.” This is exactly how it was made, that we are all calling ourselves Asian American. So, I think there’s no center. But that kind of frees us up quite a bit to sort of decide on what our points of unity or solidarity or coexistence will be. I think in my own work, I’ve started doing two things: I’ve started looking more into productions that are not commercial, because one of the things I was brought into was this star power of David Henry Hwang. Then I moved to the middle of the country, which has a very active theatre scene. We’ve got more theatre seats per capita than anywhere in the nation. There are so many small theatres here and people doing non-profit theatre work, and that’s not really recognized or written about, and some of it never gets recorded. So, that sort of regional focus has shifted maybe because of where I live. But I’ve also turned to what are some of the connections with older productions, and I’ve done a lot more work than I cared to on yellowface basically. Esther knows as well, right? You get stuck down the rabbit hole when you start looking at yellowface production as opposed to Asian American production. But one thing I regret, as much as I’ve benefited from doing that historical work, I think I do agree with Dorinne, that it’s really telling that I got a lot of recognition for doing a book on The Mikado ( The Japan of Pure Invention ), the kind of recognition that I never got for doing work on Asian American theatre. So, people were like, oh this is so interesting that you’re doing this work, and you want to say, hey, actually there are a lot of playwrights I’ve written about that have nothing to do with yellowface. But once you start writing about yellowface, it sort of perpetuates. Why is that interesting as opposed to all these playwrights who don’t do television, who do a much better job of representing Asia? SM : One of my early scene coaches was Lane Nishikawa, so I think that experience made me understand—oh, it was at the time when the Asian American Theater Company had fractured and was kind of on its last legs, so we had several actors from San Francisco who were Asian American women with me in this training thing—some of the history that Esther talks about in her book but through a different kind of lens: a gossip episteme, if you will. So, that made me realize whatever I thought this was, doing an Asian American theatre thing, is highly contested, because even in the theatre company itself, there were all kinds of narratives of what was happening at the theatre company that were sort of interrupting its progress, let’s say. So, I think all the companies, they all have those kinds of stories embedded within them, and now some of them are more archived. But there are other stories in those companies that have not been told and some that Esther chose not to discuss, like Kumu Kahua, or you know some of the other companies around the country. I think one of the things that’s happened since that time is the founding of the Consortium of Asian American Theatres and Artists (CAATA) in 2003, and I think that has provided a national platform for people to have discussions about how artists themselves think about the formation of the field and their place within it. I think we all have realized that their version of that story is not our (a scholarly) version of that story necessarily. But I think it’s productive, and one of the things that we can see is when they add in special sessions, it’s often about the tensions they see in the field that they haven’t identified before. I remember they had a Pacific Islander special session, and they had a MENA, Middle Eastern North Africa, special session; I think that suggests something about where the practitioners feel like the field is going in terms of Asian American theatre. At the same time, at UCLA, I have two colleagues, Lap Chi Chu and Myung Hee Cho, who are both Asian American artists in lighting design and scenic design, respectively, and they did a lot of work on Asian American productions in addition to regional theatre and other kinds of things, and I think they would also narrate this story differently. So, I think I agree that there’s a lot of competing narratives, and many of those narratives have yet to come to the fore or be acknowledged. I do think that the field as a whole is pivoting around certain issues right now, like Critical Refugee Studies, which is making big advances in Asian American Studies. So, I suspect that Theatre will then follow suit. I think Jo’s work in particular has done a lot to bring attention to Southeast Asian refugee communities, and that’s of course partly location and probably the kind of theatre that you were talking about. It’s not professionalized in the same way. As for some of my own work, I do want to say that the historical part that I did was sort of at Karen’s impetus because I was interested in racial fetishism, and she’s like, you have to fetishize something . You can’t just satisfy some amorphous idea. So, that led me to tracing objects and how they get racialized, costumes in particular, because of the work I did with Dorinne. So, I thought, those are, you know, physical items we could look at and think through more. It’s really the combination of Karen’s and Dorinne’s work that helped me think through how to do an early historiographic approach because I’m not a good archivist, as many of you know. I find it very difficult to sit in a room and get the gloves and everything. I find that very trying. So, I do think that the field has moved a long way. There are some trends that are happening. I mean, when I did (the Theatre Journal special issue) “ Minor Asias ,” it was partly because the editor said, “Well if you do an Asian American issue, who’s going to contribute?” So, I contacted many people, like do you have anything right now? Because there’s not enough of us in the