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Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 3 Visit Journal Homepage Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past Ryan McKinney By Published on May 13, 2019 Download Article as PDF 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. A new addition to Hamilton scholarship, Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical Is Restaging America’s Past marks another valuable collaboration between its editors, Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter. Consisting of fifteen insightful essays, the book presents adroitly composed analyses of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton as well as its surrounding historical, cultural, social, political, and racial implications. Constructed by historians from a wide array of fields ranging from American Studies and theatre studies to history and Africana Studies, Historians on Hamilton takes up “the challenge that Miranda himself made to us when he was just beginning to write the show, ‘I want the historians to take this seriously’” (6). The scholars herein rigorously examine the musical’s relationship to history and how history is made, the claim of Hamilton as a revolutionary musical, and the musical’s proposed theatrical innovations and historical omissions. Following the introduction that sets up the tone and content, the book is divided into three sections: “Act I: The Script,” “Act II: The Stage,” and “Act III: The Audience,” each consisting of five essays. The first part begins with William Hogeland’s essay, “From Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton to Hamilton: An American Musical,” which posits that any historical inaccuracies in the musical are due, in part, to not only imprecisions in the source material (Ron Chernow’s biography), but also a lack of necessary criticism of Chernow’s work from professional historians. This section also features essays by Joanne B. Freeman, Lyra D. Monteiro, and Leslie M. Harris, who explore Alexander Hamilton’s politics, the complications associated with the casting of Hamilton, and New York City’s historical past with slavery, respectively. The section closes with Catherine Allgor’s illuminating essay, “‘Remember…I’m Your Man’: Masculinity, Marriage, and Gender in Hamilton,” which introduces readers to “coverture, or the system of laws that defined women’s subordinate legal status” (96). Allgor showcases coverture’s absence from the musical and advocates for historians and theatregoers to use Hamilton’s popularity as a means to understand coverture and its legacy in the contemporary political lexicon. “Act II: The Stage” begins with three essays that view the musical as both history and entertainment: Michael O’Malley explores Hamilton and money, as well as Hamilton’s policies as Treasury Secretary; David Waldstreicher and Jeffrey L. Pasley place Hamilton in the literary genre of “Founders Chic,” defined as “admiring individual portraits of major leaders of the Early Republic like Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, and Hamilton” (140); and Andrew M. Schocket details how Hamilton follows a series of genre conventions that inform how this specific historical period is typically portrayed on stage and screen. Elizabeth L. Wollman’s and Brian Eugenio Herrera’s respective essays offer resonant conclusions to this section. Wollman smartly tempers Hamilton’s status as a revolutionary musical by historicizing other uber-popular Broadway musicals while arguing that although Hamilton is innovative, it is also “a carefully honed product of musical theatre history” (215). Herrera’s essay considers Hamilton’s theatrical context alongside other “presidential musicals” and notes both the importance of and the problems within the musical’s casting practices. Also recognizing the musical’s entrance into a “U.S. Latinx theater tradition” (238), Herrera highlights how the musical utilizes code-switching and signaling techniques to address Latinx audience members. The final section opens with Jim Cullen’s refreshing essay that recounts his development and teaching of a course on Hamilton and Hamilton, complete with a sample syllabus in the appendix. Act III continues with an essay by Patricia Herrera on Hamilton’s use of Hip Hop through the lens of her family’s cross-country trip through the United States’ national parks. Next, by viewing Hamilton as a work of art rather than scholarly history, Joseph M. Adelman’s essay provides a necessary counterpoint to some of the other chapters. The collection’s co-editors author the two concluding essays. Renee C. Romano’s piece, “Hamilton: A New American Civic Myth,” posits how conservatives and progressives in this country advocate for versions of American history that align with their differing politics, and that, in spite of this, Hamilton has still managed to strike a chord of agreement. Claire Bond Potter investigates Hamilton’s social media life by documenting the vastness of #HamFam (the Hamilton Family) and its current and future site as a digital archive. The final pages of the book consist of an appendix that offers the aforementioned course syllabus as well as a Hamilton/Hamilton chronology. This book is a worthy addition to popular culture studies, history, American Studies, Africana Studies, Latinx Studies and, of course, theatre and musical theatre studies. The book aims to serve students and fans of Hamilton, though ardent fans of the #HamFam may be less appreciative of the essays that are critical of the musical. Regardless, academics are certain to find value in this publication, and the book is very accessible for the general reader. Like the recent special issue of Studies in Musical Theatre devoted to an exploration of the musical across twelve articles, many of the essays herein investigate Hamilton primarily as a theatrical work. That said, true to its title, history reigns supreme in this collection, serving as the primary lens through which the majority of the essays explore Hamilton, as well as its greater cultural, political, and societal effects. Historians on Hamilton successfully meets Miranda’s challenge, presenting engaging essays in which accomplished historians do take Hamilton seriously and offer a range of perspectives on its place in, and depiction of, American history. Ryan McKinney Kingsborough Community College, City University of New York The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 31, Number 3 (Spring 2019) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2019 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References About The Authors 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 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

The Martin E. Segal Theater Center presents Conference of the Absent At the Segal Theatre Film and Performance Festival 2024 A film by Rimini Protokoll (Haug / Kaegi / Wetzel) / Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) Performance Art This film will be available to watch online on the festival website May 16th onwards for 3 weeks. About The Film Country Germany Language French, German, Portuguese and others, with English subtitles Running Time 107 minutes Year of Release 2021 There is a crisis! And in times of global crisis, it's all about global cooperation. Nevertheless, this time the crisis is being dealt with locally - on behalf of the world: at a conference that no one needs to book a flight or mount a train for. A performance to which the invited experts and speakers do not appear physically, but are represented by local people who only receive their script at the beginning of their presentation. In CONFERENCE OF THE ABSENT, the audience observes people from their own city as they take on the identity of an absent conference speaker. Completely without CO2-emissions and bad Skype or Zoom connections, but with all the performative means of the theater, the contributions and contradicting theses on the consequences of globalization will be delivered into the theater space - and settle them within it. The advantage of not being there - not having to be everywhere at all - becomes a joint play that can be experienced anew every evening. At the center of this game are people who become carriers of ideas and playfully acquire both biographies of experts as well as their thoughts. In this way, absence becomes an added value because it creates space for new enrollments and unexpected perspectives. Ghostwriters and speechwriters, co-authors and directors at the same time, Rimini Protokoll turns documentary co-authorship into remote directing. Concept / Text / Direction: Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi, Daniel Wetzel Video- and Light design: Marc Jungreithmeier Sound design: Daniel Dorsch Research / Dramaturgy: Imanuel Schipper, Lüder Pit Wilcke with the voice of: Nadja Stübiger and thee prompting voices of: Henriette Hölzel, David Kosel, Hans-Werner Leupelt und Karina Plachetka Cooperation political-cultural education: Dr. Werner Friedrichs Production Management: Epona Hamdan Production Management touring: Vera Nau, Monica Ferrari Dramaturgy Assistance: Sebastian Klauke Directing Assistance: Lisa Homburger and Maximilian Pellert Stage Assistance: Maksim Chernykh Production Assistance: Federico Schwindt Technical Director Touring: Joscha Eckert, Bodo Gottschalk, Marc Jungreithmeier Sound Operator Touring: Aaron Ghantus, Fabian Tombers A production of Rimini Apparat In co-production with Staatsschauspiel Dresden, Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen, HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin) and Goethe-Institut. The concept creation was funded by the Federal Agency for Civic Education. Film By Expander Film (Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky) About The Artist(s) Rimini Protokoll: Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi and Daniel Wetzel founded the theatre-label Rimini Protokoll in 2000 and have since worked in different constellations under this name. Work by work they have expanded the means of the theatre to create new perspectives on reality. Rimini Protokoll often develop their stage-works, interventions, performative installations and audio plays together with experts who have gained their knowledge and skills beyond the theatre. Furthermore, they like to transpose rooms or social structures into theatrical formats. Many of their works feature interactivity and a playful use of technology. Expander Film Lilli Kuschel and Stefan Korsinsky are co founder of the internationally operating Berlin based film label Expander Film. They aim is to produce documentaries and artistic projects which explore new paths in form and content. Besides their film and music video productions Expander works in close collaboration with various artists for video and film projects shown in exhibitions and museums around the world, accompanies projects for cultural institutions, contributes features for television, develops stage design and video in theatre plays. Get in touch with the artist(s) ferrari@rimini-protokoll.de and follow them on social media https://www.rimini-protokoll.de/website/de/ Find out all that’s happening at Segal Center Film Festival on Theatre and Performance (FTP) 2024 by following us on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram and YouTube See the full festival schedule here.

Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 1 Visit Journal Homepage Calculated Cacophonies: The Queer Asian American Family and the Nonmusical Musical in Chay Yew's Wonderland Stephen Hong Sohn By Published on December 16, 2016 Download Article as PDF While playwright Chay Yew has garnered praise for his more than a half dozen plays, few scholars have completed any sustained critical engagements of his large body of work.[1] Yew’s productions commonly address queer Asian American experiences and associated themes, including the struggle to survive amid hostile familial ties and exclusionary social contexts. My article explores such issues through an extended analysis of Wonderland, a dramatic production involving four roles. Three of the roles—a Man, a Woman, and a Son—comprise an Asian American nuclear family. The fourth figure, a Young Man, primarily comments on scenes in which he does not take part. At the conclusion, however, it becomes clear that the Young Man plays another role: the Son as an adult. Wonderland roughly tracks the life trajectories of the three primary figures, allowing Yew to stage the challenges related to achieving success, fulfillment, and belonging, especially within the minority family. Wonderland’s 1999 La Jolla Playhouse premiere was notable since two of its cast members, Alec Mapa (Son) and Sab Shimono (Man), are queer-identifying Asian American actors, and accordingly reveals an important alignment between performance and social identity.[2] Given the relative invisibility of queer Asian American actors in general and the restrictions still attached to this historical period (i.e., pre-same-sex marriage laws), the actors’ participation in this production encourages the audience and scholars alike to consider the roles beyond the prescribed heteronormative boundaries of the nuclear family. This critical practice, informed by queer and racial perspectives, is perhaps most apt for reading the role of the Man, who as the reproductively fertile father nevertheless engages in some non-normative social dynamics and practices at various points in the play. How an Asian American role is brought to life in a performance space always undergirds my analyses, especially with respect to the racialized and queer body as part of a larger family unit.[3] Each role bears the burden of expanding the audience’s vision to include the queer Asian American as part of a domestic social construct that better integrates non-normative sexualities as part of its core foundation. My article shows how Wonderland diagnoses this problem through its thematic depictions and offers an intriguing intervention through its deployment of form—what Yew describes as a “nonmusical musical.” I investigate the “nonmusical musical” as a quintessentially queer racial performance form that employs what I term as calculated cacophonies, which elucidates how Wonderland uses dialogic, sonic, and thematic relationalities to undercut the portrayed destruction of the Asian American family. The presence of calculated cacophonies allows Wonderland to spotlight some guarded optimism: there may be a sustained possibility for the queer Asian American son to find a place in the heteronuclear family. I begin my analysis by situating the play within broader historical, cultural, literary, and dramaturgical discourses, which the play’s post-1965 time period emphasizes directly. Prior to the Immigration Act of 1965, restrictive immigration, property, and marriage laws severely impacted the expansion of Asian American families. The obstacles they faced are apparent in numerous cultural productions set before 1965. Bachelors loom large, romantic relationships are often transitory,[4] and the possibility of marrying within one’s ethnic group remains challenging given the gender imbalances perpetrated by selective entry policies that favored men for their labor. In many plays and fictions, the Asian American family itself is under constant threat of dissolution.[5] We need not look too much further than Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea[6] to see the precariousness of the family even in the post–World War II period and in the latter stages of legislatively supported Asian American exclusion. Fortunately, that book’s protagonist, Ben Loy, recovers from impotency to impregnate his wife, Mei Oi, and therefore solidify a new Chinatown future, full of generative families who will fruitfully multiply. In cultural productions set in the post-1965 period, the emergence of this social formation is more assured. The heternormatively grounded “reproductive future”[7] is finally offered as a more sustainable possibility as evidenced by the proliferation of nuclear families, however functionally or dysfunctionally rendered, and accordingly depicted in a wide range of dramas and novels.[8] These many works admittedly do show clear fractures in the Asian American nuclear family and generate instabilities concerning the future of ethnoracially specific kinship formations. But what distinguishes these dramas and fictional narratives from the ones set in earlier periods is precisely the fact of the law: Asian American families can theoretically come into existence without the barriers formed by immigration policy or citizenship dilemmas. Practically, however, these works reveal that the formation of the contemporary Asian American heteronuclear family remains fragile. The family formations we see in the post-1965 productions are also made tenuous by other social dynamics. In literary critic erin Khuê Ninh’s estimation, depictions involving the Asian American family often involve daughters who are burdened with impossible expectations; they are supposed to bring honor to the family, marry the proper partner, and achieve a high professional status. So strict are these regimes that Asian American daughters will even engage in self-destructive acts to gain personal agency.[9] While Ninh concentrates specifically on the predicament of Asian American daughters in this exploitative economy undergirding the nuclear family, her conceptualization of filial debt applies to other cultural productions and their representations of intergenerational social formations. The battleground appears on the mind and body of the Asian American child who must be properly monitored, controlled, and perhaps even programmed to guarantee future economic and familial success. But Ninh’s argument presumes the heterosexuality of the daughters. The implicit question that her research and argument bring up is: Is the Asian American child who does not procreate inherently disobedient? The answer is almost certainly yes, meaning that queer sexuality becomes diametrically opposed to Asian American family.[10] Queer Asian America, the Nonmusical Musical, and Calculated Cacophonies Wonderland vividly demonstrates the ways in which queer sexuality cannot be fully acknowledged in the Asian American family in the post-1965 period.[11] On the thematic level, Wonderland disrupts the developmental narrative of the heteronormative, nuclear Asian American family, which relies on its children’s strict obedience. In an exchange with her son at the play’s inception, the mother tells him, “Coming to this country / A big sacrifice / Don’t forget / You must be survivor / Must be what again?”; the mother supplies the only apparent correct answer: “Must be success.”[12] The family’s reputation partially lies in this generational extension, as the Son makes good on his mother’s apparent sacrifice related to her uprooting and migration from Singapore. While the play follows the expected narrative by endowing the Son’s future with a burden of the heterosexual reproductive future, it undercuts the myth of the ever-sacrificial parental generation, while attending to the need for reconfiguring familial formations and expectations, especially in light of the queer Asian American’s expulsion from the home. In the context of post-1965 Asian American literature, Min Hyoung Song argues, “If queers are reproductive future’s negation, . . . then a select group of children of Asian immigrants are its objects of veneration.”[13] To be sure, the Son in Wonderland exists in the position of “veneration,” but his position becomes precarious once his queer sexuality is revealed. Additionally, Wonderland operates on the contextual level as part of a wave of theatrical productions focused on the Asian American family that surfaced in light of the success of East West Players, Pan Asian Repertory, and other pioneering companies that first arose in the period following the Civil Rights Movement. I earlier cited a dozen or so productions involving familial social dynamics that are set in the post-1965 moment; most were staged around or after 1990 and spotlight the far more expansive array of theater companies supporting Asian American productions. As Esther Kim Lee notes,[14] the proliferation of Asian American theater in this period came with more experimental and thematically unique productions.[15] Dramas concerning the Asian American family correspondingly boast inventive staging methods and dynamic aesthetic approaches, departing from the more realist conventions that characterized earlier productions.[16] Yew’s Wonderland operates in this same fashion, especially toward its conclusion, a surrealistic tonality that I consider in more detail later. Finally, on the formal level, Wonderland’s staging and production gesture to the necessity of an innovative aesthetic approach to depict the queer Asian American family. At first glance, Wonderland might be described as a chamber play, which Heath Diehl notes “is a minimalist form in both dramaturgy and performance.”[17] Though Wonderland has been produced with some use of sets, including a view of the Pacific Ocean and a “wood-paneled stage,”[18] the play is meant to highlight the performances of the four actors. The sets themselves remain fixed, while a coordinated use of lighting helps mobilize a particularly dreamlike quality through the use of “aqua tones.”[19] Diehl’s reading of another of Yew’s works, Porcelain, advances that its form, the chamber play, is essential to enhance a particular thematic issue being staged: “the current impossibility of representing gay Asian identities and the need for alternative identity formations within Asian America.”[20] The sparseness of the stage, the longer silences in that particular production all emphasize the isolation and sense of futility experienced by Porcelain’s central character. Wonderland accrues another level of formal complexity due to Yew’s description of the drama as a “nonmusical musical” in which the “monologues and dialogues” become “arias” and “duets.”[21] Though Wonderland uses no music, the play’s stage directions encourage actors to consider their lines rhythmically. Yew’s cascading script and creative use of indents spur the actors to engage their lines with musical inflection. For the most part, the invocation of nonmusical arias and duets in Wonderland reflects the ways that spoken words (and their potential musical intonations) contain some of the chaos inherent in Wonderland’s content through a kind of mellifluous speech patterning. But in three distinct places Yew subverts the general sonorousness attached to the speaking roles. I designate these moments as calculated cacophonies because they (1) involve overlapping dialogue and argumentative language to emphasize the catastrophic deconstruction of the Asian American family, but at the same time (2) exhibit word and phrase repetitions, dialogic relationalities, and subtextual thematic connections to cohere the characters. These interlocking sequences, I contend, remind us that though the Asian American family becomes violently fractured, there exists a latent desire to find unity among its exploding parts. In this sense, the play’s nonmusical musical form employs an aesthetic construct to help accentuate one central theme: the desire to make a place for queer identity within the structure of the Asian American heteronuclear family. Therefore, one may ask what is it about the nonmusical musical that makes it the appropriate form for a performance focused on the potential but eventual impossibility of the queer Asian American family? To answer this question, I turn to the scholars engaged in both race and queerness as they arise in the musical form. Stacy Wolf, D. A. Miller, and John M. Clum respectively reveal the need to engage musicals by unveiling subtexts and subtle social arrangements that constitute queer desire as they emerge in performance-based cultural productions.[22] At the same time, such scholarship is limited because it focuses on sexuality as the element that requires a kind of spectatorial un-closeting. Asian American studies and performance scholars help expand how we read performance, especially musicals, for their veiled meanings and significations.[23] For instance, Celine P. Shimizu has reconsidered Miss Saigon through the resistant acts performed by Asian American actresses who are cast as the bar girl-prostitutes.[24] Though the musical has been vilified for stereotyping Asian women as hypersexual, Shimizu’s analysis reveals the subtle ways that actresses command their roles to articulate a space of performative agency.[25] While Shimizu focuses on the intents of actresses in those roles, her approach can be expanded to consider the ways we must engage what cannot always be directly seen. I am influenced by these critical interventions in the ways that Yew’s nonmusical musical catalyzes calculated cacophonies to emphasize a different form of spectatorial un-closeting: the desire to create a stable place for the queer child in the heteronuclear Asian American family. But if there can be no actual home for the queer child in this traditional social construct, then we can at least turn to formal and thematic hybridities to engender other relational possibilities for such fugitive belongings. I thus turn to some key scenes that hallmark how calculated cacophonies function in the nonmusical musical. Babble / Babel The first scene of calculated cacophony occurs at the conclusion of part 1. The Man, an architect, has reached the pinnacle of his career after constructing a megamall called Wonderland. At the end of part 1, however, we learn that the mall has collapsed due to shoddy construction. In this scene, Young Man, Woman, and Son all “surround Man” and “batter him with an endless barrage of questions” (366). This scene seems to break the realist conventions of the play to a certain extent because the Young Man and the Son appear on stage together at the same time and place. But it is more logical to read this moment as a rendering of accusatory discourses levied at the Man from different entities, not only from the direction of his Asian American family but also legal and occupational institutions. Phrases such as “charges of negligence” and “a fatal miscalculation” (366) suggest that the Young Man, Woman, and Son also embody the legal rhetoric that emerges in the wake of such a catastrophic architectural failure. At the same time, the Man’s family questions his integrity. The Young Man asks him whether he is a “murderer”; the Son asks whether the construction of the mall with cheaper materials was “a bad judgment call”; and the Woman repeatedly asks questions that are clipped off (366). We might call this scene a nonmusical climax moment for the drama, as it jumpstarts the second part of Wonderland: the Man and his family must grapple with the fallout of this event. This scene is the first of three in which overlapping dialogue is specifically emphasized in both the actual staging and textual directions. This moment obviously deviates from the more harmonious scenes that predominate in Wonderland. The nonmusical musical incorporates calculated cacophony here to critique the Man’s single-minded focus on the Wonderland mall as the categorical architectural symbol of his status as the ideal multidimensional family man: the good corporate son who builds an expansive consumer paradise, the filial Chinese American biological child who achieves, and the successful heterosexual husband and hardworking father. This moment is critical to stage as a calculated cacophony because it undercuts a common feature of musicals that involve group numbers meant to celebrate the success or the recognition of a central romantic relationship and compulsory heterosexuality.[26] In Wonderland, the Man’s varied familial investments, which are sublimated into the construction of the megamall, are shown to be illusions not only through the play’s narrative details but also through the use of form, as nonmusical arias and duets give way to this calculated cacophony in which voices overlap and yell over each other. The Young Man, Man, Son, and Woman cannot seem to find a common social formation to endorse in the final scene of part 1. Another level of structure to this initial scene of calculated cacophony bears scrutiny. All four actors appear on stage together, with three seemingly accusing the fourth, the Man, of negligence as an architect. All four roles are given lines with an important refrain, “you know,” which appears in an interrogative context. Even as the staging and the spoken words suggest outright hostility among the characters, the repetition of this phrase “you know” provides some dialogic unity: there is a desire for a unity based on some shared understanding. At the same time, the staged chaos of this scene makes communication sometimes unintelligible. Though the script gives the characters specific words to say, the actual production involves several minutes in which a multipronged babbling predominates among the actors. This moment of calculated cacophony brings into great relief a longer discourse coded into the early sections of part 1 related to the Wonderland mall, its relationship to spectacle, religion, and the Man’s reenvisioning of his place in a corporate family. Consequently, I move to a brief consideration of the ways that the mall’s collapse and the babbling family coheres through these interrelated themes and discourses. The drama is set at a time of heightened consumerism in Los Angeles, a space that urban studies scholars such as Edward Soja, Fredric Jameson, and Mike Davis effectively read as the quintessential postmodern city.[27] Los Angeles is perhaps the perfect location for this play, as it is associated with simulacrum, a place in which image exists above substance. The architect is hired to build a number of strip malls, which stands in direct contrast to his aesthetic aspirations to “birth / tomorrow’s concert halls / cathedrals museums skyscrapers monuments” and that such buildings would be “bold / gargantuan / towering over cities and peoples / reaching / touching the heavens” (290). His company describes these strip malls as “the new city centers / The future town squares of America / where people can come together / commune socialize fraternize” (288) and adds that “These malls will dot all over America / and no matter where you are from / where you are / when you come to a mall / you’ll feel right at home” (288). The utopian description of these locations rewrites the consumer center as the home, somehow engendering a multicultural milieu, able to embrace and include individuals from varied backgrounds, races, ages, genders, and sexualities and construct this new mall-based family. In a certain sense, then, the drama depicts the Southern California strip malls as “commodified landscapes designed to satisfy fantasies of urban living.”[28] The “fantasies of urban living,” of course, are limited in their realizations, especially since American families with higher disposable incomes and class status would be more likely to find metaphorical homes in the mall.[29] The architect buys into this line of mall-based consumerism and lets it reflect in his work. And, at first, his diligence is rewarded. Upgrading from strip malls to enclosed shopping centers, he is commissioned to build Wonderland, the sort of megamall that becomes a common site throughout Southern California in the latter half of the twentieth century.[30] This structure embodies the pinnacle of the consumer’s paradise.[31] Even more than the strip mall, the shopping mall enables the sense of a family-oriented environment, replete with clean hallways, visual diversions, and communal eating spaces. In addition, the architect believes Wonderland is the conglomeration of all his hard work and will allow him to finally pursue building his own aesthetic creations. He muses, “Surely / after this / this Wonderland / the company will give me / their favorite son / on a silver platter / more responsibilities / more projects / more buildings / of stature / of rank / that join rank / rival those of / Gehry Wright and Pei” (324). Most central is that he compares the company to a family in which he is “their favorite son.” By reconstructing the corporate world as his home, the architect promotes the idea that his compromise to do as his “parents” tell him will grant him the possibility to follow his actual dream. In some sense, Wonderland emerges as a kind of reproductive product of the Man. After having completed the Wonderland megamall, he calls it “My creation / My latter-day Tower of Babel / touching / kissing the heavens” (324). The architect’s self-congratulatory proclamation recodes the mall as something he has given birth to, giving himself godlike powers that can, at least metaphorically, transform buildings into humanlike entities, replete with the capacity to lock lips with the heavens. Unfortunately, the analogy strikes as portentous since the Tower of Babel, according to the Bible, was the very structure that engendered the linguistic pluralities that divided people. His desire to create is simultaneously too prideful, a twisted version of corporate construction and reproduction based on the flawed language of capitalist consumption. Now we can return to the climactic scene of part 1’s conclusion, as a calculated cacophony that bears out the babble that follows the Tower of Babel’s emergence. The play sources Asian American familial division in the focus and emphasis on capitalist constructs of community, which prevail over and above competing social forms. Certainly innovative in its configuration, the capitalist family nevertheless promotes superficial attachments and structures, especially as noted by the Man’s own building practices, which emphasize ornamentation and façade over integrity and foundation: “I chose / I imported / more expensive materials / Italian marble teak wood titanium / I skimmed / compromised on the rest” (396). Nonsensical speech becomes the appropriate formal and contextual mode of communication by which to root this scene in which all four actors appear at the same time on the stage with “overlapping” voices and dialogue. You Couldn’t Be / You Couldn’t Be! The second scene of calculated cacophony occurs not long after the Son comes out to his parents as queer. The dialogue appears in the script as two columns, a format that encourages the actors to speak over each other, as in the first calculated cacophony scene. This two-character scene portrays a conflict being waged between an Asian American mother and her queer Asian American son: Son “You couldn’t be” Woman You couldn’t be! “No” No! “Can’t” Can’t! I hear Not possible! every word No son of mine! (388) This pivotal dialogue clarifies the Son’s expulsion from the Asian American home, as he becomes a casualty of his own truth-telling by divulging his queer sexuality. But this scene is further notable because it emphasizes familial discord rather than the harmonious unions found in the latter stages of traditional musicals.