field. I figured if I can’t get materials from people I know, which is the bulk of the field, then we’re going to have trouble putting together an issue. Actually “Minor Asias” was a pivot on my part to try to broaden the rubric partly to get more submissions. So, it’s great, Donatella, that you’ve gotten so many (for “Asian American Dramaturgies”). That’s really good to hear. EKL : That was great. What can I add to this already rich conversation? Because my training is in Theatre—I think I might be the only one who actually did graduate training in theatre history—I could just probably comment that when my book came out in 2006, it was my tenure book. It was based on my dissertation. It’s very incomplete. I was very nervous about getting it out. Like Sean said, a lot of it is gossip based, and a lot of the gossip I couldn’t add because they made me turn off the tape recorder and told me not to add things. There are so many things I could have added. When I go to the CAATA conference, people come up and say, oh you got that wrong. They still gossip about it. I really thought that by now there would be more theatre history books on Asian American theatre. So, in many ways, I feel like there hasn’t been that much progress. I expected the book to be challenged and revised, that there would be a more enriched conversation. Maybe I could just ask back to Donatella: it’s your generation’s job to add to the work that’s done before, so is that going to happen? Who is going to do that work? Personally, in my own research, like Jo, I’ve been really interested in going back historically. My first book starts in the 1960s, and I now want to figure out what happened before. That led me to my current book on yellowface ( Made-Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era ), and my next one, I think, could be even further back. I find that going back to this kind of origin story—if yellowface was an origin story for, say, Asian American actors as they say, “We did acting because we wanted to protest”—is to revise yellowface history. It’s one origin story of Asian American theatre. But I’m looking for other origin stories in Asian American theatre. Historiographically, I feel like I’m always in conversation with Tom Postlewait, my advisor that Jo mentioned, because I did take American theatre history with him, but my book is really a revision of the history, like looking at American theatre history through the lens of Asian American Studies. So, I think I’m going to continue to do that. But looking at the whole field, I thought we would have more younger scholars, junior scholars who would be doing both theoretical and historical archival work. DG : Esther, I agree with your assessment, and I also hear what Dorinne was saying about the critique of foundations. So, first I’m thinking that I might come up with a better word for titling this, but I specifically tried to have foundations with an s , just like how I really appreciate how Esther’s first book is a history and not the history of Asian American theatre. I think in general there aren’t that many critical histories of theatre institutions. My first book is an attempt to do this but of a traditionally white institution. In their definition of Americanness at Arena Stage, that is often not inclusive of Asian Americans, but that is reflective of how Asian Americanness is in that boundary of inclusion and exclusion. So, for my own work, I felt thrust into Asian American Theatre Studies mostly because of seeing all these gaps and also just dealing with anti-Asian microaggressions in graduate school and seeing so much yellowface on professional New York City stages. So, that’s what drove me to then start researching why and how contemporary yellowface persists in musicals in the twenty-first century. I’m attentive to Jo’s point though, because I invited her for a workshop of my research, and she pointed out that I need to make sure I’m not re-centering whiteness and white nonsense, and that Asian American theatre shouldn’t just be an epilogue to that book. So, Jo, you’ve really reshaped the structure of my book so that there’s always this Asian American counter-example to yellowface in every chapter, and there will be a full chapter at the end about the musical I’m obsessed with right now, which is Soft Power . So, I really appreciate that you said that. KS : I agree with what’s been said. I just have a few things to add. One is that I think the origins of Asian American theatre are interestingly complicated. In terms of the academic field of Asian American Studies or Asian American Theatre Studies, I would almost single-handedly credit that to Jo. I think you did those reading groups early on, you had a really prescient kind of sense that there’s an academic field, like making a there there for an academic field, and people who could go on the market as that. I mean, we were all just kind of doing our own thing and doing it for ourselves, like, how do I get me my job? But you actually were thinking of a field, and I think it would not exist if it wasn’t for you. JL : I have to say this: in response to a taunt by a colleague of mine who works in Asian American Literature who made a crack at me, and I said something about Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies, and she said, “What? All three of you?” I mean, she made this crack early on, so maybe it was that there were only like three. It was pretty horrible. I would argue there were other people like James Moy , and then there were historians who were doing work, like John Tchen’s New York before Chinatown . There are all these really great connections, and people come from, as Dorinne pointed out, different interdisciplines. It’s not just Theatre Studies. KS : Angela Pao , for sure. JL : Absolutely, Angela, and other people who were just not being seen. It was partly coincidence but partly