[32] Note that the first three words are basically the same: the Son parroting back what his mother is yelling. As with the first scene of calculated cacophony, the word repetition unites the characters’ roles through oral discourse, even while the spoken words connote disharmony. In other words, the calculated cacophony shows a measure of sonic structure and alignment that ties these two characters together even amid their apparent antipathy for each other. In this sense, their inability to communicate even as they speak the same words reveals both the impossibility of and longing for a queerly informed Asian American family. We cannot call this scene a traditional duet by any means, yet nevertheless an oral subtext binds mother and son as a necessary pairing. On the thematic level, Wonderland makes an important intervention here in its portrayal of the queer Asian American who cannot coexist within the framework of the nuclear family. The play’s depiction of the Son’s repudiation by his mother follows the established work of numerous scholars. As Ski Hunter notes, “If children make disclosures, parents may regard this as an act of treason against the family and culture.”[33] After all, “traditional expectations for an Asian man, especially an eldest son, are to get married and have children, especially sons, to carry on the family name. Asian American gays and lesbians face tremendous parental pressure to fulfill their traditional roles.”[34] And the price of being perceived as treasonous to the “traditional role” can be very high, encouraging some to remain in the closet for fear that they will be “disowned, or have their identity negated / denied.”[35] Wonderland perfectly showcases the ways that coming out of the closet is a communicative act fraught with psychological and material peril. As with the first scene of calculated cacophony, the overlapping dialogue makes it likely that some audience members will misunderstand the characters’ words. This aural confusion, though, is necessary given the situational context. At the same time, the full scene continually references the failure of dialogue and what is spoken versus what is understood. The mother asks: “What will people say? / What will neighbors / say? /. . . Ay, you [Son] deaf or what? / Ay, you listening or / not?” The Son responds: “I hear / every word / yelling / saying / Every word / Sentence phrase” (388). Recall that in the first scene of calculated cacophony, language becomes a kind of babble, not necessarily conducive to a meaningful conversation. In a similar manner, this second scene shows us two figures who cannot understand the other, despite their lives being more alike than they comprehend or are willing to admit. To fully flesh out this line of reasoning, I move to short readings of other moments in Wonderland that bring into relief how this particular scene accrues deeper meaning and how the two figures appear as imperfect reflections of each other. I then go on to argue that this scene of calculated cacophony calls out to other portions of Wonderland to situate how these two figures must be considered as part of a queer Asian American genealogy. As a young woman living in Singapore, the mother meets her future husband, the Man, through her work as a bargirl. The Man relates his first impressions: “And / there she is / A woman of twenty-two / Wrapped tight / in a delicate silk cheong sam / Sipping a bright red umbrella drink / gin sling / Sitting / at the Long Bar” (284). Not surprisingly, she strikes up a conversation with the Man that night, and soon after they have sexual intercourse. While no evidence within the play ever suggests directly that she or any of the other “sarong party girls” are prostitutes, references abound that they use sexual allure to achieve their own goals. The Woman, for instance, admits to the audience that she lied about her first pregnancy to persuade the Man to marry her, a ruse that works. Based on this falsehood, the architect decides that the right thing to do is to marry her and return with her to the United States. Tellingly, the Woman distances herself from the other bargirls who expressly target who they perceive is the dim-witted “white man,” duping him into believing that their engaged performances indicate their devotion and love; their true goal, of course, is to get the valued “Green Card” (311). In contrast, the Woman believes she truly loves the Asian American architect and morally justifies deception rather than couching it within a framework of citizenship gain. That the Woman is unable to directly admit what she has done, instead calling it “motivation,” further demonstrates the screens that she places over her language, a way in which the audience then is invited to look into her divulgences for subtextual significations. Her tirade, then, concerning what neighbors might say strikes as particularly hollow given her tactics in pursuing marriage with an American transnational. I read against the content and context of the scene to reconsider the mother and son through the lens of their unity on stage, as a kind of fractured duet. The pair shares the stage with overlapping dialogue that is spoken in relative temporal unison, even if the words are not exactly the same. Additionally, the script equally emphasizes their pairing through its bifurcated structure and appearance on the page. But this connection, primarily rendered through form and overlapping dialogue spoken in rhythm—that is, this calculated cacophony—is not simply a clichéd desire for rapprochement between mother and son, but a deeper understanding of the importance of their shared, but not necessarily twinned experiences, each having a complicated connection to his or her sexuality. This second scene of calculated cacophony accordingly accrues another level of meaning because of the Son’s mocking of his mother’s accent. While he purports to listen to every word his mother says, he also states that “she speaks an endless / soundtrack of broken English / Embarrasses the fuck outta me” (388). As language fractures and communication breaks down, the nonmusical musical emphasizes these calculated cacophonies further through the problem of acculturation after transnational movement. After initially arriving in the United States, the mother’s status as a foreigner directly impacts her dreams to work as a Macy’s salesperson, as she is turned away due to her accent. The Son’s derisiveness over his mother’s English language faculties hallmarks an internalized form of racial shame, which he uses as a weapon to strike back at the mother who disowns him. In a telling twist, however, the Son metaphorically becomes the mother he has denigrated when he attempts to establish an acting career. In the Son’s final extended monologue, given during a Hollywood audition, he is asked to improvise two film scenes in which he plays a racialized Asian subject. In the first, he must “Speak broken English / Deliver Thai food” (426). The customer asks him to wait inside while he retrieves payment for the food. Spying dirty magazines on the coffee table, the delivery boy becomes aroused. When the customer returns, he reveals he is Vietnam War veteran and thinks that the delivery boy is “Cambodian Vietnamese something,” later admitting that “[Asians] all look alike” (426). Later, the delivery boy is asked whether he has “ever watched The Killing Fields” (426); he responds in the affirmative by saying “yes / It was exactly like my life” (426). After that point, the veteran becomes sexually interested in the delivery boy, and they begin to touch each other. The power differential is made apparent on multiple levels as the delivery boy waits to receive cash and willingly submits to the veteran’s erotic advances, even after being reduced to a prototypical racial phenotype. This audition requires the Son to be a foreign subject whose English is far from proficient. This role is largely more indicative of the plight faced by actors, who are hampered by a Hollywood casting system that perpetrates the image of the Asian who speaks only broken English. In an ethnographic study of Asian American actors, Joann Lee notes that many of her interviewees believe that “Asian specific roles are fine,” but the chance to do much “beyond that” is extraordinarily limited.[36] Asian American actors are too often cast as “villains, gangsters and immigrants or filler roles such as professionals, or side kick to the leading role.”[37] Wonderland emphasizes the problems brought up by Lee, as the Son takes on roles that are racially insensitive and far from the lead roles he might have dreamed of as a youth. Given that the Son is probably not more than a twenty-something at the time of the audition, we know the period is sometime in the 1980s, a cultural moment in which the Asian American registered in martial arts films such as The Karate Kid.[38] Also during this period, dozens of major Hollywood films were set in the Vietnam War era. Though perhaps offering Asian American actors more work, these films largely cast the Vietnamese figures in unspeaking civilian roles. Knowing that this audition is one of few chances for him to break into the industry, the Son tactically chooses to remain invested in the casting process, even when it involves sexually and racially reductive roles. Further still, the conclusion of the audition scene suggests the possibility that the entire process may have been a variation of the proverbial casting couch, as it is implied that the Son and the director are engaging in drug use together. The Son’s original reference to the “soundtrack” that accompanies his mother’s accented English is ultimately a prophetic and apt word choice as the son’s and mother’s connection in this scene accrues more meaning as the nonmusical musical continues onward. In its most basic definition, the soundtrack functions as a key accompaniment to a visual cultural production. The soundtrack is typically structured to operate with synchronicity, aligning with particular dialogue, visual, and other such cues in a performance. The Son’s use of “soundtrack” to describe “broken English” seems at first strange given his derisive attitude, but underlying this use of the word is perhaps an unconscious desire to remain connected to his mother, however foreign she may be. Though they cannot find a time and place to be together in that stage and at that moment, their pairing emphasizes their lives as imperfect mirrors of each other. On the one hand, the mother cannot embrace the Son for his queerness, even though she, too, is attached to what might be categorized as a deviant sexuality through her tactical entry into the United States. On the other, the Son cannot embrace his mother for her lack of English fluency, even though he, too, is attached to what might be categorized as linguistic foreign-ness when he seeks a career in Hollywood. Conditional Probabilities If the first two scenes of calculated cacophony render language as a site of miscommunication but provide formal and dialogic relationalities as a temporary salve over such chaos, then the final one offers a very different directive. The third scene of calculated cacophony appears toward the end of Wonderland, not long before the Man kills himself. At this point, the Man is touring on a sort of lecture circuit in which he speaks about architectural issues. He is forced to lecture because he cannot find other work: Young Man Given Man The function of the dire most buildings is financial straits to protect people he is swimming in from the weather (429) This scene is intriguing because it presents the bifurcated structure of the “You couldn’t be!” scene between mother and son, but diverges in one key way: the Young Man’s lines are presented in the more musical cascading format while the Man’s are not. The Man’s lines connote the monotonous circumstances under which he must lecture to “make ends meet” (429). Here, calculated cacophony appears in the guise of the staging context: only one figure is aware of the other. The Young Man appears as a kind of omniscient narrator, giving us the circumstances behind why the Man must lecture at all. But the cascading lines suggest a desire for direct musical engagement: that is, a duet (or even a playful dialogue) might be possible, but the Man, for some reason, cannot understand the impact of his words beyond their most literal meanings. In particular, he explains how “[t]he structural / components / of a building / assure that the / elements required / to fulfill / its function / to stand up” are somehow met (429). These words resonate for the Man only because he failed to uphold the “function of most buildings” in his construction of the megamall, but the larger import of the Man’s lecture is far more relational: as an architect he is tasked to protect people through structural integrity, but, as a father, he seems to have abandoned a similar duty entirely. At the precise moment he is giving the lecture, the Man’s son is turning tricks in Hollywood to survive. If the Man is forced to employ his architectural skills to make lectures about how he failed to keep him and his wife solvent, then so too is his Son pushed to instrumentalize his sexuality to endure outside of the Asian American home space. As with the second scene of calculated cacophony, the father and the son accrue another level of connection through the shared but not necessarily twinned experiences concerning spectacle, deviancy, and limited occupational options. The father is put on display on a lecture circuit to spotlight what not to do when constructing large buildings. Fittingly, the Young Man calls the father’s work something that stems from his “new found celebrity” (429). Almost concurrent with the father’s appearance at universities, the Son struggles to live independently. He takes a job as a stripper, becomes a prostitute living on the profits of his regulars, and later attempts to break into the Hollywood acting industry. The Son often has to perform, especially in sexually suggestive ways, to finance his life. These sequences involving the Son’s trials outside the home all occur just before the third scene of calculated cacophony and hence inform the way in which the Young Man and the Man cannot connect with each other, even as they appear on stage together speaking lines at the same time. Because the Young Man is who the Son eventually becomes, his presence is meant to reinforce how the Son and the Man face similar dilemmas in the period following the mall’s collapse. At the same time, the Man cannot see beyond his own myopic perspective and cannot engage the Young Man in a meaningful pairing, disrupting the possibility of a harmonious duet. As in the previously described scene between the Son and mother, the Young Man and the Man are not functioning in unison. Yet this scene also appears structured through a subtextual relationality. The Young Man’s language is rooted in the discourse of conditional probabilities. According to Alan Hájek, “In general, conditional probability is probability given some body of evidence or information, probability relativised to a specified set of outcomes, where typically this set does not exhaust all possible outcomes.”[39] This definition clarifies another elliptical connection between the Young Man and Man, as the Young Man changes the conditions of a probable outcome. In this case, the Young Man provides specific conditions, the outcome of which is the Man’s appearance on the lecture circuit. The use of the conditional probability in this context is intriguing because it can only emerge as the relationship between two elements. This scene accrues a level of unity on the basis of this conditional probability: though these characters are not seen engaging in a musical duet, they nevertheless find an associative connection through the vocabulary of statistics. As with the previous scene, this kind of subtextual link appears again as the method by which calculated cacophony operates. This scene brings to mind whether or not there may have been a different outcome: did the father necessarily have to lecture in order to make ends meet? This question seems relevant in this context precisely because of the marital instability that arises in the wake of the mall’s collapse and the Son’s expulsion from the family home. Additionally, the Young Man adopts language from a quantitative discipline, gesturing in part to the very occupational path of his father. The use of language denoting conditional probabilities would have been familiar to the father given the necessity of eliminating risk factors in building constructions. In this sense, again, there is a desire to find a connection, even if the two do not appear on stage as a concordant duo. The Memory Play and the Im/possible Queer Asian American Family The shadow that continually shrouds these frustrated nonmusical duets and group numbers appears in the guise of the fractured family unit, which requires some sort of greater unifying thread. The three scenes spotlighting what I call calculated cacophonies signal the queer child’s yearning to be accepted by his Asian American parents. If circumstances make the queer Asian American son’s embrace by his parents impossible, then the nonmusical musical operates with subtextual dialogic links that provide some measure of order amid these discordant dynamics. Further still, these scenes and their various levels of thematic and formal relationalities reveal how the child’s so-called queerness is not so alien from the ways that his parents have instrumentalized their bodies and their skills to achieve and to survive. The final scene of the nonmusical musical leads us to the image of the “golden carpet” to contest a conclusion otherwise completely devoid of promise. This moment is not one of calculated cacophony, as the actors do not confront or oppose each other. But a problem equally as obvious as that encountered in the three earlier scenes—that is, the inability to communicate—does emerge in this final scene’s collection of characters on stage. The Young Man arrives to find his mother looking out over the ocean. The Young Man tells the Woman: “Dad used to say / He’d look out and wait” (453) for an image of the setting sun that looked like a “golden carpet” (453). At first the Woman does not see this image, but then the Man appears, who by this time has killed himself, and then later the Son appears, who by this time has grown up (and whose “role” is now given over to the Young Man). Only when the Young Man, Son, and Man all appear together can the Woman see the image. This final sequence of the nonmusical musical we might reconsider in light of the earlier scenes of calculated cacophony precisely because all four characters can see the same image, but cannot actually exist in the same time and space. The “golden carpet” functions as an appropriate symbol given its suggestive connotations of homely welcome and of the path that would lead the queer son back to his family. Here, we can say that Wonderland takes some inspiration from the memory play. Epitomized by The Glass Menagerie,[40] the memory play typically uses more surrealistic and subjective staging that includes projections, stylized music, and subtle lighting to generate a production focused on “moods, a study in futility and frustration constructed on incidents rather than on a consecutive plotline, using as material the trivial happenings that can throw such huge shadows in the lives of decent yet desperate people.”[41] Yew’s Wonderland draws on these stylizations, formal and staging conceits, and nonlinear plotlines, but diverges from the traditional genre conventions precisely because a memory play is typically situated from the perspective of one character or his subjective recounting of the past.[42] Instead, Wonderland quite squarely depicts the disintegration of dreams for multiple characters, eschewing a surrealistic filter for the majority of the play while accentuating the dissolution of the Asian American heteronuclear family. Further still, the meta-theatricality inherent in the memory play is not suggested in Wonderland until the concluding arc.[43] If Wonderland can be marked as a memory play at all, then this labeling is most apt in the final pages when the Son and Young Man merge on stage. Here, realism is partly eschewed as the division between time periods collapses.[44] And memory is itself the very topic of this moment, as the past comes crashing into the present, reminding the audience that the Son and Young Man still harbor that same intimate view of the ocean, though each must reflect on it with a different parent. To consider Wonderland as a memory play at this juncture is crucial precisely because it provides a necessary countermeasure to one thematic related to the traditional musical’s finale, which operates in the mode of “celebrating romantic love and American courtship ties.”[45] The memory play, with its emphasis on the importance of what has already occurred, undercuts any future-oriented ethos suggested by the successful completion of a courtship narrative with its proverbial “happily ever after” conceit. Wonderland encourages us to look back to enable a different thematic to take center stage, one related to social formation. In this sense, the memory play begins to align more seamlessly with a different feature of the musical finale: a concluding group number that functions to “celebrate community.”[46] Anne Beggs argues that “the finales [in West Side Story and Les Misérables] . . . engage with the spirits of the dead . . . , musically reiterating their messages of hope and love.”[47] We can apply Beggs’s reading to Wonderland’s final scene, as the four actors come together as a family, united through their ability to see the “golden carpet.” Even the dead Man comes back to life to provide “messages of hope and love.” A memory is resurrected, and a family is thus reconstructed. Second, the power of this finale is also made apparent in its racializing impulses. We can turn to Lei Ouyang Bryant to consider how the musical form operates with respect to themes of race and associated social differences, as they appear in a finale. Bryant analyzes The Walleye Kid: The Musical, which involves “the story of a young Korean American adoptee named Annie and her experiences”[48] in her rural white Minnesotan home. Bryant argues that the musical, adapted from Philip Gotanda’s play of the same name, “requires a resolution where we return to the trigger incident when Annie is teased by her peers, and have the kids come back to apologize to Annie so that the company can come together as a cohesive community.”[49] As Bryant notes, the musical’s concluding group number functions to show how the Korean American adoptee can find a place among her primarily white peers, transforming the racial homogeneity that might have been predominant in a school’s culture. This reading applies equally well to Wonderland because it complicates the notion of community, as the queer Asian American family remains on stage, although without a larger group surrounding it. The isolation of the queer Asian American family suggests its radical disarticulation from structural support systems that might help to sustain a fledgling and fragile social formation. Not surprisingly, then, the surrealistic nature of this scene—the Man’s magical resurrection, the Son’s temporally anachronistic presence—undercuts its actuality and tangible materialization. Here, the actual staging of Yew’s production is most salient, especially as the use of lighting helps generate the luminescence that colors the pathway to the horizon point, resulting in a “moody” and “deceptive” atmosphere.[50] As reviewer Pat Launer notes, “The ocean is almost a palpable presence in Rachel Hauck’s dramatic set design.”[51] The word “almost” is the key, as the queer Asian American family unit cannot unify their perspectives on one “golden carpet” unless somehow magically reunited. In this sense, I extrapolate from the work of Stacy Wolf, who has argued in relation to the musical Wicked that its conclusion “unifies the community, but with irony and a critical slant.”[52] Wolf’s intervention clarifies how we might reread the promise of Wonderland’s group collective as one tempered by its ultimate impossibility. Wolf’s reading, of course, is couched in relation to the queer undertones that go unresolved: “Wicked’s queer ‘marriage’ is private, spoken only between the women and impossible to be revealed publicly. The principals must permanently separate because the community refuses to tolerate their union.”[53] Not unlike Wicked, then, the only reunion possible in Wonderland is an unrealistic one, due to the heteronormative demands placed on racialized family formations. But at least in this moment, the cacophony that comprised earlier scenes is overshadowed by this chimerical convergence, a solidarity prescribing the need for a time and place that can promote the emergence of the queer Asian American family. Wonderland’s greatest dream is the desire to form a sustainable kinship system, one that exists alongside rather than beyond the heteronuclear Asian American home. Wonderland leaves us there with a gleaming “golden carpet,” coalescing features of the memory play and the nonmusical musical, to remind us that even with such a problematic conclusion, a queer Asian American family must still be made possible. Acknowledgments: First off, I want to thank the editors of JADT, Naomi J. Stubbs and James Wilson, as well as the journal’s editorial staff for their unflagging support. I very much appreciate the Herculean efforts of my readers, who include the indefatigable Lisa Wehrle and Donatella Gallela. Stephen Hong Sohn is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of Racial Asymmetries: Asian American Fictional Worlds (NYU Press, 2014), the co-editor of Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits (Temple University Press, 2006), and the editor of Karen Tei Yamashita's Anime Wong: Fictions of Performance (Coffee House Press, 2014). [1] Chay Yew’s plays have been published in two omnibus editions: Porcelain and A Language of Their Own: Two Plays (New York: Grove, 1997) and The Hyphenated American (New York: Grove, 2002). My research has yielded just a small handful of critical studies on Yew, only one of which is partially based on Wonderland: Caroline De Wagter explores the play in relation to cultural memory in “Re-configuring Cultural Memory in Chay Yew’s Wonderland and M. J. Kang’s Blessings,” in Signatures of the Past: Cultural Memory in Contemporary Anglophone North American Drama, ed. Marc Maufort and Caroline de Wagter (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 273–90. Heath A. Diehl and Jordon Schildcrout respectively engage in critical analyses of Porcelain, which is another play that focuses on queer Asian diasporic themes; see Heath A. Diehl, “Beyond The Silk Road: Staging a Queer Asian America in Chay Yew’s Porcelain,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 37, no. 1 (2004): 149–67; and Jordan Schildcrout, Murder Most Queer: The Homicidal Homosexual in the American Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press). Schildcrout, in particular, does note the influence of musical forms on his production, as one of the primary roles involves an individual with a fondness for Puccini. [2] Both actors have been out for some time. Mapa discussed his queer sexuality in his one-man performance, “I Remember Mapa,” in O Solo Homo: The New Queer Performance, ed. Holly Hughes and David Roman (New York: Grove, 1998), 199–228. One reference in which Shimono publicly addresses his queer sexuality occurred in 2010 in a post to Matthew’s Place, a site run by the Matthew Shepard Foundation; see Sab Shimono, interview by Thomas Howard, Voices (blog), 6 April 2010, http://www.matthewsplace.com/voice/sab-shimono/. [3] In this respect, my article honors the work of performance studies scholars such as Karen Shimakawa, Josephine Lee, and Esther Kim Lee, who have been attentive to the techniques of production, staging, and drama to their analyses and studies. See Karen Shimakawa, National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Josephine Lee, Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997); and Esther Kim Lee, A History of Asian American Theater (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). [4] For several prominent examples of these transitory relationships, see Genny Lim, Bitter Cane, in The Politics of Life: Four Plays by Asian American Women, ed. Velina Hasu Houston (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 163–204; Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973); and David Henry Hwang, The Dance of the Railroad, in FOB and Other Plays (New York: Plume, 1990), 51-86. [5] Two examples that concern Japanese American families are Wakako Yamauchi, And the Soul Shall Dance, in Songs My Mother Taught Me: Stories, Plays, and Memoir (New York: Feminist Press at CUNY, 1994), 153–208; Wakako Yamauchi, 12-1-A, in The Politics of Life: Four Plays by Asian American Women, ed. Velina Hasu Houston (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 45–100. [6] Louis Chu, Eat a Bowl of Tea (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976). [7] Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 147. [8] Ayad Akhtar, The Who & the What (New York: Back Bay Books, 2014); Wajahat Ali, Domestic Crusaders (San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2011); Jay Antani, The Leaving of Things (Seattle: Lake Union, 2014); Frank Chin, Chickencoop Chinaman/The Year of the Dragon: Two Plays (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981); Julia Cho, Durango, in Version 3.0: Contemporary Asian American Plays, ed. Chay Yew (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2011), 327–92; Julia Cho, 99 Histories, in Seven Contemporary Plays from the Korean Diaspora in the Americas, ed. Esther Kim Lee (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 21–84; Sung Rno, Cleveland Raining, in But Still, Like Air, I’ll Rise: New Asian American Plays, ed. Velina Hasu Houston (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), 227–70; Lloyd Suh, American Hwangap, in Seven Contemporary Plays from the Korean Diaspora in the Americas, ed. Esther Kim Lee (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 85–150; Sung J. Woo, Everything Asian (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2009). [9] erin Khuê Ninh, Ingratitude: The Debt-Bound Daughter in Asian American Literature (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 1-18. [10] David Eng argues the ways in which the Asian American is historically rendered as a queer subject through laws that have regulated sexuality and the development of families; see The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); and Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 204–28. [11] Some important publications do offer a number of important interventions, but are primarily rooted in social scientific analyses; see, e.g., Rosalind C. Chou, Asian American Sexual Politics: The Construction of Race, Gender, and Sexuality, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015); and Gina Masequesmay and Sean Metzger, “Introduction: Embodying Asian/American Sexualities,” in Embodying Asian/American Sexualities, ed. Gina Masequesmay and Sean Metzger (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009), 1–21. In specific studies of queer Asian American cultural productions, the emphasis has tended to remain on film, cinema, and television; see, for instance, Nguyen Tan Hoang, A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). [12] Chay Yew, Wonderland, in Hyphenated American, 312. All subsequent references are indicated in parentheses. Unless noted, typestyles and formatting are from the original. [13] Min Hyoung Song, The Children of 1965: On Writing, and Not Writing, As an Asian American (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 168. Song’s reading is placed in the context of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (New York: Houghton, 2003). [14] Lee, History, 200–224. [15] For another useful consideration of East West Players, see Yuko Kurahashi, Asian American Culture on Stage: The History of the East West Players (New York: Routledge, 2013). [16] Julia Cho’s 99 Histories and Sung Rno’s Cleveland Raining, for instance, include stage directions that emphasize dream-states and the fluidity of memory. [17] Diehl, “Beyond The Silk Road,” 151. [18] Michael Phillips, “Haze Obscures the Landscape in a Troubled Wonderland,” Los Angeles Times, 6 October 1999, http://articles.latimes.com/1999/oct/06/entertainment/ca-19230. [19] Ibid. [20] Diehl, “Beyond The Silk Road,” 151. [21] Yew, Hyphenated American, 281. [22] Stacy Ellen Wolf, “‘We’ll Always Be Bosom Buddies’: Female Duets and the Queering of Broadway Musical Theater,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 3 (2006): 351–76; D. A. Miller, Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); John M. Clum, Something for the Boys: Musical Theater and Gay Culture (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999). For other useful sources on queerness, performance, musicals, and associated genres, see Steven Cohan, Incongruous Entertainment: Camp, Cultural Value, and the MGM Musical (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); and Judith Peraino, Listening to the Sirens: Musical Technologies of Queer Identity from Homer to Hedwig (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). [23] More recently, cultural critics have explored how popular musicals have been revised using purportedly race-blind casting considerations, which have included Asian American actors and performers; see, e.g., such as Angela C. Pao, “Green Glass and Emeralds: Citation, Performance, and the Dynamics of Ethnic Parody in Thoroughly Modern Millie,” MELUS 36, no. 4 (2011): 35–60; and Donatella Galella, “Redefining America, Arena Stage, and Territory Folks in a Multiracial Oklahoma!,” Theatre Journal 67, no. 2 (2015): 213–33. [24] Celine P. Shimizu, The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). [25] Ibid., 51. [26] Wolf, “Bosom Buddies,” 352. [27] See Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (New York: Verso, 1989); Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991); Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage, 1992). [28] Michael Dear and Steven Flusty, “The Iron Lotus: Los Angeles and Postmodern Urbanism,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 551 (May 1997): 155. [29] Additionally, the Man must adhere to certain boundaries in the construction of these malls due to his status as what John Chase terms a “[C]onsumerist architect.” John Chase, “The Role of Consumerism in American Architecture,” Journal of Architectural Education 44, no. 4 (1991): 211. [30] Timothy Davis, “The Miracle Mile Revisited: Recycling, Renovation, and Simulation along the Commercial Strip,” Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 7 (1997): 93–114, esp. 97. [31] For some important studies on the American shopping mall (and variations such as the shopping center), see Jon Goss, “The ‘Magic of the Mall’: An Analysis of Form, Function, and Meaning in the Contemporary Retail Built Environment,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 83, no. 1 (1993): 18–47 and Lizabeth Cohen, “From Town Center to Shopping Center: The Reconfiguration of Community Marketplaces in Postwar America,” American Historical Review 101, no. 4 (1996): 1050–81. [32] For a compelling case for