because, at the time, we were working to establish a program in Asian American Studies at the University of Minnesota, which we finally did in 2004. So, that was part of my larger thing, that we were trying to become institutionalized. I became much more aware of the need for that as a form of support, acknowledgement, and recognition, that if we actually had a field, then people wouldn’t have to keep reinventing what they do for other people or feel as though there wasn’t a place for them. I honestly think some of it’s that remark Donatella said, oh you came and said this about my work. It’s probably on the order of what Sean said about Karen saying that I need to do that. You’re making an observation and then you realize, oh my goodness, someone’s taking me seriously. They’re actually thinking that I have the answer to this. I think I’ve always been a crowd sourcing person, right? That if we do this together, it is so much more fun. Who wants to be the only person working on this? I really think that that for me was a huge motivator, to get people together, because I really felt like I was limited in terms of my perspective. I mean, if you’re going to work on theatre, which is so, so many characters, you need everybody there. I do feel like, too—the point that was made earlier about listening to people who are practitioners—I do remember a note, one thing that really changed the way I write and one of the reasons why I stopped writing work that was more, in some ways, theoretically informed for academic audiences is actually because Roger Tang did a little thing on my first book, and he said something like, oh this is not bedtime reading. I was taken aback. Like, well, this wasn’t written for you. Then I thought, well, why is that? Why is it that I felt that I had to write for a specific group of theatre scholars or literary scholars and prove myself? I think that kind of freed me up to do things like the anthology we put together ( Asian American Plays for a New Generation ), plays with Mu Performing Arts at the time. It was just really great to be at a stage, since I did have tenure, where I could let go of working so hard to establish ourselves as leaders in our field, at the university, because the academy, as anyone probably knows, will just suck you dry. I mean, it’ll just sort of take the will to write anything out of you if you have to conform to that model. I don’t know how it is at all your institutions, but it is hard. KS : Jo, you’re being very modest. You say, like, who wants to be the only one in the field? I think that really runs counter to a lot of the logic of higher education, that the whole game should be to have your turf and be the only one and defend it against other people. So, I think the character of the field of Asian American Theatre as an academic field really bears your imprint. But you know, when we started, the idea that there would be job postings for an Asian American theatre specialist—I mean, that just wasn’t a thing, right? And it is now. So, I think that’s a real contribution that you’ve made to not just the profession but to, like, thinking. In terms of the field, the artistic output, how Asian American theatre and performance has changed parallels generations of scholars. Immigration has changed, and how we think about the circulation of people has changed. I think so many of us who were starting out were really formed by a particular kind of generation of Asian American, you know Sansei, or fourth or fifth generation Chinese Americans, who were doing that kind of thing that was self-marked as Asian American theatre. That’s very specific to a post-’65 kind of immigration thing, right? The character of Asian America has changed so much from the ’80s on and has changed the kinds of work that’s being done in the theatre and the kind of sensibilities. It’s sort of the idea that there’s both out-migration and in-migration, like that kind of global character of things and the circulatory kind of sensibility. I think maybe it’s my training in law, but I peg all of that to migration. I think just the kinds of people who are on the stage or at the table have been really dramatically changed. So, that’s exciting to see. DG : I have a major set of questions to help us wrap up and look ahead: Whose research and artistry have excited you most, and where do you see or hope to see the field going? SM : I still think that there have been different trends in theatre practice that have not really gotten their due in terms of Asian American attention. One of the most exciting theatre makers for me is Ping Chong, actually. I know Karen has written on (Ping Chong and Company in National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage ) and others have written on that company as well . Ping Chong and Company is in a way tracking how communities are shifting over time. I find that work very generative, as opposed to the sort of the more commercial Broadway stuff, which has to appeal to such a wide audience (and it’s a very white audience). I think even though we’ve seen shifts on Broadway, I don’t expect massive change to happen at that commercial level or scale. KS : Sean, I’m so glad you mentioned Ping. When I was trying to come up with a list, I was thinking of people like Ping Chong and his company but also people like Ralph Peña and Ma-Yi, and Mia Katigbak. Actually, I would put Jorge Ortoll in this pile, too, even though he’s not Asian American. But I really think that those are people who are doing this very unglamorous work of actually getting other people’s voices onto the stage and making the road, even while they’re doing their own artistic work, but they’re doing a ton of work that is unglamorous, that is about making this sustainable for many more people. And that especially right now just feels like it’s both urgent and kind of a long game, which I really appreciate. So, there’s all kinds of artists that I’m into, but those guys doing the backstage work are the ones I really appreciate right now. JL : I’ll have to add my voice to all the people worshipping Ping Chong. He came and did a thing with our students two years ago, a collaboration with Talvin Wilks, one of the Collidescope projects, and I have to say, it was one of the best things I’ve seen by students, ever. I mean, it was just so moving and so wonderful. I have to have a soft spot for some of the artists who come out of our Twin Cities community. There’s a number of younger artists who have been working here for some time, and we’re putting together a collection for students. I mentioned May Lee-Yang’s play to Sean, and he was writing about that , and I really just loved her work. We also recently did a production at Penumbra Theatre of Prince Gomolvilas’s The Brothers Paranormal , which I really, really enjoyed. It was a wonderful way to think about how different communities, Asian American and Black, might intersect on the stage. And Lloyd Suh! EKL : Those are great names. I’m really excited by Qui Nguyen’s plays, just so fresh and fun to teach. Also, Julia Cho. I saw Aubergine at Playwrights Horizons, and I thought it was one of the most moving Asian American plays I’ve seen. It was well cast, well designed, and to see that Off-Broadway—such a polished professional production—it was one of those plays I cried at from the beginning to the end. It was just really moving. DK : I guess I’m wondering about people we’ve not heard of, so I’m sure that there are all kinds of people. Jo, you referenced some folks in Minneapolis and so on. So, that’s who I’d be interested in hearing about and hearing from. I hope that we’ll do more of that in the future. In terms of workers, it’s not just Asian Americans, so I’m just wondering—having worked with Anna Deavere Smith, for example—like other stuff that inspires me would be Antoinette Nwandu and Jackie Siblies Drury. In terms of the scholarship—no one’s talked about what we want to see—but I myself am really interested in integrating the creative and the critical in different ways, so I started this research cluster called Creativity, Theory, Politics in American Studies trying to look at the work of scholar-artists. I’m interested in people who are trying to do that. Sean, thank you for sponsoring a book forum on Worldmaking (in the February 2022 issue of Cultural Dynamics currently available through https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/CDY/current ) that had two of the people whose work I’m interested in: Josh Chambers-Letson ( After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life ), whom I’m sure everybody knows, with genre-bending, the intersectionality, queer of color critique, and how moving it is because I weep every time I read it actually. And then Aimee Cox ( Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship ), who’s a former dancer for Ailey who integrates movement and scholarship in her work and in her lectures. For our cluster, she gave a “lecture” that incorporated academic analysis, a showing of short films, and a movement workshop. So, I want more integration of the creative and the critical. DG : Thanks for that. Is there anyone else that you want to lift up? KS : Aya Ogaya’s work is amazing. And Dorinne as a playwright-scholar! SM : I would just want to say that, once when Esther gave a talk, and someone asked her, “What do you want to see? What are you going to do next?” she said, “I’ll just do a history that goes earlier.” But I take that seriously. It seems to me in terms of the pre-1945 stuff, there’s a ton of material there that we have not addressed in great detail that I think will open up a field and will change the way that we narrativize Asian American Studies. I think in the actual work produced, there are a lot of turns that happen that we just don’t account for. There’s a lot of transnational things happening with early Asian migrants, and in that vein, people like Andrew Leong at Berkeley, who’s an English scholar working on poetry but is also thinking through Sadakichi Hartmann, have been very inspiring for my current line of work in that regard. But I think there’s a lot of people doing early nineteenth century stuff that has a lot of potential to reshape some of the field. DK : In that sense, it’s too bad Jim [Moy] couldn’t be here. One thing I hope for the future is just to combat, you know, white American theatre on so many levels. I’ve just run into so much aggressive, soul-crushing white fragility this year in all kinds of ways, including being trolled. (The trolling was in response to an interview I did with the LA Times , following the murders of the women in Atlanta.) JL : That’s terrible, Dorinne. What happened? DK : I’ve been silenced! I was in a playwriting group. “No, you can’t talk about representation because I’m not racist. I had two black friends when I was a child.” Seriously it’s parodic, it’s so bad. Do you know how white you sound? So, it’s been that kind of year. JL : If you write that person into a play, I’ll read it. DK : I have! I’ve got to get it out somehow. DG : This has been such a fun conversation. I’m excited to be able to share it with other people, and I’m really excited that the next ATHE (Association for Theatre in Higher Education) conference is themed around Dorinne’s Worldmaking , which I hope will be another point of intervention. Thanks so much for your generosity with your time today and sharing all of these reflections. References Footnotes About The Author(s) Donatella Galella is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Riverside. She researches how systemic racism shapes contemporary American theatre from the ways white institutions capitalize on blackness to the persistence of yellowface in musicals. Her essays have been published in