rereading popular musicals through the lens of queer spectatorship, see Wolf, “Bosom Buddies.” [33] Ski Hunter, Coming Out and Disclosures: LGT Persons Across the Life Span (New York: Routledge, 2012), 110. [34] Nang Du, Hendry Ton, and Elizabeth J. Kramer, “New Immigrants,” in Praeger Handbook of Asian American Health, ed. William Baragar Bateman, Noilyn Abesamis-Mendoza, and Henrietta Ho-Asjoe (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2009), 1:338. [35] Cirleen DeBlaere and Melanie Brewster, “Diversity across the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning Community,” in Creating School Environments to Support Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning Students and Families: A Guide for Working with Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning Youth and Families, ed. Emily S. Fisher and Karen Komosa-Hawkins (New York: Routledge, 2013), 77. [36] Joann Lee, “Asian American Actors in Film, Television and Theater: An Ethnographic Case Study,” Race, Gender & Class 8, no. 4 (2001): 182. [37] The problem of racialized casting is further exacerbated by the simple lack of representational diversity in film, television, and elsewhere. Margaret Hillenbrand, “Of Myths and Men: Better Luck Tomorrow and the Mainstreaming of Asian America,” Cinema Journal 47, no. 4 (2008): 50. [38] The Karate Kid, dir. John G. Avildsen, perf. Ralph Macchio, Noriyuki “Pat” Morita, Elisabeth Shue (Culver City, CA: Columbia Pictures, 1984). [39] Alan Hájek, “Conditional Probability,” in Philosophy of Statistics, ed. Prasanta S. Bandyopadhyay and Malcolm R. Forster (Amsterdam: North Holland, 2011), 7:99. [40] Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie (New York: New Directions), xix–xxi. [41] Patrick O’Connor, “Theatre,” Furrow 15, no. 3 (1964): 166. [42] According to R. B. Parker, the memory play functions primarily through the subjective viewpoint of a narrator figure: “[W]e not only see exclusively what the narrator consciously wants us to see, but also see it only in the way he chooses that we should.” R. B. Parker, “The Circle Closed: A Psychological Reading of The Glass Menagerie and The Two Character Play,” Modern Drama 28, no. 4 (1985): 519. [43] For a consideration of the memory play through the lens of meta-theatrical elements, see Philip Kolin, “Something Cloudy, Something Clear: Tennessee Williams’s Postmodern Memory Play,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 12, no. 2 (1998): 35–55. Parker also considers the meta-theatrical character of the memory play by calling it a “box-within-box structure” (Parker, “The Circle Closed,” 519). [44] Diana Sandars and Rhonda V. Wilcox, “Not ‘The Same Arrangement’: Breaking Utopian Promises in the Buffy Musical,” in Music, Sound and Silence in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, ed. Paul Gregory Attinello, Janet K. Halfyard, and Vanessa Knights (New York: Routledge, 2010), 206. In this sense, Wonderland does gesture to the central thematic of aging in the memory play and how this process necessary impacts how we look back on past events. Valerie Barnes Lipscomb, “Performing the Aging Self in Hugh Leonard’s Da and Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa,” Comparative Drama 47, no. 3 (2013): 286. [45] Andrea Most, “‘We Know We Belong to the Land’: The Theatricality of Assimilation in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!,” PMLA 113, no. 1 (1998): 79. It must be noted that Sandars and Wilcox, “Not ‘The Same Arrangement,’” provide this articulation of the musical in their context of Buffy. [46] Andrea Most specifically makes this argument in the context of Oklahoma! Most, “We Know We Belong.” [47] Anne Beggs, “‘For Urinetown is your town . . .’: The Fringes of Broadway,” Theatre Journal 62, no. 1 (2010): 46. [48] Lei Ouyang Bryant, “Performing Race and Place in Asian America: Korean American Adoptees, Musical Theatre, and the Land of 10,000 Lakes,” Asian Music 40, no. 1 (2009): 4. [49] Ibid., 9. [50] Pat Launer, “Wonderland at the La Jolla Playhouse,” KPBS, October 8, 1999, http://www.patlauner.com/review/wonderland-at-the-la-jolla-playhouse. [51] Ibid. [52] Stacy Ellen Wolf, “‘Defying Gravity’: Queer Conventions in the Musical Wicked,” Theatre Journal 60, no. 1 (2008): 17. [53] Ibid., 17–18. “Calculated Cacophonies: The Queer Asian American Family and the Nonmusical Musical in Chay Yew's Wonderland" by Stephen Hong Sohn ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 29, Number 1 (Fall 2016/Winter 2017) ©2017 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Curtis Russell Editorial Assistant: Christine Snyder Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: “Historical Subjectivity and the Revolutionary Archetype in Amiri Baraka's The Slave and Luis Valdez's Bandido!” by Jose Fernandez “Calculated Cacophonies: The Queer Asian American Family and the Nonmusical Musical in Chay Yew's Wonderland" by Stephen Hong Sohn www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director ©2016 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References About The Authors 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 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 29 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Theatre of David Henry Hwang David Coley By Published on June 4, 2017 Download Article as PDF ! Widget Didn’t Load Check your internet and refresh this page. If that doesn’t work, contact us. The Theatre of David Henry Hwang. By Esther Kim Lee. New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015; pp. x + 207. The work of David Henry Hwang represents an intersection of many of the most prominent concerns of late 20th century and early 21st century drama. His plays tackle numerous facets of identity politics, such as race, gender, sexuality, and ancestry. Esther Kim Lee’s extensive survey of Hwang’s theatrical output traces all of these themes through his successes, failures, and participation in cultural discourse. Combining her own work with that of three other scholars in the final chapter, Lee’s work functions as history, analysis, and criticism, providing a portrait of one of American theatre’s most notable dramatists. Hwang is best known for his Tony Award-winning play M. Butterfly, and though it does occupy its own chapter, much more room in this text is devoted to his other works, some of which are rather obscure. This attempt at a comprehensive survey is somewhat undercut by the relative absence of discussion of his work on musicals, most of which, with the exception of Flower Drum Song, are summed up in a couple of pages. Hwang’s position on these projects as a script doctor, rather than as primary author, may contribute to the scant attention Lee pays to them. Still, despite some gaps, Lee deftly covers most all of Hwang’s plays in an accessible and thorough manner. Lee’s approach with each text is to summarize the major plot points, but then delve into the subtext of each work and how it connects with the overall concerns of Hwang as a dramatist. She starts with a trio of plays from the beginning of Hwang’s career that reflect his early grappling with some of the themes listed above as well as the culture of his home state of California. FOB (an acronym for Fresh Off the Boat) shows Hwang exploring different types of immigrant and minority experiences in America through two contrasting Chinese American characters. Lee explores the influence of Sam Shepard on this work, as well as Hwang’s wrestling with the “dilemma of assimilation” (12). The other two plays in that first (informal) trilogy, The Dance and the Railroad and Family Devotions see Hwang dramatizing the immigrant experience through its dual challenges: fitting into a new culture while maintaining one’s own. Lee follows Hwang as he expands his thematic vision to include other cultures and ideas, incorporating Japanese stories and settings in The House of Sleeping Beauties and The Sound of a Voice. The reason for this is not just a sense of interculturalism, but also to explore gender. As Lee writes, “The Japanese tradition provides the cultural underpinnings for more rigid gender divisions, which Hwang uses to examine how gender is embodied and performed in the game of power and love” (38). She also discusses Rich Relations, one of Hwang’s notable failures that saw him turn from ethnicity as a theme before returning to it in his most famous play, M. Butterfly. Lee spends the entirety of her third chapter on that text, reviewing the scholarly, critical, and commercial responses to the play. The play would launch Hwang to a new level of prominence that would drive his career in unexpected ways. The book chronicles how Hwang’s notoriety led to him being drawn into protests over whitewashing in the casting of the Broadway musical Miss Saigon. His experiences with that controversy would make its way into his play Yellow Face, which Lee covers in the fifth chapter. Before that, the fourth chapter is devoted to Hwang’s 1990s output, consisting of Bondage, Face Value, another notable failure which closed during Broadway previews, Trying to Find Chinatown, and his successful return to Broadway in Golden Child. In his recent works, Hwang has continued to explore the intersecting concerns of race, gender, and globalization, as Lee notes, in texts that draw on the personal experiences of himself and his family. Hwang’s metatheatricality evolves to provide multiple perspectives on a given plot or character, with the combination of fiction and nonfiction exemplifying his style in several of his plays. Golden Child and Yellow Face, in particular, manifest this tendency. Lee writes that in Yellow Face, “…the characters wear multiple masks, and it is impossible to tell which mask is the ‘real’ one, or whether ‘realness’ exists at all” (114). The last two productions Lee covers, Chinglish and Kung Fu, a play about Bruce Lee, both deal with travel and communication between the United States and China, though the former brings together most all of the themes present in Hwang’s work more potently than the latter. After Lee reaches the end of Hwang’s oeuvre, she brings in three other scholars to give further critical analysis on previously discussed texts. The final chapter contains three short essays in which Josephine Lee compares Hwang’s 2001-updated script of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song to its 1958 original, Dan Bacalzo examines multiple versions of Golden Child, and Daphne Lei explores the globalized context of Chinglish. Esther Kim Lee’s prose deftly mixes biographical information with textual analysis, crafting a highly readable study that should be useful to both new and seasoned scholars. The breadth of the textual analysis is impressive, with the authors analyzing multiple versions of certain texts to trace Hwang’s evolution as an artist. Those interested in Hwang’s work will find plenty to enrich their understanding, while those studying Asian American theatre will find his work placed within that discourse. Details about specific productions are also found throughout, though the focus remains on the written texts. Those hoping for a larger analysis of production aesthetics and the ways in which Hwang’s texts have inspired particular design choices may find it lacking, but the book will certainly lead devotees of the author to further study of his contributions to the American stage. David Coley St. Gregory’s University The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 29, Number 2 (Spring 2017) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2017 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References ! Widget Didn’t Load Check your internet and refresh this page. If that doesn’t work, contact us. About The Authors ! Widget Didn’t Load Check your internet and refresh this page. If that doesn’t work, contact us. 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 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 2 Visit Journal Homepage Representation from Cambodia to America: Musical Dramaturgies in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band Jennifer Goodlander By Published on May 23, 2022 Download Article as PDF by Jennifer Goodlander The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 34, Number 2 (Spring 2022) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2022 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center For many, Cambodia and Cambodian American identities remain “unrepresentable.”[1] Jonathan H. X. Lee troubles the relationships between Southeast Asian, American, and specific national identities to suggest a rethinking of identity that might “arise from calibrating subjectivities and internal-alchemies of memories, histories, and visions.”[2] For people from Cambodia, questions of citizenship or status further come into play when considering how the United States shares responsibility for genocide because its policy of bombing the Cambodian-Vietnamese border instigated the political situation that allowed Pol Pot to come to power. Additionally, recent US immigration policy has resulted in the deportation of hundreds of Cambodian Americans to Cambodia, even though many of them have no memory of their “home” land. How then does Lauren Yee in her new play Cambodian Rock Band (CRB) craft a moving story of a father and daughter in Cambodia while complicating discourses about Cambodian and Cambodian American identities and responsibility? One of the top ten most-produced plays in 2019 in US professional theatres, CRB will go on a highly anticipated national tour in 2022. The play tells the story of Neery, who is working in Cambodia to help bring the top villains of the Khmer Rouge to justice, and her father, whom she discovers is one of the few survivors of the regime’s infamous prison, S-21. Although physical violence is not completely absent from the play, it is not the focus of emotional or narrative impact.[3] Music moves the play from family drama into larger discussions of truth and healing, memory and politics. Cathy J. Schlund-Vials names this complicated relationship “Cambodian Syndrome,” “a transnational set of amnesiac politics revealed through hegemonic modes of public policy and memory.”[4] The often illusionistic play destabilizes truth through music. Jill Dolan describes the limits of illusionism and focuses on primarily the visual and textual apparatus of representation that might be used to destabilize hegemonic readings.[5] I am proposing using music outside the limits of Brechtian tactics; it is music, not the bodies onstage, that offers the dramaturgical means for representation. Musical dramaturgy examines the way music functions, beyond invoking emotion or creating atmosphere, within a theatrical production; “what music does, rather than what is.”[6] Often, within musical dramaturgy, the focus is primarily, or even solely, on how music lives within or creates the dramatic text.[7] I expand this notion, because music, like the stage itself, is “haunted,” to borrow Marvin Carlson’s term.[8] In CBR, lyric, melody/harmony, cultures, and histories inform what we hear and what that sound means. The play opens with a live band on stage playing two songs before the house lights dim and the dialogue begins. The bouncy, joyful sound of “Cyclo” (both the name of the song and of the band) begins in the diatonic scale commonly used by American rock bands. This is in contrast to the opening refrain of the next song “Uku,” which features a pentatonic scale, the five-note scale that often suggests an “Asian” sound to the listener. A haunting flute dances lightly against the rhythm of the guitar and is complemented by percussion that invokes sounds of distant thunder or gunfire. A female singer adds another level of sound, as her voice invokes a feeling of longing. The words are in Khmer, but the sound suggests the meaning, even without translation: The windy season makes me think of my village I think of the old people, young people, aunts and uncles We used to run and play, hide and seek But now we are far apart[9] This pair of songs challenges and supports various misconceptions of Asian identities as Other and complicates global connections between Asia and the United States. Music serves as a backbone for the play and a significant element of the story; the songs are a mix of Cambodian and American radio-hits from the past and new compositions by the California-based group Dengue Fever. The audience experiences the music in the immediate present, but the music invokes the past and another culture through language and sound. Just as the music jumps across time and locale, the story of Cambodian-born Chum reconciling his relationship with his American daughter Neery explores different cultural values and intertwined histories. Yee’s deep obsession with the music of Dengue Fever inspired her to write the play, but as the play developed, the music also became central to the play’s dramaturgy. The songs do not always propel the action forward, as it would in a musical, but director Chay Yew explains, “the music is actually another character in Lauren’s play.”[10] Discussions of the play often mention that the music makes the play accessible because rock music would be familiar to an audience generally unfamiliar with Cambodia—“music is universal and defies borders.”[11] I argue that the music does more than make the play accessible. In this essay, I use CRB as a case to explore how musical dramaturgies might articulate complex Asian identities that complicate the limits of visuality. Similarly, recent scholarship on Asian and Asian American identities also focuses on the aural.[12] I use music, as Daphne Lei describes, to move identity from a binary of Asian/Asian American to a neither/nor state where “the past is ‘forgotten’ but the future is not yet reached,” and ends with the hope that “interlinked Asian and American ethnicities can be created, negotiated, and performed.”[13] I argue that the music within the play offers an alternative means to engage some of the complex relationships between Southeast Asia and the United States and mirrors a similar need for engagement within scholarship between Asian performance and Asian American performance. From the beginning, the play establishes the limits between visual versus aural regimes of knowledge. As the opening music concludes, everyone is seated and the house lights dim. A man appears onstage to thank and introduce the band. He says, “From their first, last, ONLY album, recorded in Phnom Penh, April 1974. A tape that—like so much of Cambodia’s music of the time—no longer exists,” then he changes his tone, “but that’s not what you think of when you think of Cambodia, is it? YOU think of something a little more like this.”[14] The man clicks through several slides of Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge that the stage directions describe as “Black and white. Gruesome.”[15] The images are from Cambodia in 1975-1979, when the Khmer Rouge, the name commonly given to Cambodia’s Communist Party, attempted to turn the country back to Year Zero. They emptied the cities, abolished the currency, dismantled education, and sought to eliminate any reference to the past or foreign influence. More than two million Cambodians died, some from starvation or illness, but many were also killed for petty crimes, such as stealing food. The country’s elite prisoners, including artists and intellectuals, were held at detention centers where they were tortured, forced to confess their “crimes,” and driven out of town to dig a shallow grave before they were killed. More than 20,000 people are thought to have been tortured and executed at Tuol Sleng (commonly called S-21), a former high school in Phnom Penh. When the Vietnamese liberated the city, only seven people were left alive in the prison.[16] Now a museum, Tuol Sleng represents both the power and limits of visual representation. This site of both horror and later attempts at reconciliation is one of the most popular tourist sites in Cambodia. When I visited in 2016, I was overwhelmed by the hundreds of photos hanging on the walls—mug shots of victims and documentation of the torture they endured. Scholar and Khmer Rouge survivor Boreth Ly describes how “the Khmer Rouge was very visually focused. It was a scopic regime that enforced visual surveillance on its victim and deliberately traumatized and destroyed their vision.”[17] When he was twelve years old, he and his grandmother finally returned to their home after four years of forced labor. The house was empty, and they searched for any photographs of their relatives, but they were all gone. He contrasts this loss with the multitude of photos at Tuol Sleng, documenting the prisoners who were executed.[18] These photographs have circulated globally in museums, books, and online as the primary representation of the genocide. Michelle Caswall, describes how, “a complex layering of silencing is revealed”[19] and “Because of both the transformative power of the creation of these mug shots and the complete oppressiveness of Tuol Sleng as a total institution within a totalitarian state, there are no whispers of the victims in these records; the photographs, like the dead they depict, remain frustratingly silent.”[20] The problem is that the images confound the viewer and render the victim silent. Yee engages the problem of visual representation through the many overt mentions of photographs and seeing in the play. The man in the opening is Kaing Guek Eav, or Comrade Duch as he was known, the head officer of S-21.[21] He taunts the gruesome images of the genocide—“boring,” “tragique,” “genocide, genocide, genocide, boo,” and threatens that he is always “watching watching always watching.”[22] Later, Neary realizes that her father, Chum, is likely the eighth survivor featured in a photograph. She confronts him; he confirms his identity but refuses to testify. Chum argues that the truth cannot be found in a photograph, and that if Duch is guilty, so is he. In a flashback, Yee suggests that the photographs that really matter are the ones that never existed. Chum delayed his family’s escape so his band could record the last song on their album. They want to take a photograph, but they forgot to bring a camera; there was no photo and there was no escape. These examples illustrate the complicated ways that visual evidence is threatening, unreliable, and incomplete. Another method is required to sort through the various relationships between Cambodia and American identities in the play and music offers that means. Two songs played within the prison space towards the end of the play are especially effective at dramatizing this history. Chum is eventually arrested and brought to S-21. He tries to hide his identity by claiming he is a banana seller, but he eventually ends up in a room with Duch himself. Duch asks about some words that Chum wrote and learns that they are the lyrics to Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” Duch orders Chum to play the song, but Chum requires a guitar because, “I just want you to hear how it’s supposed to be played. So you know the absolute truth,” and for the first time in months, the sound of music calms Duch and allows him to sleep.[23] Chum's words echo Dylan’s own feelings that a song is more than its lyrics; “they’re meant to be sung, not read.”[24] Dramaturgically the insertion of this quintessential American anti-war song echoes perceptions about the futility of the American effort in Southeast Asia, and especially Cambodia. Even though Dylan conceived of this song as a big statement to unite the civils rights movement and folk music, many critics dismissed it as an “empty gesture” with “little political relevance.”[25] Perhaps Duch is lulled to sleep by this reminder that likewise America has little relevance and is unlikely to come save the suffering people in Cambodia. While in prison, Chum writes, and on the night of his scheduled execution, he plays one last song, “Hammer and Nail,” the first half of which is in English: Something old Something new Something borrowed And something blue Couldn’t keep me from trying and fighting Doing everything I can To somehow end up with you again. You can call me a fool And I know that I am Won’t let you slip through my fingers Just like sand[26] On the surface, the song is about a pending wedding and a possible break-up, but the singer promises to fight for his love. Musically it bridges the sound of American folk and Cambodian surfer rock. From the first line, “Something Old,” until “just like sand,” the chord progression moves slowly up the scale, and structurally is not unlike the Dylan song. The second part repeats the lyrics in Khmer, but this time with back-up singers adding an angelic, otherworldly quality. In the context of the scene, it is about fighting for life, about fighting for something bigger than oneself. The play ends with Chum and his daughter playing “I’m Sixteen,” originally by Ros Serey Sothea, together in the prison/museum. Sothea was one of the most beloved singers of Cambodian rock before the Khmer Rouge, and “I’m Sixteen” functions as an anthem connecting Cambodians to the past. Also, this mesmerizing anthem both inspired and is featured on Dengue Fever’s first album.[27] The song and the moment onstage combine to create a kind of, to borrow Sean Metzger’s term, “temporal folding,” where “subjects emerge in a relation of figures through one another, through actions in the present associated with those in the past” that allows for a simultaneous representation of past/present and Asian/Asian American.[28] The staging reinforces the power of music, as the stage lights shift to indicate that the sun is coming up and the stage directions read “behind them, the sun rises higher and higher, blinding us. We see the bandmates’ silhouettes as they rock out to one last song.”[29] Sight is obliterated, and representation happens in the music alone. Postscript Since the world premiere of CRB in 2018, the context of the show and even this article has changed, making the play’s message even more imperative, and music continues to be the crux of representation. On July 20, 2020, in response to cancelled productions due to Covid–19 shutdowns and the growing Black Lives Matter protests after the death of George Floyd, Lauren Yee and Joe Ngo[30] announced the #CRBChallenge. Ngo articulated a debt to the Black civil rights movement and the intertwined histories of rock music: “Who hasn’t borrowed Afro-Caribbean beats?”[31] The challenge called for singers around the world to recreate songs from the show or Cambodia more generally in order to raise awareness about and to fundraise for organizations working for both Black and Cambodian American communities. The resulting videos, with #CRBChallenge, demonstrate a multi-faceted connection to the play, its story and music, and the depth of talent among Asians and Asian Americans. Jennifer Goodlander is an Associate Professor at Indiana University in the Department of Comparative Literature. Jennifer has published numerous articles and two books: Women in the Shadows: Gender, Puppets, and the Power of Tradition in Bali (Ohio University Press, 2016) and Puppets and Cities: Articulating Identities in Southeast Asia (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2018). Her current research looks at transnational Southeast Asian identities as expressed in performance, literature, and art. [1] Ashley Thompson, “Forgetting to Remember, Again: On Curatorial Practice and ‘Cambodian Art’ in the Wake of Genocide,” diacritics 41 no. 2 (2013): 82-109. [2] Jonathan H. X. Lee, “Southeast Asian Americans: Memories, Visions, and Subjectivities,” in Southeast Asian Diaspora in the United States: Memories and Visions, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, ed. Jonathan H. X. Lee, Cambridge Scholars Publisher (Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom: 2014), 1. [3] The script calls for several scenes of torture and violence, however, I have read hundreds of reviews and these scenes are not the focus and rarely mentioned. [4] Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 13. [5] Jill Dolan, Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 1-3. [6] Kim Baston, “Not Just ‘Evocative’: The Function of Music in Theatre,” Australasian Drama Studies 67 (2015), 5. Emphasis in original. [7] Carl Dahlhaus and Mary Whittal, “What is a Musical Drama?” Cambridge Opera Journal 1, no. 2 (1989): 95-96. [8] Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). [9] Lauren Yee, “Cambodian Rock Band,” American Theatre 35, no. 6 (July/August 2018), 49. The songs used in the production are written by Dengue Fever. In my descriptions of the music, I am relying on my memory of the 2019 production at the Victory Gardens, Chicago, IL, directed by Marti Lyons, and the cast album that was released in May 2020. [10] Donatella Galella, “Listening to Cambodian Rock Band: An Interview with Lauren Yee and Chay Yew,” Performance Matters 6, no. 2 (2020), 127. [11] Ibid., 130. [12] For more on Asian American identities and accents see Shilpa Davé, “Racial Accents, Hollywood Casting, and Asian American Studies,” Cinema Journal 56 no. 3 (2017): 142-147. Also for insight on performing race and the music of Dengue Fever see Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, A Race So Different: Performance and Law in Asian America (New York: New York University Press, 2013), especially chapter 5. Spoken word as music, which playwright Chay Yew calls the “nonmusical musical,” is also key to identity in Stephen Hong Sohn, “Calculated Cacophonies: The Queer Asian American Family and the Nonmusical Musical in Chay Yew’s Wonderland,” The Journal of American Drama and Theatre 29, vol. 1 (2016). [13] Daphne Lei, “Staging the Binary: Asian American Theatre in the Late Twentieth Century,” A Companion to Twentieth Century American Drama, ed. David Krasner (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 301-317. [14] Yee, CRB, 49. [15] Ibid. [16] David P. Chandler, Voices From S-21: Terror and History In Pol Pot's Secret Prison (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). [17] Boreth Ly, “Of Performance and the Persistent Temporality of Trauma: Memory, Art, and Visions,” positions: east asia cultures critique 16, no. 11 (2008), 118. [18] Ibid., 115-116. [19] Michelle Caswell, Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory, and the Photographic Record in Cambodia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), 7. [20] Ibid., 158. [21] For a history about Duch and his trial, see Alexander Laban Hinton, Man Or Monster?: The Trial of a Khmer Rouge Torturer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). [22] Yee, CRB, 50. [23] Music as a tool of survival is perhaps taken from the real-life story of Arn-Chorn-Pond whose life was saved because he played music for the Khmer Rouge. This story is retold by Patricia McCormick in the novel Never Fall Down (New York: Balzer + Bray, 2012). [24] Dylan quoted in Larry Starr, Listening to Bob Dylan (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021), 1. [25] Starr, Listening, 34. [26] Yee, CRB, 65. [27] Nic Cohn, “A Voice from the Killing Fields,” The Guardian, 19 May 2007, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2007/may/20/worldmusic.features (accessed 25 January 2022). [28] Sean Metzger, “At the Vanishing Point: Theater and Asian/American Critique,” American Quarterly 63, no. 2 (2011), 279. [29] Yee, CRB, 69. [30] Ngo, whose parents are Chinese Cambodian and survived the Khmer Rouge, played the original Chum in CRB and has recreated the role for numerous productions. [31] “Welcome to the CRB Challenge! #CRBChallenge,” Facebook, 5 July 2020, https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=282008519582298 (accessed 20 January 2022). Guest Editor: Donatella Galella Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Co-Managing Editor: Emily Furlich Co-Managing Editor: Dahye Lee Guest Editorial Board: Arnab Banerji Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns Broderick Chow Chris A. Eng Esther Kim Lee Sean Metzger Christine Mok Stephen Sohn Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: "Introduction to Asian American Dramaturgies" by Donatella Galella "Behind the Scenes of Asian American Theatre and Performance," by Donatella Galella, Dorinne Kondo, Esther Kim Lee, Josephine Lee, Sean Metzger, and Karen Shimakawa "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" by Jennifer Goodlander "The Dramaturgical Sensibility of Lauren Yee's The Great Leap and Cambodian Rock Band" by Kristin Leahey, with excerpts from an interview with Joseph Ngo "Holding up a Lens to the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists: A Photo Essay" by Roger Tang "Theatre in Hawaiʻi: An 'Illumination of the Fault Lines' of Asian American Theatre" by Jenna Gerdsen "Randul Duk Kim: A Sojourn in the Embodiment of Words" by Baron Kelly "Reappropriation, Reparative Creativity, and Feeling Yellow in Generic Ensemble Company's The Mikado: Reclaimed" by kt shorb "Dance Planets" by Al Evangelista "Dramaturgy of Deprivation (없다): An Invitation to Re-Imagine Ways We Depict Asian American and Adopted Narratives of Trauma" by Amy Mihyang Ginther "Clubhouse: Stories of Empowered Uncanny Anomalies" by Bindi Kang "Off-Yellow Time vs. Off-White Space: Activist Asian American Dramaturgy in Higher Education" by Daphne P. Lei "Asian American Dramaturgies in the Classroom: A Reflection" by Ariel Nereson www.jadtjournal.org www.jadtjournal.org ">jadt@gc.cuny.eduwww.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Yu Chien Lu, Administrative Producer ©2022 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References About The Authors 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 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

PRELUDE Festival 2023 ARTIST TALK Annie-B Parson Dance, Discussion English 30 minutes 3:30PM EST Saturday, October 14, 2023 Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All In conversation about past and upcoming projects Big Dance Theater Content / Trigger Description: Annie-B will give an artist talk. Choreographer Annie-B Parson is the artistic director of Obie award-winning Big Dance Theater, which she co-founded in 1991 with Paul Lazar and Molly Hickok. Parson has co-created over twenty large-scale works for such venues as the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Old Vic/London, Saddler’s Wells/London, The Walker, The National Theater/Paris, Japan Society and The Kitchen. Outside of her company, some of the artists she has worked with include David Byrne, David Bowie, Lorde, St. Vincent, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Wendy Whelan, Anne Carson, Esperanza Spalding, Suzan-Lori Parks, Laurie Anderson, Salt n Pepa, Jonathan Demme, and the Martha Graham Dance Company. Parson choreographed and did musical staging for American Utopia, and she choreographed Byrne’s musical Here Lies Love which is currently on Broadway; as well as his tours with Brian Eno, and St. Vincent. Parson recently choreographed two operas: Candide at the Lyon Opera, and The Hours at The Met. Parson’s writing has been published in The Atlantic, and The Paris Review; her book The Choreography of Everyday Life is published by Verso Press. Upcoming, with Thomas F. DeFrantz, she is co-editing a book entitled: Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study. bigdancetheater.org anniebparson.com Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

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

PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE Would you be shocked if I put on something more comfortable? Fernando Vieira Theater, Film, Multimedia English 30 minutes 7:30PM EST Friday, October 20, 2023 Torn Page, West 22nd Street, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All One-person show about queerness, camp, and our obsessive fascination with film divas. Content / Trigger Description: PG/ mention of gender identity Fernando Vieira is an Ecuadorian-born New York-based writer, director, and performer. Vieira debuted as a playwright and stage director with the one-person monologue “Me Voy Porque Puedo” in 2016. Other projects include starring in and directing “The Maids” in 2017 and “Las Mártiras” in 2022. Recent playwriting works include two stage plays that explore queerness, violence, and the quest for freedom: “Goodbye, Little George'', which takes place in Florida between the mid- 1960’s and early 1980’s and “Anormales”, a play about queerness in Ecuador during the early 1990’s. In 2021, Vieira created the ¡Bótate! Latinx Performance Festival. Screen work includes the documentary “Unlabeled” (2021) and experimental film “Snippets.” (2023). Fernando has been part of artistic cohorts at NYFA, Creative Capital, and Leslie-Lohman Museum. Fernando has a Bachelor of Arts in Latin American Studies and is a candidate for a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies-Film Studies concentration. www.fernando-vieira.com Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

< Back New Plays from Italy Volume 3 Valeria Orani, Frank Hentschker Italian and American Playwrights Project is curated by Umanism’s Artistic Director Valeria Orani in collaboration with The Martin E. Segal’s Director Frank Hentschker. The project brought together some of the brightest, innovative, and most engaging Italian contemporary playwrights, developing their pieces through translation into English. Italian Playwrights Project restarted an artistic dialogue between Italy and US adding continuity to what had been an on-off relationship between the two countries for the last decades. This book has been translated thanks to a grant by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation. ELISA CASSERI - EVENT ORIZON (TRANSLATED BY ADRIANA ROSSETTO) Olga is stuck in a studio apartment, she cannot figure out what has happened, she only knows that she cannot escape. When she tries to open one of the doors on the wall, she immediately comes back from another one and continues to stay there. Marco is her boyfriend but sometimes he isn’t, her father is alive but later dead, her mother left when she was a little girl but she is suddenly back. Olga struggles to understand and does not know what reality is and what she can do to change what happened and what didn’t happen. She cannot surrender to the real time, to past events, to those journeys into a grief which is too true to be science fiction. GIULIANA MUSSO - MY HERO (TRANSLATED BY PATRICIA GABORIK) My Hero is made up of three distinct monologues. Three mothers of as many Italian soldiers who took part in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mission in Afghanistan during the years 2008-2010. The three women are very different from each other for social extraction, geographic origin, cultural level and personality, but they share the experience of having a soldier's son. Characters are inspired by existing people and real-life events ARMANDO PIROZZI - A NOTEBOOK FOR WINTER (TRANSLATED BY ADRIANA ROSSETTO) A Notebook for Winter is a two-actor-piece which in three acts and tells the story of an introvert professor of literature who finds a burglar on his way back home. The knife-wielding burglar wants something unexpected from him: it is a question of life or death. FABRIZIO SINISI- THE GREAT WALK (TRANSLATED BY THOMAS SIMPSON ) The president of the International Monetary Fund, Frederic Jean-Paul, is arrested and kept in an anonymous New York police station: he’s accused of sexual violence inflicted on a waitress. His two bizarre jailers, Donald and Frank, have been ordered to guard the prisoner until the following morning, when he will be brought to a safer location. However, things don’t go as planned EDITED BY FRANK HENTSCHKERWITH VALERIA ORANI More Information & Order Details

Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 31 1 Visit Journal Homepage Pageants and Patriots: Jewish Spectacles as Performances of Belonging Rachel Merrill Moss and Gary Alan Fine By Published on November 8, 2018 Download Article as PDF References About The Authors 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 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE Fire / Escape (Work In Progress) Michal Gamily/ No Visa Production Theater English, Arabic 60 minutes 5:30PM EST Saturday, October 21, 2023 La MaMa ETC 74a E 4th Street New York, NY 10003 United States Register for Free / Donate (Please note this is a work in progress / performed rehearsal) No Visa Productions presents: Fire / Escape Written / Directed / Produced by Michal Gamily Co written by Lizi Sagie Composed and sound designed by John Sully Dramaturg: Begum Inal Performers: Marina Celander, Michal Gamily, Onni Johnson, Valois Mickens, John Sully, Jane Catherine Shaw, Marybeth Ward, George Drance Fire / Escape is a play about hummus, impossible love, and a donkey, using elements of a Greek tragedy such as: a chorus, and three goddesses of faith who are embroidering the narrative — literally and figuratively. It is a story about an emergency, a wakeup call, happening during a global emergency. The play tells the story of M, an actress and single mother, during the first few months of Covid as she is trying to adjust to the new reality in her beloved abandoned city. M starts making homemade hummus, and selling it from her fire escape. Simultaneously, she is trying to find a way to help "Him”, who has gotten stuck far away from his home, just as his health is declining. Her ongoing efforts to help reflect the nature of their troubled, unbalanced relationship throughout the years, and take M on a journey down memory lane, and self reckoning. Sirens are present throughout as a character song cycle to address the nostalgic quality of the story. There are stories within stories and repeating melodies, and rhythms, presented in different musical contexts. There are references throughout the story to classical film and plays. Fire / Escape is a play designated to be performed outdoors on a fire escape of a multi-story building. It was written based on the limitations, obstacles, and advantages of the specific structure. Fire / Escape is presented in association with Rod Rodgers Dance Company, and La MaMa ETC, with support from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Center. Fire / Escape is a part of the Segal Center's Prelude Festival 2023 No Visa Production in association with Rod Rodgers Dance Company and La MaMa ETC. LMCC grant Content / Trigger Description: No Visa Productions presents: Fire / Escape Written / Directed / Produced by Michal Gamily Co written by Lizi Sagie Composed and sound designed by John Sully Dramaturg: Begum Inal Performers: Marina Celander, Michal Gamily, Onni Johnson, Valois Mickens, John Sully, Jane Catherine Shaw, Marybeth Ward, George Drance Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE Brooklyn is Not a Sacrifice Zone (Day 2) Al Límite Collective Theater, Music, Performance Art English 30 minutes 5:00PM EST Sunday, October 29, 2023 Newtown Creek Nature Walk, Brooklyn, NY 11222, United States Free Entry, Open To All With predictions of a Nor'easter storm predicted for 21/22 Oct weekend, performances of "Brooklyn Is Not a Sacrifice Zone" will take place the following weekend on Saturday October 28th and Sunday October 29th both at 5pm. Audiences will meet at the end of Paidge Ave, near 59 Paidge Ave. in Greenpoint -- at the entrance to the Newtown Creek Nature Walk. Brooklyn is Not a Sacrifice Zone is a live theater community-engaged performance that takes audience along the banks of the Newtown Creek Nature Walk hearing the stories and visions of local residents and activists who dream to topple their neighbor, a giant fracked gas depot. We imagine what the landscape could be if National Grid's site was decommissioned and the land rehabilitated. In addition, it is also an audio archive that collects the stories of those residents, creating an online forum where others can listen and learn about the challenges in living alongside fossil fuel infrastructure and industrial wasteland. Newtown Creek Nature Walk that begins next to this address at the end of Paidge Avenue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn: 59 Paidge Ave Brooklyn, NY 11222 United States Supported by Brooklyn Arts Council Creative Equations Fund Content / Trigger Description: Descriptions of illness caused by industrial pollution Al Límite Collective was founded in 2020 by nine core members, formerly of The Living Theatre, after years of creating collaboratively. Under The Living, we began to develop our unique focus on cross-border exchange, most notably in Mexico, in the heart of the migrant crisis where our namesake (At The Limit) was born. Al Límite Collective functions as a non-hierarchical structure, sharing artistic leadership, that strategically implements a fluid devising process inviting workshop participants to become active collaborators. This method of creation has allowed our performances to continuously evolve and transform, serving as a channel for dialogue and instantaneous connections that transcend language barriers and geographical borders. Al Límite Collective has traveled across the world, from Latin America to the Middle East, from Europe to Asia, to collaborate with artists, community members, refugee and immigrant populations in workshop intensives to devise original performances centered on local social justice issues. ELECTRIC AWAKENING, which premiered in São Paolo in 2017, marks the incubation for the creation of Al Límite Collective. The production continued evolving into an open vessel/workshop to engage with more participants from different fields. In 2019, the production was brought to Mexico as part of the AL LÍMITE TOUR, along with an experimental art festival in Tijuana addressing the injustices of the US immigration system and mass incarceration of immigrant families and asylum seekers at the border. In the summer of 2023 a few members of Al Límite Collective brought Electric Awakening to Athens, Greece and taught the show to local and international performers in self-organized space, Embros Theater produced with Institute for Experimental Arts and at the International Festival of Making Theater. As the world went into lockdown due to the pandemic, Al Límite Collective initiated a multi-media call and response art project, THE LIMINAL ARCHIVE, which welcomed individuals to contribute their creative responses to the tumultuous moment. In the summer of 2020, Al Límite Collective created a site-specific street performance, BROOKLYN IS NOT A SACRIFICE ZONE, to draw attention to the dangerous North Brooklyn fracked gas pipeline running through BIPOC and low income communities, inspired by dozens of interviews with impacted locals and performed directly in the construction sites along the pipeline route. The collective also began staging mobile performances on a four-person operated bicycle platform for spontaneous pop-up theater gliding by passersby for a moment to witness. One such performance included the construction of a cage that mirrored ICE prison cells, which was biked out to an ICE detention center in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. In November 2020, invited by White Box - Harlem, Al Límite Collective staged a live immersive reading of Camus’ REVOLT IN ASTURIAS as the response to the unsettling election of the United States. In March 2021, we staged Quiet Us/ Riot Us in the streets and on rooftops throughout Brooklyn as a meditation on grief. In June 2021 we received the Silver Award for The Hear Now Festival. July 2021 we performed a live in person version of Liminal Archive which received rave reviews at the New Ohio Theatre's Ice Factory Festival. www.allimitecollective.com Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

PRELUDE Festival 2023 PANEL AI in Performance Kenneth Collins, Annie Dorsen, Andrew Scoville, Marianne Weems, and others Discussion English 60 minutes 6:00PM EST Friday, October 13, 2023 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All In this panel discussion we explore the impact of artificial intelligence on the performing arts industry. Curated by Kenneth Collins. Participants: Andrew Scoville, Annie Dorsen, Marianne Weems, and others. Content / Trigger Description: Kenneth Collins is a transdisciplinary artist, working at the intersection of digital media, performance, cinema, and installation. He got his start as an artist in New York City working for Richard Foreman at The Ontological-Hysteric Theater in the East Village. He has since been a resident artist at Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric, Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center, the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, SUNY Buffalo’s Creative Arts Initiative, and was a member of Lincoln Center Theater’s Directors Lab. Collins is best known for his work with Temporary Distortion, a non-profit arts organization he formed in New York City in 2000 with the mission to create experimental work that is accessible to all. Temporary Distortion (named one of the “Best New York Theater companies” by TimeOut NY Magazine) has maintained its roots in downtown NYC as an invested stakeholder in the local community for over 20 years, while also performing at notable venues around the world. The group explores the tensions and overlaps existing between the practices of theatre, cinema, music, and media art. Together with Collins, they continually work across disciplines to create performances, installations, films, albums, and works for the stage that have been shown in over 25 cities in Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Greece, Hungary, Japan, Russia, South Korea, Switzerland, and the United States. Academic essays discussing his work with Temporary Distortion have been published in Yale’s Theater, NYU’s The Drama Review, UCSD’s TheatreForum, Queen Mary’s Contemporary Theatre Review, American Theater Magazine, Chance Magazine, and other industry leading periodicals. His work is also discussed in the books: Performance & Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field, Corps en Scène: L’acteur et les Technologies (Bodies on stage: Acting Confronted by Technologies), Utopii performative: Artisti Radicali ai Scenei Americane in Secolul 21 (Performative Utopias: Radical Artists on the American 21st Century Stage), Media Archaeology and Intermedial Performance: Deep Time of the Theatre, Every Leader is an Artist, Theatre Today, and the popular introduction to theatre textbook, Theatre, Brief (13th Edition). His plays and writing on the arts have been published in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Yale’s Theater, UCSD’s TheatreForum, and Chance Magazine. Kenneth Collins is Assistant Professor of Media Arts Production in the Department of Film and Media Arts at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Annie Dorsen is a director and writer whose works explore the intersection of algorithmic art and live performance. Most recently, her piece Prometheus Firebringer was presented at Theater For a New Audience. Other algorithmic performance projects, including Infinite Sun (2018), The Great Outdoors (2017), Yesterday Tomorrow (2015), A Piece Of Work (2013) and Hello Hi There(2010), have been widely presented in the US and internationally. The script for A Piece Of Work was published by Ugly Duckling Presse, and she has contributed essays for The Drama Review, Theatre Magazine, Etcetera, Frakcija, and Performing Arts Journal (PAJ). She is the co-creator of the 2008 Broadway musical Passing Strange which she also directed. Dorsen has received a 2019 MacArthur Fellowship, a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2014 Herb Alpert Award for the Arts in Theatre. Andrew Scoville is a director specializing in immersive layouts, technological landscapes, and hybrid-genre theater-making. He has a passion for bringing science ideas into theatrical spaces. He recently directed “Theater of the Mind” a multi-room theater/neuroscience experience by David Byrne and Mala Gaonkar at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. He was commissioned by The New York Hall of Science to create “Escape the Planet” a family-friendly interactive STEAM experience based on the research of astronomer Dr. Moiya McTier. He has created two distinct projects with Bina48, a humanoid robot, consisting of a bust-like head and shoulders mounted on a frame, developed by Hanson Robotics. Marianne Weems is a director of theater, opera, and mixed reality performance, and artistic director of the award-winning New York-based performance and media ensemble The Builders Association. Since 1994, The Builders Association has created a significant body of work at the forefront of combining media and performance. They have created many original large-scale productions and worked with some unexpected collaborators including the architects Diller + Scofidio, The National Center for Super Computing Applications, and the South Asian arts collective motiroti. Since 1994 their productions have been presented in New York at BAM (five premieres), Lincoln Center, New York Theater Workshop, the Public Theater, St Anne’s Warehouse, the Guggenheim and Whitney Museums, and other local venues. Internationally their work has been produced at the Barbican Centre in London, Maison des Arts Paris, Melbourne Festival, the Romaeuropa Festival, the Festival Iberoamericano de Bogota, the Singapore Arts Festival, and many other venues. The company has toured globally to over 85 venues in the last 25 years (www.thebuildersassociation.org ). Weems has also worked in various creative roles with Taryn Simon, The Wooster Group, Susan Sontag, David Byrne, The V-Girls, and many others. She serves on the board of Art Matters, a modest but fierce foundation that created Visual Aids, the National Campaign for Freedom of Expression, and the Arts Forward Fund. Weems is a professor in Digital Arts and New Media (DANM) and Performance, Play & Design (PPD) at the University of California, Santa Cruz. From 2008-2014 she was the head of Graduate Directing at the School of Drama at Carnegie Mellon University and she was the lead faculty of a Carnegie Mellon arts and technology initiative based in New York City. She is the co-author with Shannon Jackson of The Builders Association: Performance and Media in Contemporary Theater (MIT Press Fall 2015) and Art Matters: How the Culture Wars Changed America (NYU Press 2000.). Current members of the Builders Association include: Moe Angelos performer/writer, Dan Dobson sound design, James Gibbs dramaturg/writer, Larry Shea media architect, Austin Switzer video design, and Jennifer Tipton lighting design. Shannon Sindelar, Producing Director. Photo credits: Kenneth Collins. Photo courtesy of the artist. Annie Dorsen. Credit by Stephen Dodd. Andrew Scoville. Credit by Billy Bustamante. Marianne Weems. Photo courtesy of the artist. Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 1 Visit Journal Homepage On Bow and Exit Music Derek Miller By Published on December 11, 2017 Download Article as PDF by Derek Miller The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 30, Number 1 (Fall 2017) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2017 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center To begin at the end: actors land in a tableau; lights fade; curtain falls. In the American musical theatre, a final chord sounds in the orchestra. End of play. But not end of production, nor end of performance. For the curtain rises again; lights come back on; actors pose for their bows. And, in many musicals, the orchestra accompanies this whole sequence. This ultimate, non-diegetic musical moment stamps indelibly the fate of some shows.[1] Recalling the industry run-through of The Music Man, the show’s creator Meredith Willson noted that curtain call as particularly memorable, a sign of good things to come for his masterpiece: The piano started “Seventy-Six Trombones.” Out came the dancers playing their pantomime trombones, swinging cross that stage as proud as you'll ever wanta see anybody be. That’s when the audience burst into spontaneous rhythmic applause as though cued to do so—as it has happened with every audience from that day forward. (Walter Kerr described it a year later in a Saturday Evening Post article on the theatre, saying that “the rhythmic hand-clapping which greeted the finale of The Music Man on opening night was the only time I have ever felt a single irresistible impulse sweep over an entire audience and stir it to a demonstration that could not possibly have been inhibited.”)[2] While that show’s curtain call aroused an unusual level of fervor in its audiences, Willson’s story exposes the importance of “bow music,” the music that plays while the cast takes their bows, and “exit music,” which plays as the audience leaves the theater. This essay explores the role of bow and exit music in the American musical. Bow and exit music—arriving as they do at the liminal moment when the preceding narrative gives way to everyday life—help audiences interpret the musical as an artistic phenomenon and encourage a particular audience relationship to the show as a commercial product. Performing this dual function, bow and exit music resemble film and television music for title sequences, end credits, and trailers. As a recent essay on that topic summarized, “Title and credit sequences link the inside and outside of fictional texts, the acknowledgement of the real-world origin of a film with its story and storyworld. In doing so, they also connect the institutional and economic reality of a film to its story.”[3] As a form of popular mass entertainment, American musicals, like film and television, must always negotiate “economic reality.” Indeed, the strain between the twin domains of art/commerce is audible in much research on the American musical.[4] Bow and exit music announce with particular poignancy the musical’s struggle for both cultural significance and financial success. The pages that follow provide an interpretive framework for understanding how bow and exit music work in the musical theatre. First, I consider how bow and exit music both sustain and disrupt extant theories of the non-musical curtain call. I then explore productions that use bow and exit music to reinforce or inflect the preceding narrative, either by emphasizing a show’s theme or by reshaping how audiences interpret characters. Shifting to commerce, I attend to shows that rely on bow and exit music to create economic demand. Finally, I argue that bow and exit music allow us better to recognize the strangeness of the creative labor that makes and performs musicals. Throughout the essay, my readings of individual shows model how we may better understand the American musical’s attempts to reconcile art and commerce when we listen carefully to the musical’s final moments. Studying Liminal Performance Events It is hard to know both where bow and exit music come from and how frequently they were heard in any given period of musical theatre history. The practice’s origins remain entirely obscure, though Michael Pisani’s herculean research into music from the nineteenth-century theater suggests that recovering this history may be possible.[5] Available evidence suggests that, at least since the so-called Golden Age (roughly 1940 to 1965), bow and exit music have been as normal a part of the American musical as choruses and eleven-o’clock numbers. For the analyses that follow, I examined 34 piano-vocal scores for musicals that opened between 1930 and 1984, among which only two (Rodgers & Hammerstein's Carousel [1945] and Allegro [1947]) included neither bow nor exit music. Because most scores are available only by rental from licensing agencies, my survey favored successful shows by well-known composers, that is, works that the major university libraries I consulted saw fit to purchase for their collections. I expanded that archive beyond published scores to include printed production scripts, as well as two film recordings. It is not impossible that my haphazard sample overestimates bow and exit music’s importance. However, given that bow and exit music derive from standard Broadway production practices (as I explain below), my sample likely provides an adequate view of bow and exit music’s normal place in the American musical theater. Indeed, while no archive speaks fully to the performances it documents, bow and exit music are so completely artifacts of production—that is, they come out of such particular production circumstances—that wherever bow and exit music appear in the archive, they most likely sounded in performance. I hazard that my archival explorations underestimate both the practice’s prevalence and the nuance with which it has been deployed. Why then, despite this prevalence, have these musics received so little scholarly (or even lay) attention? For one thing, bow and exit music exemplify liminal performance elements, elements that occur at the border between the theatrical event as such and the broader performance event that encloses it.[6] Other musical examples of such liminal performance events include overtures and entr’actes. Non-musical practices such as curtain speeches and intermissions fit into this category. Bow music, of course, underscores the paradigmatic liminal event in the theater, the curtain call, during which performers offer themselves to the audience for recognition and applause. Critical attention to curtain calls, while scant given the practice’s ubiquity, acknowledges the practice as a peculiar mélange of the semiotic field of the theatrical illusion and the phenomenal field of the performance. On the one hand, curtain calls provide finality, ending the play and the theatrical event. Yet the curtain call, as part of the performance event, also remains susceptible to audience interpretation; we cannot help but “read” the curtain call and its meanings just as we read the play. For Terence Hawkes, the curtain call thus manages an important kind of double “closure,” referring both to the audience’s ability to read a play as a meaningful semiotic system (to “close with” a play) and to the final moment of the play itself (“closure” as in “the end”). The curtain call has particular force, according to Hawkes, on the modern stage, which invites the audience to interpret everything they see and encourages a state of "total semiotization" in which there exists no “event, no matter how gratuitous or unsought for. . . that a modern audience would be unable to close with.”[7] In other words, Hawkes believes that the circle of meaningful representation in theatre now encompasses any event that takes place in and around a performance, which includes the curtain call, despite that practice’s traditional closure “to critical discussion.” Moreover, Hawkes suggests that curtain calls, far from signifying only unconsciously and accidentally, often reflect explicitly on the semiotic system that preceded them. “Actors rehearse” their bows, Hawkes notes; they circumscribe their behavior to suit the moment. Having just played Hamlet, an actor will not “laugh or caper about as a man might who has scored (in the soccer fashion) a success.” In short, the theatrical event that precedes the curtain call limits what performers can do in the curtain call itself. The curtain call represents, then, not a moment after the play so much as the play’s “edge,” which appears to the audience immediately before the play's ultimate disappearance.[8] Director William Ball emphasizes that theatrical traditions and actors’ egos play their own crucial role in staging a proper curtain call. For instance, Ball insists that curtain calls be kept short and also create a natural dramatic arc by inspiring a crescendo of applause. He identifies the curtain call as a “disciplined ritual,” in which performers should bow simply, accepting audience praise “with ritual gratitude.”[9] Ball's emphatic reuse of the word “ritual” underlines the curtain call’s obedience to codes of behavior as strict as those that mark the performance of the play itself. Moreover, to actors, the curtain call adds an essential layer of meaning that Hawkes leaves out. The order in which actors bow and the strength of the audience’s applause reveal to the actor the relative success of her performance. This fact challenges a director staging the bows for, say, Romeo and Juliet, in which Mercutio’s performance has likely inspired more audience adoration than Romeo’s. Ball recommends directors bring the two lovers out together after Mercutio, thus ensuring the necessary crescendo.[10] In determining the order of the curtain call, the director gives a “profoundly significant signal of approval” to the actor.[11] Doing right by performers when staging the curtain call influences the quality of an actor's performance: “if the actor feels betrayed, he won't act well.”[12] Ball thus reverses Hawkes’ line of causality between play and curtain call. For Hawkes, the performance determines the actor’s possible behavior during the curtain call. Ball emphasizes rather that the curtain call’s staging affects the actor’s ego and, therefore, the quality of the actor’s performance. Bert States, like Hawkes, recognizes that character persists during the curtain call, “remain[ing] in the actor, like a ghost.”[13] Yet States also stresses that the bowing actor performs not only herself and the character, but also her vulnerability as a performer, particularly by revealing the residual effects of her labor. In States’s words, the actor cannot, “refuse to display his ‘wounds’: the paint, the perspiration, the breathlessness, all the traces of having been through the role—or the role, like a fever, having been through him. Even the trace of fatigue . . . is in order because it suggests that this was hard work.”[14] These theorists of the curtain call all agree that the curtain call means something in relation to the play that it ends. They view the curtain call as a multi-layered performance that inflects the quality of the theatrical event that preceded it, reflects the tenor of the dramatic proceedings, and offers the labor of performance for the audience’s consideration. At this “seam” between the “fiction of the play” and the “fiction of manners,” audiences and actors alike return to the real world through this ritual that sews together reality and dream.[15] As Nicholas Ridout summarizes, the theater’s “machinery of representation. . . still generat[es] sparks of representation that contaminate. . . a straight face-to-face encounter” between actors and audience.[16] The curtain call, far from a merely pro forma theatrical ritual, still shimmers with meaning accrued from and borne by the just-concluded performance. All of the elements that these writers—Hawkes, Ball, States, and Ridout—recognize in the curtain call resonate, too, in bow and exit music. Yet bow and exit music, far from merely duplicating the above functions, retune the way audiences interpret the production, receive performers’ labor, and transition from the play back into the rest of their lives. Typology To understand how precisely bow and exit music expand the rich phenomenal experience of the non-musical curtain call, we must first address the fact that bow and exit music are, as a rule, not original musical compositions. Rather, they repeat (sometimes with variations) music that the audience has already heard in the show. Bow and exit music thus present a fundamentally different interpretive problem than the related practice of end credit music in film and television. End credits for today’s prestige television programs often employ a popular song that shapes how audiences interpret the episode that has just ended.[17] But that song only rarely features in the episode itself. These “novel musical postfaces,” as musicologist Annette Davison names them, speak from entirely outside the show, offering an external, sometimes jarring, commentary.[18] Musicals, by contrast, provide their own musical material for the curtain call. As post-show underscoring, bow and exit music may not be part of the theatrical performance, but the songs they rehearse were part of that performance. Bow and exit music thus also diverge from historical uses of music at the end of a performance. Music, of course, plays an important role in most Western theatrical traditions dating back to Greek tragedy. Many theatres use song (and sometimes dance) to close an evening’s entertainments. Such songs may be chosen for their energy, to provide the audience with an extra dose of good cheer on their journey home. Bow and exit music are often selected for the same purpose. But where other traditions draw on popular music from outside the show, bow and exit music are composed from internal musical ideas. They do not simply extend the performance event by providing extra music, but rather extend the music of the theatrical event into the performance event. The musical relationship between bow and exit music and the musical itself takes four basic forms. The first type of bow and exit music is no music whatsoever. Porgy & Bess, Carousel, Allegro, and West Side Story include no bow music in their printed scores.[19] These shows follow closely the operetta or opera tradition, in which, after the final chord, one neither can nor should say more, musically. The second and third types (the most popular) feature a single song for the bow music, often a show’s trademark number. The song can appear either with lyrics or without. A charming example of a single song with lyrics comes from Kiss Me, Kate, in which the cast sings “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” as they bow, but with new a couplet: “So tonight just recite to your matie / ‘Kiss me, Kate, Kiss me, Kate, Kiss me, Katie.’”[20] Babes in Arms ends with a full cast version of “Where or When”; Cabaret's cast bows to a company rendition of the title song; and Damn Yankees closes with everyone singing about “Heart.”[21] Alternatively—the third category—the single song might appear without lyrics, in a purely orchestral guise. This is the case for Guys and Dolls, in which a reprise of the title song serves first as the finale, sung by the entire company. Composer and lyricist Frank Loesser then repurposes the same number for the bows. The score notes simply: “Repeat Orch[estra] only for Curtain calls.”[22] My Fair Lady harps on “I Could Have Danced All Night”; The Music Man trumpets “Seventy-six Trombones”; Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music circles back to “Night Waltz I” from the Entr'acte.