journals including Theatre Journal , Theatre Survey , and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism and books including Reframing the Musical: Race, Culture, and Identity and Casting a Movement: The Welcome Table Initiative . Her book America in the Round: Capital, Race, and Nation at Washington DC’s Arena Stage (University of Iowa Press) was an Honorable Mention for the 2020 Barnard Hewitt Award from the American Society for Theatre Research and a Finalist for the 2020 Outstanding Book Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Dorinne Kondo is an anthropologist, Performance Studies scholar, playwright, dramaturg, podcaster, Professor of American Studies and Anthropology, and former Director of Asian American Studies at the University of Southern California. Her award-winning books include Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace and About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater. Her most recent book Worldmaking: Race, Performance and the Work of Creativity bends genre, integrating her play Seamless . She was a dramaturg for three world premieres of theatre artist Anna Deavere Smith’s plays and co-founded the research cluster “Creativity, Theory, Politics,” spotlighting the work of scholar-artists. Esther Kim Lee is Professor in the Department of Theater Studies and the International Comparative Studies and the Director of Asian American & Diaspora Studies at Duke University. She is the author of A History of Asian American Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 2006), which received the 2007 Award for Outstanding Book given by Association for Theatre in Higher Education, The Theatre of David Henry Hwang (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015), and Made-Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era (University of Michigan Press, 2022). She is the editor of Seven Contemporary Plays from the Korean Diaspora in the Americas (Duke University Press, 2012) and a four-volume collection, Modern and Contemporary World Drama: Critical and Primary Sources (Bloomsbury, 2022), which challenges the prevailing Eurocentric reading of modern drama. Josephine Lee is currently the Associate Dean of Arts and Humanities and Professor of English and Asian American Studies in the College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is the editor in chief of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture, and her other books include Oriental, Black, and White: The Formation of Racial Habits in American Theater (University of North Carolina Press), The Japan of Pure Invention: Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado (University of Minnesota Press), and Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage (Temple University Press). She has also co-edited Asian American Plays for a New Generation (with R.A. Shiomi and Don Eitel), Re/collecting Early Asian America: Essays in Cultural History (with Imogene Lim and Yuko Matsukawa) and Asian American Literature in Transition, 1850-1930 (with Julia H. Lee) . Sean Metzger is a Professor in the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television and the former president of Performance Studies international. He has published Chinese Looks: Fashion, Performance Race (2014) and The Chinese Atlantic: Seascapes and the Theatricality of Globalization (2020) both with Indiana University Press. The current editor of Theatre Journal , he has also coedited several collections of essays and a volume of plays. Karen Shimakawa is Associate Professor of Performance Studies and Co-Associate Dean of Faculty and Academic Affairs in NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and Affiliated Faculty in NYU School of Law. Her research and teaching focus on critical race theory and performance. She is the author of National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage (2002). Journal of American Drama & Theatre JADT publishes thoughtful and innovative work by leading scholars on theatre, drama, and performance in the Americas – past and present. Provocative articles provide valuable insight and information on the heritage of American theatre, as well as its continuing contribution to world literature and the performing arts. Founded in 1989 and previously edited by Professors Vera Mowry Roberts, Jane Bowers, and David Savran, this widely acclaimed peer reviewed journal is now edited by Dr. Benjamin Gillespie and Dr. Bess Rowen. Journal of American Drama and Theatre is a publication of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Visit Journal Homepage Table of Contents - Current Issue Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness Love Dances: Loss and Mourning in Intercultural Collaboration Introduction to Asian American Dramaturgies Behind the Scenes of Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies On Young Jean Lee in Young Jean Lee's We're Gonna Die by Christine Mok Representation from Cambodia to America: Musical Dramaturgies in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band The Dramaturgical Sensibility of Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap and Cambodian Rock Band Holding up a Lens to the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists: A Photo Essay Theatre in Hawaiʻi: An “Illumination of the Fault Lines” of Asian American Theatre Randall Duk Kim: A Sojourn in the Embodiment of Words Reappropriation, Reparative Creativity, and Feeling Yellow in Generic Ensemble Company’s The Mikado: Reclaimed Dance Planets Dramaturgy of Deprivation (없다): An Invitation to Re-Imagine Ways We Depict Asian American and Adopted Narratives of Trauma Clubhouse: Stories of Empowered Uncanny Anomalies Off-Yellow Time vs Off-White Space: Activist Asian American Dramaturgy in Higher Education Asian American Dramaturgies in the Classroom: A Reflection Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.