[23] Finally, some shows feature a medley, as Sondheim's Follies does, with bow music that includes fragments of “Who’s That Woman?” and “Beautiful Girls.”[24] Funny Girl's bows take place mostly to the rousing “Don't Rain on My Parade,” but transition to the ballad “People” near the end.[25] Summarizing bow music’s four general categories, we have: none; single song with lyrics; single song without lyrics; and medley. Each of those forms encourages a different array of interpretations, as the short examples above hint. Thus, the choice among these types, as well as the specific songs chosen, reflect and inflect our understanding of a musical. Representational Strategies Single Songs and Themes Let us consider now how bow music sustains the fundamental dichotomy of all curtain calls, that between the representational apparatus of the text and the phenomenal experience of the performance. The simplest way to bring closure to the theatrical event is simply to restate the central theme of the musical, usually with a single song. While, as I explain below, productions pick single songs for non-artistic reasons, too, a well-chosen single song can neatly reinforce the intellectual and emotional experience of the play. For example, the single song without lyrics accompanying Fiddler on the Roof's curtain call is, unsurprisingly, “Tradition.”[26] The same song opens the show, serves as the show’s thematic center, and represents a natural choice for the bows. Yet the choice of an upbeat and rousing final tune can also work against the rest of the play. Man of La Mancha's “The Impossible Dream” became that show’s popular standard, yet the title song appears as the bow music, selected perhaps for its driving rhythm. That choice is particularly odd given that the play’s final moments depict Cervantes and his servant’s departure to face the Inquisition, while the cast sings “Impossible Dream.” The driving bombast of the title song, repeated as the bow music, tramples “Impossible Dream”’s memorable rising melody and drowns out the play's stoic and moving final strains.[27] The show’s creators might well have heeded one Broadway music director’s warning that the selection of bow and exit music “should be made with regard to the audience's experience of the show.”[28] For some concept musicals of the 1970s, the single song’s emphatic closure was itself a dangerous trap. Unlike Golden Age musicals with clear resolutions, concept musicals often thrive on uncertainty and open-endedness. Nonetheless, many of those same shows sought to retain ties to the earlier tradition and devised new strategies for using bow and exit music to reinforce their shows’ thematic opposition to closure. Consider, for instance, A Chorus Line, one of the finest examples of the musical as meta-theater. The show's subject—the life of a Broadway chorister—organized and inspired the show’s creative process and determined the musical’s narrative structure. Strikingly, the show maintains its vertiginous metatheatrical sensibility in the curtain call, or rather, in the lack thereof. As the playscript notes: “Lights fade on ‘Rockette’ kick line [at the end of ‘One’] . . . . After singers cut off, orchestra continues vamp phrase, very loud, until cut off cue from stage manager. There are no additional ‘Bows’ after this—leaving the audience with an image of a kick line that goes on forever.”[29] The stage directions suggest both the oppressive repetitiveness of the chorister’s life in the “very loud” vamp, and, in the refusal to offer the performers for bows, a gesture towards the absence of closure as the show’s meaning. That is, although an individual chorister’s career may end, the chorus line “goes on forever.” A Chorus Line acts against audience expectations about the curtain call-as-closure to deny the finality that the moment usually provides, while still working within the single-song paradigm described above. Pippin, like A Chorus Line, is a highly metatheatrical show. The printed piano-vocal score of Stephen Schwartz’s work includes No. 36 “Bows,” consisting of the opening number, “Magic to Do,” with lyrics.[30] Schwartz seems to have imagined traditional bows, in which the company closes by celebrating the illusions they had promised the audience at the start of the show. The play, however, ends in a state of extreme anxiety about the “magic” of play-making and needed a different kind of sonic curtain call. In director Bob Fosse's ingenious staging—as captured on video of the touring production—the bows make meaning not through music, but through speech.[31] The play, a sort of bildungspiel about a sensitive son of King Charlemagne, takes place within the frame of a commedia troupe’s performance. Everything goes drastically awry in the musical’s final scene when Pippin declares his independence from the show. The Leading Player then strips Pippin, his wife Catherine, and their son of costumes, lights, and music. “Orchestra, pack up your fiddles. Get your horns. Let’s go,” orders the Lead Player. Then, to the pianist, who has been vamping throughout the last scene: “Take your damn hands off that keyboard.” The Leading Player then snarls at Pippin, “You try singing without music sweetheart.” Pippin complies, singing a few a cappella bars of the finale. Catherine speaks: CATHERINE Pippin ... do you feel that you’ve compromised? PIPPIN No. CATHERINE Do you feel like a coward? PIPPIN No. CATHERINE How do you feel ...? PIPPIN Trapped ... but happy ... (He looks from one to the other and smiles) which isn't too bad for the end of a musical comedy. Ta-da! [32] The three then bow and “the curtain comes down.” At this point, the curtain call is extremely fraught. The end of the play hinges on Pippin and his family’s escape from the mode of representation, a fact wryly acknowledged in Pippin’s reference to “a musical comedy” and in their bowing. If the production returned to the typical mode of closure for a musical, using Schwartz’s music cue for the bows, it would have evacuated the meaning that the show’s final moments had so carefully constructed. Fosse solved this problem by having the cast members announce each other with a handheld mic, to no musical accompaniment. Only after introducing the cast (and then the conductor) by name, does the company sing a reprise of “Magic to Do.” This curtain call thus has an unusual soundtrack: the names of the performers. Fosse’s choice emphasizes actors over characters and assumes a stance explicitly outside the make-believe world of the play. Pippin thus continues the tradition of the sonically scored curtain call, and even returns to the single-song format eventually. But by replacing music with the actors’ names, Fosse’s Pippin production closed in the metatheatrical spirit that pervaded the rest of the play and defined its ending. Medleys and Characters While Pippin uses sound during the curtain call to question the possibility of closure and to critique representation itself, other shows use music to reinforce the representational apparatus. Music, for instance, can act like a costume, a residue of character that clings to the actors as they receive the audience’s applause. The Harold Prince/Chelsea Theater version of Candide, for example, uses medley to rich effect, as the principals take their calls accompanied by songs associated with their characters.[33] The company bows first to “Battle Music,” Paquette and Maximillian to “Life is Happiness Indeed,” the Old Lady to the Spanish chorus from “Easily Assimilated,” Candide and Cunegonde to “Oh Happy We,” and Voltaire to “Bon Voyage.” The entire company then sings the latter song’s final chorus. Music works here almost leitmotivically; the songs index character. But unlike a truly Wagnerian leitmotiv, which metamorphoses along with the changing circumstances of its referent, the melodies in the bow music remain fixed to specific conceptions of character. The music therefore restricts how we read character while the actors bow. Consider particularly Candide and Cunegonde, who find redemption in their final musical number when they accept a simple, quotidian existence and embrace the nobility of work and family. When the couple bow, they do so to the music of their Act I duet, in which Candide's dream of a modest life clashes with Cunegonde's fantasies of wealth. Certainly, “Oh Happy We”’s elegant, spry melody makes livelier bow music than the hymn-like finale, “Make Our Garden Grow.” But the journey of these two characters to arrive at the finale’s insights washes away in the return of the former tune, which, even if we have forgotten the lyrics, evokes instability in its irregular meter. The choice of music suggests an actor playing Oedipus who, before bowing, washes the bloody makeup from his eyes and changes into a clean tunic. The bloodied costume that clings to a bowing actor signals the Oedipus who has been through a journey. But the choice of music for Candide and Cunegonde here erases their journey. The selection of “Oh Happy We” for the bows may very well be self-consciously ironic. Whether the production used this tune wittingly or not, the musical underscoring instructs us to read character in a particular way. A slightly different effect arises from the leitmotivic medley at the end of Trevor Nunn’s revival of Oklahoma![34] The curtain call is a dance number, fully choreographed by Susan Stroman. First, the men’s and women’s choruses and featured dancers bow to “The Farmer and the Cowman,” then Ali Hakim to his solo number, “It's a Scandal! It's a Outrage!,” then Will and Ado Annie to “All er Nothin’.” Aunt Eller, then Curly and Laurey all bow to “Beautiful Mornin’,” a fittingly bucolic tune that was also the show’s finale. Before this final trio appears, the antagonist, Jud, bows to the bathetic duet he sings with Curly, “Poor Jud is Daid.” The noble theme, as sounded in William David Brohn’s orchestration for brass choir, underscores not Jud’s function as a melodramatic villain, but rather his humanity. Indeed, the song reminds us, if we recall the words, that Jud is dead, and that Oklahoma! resolves at the expense of Jud’s life. If Jud bowed instead to his aria, “Lonely Room,” a twitching, minor key number, full of clustering dissonances, our reception of that character during the bows would differ significantly.[35] Nunn adds one further flourish after all the actors have bowed: the entire company gathers in a group to reprise the choral section of the title song. As a quick key to the implications of this gesture, consider Andrea Most's reading of Oklahoma! Most suggests that “anyone willing and able to perform the songs and dances can join” the community of a musical.[36] But neither Jud nor Ali Hakim is on stage to sing “Oklahoma” during the play’s wedding scene. Nunn’s decision to have them sing with the full company here thus suggests that these two characters, identified by Most as outsiders, are actually integral to the community, as I have argued elsewhere.[37] When Jud and Ali Hakim sing “Oklahoma” with the full company, the tensions necessary to create a stable community come to the fore. The audience recognizes that the community cannot make Oklahoma without the internal pressure provided by Jud and Ali Hakim. In the full company reprise of the title song during the bows, those two purported outsiders perform their true status as insiders. The Nunn production’s bow music helps us better interpret these characters. Bow music can thus be another residue of character, like a costume. Medleys prove particularly useful forms for this use of bow music because the medley allows the bow music to speak directly to each character by playing that character’s best-known tune. But by selecting a melody for each character, bow music cues specific aspects of a character, adding a last moment of semiotic representation that draws on and revises what we have experienced in the rest of the show. Commercial Strategies The original production of Oklahoma!, as captured in the score and in a published playscript, ends not with the now-famous title song, but with a full company reprise of the duet “People Will Say We're in Love.”[38] In many ways, the song is a bizarre choice for the bows, being neither an anthem for the show nor for the company, but rather a private song for Curly and Laurey. Indeed, the number’s conceit is that the lovers should not show public affection because the community might comment on it. Yet during the bows, the whole cast sings it. Why? Because the production team expected the song to be a hit. This factor, the song’s potential economic afterlife, is the final—and perhaps most important—function of the musical curtain call. That is, bow music cues the audience to buy a cast album. In this respect, the musical theater’s bows differ significantly from those of non-musicals. As Nicholas Ridout observes, although all curtain calls “conclude a market transaction,” because the actual economics of the performance were “sorted out before the curtain even rose,” the curtain call’s applause (and the performers’ acceptance of applause) forms part of a gift economy.[39] But in many musicals, both musical motifs and commercial motives underscore this gift exchange between the audience and the actors. Bow music, for such musicals, answers the demands of commerce: which tune is most salable? Thus, Gershwin’s Girl Crazy wraps up with “Embraceable You” before jumping to “I've Got Rhythm”; Rodgers and Hart’s Pal Joey signs off with “I Could Write a Book” (in fairness, about half of the songs from that show have hit potential); and the same authors’ The Boys from Syracuse goes back to “Falling in Love with Love.”[40] I noted above that Funny Girl’s curtain call music transitions from “Don't Rain on My Parade” to “People.” I conjecture that the change in tune cued star Barbra Streisand’s entrance. Both songs became huge hits and remain associated with Streisand, but only “People” put Streisand on Billboard charts in 1964. Indeed, she had recorded that number as a single even prior to the show’s premiere.[41] This economic imperative is so insistent that the great production team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II refused to let bow music’s commercial potential pass them by, even in their shows without bow music. As noted above, some of the pair’s most high-minded works, such as South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music, follow the operatic tradition and include no bow music. Those shows do, however, include scored exit music, music to be played while the audience leaves the theater. Exit music does not distinguish itself enough from bow music formally to merit a separate discussion. It does, however, underline how much these last two musical numbers speak to the musical theater’s commercial interest. For if bow music, due to the presence of the actors, contains traces of its representational function alongside its economic imperatives, exit music seems to have given up representation entirely. Exit music exists almost solely to worm a catchy tune into the audience’s ear. One guide to writing a musical explains that exit music supplies “the flavour that will be left in the public’s ear, the one you want them to keep humming as they make their way to the lobby and perhaps buy on cassette or compact disc.”[42] Thus, South Pacific’s exit music is “Some Enchanted Evening” (a number one hit for Perry Como in 1949), which leads into “Bali Ha'i"; The King and I features “Whistle a Happy Tune” and then “Shall We Dance”; and The Sound of Music essentially repeats the entr’acte with a medley of the title song, “Do Re Mi,” and “Sixteen Going on Seventeen.”[43] In the 1950s, these shows were big business; the albums for all three sat high on the Billboard Charts at various times.[44] And although these three shows offer themselves for the audience’s approval in silence during the curtain call, accepting the purer gift relationship suggested by Ridout, they immediately assume an actively commercial stance as the audience files out of the theater. Thus, if a show’s representational economy recedes in the final moments of a performance event, through the use of bow and exit music, the economics of representation come to the fore. Musical Labor Exit music—and some bow music—thus faces as much towards the audience as towards the actors. That is, if one regards bow and exit music's “sparks of representation” (to use Ridout's phrase) as fundamentally coloring the fictional world of the play, the economic imperatives that undergird these musical numbers project outwards, into the audience, now figured as consumers. As I suggested above, the naked commercial desires in bow and exit music differ meaningfully from the ghosted economic exchange in the non-musical curtain call, as theorized by Ridout. But the dual model I have described thus far for bow and exit music remains fundamentally the same as that theorized by Hawkes, Ball, States, and Ridout. There remains one significant element of the curtain call hinted at by Ball and States that I have not yet addressed: labor. Unlike non-musical curtain calls, curtain calls underscored by bow and exit music conspicuously divide labor between two groups of performers: actors and musicians. The usually invisible labor of technicians, not to mention the persistent but forgotten labor of countless other creative and administrative performers (house staff, casting agents, etc.), always ghosts the curtain call, and merits consideration in the general theory of curtain calls. But the case of musicians who play bow and exit music differs from that of backstage workers accustomed to having their labor go unacknowledged. In other circumstances, musicians can and do accept their own applause, not only for non-theatrical performances, but even in other categories of music drama such as opera. Silent curtain calls, by allowing on- and off-stage performers to rest together, equalize the labor of instrumentalists and stage performers.[45] Such unity becomes more apparent when compared to musical theater’s bow and exit musics, which undermine the integration of music and drama in the so-called integrated musical by so clearly dividing the laboring performers into two camps. During musical curtain calls, the actors transition towards their leisure time while the musicians continue to work. And in shows with exit music, a particularly speedy actor may be out the theater door before the musicians have played their final chord. Just as William Ball suggests that the order in which actors bow can impact the quality of their performances, James H. Laster, advising aspiring music directors, suggests that exit music’s liminality also informs its quality. A “young, inexperienced orchestra may feel that the exit music is not important,” Laster warns. “But they need to be informed that their job is not finished until the cut-off at the last note of the exit music.”[46] Steve Suskin, author of a book on Broadway's orchestrators, hears not boredom or inattention, but rather joy in exit music. Embedded among the musicians for a performance of Sweeney Todd, Suskin explained the end of the show thus: Everybody leaves; everybody except the orchestra, which plays the exit music. But it is a lighthearted group of musicians playing now: the drama is over, the tension is gone, the spell is broken. It is now merely music. [The music director] gives the final cutoff, the music ends with a crisp button from the brass, and we file out of the pit.[47] Whether the musicians celebrate bow and exit music as a moment for relaxed improvisation or let their minds wander at the seemingly unimportant (and often unhearable, beneath applause and chatter) end of a long performance, the fundamental disparity remains: musicians continue their labor in the musical theater well after other performers have ceased their own work. And what of the labor that goes into creating bow and exit music? A show’s orchestrator and her staff traditionally select and arrange the bow and exit music, often only in the last moments of a show’s rehearsal process. Yet, while the final decision about such music occurs quite late, the tunes are frequently among the first written for the show because bow and exit music often derive from among a production's “utility” arrangements, arrangements made during the rehearsal period to fulfill practical needs in the rehearsal room. As Robert Russell Bennett, the dean of musical theater orchestrators, explains, “You take three, four, or five of the principal melodies and arrange them (with the tune in its original form complete in each case) so that, at the direction of the conductor, they may be played” by any section of the orchestra at any volume.[48] Such utility arrangements provide placeholder music for scene changes and underscoring, as well as the overture, entr'acte, and the “Chaser, Exit or Outmarch.”[49] Each of these categories later receives “special treatment” as the production takes final form and as the orchestrator has time to focus on them individually. In Bennett’s general narrative of an orchestrator’s work, however, that time might arrive only during the final few preview performances.[50] Two points here deserve underlining. First, in bow and exit music the orchestrator and team of arrangers announce themselves as essential members in the vast peripheral, artisanal workforce that crafts a Broadway show.[51] Their work on bow and exit music enhances both the artistic value of the show, when bow and exit music addresses the play’s representational apparatus, and the production’s economic value, when the exit music helps inspire sales of recordings. Second, bow and exit music, though the last elements of a show in performance, appear very early in the production process (at least, in their form as utilities). This fact strongly differentiates bow and exit music from the non-musical curtain call, which directors rarely think about until dress rehearsals. Although the production staff might settle on bow and exit music quite late in the process, the tunes from among which the staff chooses, far from being an afterthought, literally underscore the show’s rehearsals. The practice of relying on utilities codifies those melodies as essential to the entire structure of the show: they are the beginning (overture), middle (entr’acte), and end (exit music), well before the company sets the rest of the show. As a result, songs written early, songs that captured a relatively primitive conception of a show, occupy a large sonic space in the rehearsal period.[52] Fundamentally, utilities reveal how much work a show’s purely orchestral music does for the rest of a production. It is no coincidence that utilities are so called: they are, first and foremost, useful. Even if they later sound differently (or disappear entirely), they noisily—and, paradoxically, inconspicuously—underscore a significant portion of the production process. The utilities that become bow and exit music may end up as the musical last word or as an afterthought, but they are often also part of a show's origin. Take a Bow This article has considered how bow and exit music affect our interpretation of the musical theater, and particularly how these musical practices amplify the often discordant relationship between the musical’s artistic and commercial aspirations. Like the curtain call that bow music underscores, bow and exit music occupy a strange border at the end of the theatrical event and near the end of the performance event. Despite a relatively narrow set of formal types available for bow and exit music, productions have used those musics to reinforce the show's theme, to revise the audience's understanding of character, and to promote the show’s commercial afterlife in recordings. A longer analysis of a specific show might benefit from exploring more the choice of songs (particularly in relationship to the overture), and the details of tempi (usually moderate to fast), meter (usually duple), or arrangement (usually the same key and orchestration as an earlier iteration). One might also consider bow and exit music as utilized by a particular orchestrator, composer, director, etc. With a more comprehensive data set, one might explore how bow music changes from era to era, or from subgenre to subgenre. As I hope this sketch of bow and exit music’s functions makes clear, musicals do not cease making meaning when the curtain falls, but actively and consciously continue to do so until the moment that an audience member steps out of hearing range of the orchestra. In other words, music performs in the musical theater longer than any other medium. And when we listen to that music, we might have to reinterpret some shows. To conclude with one example, consider The Pajama Game, the Richard Adler and Jerry Ross musical of 1954. In a recent history of the musical theater, Larry Stempel accuses George Abbott, the show’s original director and co-book writer, of avoiding politics. The plot concerns a struggle between management and labor at a pajama factory, a struggle that constrains the romance between a foreman and a shopworker/union leader. As Stempel notes, the show opened in the midst of the McCarthy hearings, a climate not amenable to claims for strong workers’ rights. Citing Abbott’s own statement denying any “propaganda” in the show, Stempel declares Pajama Game “militantly apolitical,” with “no serious intent of any kind.”[53] As far as most of the show goes, Stempel is right, the politics are tepid. Even the finale plays up romantic fun rather than politics, with a version of the title song that accompanies a fashion parade, culminating with the appearance of the leads, Babe and Sid wearing only a pajama top and bottom, respectively. That number also functions as a curtain call; the principals appear in the appropriate order. The entire company then sings the title song’s chorus.[54] This is charming, but, as Stempel complains of the entire show, emphasizes the romantic plots at the expense of the management-labor conflict. But then the company sings a different tune. They do not sing the ballad “Hey There,” a hit for Rosemary Clooney in 1954.[55] They do not sing the catchy love duet “There Once Was a Man.” They do not sing the jazzy “Steam Heat,” which featured iconic Bob Fosse choreography for Carol Haney. No, they sing none of the show’s hits. Rather, the entire cast sings a march in six-eight time, which, while certainly energetic, is not memorable enough to sell an album. They sing the show’s rallying labor cry: Seven and a half cents doesn't buy a helluva lot, Seven and a half cents doesn’t mean a thing, But give it to me every hour Forty hours every week That's enough for me to be Livin’ like a king.[56] This number’s return, at this moment, is a striking political gesture, a reminder that behind the play’s love stories lurks a serious economic struggle. This message, moreover, occupies what is traditionally the most overtly commercial moment in musical theater. We might, then, hear this bow music’s explicit turn to economics as a wry wink at the function of bow and exit music itself. The number says in all seriousness that economic circumstances are at the root of contemporary life, even as it asks you to buy the recording when the performance ends, that is, when the music finally stops.[57] Derek Miller is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University where he teaches courses in theater history and dramatic literature. His articles on theatrical and musical performance have appeared in publications including Theatre Journal and Studies in Musical Theatre. His book, Copyright and the Value of Performance, 1770-1911, is under contract with Cambridge University Press. More information at scholar.harvard.edu/dmiller. [1] Diegetic music forms part of the narrative world of a play; characters within the narrative frame can hear it and/or produce it. Only the audience hears non-diegetic music. For example, in The Pajama Game, “Steam Heat” is a diegetic number, a literal performance in which three characters dance and sing for their fellow union members. “Hey There” is non-diegetic: the character Sid Sorokin does not sing; the actor does. [2] Meredith Willson, But He Doesn’t Know the Territory (St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 153-154. [3] Phil Powrie and Guido Heldt, “Introduction: Trailers, Titles, and End Credits,” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 8 (2014), 111. [4] See, for example, Bernard Rosenberg and Ernest Harburg, The Broadway Musical: Collaboration in Commerce and Art (New York: NYU Press, 1993) and Steven Adler, On Broadway: Art and Commerce on the Great White Way (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004). [5] Michael V. Pisani, Music for the Melodramatic Theatre in Nineteenth-Century London & New York (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014). [6] For a theory of the boundaries between the theatrical and the performance event, see Richard Schechner, “Drama, Script, Theater, Performance,” in Performance Theory (London: Routledge, 2003). Scholars of film titles and end credits seem to prefer Gérard Genette's language of “paratext” to describe those musical practices. See Powrie and Heldt, “Introduction: Trailers, Titles, and End Credits,” 111-112. [7] Terence Hawkes, “Opening Closure,” Modern Drama 24 (1981), 355-356. Hawkes offers the example of a pimple on an actor's nose as an unintentional element that audience members might “be prepared to acknowledge, interpret, and even perhaps to applaud.” [8] Hawkes, “Opening Closure,” 356. [9] William Ball, A Sense of Direction (New York: Drama Publishers, 1980), 143. [10] Ball, A Sense of Direction, 145. Ball cites other plays such as Othello, The Three Sisters, and The Man Who Came to Dinner that pose similar problems in balancing star supporting turns against the work of a relatively unsympathetic lead. [11] Ball, A Sense of Direction, 145. [12] Ball, A Sense of Direction, 146. Dressing room assignments are, Ball notes, similarly loaded status symbols for actors, and, like curtain calls, can affect an actor's work on stage. [13] Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 199. [14] States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms, 203. [15] States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms, 203. [16] Nicholas Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 162. [17] See Annette Davison, “The End is Nigh: Music Postfaces and End-Credit Sequences in Contemporary Television Serials,” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 8 (2014) for an explanation of this practice's origins and uses in The Sopranos. [18] Davison, “The End is Nigh,” 197. Davison observes that some shows have begun linking end credit music more closely to the preceding episode's “sound world” (212). [19] George Gershwin, Du Bose Heyward, and Ira Gerswhin, Porgy and Bess (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: Gershwin Publishing Corporation/Chappell & Co., Inc., 1935); Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Carousel (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: Williamson, 1945); Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Allegro (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: Williamson, 1948); Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents, Stephen Sondheim, and Jerome Robbins, West Side Story (Piano Vocal Score) (New York: G. Schirmer, Inc. and Chappell & Co., Inc., 1959). [20] Cole Porter, Kiss Me, Kate (Piano-Vocal Score) Chappell & Co., Inc., 1967), No. 24a “Grand Finale—Last Curtain.” [21] Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Babes in Arms (Piano-Vocal Score) Chappell & Co., Inc., 1960), No. 23 Curtain Calls; John Kander and Fred Ebb, Cabaret (Piano-Vocal Score) Times Square Music Publications Company, 1968), Curtain Calls (No. 29); Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, Damn Yankees (Piano-Vocal Score) Frank Music Corp., 1957), No. 33 Heart (Bows). [22] Frank Loesser, Guys and Dolls (Piano-Vocal Score) Frank Music Corp., 1953), “The Happy Ending.” [23] Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, My Fair Lady (Piano-Vocal Score) Chappel & Co., 1958), Music for Curtain Calls (No. 27); Meredith Willson, The Music Man (Piano-Vocal Score) Frank Music Corp., 1958), Curtain Call Music (No. 26); Stephen Sondheim, A Little Night Music (Piano-Vocal Score) Revelation Music Publishing Corp. & Rilting Music, Inc., 1974), Bows (No. 33). [24] Stephen Sondheim, Follies (Piano-Vocal Score) Range Road Music Inc., Quartet Music Inc., Rilting Music Inc., and Burthen Music Compnay, Inc., 1971), No. 20 Bows. [25] Jule Styne, Funny Girl (Piano-Vocal Score) Chappell-Styne, Inc. and Wonderful Music Corp., 1964), Curtain and Exit Music (No. 30). [26] Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock, Fiddler on the Roof (Piano-Vocal Score) Sunbeam Music Corp., 1965), Music for Bows (No. 34). [27] Mitch Leigh, Joe Darion, and Dale Wasserman, Man of La Mancha (Piano-Vocal Score), Revised ed. (Greenwich, CT: Cherry Lane Music Co., 1965), Bows (No. 30). The show does, however, conclude No. 31 Exit Music with “The Impossible Dream.” [28] Joseph Church, Music Direction for the Stage: A View from the Podium (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 240. [29] James Kirkwood, Michael Bennett, and Nicholas Dante, A Chorus Line (New York: Applause Books, 1995), 145. [30] Stephen Schwartz and Roger O. Hirson, Pippin (Piano-Vocal Score) CPP/Belwin, Inc., 1988). [31] Pippin, His Life and Times, dir. David Sheehan (Tulsa: VCI Home Video, 2000), DVD. [32] Stephen Schwartz and Roger O. Hirson, Pippin: A Musical Comedy (New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1975), 83. [33] Leonard Bernstein et al., Candide (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: Schirmer Books, 1976), Bows (No. 22). The printed score includes stage directions and dialogue from the Prince production. Those directions indicate that, when the curtain rises after the finale, “the COMPANY pours out onto the ramps [around the seating area] as the PRINCIPALS take their bows in the order of their precedence to the following music” (230). Bracketed character names above particular measures in the score indicate when in the number each character appears. The score of the original production included no bow music (Leonard Bernstein, Lillian Hellman, and Richard Wilbur, Candide (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: G. Schirmer, 1958)), while the authorized Boosey & Hawkes edition (Leonard Bernstein, Hugh Wheeler, and Richard Wilbur, Candide (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: Jalni Publications, Inc. and Boosey & Hawkes, 1994)) does include No. 28 Bows. That number appears to be the final section of the Overture (bars 231-287), minus ten bars of melody from the upper woodwinds. [34] A film documents this production’s incarnation at the Royal National Theatre in London. Oklahoma!, dir. Trevor Nunn (Chatsworth, CA: Image Entertainment, 2003), DVD. [35] Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, actor Shuler Hensley's performance as Jud was exceptionally well received. Hensley received multiple awards for his performance, including the Olivier, Tony, and Drama Desk Awards for Supporting Actor in a Musical. "Awards," Oklahoma! (2002), Internet Broadway Database, http://ibdb.com/production.php?id=12938, accessed 26 May 2015. [36] Andrea Most, “‘We Know We Belong to the Land’: The Theatricality of Assimilation in Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma!,” PMLA 113, no. 1 (1998), 79. [37] Derek Miller, “‘Underneath the Ground’: Jud and the Community in Oklahoma!,” Studies in Musical Theatre 2, no. 2 (2008). [38] Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Oklahoma! (New York: Williamson, 1943), Finale Ultimo (No. 29). [39] Ridout, Stage Fright, 162, 164. [40] George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin, Guy Bolton, and John McGowan, Girl Crazy (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: New World Music Corp., 1954), Final II (No. 25); Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, and John O'Hara, Pal Joey (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: Chappell & Co., 1962), Curtain Calls (I Could Write a Book); Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, and George Abbott, The Boys from Syracuse (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: Chappell & Co., 1965), No. 20 Curtain Music. [41] As one biographer explains, “Barbra agreed to go into the studio and record [‘People’] as a single. But since Capitol Records, not Columbia, was to record the cast album, Columbia executives were reluctant to do anything to promote Funny Girl. In the end, they agreed to release the single only if ‘People’ was on the B side of the record. Columbia would do little to promote the song, instead focusing their efforts on the A side, ‘I Am Woman.’” Christopher Anderson, Barbra: The Way She Is (New York: William Morrow, 2006), 119. Despite Columbia’s lack of interest, that single spent 12 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at number five. Joel Whitburn, Pop Memories 1890-1954: The History of American Popular Music (Menomonee Falls, WI: Record Research, Inc., 1986). [42] Stephen Citron, The Musical: From the Inside Out (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1991), 257. The author notes, even more practically, that up-tempo exit music also “facilitate[s] clearing the aisles” more quickly. [43] Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, South Pacific (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: Williamson, 1949), Exit Music (No. 49); Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, The King and I (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: Williamson, 1951), Exit Music (No. 46); Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, The Sound of Music (Piano-Vocal Score) (New York: Williamson, 1960), No. 47 Exit Music. “Some Enchanted Evening” spent five weeks at number one for Perry Como (his B side, “Bali Ha’i,” hit number five), while also reaching the top 10 on recordings by Bing Crosby, Jo Stafford, Frank Sinatra, Ezio Pinza (the song's originator in his role as Emile de Becque), and Paul Weston. Whitburn, Pop Memories. [44] South Pacific appeared on the pop charts at number seven on 21 May 1949; number one was Kiss Me, Kate. Within two weeks, South Pacific was the best-selling popular music LP in the country, where it remained for 69 weeks, ultimately spending 400 weeks on the top charts. Laurence Maslon, The South Pacific Companion (New York: Fireside, 2008), 153. The King and I performed the least well, hovering around number four (for both 75s and 33s) in summer and fall 1951. The Sound of Music spent 276 weeks on Billboard’s Top 200, including 16 weeks at number one. Joel Whitburn, The Billboard Albums, 6th ed. (Menomonee Falls, WI: Record Research, Inc., 2006). [45] I sense some condescension in how conductors accept audience accolades on behalf of the orchestra, particularly when the conductor joins the actors or singers on stage, leaving the musicians in the pit below. The disparity between conductor and instrumentalist seems slightly less wide in musicals, even if the conductor bows quickly for the audience during the bow music, perhaps because such a gesture permits the orchestra a fleeting moment of performance without the conductor’s guidance. Or, as one writer makes the same point negatively: “Providing the playing of the bow music will not fall apart if the conductor stops beating time, he can acknowledge [the actors’ pointing at the orchestra during bows] by turning and bowing to the audience.” James H. Laster, So You're the New Musical Director!: An Introduction to Conducting a Broadway Musical (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2001), 146. [46] Laster, So You’re the New Musical Director!, 127. [47] Steven Suskin, The Sound of Broadway Music: A Book of Orchestrators and Orchestrations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 289. Broadway music director Joseph Church affirms Suskin’s view that exit music achieves an “informality” that “reflects the relaxation of the theater experience in its closing moments.” Church, Music Direction for the Stage, 240. [48] Robert Russell Bennett, Instrumentally Speaking (Melville, NY: Belwin-Mills Publishing Corp., 1975), 107. [49] Bennett, Instrumentally Speaking, 107. Bennett suggests that, among these standard orchestral numbers, only the overture regularly merits careful attention, and not much care at that. Even a “fancy permanent” or “New York overture,” as Bennett wryly calls it, earns little more than a single orchestral read-through before opening night. A 1951 New Yorker profile of Bennett opens describing the composition of The King and I’s overture, completed mere hours before the first tryout in New Haven. Herbert Warren Wind, “Another Opening, Another Show,” The New Yorker (1951), 46. Today, overtures have become quite scarce, according to Joseph Church. Church, Music Direction for the Stage, 239. [50] Bennett, Instrumentally Speaking, 111. Conductor Rob Berman recently affirmed that, while “composers might have some input” in choosing exit music, the selection derives usually from among the utilities. Exit music remains “one of the last pieces of music created for a show.” Robert Simonson and Kenneth Jones, “Ask Playbill.com: A Question About Exit Music and Musicals,” Playbill.com, http://www.playbill.com/features/article/ask-playbill.com-a-question-about-exit-music-at-musicals-187760. [51] Suskin, Sound of Broadway Music provides an excellent account of orchestrators and arrangers, who occupy the strange liminal space between creative artistry and technical labor that defines so much backstage work. [52] The situation differs, of course, for revivals, for which the score already exists. In such cases, the production staff may have even more creative energy to expend on overtures or bow and exit music, as evidenced by the Candide and Oklahoma! revivals discussed above. [53] Larry Stempel, Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theater (New York: Norton, 2010), 424. [54] Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, The Pajama Game (Piano-Vocal Score) Frank Music Corp., 1955), No. 25 “The Pajama Game—Closing.” [55] “Hey There” spent 24 weeks on Billboard’s “Honor Roll of Hits” (issues of 24 July 1954 to 1 January 1955), reaching number one in the 2 October 1954 issue (survey week ending 22 September) and remaining there through the issue of 13 November (survey week ending 3 November), for seven weeks at the top. Another song from the show, “Hernando's Hideaway,” spent 18 weeks in the top twenty (issue of 29 May 1954 to 25 September 1954), but never reached number one. The “Honor Roll of Hits” combines sales of recordings and sheet music with juke box and radio performances. [56] Adler and Ross, The Pajama Game, No. 25a “Seven and a Half Cents—Reprise.” [57] For a list of piano-vocal scores consulted, many of which are also cited in the body of the essay, see my personal website, http://visualizingbroadway.com/broadway/bow_and_exit_music_table.html. “On Bow and Exit Music" by Derek Miller ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 30, Number 1 (Fall 2017) ©2017 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Jessica Adam Editorial Assistant: Kirara Soto Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Tracey Elaine Chessum Bill Demastes Stuart Hecht Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes David Krasner Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Ariel Nereson Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: "Reclaiming Four Child Actors through Seven Plays in US Theatre, 1794-1800" by Jeanne Klein "The Illusion of Work: The Con Artist Plays of the Federal Theatre Project" by Paul Gagliardi "On Bow and Exit Music" by Derek Miller “Legitimate: Jerry Douglas's Tubstrip and the Erotic Theatre of Gay Liberation" by Jordan Schildcrout www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Yu Chien Lu, Administrative Producer ©2017 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References About The Authors 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 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 34 2 Visit Journal Homepage The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness By Published on May 20, 2022 Download Article as PDF The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness. Yuko Kurahashi. Jefferson, NC: McFarland Books, 2020; Pp. 240. Yuko Kurahashi’s The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness presents the first comprehensive analysis of Ping Chong’s five-decade long theatre career in which, according to Kurahashi, Chong “has created the largest and most complex body of work of any Asian American artist” (5). Kurahashi defines Chong as an “avant-garde artist who is also Asian American” instead of an “Asian American avant-garde artist” in order to highlight that his work extends beyond issues of Asian American identity and focuses on broader global concerns of displaced communities, marginalization, and racial and economic injustice (5). Kurahashi’s study traces the evolution of Chong’s performances from his early abstract productions to his multi-media performances, historical projects, and community-based oral histories, while also detailing the manner in which “the trajectory of his life and experiences underpin” his art (173). In Chapter 1, “Transpacific Journey of Two Opera Artists,” Kurahashi introduces the broader cultural and political landscape that Chong was born into in 1946 in Toronto, noting seminal moments that led to the massive influx of Chinese immigrants to North America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the discriminatory laws enacted by America and Canada to stem this flow. Chong’s parents were both Cantonese Opera artists (his father was a director and his mother was a performer) who first made their way from Guangzhou, China, to San Francisco in the 1930s with a traveling Cantonese Opera company, before moving to Canada and finally settling in New York in 1947. Kurahashi emphasizes the impact that being raised in an immigrant household had on Chong, with issues of “isolation, loneliness, and the struggle of self-identity” recurring in his work as he grapples with being a “culturally hyphenated man” in America (11). Chapter 2 details Chong’s formative collaborative relationship with Meredith Monk that began after he completed his undergraduate degree in film at the School of Visual Arts in New York. He joined the Meredith Monk Dance Company in 1972, and later that year, Chong and Monk collaborated on the dance Paris. This collaboration provided the foundation for Chong’s early performances that emphasized abstraction, non-linear or non-existent narratives, tableau, music, dance, voice-overs, “framing” by constructing faux proscenium arches, projections, “bricolage” (a technique inspired by Joseph Cornell’s artwork in which Chong juxtaposed unassociated objects onstage to create new meaning), incorporation of movement styles inspired by Japanese Noh and other Asian performance traditions, and use of language as a “medium” instead of an “instrument of communication” (35-41). Kurahashi reads these early experiments as Chong’s attempt to “integrate a multiplicity of stage elements to provoke the audience to look at the work and their world anew” (42). Chapters 3-10 introduce Chong’s major performances from 1975-2017. Kurahashi presents his works chronologically, while also dividing the performances into thematic “categories” including fear of the unknown (Chapter 3), myths (Chapter 4), modern dystopia (Chapter 5), revisionary history of East-West relations (Chapter 6), staging voices in the community (Chapter 7), memories and stories of local communities (Chapter 8), puppet theatre (Chapter 9), and collaborating with educational institutions (Chapter 10). In each chapter, Kurahashi presents “mini-reviews” of 2-5 performances in which she briefly describes the design (set, costumes, props, music, etc.) and images from the works, while also providing her interpretation of the performances’ meaning. Kurahashi’s brief analysis often relies on piecing together published reviews, resulting in a fragmented description that is difficult to visualize. Black and white rehearsal and production photographs are important additions to the book, providing readers with a clearer understanding of the performance aesthetics. Kurahashi’s analysis is most insightful in Chapters 6, 7, and 8. In Chapter 6, she critiques Chong’s “departure from the abstract and allegorical works he completed in the 1970s and 1980s” as he shifts to “historical works which focus on cultural collisions and encounters” in The East/West Quartet (82). Kurahashi describes this series as an attempt to “bring to light history which would otherwise disappear” (86). Each of the four performances addresses specific cultural and political junctures of contestation: Deshima (1990) portrays Japanese and Western colonialism from the sixteenth through twentieth century (82), Chinoiserie (1995) illustrates the manner in which Western powers attempted to assert financial and political control over China (84), After Sorrow (1997) depicts Chinese and Vietnamese culture through a poetic combination of music, dance, text, and projections (85), and Pojagi (1999) demonstrates the impact colonizers had on Korea which culminated in the division of the country during the Korean War (85). Chapters 7 and 8 are dedicated to Chong’s ongoing collaborative, community-based oral history series, Undesirable Elements (1992–present). Chong initially designed the series as a creative space for displaced people to share their personal narratives before expanding the emphasis to encompass people who he describes as having experienced “otherness beyond the boundaries of the transit” (101). For the series, Chong and his creative team visit a host community, interview local residents, select the participants for the production, conduct more in-depth interviews, refine the “scripts,” then rehearse what Chong describes as a “seated opera for the spoken word” (99). Foregoing the elaborate theatrical design of his earlier works, the Undesirable Elements series requires minimal scenery, with performers seated in a semi-circle facing the audience and reading from their scripts (100). These performances provide a public space for marginalized people to share their memories of the past and dreams for the future (110). Chong has developed over forty productions with diverse communities in cities including Berlin, Tokyo, Rotterdam, Seattle, and New York. In the book’s final chapter, “Future: ALAXSXA/ALASKA and Beyond—Quest for Identity, Otherness, and Humanity,” Kurahashi describes one of Chong’s most recent works, ALAXSXA/ALASKA, which addresses environmental and political concerns of Alaska’s Indigenous people before addressing trends in Chong’s ongoing work. In this closing analysis and throughout the book, I found myself longing for more interviews with Chong and his collaborators, more details about his creative process (how does Chong structure his interview process and textual revisions?), and clearer descriptions of Chong’s performances instead of lengthy interpretations of their meaning. Nevertheless, The Interdisciplinary Theatre of Ping Chong: Exploring Curiosity and Otherness will serve as a useful introductory resource for scholars and classrooms, helping to deepen critical understanding about one of the most important and, unfortunately, overlooked theatre artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Craig Quintero Grinnell College The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 34, Number 2 (Spring 2022) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2022 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References About The Authors 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 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

PRELUDE Festival 2023 PANEL Future Visions: Provocations for the Next Performance Ecosystem Edge Effect Discussion English 90 minutes 7:00PM EST Wednesday, October 11, 2023 Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All New York City’s performance world has always been advanced by independent creators pushing the boundaries of how, where and for whom we generate live-art experiences. This panel begins with a series of brief manifestos delivered by artists and makers fueling the next chapter of this story, followed by a moderated conversation. Curated and moderated by Jess Applebaum and Nic Benacerraf of Edge Effect Content / Trigger Description: Edge Effect is a “think and do tank” that creates participatory experiences for individuals to share knowledge across personal, cultural, and disciplinary boundaries. Each project unites a polydisciplinary coalition of humanitarians in the creation of works that address the harmful aspects of our profit-driven culture. EE’s process is deeply rooted in the edge-blurring practices of devised theater, which fosters consensual collaboration, a generous and joyful workspace, critical self-awareness, and healing through antiracist and anti-patriarchal action. The resulting collaborations take shape as live performances, broadly construed: immersive theater, hoax storefronts, dramatic concerts and lectures, and more—all designed to live at the intersection of analysis, enigma, spectacle, and delight. Jess Applebaum (she/her) is a dramaturg, community engagement coordinator, and public scholar whose 20-plus years of practice are rooted at the intersections of contemporary performance and social action. As a dramaturg, Jess works collaboratively with performance makers, academics, and activists to develop and facilitate creative processes. She believes that bodies perform knowledge, that process activates collective power, and that, together, they can inspire new pedagogical and civic practices. Jess is a founding partner of Edge Effect Media Group and an almost founding member of One Year Lease Theatre Company (OYL). Beyond these two companies, her artistic relationships include working with Panoply Performance Lab, composer/performance team Nathan Davis and Sylvia Milo, Kyoung’s Pacific Beat (KPB), directors Ashley Tata, Anna Brenner, and Simón Hanukai and choreographer Jody Oberfelder. Service to the community includes The Off-Off Community Dish, Brooklyn Commune, VP of Advocacy for LMDA, and conference committee member for CARPA8: Dramaturgies of Artistic Research at Uniarts Helsinki, which took place in 2023. Jess holds an MFA in Dramaturgy from Columbia University, a MA in Performance Studies from NYU and has a PhD in the works from CUNY Graduate Center where she was a PublicsLab Fellow. Her scholarship on dramaturgy has been presented at the Prague Quadrenille’s special convening Devising Dramaturgy in 2014 and the conference Alternative Dramaturgies held in Tangiers, Morocco. Nic Benacerraf (he/they) is a space-maker. As a director, scenographer, and scholar of live performance, he engineers consent-based systems and environments for genuine human encounters in theaters, galleries, concert halls, and streets. Nic is Founding Partner of Edge Effect Media Group, a polydisciplinary research and performance lab. For over a decade he was Founding co-Artistic Director of The Assembly, a Brooklyn-based theater collective dedicated to building slow-cooked works about pressing social issues. Nic’s scholarship uses dramaturgical strategies to unmask the field of Public Relations as the most efficacious genre of performance ever invented, and as the propaganda arm of the “capitalist, imperialist, white-supremacist patriarchy” (bell hooks). Currently, Nic teaches Directing at the Brown University / Trinity Rep MFA program. Nic received an MFA in Scenic Design from CalArts, and he is completing his PhD in Theatre & Performance at the CUNY Graduate Center. Images of his design work can be found at http://www.nicbenacerraf.com/. Ianthe Demos is the Artistic Director and a founding member of OYL, established in 2001. Ianthe’s work has received two Drama Desk nominations in NYC and a Stage Award in Edinburgh. Her directing work with OYL includes Kissing the Floor by Ellen McLaughlin, pool (no water) by Mark Ravenhill, PEMDAS by Kevin Armento, and Balls by Bryony Lavery and Kevin Armento among others. Ianthe is a full-time professor in the International Performance Ensemble at PACE University and runs OYL’s acclaimed Summer International Program in Greece, Japan, and India. Ianthe has worked extensively in the arts management field managing dance companies on the international circuit as part of Selby Artists Management. Ianthe is currently working on a new adaptation of Medea by Meropi Papastergiou, a production of Ellen McLaughlin’s Oedipus, and a new work entitled WAKE written by Leon Ingulsrud and Brooke Shilling. Jesse Cameron Alick is a dramaturg, producer, poet, playwright, essayist, artistic researcher, and science fiction expert. Jesse has been working in the nonprofit theater world for over 20 years, starting out as Artistic Director and Producer at a small independent theater company for 10 years and eventually working at the Public Theater for over a decade, in the final years as Company Dramaturg. Jesse is currently the Associate Artistic Director at The Vineyard and an active freelance dramaturg at various off-Broadway theaters in NYC, nationwide and internationally. Jesse studied writing with Adrienne Kennedy and has taught theater courses, lectured at classes, and mentored students at a myriad of programs, currently teaching at NYU. Chie Morita (森田千恵 | she/her) is a consultant, creative producer, and consummate tinkerer dedicated to retraining our inherited habits and engineering empowering new systems in the arts. She is a Co-Founder + Partner of FORGE, a boutique consultancy devoted to helping artists and organizations forge a path toward success. By leveraging the potential of proactive planning, holistic mentorship, and collaborative asking, Chie seeks to free makers (and herself) from historical hindrances, socialized stereotypes, and negative self-stories. In New York, she has worked with Tony-Award-winning Broadway Producer Joey Parnes (on A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, End of the Rainbow), institutions including The Public Theater, Third Rail Projects, The Musical Theater Factory, The New York Neo-Futurists (who, under her care, were awarded three Drama Desk nominations), TriBeCa Venue Town Stages (where she created, curated, and managed the Sokoloff Arts Fellowship Program), brands including The Macallan and Art Beyond The Glass, and such independent makers and ensembles as Heather Christian and the Arbornauts, Dylan Marron, Edge Effect, Empowered Artist Collective, Statera Arts Mentorship: NYC, UglyRhino, and Fresh Ground Pepper. Alongside her work with FORGE, she proudly mentors young makers through We Are Queens, and her alma mater, Northern Arizona University, and serves as a collaborating producer with the Wonderland Historical Society in New Orleans. Ximena Garnica is a New York City-based, Colombian-born immigrant working as a multidisciplinary artist, choreographer, director, curator, designer, and teacher. With her partner, Japanese artist Shige Moriya, Garnica is the co-founder and co-artistic director of the arts entity called LEIMAY, which means “a moment of light in the darkness” or “a moment of transition” in Japanese. Part of their work is created with the LEIMAY Ensemble, and their embodied practice LUDUS transmits the lineage of butoh dance and experimental visual and performing arts. They are invested in the entanglement from which culture and art emerge, and they value relationality, collaboration, and resource-sharing as primary to their praxis. Their multidisciplinary works include dance, theater, sculpture, video, film, mixed media, and light installations, photography, training projects, stage performances, and publications. Their works have been presented at US venues such as BAM Fisher, the Brooklyn Museum, the Japan Society, the Watermill Center, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, and internationally in Japan, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Mexico, and Colombia. They have maintained collaborations with renowned artists (Robert Wilson and Ko Murobushi) and they have received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, NPN, NYSCA, and NEFA, among others. They were nominated for Herb Alpert and United States Artists awards. They have been reviewed in The New York Times, TDR/The Theater Drama Review, The New Yorker, and Hyperallergic, among others. They are part of the theater faculty at MIT and was recently a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of California Riverside. Their writing has been published by Routledge. Garnica is an advocate of affordable live-work spaces. Their activism was instrumental in effecting changes at the New York state level to protect live-work spaces in New York City. More recently, Garnica, through LEIMAY, co-founded the Cultural Solidarity Fund, which has provided over $1 million in $500 relief microgrants to NYC artists and cultural workers affected by COVID-19. With her partner, they continue multiple organizing efforts to sustain what they call the “entanglement,” a loose knot, cluster, or constellation of relationalities—an intention to live a life in poetry. Beto O’Byrne hails from East Texas and is the co-founder of Radical Evolution, a multi-ethnic, multi-disciplinary performance collective based in Brooklyn, NY. The author of 20 plays, screenplays, and original TV pilots, his works have been produced in and developed in Austin, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, New York City, Portland, and San Antonio. O’Byrne is an advocate and organizer interested in creating solidarity between labor, arts, and antiracist/anticapitalist movements. In addition to his theatre work, O'Byrne is the creator of the political punk rock outfit, A Revolutionary Chorus, and the World of Kir, a high fantasy creative writing project. Radical Evolution is a multiethnic producing collective committed to creating artistic events that seek to understand the complexities of the mixed-identity existence in the 21st Century. We believe that visibility and representation for the fastest-growing demographic in our nation - those who identify as more than one race or ethnicity - is crucial to live performance. We incorporate people from a variety of backgrounds into our creative process, with a focus on people of color, to seed the field of experimental and collaboratively created theatre with practitioners that celebrate the intersectionality of perspectives and aesthetics of the city around us. Through this approach, we work to assert a vision for cultural and social equity in our field, city, and nation. Marisol Rosa-Shapiro / Marisol Soledad is a cultural worker, theater artist, educator, facilitator, and curator. Her acting and directing work have appeared on stages across the USA, in Philadelphia, NYC, Seattle, Boston, Miami, Maine, Massachusetts, Colorado, and Alaska. Marisol has worked as a teaching artist for many theaters, arts education initiatives, and community-based organizations across the country. She is a tenured teaching artist at the New Victory Theater in NYC where she developed The Seven Ravens Project as part of the LabWorks program for new works, and made her Off-Broadway directorial debut with Spellbound Theater’s Wink in the spring of 2023. As a member of TYA/USA’s BIPOCin TYA Advisory Board, Marisol co-facilitated spaces for members of the global majority working in TYA and supported the creation of TYA/USA’s Anti-Racist and Anti-Oppressive Futures guide for the field. She has also served as Director of Community Engagement for Shakespeare in Clark Park, and as Community Coordinator for Theatre Horizon's production of Town. Marisol is a volunteer performer, educator, and board secretary for Clowns Without Borders USA, who help build resilience through laughter with people experiencing displacement due to natural and human-made disaster across the globe. In recent years, she has been selected as a Colleen Toohey Porter Fellow with TYA/USA, a Jim Rye Fellow with International Performing Arts for Youth (IPAY), a National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures Leadership Institute Fellow, and a Target Margin Theater Institute Fellow. Her work has received support from the Network of EnsembleTheatres, Cannonball Festival, Philadelphia’s Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy, the Stockton Rush Bartol Foundation and Marrazzo Family Foundation, and Seattle’s Office of Arts and Culture. Marisol is a graduate of Princeton University and of Helikos International School for Theatre Creation in Florence, Italy. She was born and raised in NYC, where she continues to create and teach. She currently resides in Philadelphia. Photo credits: Jess Applebaum. Photo courtesy of the artist. Nic Benacerraf. Photo courtesy of the artist. Ianthe Demos. Photo courtesy of the artist. Jesse Cameron Alick. Photo courtesy of the artist. Chie Morita: credit Taylor Cooley_Katie LaMark. Ximena Garnica. Photo courtesy of the artist. Beto O’Byrne. Photo courtesy of the artist. Marisol Rosa-Shapiro / Marisol Soledad. Photo courtesy of the artist. www.edgeeffectmedia.org IG: @edge.effect.media Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 35 2 Visit Journal Homepage Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre Jeanne Klein By Published on April 17, 2023 Download Article as PDF by Jeanne Klein The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 35, Number 2 (Spring 2023) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2023 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn. New York: Routledge, 2022; Pp. 158. Cecilia Josephine Aragόn has accomplished a significant feat. Borderlands Children’s Theatre: Historical Developments and Emergence of Chicana/o/Mexican-American Youth Theatre marks the first book-length study that examines the emergent history of Latina/o Theatre for Young Audiences (LTYA) from its earliest Indigenous origins, as well as its burgeoning dramatic literature and scholarship over the past three decades. Having grown up in New Mexico and west Texas, Aragόn writes passionately from her lived childhood experiences as a Chicana/India. Her family engaged in rasquache teatro in their backyard, performed in biennial pastorela and pasiόn plays at their church, traveled in a van to perform, work, protest, and march for Chicana/o rights, and assisted border-crossing Mexican families. Facing both Anglo and Mexican prejudices, she came to recognize the double consciousness of her borderlands identity. Based on her personal, coming-of-age experiences, Aragόn argues her theory of “performing mestizaje” in which she defines bicultural and hybrid body-mind concepts that (a) exhibit an Indigenous identity in Chicana/o Latina/o cultures through language and body practices, (b) enable a transformation that helps explain mestiza/o and Indigenous consciousness, spirituality, and healing, (c) participate in promoting Indigenous rituals and celebrations through the use of mythology and symbolism, and (d) enact cultural production that contests, resists, and interrogates the impacts of imperialism and colonial systems. (3) In these ways, she gives voice to Chicana/o and Mexican-American young people whose dramatized stories remain disparaged among professional theatre companies and all too many university theatre programs today. The first three out of five chapters (half the book) comprise a meticulous literature review with requisite due diligence. In the first chapter, Aragόn’s overview of US children’s theatre is based on somewhat inaccurate narratives propounded by the Theatre for Youth and Community program at Arizona State University in Tempe, the site of her heretofore unpublished dissertation. Contrary to canonical constructions that US professional theatre and dramatic literature for children began in the 1880s, prominent child actors actually began performing plays in professional theatre companies for young spectators in the 1790s, as well as Shakespeare’s works and pantomimes since the 1750s. More importantly, she addresses the nascent study of LTYA with critical texts and play anthologies that began to appear in the 1990s. In regard to shifting cultural constructions of childhood, her heavy reliance on classic Piagetian stages of child development reflects an unfortunate yet understandable lack of awareness of this field’s complex advancements in social-cognitive and neuroscientific realms. Chapter two builds upon the crucial foundations of other scholars by reviewing the Indigenous roots of child performances in Mesoamerican rituals through Spanish colonial pastorales. After Mexico’s independence from Spain, theatrical Mexican families toured southwestern US territories and their children, the first generation of native-born Mexican-American actors, starred in Spanish-language theatre companies through the 1950s. Photographs of child performers, including stars María Luisa Villalongín and Leonardo “Lalo” G. Astol, enliven their costumed performances. From there, the pivotal Chicana/o movement begun in the 1960s gave rise to multiple youth teatros that sparked today’s generation of major LTYA playwrights. To underscore the cultural, political, economic, social, and psychological specificity of young Chicana/o identities, Aragόn delineates border theory and Chicana feminism in connection with theatre scholarship in chapter three. She also explicates Jean Phinney’s three-stage psycho-social model of ethnic identity development (1989-90). In chapter four, Aragόn applies all theoretical frameworks by analyzing representations of children and adolescents in six pivotal plays: Alicia in Wonder Tierra (or I Can’t Eat Goat Head) by Silvia Gonzalez S., Farolitos of Christmas by Rudolfo Anaya, The Highest Heaven by José Cruz González, No saco nada de la escuela by Luis Miguel Valdez, Simply María or The American Dream by Josefina Lόpez, and The Drop Out by Carlos Morton. Her succinct comparative summation of these coming-of-age plays reveals how extraordinary child and adolescent protagonists successfully negotiate familial, social, political, and psychological border crossings by age, gender, class, and ethnic identities through physical journeys, metaphorical dreams, or in school settings. Playwrights’ biographies, featured with their child and adult photographs, also serve to justify how and why these foundational works created borderlands children’s theatre. The final most provocative chapter adds Aragόn’s illuminating interviews with each playwright in which they recount their most memorable theatrical and school experiences and their artistic connections with the empowering Chicana/o movement. Notably, many highlighted their frustrating challenges trying to get their plays produced by mainstream professional companies. Paradoxically, once El Teatro Campesino achieved its mainstream status, youth teatros declined until university-bred artist-scholars revived and advanced LTYA for young audiences, albeit with too few child and adolescent actors, while various community organizations expanded theatre with Latina/o young people. Yet even today, as Aragόn makes clear, childism remains firmly entrenched far behind all other contested cultural movements (e.g., December 2016 issue of American Theatre). Despite the formation of Latinx Theatre Commons in 2012, LTYA festivals still vie for national recognition among mediated adaptations of children’s literature and other popularized trends. Even so, Aragόn’s optimistic outlook for the future of LTYA inspires hope and bodes well for the next generation of theatre artist-scholars. From my perspective, this slim but somewhat overwritten book tends to reproduce its major points unnecessarily throughout each chapter. Moreover, the requisite postmodern need to use and repeat Mexican-American, Chicana/o, Latina/o, or Latinx terminology may or may not bog down the flow of readers’ experiences. However, my foremost concern has to do with Routledge, a major theatre publisher that has failed this author by ignoring its copy-editing responsibilities. Regardless of these reservations, Aragón ultimately offers more than a cursory glimpse of historical legacies and trending representations of children and young people in LTYA. As the population of Latina/o and biracial children soars, Borderlands Children’s Theatre calls us all to take immediate actions by ensuring that young voices are not only heard but respected and celebrated for present and future generations. Jeanne Klein Lawrence, Kansas References About The Authors 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 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 33 1 Visit Journal Homepage Contemporary Women Stage Directors By Published on January 11, 2021 Download Article as PDF Contemporary Women Stage Directors: Conversations on Craft. Paulette Marty. London; New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Collections, 2019; Pp. 292 + viii. Contemporary Women Stage Directors: Conversations on Craft presents an ambitious compilation of interviews with twenty-seven contemporary women stage directors, while archiving and reflecting on relatively underrepresented women stage directors in the US and the UK. Tracing the past two decades, Marty notes that few published books focus on female stage directors. She points to two volumes by Anne Fliotsos and Wendy Vierow as rare examples. Marty distinguishes her project by focusing on mid-career women stage directors—who she argues are not featured enough by Fliotsos and Vierow. This volume provides readers the rare chance to hear disparate, highly-active women directors’ reflecting in their own words about their experiences, insights, styles, labors, and vision. Based on her experience working both as a theatre researcher and practitioner (dramaturg/director), Marty also provides a window on the contemporary theatre industry, opening far beyond how gender intersects with artistic lives. What makes this book unique in structure is that Marty directs, in effect, her book. Interview-based books deploying question-and-answer structures often feature a handful of interviewees in a chapter or section. Instead, she divides chapters, as if splitting beats, and places quotes and excerpts from her interviewees in each chapter according to its theme, as if casting speakers in dynamic dialogue. She aligns thematic chapters like scenes that build into a larger narrative: this journey of women directors pursuing their careers begins with incubating projects and concludes with each director’s own vision of today’s theatre. Although the book’s organizational structure does not provide a clear, holistic profile of each individual director, as Marty acknowledges in the introduction (9), this thematic approach instead distinctly guides readers to respect a director’s role and labor. Marty also provides a series of inspiring models, amplifying the influence of women directors working at an array of theatre venues in the US and UK. In the first two chapters, Marty sheds light on the directors’ incubating process. Chapter 1 opens by laying out how individual directors choose a particular piece of work. For example, Lear deBessonet, the founding director of the Public Theater’s Public Works project, explains that she stages classics since “no one is the authority” (24) which thereby opens up collective imagination. Marty also considers how varied directors and artistic directors actually scaffold their work: finding their niche, planning seasons, choosing collaborators, and mounting their plays in a theater. Chapter 2 demonstrates her subjects’ labor of engaging with scripts and ideas prior to rehearsals. She emphasizes each director’s signature style of analyzing the play, for instance. Further, she expands our grasp of the directorial role by examining how her subjects collaborate with playwrights, play multiple roles besides that of a director, prepare for rehearsals, and communicate with audiences. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on how these directors shape performances, starting from conceptualization of the visual and acoustic, and then moving into the rehearsal room, and, ultimately, the stage. Chapter 3 highlights how the chosen directors envision theatrical worlds visually and acoustically, collaborating with designers. Here, Marty approaches relationships between directing and designing theatre horizontally. Inspired by her subjects, she analyzes spectacle and sound beyond servers of directorial messages, conveying a comprehensive picture of the theatrical process to readers. In Rachel Chavkin’s words, it is a director’s process of “discovering the world with designers and actors” (99).True to the volume’s subtitle, Chapter 4 presents a “conversation on craft,” guided by these leading directors’ invaluable experiences and advice on the rehearsal process. Using quotes, Marty covers the practical process of rehearsal: casting actors, setting the tone for rehearsals, empowering actors, shaping the process, and using research in rehearsals. For instance, Maria Aberg, who is known for “her innovative, feminist productions of Shakespeare and other classics at the Royal Shakespeare Company” (2), introduces points she considers in the casting process when she changes the gender of a character. Readers will find many gems and tips. In the final chapters, Contemporary Women Stage Directors focuses on how each of these experienced directors develop their careers and navigate the US and UK theatre scenes. Chapter 5 considers how the directors sustain their projects, dealing with concerns such as “financial security, community, quality of life, and relationships” (159). Pursuing the theme of work-life balance, Marty places quotes from Leah Gardiner, Kimberly Senior, and Lucy Kerbel together to cover issues such as motherhood, labor and pressure. In particular, Kerbel explains that “the loop of visibility” (190) exposes directors to critics’ attention which sustains their projects. She elaborates on gendered inequality in the field by mentioning how maternity leave easily drops women directors from that loop. If Chapter 5 extensively covers their individual lives and career arcs, Chapter 6 specifically focuses on their diverse experience with systemic challenges tied to their gender, racial and/or ethnic identities in the theatre industry. The 6th chapter analyzes obstacles and disparities in the field through her array of case studies, integrating an intersectional perspective. For instance. Leah Gardiner, Paulette Randall, and KJ Sanchez tell their stories of experiencing misogyny and racism in the field. Importantly, Marty pays attention to how these women directors navigate systemic obstacles. For example, Roxana Silbert and Nadia Fall emphasize that diversity opens up more diversity and brings an alternative gaze to the field, which is dominated by white male directors. Marty concludes her book with the directors’ insight on theatre today and their expectations as working professionals. In the conclusion, Marty summarizes her interview research in two categories: what she did not find and what she did. What is notable here is her picture of a director as a relationship builder. Marty explains that “the director’s role is to build and facilitate relationships, specifically (1) between a play and an audience and (2) among members of the collaborative team” (288). Likewise, Marty, as the director of this book, builds a relationship between these women directors and her contemporary readers. She creates a bridge for these mid-stream women directors —who struggle for their comparatively underrepresented stories and insights to be heard— bringing their voices and methods as accomplished practitioners to readers, both artists and scholars. By providing many substantial examples of brilliant, motivating women stage directors from the US and UK in the early 21st century, this significant study will benefit theatre researchers and our future generation of women (and other) theater directors, artistic directors and, one hopes, producers. Dohyun Gracia Shin The Graduate Center, CUNY The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 33, Number 1 (Fall 2020) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2020 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References About The Authors 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 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 27 3 Visit Journal Homepage Twisting the Dandy: The Transformation of the Blackface Dandy in Early American Theatre Benjamin Miller By Published on November 12, 2015 Download Article as PDF When George Washington Dixon took to the stage in 1834 to perform “Zip Coon,” his latest incarnation of a blackface dandy, he most likely bent his knee a little more than in his previous portrayals of the dandy, garbled his speech a little more, and added some garish costume accessories. Dixon was twisting the dandy into something new and alien. The twisting of the dandy was a theatrical response to the real black dandies who had been present in the urban centers of America for several decades, and who provoked debates about racial classifications, white and black freedoms, and the American class system. Dixon’s participation in these debates—through the bending, distorting character changes he made—continued a process of transformation of the blackface dandy in early American theatre. The exact nature of this course of alteration, and the reasons for the blackface dandy's remodelling over time, are debatable, due to the array of influences on the character, contradictory primary texts and contemporary reviews of blackface performance, and contentious methodologies for investigating blackface entertainment. This article will draw on minstrel studies to analyse the character of the blackface dandy in three iconic songs of early American blackface theatre, “My Long Tail Blue,” “Jim Crow,” and “Zip Coon.” Arguably, the earliest popular representations of black dandyism on the American stage contained features and characteristics designed to diminish any threat posed by real black dandies to the white working class’ imagined white superiority, and these features were quickly amplified in the following years to repress the perceived challenge posed by discourses and performances of black liberty. The rapid transformation of the blackface dandy entrenched a narrative of white liberty that undercut any potential arguments for cross-racial working-class solidarity, abolition, cross-racial sexual relationships, or black rights. Within a decade of the first blackface dandy treading the boards in America, a destructive discourse of blackness—exemplified in the character of Zip Coon—eliminated the possibility that early blackface theatre could provide a theatrical response to social transformations in America that might champion the causes of equality and black liberty. Exactly how these discourses and causes are investigated has been brought into question lately. Recent methodological shifts in studies of blackness have provided an important intervention within minstrel studies, providing the occasion to reassess the figure of the blackface dandy and the role of such a figure within discourses of blackface theatre, blackness, and American liberty more generally. Methodological Shifts: The Four Stages of Minstrel Studies For nearly a century, minstrel scholars have debated the role of racial discourses in blackface performance. Mikko Tuhkanen has categorized minstrel scholars into three periods, with more recent work potentially constituting a fourth shift in approaches to minstrel studies. A common feature within twentieth-century blackface minstrelsy studies, so argues Tuhkanen, is the “repetitive dismissals of earlier studies as biased, insubstantial, or politically motivated.”[1] In the 1930s Carl Wittke and Constance Rourke theorized blackface as a process of “cultural borrowing” where white performers used performance styles of black people in creating a uniquely American form of cultural expression.[2] Responding to this reading of minstrelsy, from the 1950s through the 1970s Ralph Ellison, Nathan Huggins, and Robert Toll dismissed studies such as Wittke’s and Rourke’s, claiming they focused too intently on national formations and failed to understand the harmful racial ideologies circulating in blackface entertainment; for Ellison, Huggins, and Toll blackface was “a reflecting surface” in which white anxieties about race and politics are resolved through harmful racial stereotypes of blackness.[3] Thirdly, Eric Lott pioneered a revival in minstrel studies, followed by authors such as W.T. Lhamon, Dale Cockrell and William Mahar, attempting to balance the approaches of the first two periods of minstrel studies.[4] In Love and Theft Lott argued that Ellison, Huggins and Toll were “representative of the reigning view of minstrelsy as racial domination,” suggesting their work performs a “necessary critique [that] seems somewhat crude and idealist,” and that, instead, minstrel studies should present a “subtler account of racial representations” that reads blackface minstrelsy as a “distorted mirror, reflecting displacements and condensations and discontinuities . . . multiple determinations” of whiteness and blackness.[5] The third group condemn earlier critics who claim blackface performance to be “an unequivocally racist, antiblack practice, both in intentions and effects,” and instead, insist on a more nuanced reading strategy, one that highlights the multiple determinations of identity and political issues, intentional and unintentional, that lead to the possibility of both crosscultural affinity and antiblack sentiment in blackface performance.[6] The complication of intentionality is a feature of this third group of scholars, who re-animate rebellious, anti-bourgeois themes in blackface performance, and prioritize these themes over the oppressive, racist consequences of blackface. Tuhkanen remains neutral in the debate, concluding that the development of minstrel studies “like blackface performance itself . . . has evolved with the twists and turns of its own ‘lore cycle.’”[7] Since Tuhkanen’s 2001 article, a group of scholars have taken issue with the approaches and findings of the third group. In other words, to Tuhkanen’s genealogy of blackface minstrel studies can be added a fourth turn: scholars including Daphne Brooks, Tavia Nyong’o, and Douglas Jones who question the methodologies of previous studies in order to emphasize the way black people—audiences, artists, activists, and everyday people—shaped and responded to blackface performance over time.[8] Presenting an intervention that informs the approach taken to the analysis of blackface dandies in this article, the fourth turn in minstrel studies advocates for a methodological re-orientation that reveals historical blind spots in earlier histories and suggests ways to prioritize black experiences in an analysis of white performances of blackness. Brooks’ theorization of black performance after 1850 suggests that blackface stage characters can be read as responses by white performers to challenges issued by black people arguing against white authority and control. Brooks, in identifying how late nineteenth-century black performers intent on social, cultural and political transformation inhabited and transformed the stereotypes of blackness created by the early white minstrels, urges scholars to consider minstrelsy’s “strategy of alienating the body and ‘blackness’” and “how the practice of alienation participated in the making of a dissident theatrical figure that travelled the stage in the mid-to-late nineteenth century and found itself at the center of both hegemonic and resistant social and cultural ideologies.”[9] Brooks, that is, suggests that the racial stereotypes created in early blackface performance styles were used for both oppressive and liberatory discourses of blackness. The term “alienation,” for Brooks, refers to the “white minstrel performer’s production and navigation of a violently deformed black corporeality”—a physically and representationally twisted and gnarled form of blackness—that “shored up white supremacist ideology . . . grotesquely exposing the mutual constitution” of whiteness with blackness.[10] Such a stance reiterates the concerns of the scholars in the third turn of minstrel studies—such as Lott, who advocated for an analysis of how political and social concerns of the white performers and audiences (the constitution of whiteness) energized blackface performance—while emphasizing the fusion of social and racial themes in minstrelsy to create a unique discourse of blackness that ultimately asserts white superiority. But, importantly, Brooks adds another paradigm for analysis, examining how, particularly later in the nineteenth century, the discourse of blackness was re-appropriated and transformed by black performers, critics, and authors with an interest in black liberty. An exemplary demonstration of the methodological shift advocated by Brooks is Nyong’o’s study Amalgamation Waltz, which incorporates the performances, perspectives and responses of black people into an understanding of blackface theatre. Nyong’o recounts how an editor of the Colored American, Samuel Cornish, attacked blackface minstrelsy and chastised black members of the audiences at such performances. In 1841, recounting a friend’s experience of attending a blackface show, Cornish complained: he never saw so many colored persons at the theatre in his life, hundreds were there, and among whom were many very respectable looking persons. O shame! paying money, hard earned, to support such places and such men, to heap ridicule and a burlesque upon them in their very presence, and upon their whole class.[11] While Cornish’s attempts to convince black patrons to boycott such venues may not have been entirely successful, Frederick Douglass, in 1848, clearly thought the intended audience of blackface entertainment was white, and labelled blackface performers “the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of the white fellow-citizens.”[12] Nyong’o’s methodological re-focussing—bringing contemporary black voices into a consideration of blackface performance—highlights historical inaccuracies in earlier studies of blackface, the blind spots in what has been labelled an “orthodox division of minstrelsy into an early radical phase followed by its co-optation by commercial and middle-class interests by the 1850s.”[13] The radical phase, according to scholars such as Lott, Cockrell, Lhamon and Mahar, occurred from the 1820s to the 1840s as blackface performers engaged in and promoted cross-racial solidarity—even amalgamation—in the hope of uniting a working class that opposed exploitation by the upper classes.[14] The commercial stage, according to such scholars, occurred as blackface minstrelsy transformed into a form of entertainment for white audiences, where working-class audiences would enjoy criticisms of the upper class and both working-class and upper-class white audiences shared enjoyment in an oppressive discourse of antiblack racism.[15] Suggesting this orthodox historical view “merely transposes the desire for mongrel authenticity onto the mythic origins of a popular style,” Nyong’o reviews early blackface performance through the lens of black critics.[16] Early blackface performers are repositioned as capitalising on anxieties over racial amalgamation, leading to responses by black activists and abolitionists, whose criticisms of blackface performers’ attacks on black dignity demonstrated “concerns over respectability that animate black responses to the amalgamation panic.”[17] The methodological prioritization of black experience in the work of Nyongo, and others such as Brooks, has the potential to improve understandings of, and theories about, early blackface performance. Drawing directly on the methodological shift promoted by Nyong’o, Jones breaks with earlier groups of blackface scholars to theorize what can be termed the “expropriationist twist” of early blackface performance. Jones reinterprets black performance traditions—such as the slave performers who danced, sang and joked for money and goods at Catherine Market near Brooklyn during the 1820s—that Lhamon has shown to have influenced early blackface performers.[18] While Lhamon reads the lines of influence, from black to white performers, as an example of cross-racial solidarity, Jones reads the exchange differently.[19] Taking Fred Moten’s theorization of the black avant-garde—which identifies a “liberty awaiting activation, the politico-economic, ontological, and aesthetic surplus” in work by black artists and about “blackness”[20]—Jones questions the consequences of white would-be blackface entertainers appropriating the liberatory surplus of black performance. Jones describes this theft as “a cutting, ultimately ghastly, twist” in the historical development of blackface performance: Call it the turn of expropriation: those who donned burnt cork and crafted minstrelsy recognized the potentiality of the surplus of black performance and used it to activate their “liberty waiting.”[21] The expropriationist twist theorized by Jones explains the ideological dimensions of what Brooks referred to as “alienation.” The deformed corporeality enacted by white performers in an attempt to alienate blackness from the source of its original black expression did more than separate blackness from black concerns, it transformed blackness into an object used to present white, working-class concerns, particularly concerns to do with white working class freedom from labor exploitation. This twist in the performance of blackness is mirrored in minstrel studies that ignore the role of black people in provoking and responding to blackface performance. A reorientation of blackface criticism along the lines suggested by Jones, Nyong’o, and Brooks redresses the twist in studies of blackness, a twist typified by the ignorance of black voices and concerns in re-telling blackface history. For Jones, the “vast majority of the literature on early minstrelsy” uphold the orthodox historical view of minstrelsy criticized by Nyong’o; the orthodox view is the result of a methodology whereby “scholars borrow the model of those who crafted minstrelsy itself by refusing black people except when they are advantageous to one’s particular narrative.”[22] In other words, Jones escalates the need for a methodological change by likening earlier blackface scholars to the exclusionary blackface performers they study. Jones demonstrates the new methodology by examining how “an increasingly assertive free black community in the North” agitated for social change in the 1820s and 1830s, where for anxious white communities “blackface became one way to regulate and attenuate” such pressures.[23] Such an analysis reveals how “Minstrelsy emerged as a conduit of white assertion and a buffer against black protest.”[24] Beginning with a close analysis of an early blackface dandy that utilized blackness to present white concerns on stage, and examining both how this early dandy figure was transformed as blackface entertainment’s popularity bloomed and black responses to blackface theatre’s popularity, this article examines the twisting of the dandy in a way that begins to redress the twisting of minstrel studies. Central to blackface performance’s responses to white anxieties about transformations in American culture was the figure of the black dandy. In her history of black dandyism, Monica Miller states that black dandies emerged in response to several changes in American society and culture, including the end of festivals where black people had used fancy dress in parodying upper class whites, the end of the international slave trade and the abolition of slavery in various states at different times.[25] According to Miller, newly freed black people and their families or communities were accumulating modest amounts of wealth as a result of more economic freedoms and began to use fancy dress to announce their arrival as a new American demographic. The arrival of the black dandy into America’s urban centres was almost immediately followed by attacks and criticisms: “Attempts to control the perceived impertinency of these newly emboldened, newly fashionable blacks ranged from the subtle to the outrageous. Excessive responses included ripping the new clothes off the backs of those blacks dressed beyond what whites could bear.”[26] More subtle responses occurred on American stages. The blackface dandy is a stage character developed and refigured from the 1820s on to respond to the actual emergence of black dandies in American society as well as other social and cultural concerns. Given that the advent of black dandyism coincided with the use of typically upper-class clothing by white Americans who used elaborate suits and accessories to distinguish American identity, society and culture from Europe, the history of the black dandy as an argument about class and race restrictions is entangled with the history of the white dandy as an argument about American nationalism. For Miller, blackface dandies, as caricatures, “became part of a cultural critique of perceived white decadence that becomes increasingly difficult to parse from concerns about black ‘striving.’”[27] Themselves the product of various traditions, including clowning, commedia dell’arte, and burlesque, the blackface dandy developed as a stage character that was embroiled with these theatrical traditions as much as with the various social and cultural traditions that had led white and black Americans to use refined ways of dressing as embodied forms of argument in the first place. Black dandies, and associated stage representations, are the product of multiple traditions and critiques and, thus, must be analyzed as indeterminate or multiplicitous: In his adaptability, the dandy figure is firmly ensconced within the flow of African American history, linking African traditions and black recognition and subversive play with white power in the colonial period to black statements of respectability and individuality in freedom. Blackface minstrelsy and other caricatures fought against this mobility even as they acknowledged the ability of the figure and its real-life counterparts to reinvent themselves.[28] Importantly, the blackface dandy can be read as an acknowledgement of the power and rebellious force of real black dandies and, simultaneously, as an attempt by white performers to redress the arguments made by real black dandies against racial and social norms. The transformations of the blackface dandy in the early 1830s reveal the tensions between acknowledgement and neutralization of black resistance in American society and culture. An Early Blackface Dandy: Long Tail Blue The best-known performer of blackface dandyism in the period of early blackface was Dixon, born to a poor family in Richmond, Virginia, probably in 1801. Of what little is known about his early life, Cockrell describes how a circus manager noticed Dixon’s potential as a vocalist at the age of 15 and he was apprenticed to West’s traveling circus as an errand boy; also, it is likely he first used blackface as a clown in the circus.[29] Citing the various formal influences on early blackface, Lott mentions the American clown, as well as the harlequin of commedia dell’arte and the burlesque tramp, as overlapping traditions “tending more or less toward self mockery on the one hand and subversion on the other.”[30] Such diverse traditions influenced the formation of the blackface dandy character. A proponent of the self-mockery and subversion typical of blackface clowning and commedia dell’arte, Dixon became known for his performances of the blackface song “My Long Tail Blue” as early as 1827.[31] Of Dixon’s “My Long Tail Blue” the S. Foster Damon songbook—Series of Old American Songs (1936)—states: “it remained for half a century one of the standard burnt-cork songs.”[32] Given it is rare to find versions of “My Long Tail Blue” with a post-1830 publication date (where they are provided), or in post-1840 song sheet collections, it is unlikely the popularity of “My Long Tail Blue” lasted more than a decade. Nevertheless, “My Long Tail Blue” did popularize the character of the black dandy, which certainly proved to be an enduring presence, though continually altered and adjusted to respond to white concerns and black responses and challenges, in blackface entertainment over the rest of the century. In a description of some of Dixon’s performances in 1829, Cockrell points to the constituency of the audience in early blackface performance: during a three-day, late-July span, [Dixon] appeared at the Bowery Theatre, the Chatham Garden Theatre, and the Park Theatre and at all three sang in blackface . . . performing for “crowded galleries and scantily filled boxes,” a solid indication of the heart of his audience.[33] Ticket prices ensured that, generally, working-class crowds populated the gallery and upper-class audiences patronized the boxes. Cornish’s concerns in the early 1840s about black audience members in blackface shows suggest Dixon’s audience may have included black and white workers.[34] In any case, Dixon’s blackface routines appear to have been disliked by upper-class people, but delivered him success through the general approval of working-class, gallery audiences. The story narrated in “My Long Tail Blue” reveals what it is that appealed to these working-class audiences. “My Long Tail Blue” tells the story of a black dandy who courts women and flouts authority. The narrator of the song describes his blue jacket with long tails, a mark of respectability and class. The dandy—named Blue—wears his blue jacket on Sundays, while (religiously) pursuing women. While audiences enjoyed hearing about the character’s sexual pursuits, they also wished to see the upwardly mobile dandy brought down a peg or two. The song doesn’t disappoint, describing an encounter between Blue and Jim Crow.[35] In “My Long Tail Blue,” Crow is an escaped black slave who is found courting a white girl named Sue when Blue intrudes. As Blue intervenes and Crow sneaks away, Blue is arrested and his jacket is torn in a scuffle with the authorities. Blue has his jacket mended upon his release from jail and the song concludes with him advising the audience to go and buy a jacket so they too can be like him, winning the ladies’ hearts, flouting authority, and rising up the social hierarchy. Many aspects of the performance—from the costume to the lyrics, to the advertisements and musical style—represent the first moves by a white performer to alienate the black dandy in the creation of a blackface dandy. In her article “Daddy Blue: The Evolution of the Dark Dandy,” Barbara Lewis reads Blue as a dignified character (unlike the more loathsome characters that would dominate the following decades). Further, Lewis states that Blue represented the condition of some black Americans in reality: Blue’s handsome, dignified image, the epitome of rationality and reserve, reflected the situation for a sizable and growing segment of [upwardly mobile] African Americans. . . . Blue emblematically expressed the assurance and achievement of this group.[36] Lewis bases her reading of Blue as a somewhat authentic representation of actual, well-dressed black men on the lyrics, but also on a lithograph of Blue that was printed on the front page of an early publication of the song’s sheet music. Regardless of whether “My Long Tail Blue” faithfully reproduced or radically altered the figure of the black dandy, Dixon’s portrayal and his audience’s endorsement were provoked by the presence of refined, dignified black men in American public life. The lithograph for the sheet music provides a glimpse into how Dixon’s performance was framed and received. Given the aspects of the image mentioned in her analysis, Lewis is likely referring to the lithograph published by Atwill’s and reproduced here in Fig. 1. Another typical lithograph published by Firth has been reproduced in Fig. 2. While Lewis reads Blue as a dignified and respectable man of property who is ready to put his equal citizenship with white men to the test by taking his place in a “teeming metropolis,”[37] she misses some revealing details in the lithograph of Blue, details that are amplified when compared with the second lithograph. It is true, as Lewis states, that Blue appears to be dignified and wealthy; however, he is also demonized. In the Atwill’s lithograph Blue’s hat brim curls upwards at either end, simulating devil’s horns (Fig. 1).[38] In the Firth lithograph Blue’s moustache provides the devil’s curls, while the tail of his jacket flows away from his body into sharp points, mimicking something snake-ish or devilish (Fig. 2).[39] In both lithographs Blue’s eyes are squinted and shifty; they bring his character further under suspicion. These details bring into question the authenticity of Blue as a representation of real black dandies, instead offering support to the suggestions of Nyong’o and Jones that the twisting of blackness for white purposes in early blackface performance may have occurred more rapidly than the orthodox retelling of blackface history presumes. Arguably, the fact that Lewis misses these details allows her to idolize the character—perhaps in an effort to find an accurate cultural representation of the real black dandies of the period, who were bravely challenging social boundaries and confronting the often violent treatment of dignified black people. The missed details might result from an over-reliance on orthodox readings of minstrel history that place “My Long Tail Blue” in an early, radical stage of the form’s development. And yet, the lithographs need not be read as accurate portraits of actual dandies in order to recognize the agency of black dandies at the time. As Miller suggests, while the elaborate costume of real black dandies was “a symbol of a self-conscious manipulation of authority,” it was tempered by the corresponding representations of blackface dandyism, “an attempted denigratory parody of free blacks’ pride and enterprise.”[40] In comparing the lithographs, then, Blue should not be read as an accurate representation of real black dandies, but as an early response to the anxieties white society felt toward real black dandies. The demonization, brought about by the embodied arguments of black dandies, reveal the expropriative twist enacted by white performers who would go on to craft various determinations of blackness to alleviate their own concerns throughout the rest of the century. Figure 1: “My Long Tail Blue” (New York: Atwill’s, c.1827). The character of a dandy, Blue, with horned top hat, shifty eyes, and a straight, dignified stance. Image courtesy of John Hay Library, Brown University. Figure 2: “My Long Tail Blue” (New York: Firth, c.1827). The character of a dandy, Blue, with tailed coat, spiked moustache, shifty eyes, and a formal stance. Image courtesy of John Hay Library, Brown University. The liberatory surplus of real black dandies was transformed through Dixon’s portrayal into an argument for increased white working-class freedoms. For example, Blue’s blackness serves as a synonym for social transgression. Blue does not obey rules; for this he is a character that many in the predominantly white audience—with desires to escape social regulations—would have admired. His pursuit of women was also appealing to white audiences, but any association of white audience members with black freedoms needed to be controlled. Lott reads the phallic “long tail” of Blue’s coat as representing “white man’s obsession with a rampageous black penis . . . invoking the power of ‘blackness’ while deriding it, in an effort of cultural control.”[41] Further, as Nyong’o powerfully argues, the affect of cross-racial sexuality was particularly important in the first debates throughout the 1830s over racial equality, abolition and amalgamation.[42] Any boisterous delights to be taken in Blue’s sexual exploits were accompanied by concerns about crossracial relationships and their political associates, equal rights and freedom. As such, the sexual freedoms and any suggestion of equality and amalgamation are closed down in the narrative of the song by a fantasy of black-on-black violence (Crow versus Blue), that resolves the tension and allows audiences to re-assume their position as civilized, restrained white men differentiated from the violent black buffoons in the song’s narrative. The cultural control of Blue’s crossracial freedoms occurred through his alienation, his demonization, released the uncomfortable realization of shared liberatory interests with a black character at the same time as it addressed the animosity many whites felt towards the class of real black dandies populating the urban centers of America. To demonstrate the animosity working-class white people felt toward real black dandies, Lewis describes riots in Philadelphia during 1828 when “white ruffians” (whose “mobocratic tactics” were endorsed by local papers) physically assaulted and verbally insulted many elegant and well-dressed black people who attended balls and dances.[43] The social presence among white workers of genuine animosity toward black dandies and strongly held beliefs in an essential difference between white and black people led performers to respond with racial characterizations that differentiated white audiences from troubling presences such as Blue so that audiences could feel both socially and culturally secure. The alienation of Blue, then, suggests the expropriation and twisting of blackness to white ends occurred, albeit more subtly than in later performances, in the earliest blackface shows. Dixon’s “My Long Tail Blue” signalled the emergence of the professional blackface entertainer, and in doing so paved the way for an almost ubiquitous expropriation of blackness in decades to follow. In fact, it was the regional folk character of Jim Crow, named in “My Long Tail Blue,” who became the most famous character of early blackface theatre. While Dixon was having success with “My Long Tail Blue,” Rice began composing a song and dance about Jim Crow to which Dixon would respond in turn. Rice’s “Jim Crow” displayed a particular brand of animosity toward black dandies that would become a feature of blackface performance for decades to come. Attacking the Dandy: Jim Crow and Zip Coon Rice was born around 1808 and grew up “in New York’s most ethnically mixed neighborhood—the Seventh Ward—along the East River docks.”[44] After time spent working as a carpenter’s apprentice, by the mid-1820s Rice had turned to acting and was appearing in “supernumerary roles” in plays and by 1828 he was on the road full-time with a performance troupe, still performing bit-parts in various plays.[45] It was not long before Rice had stolen the show in his minor roles at the Park theatre in New York during 1828, drawing criticism from his senior actors who felt he distracted audiences from their shows, and by late 1828 Rice was on playbills for comic songs during interludes.[46] In 1830 Rice debuted a routine involving a catchy song and a quirky dance, possibly learnt from black performers at Catherine Market before Rice adapted it to the stage. The routine defined his career. By 22 September 1830, he was listed on a playbill for his performance of “Jim Crow,” a song Cockrell claims to have been instantly popular.[47] Two years later Rice was headlining with “Jim Crow” in New York. Between 1836 and 1841 Rice performed the song to acclaim in England, Ireland, Scotland, and France, returning several times to the United States, each time more popular than before.[48] While Rice’s popularity should not be underestimated—he is often incorrectly described as the first blackface performer, Jim Crow is the most well-known character from the period, and various versions of “Jim Crow” remained in the repertoire of blackface performers and folk bands for over a century—his popularity needs to be contextualized. In Cornish’s boycott call of blackface theatres he mentioned Rice by name and described him as “that most contemptible of all Buffoons,” and claimed, according to Nyong’o, that Rice’s trans-atlantic success had garnered support among Europeans for the US slave industry.[49] In other words, Rice’s popularity was not absolute and his routine was not as enlightened as scholars such as Lhamon believe. In fact, the persuasiveness of Rice’s racism may have been enabled by the slipperiness—the open-endedness—of the textual traces of his performances. There are a number of versions of “Jim Crow.” Lhamon, in his collection of songs and plays performed by Rice, reproduces a version of “The Original Jim Crow” published in New York in 1832 (hereafter referred to as version A).[50] The version has no less than forty-four short, four-line verses, each followed by the chorus: “Weel about and turn about and do jis so, / eb’ry time I weel about I jump Jim Crow.”[51] Another version, published in Philadelphia in the same year, contains nineteen verses (hereafter referred to as version B), only some the same as version A. Version B is subtitled “A Comic Song (Sung by Mr. Rice at the Chestnut Theatre).”[52] In both versions the chorus is the same, yet the verses differ. Early blackface songs were highly improvised and adapted to current affairs and the place of performance. There were, however, some constants in the performance, including the chorus, followed by a lengthy musical “turn around” in which the famous hopping and spinning dance-step would be performed, the twisted knee of the character, the raggedy costume, and the oscillation between stumbling soft-shoe shuffles and energetic, bounding leaps. The wheeling and spinning nature of Jim Crow suggests that the song is playing with themes of racial inversion. The chorus—which could constitute half the performance—is an obvious example. Version A contains several verses where Jim Crow pities white people because they are not black: Kase it dar misfortune, And dey’d spend ebery dollar, If dey only could be Gentlemen ob colour. It almost break my heart, To see dem envy me, An from my soul I wish dem, Full as black as we.[53] The narrator of version A continually slips between referring to the audience as white people (“I’m glad dat I’m a niggar, / An don’t you wish you was too”), and as black people (“Now my brodder niggars,” and, above, “as black as we”).[54] Version B—recalling Blue’s invitation to follow suit—invites the (white) audience to become (black) Jim Crows: Den go ahed wite fokes Don’t be slow, Hop ober dubble trubble Jump Jim Crow.[55] While these various audience affiliations are indicative of both black and white audience members, it is also an indication of how audiences were actually invited to simultaneously associate and disassociate with blackness, or, to cite Huggins: “one could almost at will move in or out of the blackface character.”[56] This dis/association is, arguably, essential to an expropriation of black liberty—a taking hold, and removal, of the aesthetic of freedom. Like the narrative of “My Long Tail Blue,” the antics described in “Jim Crow” invite white working-class audiences to envy black freedom, despise the bourgeois, and enjoy violence toward black dandies. The lithographs on the front covers of song sheets for “Jim Crow” show the character with one bent, twisted knee, emphasising a deformed version of masculinity that served to alienate blackness and differentiate it from the ideals of white manliness held by the predominantly white, working-class audience (see, for example, Fig. 3).[57] Far from any hint of dignity shown in the character of Blue, the physical deformity of Crow acts simultaneously to explain his strange, leaping dance and to mark blackness as physically inferior to the white working-class audiences of the time. “Jim Crow” is among the earliest cultural texts that are openly hostile to black dandies (a feature of Jim Crow’s character). In version A of “Jim Crow,” three verses relate Jim Crow’s encounter with a black dandy: I met a Philadelphia niggar Dress’d up quite nice and clean . . . . So I knocked down dis Sambo And shut up his light, . . . . Says I go away you niggar Or I’ll skin you like an eel.[58] The acclamation of such violence rests uneasily against the actual violence that was being directed against well-dressed black people at the time. And yet the jokes continued as Rice’s rocketing popularity led to his own star-vehicle play Oh! Hush! Or, the Virginny Cupids. Rice’s Oh! Hush! sees the character of a black dandy, Sambo Johnson, discovering the affair of his sweetheart when he enters the kitchen where she works (and where his rival suitor, Gumbo Cuffee, has hidden). Cuffee, played by Rice, was a veritable Jim Crow: an upstart, dandy-hating, field-working, anti-authoritarian man. No script of the original performance remains, though Lhamon has edited a later adaptation by Charles White. For the purposes of this discussion, the following joke from Oh! Hush! is certainly in the spirit of “Jim Crow”: CUFF: Excuse my interrupting you for I see you am busy readin’ de paper. Would you be so kind as to enlighten us upon de principal topicks ob de day? JOHNSON: Well, Mr. Cuff, I hab no objection ‘kase I see dat you common unsophisticated gemmen hab not got edgemcation yourself, and you am ‘bliged to come to me who has. So spread around, you unintellumgent bracks, hear de news ob de day discoursed in de most fluid manner. (He reads out some local items.) Dar has been a great storm at sea and de ships hab been turned upside down. CUFF: (looks at paper): Why, Mr. Johnson, you’ve got the paper upside down! (All laugh heartily).[59] The joke is clearly on the pretentious, unintelligent, black dandy, and Cuff (a.k.a Jim Crow) is his foil. The dandy, now transformed into a despicable figure, represents a turn to what Lott labels as the scapegoating of the black dandy, a character embodying “the amalgamationist threat of abolition” and allegorically revealing “the class threat of those who were advocating for it [abolition].”[60] Such attacks on black dandyism reveal how “anticapitalist frustrations,” such as animosity toward upper-class social reformists and the abolitionist bourgeoisie, “stalled potentially positive racial feelings” to uncover “the viciously racist underside of these frustrations.”[61] That is, the dandy represented working-class bosses as well as the educated elite, some of whom had become leaders of the abolitionist movement and raised the possibility that worried white working-class people: that amalgamation and equality could eliminate racial difference among workers. To hate the dandy was to hate white reformers, black reformers, and black workers. And Jim Crow most certainly hated dandies. Through his immense success, the figure of the black dandy had been transformed. Whether Rice’s extreme popularity forced a change in Dixon’s portrayal of the black dandy, or Dixon was a keen judge of social attitudes toward blackness, Dixon’s next song continued to alienate blackness with a performance that would strip the dignity of Blue completely. In 1834, Dixon first performed the song “on which his renown finally came to rest.”[62] It is debatable whether Dixon wrote the song, or whether various little-known singers had performed it for many years before, but, undoubtedly, it was Dixon who made “Zip Coon” the only song of the 1830s to compare in popularity with “Jim Crow.” “Zip Coon” is a monstrous song that mimics certain elements of “Jim Crow.” The lyrics are often nonsensical, with the chorus consisting of “Oh, zip a duden duden duden, zip a duden day” repeated four times.[63] The opening verse leads to the chorus with the line: “Den over dubble trubble, Zip coon will jump.”[64] This line echoes Jim Crow’s insistence that white people “hop ober dubble trubble / Jump Jim Crow,” just as other lines in the song appropriate other elements of “Jim Crow.”[65] Both songs, for example, reference the 1814 battle of New Orleans, where the working-class hero of the late 1820s and early 1830s, President Andrew Jackson, had previously defeated the British forces led by Major General Edward Packenham. In the lithographs for the two songs, too, Zip mimics Crow (See Fig. 3 and Fig. 4).[66] Zip’s bent knee and arms are almost exact copies of Crow’s, and despite the obvious costume differences, Zip’s costume, like Crow’s, is exuberant and disorderly, superfluous and mis-matched. Zip, the lithograph and various appropriations within the text suggest, is Blue with a twist of Crow. Zip mimicked Crow’s invocation of popular, working-class nationalism. Perhaps Zip, as he jumped “over dubble trubble,” even incorporated a spinning leap similar to the one that Rice had made famous. Figure 3: “The Original Jim Crow” (Riley, c.1832). The character of an escaped slave, Jim Crow, with bent knee and foot and ragged clothes. Image courtesy of John Hay Library, Brown University. Figure 4: “Zip Coon” (Hewitt, c.1834). The character of a buffoonish dandy, Zip Coon, with gnarled limbs in a stance similar to typical portrayals of Jim Crow. Image courtesy of John Hay Library, Brown University. The representation of blackness in “Zip Coon” is just as disjointed as in “Jim Crow,” where the narration continually oscillates between descriptions of and association with blackness. This disarray is present in the narrative voice, which slips from the first to the third person. Sometimes it is a narrator talking about meeting Zip Coon, or describing him; sometimes it is Zip himself talking about politics, his mother or a girl who loves him. The sexual pursuits and freedoms of Blue and Crow remain, but the disassociation is made all the easier by Coon’s more obvious buffoonery. As with the previous songs, “Zip Coon” allowed audiences to seize the liberties of a wealthy, sexually active, luxuriant dandy, envy those freedoms and release them with a narrative of racial deformity. The presumed political injustice of racial equality and amalgamation, then, is derided allowing white working-class audiences to fantasize about their own importance as the most manly and necessary national type. It was a belief that motivated many to protest against abolition. The twisting of the dandy—from Blue through Crow to Coon—was near absolute by the time anti-abolitionist rioters stormed a church, ransacked houses, and took siege of a theatre to disrupt a ritzy performance by renowned tragedian Edwin Forrest in 1834. Actors were driven off stage and the rioters threatened to destroy the premises until the theatre manager thought to subdue them by staging an impromtu performance catering to their ideals. He brought out an actor to sing none other than “Zip Coon.”[67] As the first three groups of minstrel scholars would have it, this riot and blackface resolution occurred at a time when early blackface performance was rebellious, encouraging cross-racial solidarity. And yet minstrelsy is here, as early as 1834 and just six years after Dixon revolutionized American theatre with “Long Tail Blue,” co-opted into an antiblack, anti-amalgamation pogrom. What was it about a blackface dandy that so calmed the crowd? Certainly not the suggestion of cross-racial affiliation. In fact, what the analysis of the blackface dandy in this article has shown is that, from the earliest representations on the blackface stage, the dandy was incorporated into a process of alienating blackness. And the dandy was rapidly twisted into a grotesque effigy to calm the minds of anti-abolitionist rioters. As Nyong’o and Jones have forcefully argued, the discourse of blackness under blackface saw the theft of potential narratives of black freedom and its transformation—disfigurement—into narratives to support white working-class freedoms.[68] But, following this expropriation and alienation, what of the potential “liberty awaiting activation”? The changes in representation of the dandy from “My Long Tail Blue,” through “Jim Crow,” to “Zip Coon” indicates a much broader shift in the representation of blackness between 1828 and 1834. The distortion of the characterization of blackness stripped the black dandy of subversive potential and had a significant impact in real life for some early nineteenth-century Americans. Lewis reads firstly Jim Crow and then Zip Coon as figures growing out of white working-class hostility towards dignified black people who were slowly accumulating wealth: If Crow served as the antithesis to Blue, Coon mixed their individual elements into a scoundrel composite, the gangling servant dressed in the master’s clothes. Coon combined the original and its reverse into a mockery of the former.[69] Lewis effectively maps the evolution of the dandy figure as it related to attitudes towards blackness in Jacksonian America. Testing Lewis’ argument, it can be seen that Lewis is correct to imply racist characters mirrored (perhaps even provoked) real violence that was occurring against black people at the time (be it through direct physical intimidation or the institution of slavery). But the analysis in this article shows that Crow was not simply the “reverse” of Blue, but a heightened form of the animosity towards black people that was actually inherent in the portrayal of Blue. Such an analysis, in tandem with Lewis’ and Miller’s analysis of the history of real black dandies, refutes claims that blackface performance was revolutionary and radical despite (or besides) its racism. Even as blackface entertainment articulated the desires of the white working class or arguments against white dandies and class traitors, blackface also represented the broader shift occurring in white social attitudes toward blackness. Seen clearly in the shift from Blue to Zip, between 1828 and 1834 the iconography of racism that permeated the popular imagination of working-class Americans amplified subhuman, demonic and grotesque features, and it did so to ease white audiences’ concerns about abolition, amalgamation and other discourses of black freedom. The figure of the blackface dandy became a cornerstone of professional blackface minstrelsy from the 1840s onward, and even into the nostalgic vaudevillian revivals of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. The ways that the blackface dandy allowed for working-class animosity of the upper classes, for upper-class self-mockery, and for general mockery of black people proved popular for a more economically diverse audience than the rowdy working-class crowds of early blackface. For Lott, the diverse appeals of professional minstrelsy—many of them embodied in the character of the black dandy—closed down any cross-racial affiliation potentially inspired by blackface performance: Energies directed against the state apparatus might too easily join those focused on black people. . . . Class straits may energize interracial cooperation, but they are also often likely to close down the possibility of interracial embrace.[70] And yet, the re-readings of blackface minstrel history to account for black influences upon and responses to early blackface—applied in this paper to the blackface dandy—bring into question whether there was ever the potential for a social, inter-racial embrace with the blackface dandy as a catalyst. In fact, as the work of Brooks, Miller, and Barbara Webb show, it was not until black performers and activists such as George Walker and W.E.B. DuBois inhabited and transformed the blackface dandy stereotype that any possibility of overcoming, in a productive and unifying way, the white animosity toward black freedoms was possible.[71] Despite the best efforts of white performers to twist and alienate blackness, and despite the devastating impact of narratives of white supremacy staged through blackface performance for half a century, the surplus of black liberty was, and arguably still is, awaiting activation in these stage types, responses, and texts. Recognizing this is an essential step toward undoing the white racial privilege created in early minstrel representations. And framing early blackface texts and characters as responses to narratives of black freedom will expose them for what they are: illusions of white control. Benjamin Miller is a lecturer in the School of Letters, Art and Media at the University of Sydney. His research examines the relationship between representations of race in the US and Australia. He completed his PhD thesis in 2010 on representations of blackness and Aboriginality in American and Australian culture and has published on representations of Aboriginal people in Australian theatre, cinema and literature, and on the writing of Aboriginal author David Unaipon. [1] Mikko Tuhkanen, “Of Blackface and Paranoid Knowledge: Richard Wright, Jacques Lacan and the Ambivalence of Black Minstrelsy,” Diacritics 31, no. 2 (2001): 13. [2] See Carl Wittke, Tambo and Bones: A History of the American Minstrel Stage (Durham: Duke University Press, 1930); Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931). [3] Tuhkanen, “Of Blackface,” 16. See also Ralph Ellison, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke” [1958], in Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage, 1964), 45-59; Nathan Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); Robert Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). [4] Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). See also W.T. Lhamon Jr., Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); William Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Ante-bellum American Popular Culture (Urbana: Illinois University Press, 1999). [5] Lott, Love and Theft, 7-8. [6] Tuhkanen, “Of Blackface,” 16. [7] Ibid., 13-14. [8] Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (London: Duke University Press, 2006); Tavia Nyong’o, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Douglas Jones Jr., “Black Politics but Not Black People: Rethinking the Social and ‘Racial’ History of Early Minstrelsy,” TDR: The Drama Review 57, no. 2 (2013): 21-37. [9] Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 28. [10] Ibid., 27-28. [11] Quoted in Nyong’o, Amalgamation Waltz, 120. [12] Quoted in Nyong’o, Amalgamation Waltz, 123. [13] Nyong’o, Amalgamation Waltz, 8. [14] W.T. Lhamon Jr., Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 8. According to Lhamon, “The [early blackface] scripts had enough play to make them particularly useful for organizing heterogeneous publics. In flocking to see Jim Crow, disparate types discovered their mutual affinities. Around Jim Crow’s mask the dispersed riffraff of a quickening industrialism began to act out their own parts in a new play in which the insubordinates were mixing among themselves but not melding with the previously dominant” (8). [15] Cockrell, Demons, 161. For Cockrell, as early blackface transformed into minstrelsy around 1843, “Caught in the middle, between class and race, white common people had to devise both upward and downward processes and rituals” (161). [16] Nyong’o, Amalgamation Waltz, 8. [17] Ibid., 8-9. [18] Lhamon, Raising Cain, 34. [19] Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, 30. Lhamon suggests that the blackface characterization of Jim Crow provided the “template” for a “transracial affiliation [that] was virtually unprecedented” (30). [20] Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 41. [21] Jones, “Black Politics,” 25. Emphasis in original. [22] Ibid., 27-28. [23] Ibid., 17. [24] Ibid. [25] Monica Miller, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 101. [26] Ibid., 102. [27] Ibid., 101. [28] Ibid., 105. [29] Cockrell, Demons, 96. [30] Lott, Love and Theft, 22. [31] Barbara Lewis, “Daddy Blue: The Evolution of the Dark Daddy,” in Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Minstrelsy, ed. Annemarie Bean, James V. Hatch, and Brooks McNamara (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 257. [32] Quoted in ibid. [33] Cockrell, Demons, 96. [34] Nyong’o, Amalgamation Waltz, 120. [35] As an aside, it should be noted that the Jim Crow character here was drawn from regional, oral folk tales that had been circulating for decades before the character was appropriated and adapted into the exemplar early blackface character performed by T.D. Rice. Lhamon, Raising Cain, 180. [36] Lewis, “Daddy Blue,” 259-60. [37] Ibid., 258-9. [38] “My Long Tail Blue” (New York: Atwill, c.1827). [39] “My Long Tail Blue” (New York: Firth, c. 1827). [40] Miller, Slaves to Fashion, 81. [41] Lott, Love and Theft, 25-26. [42] Nyong’o, Amalgamation Waltz, 72. [43] Lewis, “Daddy Blue,” 264. [44] Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, 1. [45] Cockrell, Demons, 62. [46] Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, 32-33. [47] Cockrell, Demons, 64. [48] Ibid., 65-66. [49] Nyong’o, Amalgmation Waltz, 121. [50] “The Original Jim Crow,” (New York: Riley, c.1832), republished in Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, 95-102. [51] Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, 96. [52] “Jim Crow: A Comic Song (Sung by Rice at the Chestnut St Theatre),” (Philadelphia: Edgar, c.1832). [53] Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, 99. [54] Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, 98. It is also important here to make a note about the language of the sources I am quoting. I quote some hateful words in this article. In choosing to include these words I am following the argument of Jabari Asim in The N Word: “the word ‘nigger’ serves . . . as a linguistic extension of white supremacy, the most potent part of a language of oppression that has changed over time from overt to coded.” For Asim, the “N word” and other derogatory words are hurtful, but open identification of such language helps to identify moments of racism while also acknowledging the close relationship between language and privilege. For more, see Jabari Asim, The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t, and Why (New York: Houghton, 2007), 4. [55] “Jim Crow: A Comic Song,” stanza 18. [56] Huggins, Harlem Renaissance, 257. [57] “The Original Jim Crow,” n.p. [58] Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, 98. [59] Ibid., 150. [60] Lott, Love and Theft, 134. [61] Ibid., 135. [62] Cockrell, Demons, 99. [63] “Zip Coon: A Favorite Comic Song (Sung by G.W. Dixon),” (New York: Hewitt, 1834). [64] Ibid., stanza 1. [65] “Jim Crow: A Comic Song,” stanza 18. [66] “The Original Jim Crow,” n.p.; “Zip Coon,” n.p. [67] Lott, Love and Theft, 132-3. [68] Nyong’o, Amalgamation Waltz, 122; Jones, “Black Politics,” 25. [69] Lewis, “Daddy Blue,” 259. [70] Lott, Love and Theft, 237. [71] Brooks, Bodies, 207-17; Miller, Slaves to Fashion, 137-45; Barbara Webb, “The Black Dandyism of George Walker: A Case Study in Genealogical Method,” The Drama Review 45, no. 4 (2001): 7-24. "Twisting the Dandy: The Transformation of the Blackface Dandy in Early American Theatre" by Benjamin Miller ISNN 2376-4236 The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 27, Number 3 (Fall 2015) ©2015 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Editorial Board: Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson Advisory Editor: David Savran Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve Editorial Staff: Managing Editor: Jim Bredeson Editorial Assistant: Kyueun Kim Advisory Board: Michael Y. Bennett Kevin Byrne Bill Demastes Jorge Huerta Amy E. Hughes Esther Kim Lee Kim Marra Beth Osborne Jordan Schildcrout Robert Vorlicky Maurya Wickstrom Stacy Wolf Table of Contents: “Twisting the Dandy: The Transformation of the Blackface Dandy in Early American Theatre” by Benjamin Miller “West of Broadway: the Rockefeller Foundation and American Theatre in the 1930s” by Malcolm Richardson “Arthur Miller: Reception and Influence in China” by Wu Wenquan, Chen Li, and Zhu Qinjuan www.jadtjournal.org jadt@gc.cuny.edu Martin E. Segal Theatre Center: Frank Hentschker, Executive Director Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director ©2015 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center The Graduate Center CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10016 References About The Authors 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 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

PRELUDE Festival 2023 PERFORMANCE Please Do Not Touch the Indians Eagle Project 60 minutes 3:00PM EST Wednesday, October 11, 2023 Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA Free Entry, Open To All This is a reading of an excerpt of the play, "Please Do Not Touch the Indians." This is a play about the history of what happened to all Indians. Two wooden Indians sit on a bench in front of a gift shop and have their picture taken by a tourist. Characters appear as images of a child lost and they share their tragic journey of historical wrongs. In the end, we see that what we have seen is what the 2 Indians see every day as they come there to remember their lost child. It is a simple tale of lost love for a child, of a lost people, joined by their memories. Content / Trigger Description: Joseph A. Dandurand is a member of Kwantlen First Nation located on the Fraser River about 20 minutes east of Vancouver. He resides there with his 3 children Danessa, Marlysse, and Jace. Joseph is the Director of the Kwantlen Cultural Center. Joseph received a Diploma in Performing Arts from Algonquin College and studied Theatre and Direction at the University of Ottawa. He has been the Storyteller in Residence at the Vancouver Public Library. He has published 13 books of poetry and the latest are: I WANT by Leaf Press (2015) and HEAR AND FORETELL by BookLand Press (2015) The Rumour (2018) by BookLand Press in (2018) SH:LAM (the doctor) Mawenzi Press (2019) The Corrupted by Guernica Press (2020) his children’s play: Th’owixiya: the hungry Feast dish by Playwrights Press Canada (2019) his children’s books: The Sasquatch, the fire, and the cedar basket (2020) and The Magical Sturgeon (2022) published by Nightwood Press along with his poetry manuscript: The Punishment (2022) He also is very busy Storytelling at many events and Schools. Opalanietet is a member of the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape tribal nation of New Jersey. He is currently a PhD student at The Graduate Center at the City of University of New York (CUNY), and the Founder and Artistic Director of Eagle Project, www.eagleprojectarts.org . Upon graduating from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, Opalanietet has performed in workshops and productions at such renown New York theatrical institutions as the Public Theater, Nuyorican Poets Café, New York City Opera, and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. In November of 2020, Opalanietet made history by giving the first-ever Lenape Land Acknowledgement at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on NBC. Founded by Opalanietet (Ryan Victor Pierce) in 2012, Eagle Project is the only Lenape-led performing arts company in New York City. Its mission is to explore the American identity through the performing arts and our Native American heritage, deciphering what exactly it means to be American while using the Native American experience as the primary means for which to conduct its investigation. Since its inception, Eagle Project has produced six full productions, numerous readings and workshops, and has collaborated with the Public Theater, Nuyorican Poets Café, Rattlestick Theater, and Ashtar Theater in Palestine. For more information, visit www.eagleprojectarts.org . https://www.eagleprojectarts.org/ Watch Recording Explore more performances, talks and discussions at PRELUDE 2023 See What's on

Back to Top Untitled Article References Authors Keep Reading < Back Journal of American Drama & Theatre Volume Issue 30 1 Visit Journal Homepage Musicals, Minstrelsy, and More Book Reviews By Published on December 12, 2017 Download Article as PDF ! Widget Didn’t Load Check your internet and refresh this page. If that doesn’t work, contact us. Donatella Galella, Editor American Musical Theater By James Leve Reviewed by Eric M. Glover May Irwin: Singing, Shouting, and the Shadow of Minstrelsy By Sharon Ammen Reviewed by Franklin J. Lasik Chinese Looks: Fashion, Performance, Race By Sean Metzger Reviewed by Christine Mok New York's Yiddish Theater: From the Bowery to Broadway Edited by Edna Nahshon Reviewed by Derek R. Munson Musical Theatre Books (Actor-Musicianship, The Complete Book of 1940s Broadway Musicals, and Musical Theatre Song) By Jeremy Harrison, Dan Dietz, and Stephen Purdy Reviewed by Curtis Russell Books Received The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 30, Number 1 (Fall 2017) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2017 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center References ! Widget Didn’t Load Check your internet and refresh this page. If that doesn’t work, contact us. About The Authors ! Widget Didn’t Load Check your internet and refresh this page. If that doesn’t work, contact us. 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 Previous Next Attribution: This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.